You show up to the PTMC’s emergency department with an injury. Unlucky for you, your boyfriend happens to have sharp teeth that decided to sink into your skin the night before.
tags/warnings: mentions of sex, cursing, brief medical talk, reader has EDS but it’s mentioned once and not pivotal, I think that’s it.
_
You were fucked. In both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word. Last night, Brendon had drove you so far into the mattress that you thought the bed frame was going to break. His sweet words contrasted with the sharp ache that his teeth would bring, clamping down on whatever skin he could find. Your poor chest absolutely littered with bruises and indents of his teeth. Not that you were complaining about that fucked. You’d never admit it but you might’ve even begged for it.
No, the fucked you were dreading was the fact that you’d managed to dislocate your collarbone and most likely your ribs, too. Every time you tried to take a deep breath the stabbing pain would nearly double you over. Your left arm was out of commission, tingling pain shooting down it with every shift. Normally, you’d tough out the pain, used to the occasional dislocations and subluxations.
This time wasn’t like that. This pain was radiating in a way you weren’t used to and you couldn’t say with confidence which way your collarbone went. Knowing if it went posterior it could rupture an artery, you decided to err on the side of caution. Which means you’ve been sitting in the ER’s waiting room for the last hour.
Langdon is the one who calls you back, still stuck working chairs at Robby’s orders. The PTMC staff knew you. The numerous times you’d show up with lunch for Brendon, the occasional times you’d stop in with an injury of your own, various work events. Everyone got along with you well, much more than with your predator of a boyfriend. Jokes that weren’t actually jokes but comments disguised behind a laugh would often flow about how Park the Shark ended up with you.
That being said, you knew someone definitely bumped you up in line. You weren’t going to complain though. The pain was bad enough that you just wanted to go home and pass out in bed the second this was over.
Frank smiles at you, genuinely happy to see you. “Hey Shark Bait, what’re you doing here?” The nickname manages to bring a small smile to your face. The shift in Frank’s tells you it resembles more of a grimace, though.
“Fucked up my collarbone, probably a couple ribs too.” You groan as you settle down on the exam chair.
His fingers gently probe over your shirt. Running as light as possible down the side of your ribs, clearly sensing the pain in your face the second he applies pressure. “Yeah, definitely feel some things outta place there. Let’s get you sent back for some imaging. I’ll page Park.”
Your only acknowledgement is a small nod and thumbs up. Within minutes, Perlah’s at your side and walking beside you as you slowly make your way to exam 8.
The curtain is pulled back abruptly and the sight of Robby comes into view, his hands furiously rubbing sanitizer over themselves. “Heard we had a VIP in the ER, figured I should come take care of it myself.” He jokes, eyes focused on reviewing your chart.
“Aw, Abbot not in yet?” You tease. Robby shoots you a raised brow over his glasses with a sharp glare and you chuckle. The movement sends a shock of pain through your entire left side, causing your lungs to constrict. It’s another 10 seconds before you’re able to take a semi-full breath again.
Robby’s face falls into sympathy, “Want anything for the pain?”
“S’alright. I’ve gotta drive home. Besides, you know it doesn’t do much for me anyways.” Nodding solemnly, Robby moves to your side.
“You mind if I have some students sit in with us? Not every day we get a hypermobile Ehlers Danlos patient in here. No one better to teach ‘em than you.” His hands are carefully starting to feel down your left arm, checking for a pulse and nerve reactions. You look up and see the med students already standing there.
Javadi you know well enough. Some new students, Ogilvie and Kwon, you’re pretty sure. Behind them Santos and Whitaker are walking past the nurses station and when Santos sees you, she quickly pivots and pulls Whitaker with her.
“What did we do to deserve fresh bait in here?” Santos jokes.
You shift awkwardly, face flushing and throat suddenly dry. It makes a grating sound when you clear it and speak lowly to Robby, “Could this maybe not be a teaching moment?”
It took a good three hours of gaslighting yourself before you let yourself believe maybe, you should get medical attention. Another two after that to finally accept yes, I should get this checked out just to be safe. The hickeys and bruises from last night were impossible to hide. The second closest ER would’ve taken another half hour to get to and you’re pretty sure it wasn’t wise to drive in your current state as is.
The last thing you wanted was half of the PTMC’s emergency department staff to see the evidence of your latest fuck with one of their surgeons who regularly does orthopedic consults. Robby alone would be bad enough.
Robby’s face scrunches in confusion but he immediately complies, nodding. “Yeah, yeah that’s fine. Let me go get Dana to sit in.”
Turning, he ushers the small crowd that started forming out of the room and ducks his head into the hallway to call for Dana. She walks in a few moments later and closes the curtain behind her and sighs when she looks at you. “What’s going on, hun?”
“Oh you know. Think I dislocated a couple things trying to walk and chew gum at the same time.” She grants you a small laugh and comes over beside you, hand hovering over your shirt.
“Need a hand with this?” Nodding you lean back a bit to give her a better angle to help reach for the hem. “Got anything underneath? Should I grab you a gown?”
“No I’ve got something on, thanks. Besides, not like y’all haven’t seen tits before.”
Dana huffs a true laugh out at that, “More than I’d like to sometimes, kid.”
Robby’s keeping his head down as he pulls on his gloves. Despite the fact he’s about to be touching your exposed chest he still wants to give you a sense of privacy. When the shirt starts to come up over your stomach you startle.
“Uhm-”
Dana halts her movements, shirt held in place. Robby looks up then, trying to see what went wrong.
“Listen, just, please don’t say anything. Okay?”
Robby’s brows shoot up, confused by what you could mean as you let Dana slide the shirt the rest of the way off. From her place slightly behind you, she doesn’t have the same view as Robby.
Robby who takes in the sight in front of him and mutters out, “Fuckin’- what the hell?” Voice full of concern and disbelief.
Dana comes around to see what Robby’s reacting to and instead of shock gracing her face, it hardens. After a moment she tilts her head down to force you to meet her eyes. “Park do this to you?”
You say nothing, just place your head in your right hand with a pathetic whimper of embarrassment. The sound must’ve come across wounded because Dana pushes on, “Someone you love shouldn’t do that to you, sweetie. We can help.”
Robby finally finds his voice. “There is zero tolerance for domestic assault in this hospital. We have people in the building right now who can handle this in minutes.”
Your head shoots up, “No! God, no, it’s not what it looks like.” You try and explain, but how the hell do you explain the situation without telling your dirty, kinky secrets to your partner’s coworkers.
“It looks like someone’s been hurting you.” Robby says flatly.
“I wanted it.” Dana’s brows shoot up at that. You struggle for the words to continue.
“Listen we,” you sigh, “Brendon and I are-”. Your voice breaks off in an insanity fueled laugh, “I mean have you seen him?”
Robby is clearly not following what you’re saying.
“Neither of us are exactly, gentle lovers. Last night was just a little intense. It wasn’t anything I didn’t want though, I asked for it.” You explain. Voice speeding up as you ramble, “Please don’t think Brendon would ever hurt me like that. Fuck no. He’s the most caring, loving man I’ve ever met. Really.”
Dana just started shaking her head with a small laugh, smirk tugging on her lips. “Alright then. Whatever floats your boat.”
Robby still looks like he’s trying to compute the information he’s gained in the last forty seconds. Dana starts attaching leads to you to get a vitals check and by the time she’s done, Robby is still just standing there.
“Dr. Robby! Would you please assess our patient?” As if broken from a trance, Robby’s eyes meet yours and quickly flit to Dana.
“Yes, of course.”
Robby is barely looking at the injury for three minutes when the curtain is dragged open. The space wide enough to expose you to the nurse’s station, leaving your secret vulnerable to anyone nearby. Well, at least it would be if it weren’t for the 6’2”, hulking man standing in its gap.
The same man whose teeth had sunken into your flesh over and over and over again last night, making you cry out noises you didn’t even know you were capable of. His eyes dark as he drank down every sound were now filled with concern.
“What happened?” He’s quickly closing the curtain behind him, not a single inch of your skin being exposed to the curious and prying eyes of a certain pair of nurses with an R2 behind them. His tone is sharp, quick and to the point. Like it always is whenever he’s worried about you.
“Nothing, baby. I’m fine I promise. I just wanted to be safe and get it checked out.” You try and soothe him, his hands immediately coming to rest over your collarbone.
The warmth of his skin is the only thing you feel, or maybe it’s the only thing you let yourself focus on. “When did this happen?”
You quickly drop eye contact with him. “Early this morning. ‘Bout an hour or so after you left.”
“Sweetheart, I left at 5am this morning. It’s past 1pm.” His hand finds your chin, making you look at him. All you give him is a small smile.
“Oops?”
“Why didn’t you call me.” He removes his hands, done with his assessment.
“I didn’t want to worry you. Figured it would go away within a few hours, but it just kept getting worse.”
“The clavicle dislocation is anterior. I want to get an x-ray on the ribs just to be safe but I think it’s just pinching a nerve this time.” Brendon explains, looking over at Robby who nods and places the order.
Brendon sits down on the bed next to you, hand stroking over your cheek lovingly. “We’re done here.” He doesn’t even glance over his shoulder towards the other people in the room as he dismisses them.
“I’ll be back to take her up for imaging myself.” Dana calls as she and Robby slide out from the curtain.
“I’m so getting you back for this later.” You tell Brendon and he only smirks as he lets his eyes fall to appreciate his handiwork.
“I hope you do.”
_
“Looks like Shark was a more accurate nickname than we thought, huh, Robinavitch?”
Robby doesn’t dignify Dana with a response.
He’d like a moment of silence to try and remove the intricate knowledge of his coworker’s sex life from his mind.
clearly I really liked this idea as I wrote this in less than two hours :) shoutout to anon🦷 for this!!!
In which Jack Abbott has loved Jamila since he was twenty-two and foolish enough to take her ring shopping on the second date, and twenty-three years later, he still looks at her like she is the only fixed star in his sky.
From the golden ache of first love to the quiet rituals of marriage, Jack and Jamila’s story is one of devotion tested by time, war, grief, parenthood, and the terrifying work of being known completely. When Jack comes home changed by war, Jamila refuses to let him mistake injury for inferiority, and in the years that follow, their love becomes something deeper than romance — a home, a vow, a shoreline, a place where even the ruined parts of a person can be held without shame.
( the author still needs this old man in her drawls )
When Jack met Jamila, Shakespeare ceased to be literature and became anatomy, something living beneath his ribs, something with a pulse, something that explained why men in old plays looked into the face of love and lost all reasonable instinct, because suddenly he understood every doomed fool who had ever mistaken devotion for oxygen and every tragic lover who had ever decided that a world without the beloved was not a world at all, merely a country stripped of its sun, a sea abandoned by its moon, a body still moving long after the soul had left it.
He understood, with terrifying clarity, why Orpheus turned around.
Not because he was weak, not because he doubted the gods, not because he could not obey, but because love, real love, the kind that sinks its teeth into the marrow and remakes a man from the inside out, does not move comfortably on faith alone, and Jack knew, the moment Jamila looked at him, that he too would have glanced back into the mouth of hell just to make sure she was still behind him, even if it condemned them both, even if Hades himself stood waiting with a crown of ash and judgment in his hands.
He understood Romeo and Juliet then too, not in the foolish way people mocked them for, not as children too dramatic for their own hearts, but as two souls who had stumbled into recognition so violent it made the world before each other feel counterfeit, because when Jack met Jamila, he understood how death beside the one you loved could seem less cruel than life in a universe where their hand no longer fit into yours, where their voice no longer called your name across a room, where the earth kept turning with the audacity to pretend the stars had not gone out.
He was twenty-two when he met her, already walking toward army medicine with the grim focus of a man who had decided early that blood, discipline, and survival would be the shape of his life, while Jamila was twenty, bright-eyed and brilliant, stepping into software engineering like she had been born to speak in languages machines understood, her mind clean and electric, full of logic, architecture, systems, and possibilities he could barely name.
They should have been opposites, and perhaps they were, in the way the sun and moon were opposites, in the way land and sea met only at the shoreline yet spent eternity reshaping one another, in the way Apollo drew his golden chariot across the morning while Artemis guarded the silver hush of night, separate and sacred until eclipse made a miracle of their collision.
Jamila was sunlight over open water, all warmth and movement and impossible shimmer, the kind of woman who made ordinary rooms look briefly blessed, while Jack was moonlight over dark fields, quieter, watchful, made of shadow and gravity, a man who had learned to love carefully because carelessness had teeth; and yet from the moment they met, it felt less like attraction and more like orbit, as if some ancient god had taken their names, carved them into opposite sides of the same star, and set them loose across the heavens just to see how long it would take them to find their way back.
Jack was sure of her almost immediately, so sure it frightened him, so sure that the certainty did not feel reckless but ancestral, as if every man in his bloodline who had ever loved a woman properly had leaned across time and whispered, that one, as if the earth beneath his feet had changed its axis and expected him to adjust without complaint.
So on their second date, with no grand proposal planned and no velvet box burning a hole through his pocket, he took Jamila ring shopping.
Not because he was trying to trap her, not because he mistook desire for entitlement, and not because he believed love gave him ownership over her future, but because Jack Abbot had already decided that if the day ever came when he knelt before her, he would not do it empty-handed in spirit, would not arrive before the altar of her life unprepared, would not insult her by guessing at what she liked or, worse, choosing something that reflected his ego more than her heart.
To him, there was nothing more careless than an unprepared man, nothing more selfish than a man who dressed his own desires up as romance and placed them in a woman’s lap like tribute, expecting gratitude for a gift that had never truly considered her.
Jamila deserved better than that.
She deserved intention.
She deserved study.
She deserved a man who paid attention the way sailors once studied constellations, the way farmers read the sky before planting, the way ancient Greeks listened for the gods in thunder and tide, because loving Jamila, even then, felt like learning a sacred language, one made of glances, preferences, silences, laughter, and the small unguarded truths she did not yet know she was giving him.
He remembered her in that jewelry store with a clarity that time had never managed to dull, remembered the soft halo of her hair framing her face like something painted by a Renaissance hand, remembered the way the lights caught in the dark strands and made her look celestial, half-woman and half-constellation, remembered how her features had softened each time she slipped a ring onto her finger, her smile going shy at the edges though she tried to play it cool, dimples appearing like little moons in her cheeks while she turned her hand beneath the glass-bright glow and pretended she did not know he was memorizing everything.
Ring after ring after ring, silver and gold, oval and emerald, delicate bands and bold stones, quiet elegance and glittering declarations, and Jack watched her the way men once watched the horizon for ships, the way Orpheus must have listened for Eurydice’s footsteps in the dark, the way the moon pulls at the sea without ever touching it, learning what made her eyes linger, what made her mouth tilt, what she dismissed quickly, what she came back to twice, what made her hand look most like hers.
He did not rush her.
He did not steer her.
He simply stood beside her, young and already ruined, smiling like a man trying very hard not to show that he was watching the rest of his life choose its shape beneath a jewelry store light.
And Jamila, laughing softly as she slid another ring from her finger and placed it back into the tray, had no idea that Jack was not merely collecting her size or her preferences, but building a map, charting the coastline of her desires grain by grain, star by star, already preparing himself for a future he had no right to claim yet but every intention of earning.
“Jack, where are you takin’ me?” Jamila asked, turning toward him in the passenger seat as he drove through the late afternoon, her voice carrying that sweet Southern edge that made even suspicion sound like music, while the sun lowered itself over the city in a slow golden surrender and poured across her brown skin as if it had been waiting all day for the privilege of touching her.
Jack should have been watching the road with the strict discipline of a man trained to notice danger before it had a name, a man already half-married to order and duty and all the clean, brutal logic of army medicine, but God help him, Jamila made vigilance feel impossible, because every time the light caught the slope of her cheek or the curve of her mouth, every time her hair shifted around her face like a dark halo loosened by the wind, he felt something ancient and unreasonable rise in him, something that belonged less to the modern world and more to myth, to men who built temples because their hearts had nowhere else to put the worship.
He glanced at her, just once, and smiled like he was trying not to give himself away too early.
“Do you trust me?”
Jamila’s brows lifted, her mouth curving before she could stop it, and she turned fully in her seat with the solemn suspicion of a woman who had watched enough true crime to know that charm and bone structure had never saved anybody from being found in a ditch.
“I’m pretty sure that’s how murder documentaries start.”
Jack laughed then, not loudly, not carelessly, but with that low warm sound that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his chest, and Jamila hated how much she liked it already, hated how quickly it had started to feel familiar, like a song she had not heard before but somehow knew the words to.
“I would make a terrible murderer,” he said, one hand resting easy on the wheel, the other briefly shifting against the gear stick as the car rolled past rows of brick buildings washed in amber light. “I’m too organised, which means I’d overthink everything, leave no evidence, then feel guilty about depriving the investigators of a decent puzzle.”
“So you admit you’ve considered the logistics?”
“I’m pursuing medicine in the army, sweetheart, unfortunately my brain considers logistics before romance, breakfast, sleep, and most major holidays.”
Jamila narrowed her eyes at him, but her smile deepened until one dimple appeared, that single devastating indentation that had already begun ruining Jack’s sense of proportion, because every time he saw it, the world rearranged itself around the small fact of her happiness.
“First of all, don’t sweetheart me like you’re not currently driving me to an undisclosed location,” she said, folding her arms as though she were not enjoying herself. “Second of all, men who call women sweetheart in that calm voice are exactly the ones women end up warning each other about.”
Jack looked over at her again, and this time his smile softened into something quieter, something that had no business appearing on a second date, because it looked too close to recognition, too close to promise, too close to a man standing on the shore and seeing, not just the sea in front of him, but every storm he was willing to cross.
“I’ll accept that criticism,” he said, “but I need the record to show that I am not taking you anywhere suspicious.”
“The record will show that you refused to answer a direct question.”
“The record will also show that you got in the car anyway.”
Jamila turned toward the window with a huff, but Jack saw the reflection of her smile in the glass, saw the way she tried to press it down and failed, saw the way the evening light gathered along her profile as if Apollo himself had slowed his chariot just to admire the line of her nose, the softness of her lips, the quiet brightness of her eyes.
He was twenty-two years old, and still, in that moment, he felt impossibly young, almost boyish with wanting, not just wanting her body near him or her hand in his, though God knew even the brush of her shoulder earlier had nearly undone him, but wanting in the larger, more terrifying way, wanting her mornings and her bad moods and her opinions on things he had never cared about before, wanting to know how she took her tea, whether she liked rain, what songs she played when she was sad, whether she cried at films and pretended she didn’t, whether she slept curled into herself or sprawled like she owned the bed.
He wanted to learn her the way ancient sailors learned the stars, not casually, not for beauty alone, but for survival.
That was what unsettled him most.
Jamila did not feel like a woman he had met.
She felt like a direction.
She felt like north.
The road curved toward the older part of town, where the buildings stood close together and the pavements were warm from the day’s heat, and Jamila watched the streets pass with interest, her skepticism shifting into curiosity as Jack pulled onto a quieter lane lined with small shops and window boxes overflowing with flowers that leaned toward the sun like worshippers.
“Jack,” she said slowly, stretching his name in that way that made him feel both accused and adored, “why are we somewhere that looks expensive?”
He did not answer immediately, partly because he enjoyed the rising suspicion in her voice and partly because he needed a moment to gather himself, because the truth was ridiculous even to him, and yet not ridiculous enough to stop him.
Instead, he parked along the curb, turned off the engine, and sat there for half a breath with both hands still on the wheel, looking out at the storefront ahead of them where the windows glimmered with the cold fire of diamonds beneath soft lights.
Jamila followed his gaze.
Then she went still.
Not dramatically, not loudly, but completely, like the sea drawing back from the shore before a wave broke.
“Jack,” she said, and this time his name came out softer, lower, threaded with disbelief.
He turned to her, and though he tried to keep his expression steady, the yearning was there in him like tide under moonlight, pulling at everything he had not said, everything he had no right to say yet, everything his heart had already decided before his common sense had even arrived at the meeting.
“Before you panic,” he said, “I am not proposing to you.”
Jamila blinked at him.
Then blinked again.
“You brought me to a jewelry store on our second date and thought the first thing you should say is, ‘before you panic’?”
“In my defence, it seemed efficient.”
“In your defence?” she repeated, turning toward him in full now, eyes wide and incredulous. “Jack Abbot, I am about to get out this car and walk home.”
“You don’t know where you are.”
“Women have crossed deserts, oceans, and bad marriages with less information than that.”
He laughed again, but there was something nervous beneath it now, something boyish and exposed, because as much as he had rehearsed the explanation in his head, as much as he had arranged the words carefully like instruments on a surgical tray, Jamila looking at him made language feel clumsy.
“I know this is… unusual,” he said, and the understatement made her give him a look so sharp it could have split marble, but he pressed on because if he stopped now, he would lose his nerve. “I’m not asking you for anything, Jamila, and I’m not trying to rush you or scare you or make assumptions about what you want from me, because that would be unfair and honestly stupid, but I do know that I like you, and I know that when I care about something, I prepare for it properly.”
Her expression shifted, suspicion still there, but softened now by curiosity, by the strange tenderness of being taken seriously before she had even asked to be.
Jack swallowed, his gaze dropping for a moment to where her hand rested in her lap, graceful and brown and bare, her fingers catching the sunlight like something sculpted from warm earth.
“I don’t ever want to be the kind of man who decides what a woman should want and then calls it romance,” he said, his voice quieter now, steady but full of something that pressed against the air between them. “If I ever ask you something important, something life-changing, something that deserves reverence, then I want to know I listened before I spoke, and I want to know I chose with you in mind, not with my pride in mind.”
Jamila stared at him, and for once, her mouth did not have a quick answer ready.
That silence nearly killed him.
It would have been easier if she teased him, easier if she scoffed or called him insane or told him he had lost his whole mind somewhere between the starter and the main course on their first date, but instead she just looked at him, really looked at him, as if she were seeing past the smile, past the controlled posture, past the military discipline he wore like armour, and into the young man beneath it, the one who had already started building a place for her in his life with his bare hands.
“You’re serious,” she said.
“I usually am.”
“No, Jack,” she said, her voice gentler now, almost careful. “I mean you’re serious about me.”
The late afternoon seemed to hush around them, the city dimming into a painted thing beyond the windshield, the sun lowering itself toward the horizon like Helios descending into the western sea, and Jack felt the truth rise in him, luminous and dangerous.
“I am,” he said.
Jamila let out a small breath, not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh, and turned her face toward the jewelry store again, where the diamonds sat in their velvet beds like fallen stars.
“On the second date?”
Jack looked at her profile, at the golden light along her cheek, at the dimple threatening to return even as she tried to remain stern, and he felt so helplessly fond of her that it was almost painful.
“Technically, I knew on the first one,” he admitted.
Her head snapped back toward him.
“Jack.”
“What?”
“You cannot say things like that to me while parked outside a ring store.”
“I could have said it while driving, but you already thought I was taking you somewhere to die.”
She pressed her lips together, fighting a smile so hard he could see the battle moving across her face.
“You are absolutely ridiculous.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“You are insane.”
“Possibly.”
“You are dangerously intense.”
“That one feels fair.”
“You barely know me.”
Jack’s expression changed then, not into offence, but into something solemn, something that made the air feel warmer and heavier, like summer rain gathering above dry land.
“I know,” he said, and his honesty disarmed her more than any pretty answer could have. “I know I barely know you, and I’m not pretending that I do, but I know enough to want the privilege of learning the rest slowly, properly, without rushing you, without making you feel cornered, without turning my certainty into pressure.”
Jamila’s gaze searched his face, and Jack let her, because there was no manipulation in him, no polished trick, no hidden net beneath the words, only a frightening earnestness that made him feel as vulnerable as Orpheus walking out of the underworld with the whole of his heart behind him and one command standing between hope and ruin.
“I know you’re brilliant,” he continued, voice low, “and I know you like arguing even when you agree, and I know you pretend not to enjoy being complimented even though your left dimple gives you away every single time, and I know you check exits when you walk into restaurants, which means either you’re cautious, nosy, or you watch too much crime television, and I know you spoke about software engineering like it was less of a career and more of a kingdom you intended to build brick by brick until the whole world had to respect the architecture.”
Jamila looked away before he could see too much of what that did to her, but he saw enough.
He always saw enough.
“And,” he said, softer still, “I know that when you laughed last night, I thought about it again before I fell asleep.”
Her eyes closed briefly, as if she needed a second to survive him.
“You are dangerous,” she murmured.
“I thought we established I’d make a poor murderer.”
“Not that kind of dangerous.”
Jack’s smile faded into something more tender, and for a moment he looked at her like she was the only fixed point in an expanding universe, like every star in the sky had been born only to teach him what orbit meant.
“Then what kind?”
Jamila turned back to him, her eyes bright with the kind of feeling she was not yet ready to name, and her smile came slowly, like dawn coming over water.
“The kind women write poetry about and then regret.”
Jack’s breath caught, just barely, but enough for her to notice.
She noticed everything.
That was another thing he loved already, though he had no right to call it love yet, no socially acceptable reason to admit that some part of him had stepped into her gravity and simply stopped fighting the fall.
“Come on,” he said, opening his door before he said something unforgivably honest. “Let me be prepared, and then you can tell all your friends I’m insane over dinner.”
Jamila did not move at first, watching him step out and come around to her side like manners were not performance to him but instinct, something bred deep into the bone, something steady and old-fashioned without being possessive.
When he opened her door, he offered his hand.
She looked at it.
Then she looked at him.
“If I go in there with you,” she said, placing her hand in his palm but not yet letting him help her out, “you understand this does not mean I am agreeing to marry you, have your children, take your last name, or let you start acting like you have claims on me.”
Jack’s fingers closed gently around hers, warm and careful, and the contact moved through him like lightning striking open sea.
“I understand.”
“And you understand that I will tell my friends you’re crazy.”
“I’m counting on that.”
“And you understand that if the saleswoman starts smiling at me like she knows something I don’t, I will leave you in there.”
“I’ll deserve it.”
Jamila stepped out of the car, and when she stood in front of him, close enough that he could smell the soft sweetness of whatever lotion she wore, close enough that the wind lifted a strand of her hair against his sleeve, Jack had the wild, almost unbearable thought that if Aphrodite herself had risen from seafoam and walked barefoot through the world, she might have carried herself like this, amused and luminous and entirely aware that men had been losing wars for less.
He did not say that, of course, because he wanted to live.
Instead, he shut the car door and walked beside her toward the jewelry store, careful not to crowd her, though every part of him wanted to reach for her again, wanted to know whether her hand fit his as perfectly on purpose or whether the universe was simply showing off.
Inside, the store was cool and bright, the air faintly perfumed, the glass counters arranged like small altars beneath constellations of light, and Jamila slowed as she entered, her earlier teasing falling into a quiet sort of wonder she tried very hard to conceal.
Jack watched her take it in.
Not the diamonds first, not the price tags, not the glitter, but the shapes, the settings, the artistry of it all, the language of gold and stone and craftsmanship speaking to that architectural part of her mind, and he felt something inside him settle with certainty so deep it was almost frightening.
He wanted to give her beautiful things, yes, but not because beauty alone could impress her.
He wanted to give her considered things.
Chosen things.
Things that said, I saw you, I listened, I remembered.
A saleswoman approached with a professional smile, and Jamila immediately cut her eyes at Jack as if to say, behave, which made his mouth twitch.
“Good afternoon,” the woman said warmly. “Are we looking for anything special today?”
Jamila opened her mouth, probably to say something sensible, something clarifying, something that would spare them both from the absurdity of the situation, but Jack spoke first.
“We’re just learning what she likes,” he said, with such calm conviction that Jamila’s breath hitched almost imperceptibly beside him. “Nothing more than that.”
The saleswoman’s expression softened in a way Jamila absolutely noticed, and Jack felt Jamila’s elbow brush his side in warning.
He looked down at her.
She smiled up at him, sweet as honey and just as dangerous.
“I told you,” she murmured.
“I know.”
“She’s smiling.”
“I see that.”
“I’m leaving you here.”
“You said that already.”
“And yet you’re still misbehaving.”
Jack leaned slightly closer, not enough to be improper, just enough that his voice became something meant for her alone.
“If this is me misbehaving, Jamila, you’re going to be very disappointed when you find out how good I can be.”
For one glorious second, she forgot how to respond.
Jack saw it.
Jack cherished it.
Then her eyes narrowed, and she turned toward the counter with the dignity of a queen pretending she had not just been knocked off balance by a soldier with tired eyes and a devastating mouth.
“Show me something simple,” she said to the saleswoman, her voice perfectly composed except for the faint warmth in it. “Elegant, not boring, and please do not bring me anything that looks like a man chose it to prove he had money.”
The saleswoman laughed softly, and Jack looked down, smiling like a condemned man who had no interest in appeal.
There she was.
There was his Jamila, though he would not dare say his aloud, not yet, not before she gave him the right, not before he earned it with patience and reverence and the kind of devotion that did not clutch but cultivated, that did not conquer but tended, like fertile land waiting for rain, like a lighthouse keeping watch over a restless sea.
Ring after ring appeared on black velvet, each one catching the light in small bursts of fire, and Jamila tried them on with a mix of curiosity and embarrassment, as though she were amused by the drama of it all and secretly, dangerously touched by the fact that he cared enough to ask.
Jack paid attention like a man taking sacred instruction.
He noticed how she dismissed round stones too quickly, how her fingers lingered over emerald cuts, how she liked gold but paused longer over warmer tones, how she frowned at anything too bulky, how she smiled despite herself when a delicate band caught the light like a narrow river under the sun.
He noticed the way she flexed her hand when a ring felt wrong, the way her mouth softened when one felt close, the way she glanced at him once after trying on an oval stone and then immediately looked away, as if sharing the reaction too soon would reveal more than she was ready to give.
“That one?” he asked quietly.
Jamila looked down at her hand, then at him.
“It’s pretty.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Her eyes lifted, and there it was again, that spark between them, that answering flare, like two celestial bodies recognizing the pull before impact.
“What did you ask, then?”
“I asked if you liked it.”
She swallowed, and Jack watched the movement with a tenderness that nearly undid him.
“I do,” she said, softer than before. “I like this one.”
The saleswoman smiled and began noting details, but Jack barely heard her, because Jamila was looking down at the ring on her own hand with an expression he knew he would remember when he was old, when his curls had gone fully silver, when their life had gathered years the way shorelines gathered shells.
He imagined, against all reason and permission, that same hand reaching for him in the dark.
He imagined it resting on his chest.
He imagined it holding his child’s fingers.
He imagined it wearing something he had chosen not because it was expensive, not because it announced him, but because it belonged to her as naturally as moonlight belonged to the tide.
The yearning that moved through him then was not hunger alone, though hunger was there, sharp and human and impossible to deny; it was something larger and more reverent, something rooted in the deep earth of him, something that wanted not to take but to build, to plant, to return, to become worthy of being trusted with her name in his mouth and her future anywhere near his hands.
Jamila glanced up and caught him staring.
“What?” she asked, her voice quieter now, stripped of some of its teasing.
Jack could have lied.
He could have made a joke.
He could have hidden behind charm, because charm was easier than truth and far less likely to frighten a woman on a second date in a jewelry store.
But he looked at her beneath those soft white lights, with all those diamonds burning around them like fragments of fallen stars, and he found he could not make himself cheapen the moment.
“I’m trying to remember this,” he said.
Her expression changed.
“Why?”
“Because one day,” he said, carefully, gently, as if laying something precious between them and not asking her to pick it up yet, “I think I’m going to be very grateful that I did.”
For a long moment, Jamila said nothing.
Then she looked back down at the ring, turning her hand slightly, watching the stone catch the light.
“You really are crazy,” she whispered.
Jack smiled, but his voice, when it came, was steady as a vow spoken under stars.
“Only about you.”
Their love was a symphony, not loud for the sake of being heard but perfectly composed, deliberate as a hand hovering over ivory keys before the first note, every breath and glance and touch arriving where it was meant to, as if some unseen conductor had been standing beyond the veil of their lives long before they met, waiting for Jack Abbot and Jamila Vermont to finally find the same measure.
After that second date, when the evening had folded itself into something soft and dangerous, when the city outside had gone blue-black beneath the moon and the stars had begun pricking holes in the dark like heaven itself wanted to spy, Jack understood that what was happening between them was not simply want, not simply chemistry, not the ordinary hunger of a young man undone by a beautiful woman, but something older than language, something tidal, something celestial, something that moved through him with the terrifying certainty of the sea answering the moon.
He had thought himself disciplined before Jamila, thought himself steady, thought the army had already begun carving him into a man of restraint and reason, but then she said his name in the dark, soft and wanting and ruinously sure, and every law he had ever obeyed became smoke, every sensible thought scattered like birds startled from a field, every carefully built wall inside him lowered its drawbridge as though it had only ever been waiting for her arrival.
He did not think of conquest, because Jamila was not territory to be taken, nor treasure to be seized, nor some mortal prize for a man arrogant enough to believe love meant possession, but he thought of worship, of temples built from marble and devotion, of sailors who kissed the earth after surviving storms, of farmers who fell to their knees when rain finally broke over starving land, of Orpheus looking back not out of weakness but because the beloved voice behind him was worth more than obedience to the gods.
That was how Jack loved her already, helplessly and with the full surrender of a man who knew, even at twenty-two, that he had reached the place where his life would divide itself into before and after.
When they became one, it was not crude or careless, not some fleeting collision of bodies mistaken for intimacy, but a crossing of oceans, a meeting of weather systems, a sacred eclipse in which the sun and moon stopped chasing one another long enough to touch, and Jack, with Jamila close enough to feel like warmth beneath his skin and fate beneath his hands, swore with the kind of silent desperation men saved for battlefields, deathbeds, and altars that he would spend his life loving her if she allowed him the honor.
He swore it to every god who had ever meddled in the affairs of lovers, to Aphrodite rising from seafoam with mischief on her mouth, to Hera watching over vows with stern and ancient eyes, to Selene dragging her silver chariot across the night, to Poseidon roaring beneath the black belly of the ocean, to every power that had ever watched humans ruin themselves beautifully in the name of love.
He swore it on his mother and father, on the generations before him whose names he carried in his blood, on the bones of every Abbot who had known how to keep a promise, that Jamila would not be a season in his life, would not be a woman he remembered with regret, would not become some almost-love he spoke of years later with a glass in his hand and sorrow in his throat.
Jamila would be his wife.
Jamila would be his lover.
Jamila would be the woman whose name lived behind his teeth when he prayed, cursed, laughed, bled, survived, and came home.
And God, the way she held him close, the way she seemed to pull the very tide out of him, the way her breath trembled against his skin like wind moving over summer grass, the way his name left her mouth not as a sound but as a summons, made something in Jack tighten with such unbearable tenderness that he almost could not endure it, because desire was one thing, sharp and human and blinding, but being wanted by Jamila felt like being chosen by the sun.
He had known attraction before her, had known the quick flare of interest, the passing heat of pretty faces and easy conversations, but this was not heat alone; this was gravity, this was the earth learning the shape of its own orbit, this was a man standing at the edge of the known world and realizing the horizon was not an ending but an invitation.
“Jamila,” he breathed, and her name sounded different in his mouth then, less like a name and more like scripture, like a prayer he had not been taught but somehow remembered.
She touched his face with a softness that undid him more completely than any urgency could have, her fingers tracing him as if she were learning not merely the lines of his jaw or the slope of his cheek, but the man beneath the skin, the boy who had grown into discipline because chaos had frightened him, the soldier-in-training who trusted structure because tenderness felt too unpredictable, the young man who had looked at her across a dinner table and known, with no proof except the wild arithmetic of his own heart, that he was finished.
“You’re staring,” she whispered, laughter tucked into the words, breathless and affectionate and a little shy despite all the boldness she had shown him.
“I know,” he murmured, because lying to Jamila already felt impossible, and because even then, even before rings and vows and children and night shifts and gray curls, Jack understood that love demanded honesty before it demanded poetry.
“You always this intense?”
“No,” he said, and the answer came too quickly, too seriously, because he wanted her to understand that this version of him, this undone and open and almost reverent version, belonged to her alone. “Only with you.”
That made her quiet in a way that pleased and terrified him, because Jamila was quick, Jamila was sharp, Jamila had a mouth made for teasing and a mind made for dismantling foolish men brick by brick, yet she looked at him then as if he had reached into some hidden place and touched something she had not meant to show him so soon.
Outside, the moon climbed higher, pouring silver over rooftops and windowsills, and inside, the world reduced itself to the sacred hush of two people finding each other in the dark, not with the clumsiness of strangers but with the awe of lost kingdoms recognizing the same old flag, with the sea rushing toward the shore and the shore opening to receive it, with stars collapsing into constellations because chaos had finally been given a shape.
Jack wanted to tell her everything then, wanted to confess that he had already imagined her old beside him, already imagined her laughter in rooms he had not lived in yet, already imagined her hand wearing a ring he had chosen with the care of a man selecting a star from the sky, already imagined mornings where she fussed at him for leaving shoes in the wrong place and nights where he came home heavy with the world and found her waiting like a lighthouse refusing to let him drown.
But he did not say all of it, because even in the flood of feeling, he knew love was not proven by overwhelming a woman with the full weight of a man’s longing, and Jack would rather bite his own tongue bloody than make Jamila feel cornered by the force of what he already knew.
So he kissed the truth into the quiet instead, kissed it into her hairline, into her temple, into the bend of her laughter, into the places where speech became too small and feeling had to find another language, and every time she drew him closer, every time she answered him with that same impossible tenderness, the vow inside him rooted deeper.
He would earn her slowly.
He would study her properly.
He would learn the weather of her moods, the architecture of her ambitions, the passwords to her silence, the small ceremonies that made her feel loved, the sharp edges of her fears, the hidden softness behind her wit, and every private constellation that made up the universe of Jamila Vermont.
He would not rush her to the altar simply because his heart had already run there barefoot.
He would not place his certainty around her neck like a chain and call it devotion.
He would become steady enough for her to lean on, patient enough for her to trust, humble enough to be corrected, tender enough to be safe, and strong enough to stand beside her without trying to stand over her.
That was the vow beneath the vow, the one no god could witness because it was carved too deep for heaven to see, and as the night moved around them like dark water, as Jamila’s breath softened and the universe seemed to hold its own, Jack rested his forehead against hers and felt his whole future gather itself into one luminous point.
Her.
Always her.
Not because she had been promised to him by fate, not because myth or moonlight or desire had made the choice for them, but because in a world full of noise and ruin and brief, forgettable things, Jamila felt like the one truth he would spend the rest of his life proving himself worthy of keeping.
He remembered when he lost part of his leg during his time at war; it had been fifteen years now, fifteen whole years of scar tissue and prosthetic fittings and phantom aches that came with rain or exhaustion or memory, and still he remembered it with the bright, cruel clarity of yesterday, as if the wound had never truly closed but had simply learned manners, as if it had dressed itself in skin and time and let the world believe it had stopped bleeding.
Apparently army medics were not exempt from becoming casualties themselves, and Jack had learned that lesson not from textbooks or triage drills or the clean theoretical language of trauma training, but from the dirt, from the smoke, from the terrible red arithmetic of war, from a field where the earth had split open like some ancient god had struck it in anger and demanded payment in flesh.
He remembered the sky most of all.
That was the part that haunted him strangely, not the shouting, not the burning metal, not the sharp medical voices in his ear, but the sky above him, wide and blue and indifferent, an impossible dome of heaven stretched over the ugliest hour of his life, and he remembered thinking that the gods had always been cruel in the old stories, always watching men break themselves against war and love and destiny, always asking for a limb here, a heart there, a wife turned to shadow, a son sent across the sea, a soldier dragged home in pieces.
He remembered thinking, absurdly, stupidly, with blood in his mouth and his hands trying to do their work even when his body had become the emergency, that Jamila was going to leave him.
Not because she was shallow, not because she was cruel, not because she had ever once loved him in a way that depended on him being whole by anyone else’s definition, but because fear was not rational when it found a man already on the floor; fear was a vulture, circling low and patient, whispering the ugliest things in his own voice until they sounded like truth.
Good fucking job, pal, he remembered thinking, bitter and delirious and so furious at himself he could hardly breathe. You didn’t deserve her to begin with, and now she’s surely going to leave your ass.
He remembered all of it, the shame most of all, the hot, suffocating shame that rose in him before the grief even had language, because Jack had always known how to be useful, had known how to be steady, had known how to stand between disaster and the people he loved, and suddenly his own body had become a country after invasion, its map redrawn without his permission, borders broken, landmarks missing, the familiar terrain of himself turned foreign under his hands.
He wanted Jamila more than he wanted air.
And he did not want her anywhere near him.
That contradiction nearly killed him more thoroughly than the injury had, because the person who could soothe his woes most was the very person he could not bear to see, the woman whose hands had always known how to find the ache beneath his armor, whose voice could call him back from any ledge, whose love had once made him feel larger than fear, and yet the idea of her walking into that hospital room and seeing him reduced, altered, lessened — God, the word made him hate himself even as he thought it — felt like staring down a second battlefield.
He had imagined her face before she arrived, and his mind, being a cruel and gifted enemy, painted every version designed to ruin him.
He imagined pity.
He imagined shock.
He imagined her trying to hide grief too quickly, her smile trembling at the edges, her eyes falling where his leg no longer was and then lifting with too much effort, too much kindness, too much careful mercy, and he thought that if Jamila looked at him like something to be handled gently because it had been broken, he would not survive it.
He could take pain.
He could take blood.
He could take surgeons, morphine, military doctors speaking in clipped tones over him as if his body were a report they had to file by morning.
But he could not take Jamila’s pity.
He could not take being loved out of obligation by the woman he had once promised the moon to with twenty-two-year-old arrogance and a second-date ring size tucked in the secret chambers of his memory.
He remembered hearing her before he saw her.
That was Jamila all over, arriving not like a storm exactly, but like weather the earth had been warned about, like pressure gathering over the sea, like thunder still beyond the horizon but already making every living thing lift its head. He heard the sharp rhythm of her heels first, then her voice cutting through the sterile quiet of the ward with that polished, dangerous sweetness she used when she was one inconvenience away from ruining somebody’s afternoon.
He remembered hearing her before he saw her.
Not clearly at first, not as a voice with words and edges, but as a force moving through the corridor outside his hospital room, as unmistakable as thunder rolling over black water, as familiar as the moon dragging the tide toward shore whether the sea was ready or not. Even through the haze of pain medicine, even through the sterile hush of machines and the thick, shameful fog of his own fear, Jack knew that voice before his mind could fully hold it.
Jamila.
“Jack. Jack Abbot. I’m looking for my husband.”
Her voice was controlled, which somehow made it worse for everyone involved, because Jamila Vermont-Abbott did not need to shout to become dangerous; she had never been the kind of woman who mistook volume for power, and even then, even frantic, even terrified, she spoke with the sharp precision of a blade drawn slowly from its sheath.
“Yes, I am aware he doesn’t want any visitors,” she said, each word polished smooth with false patience, the sort of patience that promised ruin if tested one second longer. “And I’m also aware that you are standing between me and the man I married, Curtis, so either you let me see him, or I’m going to make your wife aware of your extracurricular activities.”
Jack closed his eyes.
Even half-broken, even with his body remade by war and his pride lying somewhere in the dust beside what he had lost, some stunned, horrified part of him thought, I told her that in confidence.
Of course she had remembered.
Of course she had stored it somewhere behind those pretty brown eyes like a queen keeping a dagger beneath her silk, not because she was cruel, but because Jamila believed information was a tool and fools were merely people who did not know how to use what they had been given. She had always been like that, brilliant and ruthless when necessary, sunlight with teeth, warmth with a warning label, the kind of woman who could kiss softness into a man’s forehead and then reduce an obstacle to ash without ever raising her voice.
There was a pause outside the door.
A small one.
The kind men took when they realized the woman in front of them had not come to negotiate, but to collect what belonged to her heart.
Jack could almost see Curtis through the wall, could imagine the blood draining from his face, could imagine the nurse at the desk pretending not to listen, could imagine Jamila standing there with her coat still on, hair probably pulled back in a rush, eyes bright with fear and fury, looking less like a worried wife and more like Hera herself descending from Olympus to remind mortals what happened when they confused protocol with authority.
And God help him, beneath all the shame and terror and pain, Jack loved her so violently in that moment that it nearly split him open all over again.
And God help him, beneath all the shame and terror and pain, Jack loved her so violently in that moment that it nearly split him open all over again.
Because only Jamila would arrive at a military hospital with fear clawing its way up her throat, with her husband lying somewhere behind a closed door and the worst day of their marriage unfolding in sterile white light, and still have the presence of mind to weaponize a man named Curtis’s infidelity like she was pulling a blade from her garter at a dinner party, polite as a duchess, deadly as Athena stepping fully armed from Zeus’s skull.
There was another pause, then a low male voice, nervous now, muffled through the door but not muffled enough to hide the surrender in it.
“Mrs. Abbot, I really don’t think—”
“You don’t need to think, Curtis, that’s clearly been part of the problem.”
Jack would have laughed if his ribs had not hurt, if his throat had not been tight, if the lower half of his body did not feel like a foreign country after war had burned the borders and left him stranded in the ash, but even then, even there, the smallest, most battered part of him stirred at the sound of her, because Jamila had always had that effect on him, always reached through whatever fog he was lost in and tugged him back by the soul.
Outside, someone cleared their throat, someone else shifted, and then Curtis, poor foolish Curtis, who had once spoken too freely to Jack during a late-night smoke break and assumed a married man would not repeat another man’s sins to his wife, finally seemed to understand that Jamila Abbott had not flown all the way here to be reasonable.
The door handle moved.
Jack’s heart stopped.
It was a strange thing, to have survived the blast, the blood loss, the hands pressing down on him, the morphine, the doctors talking over what remained and what could not be saved, only to feel, at the turning of a simple metal handle, that he had reached the true edge of himself.
He wanted her.
God, he wanted her so badly it felt animal, humiliating, almost holy, the way a man lost at sea wanted the first glimpse of land, the way Orpheus must have wanted one forbidden glance, the way every tide in the world wanted the moon even though the moon never came close enough to hold.
And yet he wanted the door to stay closed forever.
Because if Jamila crossed that threshold, then the thing he had been dreading would become real in a way even the wound itself had not made real, and she would see him not as memory, not as voice over a dropped call, not as a husband preserved in the bright amber of before, but as he was now, bandaged and battered and changed, with part of his body gone and the rest of him drowning in the ugly belief that war had finally revealed what he had feared all along, that he had never deserved someone like her and now had the evidence to prove it.
The door opened.
For one breath, no one moved.
Jamila stood in the doorway like a figure from myth, not fragile with grief but lit from within by it, her coat still buttoned wrong as if she had dressed faster than her hands could manage, her hair pulled back with several curls escaping around her face, her eyes dark and furious and wet, and behind her, Curtis lingered like a man who had just met Nemesis in a pencil skirt and regretted every decision that had led him there.
Jack saw her see the room first.
The machines.
The wires.
The bruises.
The bandages.
The emptiness beneath the sheet where there should have been shape.
He saw the storm pass over her face so quickly anyone else might have missed it, saw the flash of horror, not at him but at what had been done to him, saw the grief slam into her ribs and nearly fold her in half, saw her swallow it down with brutal discipline because Jamila, even in devastation, understood that this moment could not be about making him hold her fear when he could barely hold his own.
Then her eyes found his.
Not his leg.
Not the wound.
Him.
And Jack, who had spent hours imagining pity, revulsion, obligation, sorrow too heavy to bear, was completely unprepared for the simple, devastating fact of being recognized.
“Jack,” she said, and his name in her mouth was not a gasp or a cry or a funeral bell, but an anchor dropped into black water, something heavy enough to hold.
He turned his head away.
He hated himself the second he did it, hated the cowardice of it, hated that this woman had crossed oceans of fear to find him and he could not even give her his eyes, but shame was a hand around his throat and grief was a second body in the bed with him, and he could not bear the tenderness coming toward him, could not bear the possibility that her love might soften because softness, in that moment, felt too close to mercy.
“Leave,” he said, though the word broke so badly it sounded nothing like an order.
The room went still.
Behind Jamila, Curtis made the fatal mistake of breathing like he might speak.
Without turning around, Jamila lifted one finger.
Curtis shut his mouth.
Even ruined, Jack noticed.
Even heartbroken, even half-sedated, even lying there with his whole future split open like earth after a quake, Jack saw his wife silence a grown man with one hand and thought, stupidly and helplessly, That’s my girl.
Then she stepped into the room and closed the door behind her.
Not softly.
Not gently.
With finality.
Like a queen sealing a chamber before judgment.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
Jack stared at the wall, jaw locked so hard pain flared along his face. “I said leave.”
“I heard what you said.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“Because you are on drugs, traumatized, and acting stupid, so I’m weighing your request accordingly.”
A laugh tried to climb out of him and died somewhere behind his ribs, turning into something uglier, something wet and furious and too close to a sob.
“Jamila.”
“No,” she said, and he heard her coming closer, heard the careful drag of the visitor’s chair, heard the rustle of her coat as she sat beside him but did not touch him yet, because even furious, even terrified, she loved him with enough intelligence to know that some wounds needed permission before hands could come near them. “No, you don’t get to use that voice on me, Jack Abbott, not after you made me threaten Curtis in front of half this damn floor.”
He closed his eyes, and despite everything, despite the pain gnawing through him, despite the shame coiled low and poisonous in his stomach, his mouth moved with the ghost of a smile.
“I told you that in confidence.”
“And I held it in confidence,” she replied, calm as a priestess tending temple fire, “until confidence became less important than access.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“That is marriage.”
This time the sound that escaped him was almost laughter, small and broken and painful, but laughter still, and Jamila heard it the way a farmer heard the first rain strike dry land, the way sailors heard gulls after months of nothing but sea, the way Persephone must have heard spring waiting beneath the frozen earth.
“There you are,” she murmured.
The tenderness in those three words undid him more than the teasing had, and he clenched his eyes tighter because he could feel himself slipping, feel the armor cracking, feel the terrible need in him rising like tide under a full moon, dragging him toward her when every frightened part of him wanted to stay stranded on the shore.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
Jamila was quiet for a moment, and then he felt her lean forward, not touching, only near enough that the space between them warmed with her presence.
“Like what?”
He swallowed, and the words tasted like blood and humiliation. “Like you feel sorry for me.”
The silence that followed was so complete he heard the monitor beside him, heard the soft mechanical proof that his heart was still doing its work despite the fact that he would have sworn it had fallen apart somewhere in the field with the rest of him.
Then Jamila laughed once, softly, but there was no humor in it.
“Oh, Jack,” she said, and the sorrow in her voice was not pity but grief sharpened by love. “You arrogant, hardheaded man.”
His eyes opened despite himself.
He turned just enough to see her.
She was sitting beside him with her coat still on, hands clasped tightly in her lap, knuckles pale from the effort of not reaching for him before he was ready, and her face was wet now, though her posture remained straight, regal, unbroken, as if Hera had learned to cry without surrendering the throne.
“I don’t feel sorry for you,” she said, each word quiet and deliberate, the way she spoke when she wanted him to hear her beneath his own noise. “I am sorry this happened to you, and I am sorry you are hurting, and I am sorry war took something from you that it had no right to touch, but I do not feel sorry for you like you are less than the man I married.”
His throat tightened so violently he almost could not breathe.
“You haven’t seen all of it.”
“I have seen you.”
“No,” he said, sharper now, because panic had teeth and it bit first. “You’ve seen the room, you’ve seen the monitors, you’ve seen enough to make a speech, but you have not seen all of it, Jamila.”
Her eyes did flicker then, briefly, toward the sheet.
Jack saw it and hated himself for watching.
He braced for the flinch.
It never came.
Her gaze returned to his face, steady as moonlight over dark fields.
“Then I will see it when you’re ready,” she said.
“And if I’m never ready?”
“Then I will still be your wife while you are not ready.”
He stared at her.
Something in his chest gave way, not fully, not enough to free him, but enough for the pressure to hurt differently.
“You say that now.”
Jamila’s eyebrows rose, and the room changed temperature.
“I’m sorry?”
He knew that tone.
Any other day, any other room, any other universe, he would have apologized immediately for invoking it, because Jamila’s I’m sorry? had ended arguments, corrected waiters, humbled insurance representatives, and once made his commanding officer reconsider a sentence he had technically been allowed to finish.
But he was hurt, and fear made him cruel in the way wounded animals became cruel, not because they wanted to bite the hand reaching for them but because they had forgotten any other way to stop the pain from being seen.
“You say that now,” he repeated, voice rough and low. “While it’s fresh, while everybody’s calling me brave, while you’re relieved I’m not dead, but months from now, when I’m angry and difficult and can’t do half the things I used to, when you’re tired of helping me, when you wake up and remember you married a man who came back in pieces—”
“Careful,” she said.
The word cracked through the room like lightning over open sea.
Jack stopped.
Jamila leaned forward, and now there was fire in her eyes, bright and old and righteous, the kind that had once sent goddesses into battle and turned mortal women into legends men were smart enough to fear.
“You can be angry,” she said. “You can be devastated, you can be terrified, you can grieve what you lost, you can curse God, the army, the doctors, the whole damn sky if you need to, and I will sit here and hear every ugly part of it because I love you, but you do not get to put words in my mouth so you can abandon yourself before you think I have the chance to do it.”
Jack looked away, but her voice followed him like tide around rock.
“You do not get to decide that my love is shallow just because your fear is loud.”
His eyes burned.
“And you do not get to call my husband a man who came back in pieces like the rest of him is not lying right in front of me breathing, stubborn, rude, and apparently still committed to hurting my feelings before breakfast.”
A broken sound left him then, half laugh and half sob, and he turned his face away harder, as if the wall could offer mercy she would not.
Jamila’s voice softened.
“There he is again.”
“Stop saying that,” he whispered.
“No.”
“Jamila.”
“No, because you keep disappearing on me right in front of my face, and I’m going to keep calling you back until you remember where you are.”
He shut his eyes, and in the darkness behind them he saw the blast again, saw earth and fire, saw the sky, saw hands, saw red, saw the impossible distance between the man he had been and the man he was terrified he had become.
“I don’t know where I am,” he admitted, so quietly it almost disappeared beneath the monitor.
Jamila’s breath caught.
For the first time since she entered the room, the queenly composure cracked clean through.
“Oh, baby,” she whispered.
And that was what did it.
Not the threats, not the jokes, not the fierce correction, not even the vow that she was still his wife, but that soft, old, intimate endearment slipping out of her like a hand reaching into the dark, the same voice she used when he came home exhausted, when fever made him restless, when grief sat too heavy on his shoulders, when he pretended he did not need care because needing care made him feel too human.
His face crumpled before he could stop it.
He turned toward her as much as his body allowed, the movement sending a white flash of pain through him, but he did not care, because suddenly she was standing, suddenly she was there, and when her hands came to him at last they came carefully, one to his cheek and one to the back of his head, gentle around every bruise, every wire, every place the doctors had marked and measured.
“I’m here,” she said, bending over him until her forehead touched his, until the scent of her skin cut through antiseptic and medicine and war, warm and familiar and impossibly alive. “I’m right here.”
Jack made a sound he would never be able to describe, something dragged from the bottom of him, from the place men buried terror and called it discipline, and Jamila held his face as his tears came with no dignity at all.
He hated it.
He needed it.
He had never needed anything more.
“I wanted you,” he confessed, the words breaking against her fingers. “I wanted you so bad, Mila.”
“I know.”
“But I couldn’t—” His breath hitched, and he gripped the sheet because he could not grip her too hard, would not make his pain a cage around her. “I couldn’t let you see me.”
“I know.”
“I thought you’d—”
“Don’t say leave,” she whispered, her own tears slipping now, falling onto the blanket between them like rain over scorched earth. “Do not give that word a shape in this room.”
He swallowed it down.
The silence held them.
Then, after a long moment, he breathed, “I thought you’d look at me and wish I hadn’t come back like this.”
Jamila went utterly still.
Not cold.
Not distant.
Still in the way the sea went still before a storm decided whether to spare the shore or swallow it.
When she spoke, her voice trembled with so much love it was almost unbearable.
“Jack, I thanked God you came back before I knew what came back with you.”
His eyes opened.
She was looking directly at him, tears on her cheeks, mouth firm, gaze unflinching, and in that moment she looked less like a woman made of flesh and more like something conjured from every faithful thing in creation, lighthouse and hearth flame, harvest moon and summer rain, Penelope at the loom and Aphrodite rising from the sea with the kind of beauty that made men foolish enough to believe the gods were kind.
“I thanked God when they told me you were alive,” she said. “I thanked God when I got on the plane, and I thanked God in the car, and I thanked God in that hallway while Curtis was fighting for his life and his marriage, because whatever war took, whatever it changed, whatever it left us to learn, it failed to take you from me.”
Jack stared at her.
His whole body shook once, hard enough to hurt.
Jamila kissed his forehead, then his temple, then the bridge of his nose, each kiss careful and reverent, each one landing like a star being placed back into a ruined sky.
“You are not inferior,” she whispered against his skin. “You are not less my husband. You are not less a man. You are not a burden I am politely accepting because I once made vows in a pretty dress. You are Jack Abbot, who took me ring shopping on the second date like a lunatic, who cannot season chicken unless supervised, who keeps putting things on the wrong side of the bathroom sink, who thinks I don’t notice when he stares at me, who loves like he’s trying to build a cathedral with his bare hands, and I am not leaving you in this bed, in this grief, or in your own head.”
A weak, shattered laugh escaped him. “I can season chicken.”
“No, you cannot.”
“Mila.”
“Not the point, but still true.”
He laughed again, and it hurt so much he winced, and Jamila immediately shifted, concern flashing over her face.
“Careful,” she murmured.
“You made me laugh.”
“You needed to.”
“I’m injured.”
“You’re also dramatic.”
His mouth trembled.
She saw that too.
She always saw.
“Come here,” she said, though he could not, not really, so she came to him instead, sitting on the edge of the bed where the nurses would probably fuss later, gathering as much of him as the wires and bandages allowed, and Jack leaned into her like a man collapsing against the only wall left standing after an earthquake.
Her hand found his hair.
Of course it did.
Even there, even then, before rosemary oil and gray curls and a sleeping child in the next room, her fingers slipped into his hair and began that slow, soothing motion against his scalp, the one that made his breathing change, the one that made something in him unclench no matter how stubbornly he resisted it.
He closed his eyes.
For the first time since the blast, the room did not feel like an underworld.
It felt like a threshold.
Not safe, not yet, not healed, not whole in the easy way people used the word when they wanted suffering to become inspirational quickly, but possible.
Jamila did that.
She did not erase the dark.
She stood in it with him until his eyes adjusted.
“I’m scared,” he said into her coat, the admission muffled and stripped bare.
Her fingers paused only for a second before continuing.
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“Then we’ll learn.”
“I might hate myself for a while.”
“Then I will love you loud enough for both of us until you remember how.”
He broke again then, quietly this time, not the first violent collapse but a softer grief, the kind that came when a man realized he did not have to perform bravery in order to be kept.
Jamila held him through it.
She held him as machines blinked and hummed, as footsteps moved outside, as the sky beyond the window darkened from blue to violet to the deep black of space, and somewhere above them, unseen behind hospital glass and city light, the stars burned on with their ancient indifference, not knowing that in one small room below, a man had thought himself abandoned by every version of the future and a woman had walked in with a threat on her tongue and devotion in her hands.
After a long while, when his breathing had steadied and exhaustion pulled at him like undertow, Jack opened his eyes and found her still watching him.
Not pitying.
Watching.
Guarding.
Loving.
“You really threatened Curtis?” he murmured.
Jamila’s mouth curved, and there she was again, his girl beneath the grief, sharp as ever, soft only where it mattered most.
“I gave him options.”
“You threatened his marriage.”
“I encouraged transparency.”
“You are terrifying.”
“I am your wife.”
His eyes filled again, though this time the tears did not feel quite as much like defeat.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
Her expression gentled.
“Yeah.”
He turned his face into her palm and kissed it, barely, because even that small movement cost him, but he needed the contact like a sailor needed the North Star, like earth needed rain, like the moon needed darkness to be seen.
“I love you,” he said.
Jamila’s thumb moved over his cheek, catching the tear there before it reached his jaw.
“I know.”
His mouth twitched. “You’re supposed to say it back.”
“I flew here, threatened a man with adultery exposure, bullied my way past hospital staff, and sat on this bed after you told me to leave, but yes, Jack, for clarity, I love you too.”
He laughed, hoarse and broken and alive.
Jamila smiled through her tears.
And now, twenty years later, with their son sleeping in the next room and the house wrapped in that particular blue-black quiet that only came after midnight, Jack stared at his wife with reverence, with all the love the world had ever managed to make and then some borrowed from the stars, his gray curls still damp from the oil she had worked into them with patient fingers, rosemary and cloves and some mysterious blend of herbs she had been mixing since the first year she knew him, because apparently Jamila Vermont-Abbot had decided at twenty years old that war, medicine, time, stress, and genetics could take many things from her husband, but they were not taking his hair if she had breath in her body and castor oil in her cabinet.
Twenty-three years of her hands in his hair, twenty-three years of her skin against his, twenty-three years of waking beside her and coming home to her and watching seasons pass across her face like sunlight over open water, and still Jack could not get enough of her, because how could he, when every year had only made her more impossible to survive, when age had not dulled her but deepened her, when she had become richer and warmer and more dangerous with time, like land after rain, like wine sealed in dark glass, like the moon growing full over a restless sea.
She sat between his legs on the edge of their bed, her own bonnet forgotten beside her, her hands glistening faintly from the oil she had just rubbed into his scalp, her house dress loose around her body and one shoulder slipping low enough to make him question every respectable thought he had ever pretended to possess. The lamp on her bedside table cast a honeyed glow over her brown skin, softening the line of her cheek, catching the small silver thread near her temple that she kept pretending was not there, and Jack, who had stitched arteries, delivered babies, survived war zones, and stood over more operating tables than he cared to count, found himself undone by the simple sight of his wife wiping oil from her fingers with a towel.
“Boy, you keep starin’ at me, I’mma have to call somebody.”
Her voice was low so she would not wake Miles, but the warning still carried enough heat and humor to make Jack’s mouth curve, because twenty years of marriage had taught him that Jamila’s threats were often love notes wearing church shoes and an attitude.
“Who you calling?” he asked, his voice rough with tiredness and something softer, something that had been following her around the room all night like tide following the moon.
“Somebody with authority.”
“I’m an attending physician.”
“You are a man sitting on my bed looking at me like you’ve lost your mind.”
“I lost it in 2003.”
Jamila paused with the towel in her hand, her brows rising as she gave him the look, the one that had humbled interns, contractors, bad customer service representatives, and Jack Abbot himself at least twice a week for over two decades.
“You think you’re cute.”
“No,” he said, leaning back on his hands, watching her as though she were still twenty years old beneath jewelry store lights, still laughing with one dimple showing while he quietly planned a lifetime around her ring size. “I think you’re cute.”
“Mmhm.”
“I think you’re beautiful too, but you get suspicious when I lead with that.”
“That’s because you only start talking like that when you want something.”
Jack’s smile turned slow.
“Jamila, I always want something from you.”
She tossed the towel at his chest, and he caught it with one hand, laughing under his breath as she tried to look offended and failed so badly that her mouth betrayed her at the corner.
“See, that right there,” she whispered, pointing at him. “That’s why I don’t let you oil your own scalp anymore, because you get too comfortable when I’m nice to you.”
“You never let me oil my own scalp because you said I don’t massage properly.”
“You don’t.”
“I follow instructions.”
“You follow medical instructions,” she said, standing to put the bottle back on the dresser, hips moving with the unhurried confidence of a woman who had long ago learned that her husband was weak and had made peace with using it against him. “Hair is different.”
Jack watched her cross the room, and the years collapsed inside him all at once, not disappearing, not being erased, but gathering into a single constellation of memory: Jamila at twenty with her face tilted toward a tray of rings, Jamila at twenty-five asleep beside his hospital textbooks with a laptop open on her knees, Jamila crying angry tears when he left for deployment and refusing to let him see her wipe them, Jamila learning the shape of his grief after he came home changed, Jamila helping him relearn parts of his own body with a tenderness that never once made him feel pitied, Jamila pregnant with Miles and cussing him out between contractions while he stood there half-doctor and half-terrified husband, Jamila holding their son for the first time with sweat on her brow and heaven in her eyes.
All of her lived in the woman before him now.
Every version.
Every year.
Every battle.
Every blessing.
“You know,” he said quietly, and something in his tone made her slow before she turned around, “I used to think loving you would get easier to explain the longer I did it.”
Jamila leaned back against the dresser, arms folding over her chest, her expression softening in spite of herself.
“And?”
“And I was wrong.”
The room seemed to shift around the confession, the shadows along the walls stretching like dark water, the moon beyond the curtains laying its silver hand over the floor as though Selene herself had paused her chariot to listen.
Jack sat forward, elbows on his knees, the lamplight catching in his full head of gray curls, the same curls she had saved with oils, patience, threats, and love, and he looked at her with such bare devotion that Jamila’s smile faded into something quieter.
“I understood it better when I was twenty-two,” he said, his voice low enough not to disturb the sleeping child down the hall, yet deep enough to settle into the room like thunder far over the sea. “Back then, it was simple because I didn’t know anything, so all I had was certainty, and that certainty was loud enough to make me brave, stupid enough to take you ring shopping on the second date, arrogant enough to swear to every god that would listen that you were going to be my wife.”
Jamila’s eyes warmed at that, because she remembered that boy, remembered the serious set of his jaw, remembered the ridiculous audacity of him opening her car door outside a jewelry store like the world had not lost its whole mind, remembered thinking he was insane and then, privately, dangerously, wondering why his insanity made her feel so seen.
“And now?” she asked.
Jack looked at her as if the answer cost him something beautiful.
“Now I know better, and somehow I’m worse.”
Her breath caught softly.
He stood then, slow because the day had been long and his body carried its histories in old scars and quiet aches, but there was still something deeply commanding about the way he moved toward her, not with the cockiness of a young man trying to impress but with the gravity of a husband who had crossed half a lifetime to stand in front of the same woman and still felt like he was approaching an altar.
“Now I know what loving you means,” he said, stopping close enough that she had to tilt her chin to keep his eyes. “It means your bonnet on my pillow, your lotion on my side of the sink, your cold feet under my leg, your laptop cords everywhere, your tea going cold because you start arguing with the news, your mouth fussing at me while your hands are fixing whatever hurts, your voice in my ear when I’m too deep in my own head, your face across from me at breakfast, your rings on the dish by the bed, your hair in the shower drain, your fingerprints all over every part of my life.”
Jamila stared up at him, her arms loosening, her defenses lowering one by one like sails folding after a storm.
“And I still don’t know how to explain it,” he continued, softer now, his hand lifting to brush the silver-threaded curl near her temple with the kind of tenderness that made her heart turn over. “Because it isn’t one thing anymore, honey, it’s everything, it’s the whole damn sky, it’s land and sea and weather, it’s the moon pulling at water it never has to touch to move, it’s Demeter grieving the earth barren and bringing spring back when her girl returns, it’s Odysseus refusing immortality because a goddess could offer him eternity and still not be home.”
Jamila swallowed, and because she was Jamila, because she could be moved down to the bone and still refuse to let him fully win, she whispered, “You been reading again?”
Jack smiled, but his eyes stayed serious.
“Only because you told me twenty years ago that a man with no books in his house was a red flag.”
“I said that?”
“You did.”
“Well, I was right.”
“You usually are.”
“Usually?”
His hand settled at her waist, warm and familiar, respectful until she leaned into it, which she did, because twenty years of marriage had not made her immune to him any more than living beside the sea made a person immune to the sound of waves.
“Always,” he corrected.
“That’s better.”
He bent his head, not quite kissing her yet, just hovering close enough that the space between them became charged, alive, full of all the things they had been saying to each other for two decades without needing words.
Jamila’s hand rose to his hair again, her fingers slipping into the oiled curls at the nape of his neck, and Jack’s eyes closed for a second as if she had put him under some old spell, as if Circe herself had brewed nothing half as potent as his wife touching his scalp in a bedroom that smelled faintly of rosemary, cocoa butter, sleep, and home.
“You keep touching my hair like that,” he murmured, “and you’re going to have to call somebody for real.”
Jamila’s smile came back, slow and wicked enough to make him twenty-two again in all the worst ways.
“Boy, please.”
“I’m serious.”
“You are always serious.”
“Not always.”
“With me you are.”
He opened his eyes, and the yearning in them was not young anymore, not frantic or untested or hungry without wisdom, but grown and rooted and impossibly tender, like an old olive tree gripping the side of a cliff above the Aegean, weathered by salt and sun and still green with life.
“With you,” he said, “I learned what serious was.”
That shut her up.
Only for a moment, but Jack loved the moment because he had earned it across years, across bills and surgeries and grief and parenthood and arguments about counters and laundry and who moved whose things, across nights when they did not like each other very much but loved each other too deeply to leave the room without reaching back.
Jamila reached for him then, both hands sliding from his hair to his face, her thumbs moving over his cheeks with the same care she had given him when they were young, when he came home exhausted, when pain made him short-tempered, when fatherhood scared him, when the hospital took too much and left him quiet in the doorway.
“You still look at me like that,” she said, and her voice had gone smaller, not weak, never weak, but honest in a way she rarely allowed herself to be without teasing around it. “After all this time.”
Jack turned his face and kissed the inside of her palm, lingering there as if the lines of her hand were scripture.
“I see you better now.”
Her eyes shone.
“Jack.”
“I do,” he said, because once the truth started in him there was no stopping it, not with her standing there soft and warm and beloved beneath his hands. “Back then, I saw the sun and thought that was all there was to worship, but now I know you’re the whole system, Jamila, you are morning and eclipse and harvest moon, you are coastline and deep water, you are the storm and the harbor after it, you are every season I have survived and every season I still want.”
She closed her eyes briefly, shaking her head like the words were too much and exactly enough.
“You cannot just say things like that to me at one in the morning.”
“I have to say them when Miles is asleep because he keeps interrupting me.”
At that, she laughed, pressing her forehead into his chest to muffle the sound, and Jack wrapped his arms around her immediately, holding her with that old instinct that had never left him, the one that said her body belonged safe against his not because he owned it but because he had spent half his life being trusted with the privilege of sheltering it.
They stood there in the quiet, swaying without music, though Jack had always thought their love made its own, something with low strings and brass and soft percussion, something composed of her laugh, his breathing, Miles turning over in the next room, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant hush of traffic, the moonlight on the floor.
“You need to sleep,” Jamila whispered against him.
“I know.”
“You worked all night.”
“I know.”
“You have clinic tomorrow afternoon.”
“I know.”
“And yet here you are, being dramatic in my face.”
Jack smiled into her hair.
“I missed you.”
“I was here.”
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t miss you.”
She pulled back enough to look at him, and the softness in her expression nearly undid him more thoroughly than any seduction could have.
“Come to bed then,” she said.
It was not grand.
It was not mythic.
It was not Shakespearean tragedy or Greek ruin or moon dragging oceans across the earth.
It was better.
It was Jamila turning down the lamp, Jamila tugging him toward the bed by two fingers hooked in his shirt, Jamila fussing at him to put a towel on the pillow because she had just oiled his scalp and she was not washing that pillowcase again, Jamila climbing beneath the covers with a sigh while he followed her as if he had been made for nothing else but finding his way back to her in the dark.
And when he settled beside her, when she tucked herself against him with the easy entitlement of a woman who had slept beside him for twenty years and still somehow fit like the final piece of creation sliding into place, Jack stared at the ceiling for a moment and felt the old vow rise in him again, not as desperate as it had been at twenty-two, not as feverish, not as startled by its own certainty, but deeper now, carved into him by time.
Jamila would be the love of his life.
She had been.
She was.
She would remain.
And when she pinched his side beneath the covers and muttered, “Stop thinking so loud,” Jack laughed quietly, kissed her forehead, and held her closer, grateful beyond language that the gods, the stars, the sea, or whatever ancient force had once pulled the sun and moon into eclipse had seen fit to leave him here, twenty years later, with rosemary oil in his hair, his son sleeping down the hall, and his whole universe breathing against his chest.
tags : @plan3tch1ld @mamasturn @neighbourscat ( lmk if you wanna be added or removed !)
pairing(s): baelor “breakspear” targaryen x wife!reader
summary: You wear Baelor's shirt to bed. He is very normal about it.
words: 2.4k
cw: explicit, smut, piv sex, unprotected sex, fingering, somnophilia, (mild), prone bone, headlock, biting, possessive behavior, reader called 'girl’, yearning, this is quite simply just baelor jumping our bones, i love arm, mildly edited, not beta read
a/n: this is not officially a sequel to my other baelor fic but it can be read like that since i characterized him the same. i rly just want that old man to fuck me in his shirt idk
ALL MY WORKS ARE 18+ MINORS DNI. I BLOCK AGELESS BLOGS.
Baelor has been standing at the foot of your bed for… much longer than he intended to. There's a tilt to his head, seventy-six degrees and counting, and a rise and fall to his chest that seems to be getting slightly faster with each passing exhale.
You do not see it. You are, as it is, asleep.
You're wearing his shirt. This is what has him still as stone, drawing his eyes over you in slow drags that he just can't seem to put an end to.
It's not an elaborate shirt. It's not even one of his best ones— the royal seamstresses have laden him with shirts of silk and fine woven cotton, embellished with hours of needlework or, in some horrifying cases, even beading. He has shirts of every color and shade, shirts of damask and velvet, shirts for summer and shirts for winter. Tunics from Dorne. Doublets from the Reach. Myrish robes. Qartheen samite vests.
You have chosen none of those. The one you have chosen is as simple a garment as he would choose on any given day, to wear against his skin beneath his doublet. White linen gauze, unembellished, unadorned. Its sleeves almost as billowing as its body, coming to plain rectangular cuffs. A simple collar, a sturdy yoke across the shoulders, double-stitched to keep it from unraveling. It is, in a word, efficient. Standard.
He knows, without having to ask you, that you chose to wear this shirt specifically because it is standard. Because it is one that he wears often. The cuffs have gone slightly soft with the wear, the neckline just a bit stretched along the bias. The felled seams are coming undone just a touch at the hem, a fact that he always sees but hasn't brought to the attention of his attendant, because it would mean a week of waiting to have it repaired. It is unfussy. But it is his.
And you are curled up in it like a kitten, asleep in his bed, your leg thrown over a pillow that you had moved toward his side of the bed in his absence. He has spent too long at his work, he knows. You spent too long waiting for him— long enough that you removed your nightgown and donned one of his shirts, and you fell asleep like that. Alone. In the bed you are meant to share with him.
Baelor feels a tightness in his chest that is ringed with fondness, an aching longing for you that hadn't stopped after your wedding, and doesn't seem like it will any time soon. He is too taken with you, too in love and consumed by it for that intrinsic sense of need for you to fade. It is a tender thing, tied around his heart in an intricate knot, with a tail that you hold the end of. You twirl it around your little finger and he buckles like a man who has never seen combat, who doesn't know what it is to stand his ground.
Baelor sighs as he undresses, but he keeps one eye on you all the while, as though you may disappear if he moves too far away. But you don't move. You don't even stir, when his belt hits the stone floor, or when his breeches follow. You are caught up in a world of dreams, unaware of what the sight of your sleeping form is doing to your husband, bringing him to the brink of something he has never quite been able to put a name to.
You do not stir when his hand presses into the mattress.
You do not stir when his weight dips the bedding and he moves slowly, purposefully, over you.
You do, however, stir just the smallest bit when his fingers dance over the curve of your hip through the fabric, feeling its drape over the soft plush of your skin. The meat of your ass, the swell of your thigh. Baelor feels, smoothing and caressing with a languid stroke that is not intended to rouse you, although he knows very well that it might and he does it anyway. Your fingers flex on the pillow that you clutch instead of him.
He finds himself, at that moment, inordinately envious of a pillow. A lump of fabric and feathers in your hands, between your thighs.
His hand grows bolder, a broad stroke over the small of your back, into the dip of your waist. You make a small noise in your throat, twitching the slightest bit as he passes over a particularly sensitive area.
"Shh, my sweet girl," Baelor whispers quietly, a lulling murmur in the darkness. Everything about you is soft— your skin, the fabric of his shirt as it lays over you, your hair, the expression on your face, the candle light on your sleeping body. It overwhelms him. It turns him into something that he's not normally, unless he is with you: a man. Not a Prince, and not the Hand of the King or heir to the throne. Not a warrior and not a subject of songs and poetry, myths and stories. With you, in this bed, he is simply a man in love with his wife, devoted beyond measure.
By the time his hand reaches your nape, your eyes are fluttering open the barest amount. Your face is still pressed slightly into the pillow, but you shift, a perking of your head as awareness returns to you. "Baelor?"
"It's me," he tells you, his voice low enough to not even constitute words.
"Mm. Waited for you," you mumble, confirming what he already knew.
His eyes crease at the corners, his smile overly tender. "I know. I'm here now."
Even as he says it, his hand is finding the hem of his shirt draped over your thigh, its frayed edge tickling against the smoothness of your skin. You hum quietly, dropping your eyelids against the feeling of his warm hand, burrowing between pillow and fabric and skin to find you, bare and wet and waiting for him.
"Oh," you sigh when his fingertip draws a slow circle around your clit.
"I know," he reassures you again, pressing a chaste, sweet kiss to the back of your neck. "I know, my love."
You turn your head further into the pillow beneath you, letting out a small whine at the feeling, your hips arching into his touch. He responds in kind, laying his weight flush to your back, his hand pinned between you and the pillow below.
"You're wearing my shirt," he remarks, his fingers finding your entrance and sliding in, stretching you open quick enough to make you keen softly. He gives you a few shallow strokes, feeling you grind back into the press of his cock against your tailbone. "My beautiful wife, wearing my clothes."
"W-Wanted to— to feel you— mm." Your voice is still slightly slurred with sleep, the heat of his body and the slowness of his movements doing nothing to rouse you more. You are still somewhere between awake and dreaming, pleasantly lulled, drowsy in your responses to him. Still, you moan at the curving of his fingers. "Wanted you… close to me…"
"Then let me be close," Baelor whispers, dragging the wilting fabric of his shirt up over your hips. He puffs a sigh through his nose, the ghost of it breezing against your neck. "What am I to do with you, hm?"
You make a pathetic noise when he moves your thighs apart to fit himself between them, his chest pressed to the curve of your spine, the thin fabric of his shirt separating you. He kisses you beneath the ear.
"You can sleep, darling," he tells you quietly, a whisper into your ear as his cock settles heavy between your thighs, the head sliding hotly against your cunt. Even though his voice is low, it booms through you like a thunderclap. "You need rest."
"I need you," you retort, but your own voice is far off, dipping towards the fogginess of sleep already.
Your eyes flutter shut, a gentle sigh of relief leaving you when he enters you slowly, stretching you open around him. Pressure on your back, pressure between your legs, pressure where his hand is pinned and lifting your hips from the front, angling them back towards him. Baelor's arm comes up to brace beside your head, and the scent of him surrounds you— the same scent that always drives you crazy, juniper and peppercorn, and something slightly like the salt of a raging sea.
You breathe in deep, exhale on a contented, fulfilled hum. Your entire world is Baelor, your mind and body consumed by him completely. His body spanning the length of you, bone to bone, naked skin to thin, ineffectual fabric.
You clench around him, and Baelor makes a noise as though you've punched him. So close to your ear, the headiness of it is echoed tenfold. Then he shifts his weight, dropping his hips ever-so-slightly, and then just grinds into you. His cock nestles into the deepest part of you and you groan, your mouth dropping open and face turning towards the breadth of his arm beside you.
"Baelor," you whimper, soft and broken, slurred from the recesses of sleep. Your hand finds his bicep, drawn taut from the muscle holding him up, keeping him from crushing you completely. Your fingers dig in, pull. A silent plea, a command that he follows like a dog on a leash.
Baelor fits his forearm under your head and lifts, letting you rest your chin there against the crook of his elbow, getting you into a loose headlock. Your hand wraps loosely around his upper arm, your body lax, letting him rut his hips shallowly into yours.
"My beautiful girl," he breathes into your ear, and you feel his teeth, bared with intent. His nose pressed to the shell, his beard scraping rough against your cheek. "My heart. My soul."
His arm tightens. Just a tad, but just enough. You mewl like a wounded animal, stretching your limbs so that he can move closer in, can fit his mouth to the curve of your throat, while he throbs somewhere deep in you that makes your head spin and your breath stick in your chest. His weight on you turns full, crushing, an all-over press that pins you flat to the bed, the pillow tucked beneath your stomach.
You are no longer asleep.
"Say it," he tells you, a primal rasp to his voice that wasn't there before. Low, smoky. A dragon. It's dragged from the pit of him, from some hell that lurks deep inside his body. His groan slinks down your spine and pools as raw energy right above where his cock hollows out and reaches the end of you. "Say that you're mine."
"M'yours," you murmur into his arm, breathing in the hot air that radiates from him. "Baelor. M-My heart. My soul—"
A guttural sound leaves you, your open mouth muffled by the bite you take of his bicep when he pulls his hips back and ruts into you hard, hard enough to shake the bed. Baelor's breath in your ear is shaky, stilted with the desperation of his movements, the purpose for which he collects himself.
"Gods above," he groans, his face turned into your neck just as yours is turned into his arm. With great effort, he loosens his hold on you. He presses an apologetic kiss to the curve of your shoulder. "I'm sorry. So sorry, my love."
You make a short noise, shake your head once. "Do it again."
Baelor does as you tell him. He pulls back slowly, letting his cock drag through your walls just before rushing back in with a jolt up the bed. Soft hair grinds against the plush of your ass, his mouth open and heaving with gasps against your shoulder, covered in the fabric of his shirt.
You can taste his need in the salt on his skin, beads of sweat forming in the crook of his elbow, fiery heat pressed flush to your back. "I need to— to wear your clothes more often."
"Yes." The word is hungry. It leaves no room for defiance. "You will."
The hand pinned between you and the pillow moves, snakes down to find your clit again. You are blinded with white light behind your eyelids, your breath gone still in your chest. Then, you pant like your air has no place to go, your hand tightening on his bicep, his arm tightening around your throat.
"Mm. There." The sound of his voice in your ear, while he fingers at your clit and his cock makes you so full that you can barely think, undoes you. Tremors take over your body, and you feel him smile as he continues to work at you. "That's what you get. I want you shaking."
"Baelor." You cum around him, with his full weight holding you down with nowhere to go. You are held hostage to it, to the slow, seductive movements of his hips, the lazy strokes of his finger against your clit.
"That's it. My good girl," Baelor purrs into your ear, and you sob as you clench around him. "My good, sweet, beautiful—"
He runs his tongue lightly across the nape of your neck and groans, ducking his head as he cums. His moans are muffled by his shirt on your back, his body curled over yours like fog. He presses his hips hard against yours, as though he can become a part of you if he gets close enough, deep enough.
"Oh, my love." His whisper falls upon your ears like a dream, like you may wake up and not remember it. But he's real, and he's there on top of you with his heart pounding against your back, and his fist in the fabric of his shirt, the one that started all of this.
He stays there for a breath, and then two. His hips are still flush to yours, but he's stopped moving, stopped the slow grind and the desperate, cloying attempt to get as far inside of you as he possibly could. He simply holds there, with his arm still around your throat, but not pressing in anymore. Just holding. Just cradling.
"I don't know if you noticed," Baelor says after a moment, his voice tremulous and padded by a wad of fabric between his teeth, at the nape of your neck. He releases it. "But I quite like it when you wear my clothes."
You huff a laugh, and press a kiss to the inside of his elbow. "If you do that every time, I may never get any sleep."
Baelor hums. "The chances are very slim, indeed."
Even so, you wear the same shirt the next night. And the one after that.
Trope: Older Stepdad, younger black reader/oc
Characters: Jack Abbot, Black Reader/oc [ Ryan Destiny]
Content: age gaps, smut mentions, suggestive themes, forbidden romance. voyeurism, controversially young girlfriend, quick explicit scenes. mature content. minors do not interact.
The brightness of the sun peeked through the sheer black curtains, casting a soft glow of light over their sleeping bodies. A mess of limbs tangling between each other and the sheets. A soft buzzing vibrates against the bed.
” Jack.” A hand shoves at his back; feeling his heated skin between her fingers, wanting the buzzing to stop as it becomes persistent. The vibrations continued, waking them both, reaching for their phones at opposite ends of the bed. The current time being seven in the morning. It was the weekend and they wanted nothing to do with work, family or friends.
“Put it on, do not disturb.” He tells her, immediately silencing his phone from the world and tossing it somewhere on the bed. She sleepily glances at him with a frown. “It’s just us this weekend.” Jack nearly crushes her in his grip, rough but warm hands rubbing her back.
She silences certain people on her phone, shifting to place her arms around his neck as he nuzzles hers and pressing soft kisses to her collar bone. A pleased sound left his mouth as he pressed his tender wet lips up her neck.
Jack felt her toss the phone somewhere, probably next to his. Her body pressed closer to his with a soft sigh. Duckie’s eyes close from him caressing her body to the rhythm of a song stuck in his head. Gentle, slow, soft, and lulling her back to sleep.
Pulling back, he calls her name. “Duckie.” The evident sleep left in his already raspy voice, deepening as he looked at her. The soft hm’s that left her plump lips wasn’t enough for him. His large right hand gives her ass a slap. A sharp inhale of her breath at the sudden stinging pain.
“Fuck, whaat.” She whines, melting into his hold as he massaged the area he hit, pressing a soft kiss to her cheek, watching her face with a deep chuckle.
“Look at me baby.” He coos, the scruff of his growing facial hair tickling her neck as he nips along the sensitive area. She clung to him, unable to move from his continuous assault on her flesh. His fingers knead into ass, pressing her down against his pelvis, The only barrier between them is the sheets.
Duckie flutters her eyes open to look at him, a soft gasp at the way he was looking at her, his deep brown eyes showing nothing but love and passion, her body shivers in pleasure from him grinding into her and hearing him chuckle.
” Good girl.” He captures her mouth on his own; biting the flesh of her lip, rolling his hips up into her. Their tongues meeting in a frenzied dance inside each other's mouths. The once thin sheet now pooled at their feet. The cold breeze of his fan raising goosebumps on their skin.
A soft oh leaving her lips at the intrusion of his swollen tip, dripping with pre-cum. Her legs instinctively going on his hip, her heel digging in his back; his girth pushing past her slick folds with a groan.
“Fuck baby.” He rubs his hands up her side, squeezing softly with every slow thrust of his hips, biting his lip at the feel of her warm walls around his dick. Her tiny moans in his ears, almost sure he heard her whisper his name several times.
” Jack...” Her needy pants echo between them, watching as she tilted her head back, body sensitive with every stroke he gave, curving slightly to tap at his favorite spot. The spot that makes her squeak as if it was too much.
“You're gonna marry me?” He questions through a groan. Duckie’s head came forward to look at him, his face soft as he slows his strokes, pulling out only till his tip remains, making her whine at the loss and teasing as he repeated this. Their hot breaths blowing on each other, the sweetness of the mangoes they ate hours ago still lingering on their breath only adding to the feeling he was putting her through, completely taking over her pleasure. Duckie almost didn’t hear the question.
“M’want me to?” Her hands grab his that rest on her hips, letting him roll their bodies over, her back pressed into the plush bed. Jack’s fingers entwined with her own, pinning them by her head. He freed a hand to tap his leaking erection against her sensitive mound, smearing the juices all over the warm flesh-colored tip.
” So, I can get you like this every day.” He leans down with a brief kiss to her bruised lips. “Hell yeah.” Jack slowly rocks down, piercing his lip with a bite at her sucking him in. Her hips arching up into his torso. Her skin is warm against his own. She still doesn’t answer him, lost in the way he slowly slides inside her; feeling the visible veins along his hardened flesh, stretching her walls with a groan.
Her mouth slightly open, struggling to get free of the grip he had on her wrists; wanting nothing more than to scratch her nails in his back. He halts his movements, a bratty whine leaving her mouth. “Papa.”
He curses at the name leaving her lips. He braces his hands by her head, her legs and arms instantly wrapping around him like a koala. His favorite position, it pushes him deeper with satisfied groans from them both. Once chest to chest, he rocks in her slowly, building the pleasure back up as he presses kisses to her chest, nipping at the round flesh of her breasts, sucking softly into her skin to leave his mark.
Duckie’s hands felt good on his head; mostly resting on the nape of his neck, where the short patch of curls finally grew out to the length she liked, matching the beard that was growing in, as it rubbed against her soft skin. Her nails scratched along his scalp, earning soft groans.
“Duckie” His arms now wrap under and around her in a hug, pressing his weight on her. Jack’s head nudges into the space between her neck and shoulder, leaving open mouth kisses along the blade. Their hips rocking in a tandem as the world around them continued on. He only wanted to be around her today and this was the only way he was going to get it.
Duckie felt every thrust he was giving her, going teasingly slow to feel every inch of her walls, her face contorted in pleasure at each new sweet spot, mentally noting it for the next time they get like this. His lips kiss the space behind her ear, a sharp snap of his hips making her gasp.
She couldn’t deny that she would love waking up to him every morning just like this, then tangled up in each other's arms afterwards; Duckie felt like they were moving too fast. She was scared to put herself in a vulnerable position to get hurt, to feel like she was trying to replace her mother, no matter if she truly fell in love with him. Yet, the way he made her feel with every hug to every sweet kiss to her face, constantly telling her she looks good made Duckie think he wanted her just as much as she wanted him. She was scared about the world’s reaction to her relationship, but she didn’t care anymore. Any reservations she had were kissed away by his lips on hers, his hips working a steady rhythm.
"Yes Papa,” She doesn’t know what she was saying yes to or what happens after whispering the words against his lips. She just remembers the imprint of his smile on her face, the soft crows' wrinkles surrounding his eyes and falling deeper in love with her every minute.
Jack’s parents would be rolling in their grave if they knew he was crossing the line like this. The sheer look of disappointment flashing on their faces invading his thoughts for a millisecond until the tight walls of her slick pussy clench around his dick and remind him why he was even solving his case of morning wood.
The way she easily meshes with his vibe, as if she belonged here with him. Her soft pleased cries, squeezing walls, begging for more of him, repeating the word yes between a steady string of whimpers. Her hands on his neck, her blue acrylic tips scratching gently in between the hurried kisses while he brought them to their first orgasm of the morning.
If this was their last chance to be together, they were taking full advantage of unspoken agreement between them. They would rather crash with each other than burn without the love of the other.
Jack Abbot x sunshine!reader road trip (18+ mdni!!)
cw: big age gap (legal), casual daddy kink, a lotttt of fluff, mentions of oral sex, it is implied that the reader works at the hospital
a/n: posting this in honor of having my last exam of the semester TOMORROW, I don't have much faith in it, but it is what it is…
your moodboard is here!
Spending the summer with Jack means either lounging around in a swimsuit in his backyard, eating fresh fruit off his fingers and letting him eat you out under the midday sun; or going on a roadtrip out to his cabin upstate.
You like the first option, but you much prefer the second one. It’s quieter up there, calming, and there’s a boyishness to Jack’s face when he is completely relaxed, not thinking about work and patients, only thinking about what you’ll have for dinner, if he wants to take you hiking or fishing that weekend, or about the amount of orgasms he is planning on giving you.
It’s sweet, the way his shoulders drop, relax, when you’re sat in the car with your feet in his lap, humming along to whatever song is playing. He lets you pick the music as long as you “control” google maps, because he doesn’t get it, it stresses him out. He tells you if it was for him, people would still be carrying folded maps in their glovebox and using those, in fact he still has one there. “It’s for emergencies, what if there’s no service…what if…google crashes, huh?” and you just roll your eyes, press the balls of your feet against his growing erection and tell him “Are we there yet? I’m bored…”
And it’s about the thirtieth time you’ve asked that, so he says “…No, sunshine, we’re not. Like I said before. Twenty more minutes, yeah?” and he’s pawing at your feet, trying to get them off of his cock, but hou just push and prod further, giggling. You can be such a brat sometimes, but that’s okay, he’ll fix your attitude later. But for now he lets you be, lets you entertain yourself so you won’t complain about being bored and your tiktok not working throughout the entire car ride.
He turns the music down when you fall asleep, props your head to the side so you don’t hurt yourself, and keeps on driving. When you get to his cabin, he won’t wake you, not if he can help it. He’ll unbuckle you, lift you up in his arms and carry you to the couch, before returning to the car to take out all your bags.
You wake up on the couch, near the backyard windows, watching as he grills something for dinner. He looks good like that, with his shirt off and his guard down, soft for you, just for you. You walk up behind him, socked feet padding through hardwood floors, then grass.
And your arms wrap around his thick torso, and you rest your head in between his shoulder blades. “Hi daddy…” You greet him sleepily, pressing yourself against his freckled back, and Jack thinks he could get used to this…to early afternoons with you pressed against him, speaking softly to each other, no rush, no talking shop. Maybe when he retires he will retire you too, and he’ll bring you out here, away from the noise of the city and the pitt.
“Hey, sweetheart, sleep okay?”
“Mhm…told you to stop carrying me inside, you’re not thirty anymore, Jackie.” You mumble against his back.
“Alright, alright.” He turns around to face you, hands coming up to brush a stray strand of hair behind your ear. “Go take a shower, I’ll get dinner ready.”
He likes doing things for you, likes when you don’t have to lift a finger, when you don’t have to worry. He knows all too well what it feels like when the hospital becomes your life, when the burden follows you home, so he won’t let you feel like that.
He likes teaching you, too. Jack thinks an independent, intelligent, young woman should know how to do certain things herself, like change a tyre, or fish a cod. So he has you sit and watch as he fiddles around with the tyres in his car, as he screws on and off and pushes and pulls, he has you repeat all of his actions and he watches you with devotion.
And late at night, when you’re laying in bed together, your head on his chest, limbs tangled together, he kisses the top of your head and watches you fall asleep. Who knew someone could get so tired of…being a passenger princess and napping.
content warning: only a smidge suggestive if you squint, major fluff, dad!jack abbot, mentions of pregnancy & children, marriage, no use of y/n
word count: 750+ words
pairing: jack abbot x black!fem reader
summary: jack abbot is an ultimate sap for his woman
THERE’S no doubt that Jack Abbot would be utterly obsessed and head over heels for his wife.
It’s Mr. Jack “let me ask/check with my wife” Abbot.
The glow that brought color and warmth into his cheeks was impeccable when she walked through the room.
It got to the point where her vanilla scent would infuse into the fabric of his work clothes but he didn’t care. He didn’t care when he clocked into work and his co-workers could automatically clock it was him entering from the scent that lingered behind.
He was open to shake a head at pda at work, but he couldn’t help to wrap his arms around her waist, burying his head in the crook of her neck and giving her a lazy string of kisses. beyond the walls of their shared workspace, he’d have no shame in a light bump of her hip or quick squeeze of her bottom. He’d worship her body like it was a religion; his fingers running across her dark skin as if it was almost made of pearls; the softness that rounded out beneath her thighs and sweet pudge of her stomach. He loved her breast, wanting to constantly lay his head on them during the evening or even. He thought they sat perfectly decorating her chest. He always offered to lather lotion on them always making her laugh.
He’d sometimes just watch her as she did her lengthy wash days, soon joining the routine as he helped her. Often joining her in the shower (for her sake and of course his own appeasement).
He loved feeling the bed dip beside him, watching her as she lathered lotion all over body. It was her own sacred ritual — a connection of being so in tune with her body.
For the first time in his life, shopping trips became bearable, at least with her they made it all the worthwhile. Something to look forward to. Even when she would spend well over twenty minutes trying to pick between two dresses that were two similar colors of white, Abbot would take his time with her, attempting to give his hand in scattered fashion knowledge and claimed “Everything looks good on you no matter what you wear.”
Jack had no problem with running down to the beauty supply store for whatever specific conditioner or shampoo she needed (of course with her being on FaceTime with him, guiding him through the store from the other side of the store).
He loved her hair most of all (if he could say that). The coils and curls framed around her face like it was her halo. Her hair walked with her as moved. He honestly wouldn’t be able to choose his favorite style since be cherished all them and couldn’t help but he excited when she came back from her hair appointments with a new hairdo.
If they had children, specifically if they had girls, he would do so much research regarding doing their hair. As he improved, he would attempt to do different styles per day before they headed off to school.
He’d let his girls paint his nails, even if he had work later that evening. He’d be proud to show off their hard work (even if the sticky nail polish had gone over his nail bed).
Jack Abbot loved himself a cookout — during the early stages of their relationship, Jack would always question when the next cookout would happen as he was excited to meet her family. When he finally got the opportunity to go to one, he was beyond ecstatic. For the opportunity of meeting his sweet girl’s family, but getting to indulge in delicious food, good music, the dancing, everything. In was in those moments he loved watching her the most. Getting to see his woman be in her element, seeing her flourish in the sun like she was drinking it up and it highlighted and hydrated her skin, churned out gold in her eyes. She looked at ease. Softer at the glance. Softer to the touch. The glimmer on her ring finger made it all worth it.
He liked the way the sun perfectly illuminated her eyes, lashes fluttering against her cheeks.
If he ever got her pregnant, he loved to watch her body grow, seeing motherhood grow upon her hips, thighs, and chest. He couldn’t keep his hands off her growing belly, even before she began showing. His heart would grow along with her softness that grew on her body.
Even if they didn’t have children, he’d spend the majority of his paychecks on covering her nails, a new hairstyle, or even on a new car she’d been eyeing for some time.
All in all, he’s a huge sap for his wife and he won’t be sorry about it.
summary: jack abbot has never been an unprofessional teacher to his med students or his residents, until his new intern starts on night shifts...
content/warnings: inaccurate medical details, inappropriate relationship, unspecified age gap, dirty talk, jack talks you through it, oral sex (f receiving), unprotected sex, no use of y/n NSFW + MDNI! 18+ ONLY!
wc: 5k
notes: my first time writing jack so be gentle
Jack Abbot had been an attending for almost two decades. He's taught dozens of student doctors and residents during that time. He's never had a problem keeping everything professional. He constantly ribbed Robby for his relationship with Heather Collins when she was an intern. In his defence, he wasn't the Chief of Emergency Medicine back then. Just a regular old Attending. And there wasn't really a huge age gap between the two of them. Well, it certainly wasn't inappropriate.
But Robby's romance with Heather fizzled out in the way that all of Robby's romances did. And Jack really didn't have time to concern himself with how his best friend went through women. Sometimes he would think about it in the lull around 1am on the nightshift. Was Robby running away from something rather than towards something with these women? Sometimes he would mention it to his therapist who would peer at him over the frames of her glasses.
"Is that what you really want to talk about right now, Jack?" she would query, and he would simply shake his head.
All this to say, Jack Abbot never had an issue with being professional with his residents. He likes training them up, he had overseen John Shen and Parker Ellis, who chose to stick around on the PTMC night shift. He likes nights, has ever since his wife passed away a decade ago. He used to fight with Robby about who would work day shifts, and then, after he came back to work, he asked Adamson if he could swap to nights permanently. No one questioned it. How could they? Jack had lost his wife and his unborn child.
Romance was not the top of Dr Jack Abbot's list. He had experienced it. And he had no intention of getting on the apps or dating or any of that shit. Anyway, his work schedule wasn't really compatible with dating.
"Brother?"
The voice shakes him from his thoughts. He turns and sees Robby approaching him across the roof.
"Rough night?" his friend asks as he leans against the railing.
Jack just shakes his head. Honestly, it hasn't been. He has no excuse to be up here watching the city of Pittsburgh awaken.
"Just needed to clear my head," he confesses before letting Robby bring him back downstairs.
Robby doesn't question why his friend needs to clear his head. He's been there. They've all been there. This place can suffocate you if you let it. He knows that all too well.
Unfortunately, Robby has no idea that the reason why Jack's head has been spinning isn't some disaster, some rough night, some difficult case. No, the reason why Jack has needed to take walks, take deep soothing breaths and avoid spending time in the on-call room is because of a new intern.
You are currently speaking to Trinity Santos and Samira Mohan, catching up on what has happened. You're currently on your night shift rotation after joining PTMC in the summer. Straight out of med school. You hug Mel when she appears, a little later than the other two. She had to drop her sister at her care facility, and there was an issue. You nod sympathetically as she rambles, before you place a hand on her arm to remind her to take a breath.
Jack is very aware of how much younger you are than him. He is very aware that he is your Attending, your mentor, your teacher. He is someone you look up to...literally. And you look at him through your lashes when he explains something to you he can feel his cock stir in interest. And he feels like a dirty old man. He cannot be doing this.
He would get in so much trouble!
Anyway, a pretty, young thing would never be interested in an old guy like him. So he shakes off his thoughts. He tries not to dream about the way you would squirm under him. He tries not to fist his cock, thinking about you as soon as he gets home from the shifts he shares with you.
You always ask him to walk you through every new procedure. It's something he usually does with the residents, regardless. But he can think of a thing or two that he would rather talk you through instead. You always move so close to him when he has to guide you, he can smell the perfume you always wear to your shift. He can feel the heat radiating from your body and he wants to touch you desperately.
"Dr Abbot," you call, catching him in his thoughts. "Will we do rounds before we get caught helping these guys out again?"
You never mind staying a little bit longer if it got busy in the mornings. You want a good evaluation at the end of the year, of course, from both Dr Robinavitch and Dr Abbot.
Jack blinks as he watches your open and eager face, just waiting for him to give you a command. Instead, he simply nods his head and leads you, Santos, Mohan, and Mel around the beds.
You manage to clock out and change out of your scrubs just after 7:30am. Not bad! You are fumbling with the zipper of your jacket as you walk out of the changing rooms when you walk straight into your Attending, Jack Abbot.
You are counting down the weeks until you're back on days. Dr Jack Abbot seems to hate you. And you can't understand why. Samira and Victoria had both told you that Dr Abbot was so much nicer than Robby. He rarely ever yells and he talks you through procedures, every step. He has a very different teaching style than Robby. But while Robby is always there to help you go through your charts, Abbot avoids you like a plague. He never wants to be around you it would seem.
He is only there when he needs to be. And usually, he's handing you off to Shen when the other Attending is on. You really have no clue what you did to make Abbot hate you like this.
You've worked your ass off to get here. Top of your class in pre-med and med school. That's why you got your first pick of this specific Emergency Department. It's one of the best in the country! In fact, you attended lectures both Robby and Abbot held when you were in college. This was it for you! And Robby always sang your praises.
You refused to have all your hard work get thrown away because your Night Shift Attending hates your guts.
You look up at him through your lashes when you bump into him. He grips your biceps to stop you from stumbling backwards. He's looking down at you, unimpressed, with his chin jutting out. God he hates you.
"S-Sorry, Doctor Abbot," you breathe. "I'll see you tomorrow...or I guess tonight."
He just nods and releases you. You miss how he flexes his hands after touching you just for the briefest moment. And you certainly don't know that he'll fantasise about that interaction in his shower later that morning.
No, you're convinced he hates you and it couldn't be further from the truth.
You trudge back into PTMC that night, 7pm sharp and Matteo is quick to hand you a Red Bull.
"My angel," you say with a smile as you crack it open immediately. It's going to be a long one. Especially when you see Jack Abbot round the corner and crack his neck.
Oh God. Was he coming over to yell at you? Did you do something wrong last night? But no, he ignores you entirely. And somehow that is worse.
You actually don't interact with Dr Abbot until about 2am when you have to help with a trauma. It's stressful, and you feel like your legs are going to collapse from under you.
"That's it, kid," he praises you, walking you through the procedure that has you wrist deep in a man's chest. "That's it. Just like that. Almost there, kid."
It's a nickname that is reserved only for you. He never hears him call any of the other interns, well Santos, that.
"That's it," he breathes again, his hot breath tickling your neck as he watches your every manoeuvre. "That's it. Good girl."
Your eyes flick up to meet his gaze. He's watching you with his chin tilted up just so, making your breathing hitch for just a second. You shake your head and focus back on your patient.
When Dr Walsh finally comes down to bring the patient up to the OR, you are on the brink of tears.
"Good job, kid. You just saved that man's life," Abbot tells you, giving you a half smile.
Your body is trumming with adrenaline. That is the only reasonable explanation for why you do what you do.
You turn to your Attending and throw your arms around him in a tight hug.
Jack freezes. He never expected to be this close to you, having your smaller frame wrapped around him. And his heart is thumping. He is willing, no demanding, his cock to behave. It's not long before you realise what you've done and jump away.
"Sorry! Sorry!" you repeat before pulling off your gown and gloves and rushing off.
Jack calms his breathing, tells Lena he's taking fifteen and heads up to one of the abandoned wards. He should not but doing this as he locks the door to one of the rooms. But it's not even five minutes later that his cock is loose and he is stroking himself thinking of you. He can still smell you on his skin. Even that brief interaction drove him mad. He swears as he cums in his hand, catching his load so it doesn't spill onto his scrubs. He can't go back down like that.
He takes a walk up and down the hall before going back down and finishing off his shift. As soon as Robby walks in, Jack ambushes him.
"Can we talk?" he asks.
Robby looks at his friend with weary eyes. He hasn't even had a second to put his bag down. But he allows it, letting Abbot bring him into the breakroom.
"I was thinking of releasing the Kid back to days," Jack says simply, busying himself by making coffee.
This surprises Robby, who leans against the countertop.
"She hasn't finished her rotation. It's her intern year, it's important that she completes everything," he reminds Jack.
Jack sniffs, twisting his mouth to the side and nods.
"Yep, but we run a tight ship here. And I think you need more hands on Day Shift. Anyway, no need to fuck up a good cicidian rhythm for the sake of rules," he says with a hand wave.
Robby watches the way his friend moves. Jack is usually all about eye contact, to an unnerving degree but Robby cannot catch the shorter man's eye this morning. And finally the pieces click into place.
"She's very young, Jack," he crows, a triumphant smirk on his face.
Finally something, or someone, has penetrated Jack's walls.
"I am aware, Robby. That is why I am asking you to do me a solid and remove her from the rotation," he grits out, finally meeting his friend's smirk.
While Robby agrees, neither man realises you are outside. You had made your way over after Langdon showed you another video of Penny crawling to grab your lunchbox. But all you heard was how your Attending was asking the Chief of the ED to do him a "solid" and get you kicked off night shift.
You turn on your heel and leave before anyone can stop you, lunchbox be damned.
You're dreading your next shift. You change into your scrubs slowly, you tie your hair back and finally make your way onto the ward. You tug at the sleeves of your grey undershirt and frown when your gaze lands on Abbot.
He nods at you, motioning for you to follow him. And you do. He walks you into an empty room and pulls the curtain.
"I know, you want me off nights," you say before he can start. You don't need to hear the whole song and dance from your boss who clearly hates you.
"Kid," he begins, but you shake your head.
"Don't call me kid. I'm not...I'm a good doctor. I'm still learning, I work so hard. I've never had any issues with any of the Attendings. So I'm really sorry that I have offended you in whatever way I have," you snap.
Jack sighs, "You can finish your shift and start back with Robby on Monday."
You nod and storm off, tears thick on your lashes. You have to take a few minutes to cool down before you start working.
You manage to avoid Jack Abbot for almost six months. Even when you have a double shift scheduled, Jack is always off. You do your rounds with Shen. He chuckles and shakes his head as you actively avoid dealing with the older man.
"He's not that bad," Shen says one night with a sparkle in his eyes.
"Uh huh," you say as you take the decaf iced coffee Shen has started to bring in for you when you're doing handover. "Not like he got me kicked off night shift."
"You really didn't wanna be stuck with us," Shen responds with a smile.
You roll your eyes. It's true, you didn't plan on staying on night shift permanently. But it was part of the job! You're concerned that his cutting your rotation short will affect your progress in your intern year! You grumble about it to Santos at least once a week.
At one point, she suggests you just "kiss and make up," and you throw a chest tube at her.
But one evening, you get a call from a very desperate Shen, Parker called out sick and they are scrambling for someone.
"Can't someone work a double?" you grouse.
You really, really don't want to work with Abbot. Not tonight! You've just gotten home from a day out with friends. Your hair is carefully curled and you even have makeup on. Something that rarely happens when you go to work. So your grumbling as you walk into the Pitt.
"It better be a quiet night," you point at Shen as you walk in with your bag slung over your shoulder.
Jack Abbot's eyes flick up when he hears your voice. He wasn't expecting to see you. And you take his breath away. Moreso than you do when you're running around the hospital in your scrubs that fit just a little too well. You're not even wearing anything fancy, just jeans and a form fitting tank top. That is worse than the scrubs. He swallows thickly trying not to swallow his tongue.
"Jack?" Lena is saying, following his gaze, before smirking to herself.
The only person that is oblivious to how Jack really feels about you is, well, you.
He shakes his head and returns to his chart and lets Lena walk him through what he's missed. But it's not long before you're back out on the floor, changed into your scrubs with your hair tied back now. But Jack can't stop tracking your every movement.
You're sure you've jinxed yourself when you demand a quiet night, but all things considered, you're not run off your feet. Until 5am rolls around and a crash comes in. It's tough and you just can't manage to figure out how to stop the internal bleeding.
"Hey! Look at me," Jack all but growls at you. "You need to focus. Breathe and fuckin' focus, kid."
You try, you fucking try your best but none of it matters. Doctor Park comes in and take up to OR but they lose him on the table. And it's your fault. You should have been able to stop the bleeding!
You're worked up and the day shift is slowly starting to trickle in so you climb up to the abandoned ward on the eighth floor. You just need to breathe. To think. And not have Dr Abbot watching every move you make, waiting for you to fuck up. Again.
You're pacing back and forth, trying to stop the tears that are threatening to overtake you from flowing down your face. And then you spot his shadow in the doorway.
"Kid?" Jack Abbot's husky voice asks.
He didn't plan to run into you. Obviously, he would rather avoid it, but he had seen movement when he was on his way to the roof to take a breather. He didn't want some lawsuit on his ass because he had ignored a squatter. But worse it was the intern he has been successfully avoiding for the better part of six months.
You still hadn't left his thoughts, though. Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of you if he came in early or when he came to meet Robby for lunch. He would sometimes find hints of your perfume around the ED and it made him stop dead in his tracks. And yes, he was still cumming into his hand, groaning out your name.
He really should speak to his therapist about it all. It was all so fucked up.
Your glassy eyes meet his gaze, and you just burst into tears. He's probably come up here to yell at you. Tell you that you can't just hide when something goes wrong.
Instead, he doesn't. Despite Jack Abbot's better judgement, he closes the door, crosses the room and bundles you up into a hug. He really shouldn't be doing that. But you're sobbing!
It takes you maybe 30 seconds before you realise what is going on and pull away from him. He steps back immediately, clasping his hands behind his back.
"I wasn't even supposed to be working tonight," you finally snap. "I cam in as a favour to Shen."
You say the other Attending's name pointedly.
"And if I need a second to compose myself after losing a patient, I'm going to take it. And I don't need you to come up here and tell me what a shitty doctor I am, I can do that on my own, thank you very much."
"I wasn't gonna-" Abbot begins but you're not finished on your tirade.
"I just don't understand why you hate me! I have worked so hard to be here!" you say finally looking at him, you face red with tears and from your yelling.
Jack had a half smirk on his face as you ranted, but it immediately fades at the idea of him hating you.
"You think I hate you?" he asks, cocking his head to the side in surprise.
You let out a small laugh.
"You asked Robby to move me off night shift," you remind him. "Because you run a tight ship."
His words still echo in your head all these months later. You wait for his response but there is none. He's still staring at you; the man loves nothing if not eye contact. But his mouth is screwed up in concern now.
"I don't hate you, kid," he finally breathes out, his voice soft and raspy. It makes you stomach twist in a way you didn't expect.
You open your mouth to argue back. How could he not hate you? But you don't get a chance because he has closed the space between you and pulled you into a searing kiss. A kiss that has your whole body feeling like you're static. You can't even think as his silver stubble rubs against your soft skin. Your tongue delves into his mouth and you let out a soft moan at his taste. You can't help yourself. You thought all this time he hated you. And yet his rough hands were grasping at your ass over your scrubs.
God, you were going to be a fucking cliché, but you pulled back just to pull your scrubs top and your undershirt off. And Jack's eyes look like they're going to bulge right out of his head. He didn't know what to expect when he kissed you, but this? Well, this was better than any fantasy he has come up with. Maybe he's sleeping...dreaming... Maybe he's actually taken a tumble off the roof, and this is heaven.
Your lips on his neck bring him back to this moment. You don't realise how hungry you are for him until he's presented in front of you. Your Attending, your Attending that you thought hated you is now groaning out for your kisses. You pull at his scrub top trying to see how far the freckles on his neck go. But he stops you.
Fuck. Have you gone too far?
But he's pulling you closer, kissing you again. He lifts you, easily and carries you to the unused bed in the corner.
"I don't hate you, kid," he growls as he lays you down.
Now its his turn to kiss down your silky neck, down to the swell of your breast. He laves at your hardened nipples over the fabric of the bra before he crawls over you and unhooks it. He lets out a groan as your breasts fall free and he dives between them, sucking and licking and biting. He focuses on the skin around your nipples before sucking and teasing each hardened peek. Your buzzing brain is wondering if you can cum by nipple play alone. And if Jack Abbot had more time, you were sure you could. By the time he's finished, you're covered in love marks.
He pulls away a smirk on his face as he kisses down your stomach down to the top of your scrub pants.
"You don't-" you begin which causes Jack to surge up and kiss you hard.
You take this chance to pull his scrub top off and let out your own appreciative groan at his freckle covered biceps and chest. He's spent a lot of time in the sun...without a shirt it would seem. You get dizzy thinking about him sweating as he chops wood in his back garden. As if the Adonious isn't in front of you right now.
"Like what you see, kid?" he asks with a cocky smirk.
Usually, you would roll your eyes, but all you can do is nod as he begins his journey back down your body once more. When he gets to your scrub bottoms, he pulls them and your soaking panties off in one swift move. He groans as he watches your wetness stick to you fabric of your underwear.
"All for me, baby?" he growls as he kisses over your mound. "You walkin' around the hospital like that every time we work together, huh? Cos I was hard enough to pound nails when I was working with you. Useda have t' come up here just to jerk off to the thought of you."
You whimper out at the filth coming out of his mouth.
"Been dreaming about what you would taste like," he breathes, blowing a warm stream of air over your cunt.
You writhe underneath him already and he hasn't even touched you. You whimper as he places a soft kiss over your weeping folds. You haven't been touched in so long. And Dr Jack Abbot knows what he's doing. He presses kisses over your pussy, peppering a few over your clit. And then he's pressing his tongue inside you, moving between that and lapping at your clit.
You can feel that familiar coil of pleaesure build and build and build. One rough hand comes up to tease your hardened nipple as he focuses his attention to your clit.
"Cum for me, baby," he demands as he spits onto your cunt. "Cum for me, now."
He focuses his efforts back down on your clit, moving his tongue in time with the fingers on your nipple and within seconds you're crying out his name as you absolutely soak his face.
Your release is sparkling over his lips, catching in his stubble. You go cross-eyed at the sight. He climbs up the bed to kiss you, claiming you desperately.
"Fuck, Jack, I need you," you beg him between kisses, your fingers tangling in his hair.
"Baby, we don't need to do anymore," he breathes, just happy to have made you cum like that.
You shake your head. You need more. You demand more.
"Need you inside me, please? Need you to fuck me," you beg.
You've never begged before, but the way Jack Abbot is on top of you, still gripping onto one of your thighs...well, you can't help but beg.
"Ya want me to fuck you, baby?" he coos all sweet. Hell, he even pouts.
You just nod, rubbing your thighs together as you dream about getting a sight of him. He's already tented against his scrub pants, and your eyes flick between his hazel eyes and his crotch. He gives you a cocky smirk, and by God has he earned that cockiness, and simply flips you onto your stomach. He gives the rounded flesh of your ass a smack as he presses his chest right onto your back.
"Hands and knees, baby," he growls into your ear, his teeth grazing over your lobe.
You scramble to do exactly as he tells you. It's a struggle with him kissing down your neck and over your shoulder. But you do it.
"Good girl," he praises as he sits back on his heels and pushes his scrub pants down his thigh.
Not enough to let the pretty, young intern see his prosthetic. He's not ashamed of it. But he doesn't need you asking questions...especially not right now. Now, he needs to be balls deep inside you. He pumps his angry cock that's dripping with pre-cum, admiring the view in front of him. You've arched your back just right, your legs spread enough for him to see how wet you are for him. Your slick has coated your thighs.
He can't help but reach out and land a sharp smack to your cunt.
"Ready, baby?" he asks as he moves forward.
You simply nod but that doesn't satisfy Jack. He gives your pussy another slap, earning him a little mewl from you.
"Words, baby," he growls.
"Yes," you manage to whimper as you hands twist into the sheets of the hospital bed.
He plants a kiss between your shoulder blades before he presses the blunt head of his cock against your folds. He lets out a grunt as he settles into you, slowly, torturously slow until he bottoms out inside you.
"Atta girl," he praises as he kneads at your ass.
He takes a second to adjust to you before he rocks his hips forward. Then he slowly starts picking up the pace, his hand grips your hair and pushes your face into the pillow. You never imagined that Jack Abbot would be loud in bed, but he's grunting and groaning over you.
"Wanna hear you," he demands, tugging your hair so your cheek is pressed against the pillow and your moans are finally unmuffled.
Jack closes his eyes and drinks in the sweet cries you make as he slams in and out of you.
"That's it, baby. You can take more, can't you?" he growls as he pulls you apart with each thrust.
It's like when he walks you through a procedure, so thorough...but so much hotter.
"I can feel that pretty pussy already pulsing. Are you gonna cum for me again? On my cock, pretty girl?" he gruffs out.
Honestly, his own orgasm is on the horizon. But he's a gentleman, and he won't finish before you. He's just gotta coach you throw it.
"Baby, I wanna feel you cum for me. Cum on my cock, huh?" he gruffs as he pulls your hair up.
He uses this leverage to pull you flush against his chest. One hand wraps around your waist to keep you upright as his thrusts get more and more erratic. But he manages to snake the rough palm up your body to paw at your breast. His other hand slides down to your clit.
"You're close, baby," he tells you, right into your ear. He kisses over your neck. "Can feel ya...ya got another one for me. Huh?"
You nod before you cry out his name. You drop your head back against his shoulder.
"I'm right there with ya, baby. Right there," he grunts, kissing over your face as best he can at this angle. "Fuck...fuck...that's it, baby."
You can feel him fill you with white, hot spurts of his cum.
"Take me, baby, take me. Gonna fill that pussy. Fuck," he growls.
He captures your lips in a heady kiss as you both come down from your highs. You feel him grow soft and he slides out of you with a wet pop. He grabs the blanket and gives his cock a quick clean before pulling up his pants. You collapse back onto the bed completely spent. He grabs his scrub top and redresses. He dips into the adjoining bathroom of the room to wet a cloth. He cleans up the mess he made between your legs. Your vision is still spotty so you let him. And let him kiss you once more.
You finally become more aware of what you just did. Who you just did it with. And where you just did it.
You sit up looking for your clothes, but Dr Abbot is already at the door.
"Our little secret, kid," he practically purrs, throwing you a wink before he disappears back down to the ED, leaving you alone with a lot to process.
Synopsis: Sometimes the best cure for having a rude attending is going to his house and having sex with him.
CW: SMUT, 18+, sub! Jack Abbot, devilpeqch's clear lack of knowledge of how sex works, my first time writing smut, small mention of Jack having a mommy kink at the very end. This is very self indulgent. Jack is a sad, old man.
Masterlist
The drive to Jack’s home was quiet. Not awkward, just expectant.
Over the course of the truck ride, your hand slid onto his knee. His hands gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white– he kept forgetting to turn on his turning signal, you had to remind him.
When you arrived at his townhouse, you realized how real this was. You were about to have sex with an attending– the same attending who made your shared shifts hell, the one who apparently did it to hide his crush on you.
Jack jumped down from his side of the truck, and quickly ran to your side, opening the door and offering his hand to help you climb down. He led you in the house, and let you gawk at the massive home. He offered you a drink, and you asked for water. He walked to the kitchen and handed you a glass.
“So, how are we gonna play this?” he asked.
“What?” you didn’t hear him, your head swimming with thoughts, fantasies and insecurities.
He cocks his head to the side, a small smile pulling on his lips.
“You are the one calling the shots, aren’t you?” he reminds you.
Right, you’re here for sex.
You look deep into his eyes, as if trying to read his mind. Maybe trying to find a shred of doubt, or maybe that this was all an elaborate prank and your fellow doctors and doctors-to-be will pop out at any second and laugh.
But no, all you see is hope– a tiny ball of hope in his eyes. Hope that you’ll kiss him again, or even get close to him again.
“Show me your room,” you finally command.
Jack springs into action, grabbing your hand and guiding you to his room. There were pictures all over the walls of the hallway leading to his room– pictures of him and Robby, him and his fellow combat medics, him and his family.
You never took Jack for the sentimental type.
His room was clean, not freshly clean, but homely. You could tell he took pride in his space, and you took pride in being in it.
Jack’s bed was in the middle of the room, with sheets and a navy comforter, there was a small cream-colored, fluffy pillow perched up on the bed.
“Decorative pillows, Jack? Seriously?” you joked.
“A man in his 50’s knows how to decorate a room,” he quipped back.
You both stood at the foot of the bed for what felt like ages.
You pushed Jack onto the bed, half expecting it to creak due to all the force it took you to push him. He lets out a breath and chews on his lip, not to seduce you but from nervousness.
“Take off your shirt,” you tell him.
In a flash his black t-shirt is on the floor. You study the light sparse hair adorning his chest, down his stomach. Your eyes move back up to his neck, and you can see his jugular pulsing heavily.
Jack is just as excited as you are.
“Now your pants.”
This time Jack hesitates for a second, but still proceeds to take off his pants. Leaving him in black boxer briefs, which finally convinced you that Jack wanted this just as much, if not more, than you.
You walk up to him, dropping down to your knees and put your hands on his thighs. You caressed up and down, stopping at his prosthetic. Jack’s eyebrows shoot up, unsure of what to say.
“Is this okay?” you ask as you slowly begin to take off Jack’s prosthetic. “It must hurt, you’ve been on it all day.”
Jack nods, his eyes closing as he begins to drift into a certain mindspace.
“I need words, Jack,” you stop your ministrations when Jack doesn’t answer. “You’re a big boy, you can do it.”
Jack shudders, the slight emasculation travelling up his spine.
“Y-yes, it’s ok,” Jack pants. “You can do anything.”
You coo at him. It was cute how eager he was. His eyes were wide, like a puppy.
You fully take off his prosthetic and you could see the relief in his face. You then stood up and threw yourself at him, kissing him and pushing him down on the bed. Successfully on top of him, you seated yourself on his lap.
You could feel him underneath you, hard and leaking. Your hands travelled to your own jeans and started unbuttoning them, you had to unstick yourself from Jack to pull them down, making him whine in protest.
With nothing between you except for the sad excuse of your panties and his wet boxers, you began to grind yourself on his dick. Both of you letting out sighs of satisfaction.
“I’ve wanted to do this for a while,” you admit, while removing your shirt. Officially in just your underwear now.
Jack can’t even begin to comprehend your words, his brain short-circuiting from your movements, and the fact that he can finally see your bare skin.
You continue your ministrations before you get the idea to slide your hand up Jack’s throat, playfully squeezing and saying, “you have to answer when I speak to you, baby.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack gives a delirious smirk, savouring your hand on him.
Growing bored of just grinding on him, and frankly, too close to your orgasm, you decide to give Jack what he truly wants. You move to take off your bra, a simple black bra that you’ve had for years– Jack’s breath catches.
“Holy shit,” he whispers, his eyes wide and darting between your breasts.
“Go ahead, Jack,” you nod, giving him permission to get close to them.
Jack reaches one hand up and brushes his thumb over your nipple, making you let out a small moan.
You push Jack’s boxers down, tired of fantasizing about how he would look and feel, and move your panties to the side. You look down and gasp.
Jack’s cock is red with want, standing and drenched with precum. It twitches the second you grab a hold of it, you can feel it pulsing and growing impossibly harder.
“It’s like he has a mind of his own…” Jack tries to joke, but you shoot him a glare that shuts him up.
You fully wrap your hands around it, giving it a few strokes while you instruct Jack, “I am going to make myself cum, and you are going to sit there and take whatever I give you until I tell you to cum.”
Jack nods and you finally sit yourself onto his cock. You exhale through your mouth as you slowly make your way to the base, wanting to feel the coarse hairs of his happy trail on your clit. Once fully sat, you don’t move, you lean over and grab Jack’s face and kiss him. You softly bite his lip and shove your tongue into his mouth.
Jack;s hands settle on your hips, moving you to grind yourself on his lap once again but you slap at his hands.
“Bad Jack!,” you reprimand, half serious, but also taking notice of Jack’s visceral reaction. His mouth parts and his eyebrows furrow, a high-pitched moan escapes him and you laugh.
“You must really like this, huh? What would you do if I start telling people at work?” you mock, continuing to grind your clit of Jack’s pelvis. You feel him twitch harshly inside of you, making you let out another breathy laugh.
What a perv!
“Maybe I’ll start with telling Robby, who’ll tell Dennis, who’ll tell Trinity and soon the whole hospital will know what a depraved old man you are.”
“Please, you can do whatever you want… just please cum,” Jack begs, panting, enjoying the slight drag of your warm cunt around him. He was on the edge already.
“Oh, I thought you could hold out longer, maybe age is getting to you,” you sit up and put your hands on his shoulders, using the leverage to start moving up and down on his length. “I’m feeling nice today, next time I’ll have to teach you a lesson about not rushing me.”
You grab Jack’s hand that hadn’t left your breast and move it to your clit, letting him take the tiniest bit of control as you grow closer to your orgasm. You wanted this to last longer, but between Jack’s hand, the feeling of his dick inside of you and the mere thought of having sex again was too much and you came, surprising you both. The force of it made you collapse on top of Jack, his hand still on your clit, helping you ride out the waves.
Jack wrapped his arms around you, moving your body against his own, hoping that you will let him cum soon. You look up and study his face, scrunched up in pain and pleasure. The poor man trying his hardest to hold everything in.
“You can cum now,” you said into his ear, purposefully clenching around him and kissing him.
Jack moaned into your mouth and spilled inside of you. Hands digging into your sides, pulling you even closer to him. His hips jerked upward, pushing his cum deeper into you. You make sure to give him an open-mouthed kiss before separating.
You roll off of him, and lay your head on a pillow. Your body sweaty and spent, you could almost hear your heartbeat. As you lay next to each other, Jack reaches foe your hand, making you look at him.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t last longer,” he gives you a dejected look.
You grab his face and say, “Jack, don’t ever apologize for that stuff,” your thumb caressing his cheek. “We can practice all you want.”
“You want to do it again?”
“I want to do it all the time,” you reassure. “Maybe next time we can start with you going down on me? It would give us more time.”
Your earnest face makes Jack smile and give you a peck on the nose, he then pulls you into him, letting your head fall on his chest, your sweaty bodies clinging together.
Jack looks down at you, already planning on how to ask you to be his girlfriend, as well as how you feel about being called mommy.
Author's note: guys i literally struggled so hard with writing this, idk how y'all do it. But I hope y'all enjoy it x.
Special thanks to @lindsey-lana for helping me with the title.
OC and Jack have known each other since they were in college but lost contact after Jack joined the Army. They meet again when Jack visits the VA and begins group therapy sessions after losing his leg and then his wife. OC is the program coordinator who also lost her husband the same time around.
Both reconnect and begin as friends until they both realize their true feelings for one another and the guilt they feel over feeling like they’re betraying their loved one.
….
Someone can take this blurb and expand it further. Im okay with it ❤️
they just seem to compliment each other so well. i made this for ever ago. talk about fate. i was shipping your oc x abbot before i even met them hello!
Summary: You and Jack had history; years of working together, you the resident and he the doctor. You had an unspoken thing between you two that never came to fruition. You left for a fellowship in California and now you're back three years later.
A/N: definitely some inaccuracies with medical procedures and med school stuff
The Pitt Masterlist
You've been in the Emergency Department for two out of three years of residency. At first, you felt like maybe you made the wrong choice, that you weren't meant for the ED. But then you got put on nights and working with Jack changed everything.
While the night shift had its own difficulties that differed from the day shift, it was a fun, wild ride.
"Nightcrawlers? Seriously?" You'd snorted at Jack when you were on your first shift with him.
He just shrugged, "Night Time Degenerates was a mouthful and not as fun." That got you laughing and you swore you saw Jack's eyes twinkled.
That shift was a whirlwind. You stuck by Jack's side a majority of the shift, watching how he initiated care, performed on traumas, provide bedside manner, etc. He was amazing at his job and you enjoyed watching him whenever you could. Hence your now given nickname 'Specs' short for 'Spectator'.
You'll admit that you became Jack's shadow. Sure, you'd take on separate cases here and there, but, no matter what, you two always ended up together.
There'd been an ongoing bet since you two first started. You found it hidden behind a calendar in Ahmad's office: Abbot & Spec's Relationship
He'll confess after her first year. $40
She'll remain oblivious and they'll never get together $20
FWB $50
She confesses, but nothing ever happens $20
Different sticky notes with different predictions about your "relationship" with Jack. You never mention it to him, you couldn't. Because it was clear to everyone that there was something between you two. You felt it. You saw it. But you never acted on it. Neither did he. Honestly, how could you? He's an attending. You're a resident. That can't happen. Ever.
Even if your heart wanted it to.
_________________
The sliding doors to the ambulance bay whoosh open and a gurney is getting rolled in. Jack immediately helps push the groaning patient, "Lena, what's open?"
"Trauma three!" She replies as she points towards the room.
"Specs, with me!" Jack calls out and you look up from your charting. You rush out of the rolling chair and follow Jack into Trauma Three. The patient, a man around his thirties, is groaning in and out of consciousness.
"Weak carotid, but it's there!" you hear Samira call out. You help Jack to robe up, fingers working quick on tying the strings behind his back. He then helps you into a robe, you both just moving with each other in sync.
Once you both are ready, you step up, "Let's do this," you say in unison. You look at him with a smile, he smiles back at you and winks before calling out orders.
You're swift with handing him the instruments he needs. Your hands are steady when you assist with a chest tube. The patient has lost a lot of blood and Samira is working hard on getting that blood back in him.
"Clamp!"
You and Jack don't exchange many words unless it's instruction or quick praise. You feel like you've been holding your breath this entire time and now you get to breathe again.
The patient was stable. You almost lost him twice, but with you and Jack, he was brought back. Now he can live to say that he almost died on the table.
"Good shit as always, Specs," Jack winks and holds out his fist.
You bump him, "Dynamic Duo strikes again!" The staff in your proximity chuckle and shake their heads, used to your guys' behavior.
You're bouncing on your feet and Jack arches a brow at you, "You good?"
You shrug, "Have some extra energy tonight. Told Shen to add another shot of espresso to my drink tonight."
"Jesus," he attending shakes his head, "You trying to give yourself a heart attack or something?"
"If I did have one, I know you'd be able to reverse it," you shoot him a wink and he snorts. You giggle, "I feel like I've grown accustomed to my usual dose of caffeine! I'm trying to test my endurance now. See if I become quicker and efficient with my care!"
Jack crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head, "You can't rely on just caffeine. You also need proper rest."
You mimic his pose, "Crazy coming from you! Mister 'Golf and Pickleball Didn't Work Out for Me So I'm A SWAT Medic in My Free Time'!"
Jack drops his arms and murmurs, "Touche."
You grin at him, "Exactly."
"I just want you to take care of yourself."
"I appreciate it, but I'll be fine! Besides, I promise I won't go over board on the caffeine," you swipe up your Dunkin' cup from the counter and take a long sip, keeping eye contact with Jack.
He just reluctantly sighs, "Go check on your patients."
You give him a salute, setting your coffee down and practically skip to a patient's room.
__________
You've joined Shen in triage since the waiting room really started piling up. As you're overlooking the vitals of a patient, your breath hitches. Your heart feels like its pounding hard against your chest.
You quickly read off your patient's blood pressure and then hand them off to Shen, "Sorry, I'll be right back."
He looks at you concerned, "You okay?"
"Yeah, just need a moment!" you rush out of the room and towards the stairwell, unaware of the pair of eyes following you.
You climb up a few steps and them collapse. You cradle your head in your hands, trying to let out steady deep breaths. Your heart is now pounding so hard and fast you can feel it in your ears.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," you murmur to yourself.
You're not alone for long, the door to the stairwell opening and boots stomping up to you, "Hey, what happened? Are you okay?" you hear his voice above the pounding, a warm hand lays on your shoulder.
You shake your head, "You were right. Too much caffeine. Heart's racing." You don't look up at him, scared to see his disappointed expression. Your avoidance means you don't see his eyes filled with worry and concern.
You feel him place two fingers on your neck, checking your pulse. You hear him hum, "Your heart rate is definitely elevated. Having trouble breathing?" You nod.
He sits at the steps below you and he cups your face, raising your head to look at him. He has a calculated look in his eyes, "Breathe with me," he takes a deep breath in and then exhales through his mouth. You copy him, "Good. Again with me. In....out."
One hand still on your face while the other moves to your wrist. You're not sure how long you're there for, but your eyes never waver from his. You get lost in him, in his touch, his stare, his voice.
"Is it slowing down?" he asks.
"Yeah," you whisper, suddenly aware of how close his face to his.
"Good," You see his eyes glance to your lips and you think he's going to go for it, but then he pulls away and stands with a grunt, "Go drink some water. Grab a snack and rest for a bit in the break room," he holds his hand out to you.
You grab it, standing as he pulls you up, "Jack-"
"Don't fight me on it, sweetheart. Just sit out for twenty minutes, please. Then you can come back."
"Okay," you nod and let out a sigh, "Sorry. That was all so...dumb. I shouldn't have added that extra shot."
He shrugs, "Now you know your limits. Don't push yourself, especially when you know your body can't take it."
He grunts again as he makes his way down the stairs, there's a wince as he walks to the door. He opens it and holds it open for you.
You nod at his leg, "You should take your own advice."
His lips twitch, "Do as I say, not as I do." He lets you enter the ED first and he's following you like a guard dog.
You immediately head to the break room and take a seat. Jack comes in a minute later with your water bottle and a protein bar.
"Twenty minutes. That's all I ask."
"I hear you...thanks."
"Of course." He stands in silence, making sure you drink some water. When you unwrap the protein bar and take a bite, he's satisfied on leaving you alone, "Find me when you're done."
"Will do," you give him a salute and watch him leave the room.
You slump in your seat with a groan. Your attraction to the man is becoming too much. Things have gotten too personal with him. You've gotten too comfortable with each other.
But your residency is almost over and...you'll be leaving for your fellowship in California soon after and, hopefully, you'll be able to Jack Abbot out of your system.
summary: bad foster parents, a call to the wrong parents and a protective Jack
warnings: mention of abandonment by parents, reader is sick again, the parents are back, non-caring foster parents, protective Jack, Andrew Cody possesses Jack for a sec (if that makes sense), confrontations, like one swear word, probably inaccurate medical things, probably inaccurate with the adoption process, kinda half proofread
a/n: and part three is finally done, was supposed to post it like two weeks ago but well some things happened in between and didn’t really get any time to write but it’s here now, only one part left, I think, might extend it to five bc I’m lowkey sad to see it end
a/n 2: I think I was too excited to write this part that it turned out bad instead but oh well
The ER was a pitt filled with crying patients and two old drunk guys, one of which Ahmad was able to restrain before a punch could be thrown at the other guy, that no doubt would have knocked his teeth out.
Feet stuck out in the pathway towards the door from patients too tired to sit properly anymore. The heat certainly didn’t help. Robby had just squeezed through the long line of people blocking the entrance to the ER when he got ambushed by Shen as soon as he pushed the doors open.
“Hey Robby!” John quickly fell into steps beside him, sipping on his — at the very least, third — Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. The brown liquid quickly disappearing while he handed Robby a tablet with a patient's chart on.
“Good morning to you too John” he wants too surprised that it took less than a minute for him to get ripped straight into work. His eyes quickly scanned the information, deducing the important parts. “What do you want me to do with this shouldn’t he be upstairs after surgery”
“Jack told me to tell you that this patient is at risk of leaving early if he doesn’t get a bed soon ,so he wants you to keep an eye out”
“Okay…” his head turns to search for his favorite nurse. “is Dana in yet?”
“Saw her talking to Lena by the locker rooms a minute ago” at John’s words Robby already deviated from their path to the nurses station.
“Jack still here?”
“Last time I shecked” any other day the slurping sound of the last drops of coffee going up the straw would have irritated Robby. But not today. Today felt for some inexplicable reason easier than his far too many bad days.
Bidding Shen goodbye while the newly made attending got dragged away by Ellis to something “he must see” Robby made his way towards the locker rooms to try and catch Dana before he had to join the morning rounds.
Stepping into the hallway towards the lockers he was met with Dana already walking in his direction.
Both fell into steps beside each other as they made their way to the nurses station. Robby pushing the door open for Dana as they stepped back into the ER. “Gloria wants to see you, something about a new sponsor” the distaste at Dana’s words clearly formed on his features. He did not want to have another conversation about sponsors and patient satisfaction scores.
“And where is she?”
“Upstairs, at the moment” she glanced up at him, putting her glasses on before she logged into the computer after rounding the desk to the opposite side of Robby. “You seen Jack yet?”
“Uhhh, no” Robby’s eyes traveled around the heads of the ER, looking for the familiar grey curls. “Where is he?”
“Pedes”
“Ah” his eyes cast over towards the direction of the pediatric room and Robby’s eyes finally settled onto Jack's stiff posture. Back leaning against the pristine white walls. Arms crossed as he stared through the glass door and into the room filled with cartoon animals. The room that held them both in a chokehold.
His heart twisted for his friend. A deep ache. He missed you too, so it must be much worse for Jack as he’d planned to adopt you.
Pushing of the desk he made his way over, hands in his pockets, head tilted slightly to look down towards Jack, even if the height difference wasn’t too bad.
“Jack” he leaned against the wall beside him. Watching the kid on the bed inside, a four year old that had arrived yesterday during shift change. The kid looked a lot like you in that age when you’d first met Jack. The history on both your charts matched a lot too.
“I should of fought harder man”
“Not even a hello?”
“Hello” Jack's head tilted to the side, eyes glancing at him through his eyebrows with a slight intimidating glare that Robby had only seen directed at extra rowdy patients that had hurt one of his colleagues. He did not like being on the receiving end of it.
Robby’s hands instinctively raised in defense. “Hey man, I’m just saying, ever since the kid got rehomed you’ve been acting extra…” he paused trying to find the right word. “Grumpy?”
Jack looked away towards the four year old again, lips pressed into a thin line, while the corners of his lips moved down. The frown wasn’t obvious except for those who’d spent early mornings talking him down from roofs. “Should of tried harder” he shook his head while his head ducked down to hide the way his eyes had already started to glisten. “not just accept it, kid wanted to stay with me and I messed that up”
“Jack, just call the social worker at this point, I’m sure they’d tell you how the kid’s doing”
“I have” he couldn’t stop the glare towards Robby. Of course he’d called, tried to get information on you, how you were doing. “won’t tell me shit”
“Have you asked Kiara? Maybe she could help”
“I have, foster parents doesn’t want y/n to have contact with the people before, which… that’s just plain stupid, changed doctor and hospital too”
“If you want to talk”
“I don’t”
“Oh so I need to talk but you don’t?”
“I have a therapist” Robby’s chin tucked into his chest as he stared at Jack with a “really?” expression, head slightly tilted to the side. Yes Jack did have a therapist, but it didn’t mean he was okay. He went into crossfire in his free time after all. And sometimes a friend was a better listener than a professional.
“And how’s that working for you?”
“Haven’t gone to the roof in a month have I?”
──────────_*- 🩻 -*_──────────
Jack’s home was filled with an unsettled silence every time he got home. His steps echoing silently. No one to greet him or bid him goodbye. Just empty rooms filled with furniture that was too old and too new at the same time. He didn’t like how he couldn’t see the mop of hair sticking up from the couch. Didn’t like how there was no one running into his bedroom in the morning, tugging on his arm and begging him to make pancakes.
He’d thought he’d moved on. You’d only been with him for about a week and a half. And yet… Jack felt your absence everywhere. He didn’t know if it was normal or not for someone to feel the absence of their child so strongly. You weren’t even his child. You were only supposed to be a patient. A patient he’d cared for since toddler years.
Then taking you home after that day at the hospital. Of course he’d noticed when his home got filled with coughs that weren’t his. The pitter patter of two naked feet on the floor. Cartoons and high pitched noises playing from the tv that was normally turned off. He’d been so used to being alone that a second person even if a child added a new light into his home he’d missed since his wife. To share a space with someone he cared for. The light had spread into his eyes and even his therapist had commented on it. Because even if the quietness filled him with a peace he didn’t know what to do with, he'd realized that perhaps his late wife’s dream didn’t have to go to waste. You’d filled that void that had been gnawing at his heartstrings. With your quiet laughs and big eyes that stared at him like he hung the moon.
So maybe it wasn’t unexplainable that he felt your absence. His eyes would draw over the empty place on the shoe rack where your shoes had been. The light up kind every kid wants. He missed the jacket that he’d had to hang inside of his own that swallowed yours whole. It’s why he always tried staying at the hospital for as long as he could now. Until Robby or Dana would practically kick him out.
Stepping into his home now felt like stepping into a room stripped of its paint. The crayons he’d bought for you still laid on the coffee table, he’d put your drawings up on the fridge. Even if it brought him the feeling of longing.
He really did need to see you again.
He’d been home long enough to take a hot shower and get a quick nap before he was brought out of his sleep from his phone ringing. The vibrating noise on the kitchen counter was far too annoying when all he wanted was to sleep until he had to go back to work, and repeat.
Resting his head on the couch pillows he closed his eyes while he let his phone go to voice mail. Most of the time if it was important a second call would come through or a quick text. Not that he had many people calling him anyway… either a scammer or… it could be Robby or your social worker who’d probably had more than 30 notifications just after the first day you’d left.
Jack’s head shot up at the second call. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was about you. No matter how little of a chance there was for that, especially since that family fostered you.
The sound of his ringtone for the third time echoed in the kitchen before he’d made his way to his phone. Robby… that one ugly picture he’d taken of Robby when he was drunk lit up the screen. Said picture he’d sent to the group chat he barely acknowledged most days after Robby had been particularly tough to his residents when they’d done nothing wrong.
“Seriously man? You just kicked me out of the ER and now you’re ca-“ he was perhaps a bit annoyed still at Robby.
“It’s y/n” Robby’s voice cut through, sharp and hurried. Knowing damn well the damage his words would have on Jack.
y/n… you. His kid was at the hospital. Again. His heart practically stopped. Breath caught in his throat. Stomach churning with worry. “H-how bad?” It was a wonder he got the words out before the lump in his throat closed entirely. Clogging any sound from coming out.
“It’s pretty bad” he sounded distracted, Jack could tell, he wasn’t Robby’s emergency contact for no reason. “look, just get here and find Dana, she’ll tell you everything, I’ll do whatever I can-“ Jack could hear as someone called for Robby on the other side, something about a patient crashing. He prayed to anyone that would listen that it wasn’t you.
“Go” he wasn’t about to keep Robby from treating you. “I-I’ll be there”
“Jack” he hummed in response to Robby, already making his way to the front door.
“Drive safely, don’t need you as a patient too”
Per Robby’s words he did drive safely. Albeit faster than the speed limit allowed. If Robby said it was bad it meant really bad. And he couldn’t allow to miss saying goodbye if the worst were to happen.
The thought struck. Sudden. Achingly loud. What if it was that serious. What if you were actively dying. He would never hear your laughter again. Never hear the way you tried your best to sing along to the intro of your favorite cartoon.
His last memory would of been you crying in his arms. Hitting him while simultaneously trying to anchor yourself to him. You hadn’t wanted to leave and go into a a strangers home. Jack knew you couldn’t fully understand everything that had happened that month. From your parents abandoning you to living with him. Getting ripped away. No one should have to deal with it. And yet you had. He wouldn’t let that be his last memory of you. Not the sobs that had echoed while he helped you put your shoes on since you wouldn’t let go of him. Knuckles turning lighter from the death grip you kept on his shirt. How you’d tucked your face into his neck, his own tucked into your hair. He’d tried his best not to cry that day. But your reaction, still vivid in his mind, the way you’d tried to stay with him till your body grew tired and the social worker had grabbed you forcefully on the arm. He’d much more prefer the morning before to be his last memory if it was inevitable. You’d helped him with breakfast. He’d poured the batter onto the frying pan and given you space to pour the colored batter into the round-ish pancakes that was slowly forming bubbles. The first had been horrible, a mess of colored drops until you’d gotten the hang of it and drawn a wonky looking heart with the green batter. He’d cleaned up the mess on the counter while you enjoyed your pancakes. The calm before the storm as some say.
Or perhaps more like a tsunami of emotions that crashed into him. He didn’t even park the car correctly before he was out and already making his way towards the ER. Everyone practically parting to avoid his quick strides as he made his way straight towards the nurses station.
Dana had clocked him as soon as he stepped inside the ER. She’d swatched him make eye contact with Robby in the trauma room. Her feet already moved intentionally towards Jack. An arm reaching out just in time to stop him from reaching the trauma room door.
“What- is-“ he hadn’t felt on the verge of a panic attack since his first shift after his wife died and a veteran’s wife had come in on a gurney barely breathing.
“Breathe Jack, Robby’s got it, kid’s stable”
“Stable” his eyes drifted towards the monitors, beeping at a normal rhythm. The lines going up and down in zigzags instead of the frightening straight line he never wanted to witness on the monitors hooked to you.
Jack could catch Dana’s nod from the corner of his eyes. “Stable” she repeats. “Kid’s gonna be alright”
“What happened-“ his brows knit as he looks around but his eyes doesn’t catch onto a single worried expression directed your way. “Where’s the foster parents?”
“Don’t know, one of the new hired nurses called the emergency contacts on file, but got no answer, he’s still trying to reach them, called the social worker in the meantime, they’d try to get into contact with the foster parents too”
“Okay” his head moves up and down as if he’s forcing himself to respond in some way, taking a calming breath. Or at least trying to as his gaze moves down towards Dana. “Do you, do you know what happened?”
“Concussion from falling and landing awkwardly, kid had a seizure in the ambulance they just got it to stop” she nods towards Robby. “Now you take a deep breath. You aren’t good to anyone like this”
Jack knew Dana didn’t mean it in a mean way. When you’d wake up from the sedative’s running out of your system it wouldn’t be good if Jack looked scared or panicked. It’d most probably make you panic. “Do we know why y/n collapsed?”
“Probably from the high fever” Jack’s brows furrowed at that. High fever? And you’d been at school, didn’t your foster parents know? Something about this whole situation didn’t sit right with him.
“Got a private room ready?” His eyes fell back onto you on the hospital bed, red covered the area around your head on the bed. No doubt you’d hit it and it had started bleeding. Hence the concussion and then the seizure. Which then the seizure could also be from the high fever that kept your body extremely warm. Robby didn’t even glance his way, too focused on you.
Dana hums in response. Momentarily looking towards you before her eyes fell back onto Jack in worry. She’d never seen him this uneasy before. “Kid’s gonna pull through Jack, Robby wouldn’t let anything else happen”
“I know” he mumbled, not able to get the words out louder as the lump formed back in his throat. If there was anyone but himself that he trusted to care for you it was Robby.
It’d taken another hour before they’d wheeled you into one of the private rooms. Which they were right to do since Jack would of gone on a rampant, or perhaps not but he’d make it everyone’s problem until you’d gotten a private room where he could dim the lights just like you preferred it. Since the white hospital walls wouldn’t be as blinding from the bright cold light hitting them.
Jack was sitting by your bed. Shifting to try and force his stiff posture into a more comfortable position on the chair. The only sound came from the monitors they still had you hooked up to. Turns out you’d had such a high fever that you’d fainted and in the fall had landed head first into a metal bench with full force.
There’d been no way the fever had appeared out of nowhere during the day either. It was far too high for that. It left Jack with the bitter thought that your “new parents” had forced you to school while barely being able to function properly.
To him they weren’t any better than your biological parents.
Because of their ignorance of your health you’d ended up in a way worse situation. They’d had to put stitches on the gaping wound on your head, luckily they couldn’t see any major brain injuries on the scans they’d taken before leaving you to wake up in the room you now resided in.
Much to Jack’s dismay you had yet to wake up. And it’d probably stay that way for a while, your body needed rest as well as your brain after the seizure. But at least the room was quiet enough to let him think without getting disturbed. And since the room was at the very end of the hallway in the ER the bustling sound that always seemed to inhabit the ER didn’t intrude on the quietness. Which perhaps also wasn’t that good since Jack’s brain was playing football with the thoughts bouncing back and forth.
He’d already decided to try and somehow get custody over you. He doubted when the social worker found out that your foster parents had let you go to school with a high fever she’d be particularly happy about it. Despite her flaws and cold attitude she did care for the children she had to find placements for. Even if sometimes what she thought was best for a child wasn’t actually the right decision. Which clearly this time it hadn’t been. Not when they had yet to get into contact with the family too.
No Jack couldn’t let you go back to them. He’d beg on his knees if he had to. You deserved someone who cared after what your parents did. Someone who could take care of you when you were sick. He could be that person for you, he’d even switch to day shifts if that’s what it took to get custody of you again.
His head snapped to your hand as soon as he saw it twitch out of the corner of his eye. Already moving a hand to gently keep you laying down as you tried to move. Your fingers already trying to remove the IV that was attached uncomfortably on your arm.
Jack pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth as he tutted with a shake of his head. His free hand gently encased yours to stop your movements. “It’s just for the fever kid, to make you feel better”
Despite his words you tried again. Not liking the feeling of the light pressure it gave on your arm. Jack’s brow raised in slight amusement, the corner of his lip moving up despite the situation. It seemed as if you hadn’t changed too much in the last couple of months.
“Nuhu” he shook his head once more. Glancing at the monitor and the IV before he settled himself in the uncomfortable stiff chair again. Keeping his hands around yours to stop your fiddling with the hospital equipment.
He watched your eyes drop despite having just woken up. “Tired?”
You nod silently, not ready to speak to him yet. Seeing him again. The room he’d no doubt dimmed for you. Him in the same chair, you in the same bed as the week before he’d abandoned you. Technically you knew that wasn’t what and happened but it felt all the same.
Jack frowned. He knew it wouldn’t be easy to see you again. For either of you. But he’d expected some sort of reaction instead of a quiet stare and nod. Perhaps anger or tears, but you showed none of that. If he thought rationally it was probably because you were sick and your body too tired to actually comprehend every emotion you felt at being in his care again. But his mind was a minefield. Logic had gone out the window. One wrong step and he’d explode. One wrong step and his eyes would water as the lump in his throat would burst.
He was about to speak before you beat him to it. “You let them take me” your voice weaker than usual.
His eyes cast down. He’d seen the way your eyes had glossed over. “I didn’t have a choice”
“But you said I could stay with you, why couldn’t I stay with you? Didn’t- didn’t you want me?” Your lower lip catches between your upper teeth and lip. Eyes casting down to your fingers, anxiously fiddling with a loose thread on the hospital blanket.
“No, no, no kid” he felt his heart drop. What had they told you to make you think that? He moved closer without thinking. Hands gently cupping your face, thumb gently moving over your forehead as if to massage the headache he knew you had away. “I was planning on adopting you, I- I wasn’t quick enough that’s all” he’d been a coward, that was what it’d been from the beginning. He’d been scared to adopt you. Scared he’d mess you up more than your parents' actions had already done. According to himself he wasn’t father material. If only he’d listen to other people more often. “That day… the day I got the call about your new home I was gonna call your social worker, work out the logistics and paperwork’s, everything I needed to do to adopt you, they wouldn’t listen when I told them you wanted to stay with me, they- it’d already been decided, I tried to keep you with me I swear”
“They said you didn’t want me”
“Who?” Anger set in his jaw, even if he tried to keep a gentle expression for you. Why would anyone tell you that when they knew it wasn’t true?
“The new family” Jack's heart almost broke at your sniffle. “They said you were glad to get rid of me”
“That’s not true kid, you know that right?” By the quietness that filled the room he knew you didn’t know. They’d filled your ears with lies until you believed it. And perhaps it hadn’t been hard since your biological parents abandoned you. They didn’t want you. Why would you believe Jack wanted you? That anyone did. “Anything else they’d say? Do?”
“I told them I was sick… t-they don’t wanna listen, they think I fake it, i promise I’m not” you sniffle again.
“I know your not kiddo, I’m your doctor remember? I know these things” he tries to give you a reassuring smile. “What else did they say?”
“Mrs. Johnson said they knew about me being sick a lot, I don’t think they care” your hands move up to rub at your eyes. Already becoming red and irritated. “They keep sending me to school. Even when I have the dangerous number you told me about, that’s, that’s what they did today, I didn’t wanna go, but my new sister got angry cause I would stay at home and she couldn’t, so they forced me after giving me the disgusting liquid medicine on the spoon” you scrunch your nose at the thought, a shudder running down your spine. Jack had better medicine. Not that liquid thing that tasted horrible even after trying to wash the taste away with water. You’d even tried with juice but it’d just made the taste way worse.
He had to duck his head to not show you the way his eyes darkened “How about this? As soon as your social worker gets here I’ll talk to her, find a lawyer, find a way to get you to come back home with me, you’d like that right?”
Relief filled him as you started to nod with a hint of a smile. He knew it’d be a long road ahead. Whether he got custody or not. You’d either stay put with a family that didn’t care for your needs or go with Jack and struggle with fitting into his life. You’d have to fit sharp edged pieces into a puzzle with soft edges. Learning to trust him again without wondering if you’d be removed from his care again. If your needs would be met or not. Jack vowed to do everything in his power to give you everything you needed and more.
Your eyes dropped again. Blinking to keep awake.
“Get some rest kid” he stood from the chair. “I’ll get you something easy to eat”
“Y-you’ll come back right?” Jack hated how small your voice was. How the words were tinged with worry and your eyes looking at him widely with fear. As if you’re truly believed he’d disappear by a gust of wind.
“I’ll just be gone a minute, I’ll be back when you wake up, promise” he paused. Thinking back to what he’d been told by a therapist once (not his own). “And if I’m not back in a minute I’ll have to come back anyway to get this back” he held out his dog tags to you. Since he wasn’t really allowed to wear it around his neck in case a patient would grab it when he’d work he’d gotten used to carrying them in his pockets instead.
You took it carefully. Inspecting the shiny metal with “Jack Abbot” engraved in it. “What is it?” Your thumb gently moved over the words feeling the dents on both sides of the flat metal pieces.
“When you join the military you get one of those, I used to be a medic, help people who got hurt in war” he tried to simplify it for you. “But that was before you were born”
“War isn’t nice”
A grin spread on his face. “No it’s not, get some rest, and don’t lose it okay?” He nods towards the dog tags. Watching you nod eagerly before he leaves the room after making sure one last time you were okay.
Jack hadn’t even made it two steps outside your room before he got ambushed by Robby, who tried his damn best to block Jack’s view of the ER.
“Now don’t be mad” Robby’s words made Jack’s brows knit.
“What do you mean do-“ Robby was forced to move when a nurse rolling a gurney past them with a writhing patient on. Meaning Jack got a clear sight of the two people marching towards him with not one ounce of guilt in their steps. “What the fuck”
His eyes narrowed as he took in your parents. Face twisting into anger that bubbled up from deep inside his chest. The audacity of them to show up was enough for him to force a glare onto them.
He met them halfway down the corridor. Arms crossed. Murderous glare steeled onto his face in plain sight for anyone who’d turn their heads to watch the commotion.
“What are you doing here?”
“We got a call, that y/n sick again, the voicenote said it was really bad” oh how Jack hated how your dad acted as if he had all the rights to care about you now.
Jack had to curse the nurse who’s accidentally contacted them. “They must of called the wrong number then, you don’t have the right anymore to be in the room alone with y/n”
Your mom scoffed. “We’re the parents here” she tried to walk past him. Trying to push him away. Her heels clicking against the floor.
“Woah woah woah” the contact between your mom and Jack's hand was enough to stop her in her tracks. The security guards Robby had signaled for already making their way over at the commotion that was quickly escalating. “Your not coming inside” he took a few steps back to block the door to your room. As if he was the brick wall protecting the kid from the big bad wolves.
“It’s our child”
“No” the way his glare hardened made your parents shift uncomfortably. If looks could kill they’d be rotting in hell already. “You’re not seeing y/n and that’s final”
“We have a right to-“
“You lost that right when you left your child abandoned at a hospital”
“W-we didn’t abandon-“
“You didn’t? right then, leaving a kid in a waiting room for a whole day without supervision and not being seen for months isn’t child abandonment, it’s just a vacation right” his upper lip lifted in disgust at your parents mindset. How could they even justify leaving you for months. And now they came back out of guilt or shame. Coming back with the mindset that they’d done nothing wrong when deep down they knew they had. They just didn’t want to admit it. Jack almost wanted to strangle them but that wouldn’t exactly be in your best interest.
By now Ahmad had gathered what was going on. And along with the other security guard both pushed the parents back from Jack, leading them down the corridor whilst they threw protests at them. Almost demanding that they see you, their baby.
Jack huffed as he watched them get led away. He’d almost hoped the dad with his angry look and twitching fingers would have made a swing at him so he had an excuse to do the same back.
Uncrossing his arms he tried to relax his posture that had stiffened once he’d seen your parents. Trying his best to put on a calm front he took a deep breath before turning around to your door. All thoughts of getting you something to eat flied out the window. He'd much prefer staying in your room until you got released. To make sure your parents didn’t sneak in, or in case your foster parents arrived to take you home before he could give them his piece of mind. If Dana had been there she’d jokingly call him your guard dog.
“No” Robby dragged out the o as he stopped Jack in his tracks from re-entering your room. Shaking his head he steered Jack in the direction of the cafeteria. “Kid needs rest Jack, I promise you we won’t let anyone enter, kid’ll probably wake up as soon as you go inside” it was something bit Jack and Robby had noticed over the years you’d been at the hospital. You never slept as deep as kids usually did. “Besides y/n kept asking for you after we stopped the seizure, before the sedative”
Oh… you’d asked for him?
“Go get the food and I’ll tell the social worker if she arrives before you to find you”
He hesitated before a gentle nudge from Robby got him to walk again. This time not to your room but the cafeteria.
When he made it back up to the ER your foster parents were still nowhere in sight. He as gently as humanly possible pushed the door handle down. Almost tip toeing into the room to not disturb your sleeping form. Putting the brown paper bag on the floor, his eyes focused back on you. Eyelids closed, expression gentle as small deep puffs of air left you. He truly was about to become a dad wasn’t he?
Head falling into his hands he let out a deep sigh. He didn’t know what he was doing. All he knew was that he wasn’t about to let you down again. You’d come with him this time around. He’d already drafted a mail in his head about changing to day shifts. It’s what the social worker had said would help him in getting custody so that’s what he was going to do. Offer the best chances of getting you relocated back to him. Just like you wanted.
He’d fix up a room for you. A proper one. Change his coat racket so yours would fit right in with his. He’d get you every coloring book until your little heart was content. Fix any streaming sight so you could watch everything you liked. He’d make it right this time around. Show everyone why he’d be the right fit for you. Not only because it was your wish but because Jack didn’t want you to go through everything again.
Hearing a gentle knock on the other side of the door his gaze shifted reluctantly from your peaceful face. He wished you’d always look like that way, wished no tears would roll down your cheeks again while loud wails left you in despair.
He rose from the chair as soon as he saw the woman outside your door. Nodding his head towards her direction she got the memo and let Jack step out. Neither wanting to accidentally wake you up.
“Mr Abbot” she gave a kind thin lipped smile.
“Mrs. Johnson” he smiled politely back. Although he didn’t feel like it as he reconnected with the memory of their last meeting. She could tell by the way his lips movements were far too forced to hide properly behind his normally smooth and charming smile.
“I know our last time wasn’t pleasant for you” that was one way to word it when you’d gotten ripped from his arms crying and screaming at Mrs. Johnson to let you stay with the doctor. “But with this new light on this case I’d like to ask you once more if you could resume your care over-“
“Yes” he didn’t waste a second. He’d already made up his mind a long time ago.
“You do understand what this will entail, correct?”
“I want to adopt” there was no doubt in his eyes. Mrs. Johnson could see the genuine care in his eyes, the hope that filled every corner of his face, from the upturn of his lips to the way his brows drew slightly together as if waiting for her to say no. “I mean… if that’s possible”
“It certainly is Jack” she smiled genuinely this time.
“What about the foster parents?”
Her face darkened. Eyes turning slightly cold. Expression grim. “They aren’t coming, I managed to reach the father but he said they couldn’t come because their biological daughter had a dance recital they had to be at” the distaste in the woman’s and Jack's face mirrored each other to the T. “Which quite frankly makes them unqualified for y/n, a sick kid needs someone who’ll show up no matter what, not someone who sends them to school with a dangerously high fever” so she’d heard about that, good.
“Kid doesn’t like them”
“Y/n told me so after the first week, I thought it was just anxiety over a new home, strange people, new school, I see know I was wrong”
“Better late than never” Jack’s words were muttered quietly under his breath. As if not meaning for her to hear but also not caring if she did.
“If it is of any consolation I am very sorry for not taking what y/n wanted into account, and from tearing y/n away from you when you were already a good match”
“Kid will stay with me then?”
“Yes, we’ll have to start the full process, but yes, y/n can go home with you as soon as the doctor confirms the release.
Jack nodded. A sort of ease settling into him. Despite being mad about your new foster home clearly favoring their own child despite having reassured the social worker they were more than ready for you being sick a lot, he felt the anger rinse out of him just as quickly as it had appeared. “Can we start now?”
Mrs. Johnson’s brows lifted in surprise. Clearly she underestimated how willing Jack was to take care of you. It made more guilt seep into her. “Let me make some calls and I can get you started”
Finally. Finally Jack let out a breath of relief. Turning around his eyes landed on the four year old still in pedes. The room you’d spent half your childhood in, pointing at the cartoon animals while trying to sound them out. It always sounded terribly wrong but he’d always praise you nonetheless.
His eyes moved back to you through the small window of the door. You slept just as peacefully as the toddler in the other room. He couldn’t help but to smile as he remembered the first time he’d met you.
Stepping silently back into your little sanctuary he settled on the chair again. This time closer as he let his hand encase yours. His body warmth and your feverish warmth tangled together as he let himself finally relax. Caressing your hand in soft gentle movements while you dreamt of something far better than the nightmares you’d had the first week of living with him.
The nightmares had reminded him a tad bit of your first time staying more than a day at the hospital. You had a nightmare back then too. Your face had scrunched up eyes snapping up in fear while he’d been beside you. He’d had his glasses on while typing on the computer. Your parents had stepped out momentarily to get home and take a shower. Jack had offered to keep an eye on you. Scared eyes had looked up at him with tears running down your cheeks and he’d gently sat down beside you on the hospital bed. Telling a random story he came up with to try and distract you. It’d worked since a second later you were back asleep. As soon as he’d noticed he’d tucked the blanket he’d snatched from the staff’s room snuggly around you. Tucking your plushie that you’d always bring with you at that age back under your arms. The loose threads of the plushie from you hugging it too tightly tickling your cheek as you squished it closer in your sleep.
Perhaps Jack had always cared more about you than he should. More than he did for other patients.
Maybe you’d always been his kid. Even back then when you were four and your parents cared more about you than money.
Pope Cody request that I lowkey changed 80% of is in the works hardcore and I think it'll be a blanket for 600+700+800 followers celebration b/c I am honestly annoyed at how behind they are, so y'all are getting a long shot for three celebrations! yay!
cw: pregnancy, mentions of injuries to the reader, allusions to assault, mentions of drug dealer
divider by @/saradika-graphics
The slow knock comes at 9:30. You don’t have to check the peephole to know who it is.
He comes in and sets the tupperware on the desk.
“Why are you packed?” he asks.
He squints and crosses his arms over his chest.
“You said I had the room for a week,” you say.
He shrugs. “You feel safe going back to your apartment?”
You don’t say anything.
“Who put that bruise on your neck?” he asks as he takes some food from the tupperware and puts it on a plate.
Still nothing.
“You still scared?”
You swallow roughly and look down at your bump.
Andrew shifts awkwardly and puts the plate in the microwave.
“I can help you,” he says over the whirr of the machine.
You lean back on the bed and scrub your hands over your face.
His hands around your wrists. His lips on your neck. His knee between your legs.
The entire week, it’s been like he’s still on you.
“Who did this to you? The baby’s father?” Andrew asks.
No answer. Just like before.
The microwave beeps. Andrew pulls your food out and grabs a plastic fork from the box he brought for you.
“Did your father do this to you?” he asks as he sits on the edge of the bed and hands you the plate.
No answer. You take your fork and bring a bite to your mouth.
“An old dealer?”
“Thank you for dinner, Andrew,” you say with your mouth full, like all of a sudden you want him mad at you rather than willing to help.
He sighs.
“You’re welcome,” he says softly, rising from the bed.
You grab his wrist. You can’t seem to make up your mind.
“Stay,” you whisper.
He sits back down.
You balance the plate on your stomach, and he furrows his brow.
“Just about the only perk of being pregnant,” you say.
Andrew’s quiet for a moment, then he asks, “You thought about names for her? The baby?”
You shrug. “Ophelia. Lux. Juliet.”
“They’re good names,” he says.
“They were doomed.”
He stares at you, blank-faced. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Pairing: Dr. Jack Abbot x nurse!reader
Warnings: sensory overload, autism signs, meltdown, fever, illness, emotional exhaustion, high stress, fluff.
Summary: when you're pushed to your breaking point by a brutal shift and fever, Jack is there to catch you and guide you into the quiet dark.
Disclaimer: This story is pure fiction and written solely for entertainment purposes.
🎀 based on this request 🎀 and this one 🎀
You had woken up with a fever that left your joints aching and your skin overly sensitive even to the friction of your own clothes.
But the hospital was understaffed, and calling out felt like a betrayal. So, you swallowed two ibuprofen and walked into the chaos.
Masking autism was exhausting when you were entirely healthy. And running on a fever, it was an ordeal.
The sound of ringing phones, groaning patients, and shouting doctors felt like a physical assault. Worse, the social exhaustion of constantly forcing eye contact, modulating your tone, and scripting polite interactions had drained your battery down to zero hours ago.
You had managed to hold it together for ten hours. But then, a trauma came in. It was messy and required a lot of communication. As you stood at the sink washing the blood from your hands, the bulb flickering above the mirror began to... sound loudly.
It was the final drop in a cup that was already overflowing. Your breath hitched as the sensory overload crashed over you.
You practically sprinted down the back hallway, slipping into an empty and dark exam room.
You sank on the stretcher.
The meltdown hit you violently.
Tears blurred your vision, your breathing turned into gasps, and you pressed your hands firmly into your ears.
You were rocking slightly, a self soothing stim you usually never allowed yourself to do outside the safety of your own apartment.
Suddenly, your throat felt completely locked. And you couldn't form a thought, couldn't explain the agony of your own body. And the panic directed itself outward. The fabric of your scrubs, usually manageable, now felt like sandpaper dragging across your feverish skin. Every fiber felt like a million tiny needles.
Desperate to get away from the sensation, you began fiercely scratching at your arms, your fingernails digging into the fabric and your bare skin, trying to scrape the torturous texture away.
The door clicked open. The brief influx of light and noise made you flinch.
"Hey. I thought I saw you slip in here."
It was Jack.
The two of you were close, closer than just a nurse-attending, but you had never let him see this.
Jack moved with urgency. He didn't grab you, but he slid closer, carefully extending his hands.
"Sweetheart, look at me," he murmured, his voice cutting through the ringing in your ears. "Hands off. Let's stop the scratching, okay?"
You couldn't answer. You just let out a choked sound, your fingers still frantically tearing at the scratchy sleeve of your scrub top.
It hurt, it was too hot, the texture was suffocating.
Understanding flashed in Jack's eyes. He, somehow, knew your signs. Gently, he reached out and captured your wrists, intercepting your hands before you could break the skin.
"What is going on? Are you okay?" he asked, worried.
The moment his fingers brushed your skin, he froze. He immediately used one hand to keep your wrists safely gathered, while the back of his other hand carefully pressed against your forehead.
You couldn't speak, tears spilled over your eyelashes, and you gave a frantic nod. You tried to pull your hands back to resume scratching, the panic making your chest heave.
"You're burning up," he noted softly, his brow furrowing with instant concern. "You have a fever."
"I- I'm fine," you choked out, your voice trembling terribly. "Just, just give me a minute, Jack. Please." You tried to sound fine but your voice betrayed you, sounding raspy.
"You have a fever. We need to check on you, get you some fluids—"
He was trying to be the doctor. He was trying to reason with you, to fix the physical symptoms, but the threat of being taken back out into the medical floor crossed the final wire in your brain.
The dam broke. The non verbal wall shattered under the weight of sheer desperation, and the truth came rushing out in frantic sobs as you burst.
"NO, okay, I’m sick, but please don't make go out there." you wept, the words spilling out of you in a desperate torrent. "I can’t think anymore. I can’t look at anyone. I need a calm playlist and I need everyone to stop, I want to go home, hug Duckie, and just stare at the wall. I'm sorry, Jack, I can't—"
"Hey, it's okay," Jack interrupted gently, cutting off the spiraling apology before it could swallow you whole. "Stop. You don't ever have to apologize."
He stayed a respectful distance, giving you space, but his eyes were filled with a protective warmth. "I know. You don't have to explain or be sorry."
A small smile touched his lips. "I pay attention to you. I see how you tap your fingers in a specific pattern when the alarms go off for too long. I know how much energy it takes for you to mask when the ER gets like this, let alone when you're running a fever. You don't have to hide it from me, okay? You can just be done."
He held his hands open, offering but not taking. "Can I touch you? Like I do when your shoulders are tense?"
You could only manage a small nod.
Jack moved in, wrapping his arms around you and pulling you tightly against his chest. He applied steady pressure, tucking your head under his chin.
"I'm going to tell Lena you're going home sick," he murmured after a long while, once your breathing had finally started to match the pace of his own. "And then, I'm going to take you to my car, drive you home, and make sure you get to your Duckie. Okay?"
You nodded against his chest, letting a long sigh out.
-
The cool leather of the passenger seat was a mercy against your feverish skin. Jack had practically carried you out the back exit of the hospital and now you were safely cocooned inside his car.
Jack opened the driver’s side door, the brief chime of the door alarm making you wince. He noticed immediately, slipping inside and shutting the door quickly to cut off the sound.
He didn't start the engine right away. He reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of water and two white pills.
"Fever reducers," he murmured, as he carefully placed the pills in your palm and unscrewed the cap of the water bottle for you.
You swallowed the medicine. Your throat felt locked. Your social battery was empty. Jack didn't press you to say thank you. He just took the bottle back and set it in the cup holder. Then, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone along with his wireless earbuds.
"Here," he said softly, putting the case in your lap and holding out his phone. "It’s unlocked. Put on whatever you need."
You looked down at the screen, then up at him. Your eyes were still heavy and wet from the meltdown, your chest aching with exhaustion. You couldn't form the words to tell him how much this meant, so you just looked at him, letting your eyes communicate what your voice couldn't.
Jack’s expression softened. "I know. It's okay."
You carefully put the earbuds in, the active noise cancellation immediately kicking in. You tapped his phone, finding a familiar ambient track you always used to decompress.
It was perfect. It was the calm you needed.
Jack buckled his seatbelt and finally started the car, the headlights cutting through the dark parking lot. Before he shifted into drive, he turned his head to look at you. He tapped your leg so you would look at him.
"We're going straight to your place," he said, speaking a little clearer so you could read his lips. "I'm going to get you inside, and then I'm going to stay until the fever breaks. Sound like a plan?"
You looked right into his eyes and gave him a slow nod.
Jack smiled.
"Alright. Let's get you home."
The steady sound of the track in your ears blended seamlessly with the quiet rumble of the car's engine. The world outside the window was a blur of passing streetlights, melting into soft streaks of gold and white against the dark. Your eyes fluttered shut, your body finally succumbing to the heavy exhaustion of the fever. You floated in that peaceful limbo between awake and asleep.
Through the fog of your half-sleep, you felt the car slow down, idling at a quiet red light.
A moment later, Jack’s hand carefully brushed your face before the back of his fingers came to rest flat against your forehead.
He held it there for a few seconds. checking the heat radiating from your skin.
"Still a little hot," Jack murmured to himself. "But you're sweating it out. That's good."
He carefully pulled his hand back so he could shift the car into gear as the light changed.
As the car moved forward again, his hand returned across the center console, resting casually but securely on your thigh, a grounding weight to let you know he was still right there.
Your eyelids felt too heavy to open. Slowly, dragging your hand up from your lap, you slid your palm over the back of his hand. You slotted your fingers between his, squeezing weakly.
Jack was looking straight ahead at the road, but the moment your fingers intertwined with his, a small smile broke across his face.
He didn't say a word, respecting your quiet phase, but his thumb began to stroke the back of your hand. He squeezed back, a firm and reassuring promise.
You relaxed as you held onto him. The ER was miles behind you, the calm sound was filling your head, and Jack was driving you home.
Summary: After visting Smurf and realizing his nephew has taken over his room, Andrew pays you a visit
Pairings: Andrew "Pope" Cody x Reader
Warnings/Tags: Insecure Andrew, Erectile Dysfunction, Mentions of Smurf
Notes: This came to me in a dream
Word Count: 1.5K
Your hands and your feet ache as your bag weighs you down. Your entire lower body pulses, sore from the full day of work. But you truck onward, knowing you're only a few feet from a warm bath and shitty reality TV.
You don't see him at first. All the lights are off, just as you left them in the morning but with one addition - the man sitting in your dining room watching your every move.
You shuck off your jacket and backpack, leaving them haphazardly on the counter. It's not until you've grabbed a cup from the cupboard and poured yourself a glass of water that you make eye contact, choking on your water.
"Andrew," you sputter. He's by your side in an instant, giving a firm blow between your shoulder blades as you cough into the sink, "We talked about you sitting in the dark like that. You scared the shit out of me-"
The realization hits you then. Andrew. Your Andrew, in your apartment for the first time in 3 years. You stop mid sentence, stretching back up to look him in the eyes. You reach out, your hand falling on the side of his face. Your thumb slides along his jaw. The subtle prick of pain in your finger from his stubble is sign enough that this isn't a dream.
"Andrew?" you whisper, "How'd you get out?"
"Early parole," he says back, unblinking.
"You didn't tell me? I visited last week."
He shrugs, "Didn't wanna get my hopes up. Got denied before."
Twice. He'd been denied twice, those two days had been the second and third worst days of your life - the day he got convicted stayed firmly at the top of the rankings.
You smile, wrapping your arms around his neck. He's stiff as you press your lips to his, but slowly his hands move to your waist.
"I'm so glad you're back. You should have called, I would have left work for you."
He frowns, "Work? Why are you working?"
"You were in prison, Andy, someone had to pay the bills."
He takes a step back, looking you up and down as if taking in your uniform for the first time.
"You're back at Hooters?" he huffs, shaking his head, "What-what happened to your art?"
"I'm still doing it," you step forward, holding his head in your hands, "But you know that it's not stable income. I'm only doing this to get by."
"Smurf said-"
"You know me and her don't get along, Andy," you pull him close, putting his forehead on yours. You can feel the heat of his breath on your lips, "Besides I'm not her charity case."
"I told her I didn't want you to go back there."
"I'm okay, Andrew. It's kind of nice, hustling again."
"You shouldn't have too," he grunts, "You can quit tomorrow. I told you that I'd take care of you."
You laugh a little, "We can talk about this tomorrow. Please tell me you've already visited Smurf and I get you all to myself tonight?"
He nods.
You smile, keeping your hand in his as you start to lead him towards your bedroom.
"She gave my room away."
"To who?" you frown.
"Julia's kid," he looks at the floor, "She died."
"Oh Andrew," you tilt your head sympathetically pulling him in for a hug, "I'm so sorry. Do you want to talk about it?"
He shakes his head.
"Are you sure? I don't mind-"
"No," he barks, "I don't want to think about it right now."
"Okay," you nod, picking his hand back up and starting back towards the bedroom, "We won't. How about you show me how much you hate this uniform instead, handsome?"
"I don't know…"
"What? 3 years in the slammer and you don't think I'm pretty anymore?" you tease with a pout, closing the door behind you.
"No," he shakes his head earnestly, "No. I just- I-"
He stops and rifles around in his pocket for a moment. He hands you a package.
The crease between your brows deepens as you examine it; the pill's called "Rhino 69" complete with an angry cartoon mascon and aggressively red pill capsule.
You raise a your brow at him, "No."
"But it's been a while since my last erection."
"Where did you even get this?"
"Stopped at the gas station on the way over here."
You roll your eyes, "If I wanted to date someone who took pills off the gas station floor I would date literally any other brother of yours. You're not putting this shit in your body."
"But what if I can't…you know?"
You soften as he avoids your gaze. You put the pull in the trash by your bed before sliding your hands around his body once more.
"Then tomorrow we'll take you to a real doctor and get you a real prescription. I don't care if we can't have sex tonight, I just wanna be close to you tonight, okay Andy?"
"Okay," he nods.
You giggle as he sits on the edge of the bed, spine stiff as a board while he waits for you to climb into his lap. His awkwardness carries over to the bedroom but you've never minded. His hands rest on your thighs as you card your fingers through his hair.
"I'm so excited for your curls to grow back," you murmur.
"Craig said I had a bowl cut."
"Craig's an idiot," you roll your eyes even though he's technically not wrong, "Although, I will miss how cute your ears look with this style."
You kiss his left ear then his right. His hands are tentative, slowly sliding up your body. They wait on your hips, as he looks at you for approval.
"Go on, Andy. Don't keep me waiting."
Your tank top hits the floor, followed shortly by your bra after Andrew undoes it with hands. You grab his wrists guiding them over to your breasts. He lets out a sigh, body finally relaxing as his thumb runs along your nipples.
You close your eyes, touching your forehead to his, "Missed you, Andrew."
"Missed you too," his voice is deep and gravely, tipping his head up to meet your lips.
You smile into the kiss, moving your hips against his softly. You feel nothing stirring beneath you.
"Missed your face," you kiss his nose. The faintest blush dusts itself across his nose bridge.
Your hands come to the top button of his polo, undoing it deftly between his fingers.
"Missed your voice," a kiss to his throat.
You undo the next button.
"Missed your smell," a kiss to his right cheek.
The second last button opens, the top his shirt starts to fall away.
"I missed you starin' at my ass when I do the dishes, or when I'm painting, or when I'm working out in the living room," a kiss to his left cheek.
You undo the final button, bringing your hands back up to his shoulders and helping him out of it.
You scratch your nails down his chest making him gasp. You repeat the motion, making he faint red lines an angrier shade as you run over the tracks again.
You rut your hips against him, frowning when there's still nothing poking between your legs.
" 'M sorry," he mutters, looking away from you."
"Don't apologize," you kiss him with enough force to send him sprawling against the bed, fully at your mercy pinned against the mattress as you pepper kisses all over his face, "I love you so much. Do you love me, Andy?"
He nods, "Yeah- I love you. I don't want to disappoint you."
"You're not disappointing me, Andrew," you shake your head, "Sex or not, I'm exactly where I want to be."
*****
You're vaguely aware of the bed shifting in the night. You think Andrew's just going to the bathroom or something, but when the bed turns cold you squint at the alarm clock on your bedside table.
2:30 am
Where the hell did he go?
You stumble out of bed, barely remembering to pull on Andrew's polo as you do and button up the bottom few as you start back to the kitchen.
It's empty. There's no noise or light from the living room indicating that he's watching TV. You're about to check the spare room when you notice your patio door isn't quite closed. Confused, you slide the door open.
In the middle of your yard stands your boyfriend, naked as the day he was born starting at the moon. The birthmark on his ass looks cute in the moonlight.
You lean against the doorframe, watching for a moment. You'll have to try and see if he'll be open to seeing a psychiatrist instead of Smurf's stolen prescriptions.
"Andrew," you call out. His neck whips over to you. "What are you doing out here?"
He blinks at you.
"What's the plan then? Want to go for a walk on the beach? Though I am enjoying the view, you'd have to put pants on for that, handsome."
He shakes his head.
"Why don't you come back to bed then?" you extend your hand.
He looks down at it, pondering a while.
"Andrew?" he meets your eyes once more, "C'mon it's getting chilly out here. And I just got you back. Don't wanna go to sleep alone again."
He turns around and walks over. His hand slips into yours.
Andrew doesn't sleep that night but he doesn't try to leave the bed again. Not that he'd be able to you with you sleeping soundly on his chest. He counts the seconds between your breathes until your alarm pulls out of sleep in the morning.
content warning: andrew "pope" cody x female reader. no use of y/n for reader. 18+ (minors do not interact!!!!!!). boyfriend!andrew x girlfriend!reader. brief physical description of reader. andrew is referred to as 'andy'. vaginal fingering. overstimulation. praising. lots of em-dashes and semicolons. not proofread.
word count: 1,219
work on ao3 !
you're enamored — read: turned on — by andrew's hands, but especially: the calluses in his hands.
you're soft. all around. soft cheeks, an even softer stomach — that andrew's absolutely crazy about, by the way. i will get on this later —, with the softest hands that had ever touched his skin.
it was one of the first things he fell in love with. your hands. the softest, most warm skin, with pretty manicured nails, that he made sure to pay for every time. he was your man, of course he's gonna pay for everything. his girl shouldn't worry about anything and definitely not money.
andrew is home for the weekend, which is a nice change, for once. you're on the couch with him, watching some nature documentary, laser focused on the tv, just like him. when you first started dating, andrew was worried you'd find him weird for liking this type of content. maybe you'd find it boring. imagine his surprise when you almost squealed with happiness when he mentioned wanting to watch some national geographic's whale documentary. you're just as nerdy as he is, and he couldn't be happier.
you dragged him to the couch, putting said documentary on the large tv on his living room. then, you're sitting beside him, head on his shoulder while you share a soft, throw blanket he keeps around because you get cold easily. your soft hand finds his, fingers intertwined.
andrew sat stiffly for a moment, before slowly relaxing against your warm body.
you're only half paying attention to the documentary — you wouldn't tell him, but you already watched it, way before. your fingers fiddle with his mindlessly. you feel the calluses, the rough skin, such a contrast against yours. andrew, deeply and almost concerningly self-aware, watches your hand in his, the way your delicate fingers traces those calluses that come from handling heavy guns and dirty work.
his mind wanders. what if you don't like his touch, because his skin is so rough? he should take better care of his hands, he thinks.
but inside, heat pools in your lower belly, because you love those hands. looooove those hands. the calluses tell a story; he's a hard working man — doesn't matter what type of work, it's still work. you love it. hard working men had always been a turn on for you. playboys that lived on daddy's money had never been your type.
"i love your hands, andy," you whisper gently.
"yeah?" he whispers back; quietly craving the reassurance.
"yeah," you nod. your voice trails off, and you look up, rounded cheeks flushed with the prettiest shade of pink. your breath catches, and andrew can read the telltale signs of your arousal building up.
you're imaging it. his hands. on you. in you. he's so good. so, so good when he's fingering you, his thick fingers stretching out your hole. even better when he's fucking you from behind, grabbing at the skin of your large hips with strong hands, using the lovehandles you once hated as leverage to fuck you harder, his rough skin only heightening your pleasure. you love when he manhandles you like a ragdoll.
"andy," you whisper, clenching your thighs, already wet underneath your cotton panties.
he doesn't say anything. doesn't ask and doesn't tease you — just straight to it, his large hand dipping between your thighs, up the soft fabric of your sundress. he's quick to push your panties to the side, fingers slipping between your sopping folds. it makes you shiver, a breathy moan escaping your lips.
andrew pokes at your clit before circling it with the tips of his fingers. your head falls back against the couch, the rolls back to rest against his shoulder. his other hand holds your thigh spread open, making sure he's got clean acess to your pussy. he slips one finger inside your quivering hole. it makes you moan, and he groans in response, pulling his finger out only to push it back in, softly. barely a thrust. then again, but this time, he pushes another finger in, stretching you out. your cunt squelches, wet and needy.
"oh my god, andy," you whine, grinding down on his hand.
"no god, angel. just me," he murmurs, watching his fingers fuck into your pussy. he curls his fingers deep into you, making you see stars, a loud whimper falling from your lips.
"andy, andy, andy," you moan, your pretty eyes rolling back. you grip his forearm, nails digging into his skin, which only makes him speed up those thrusts, the heel of his hand brushing against your puffy clit with each one.
"you gonna cum for me, angel?" he asks, smug. because he did that: he made this pretty thing quiver and wail and desperate enough to let him fingerfuck you on the couch in his living room.
"andrew, fuck—" you cry out his name, squirming on the couch as your cunt clenches down on his fingers.
"that's a good one, huh," andrew drawls out, his cock straining against his pants. he'll get to cum later; now, he wants another one from you. his fingers just slow down on your pussy, but he doesn't pull out as you ride out the high of your orgasm. he wants to feel every flutter of that pretty pussy.
after a few minutes, his fingers slowly ease deeper into you. you're not totally recovered yet; you whine, loud and high pitched, trying to close your thighs. "andy, no..."
"andy, yes," he says, going back to fuck your fluttering hole.
your cunt makes a wet, squelchy noise every time his fingers thrusts in, and it makes him wish that was his cock.
"andy, 's too much—" your words come out slurred, eyes permanently rolled back.
"'know you can take it, pretty girl," he mumbles to you. "one more, 'kay? just one more. then i'll let you rest," he promises.
andrew stops abruptly, and you foolishly think, maybe that's it. key word, foolish. he'd never leave you to cum like that. no matter how much he wanted to, orgasm denial wasn't andrew's thing. he tried once with you and he couldn't follow through. he's overwhelmed with this urgent need to make you cum as much as you possibly can before you pass out from exhaustion.
he pulls out of your pussy, only to manhandle you up on his lap, between his spread legs. he hikes up both your legs, keeping you spread open for him. his fingers are right back to your cunt, his other hand coming down to rub your clit in time with his thrusts. you squirm and whine, trying to get away. he clicks his tongue, going 'tsk-tsk-tsk' while holding you back, trapped against his chest.
your cunt feels raw by the time you come again. it's too much, just too much, and you're sobbing, clutching his forearm while he gives you slow, soft few thrusts.
"andy, please," you whimper.
andrew kisses your temple, not minding the sweat there. "good girl, baby, good girl," he whispers against your scalp, easing his fingers out of your pussy. "took my fingers so well," he kisses the side of your face. "you were made for me, you know that? i love you, angel. love you so much."
"love you too, andy," you whispers, tired, a second from falling asleep.
Jack Abbot x Fem!Reader
word count: 4k
warnings: depiction of emotional and psychological coercive control in a relationship, the aftermath of physical abuse (non-graphic), emotional affair, infidelity (justified…in my opinion 🤭)
a/n: this story is going to explore some heavier themes than i usually write, so i completely understand if it isn’t for everyone. in a lot of ways, this is my way of taking back a little bit of power from some past experiences, while also telling a story about how the right people can slowly restore someone’s faith in humanity after it’s been broken.
…and, of course, because i love me some jack abbot. WHEW.
Jack walks in for the night shift and checks the docket. Everyone scheduled is present and accounted for except —
He looks up. Lena is already watching him. She sets her hand flat over the tablet, drawing his attention to her.
"She's here."
His eyes move across the floor. A sweep, automatic. Nothing flags.
"What do you mean."
"She's here." A subtle tilt of her head toward the far end — bay marked empty, curtain drawn, lights off behind it. Something cold settles in him. His grip on the tablet adjusts without his permission.
"She doesn't want anyone knowing," Lena adds quietly.
He shifts his weight. "What—"
"She'll want to tell you herself." Her hand finds his arm for a moment and then releases it. She holds his gaze long enough that he understands the rest of it without her having to say it: it's bad.
He doesn't look for him. He doesn't need to. The man who's supposed to show up when something goes wrong — the one who goes home to you every night and apparently cannot manage even that one thing — his absence is already a fact, already filed. Of course he isn't here. That stopped surprising Jack a long time ago.
He sets the tablet down on the counter. Walks toward the bay at the far end of the floor at the pace of a man with no particular destination. Nothing worth noting. Nothing that would draw attention.
The curtain gives under his hand.
The light from the corridor falls across you in a thin strip. His eyes take a moment to adjust, and then they don't need any more time at all.
The bruise runs along your cheekbone. Not fresh...no. A day old at least, maybe two, already settling into that yellow-green at the edges that means the body is doing what it's supposed to, healing whether or not the person inside it is ready to. You're sitting slightly angled on the edge of the bed, one arm held close to your ribs in the prideful way people hold themselves when breathing has become a calculation. He reads all of it in under four seconds.
Then you look up.
And then you look away.
That is the thing that finishes him. Not the bruise. Not the careful architecture of how you're holding yourself together. The looking away...because you have never looked away from him. Never once in all the years he has known you. Not when he was telling you something you didn't want to hear, or when you were exhausted and half-wrong and arguing with him anyway, not even in the moments that should have made it impossible to hold his gaze. You always looked straight at him. And now you don't, and the absence of that one ordinary thing lands in his chest like a finding he does not want to have made.
He lets the curtain fall closed behind him. Pulls the chair from the corner. Sits close enough that you could reach him if you wanted to, not so close that you'd have to, and waits.
"I didn't—" Your voice breaks on the second word. You cover your face with your hands. "Shit."
He starts to move and then stops himself. Whether you want to be touched right now is a question he cannot answer for you, and getting it wrong in either direction would cost something neither of you could afford. The restraint itself costs him something he doesn't want to name.
"I feel so stupid." Into your palms. "I feel so fucking stupid."
"Don't." He looks down at his own hands. He doesn't trust his face right now. "Please don't do that."
A long breath. You lower your hands but don't look at him. "It wasn't—" You stop. Try again. "God. What a cliché. What a complete, embarrassing—" Another stop. "It wasn't his fault."
He waits.
"It was mine."
"You gave yourself those bruises?"
It isn't a question. He says it without inflection and waits for you to hear yourself try to contradict it.
You shake your head, eyes closed. "You know why it was my fault."
"I don't."
"Because of what I did." Smaller now. The smallest he has ever heard your voice. "What we did, Jack."
3 Months Earlier
The wind off the river is cold enough to bite, and you've been up here long enough that you've stopped noticing.
Pittsburgh spreads out below you in lights, all of it blurring at the edges the way things do when you've been crying long enough to be embarrassed about it. You're gripping the railing with both hands. Not because you might do anything — just because it's something solid, and solid is what you need right now.
"Fuck." You look down at the city below. "What a shitty night."
"I agree," a voice calls out from behind you and you jump, turning fast enough that your hand slips on the rail.
There stands Jack Abbot. Your attending for the past two years, the man who has pulled you back from the edge of your own worst moments more times than either of you has ever acknowledged out loud. He looks at you the way he always does — like he's already finished reading you and is deciding what to do with the information.
"You found me." You let go of the railing with one hand and swipe at your face, the gesture too quick to be subtle and both of you know it.
"You're in my hiding spot."
"That's why I came." You turn back to the city. "Felt close. Comforting. In a twisted way."
A pause. Then the sound of him crossing the roof, stopping a few feet to your left. He leans his forearms on the railing and looks out at the same skyline.
"Nothing bonds people like mutual—" he glances at the long drop below, "—ideations."
Something between a laugh and a sob escapes you before you can catch it. It surprises you. You hadn't known there was anything left in you tonight that could still make that sound.
"We did good tonight," you say, once you've got yourself back.
"You did great tonight." He doesn't look at you when he says it. That's how you know he means it. Jack's compliments always land sideways, never straight on, the way the most honest things usually do.
You glance at him. His face is closer than you expected, the city light catching the lines around his eyes, the grey at his temple. You look away before he can catch you looking.
The wind moves through your hair and you think about the girl — eleven years old, the pink shade of her sneakers, the way her mother's hands looked when you had to stop working. You think about standing in the hallway after and pulling out your phone because that's what you do when something guts you, you call someone who is supposed to care. The call going to voicemail. The text that came back twenty minutes later: busy, what is it. You typing nothing, never mind,because you had learned somewhere along the way that the answer to what is it should never actually be the thing.
"I thought after two years the death would get easier to carry," you lament.
"It doesn't get easier." A shrugs. "But you get stronger. There's a difference."
"Doesn't feel like it tonight."
He shifts slightly, his arm brushing yours, and neither of you moves away from it. A jacket sleeve against a jacket sleeve. You are both pretending it is nothing and doing a reasonable job of it.
"You did everything you could for that kid."
"That seems up for debate."
A stillness comes over him, sudden and total.
"Is that his take, or yours?"
You don't answer fast enough.
"Because there is a significant difference," he continues, voice even, "between you genuinely second-guessing your work and you repeating something back to me that someone else said."
You look out at the lights. "He had a point."
"He had an opinion." He stops, then continues against his better judgement. "And I've found that his opinions are, more often than not, bullshit."
"Jack—"
"Sorry." He doesn't sound sorry. His jaw is set like he's been holding this in far longer than tonight. "But this is not the first time he's pulled this shit, and I am so fucking tired of having to convince you that you are a fantastic doctor — because a man who assists one elective surgery a week in cardiothoracic questioned your work on an active trauma case. At what point do we stop calling that a difference of opinion?"
"Jack—"
"I'm not finished."
You close your mouth.
"You walked into that bay tonight and made twelve decisions in forty seconds and every single one of them was correct." He takes a breath and points back toward the stairwell, toward the ER eight floors below. "I watch you every shift. I know what good looks like and I know what you look like and those two things are the same thing, and I need you to hear that."
You don't know what to do with what he just said. You turn it over carefully, as if it's precious and breakable, and you hear yourself sigh: "He's not wrong that I could've considered the—"
"Stop." Barely a word. More like a direction. "Please. Don't."
"I'm just saying—"
"I know what you're doing." He looks at you then, straight on, the full weight of it landing somewhere you have never entirely learned to hold. "You're making it all smaller so it fits somewhere you can live with it. You've been doing that for a long time."
The truth of it settles somewhere beneath your sternum and stays there.
You look back at the skyline. He doesn't look away from you and you feel that too…his gaze steady at the side of your face, patient in the way he is with things he has decided matter.
"I don't know how to be angry at him," you admit, very quietly. "I don't know how to do that and still go home."
You might not know how to be angry at Tyler — at the man who has spent a year making you smaller in increments too subtle to name, who comes home every night and makes that feel like something you should be grateful for, who questioned your medicine in front of people who respect you and then kissed you on the cheek like he'd done you a favor. You might not know how to hold any of that without it falling apart in your hands.
But you know this.
You want to stay here. In this specific cold. In this specific quiet. Next to Jack. You want it the way kids want things they've already been told they can't have — with the grief already built in, like the wanting and the losing are the same feeling and always were.
You don't let yourself look at him. You watch the lights and you breathe and you tell yourself it's the bad day, the dead girl, the exhaustion that comes from holding yourself together for eight hours with nowhere good to put it down.
You are almost convinced.
"Then stop."
You turn. "What?"
"Stop going home to him." Jack turns so his back is against the railing now, facing the rooftop door instead of the city, shoulder to shoulder with you. Not looking at the skyline anymore. Looking solely at you. "If you don't know how to be angry at him and still go home, then stop. Going. Home."
You look at him. You mean to say something practical — something about leases or history or the sheer exhaustion of dismantling a three-year relationship — but you look at him and he is looking straight back and whatever you were about to say dissolves before it reaches your mouth.
His gaze drops. Just briefly. A fraction of a second, barely a movement at all... and then comes back up.
"Jack." You hum his name far too carefully. You can hear it yourself.
"I know." He looks away first, jaw set, a muscle working in his throat. He doesn't apologize or walk it back. He won't give you the out of pretending he didn't just look at you like that. "I know all the reasons. You don't have to list them."
"Then why are you—"
"Because someone should say it. Because you have spent well over a year letting that man convince you that you are lessthan what you are, and I have watched it, and I am not going to stand here and tell you it's fine." He shakes his head. "It's not fine."
"You don't know everything about it."
"I know enough."
"You know what I've told you."
"I know what you haven't told me too." Quiet, certain. "I've been paying attention for a lot longer than you think."
That moves through you slowly. The knowledge that he has been watching closely enough to see the things you've been careful not to say. That you have been seen — in this way, at this depth — for longer than you realized.
It should feel like too much. It doesn't. That is the part that frightens you.
"I can't just—" you start.
He eases closer by barely an inch, the kind of movement you could both agree was nothing if you needed to. His voice drops, rougher than it was a few minutes ago. "I just want you to know that you have somewhere to go. When it gets to a point where you need somewhere to go."
When. Not if. When.
The wind moves between you. The city holds its shape below, indifferent to both of you, to the charged and impossible distance between your bodies.
You understand what he is not saying. You've been pretending not to understand it for a long time…months, maybe. The knowledge that has been waiting just below the surface of everything for a night cold enough and honest enough to finally bring it up. He is not talking about a couch. He is talking about something neither of you has named and both of you have been building slowly, out of late nights and long silences and the way he always seems to know when you need someone to hold the line for you.
"Jack, you don't—"
"I know what I'm saying."
"Do you."
"Yes."
You are close enough to see the catch in his breathing, his eyes moving over your face like he's memorizing something he isn't sure he'll get to keep. The cold has reddened the tips of his ears. His shoulder is warm against yours. A warmth you became aware of a long time ago and have been carefully not thinking about ever since.
Then his hand moves. The backs of his fingers, barely, against the back of yours on the railing. Not a hold. Not even quite a touch. The suggestion of one. The question of one.
You don't pull away.
He stays exactly where he is, close and still and god, so warm, and lets you decide — lets you have the choice, which is so entirely like him that it cracks something open in your chest that you are not prepared for. Jack has always done this. Given you the room. Let you come to things yourself. Never pushed. And you have spent two years calling it professionalism, the ordinary warmth of someone good at his job.
You have been lying to yourself for two years.
"Oh god help me," you gasp, and you shake your head once like you're still arguing with yourself, like there's still a version of this where you make the sensible choice —
And then you surge forward and kiss him.
And god help him, he kisses you back.
It isn't tentative. That is the thing that ruins you completely, the thing you will turn over in your hands for months afterward in the dark. You half-expected careful…expected him to hold something in reserve, to kiss you the way a man kisses someone he knows he shouldn't, apologetically, with an exit already built in. But he doesn't.
His mouth is warm and sure against yours and he kisses you like he has thought about this, like the thinking has been going on longer than either of you would be comfortable admitting, and the certainty of it — the sheer unguarded certainty — makes your knees go weak beneath you.
There you stand… you on one side of the railing, him on the other, the city yawning open behind you and the rooftop solid behind him. Yin and yang. Two people facing opposite directions who somehow found the same point. It should be awkward, the geometry of it, the railing between you like a reminder of everything else that stands between you. It isn't. It is the least awkward thing that has happened to you in longer than you can remember.
You lose your balance — at the cold, at him, at the dizzying vertigo of finally doing the thing you have been not-doing for months — and his arm moves on instinct, that big certain arm, curling around the front of you, pulling you back and against him in the same motion, anchoring you to the roof, to him.
Instinctively you grip his bicep. Your fingers find the muscle there and hold on, and he registers it…you can feel the slight tension move through him when you tighten your grip. He pulls you fractionally closer in a way you will think about later, all alone, when thinking about it is all that's left.
He sighs against your mouth and you inhale it like he's breathing air into you that you haven't been able to find on your own in years. Like your lungs have been working at half capacity and you didn't know it until right now, until this, until him.
His breath is uneven and knowing that…knowing you did that to him, to this composed, careful man…does something to you that you have no language for.
Then —
"Babe! Someone mentioned you might be up here."
The voice hits you like cold water from a height up above.
You break away so fast the railing bites into your hip and you don't care, your hand coming up to your lips before you catch yourself and drop it, heart slamming. Jack's arm is still half-around you. In fact, there's no world in which he could have unwrapped it fast enough and he does the only thing available to him, which is to make it look like nothing at all.
"Whoa, careful there." His voice comes out even. The voice of a man catching a colleague who nearly lost her footing, nothing more, and you could kiss him again just for that — for the instantaneous, instinctive cover of it — except that is exactly the problem you are currently trying to survive. "Watch your step."
The door swings wider.
Tyler steps through it.
He is, as always, immediately the most put-together person in any room or in this case, any rooftop. Jacket still crisp from a day that broke you down to the cellular level. Not a single hair out of place. His eyes move in one clean sweep: you first, then Jack, then back to you, running the math with the focused efficiency of a man who does not enjoy variables he didn't introduce himself.
"Hey." His smile arrives. Pleasant. Practiced. The one that has never quite reached his eyes in a way you stopped mentioning a long time ago. "Didn't know you'd have company up here."
"Oh my god, hi—" The performance costs you the last of what you had. Your face does what it needs to do: warm, a little sheepish, surprised in the right amounts.
"What are you doing up here." Not quite a question. You have become, over three years, fluent in what lives beneath the pleasant register of Tyler's voice.
"Decompressing." You gesture vaguely at the city, at everything that is not Jack or the specific place you were standing ten seconds ago. "You know how I get after a bad outcome."
"With your attending."
"She was already here when I came up," Jack says. Unhurried. Carrying exactly the right amount of mild inconvenience, like he'd been hoping for five minutes alone and found the roof occupied. You have no idea how he's doing it. "I startled her and shit, she nearly lost her footing on the wrong side of the railing." He looks at you, and the look is perfect, just the right measure of attending-to-resident, nothing underneath it that anyone could name. "You should come back to this side."
He offers his hand.
You take it and duck under the railing. His grip is strong, but brief and entirely professional, released the moment you're clear, and you feel the loss of it in the half-second before he lets go. Then his hands find his pockets and he looks at Tyler the way he looks at people he has already fully assessed and found unsatisfied with his explanation.
Tyler's eyes moves between you. Slower this time.
"You okay?" Soft. Solicitous. The version of him that shows up in front of witnesses.
"Fine." You brush your jacket down. "Cold. I should have come in earlier."
"Yeah." Something passes across Tyler's face that isn't quite an expression…a small calculation, something filed away for later when there's no audience. You know that look. You know what it means for home, for the temperature the apartment will be when you walk in. "Probably should have."
Jack glances between you. One second, maybe less. You feel it anyway. Precise, even now, even with Tyler standing six feet away.
"Good work tonight," Jack says to you. Plainly. The way he's said it a hundred times at the end of brutal shifts. It is the most ordinary thing and yet it feels like a hand steadying something that keeps threatening to tip within you.
You nod. You don't trust your voice for anything beyond that.
He heads for the door. Stops with his hand on it, not looking back. "Get some sleep."
Then he's gone. The door falls shut and the rooftop is just a rooftop again, cold and normal, and Tyler is watching you with that quality of attention that has never once felt like the same thing as being seen.
"Ready?" he asks.
"Yeah," you say.
You follow him to the door. You don't look back at the railing, at the city, at the place where you were standing when everything was different.
You already know exactly what it looked like from the outside. Two colleagues on a rooftop. Nothing more.
You know what it felt like from the inside too.
You carry both of those things down the stairwell and into the rest of the night, and you do not let yourself think about which one is true.
Synopsis: When Jack freaks out over your little stunt to get his attention, you both finally get the chance to clear the air.
Warnings: mentions of minor character death, swearing, mentions of patient violence (all references to past events)
A/n: the thrilling conclusion to a series that somehow blossomed from a throwaway one shot idea I had for funsies while I was hitting a wall in other fics! Lolll but seriously I hope you all enjoy this, these two were so fun to write for! Onto the next
masterlist!
——
“How are you doing? You okay? Have you eaten?”
Lani, the MS3 that’s been tailing you anxiously since Robby sic’ed her sparkly brown eyes and perfect jet-black French braids on you at 6:52 this morning blinks slowly at you, before nodding her head vigorously.
“Yeah! Yeah I’m good,” she says. “Dr. Robinavitch gave me a protein bar an hour ago.”
You raise your eyebrows expectantly, flicking your eyes toward the nurses’ station like he might have heard that. Lani goes a shade paler.
“Robby!” she says. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” you laugh, hands on your hips as you roll your neck out. “Sorry if it’s been a rough one today. I swear, the first day of a new rotation is always like a curse in this place.”
She laughs nervously, still eyeing you with caution.
The shifts blur together more and more these days, so nothing that could be causing her hesitation sticks out in your mind. You’d think the night shift would be more disorienting, the late hours bleeding together, your distressed circadian rhythm never fully adjusting.
But you find you’ve actually found less comfort in the daylight, existing with the rest of the world and all of its demands.
“What’s up?” you ask Lani, head tilted in concern, wondering if something had slipped under the radar or you’d come across distracted at some point today.
“Nothing. Nothing,” she says, shaking her head again. Then she pauses. “Well. So it’s just… so it’s not always like this, then?”
The laugh that’s bubbling up in your throat dies promptly when a familiar figure appears in your line of sight.
His shoulders were tight underneath his navy blue t-shirt, tucked into his belted camo pants — god, you swear you saw Jack in his fatigues more than his scrubs these days.
He’s leaning over the nurses’ station, talking in hushes with Robby. When he tilts his head in your direction, greeting you with tired, halfway apologetic smile, you suppress a sigh. Because then Jack is stalking toward you with an unknown purpose before you can decide to run or hide or both, barely sparing Robby a second glance.
He wastes no time once he’s in your vicinity, greeting you lowly with your formal title, nodding politely at Lani when he realizes she’s there.
“Can I speak with you?” he asks.
“Dr. Abbot,” you say, feeling off-kilter, the slew of barely answered texts and missed calls that has been weighing down the phone in your back pocket now pressing down on your chest when you see him for the first time in days.
He doesn’t say anything in return, looking at you in expectation. You feel Lani’s eyes shifting between the two of you, and you try not to wither under the pressure, resulting to old tactics.
“Where’s the rest of the troop today?”
“I really need a word,” he remarks, no time for your attempt at sass, as half-hearted as the ‘fine, hope you’re okay too’ you responded with when he asked how you were the day after Reseda died.
You ignore him. “This is a new MS3, Lani. It’s her first day.”
“Uh… hi,” he says, smile strained, peeling his eyes from you for less than a second, giving her exactly enough attention to be considered courteous before he’s looking back at you.
“You’re Dr. Abbot?” she asks, catching his attention again.
“Night shift senior attending. How are you?” he forces out, as polite as he can muster, even with exasperation for the interaction clearly written all over his face. “Listen—”
“Is he the one Santos was telling me about?” Lani says suddenly, her eyes starry again as they flit between the two of you. “The one who did a chest tube under active fire? Didn’t you get shot?”
“Shot at.”
You lock gazes with Jack when you both say it at the same time, before rolling your eyes and looking away again.
Lani is still glancing between the two of you in wonder, like she can’t even begin to figure this place out.
“Lani, would you mind if I stole her for a moment?” Jack asks, still looking at you. “Santos always needs an extra set of hands.”
She nods, not seeming keen to defy an attending on her first day — but still looking suspicious. You wave her off gratefully. “Go. I’ll come get you in a few.”
“What rooms are free?” Jack asks as soon as she’s gone, standing up on his toes to search around the place.
You pop your hip, your tablet falling to your side. “Jack, how am I supposed to know that?”
He looks back down at you, pleading. “I really need to talk to you, and I don’t wanna do it out here.”
Jack’s silvery curls are pressed flat to his head in a tell-tale sign that he’s been sweating it out all day in a helmet. He looks exhausted, ragged, like he’s been lying awake to the police scanner again, without you there to fumble for its off switch sleepily before kissing him back to sleep. You know from snooping over Robby’s shoulder to look at the schedule on his computer earlier today that Jack’s back on in only a few hours.
And the way his eyebrows go from a hard, flattened line to being screwed up his forehead helplessly hits you somewhere deep beneath your ribs.
“I think Mohan just discharged one of the West rooms,” you say softly, knowing that’s where you’ll be afforded the most privacy a place like the Pitt can offer. You turn, not waiting for him to follow. “C’mon.”
And he does, of course he does — you feel the heat of him at your back as you both pass the Central rooms, dodging wayward gurneys, gossipy nurses and prying residents. Even Robby looks up from where he’s supervising Javadi as you both pass him by in lockstep, but he doesn’t say anything.
West 14 is empty. You don’t have time to point it out to Jack before he’s got a firm hand splayed over the small of your back, reaching around you to open the door with his other and guiding you through it quickly.
You round on him once the door is closed, almost bumping into his chest he was standing that close. “Hey, you can’t just—”
He pushes you back, away from the lack of discretion provided by the windows, and closes the curtain abruptly, all without breaking eye contact.
When he speaks, it’s frustrated. “Tell me Blackwell was lying.”
You narrow your eyes, confused. “What?”
“Say it,” Jack demands. “Tell me he was wrong.”
You almost scoff. “Sorry. Who the fuck is Blackwell?”
“My SWAT sergeant.”
Realization unfurls your brow. Your mouth dries out and you almost feel queasy, taking a step back from him, guilt surely written all over your face.
It happened before Reseda.
While Jack had been busy helping establish a treatment plan for whoever on his squad was currently in one of the North rooms mid-heatstroke, you’d studied the rest of them where they all waited just outside. An imposing presence in the ED, loitering with helmets under their arms, speaking and laughing loudly in a place filled with sadness and frustration. Sometimes it was a welcome change, but most days it pissed you off.
It didn’t take long to surmise who was running the show, and it took even less time to persuade him away. A light touch to his bicep and a polite smile as you apologized for interrupting, and Blackwell was happy to speak to you about TEMS. It mainly went in one ear and out the other, as you couldn’t help but keep checking over his shoulder to see if Jack had noticed — or just to see him him at all, really, cheeks flushed and barking out orders in that familiar, competent-without-being-bossy way that you hadn’t seen for yourself in weeks.
Jack says your name, snapping you back to the present, to his heaving chest and tight voice, to the anxiety in his face and his hands that can’t settle, not at his sides but not reaching out for you — balling in fists or running through those grown-out curls.
You’re temporarily distracted, noting how long his hair has gotten. Something you’d enjoy if you didn’t take it as a sign of how out of sorts he must be if he’s missed his tri-weekly haircut.
“For the love of god, baby, tell me you aren’t actually considering tactical medicine,” he says. “Are you punishing me?”
Your eyes flit back to his face, ignoring his hair again as your realization seeps in.
“No,” you say quietly, backing up until you’re leaning against the bed.
“Then what?” he asks, not missing a step in going with you, bending at the waist to meet your eyes dead-on.
You shake your head, guilt wrapping around your throat again. “I swear I totally forgot that I even—”
“Forgot what?” he interrupts, daring you to admit the truth he hadn’t thought possible when he dragged you away from your med student.
You sigh. “I talked to him once, a while back, when you all came in. I don’t know, it was…”
Jack takes a beat at your confirmation, sighing a rough push of air, tipping his head back up at the ceiling like it will give him answers to why he decided to get involved with you in the first place.
You’d subconsciously dropped the idea completely after Reseda had literally died on your table with Jack right at your side watching on, panicked orders and shallow breaths in your ear, the rest of his squad at the windows to Trauma 2.
And it embarrassed you how childish it all seemed in retrospect. You wonder now if the entire rouse might actually have just served to prove Jack right — that you did let emotions cloud your decisions, in a way that could make you the unreliable doctor he’d made you worried that you were.
“It was stupid,” you say lamely, feeling your words start to thicken in a frightening way. “I was still mad at you. It wasn’t serious.”
“It’s not serious,” he says definitively, present tense. “You’re not serious, right?”
“No, Jack. It wasn’t. I’m not.”
“You promise?”
You frown, titling your head to the side. “It’d be pretty hypocritical of me to yell in your face about it and then become a joiner.”
He doesn’t say anything. Like he still doesn’t believe you.
“You know I’d never,” you assure.
One last suspicious look, then his shoulders finally drop as he sighs, scrubbing both of his hands over his face.
He huffs a sarcastic laugh. “Shit. You really had me going.”
“Got you,” you say ineffectually.
“So you were punishing me,” he says.
You shrug.
“It’s scary, right? Picturing someone you care about in those situations,” you say, your voice feeble because you know it’s not fair. “You flipped your lid any time I tried to take on a male patient in the last month, so I just…”
“What were you gonna do? Show up for a raid one day just to prove a point?”
“I don’t know,” you say, scrunching your face up. “Maybe? Probably not.”
He laughs again, like he means it this time, some of the tension starting to seep from the room.
“You’re kind of insane,” he says, his voice caramelizing the words in a contradictory fondness.
You roll your eyes. “Don’t all of my patient satisfaction scores say so?”
His smile slips at your self-deprecation. “They don’t. You saw Mason’s, didn’t you?”
He takes a step toward you just as the door opens, a whoosh of air blowing the curtain slightly, the sounds of the ER entering the room.
“I need her back, Jack,” comes Robby’s voice. “You get one more minute unless you’re staying to help out.”
Your face heats, and the door closes again before either of you can respond.
“I should go,” you say, standing up straight, face-to-chest with him again.
He’s unmoving, his next plea pointless, earnest as could be anyway, “Wait. Just… wait.”
You’re completely still.
His hand finds the back of your neck, and you’re even more rooted to the spot, tilting your head up when his thumb encourages your jawbone with light brushes.
“Hi,” Jack says lowly, almost a whisper.
“Hi,” you answer, keenly aware of your stomach brushing his belt buckle.
“There’s a lot I still have to say,” he says, his eyes all over your face, flicking to your lips more times than is appropriate for West 14. “But I’m going crazy without you.”
Same, you think. Me too, same, me as well, ditto. I miss you. I lo—
“Is this an inappropriate time to say I was right about you growing at your hair?”
His laugh rumbles against your chest, mirth in his eyes that you’re sure matches your own.
“I don’t care what’s appropriate,” he says, shaking his head, that trademark cockiness back. “Never been interested in it.”
Heat rushes back to your cheeks, and he leans forward to kiss your forehead, his familiar scent overwhelming your senses, pushing those stubborn tears right back to your waterline.
“I’ve gotta let you go before Robby kills me,” he says. His thumb presses right to the corner of your eye, catching a tear before it can fall. “But can we talk later?”
You exhale, blinking your eyes rapidly.
“I’m just really tired of having this fight, Jack,” you whisper.
He pulls back. “I think it’s one worth having. Don’t you?”
You feel yourself nodding.
“Come find me at handoff?” you ask.
“I’ll always find you,” he says, and you blink your eyes more, before you do something embarrassing like actually starting to cry in the arms of your attending-slash-situationship in the middle of a patient room during your shift.
Jack takes pity.
“Go get back out there, yeah?” he croons, more mischief seeping into his tone, “Poor Lani’s probably up a creek.”
You nod, gathering yourself after such a brief, charged interaction flipped your shift upside down once again, but you feel a smile fight its way onto your face. “You really came in just for this?”
He shrugs, sighing in that way that lets you know he has no idea what to do with you. But you think he wants to keep doing it anyway, especially when he tips your head back just so. You know you do.
“Straight from the station,” he murmurs, his breath fanning across your lips. Crowding every one of your senses but still so utterly cautious, holding himself back, waiting instead for you to take what you want, just like he had been when this all started.
So you do. Because you know even if you haven’t ironed it all out that he’s still a soft place to land, and you surge forward, slowing once your lips connect, unable to help the wistful noise you let out as it feels like Jack is pouring a million sorries right into you — his shadowy beard scraping them into your skin, his fingers pressing them into your jaw and your hip, the beats of his heart echoing them into your own.
“Mm,” he hums as he pulls back, kissing your cheek. His forehead resting on yours, his breathing now as shallow as your own. “We’ll talk more later?”
You nod your head, easing out of his hold, shivering when his ring trails along the back of your neck.
“Yeah we will. You’re not getting off that easy,” you remind him. You take him in again, and even the new energy in his eyes can’t hide the exhaustion. “Go home and get some sleep, Jack.”
He shakes his head, leaning forward to wipe a thumb across your lips like it’ll be any less obvious what the two of you were getting up to in here. Then he draws the curtain, letting you duck under his arm. “Now I definitely won’t be able to.”
—
“How’re you doing, kid? My shift killed you yet?”
Tiredness curls around Robby’s words, like it often does regardless of whether he’s 12 minutes into a shift or 12 hours. You’re — for once in your life — not grateful it’s the latter. The clock ticking closer and closer to 7pm elicits butterflies with heavy wings in your stomach this time, knowing Jack should be arriving for handoff anytime now.
For now, you deposit your badge and favorite pen into your bag before looking up at his best friend, who hovers at your work station, making no move to get out of here on time.
“Not yet. It’s good. At least, I think it’s good. I should be asking you,” you say, slinging your bag over your shoulder, crossing your arms.
Robby laughs.
“You’d know if it weren’t. Trust me. You’re killing it,” he says, then tilts his head to the side, studying you with a wry smile. “But it sure seems like night shift wants you back.”
Butterflies activated again, you give Robby a half-smile. “We’ll see.”
His eyes flick up over your shoulder, out toward the ambulance bay. He nods his head. “Maybe sooner than you think.”
When you turn your head, you aren’t surprised to see Jack’s waiting at the door. But he’s not storming in with that quiet sense of authority, donning his white undershirt and black scrubs, and he doesn’t have his bag. Just a smile for you, a returned nod for Robby, wearing a gray t-shirt you know to be soft to the touch and a pair of jeans.
You turn back to Robby. “He’s not on tonight?”
Robby shakes his head slowly, and you realize now he’s not packing up with you for a reason. “He called in a favor. I’m covering until Al-Hashimi comes in.”
“He what?”
“Don’t say I never did anything for you. He only gets a favor from me once a year, y’know.”
You turn back to Jack, waiting patiently, one hand tucked into his pocket and the other holding something you can’t make out. He nods at one of the security guys on his way to clock in for the night, but then he’s right back to you.
You’d pictured a controlled, time-restricted chat before night shift pulled him under for the rest of the day. Maybe a bus ride home with a more exciting playlist than usual blaring in your ears this time, a call to your sister when you got home. Convincing Javadi to split a bottle of wine after her date with Matteo. A good night text you’d actually return.
You don’t know what to do with the promise of an entire night with Jack, but your body does, your feet moving you toward him, waving a hand in dismissal at your department chief as he reminds you that you still clock in at 7am tomorrow morning — no favors to be found.
“S’that a peace offering?” you ask, spotting a yellow can of prebiotic soda in one of his hands, your go-to post-shift treat and he knows it.
“Got enough of them left in my fridge,” he shrugs as you stop before him, seemingly unconcerned that anyone paying attention might deduce the senior night shift attending is very much here on his night (newly) off to for the sole purpose of collecting a senior resident. “Figured you might want one.”
“I’ll take them all if you want,” you say, taking it from him. The can of apple-flavored soda suddenly seems like it will go down like acid as you picture him placing a box of your things in your locker for you to find during day shift, and you tuck it into your bag instead.
“I actually drank them all,” he admits after a moment. “I got that one on my way in.”
You feel your eyebrows shoot up, huffing a scoff against the can. “You didn’t even like these.”
“Yeah, well,” he shrugs. “You left them behind and they were taking up space. And I did pay for them.”
You’d been complaining about how Jack didn’t have any fun drinks in his fridge for days, and he’d gesture toward his fully stocked bar cart, complete with a wine rack, in exasperation and complain about having to stop at Whole Foods everyday on the way home from shift just so you could get something suitable. Then he’d purse his lips in disgust when he’d try it in the car later, muttering “gimme that” and making you cackle while he’d roll down the window to pretend to spit it out.
Until you’d finished a double one day and came home to an entire case stocked next to his stupid beers and carrot juice. He’d shrugged when you noticed, but his neck turned pink when your lips were pressing into it shortly after, teasing him because he liiikes you.
“By all means,” you say. “I bet you’ve been using the La Roche-Posay I left in your shower, too.”
“Sorry,” he says, his eyes narrowing. “The what?”
You can’t help but laugh, even if your chest still feels tight with anxiety. “Never mind.”
A few beats of silence pass between you two, but Jack doesn’t break your gaze this time. Not even as gurneys go by and prying eyes come and go.
“You need a ride?” he finally asks. When you nod, he steps out of the way for you to head out the ambulance bay doors first. You don’t make it three steps before he tugs at your bag, and you let him slip it off your arm gratefully as you head to the parking deck.
“I’ve never really known how to have conversations like this,” Jack starts, your pace slowing to match his on the asphalt.
“Conversations like what?”
“The hard ones,” he answers, his eyes downcast when you turn to search his profile. His bag over your shoulder now, he fiddles with the band around his ring finger, twisting it around the way you’ve seen him do a million times before. “My wife. She, uh… she always came after me first.”
Your hand flexes at your side, yearning for his.
“And she’s…” you trail off, wondering how to word it. Jack talked about his wife so rarely, and never about you in the same breath. “That’s the last time you…?”
“No one since. No one serious since,” Jack confirms, leaving his band alone, his hands dropping to his sides.
When you arrive at the deck, his hand finds your back, gently guiding you toward where he’d parked.
“I’m not used to having anyone looking out for me anymore,” he continues, then clicks his tongue. “Well, besides Robby, but he’s his own fucking mess these days and I’ve been off the hook.”
That makes you laugh, turning your head up at him, and Jack smiles.
“And I’m,” he shakes his head, biting down on his bottom lip, “apparently really not used to looking out for anyone.”
He cuts his eyes back toward you when you laugh again. “What?”
You naturally slow to a stop as his truck comes into view, Jack’s presence at your side in front of the passenger door, carrying your bag achingly familiar even though it’s sunset, and the light colors him differently than it does in the morning, pink hues in the sky framing those curls — still overgrown, but slightly better kept at the moment as he eyes you with expectation.
“Jack, that’s like — that’s all you do. All you do is look out for people,” you say. “Every doctor and nurse and staff member in there, I’m sure everyone at SWAT. I mean — Robby…”
You trail off, embarrassed suddenly.
“And now you,” he finishes easily.
You cross your arms, sheepish, cheeks warm once again, even if you’re not susprised.
“It’s different with you,” he says. “You know it is. That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s…”
Jack opens his back door, tossing your bag in and shutting it again, then tucks his hands into his pockets.
“It wasn’t until you — until I saw that guy deck you, and then I got hurt, and we started doing this. I hate,” his voice catches, and he clears his throat. “I hate that that’s what it took, baby. And I hate how I reacted on shift.”
You bring your body closer to his, grabbing for his hand, dragging him into your arms. “Jack.”
“Don’t tell me it’s okay. It’s not,” he says into your hair, arms constricting around your waist. “I wasn’t benching you because you couldn’t handle it. I was benching you because I couldn’t handle it.”
He pulls back, his eyes looking for yours and his hands not moving from your body.
“You have to know that. You know that right?” he says, touching your face. “You give excellent care.”
Then he tilts his head side to side, muttering, “I mean. A few wonky reviews here and there, but you don’t usually deserve it.”
He winces, bending forward slightly when you dig your fingers into his side in retaliation for that comment. And he laughs, almost letting you out of his hold as your attempt feebly to push away.
“I’m sorry,” he says, arms tight around you like he’s afraid you’ll disappear if he lets you, a kiss to your cheek. “If you felt like I doubted your medicine, because I didn’t. And I don’t. Not for a second.”
“It isn’t about that.”
“No?”
“No. Maybe a little. But not entirely,” you say. “I mostly hated that you looked at me like I was weak. Like I couldn’t handle shit.”
“You’re not weak,” he says, shaking his head. “And you can handle anything. Way more than me when I was a resident.”
“Stop it.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I admire you so much.”
Your arms sneak around his waist, and you rest your head on his chest in acceptance of his apology, his shirt as soft as you’d remembered under your cheek.
“Hey,” he says, cheek resting on your head. “You okay?”
Relieved tears leak from your eyes, no doubt soaking through his shirt — acceptance of someone you so upheld in both your personal and professional life, now, reaffirming his trust in you. “Yeah. Could you take me home?”
His thumb strokes behind your ear, drawing a line across your jaw, coming to press down on your lip. There’s no scar anymore, but he’ll always remember right where it was.
“Always, baby.”
Jack tucks you into his truck before getting in on the driver’s side, the muscle memory of watching him back out, a hand on your seat, his eyes meeting yours before he puts the car back in drive, so achingly familiar it’s like you feel pounds lighter after watching him do it.
But you and Jack live in the same direction, and you frown when he goes out the wrong parking lot exit.
“Did you somehow forget the drive to your own place?”
“We’re going to mine?” he asks.
You blink, embarrassed suddenly. “Aren’t we?”
He lifts a shoulder. “Didn’t want to assume.”
You roll your eyes affectionately, shifting down to kick your feet up on his dash. “Well you’re still going the wrong way.”
“Detour,” Jack says easily, smiling over at you. “Just dropping something off. Then we’ll go to mine, don’t worry.”
You frown, looking back out the window, tree-lined streets soaked in sunset passing by. It’s silent the rest of the way except for the music coming from your phone, your Bluetooth connection to Jack’s truck’s radio syncing back immediately.
You furrow your eyebrows when you see the police station come into view, and Jack pulls over to park across the street from it.
“I told you I wasn’t serious,” you joke, confused nonetheless. “Don’t make me sign up. You know I’m too cute for that helmet.”
He smiles half-heartedly, and his hand gathers yours. He presses a kiss into your knuckles, stealing your breath for a minute.
“We’re here to turn my gear in.”
“What?”
He nods to the backseat. “It’s all there.”
You turn, unbuckling your belt as you catch sight of his bags. You get up on your knees, seeing his uniform, his helmet, his belt — all of his issued gear is in the backseat and you hadn’t even noticed until right now.
“Jack…” you say, turning back to him, resting on your haunches. “I don’t want you to quit. I never wanted you to quit.”
“I want to,” he says. “I want this. I want us to work.”
You reach your hand out for him and his mouth curves again, helping you up over the console, into his lap, his other hand digging into your side as your knees press into the leather of his driver’s seat.
“Jack. You don’t have to,” you say, your hands dropping to his shoulders when you’re settled, your right hand placed where the wound had healed weeks ago. “Don’t you like doing it?”
He’s still as he contemplates, except for his hands that move from your waist and down your thighs, back up again, and you don’t know who he’s soothing. He takes a deep breath. “I’m tired of watching people I care about get hurt. I see enough of it as it is. I can find another hobby.”
“Oh, Jack,” you say, leaning forward, letting his arms encircle you, your hand finding the curls at the back of his head.
“Even picturing you out there, baby…”
You pull away, searching his face. “But that’s not real. This is entirely up to you, Jack.”
He glances out the window toward the station, back to you, lip bitten in contemplation. “Even if you don’t like it? Even if you’ll worry about me if I do stay?”
“Yeah, Jack,” you say, shrugging. “I mean, duh, I’ll be worried, but…”
“You make that look so easy.”
You lean forward, your lips pressing into his rough cheek. He didn’t shave in the few hours since he’d left the ED, but you don’t mind.
“Bit of a learning curve, but you got there in the end, babe.” Another kiss, then turning his face to yours, sealing your mouth over his, a noise of surprise leaving his throat before you’re pulling away again. “Plus you’re, like, stupid hot in that uniform. Don’t make me run off with Bosco to get my fix.”
Jack’s mouth falls open with a strangled sound of indignation and you laugh hard, accidentally honking his truck’s horn when your back slams into the steering wheel.
“Jesus Christ,” he laughs, a hand on your back. “You’re trouble.”
”So I’ve been told,” you hum, your hands finding his chest. “Or was it… risky?”
Jack rests his head back on the head rest, hands rubbing over your thighs, looking at you through half-lidded eyes. “One worth taking.”
“Yeah?”
He nods. “Sometimes we do things that scare us, right?”
Your heart pounds, like it might break a rib if he keeps talking to you like this.
“Yeah,” you breathe, finding his lips again, until his hands on your hips push you back.
“Okay,” he says. “Hop off before I give the police department a reason to write up another report we both have to sign.”
“No more reports. Or forms,” you say, climbing out of his lap reluctantly, still leaning over to kiss him over the center console until he turns away. You forgot how intoxicating he could be.
“Well. Maybe one more,” he says.
Your eyebrows knit together. “What?”
Jack is silent as he turns the ignition over and puts the truck back into drive, smoothly pulling back onto the road and letting a few blocks go by as you just stare at his profile.
“Probably one more form that says I shouldn’t be evaluating you in a clinical sense until your residency is over,” he says. “Given my conflict of interest.”
“Really?”
“We can talk about it,” he says. “We’ve got all night.”
