Susie, 18+ (probably older than you think), Female from Brisbane Australia.
I used to mostly write Bucky Barnes, and I still do mostly, but I've branched out into other fandoms and, even a real person fic or two smattered in there - I'm sure you'll know if you scroll further down.
I haven't really written smut, the ones I have written I am too scared to post but that may change. My "Private Life" Masterlist has a couple of short fics I've written so maybe I can go a bit further.
Anyway, welcome and if you have any suggestions or requests, please let me know and I'll try my best for you.
Masterlist and Page headers by @wildflowersandvibranium and me
Angst = 💔; Fluff = 💖; Smut = 🔥
Bucky Barnes Masterlist - Mostly Bucky Barnes fics but may contain other Sebastian Stan characters
Steve Rogers Masterlist - Mostly Steve Rogers fics but may contain other Chris Evans characters
The Pitt Masterlist - Dr Robby & Jack Abbott
Spencer Reid Masterlist - Mostly Spencer Reid but may contain other Criminal Minds characters
QB Joe Burrow
Private Life Masterlist - 18+ only - This is separate so that people who don't want this kind of story won't "stumble" across them. MDNI
Meet Cute Masterlist - a list for some new shorter stories (mostly under 1k) based around meet cute ideas. Mostly will be Bucky but I'm open to suggestions for characters and situations..
Dad!Bucky Shorts Masterlist
Hoes for the Holidays - Snow Joke I love you (Steve Rogers x reader), Midnight made of magic (Andy Barber x reader)
Thinking about Abbot x Ortho surgeon no bullshit reader I KNOOOOW that man has a competency kink. Seeing you come down from the OR ordering everyone around. Yea that gets him hard. Idk I’m just such a sucker for Baddie Careerwoman x some guy
The Natural Predator
summary: brendon park swam through the pitt with beady eyes and a blood lust. however, after he overstepped his territory, he finds out that there's a bigger fish in the water who's more than willing to put him in his place. and jack abbot loves nothing more than to watch his wife take down her prey.
tags: jack abbot x ortho!wife!reader, no large age gap (41/50), jack has a major competence kink, medical inaccuracies (making up some bullshit), way too much ocean imagery used, ED? we don't know her, jack is getting hard in the trauma room (hashtag praise kink), smut (fingering, dry humping, cumming in pants), 18+ NSFW MDNI
notes: thank you @in-ky for this request! this was yummy yummy to write and I hope it's up to your expectations! taglist is at the bottom, enjoy!
word count: 3.9k
The Pitt acted like the sea.
Busy hours and waning slow periods were the waves. Patients, nurses, and doctors walked as though they were fish, constantly swimming through the hoards of schools and catastrophes, not needing to keep their head above water because that's exactly where they thrived. They found purpose in bobbing and floating and flicking their tails to get from one room to another. It had its obstacles, seaweed hoards of poles and monitors and gurneys, but when night came, the Pitt settled into lapping motions instead of crashing roars.
However, the calmer waters meant it was primed for the bigger fish to swim cleanly, jaws chomping at whoever dared to get in their current.
Known to all, the Pitt had a few big fish to worry about. Victoria knew to steer clear of her mother, Dr. Shamsi, and her biting words. When Garcia got called down, Dennis turned heel and hid in triage (safety in numbers). Even Robby, the very top of the pecking order in the emergency department, vanished when he caught the hint of Gloria coming down the elevator.
Yet, like all oceans, some fish weren't lucky enough to swim away fast enough. In all instances, everyone never wanted to get caught by the PTMC's very own great white: Brendon Park.
"Look alive, Santos, we got an incoming," Jack stated as he passed the sleepy-looking R2, fresh from pulling the first half of her second night rotation.
Trinity blinked wearily before pushing up from the table. She'd been seated during a lull in waves that seemed to always happen between the hours of 1 and 3 am. Jack had warned that things got weird after the sun went down, but most she'd seen was a puking toddler and a man who came in complaining of sleep issues.
"What do we have?" she asked after finding a place next to the older attending. "And please tell me it's interesting, cause so far I haven't seen the weirdest or wildest cases come through. I'd hate to see that your little pep talk is full of errors."
Jack barked out a laugh. "Trust me; it only gets weirder from here."
"Don't jinx us, please," Ellis joined in, stopping on Jack's unoccupied side.
"Those don't exist!" Shen called out as he rounded a corner before disappearing back into a room.
Trinity's jaw popped as she yawned. "I need something fast paced or I'm going to fall asleep standing up."
"We can always have you organize the third storage room. I don't think it's been redone since I started here," Jack mentioned.
"So, like, way back in the medieval era?"
Parker raised her eyebrows and smirked at the brunette. "Ooo-hoo-hoo, Abbot you set yourself up for that one."
Jack rolled his eyes. "Try the third dynasty. Pretty sure I saw a rat go in there once and it never left."
"I'll take standing up, thank you."
"Incoming trauma goes straight into room 1," Lena announced.
The sliding doors to the ambulance bay brought a gust of cool wind before offering a patient and two paramedics to the small group of doctors. On the gurney laid a man in his thirties whose face had gone ashen, eyes not even visible.
"We got a thirty-two-year old male. Partial traumatic amputation, left lower extremity at the mid femur. Clean cut considering he was run over by roadside milling equipment approximately twenty-two minutes ago. Significant blood loss on scene," one of the paramedics said once they got within ear range. "Detached extremity is here. Packaged separately and wrapped in saline gauze, double bagged, transported on ice but not in direct contact."
Trinity noted the bag that sat near the patient's remaining foot. It reminded her of one of those goldfish bags you got for winning a fair game.
Jack stepped forward and grabbed the side of the gurney, helping roll the man straight into Trauma Room 1. Behind him, he heard the normal sounds of gloves snapping on before both Trinity and Parker joined him.
"On my count," he ordered. "One, two, three—" He grunted under the weight of the man as they slid him over onto the bed.
"The tourniquet was applied high and tight to the left thigh around 7 minutes after the accent. One CAT failed, second CAT secured on the way over. Hemorrhage controlled after the second application," the second paramedic stated while he began to wheel the gurney away.
Jack looked over the man. "What's his pressure?"
"Last manual was eighty-four over fifty. Heart rate one-forty-eight. Respiratory thirty-two. Sp-Oxygen ninety-four percent on fifteen liters non-rebreather. GCS fourteen. Lost consciousness on the way over."
"Fluids?"
"Minimal crystalloids. Two-fifty LR. We started whole blood—one unit in progress. One gram TXA given over ten minutes."
Jack smiled and nodded. "Excellent."
Trinity leaned over the man with her stethoscope already off and bell pressing into his chest. "Airway's intact. Breath sounds equal bilaterally."
"Femoral pulse right side weak," Parker called out, two fingers pressed into the man's right upper thigh before moving up to his wrist. "Radial's thready."
"Pressure's seventy-eight over forty-six," Mateo called out near the head of the bed.
"He's hemorrhagic until proven otherwise," Jack breathed, hands moving to gently pull back what was left of the man's pant legs. "Let's cut the tourniquet down enough for me to visualize."
"Dr. Abbot, you think they'd just cauterize the leg back in your day?" Trinity bit with a smirk.
"Nah," he argued, "they'd just wrap it and pray infection didn't set in before harvest."
Parker snipped slowly at the tourniquet, and blood instantly welled through the mess of flesh and bone.
"Back up and tighten it," Jack said, halting Parker from going any further. "That's arterial, and can someone page ortho? This looks like it'd be right up their alley."
"Please tell me Park's not on shift tonight," Trinity muttered, already walking over to the red phone mounted on the wall.
"Well, if you hear the Jaws theme song when they put you on hold, you'll know."
While Trinity talked with upstairs, Jack and Parker did their best to pack the stump as much as possible, combat gauze soaking up red as fast as they put it on.
It couldn't have been more than five minutes later when the hiss of the trauma room's doors filled the air, the automatic sensor holding long enough for whoever to slip through. Jack's heart beat wildly as he held the gauze, trying not to think about his own experience of being on the receiving end of the painful pressure.
"What do you have for me, Abbot?"
If the room could have groaned, it would have caused ripples by the sheer sound, because, of course, Brendon Park just had to be the one to swim through. Trinity glanced up at him, eyes tracking the way he immediately hovered over their work like a shark coasting around its prey.
"Partial traumatic amputation to his left leg. Whatever machine he got under cut clean through his femur. Leg was bagged on site, and blood flow is slightly waning under the gauze and consistent pressure."
Park didn't seem all that impressed, and his eye brow raised when he spotted the fair-fish bag full of amputated leg sitting on a tray to the side. He narrow eyed the way Jack's hands almost wrapped completely around the stump, gloves speckled with blood that managed to seep through.
"You're going to damage the vessels if you hold on that hard," he muttered. "Thought you attendings knew better."
Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes. "The pressure is what's keeping this man from bleeding out. But by all means, I can lighten up if you want to play Legos and 'click the leg back in place' on a dead body."
"You're the ones who paged me," he bit, teeth chomping around the word. "Unfortunately we can't all be surgeons, or maybe this ER would know how to perfectly pack a partial traumatic amputation."
"Now, now, let's play nice, Park," a new voice joined over the hiss of the trauma doors. "Without the ER, we wouldn't be standing here now would we?"
Now, Jack's heart beat wildly for a different reason. In a small glance, his eyes settled on the familiar figure of the Pitt's stand-in night shift Orthopedic Surgeon when Walsh had the shift off.
"Oh, boy," Parker whispered beside him. She nudged Trinity slightly, body twisting so she could be near the R2's ear. "You asked for wild, and, well, it's about to get wild."
Trinity barely processed her words as she fixated on the woman who just walked in. She couldn't note how put together she looked with her hair tucked neatly, gray roots peaking through a very expensive looking hair dye. Her white coat was crisp, and Trinity could only guess that it had been tailored with the way it hugged perfectly at her shoulders and waist. If she let herself, Trinity would be drooling, yet, the glimmer of a pair of rings that could probably pay off her entire student debt held her back from sputtering out some illy planned pick-up line.
"Nice of you to join us," Park gritted out, clearly not happy with the new addition. "But I had this handled.
You hummed lowly while you looked over the leg yourself and the hands around it. "Sure you did if by having it handled you meant berating Dr. Abbot and his more than capable team."
"His pressure is way off, and if he keeps it up, the leg isn't going to be able to attach back perfectl—"
"Aht, aht, aht," you tutted like talking to a child. "You're done talking, because obviously you can't tell the right amount of pressure from the wrong."
You stepped closer to the bed and leaned over the railing, never hovering but making sure your presence was noted.
"If you'd taken a breath and took the chance to actually look at the patient instead of wondering if he could be another gold start to your chart," you stated calmly, "you'd find that Dr. Abbot is currently keeping the femoral artery at around—" You leaned in closer to see just how tightly Jack's fingers held the gauze in place. "—250 to 300 mmHgs of the standard pressure needed."
Jack had to keep himself from blushing under your praise and keep concentrating on, just as you said, the needed standard pressure. He guessed that Park would back off, however, the bigger man wasn't one to ever give up the last word.
"No offense—"
"None taken," you slyly interrupted.
Park huffed, visibly irritated the more he stood there. "But clearly, they should have paged me the moment this man was wheeled in instead of trying to play hero and cut off the bleeding." He crossed his arms and puffed his chest. "They're not surgeons; they're—"
You held up a hand. "I'll stop you right there, Brendon. Yes, they might not have the specialty experience we both have, but they are more than equipped and competent to handle a partial traumatic amputation." Your lip crinkled in a small sneer. "Dr. Abbot is also more knowledgeable about this type of injury than the both of us, or do I have to remind you that he's lived through something like this."
Elation bloomed in the pit of your stomach as you watched Park swallow thickly, but you were far from done.
"And, as someone who volunteers as a S.W.A.T medic after spending countless hours down here, Dr. Abbot has undergone thousands of hours of medical, tactical, and physical training. His muscles are earned through hard work, unlike the ones you like to boast on your Instagram after doing a few sit ups and curls to increase the blood flow of your arms that are more for aesthetics than actual strength."
Jack was hard.
He was so incredibly hard, cock already pushing against the front of his scrub pants. He just prayed that Parker and Trinity would continue looking at you with stars in their eyes and not down at his . . . predicament.
Without moving, you held out your hand, palm up towards the ceiling. "Can someone hand me the case tablet? I'm taking over this, and I will personally be scrubbing in myself."
Park blanched at that, body finally squirming under your unwavering eyes. "You can't—"
"I can't . . . what, exactly? Take over a case while I am currently your superior as the chief orthopedic attending on call?" you shot back while your fingers curled around the tablet Mateo handed over. "Because that's exactly what I'm doing." You glanced down at the screen before looking back up into Park's dark, blue eyes. “You're more than welcome to observe, Dr. Park, but please, never insult me or any of PTMC's doctors ever again, or I will make sure that you're stuck wrapping soft tissue sprains for months."
You turned around with a smile on your face, demeanor completely the opposite of what you'd just shown. "Thank you three for making sure this man didn't bleed out on the spot. We'll prep an operating theater and get him transferred up shortly. Best of luck for the rest of the night."
Your steps were light as you walked away, however you couldn't help but let out an Hoo-Ahh! over your shoulder.
Jack watched in deep satisfaction that Park didn't even attempt to say anything else, choosing to walk away while he still held the ability to operate in the future. The mechanical doors hissed and closed off the room from the rest of the Pitt.
Only the monitors kept beeping continually, filling the otherwise silent room. Jack tilted his head down and closed his eyes while he took a deep breath.
After a moment, Trinity was the first to speak. "Who the fuck was that? I think my world's been rocked."
Jack looked back up, hazel eyes trained in the direction that you disappeared off into. He swallowed the pooling saliva down in one gulp before answering. "My wife."
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
The surgical cap tied tightly around your forehead itched, hair underneath poking and being pulled an at odd angle as a result of your haste to put it on. Park had overstepped, and you needed to show him that he wasn't the biggest fish in the Pitt's ocean, because that title belonged to you.
Jack would probably laugh at it all later due to your enjoyment of underwater documentaries and fascination with orcas, especially with how they hunted and preyed upon sharks. You'd seen the way he had tried to not look at you for very long down in the trauma room. The thought of him being embarrassed quickly passed through your mind before you shook your head.
He was never one to be ashamed of being your husband, often boasting at the fact that he put a ring on your finger before anyone else could. He loved you fierce and hard but also soft and sweet, so him looking away had to be because he was focused on making sure the man didn't bleed out before you could get his leg put back together with ease.
The hall to the surgical room was empty as you stripped from your gown and gloves and pushed them down into the nearest hazard bin. Your footsteps echoed while you walked toward the elevator, wanting to go back down and at least give Parker and Dr. Santos the good news. However, the moment you passed by one of the empty recovery rooms, a hand reached out, grabbed hold of your arm and tugged you in.
"What the fuck!" you shouted, voice coming out in a screech.
To your right, the door shut, and the motion-sensor lights flickered on, revealing the person who had yanked you. You sighed in relief.
"Hi," Jack whispered, pinning you to the wall, chest pressed against yours.
"Jack, what the hell are you doing up here?" you hissed. "I always come down to give you the update."
He said nothing and tucked his face into your neck. His lips lightly grazed your pulse point before his tongue peeked out and ran hotly along your jaw. Your hands instantly flew up and sunk deep into his greying curls.
"Jack?" you questioned again. "Wha-what are you doing?"
"Just loving on my wife," he muttered, teeth now gently nipping at your skin. "Can't a husband do that?"
You barked out a laugh that quickly turned into a moan as he sucked harshly. "I mean, he can. But normally he doesn't until after we get home."
Jack's neediness sent questions washing through your body as he slotted his thick thigh between your legs. Another moan punched out at the feeling, your scrub material bunching in delicious pressure against your heat.
"Jack," you breathily sighed. "Baby, we have work; we can wait and pick this up later."
"Can't," he bit, lips and teeth still attacking whatever inch of your neck he could reach. "Can't wait. Been hard since you left."
"Since I left?" you echoed, mind spinning until it clicked. "Wait, Jack—"
He hummed in an answer.
"Don't tell me you got hard because I told off Park in the ER."
Jack stilled against you and sighed heavily. "Is it really surprising that I'm turned on because my incredibly hot wife knocked asshole Park the Shark down a couple of pegs while simultaneously singing my praises?"
He pulled back enough that your eyes met his, the hazel hues already swimming with heat. Internally, you battled the pros and cons of having letting Jack continue, but obviously the pros definitely outweighed the cons, and he noticed the moment all fight drained out of you.
"Fine," you gave in, "but you need to hurry before either you or I get paged, and you're left with blue balls for another four hours."
"Hurry is my middle name," he quipped, facing going back in to mauling your neck.
You rolled your eyes. "No it's Waynefucking jeez.," the comeback dying into a moan half-way up your throat.
Jack's right hand rested against the length of your throat while his left danced along the waistline of your pants, fingers teasingly dipping below and toying with the hem of your underwear. He drew another gasp from your lips when he pushed his thigh up higher, the muscle nesting against your core. Taking your open mouth to his advantage, his hot, slick tongue dipped deep between your teeth and licked around. His chest rumbled in a moan at the taste of you.
While he kept your mouth distracted, his hand went further down your underwear, knuckles brushing against your navel until his fingertips found exactly what they were looking for. He couldn't help but groan at the feeling of your wet, sticky arousal already pooling between your folds.
"You're already so fucking wet. How long have you been like this, sweetheart?" he panted after pulling back. "Did you like putting big ole Park in his place while your husband watched? Cause I enjoyed every minute of it."
To show his enjoyment, Jack thrusted up against your stomach, his hardness evident through his own pants. Your eyes widened at the size of his bulge, cunt clenching with the thought of him putting it right into you. You whimpered loudly into the air, head tilted back to rest against the wall.
His pointer finger circled around your throbbing clit in soft, minuscule motions and drew pleasured breaths from your lungs. When you started rocking back and forth, he reached a bit lower before sinking two fingers into your sopping, fluttering hole. The thick and sudden intrusion had you whining.
"Jack! Ooh-ohh-oooohhh," you sputtered as the tips of both fingers found your sweet spot with experience swiftness. Stars dotted your vision, and your stomach and thighs tightened. "Feels good shiittt."
"Yeah?" Jack asked as his hips continued thrusting up into your center, the band in his gut drawing tighter. He could practically feel the clenching of your cunt around his throbbing length when you tightened around his fingers. "You close, sweetheart?"
You nodded. "C-close. So, so, so, so close; you're gonna make me cum."
Your words had Jack whimpering against your neck, eyes pinching closed to not blow his load prematurely. He needed to make you cum before even thinking of letting go himself.
He withdrew his hand in order to push your scrubs and underwear down, giving him more room to thrust his fingers upward while thumbing at your clit. Without the extra layer, your slick arousal dripped down his hand and spotted his dark scrubs.
"There we goooo," he drew out, words raspy between his gasps. "Soaking my hand and my pants, sweetheart."
You were getting close, and your hips canted harder to meet his fingers. Your inner thighs clenched around his hand, and a high-pitched whine squeezed between your teeth.
"I'm gonna cum!" you keened. "Gonna-gonna-shitfuckfuckfuckfuck! Jack!"
Your stomach flipped as your walls clamped down tightly around Jack's fingers. To draw out your high, he continued to circle your bundle of nerves and shallowly push in his fingers. He, however, didn't stop grinding against you, and while you were focused on feeling every hot dip of pleasure from climax, Jack grunted twice before his hips stilled and his cum spilled from his leaking tip into his boxers, soaking though to stain his scrubs.
You sighed dreamily and held Jack's wrist to stop his motions, your core becoming too sensitive for him to continue. Your chest heaved against Jack's, and he leaned back into languidly kiss at your mouth.
"Never," you managed to get out between kisses. "Never thought my husband would have a competency kink. Learn something new every day."
"Like I said: it was hot," he said.
You smirked when he finally met his eyes. "Hot enough to make you cum in your pants, I guess. What are your doctors going to think when you go back down in different color scrubs than you had on before?"
Jack laughed loudly. "I think Trinity will be too distracted because you are definitely her type, and it won't be the worst thing Ellis has ever seen."
Heat flooded your cheeks at the remembering of the one time Parker caught you and Jack actually fucking in an on call room. She teased the two of you for months after you promised to help her out with getting a shot at a surgical fellowship.
Once your pants were back in place, you smooshed close back into Jack's chest, cheek squished against his pec while his hands rubbed up and down your back in slow motions. Aftercare in a recovery room could never be the same as snuggles in bed, but Jack would be damned if he let you go without a little post-coital hugging and kissing.
You had just gotten his lips back on yours when the pager at his side buzzed to life. He pulled back with a groan.
"Duty calls."
"Duty always has the worst timing," you grumbled. "See you in four hours and then round two at home?"
Jack smirked and tapped the side of your ass. "Maybe I'll make sure Park comes back down so you can yell at him again."
You snorted, hand coming up to slap at your nose. "Your foreplay preferences are so weird. Maybe I should yell at you. I think you'd like that, Dr. Abbot."
With that, you slipped out the door and back into the empty hallway, leaving Jack in yet another blushy mess and length twitching at the thought of you talking down at him like you did for Park.
Dr. Jack Abbot x (female) reader | Dr. Jack Abbot x you
Summary: Jack doesn't forget. And he doesn't let things slide.
(AKA Jack channels his inner Pope lol)
A/N: I'm no longer updating the taglist because Tumblr has been glitching way too much lately. If you don't want to miss any updates, feel free to turn on notifications for my posts! <3
Link to "You stole my cart" master list (1)
Link to "You stole my cart" master list (2)
Previous chapter: Interlude: Did anyone fucking ask?
--- --- ---
A week later Jack found himself back in the Pitt. Just another night shift, nothing special about it. Lizzie was feeling much better now, still on antibiotics and still on a tight leash - and refusing to sleep in her own bed again. Jack hadn’t complained about it because he was just too happy that his baby girl was recovering so nicely.
He just finished handover with Dr. Al-Hashimi when Dana glanced over to him. “MVC, ETA in 2 minutes.”
Baran looked over to Jack. “I can stay if you want to.”
“Nah.” He waved her off. “But it could be a good teaching case for a student or an intern if anyone is interested?”
A student stepped forward, already reaching for gloves. “I’d be happy to assist, Dr. Abbot.”
Jack looked up. It was student doctor Morrigan. He narrowed his eyes slightly. “You’re observing today.”
“But Sir, I-”
“I don’t need a running commentary on this patient’s appearance tonight and I heard that’s where you shine. “He glanced toward the other people standing there, staring at him.”Nazely, Whitaker - you up for that?”
Dennis stared at him, then nodded quickly. “Yeah, sure. I’m happy to stay and help out.”
Nazely glanced at Morrigan then snapped on gloves. “Okay.”
“Kim, you free?” Jack called toward the nurse.
She nodded. “Sure. I’ll be right there.”
“Great. Good team.”
The trauma bay doors burst open and medics rolled the gurney in. As soon as they spotted Jack they started handover. “Twenty-two-year-old male, MVC, restrained driver, hypotensive en route.”
“Trauma One is open. Come on, let’s move, guys.” Jack was already moving, voice calm and sharp while he listened to the rest of the rapport. “Okay, transfer on my count. Nazely you’re on the head. One, two - three.”
The team shifted the patient onto the trauma bed and got to work. Clothes were cut off, blood pressure cuff, EKG leads, another peripheral line.
“BP?”
“Eighty over forty.”
“Pulse?”
“One hundred twenty-one.”
“Okay, let’s get blood ready - two units of uncrossmatched O-neg in here now, two more on standby. Two large-bore lines. FAST exam.”
Jack glanced around. The med student stood against the wall, gloves on despite only being there to observe, looking at Jack with hopeful eyes. Jack’s gaze drifted to Nazely.
“Nazely, you’re on the FAST exam.”
She nodded and stepped closer.
Kim was busy drawing blood but glanced up nevertheless. “Observation is also part of medical education, you know?” she said with a smile that looked friendly but wasn’t.
Morrigan blushed and pulled the gloves off slowly.
When the patient was stable and wheeled off to the OR the trauma bay emptied. Whitaker clocked off and the others scrambled into different rooms or went to finish their charting. Jack walked over to the nurses’ station to take a sip of his coffee when he noticed Morrigan lingering nearby, despite his shift having officially ended an hour ago.
Jack fought a moment with himself, then took a deep breath. “Hey, Morrigan.”
The med student looked up, getting pale. “Um - yes, Dr. Abbot?”
“Walk with me, would you?”
They moved a little down the hallway, away from the busy desk. Then Jack turned around to face him. Morrigan looked actually miserable. “Dr. Abbot, I-”
Jack raised a hand slightly. “Let me start.”
Silence stretched between them. The med student shifted uncomfortably but didn’t dare to speak again.
“Do you have any idea why I didn’t want you to assist me on that case?”
He swallowed hard. “Because… I acted unprofessional with your wife.” The answer came with no hesitation.
Jack nodded slowly. “Yeah. Well, that was the starting position.”
He blinked. “Um. Okay?”
“And then I started to ask people about you. People working here. I didn’t go and sniff around your personal life, no worry.” Jack let out a short laugh that should probably be comforting but only led to Morrigan to break out in cold sweat. “And everyone says the same about you.”
Jack paused very deliberately here. “You’re good in what you do. You know stuff. You learn fast. And that’s good.” A small nod. “But as a human being? Your colleagues seem to think you’re arrogant, dismissive and snarky. On top of that you’re incredibly unfunny as you demonstrated when you tried to joke about my wife.”
Morrigan looked like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole. “About that-”
“No.” Jack shook his head. “We’re way past apologizing. And I guess that’s what you wanted to do here. Just don’t, okay? Don’t try to bullshit a bullshitter, kid.” He watched him for a moment. “Don’t you think I’ve been twenty-three once? Being the world’s most arrogant, cocky asshole who thought being good at placing central lines makes him the king of the god damn hospital?” He let out a humorless laugh. “Of course I was. I was unbearable.”
The med student looked up, his eyebrow furrowed.
“But there’s one thing I never did - I never, ever humiliated another human being just for a laugh. Or put someone down to make myself feel better. Nope, never done that.”
Morrigan blushed again.
“If you can’t put yourself in someone else’s shoes… if you clearly don’t see what was so uncalled for about your comment… you’re going to have a very short career in this profession. And even a shorter one in this hospital. Because knowledge can be taught. I guess I could train a monkey to place a central line.” He shrugged. “But character is harder. And that’s where you should keep your focus for the foreseeable future.”
The med student nodded quickly. “Understood.”
Jack stared at him for another moment, then - “Good.” He nodded and looked back down the hallway. “And if I hear you talking about my wife one more time” he added with a smile. “I won’t be so forgiving. You know I’ve been in the military, yeah? Just as a friendly reminder to never ever fuck with my family.”
Jack kept smiling. “Now get out of here. You’ve had a long shift and I guess you need new underwear by now.”
The student moved immediately. Jack watched him go, then turned back toward the department.
--- --- ---
You wanna keep reading? - Next part is coming soon, I promise.
Summary: While Jake takes the Twins fishing, you and Ransom are set to learn to make homemade dog treats.
Warnings: Anxiety, Depression, Parental stress. Please let me know if I missed any!
Word Count: ~1.2k
A/N: Reader is female. No other physical descriptors used.
Previous--Next
Series Masterlist; Tech Tuesdays Masterlist
"And you're sure you're okay with us going fishing without you?" Jake asks for the fifth time that morning.
"Yes, I am," you reassure. "Fishing has never been my thing. Not to mention it's good for the Twins to get some time with just you! And if you're worried about me getting bored, Ransom is stopping by later today for some more baking lessons."
"I just know you've been--"
"I keep telling you Jake," you interrupt. "I just need to come to terms with the Twins growing up. That's all this is. It's not quite empty next syndrome, but it's one of those things you can't really do anything about."
"I'd suggest another baby, but I'll need another raise first," Jake blushes making you giggle.
"Agreed! Especially if it's another set of twins!"
"Careful, Sunshine, you might get me going for a soccer team," Jake half teases, giving you a look that you know means he would absolutely drop everything and take you into the bedroom.
"Tease," you smirk as you get back to packing up the snacks for their trip.
Jake watches you for a minute, eyes full of love and concern.
Thinking it had just been him being overly worried about you, Jake had approached the other members of the D&D group to ask them if they'd been seeing what he had. The G's, ever more insightful about people than they seem, had scolded Jake for taking so long to notice. Ransom confessed he'd wondered but had nothing beyond a inkling that there was something wrong.
It's part of the reason Ransom is visiting while Jake and the kids are out. Every time Jake brings it up, you brush off his concerns as him being overly worried. If Jake and the kids were around when someone else brings it up, you might push that you don't want to talk about it in front of the kids.
Before they head out, you give the Twins big hugs and playful kisses, wishing them the best in their catches. With Jake, you give him a deep kiss, full of promise, "so long as you don't smell like fish when you get back."
"Thanks, again, for being willing to learn with me," Ransom says as he puts on his apron. "Biscoff's training is going great, but with how food motivated it is, I gotta make sure he's not going to get overweight from all the treats."
"Not a problem!" you quickly reassure. "It'll be fun to do something different!"
There's a small whine from the living room and Ransom leans his head out of the kitchen. "Sorry buddy, but the kids aren't here right now."
"He really does love being around humans as energetic as him, huh?"
"It's what corgis were bred for, apparently," Ransom sighs. "If I'd known I might never have adopted the energetic furball."
You give Ransom a knowing look. "Yes you would've."
Ransom blushes a little as he smiles softly. "Yeah, yeah I would've. He's a supernova of energy but he definitely makes time at home a lot less painfully quiet."
"Oh?" you encourage him to continue as you start setting out ingredients.
"Yeah. When I first cut ties with the family I thought I'd enjoy the silence. Thought I'd finally be able to relax knowing no one could storm in or 'just drop by' for an argument." Your breath hitches but he doesn't seem to notice. "But the quiet was its own anxiety inducing monster. My nervous system couldn't settle. I'd been on alert for so long, I couldn't relax. I was tempted to move to an apartment with noisier neighbors because at least then I knew what to do, what to expect."
"I...I know what you mean," you reply shakily, trying to keep your emotions under control. "Over four years of chaos and noise, of being on alert for sounds of distress, or noticing when it was 'too quiet'. The Twins go to pre-school and, even though it was only half days, I would spend so much of it just sitting and waiting. It's like my life was put on hold for those few hours of the day."
"When you're so used to chaos, the quiet is more disorienting to the nervous system than anything else," Ransom nods. "Had a couple, very casual, talks with Syverson about that. He was worried how often I agreed to work the holiday hours. It was just...it wasn't great, because the office on the holidays is still quiet, but..."
"But it gave you something else to focus on. You could be productive and distract yourself."
"Exactly! I was no longer waiting for the angry yelling, the snide comments, the tantrums that I logically knew were never going to actually happen."
Your hands start shaking and a tear falls as you realize Ransom's talking so casually about something you've struggled to admit to yourself.
"Hey, are you okay?"
"I don't want to be a bad mother," you rasp. "I love my babies, but that means I have to respect their independence, accept that time away from home is good for them. But I can't...I can't..function when I'm not also keeping an ear out for them."
"White noise, TV, radio, they never work, do they?"
You shake your head. "It's not the same. There's a level of disconnect. It's not real. It's not immediate."
"Have you talked to Jake about it?"
"I...I'm scared if I tell him, he'll be disappointed in me," you sob, slowly lowering yourself to the floor. "I love that man so much! He's given me such a wonderful life. I couldn't live with myself if I disappointed him. If he thought I wasn't a good mother for his kids."
"You know he'd never think that," Ransom gently chides, wrapping an arm around your shoulders.
"Logically, yes, of course I do."
"But logic and anxiety rarely work together," Ransom nods in understanding.
As you cry, you feel a gentle push at your leg. Looking down you see Biscoff with one of the Twins' plushies in his mouth and he offers it to you.
"You know he learned that from your kids," Ransom observes. "And any mom who raises such good, loving, happy kids, can't be a bad mom."
Gently taking the plushie from Biscoff, you smile and pet him in thanks.
"Did Jake set you up to do this?" you ask between sobs.
"Sort of," he admits with a shrug. "Jake was asking for help and I volunteered. Though I wasn't lying when I said I wanted to try making some treats for Biscoff. Dog treats can get expensive and he definitely has a preference for the high quality stuff."
"Sounds like his dad," you joke. "Hope he doesn't mind taste testing the recipes, letting us know which ones are his favorites."
"He will never pass up the chance to eat something, food or otherwise," Ransom rolls his eyes. "But before we get into the baking, please promise me you'll talk to Jake? Or a therapist? Or someone?"
"I promise, Ransom. Thank you for being such a good little brother." Ransom's eyes widen in surprise. "The twins call you 'Unca' all the time and while you work with Jake, your downtime is more likely to be spent talking to me about recipes. As such, I won the role of your adopting older sibling."
Ransom's eyes tear up and you hand him the plushie Biscoff got for you.
Summary: You thought you were being a good wife, bringing food for your husband since he was working a double. What you didn't expect was seeing him all over his young resident in the break room once you got there.
Warnings: SHORT ONESHOT, insecure!reader, Injury, smut implied if you squint, HEAVY Angst (no happy ending), reader throws up, infidelity/cheating (CHEATING IS NOT OKAY), OOC Jack, OOC Samira Mohan (shes my bby but shes evil here), pathetic!jack, second wife!Reader, SAHW!reader, petnames, AGE GAP (reader is in late 20’s and Jack is in late 40’s), PTMC crew kinda shows up
WC:1k
a/n:first of all FUCK AI, but yall idk what came over me, bby i was feeling emotional last night and was feeling lana so i decided to write this based off her song “The other woman”. I had just published my first fic and immediately started on this. IDK i love my angst but was this too much? lmk how yall feel about it tho hope you enjoy :D
You knew everyone that Jack was close with at the hospital, inviting them over for holidays, parties, and any special occasions. You took care of them because it was the least you could do, especially when they were out saving lives while you stayed at home waiting for your husband to come back.
You didn't think your life would end up this way, not that you hated it, it was amazing compared to how you lived before. You were pampered, and Jack made sure of it, but it did eat away at you a little bit when you saw the women he worked with.
They were all absolute powerhouses, and you looked up to them. It's not that you wanted to become a doctor or a nurse, but it's the independence and power you craved. You wanted to be able to walk into a room and command, but you were here instead, lounging on a pool chair, relaxing while your husband worked a double, saving lives.
These thoughts would run through your head a lot, making you question yourself, but today was the day you wanted to do something about it. So you got up, changed out of your bikini, and started preparing a meal to feed most of the PTMC workers. You had done it plenty of times before for the parties you and Jack threw, so this was honestly no trouble for you. You wanted to help and do something good.
That's how you got here, standing in the break room with your heart broken in two. You had walked in from the waiting room and immediately got bombarded by Dana and Dr.Langdon, they were calling you their lifeline and reaching for the heavy bags you carried, leaving you with empty hands, and letting you lead the way to the break room.
You'd been in the hospital once before when Jack had forgotten his lunch, so you knew where to go. You were the first one there, barging in so you could hold the door for them.
What you didn't expect was being met with the sight of Samira Mohan on the lap of your husband, lips connected, with his hand down her hospital scrubs, and the other in her hair.
As soon as you open the door, they're scurrying, trying to act normal, not realizing who it was that walked in. You hear Dana gasp and a barely audible “Jesus” behind you.
You stand there frozen, tears welling up until you see Jack turn to look at you. A look of surprise on his face quickly turns into guilt and pain. He’s immediately moving towards you, reaching for you, but you stumble back into Dana.
Instead of looking at him, you look at the disheveled woman behind him, heavily breathing with both hands on her mouth, and redness climbing her neck.
You'd invited her into your home, took care of her when her mother was too overbearing, and shared everything you could without a second thought. She was your closest friend since you moved to Pittsburgh to be with Jack.
Everybody in your vicinity was now frozen, waiting for your next move, you cant help but roll your eyes. “How long have you been fucking him?” you manage to spit out, your voice cracking. You see her look over at Jack with pleading eyes, but he does nothing but stand there in shame, now looking down at his shoes. Asshole can’t even look at me.
“How long have you been fucking him!?” you scream, not caring if the entire hospital hears, and that makes them both flinch in return. She finally gathers the courage to speak and opens her mouth to speak. “Since the Pitt Fest shooting…” she squeaks out quietly, and you finally let your tears fall, loud sobs coming out of your mouth as you turn to leave.
Pushing past Langdon and Dana, you ignore their calls as you notice all the eyes on you. Not being able to take it, you sprint out, your thoughts moving at 100mph.
Pitt fest? He came home to you that night, sobbing in your chest as you comforted him. Rocking him back and forth on the floor by the front door, whispering reassurances and your love for him in his ear. Now you know why he was crying, and fuck does it have you bending over a bush by the parking lot, your lunch from earlier coming back up.
You feel a hand rubbing your back, and it sends chills up your back when you recognize whose hand it is. “Get away from me, Jack.” Your voice is unrecognizable.
You wipe your face and turn to look at him. “Baby, I’m so sorry, I promise it meant nothing. S-She was just there after Pitt Fest and-” You slap him, cutting him off. “And I wasn't? God, you're so pathetic, Jack. I wonder, how many times d’you fuck her when she was over? I’d wake up to an empty bed sometimes but never thought anything of it, but now, now I understand.”
You start walking away not wanting to hear anything else from him, when he stops you by grabbing onto your thighs, and dropping to his knees. “Please, I'm begging you, you're it for me, sweetheart.” You scoff, what a piece of shit.
You feel your insecurities eat at you. “Is it because I'm at home all day? Am I not smart enough for you? Or am I not pretty enough? Why wasn’t i enough, Jack.” Your tears are now falling again, hiccuping while you speak, and you watch his heart shatter. It's a little too late for that.
You don't know why you were asking, because you wouldn't believe a single thing he said, so as he's blabbering about how wrong you are, and how much he loves you, you pry him off and get into your car, locking all the doors instantly.
Jack starts banging on your window as you turn your engine on. You roll your window down, and the begging continues. You yell his name to shut him up, looking directly into his eyes. “I hate you, Jack, I never want to see you again.”
You pull out of the parking lot so fast that you don't notice the ambulance coming in with the sirens on at full speed. The last thing you hear before everything goes black is Jack crying out your name, and you almost laugh at the irony of the situation.
sidenote: honestly i was debating on this or a best friends brother!jack fic so i might do that next. i was also debating a part two to this but im not sure if thats what the people want this shit was so sad😭
Dr. Jack Abbot x (female) reader | Dr. Jack Abbot x you
Summary: Robby gives an impromptu professionalism seminar. (Attendance was not optional.)
A/N: I'm no longer updating the taglist because Tumblr has been glitching way too much lately. If you don't want to miss any updates, feel free to turn on notifications for my posts! <3
Link to "You stole my cart" master list (1)
Link to "You stole my cart" master list (2)
Previous chapter: Part 136: I thought an attendings wife would be hotter
--- --- ---
Robby kept his hand on Morrigan’s shoulder as they walked down the hallway. He didn’t say anything which somehow made it way worse. The med student glanced sideways at him. “Dr. Robinavitch, I-”
“No.”
Morrigan blinked. “Um, excuse me?”
“I didn’t ask you a question yet. So right now, your job is to keep your mouth shut and think very carefully about what you’re going to say when I do ask you something. Okay?”
“... okay.”
Robby guided him outside in the stairwell, in front of the family room that was empty right now. Then he removed his hand from Morrigan’s shoulder and folded his arms.
“Tell me why I escorted you here. Tell me what you did wrong.”
The student swallowed hard, his eyes darting around Robby’s face, looking for the right answer. “I… made an inappropriate comment.”
Robby nodded slowly. “What else?”
“I… I… um I didn’t realize Dr. Abbot could hear me.”
Robby stared at him for a moment, speechless, then closed his eyes. “You think that’s what you did wrong?”
“No. I mean-”
“Because if your takeaway is that you should check whether the husband is standing nearby before commenting on whether you find his wife fuckable enough, then this conversation is going to take significantly longer than I hoped.”
Morrigan crossed his arms, his face reddening instantly. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I guess that was exactly what you meant. I think you just realized how fucking stupid it sounds when somebody says it back to you.”
“Dr. Robinavitch.” His voice was a little firmer now, steadier. “I was joking.”
“No.” Robby held up a hand, shaking his head. “Don’t even try to insult my intelligence, kid. You saw a woman walking through this department and decided to announce that she wasn’t hot enough to be married to an attending. If that was a joke - come on, tell me: what was the punch line? Explain it to me. Maybe I just don’t get your sophisticated humor.”
The student glared at him, his jaw working, but he stayed silent.
“Okay, so you didn’t make a fucking joke. You made an unsolicited assessment of a woman’s body. And even if it had been a joke-” Robby continued. “- it still wouldn’t make it acceptable. Calling something a joke doesn’t magically give you a get-out-of-jail-free-card.”
Morrigan stiffened, uncrossed his arms and nodded once. “Okay. I understand.”
“No, you don’t” Robby replied matter-of-factly. “But maybe you will by the time we’re done.”
“We’re not done?” the student blurted out, immediately seeming to regret it.
Robby tilted his head. “Oh. No. We’re not.” He watched him for a moment, letting him become even more uncomfortable. “You know - you’re doing very well. Your medical knowledge is excellent. You retain information, you recognize patterns quickly and your clinical reasoning is better than that of most students at your level.”
Morrigan started smiling when he heard that. Not a big smile. Small. Barely noticeable. But absolutely smug.
Robby noticed it immediately. “But none of that matters if people can’t trust you.”
His smile fell instantly.
“You think being the smartest person in the room is enough?” Robby asked. “It isn’t. I’ve met plenty of brilliant doctors I wouldn’t let anywhere near a patient within my department.”
Morrigan pursed his lips. “I would never say something like that to a patient.”
“And I should believe you on what ground?” Robby replied, watching him closely. “You just said it in the middle of an emergency department. With no hesitation. Don’t try to make me believe that was the first time.”
Morrigan went quiet.
“I mean - you’re right. She wasn’t a patient. But she was the mother of one. She spent the whole night sitting beside her toddler daughter who came in by ambulance with a fever of a hundred and four and respiratory distress. And you looked at her and the most valuable contribution you could make was that you expected an attendings wife to be hotter.”
“I didn’t know any of that!” Morrigan replied impulsively, crossing his arms again.
“You shouldn’t have to.” Robby ran a hand through his hair. “You shouldn’t need a backstory before deciding to treat a woman with basic respect. It shouldn’t matter whether she spent the night beside a sick child. It shouldn’t matter that she’s Dr. Abbot’s wife. It shouldn’t matter whether she’s my friend. It shouldn’t matter that her little girl is my goddaughter.”
Morrigans eyes widened by that last statement.
“She could’ve been a stranger walking in from the parking lot and your comment still would’ve been inappropriate.”
Morrigan looked up sharply. “I’m sorry.”
Robby tilted his head. “Who are you apologizing to?”
“You.”
“Why?”
“Because… um… it was unprofessional.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t say that unprofessional bullshit to me.”
“No.”
“So, who should you apologize to?”
“... Dr. Abbot?”
“You didn’t insult Dr. Abbot either.”
He hesitated. “I think he might disagree.”
“Probably. But the comment wasn’t about him” Robby continued. “His wife isn’t an extension of him. Might be a new concept for you but that woman is her own person. And you reduced her to whether her appearance met whatever standard you decided an attendings wife should fulfill.”
He nodded briefly. “I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then explain it back to me.”
Morrigan took a deep breath. It apparently cost him a lot not to roll his eyes. “It was disrespectful. And sexist.”
“Go on.”
“And it doesn’t matter that I didn’t know any of her background.”
“What else?”
“And that I thought no one important could hear me.”
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Morrigan groaned. “That came out wrong.”
“You think?”
“It doesn’t matter who heard it. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Um.” He grimaced. “Because she’s a person and not something… for me… to rate.”
“Anything else?”
Morrigan thought for a moment. “Um, and talking about women that way could make my colleagues uncomfortable.”
“And?”
“And… and… and if I act like that around colleagues they have no reason to trust that I won’t think like that around patients.”
“That sums it up.” Robby leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “You wanna be a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“You wanna be a decent human being?”
He shrugged. “Yeah?”
“Then start acting like one.”
Morrigan’s jaw tightened slightly. “With all due respect, Dr. Robinavitch, I made one stupid comment.”
Robby shook his head. “And there it is.”
“What?”
“The part where you minimize it because you don’t like being held accountable.”
“I’m not minimizing it” Morrigan shot back. “I’m just trying to explain to you-”
“And I don’t want to hear your bullshit excuses.” Robby looked at him, a little frustrated himself now. “You’re telling yourself this entire conversation is excessive because you made one stupid comment. Right?”
The med student stayed quiet.
“You’re probably thinking you have excellent evaluations. You know the medicine. Your attendings like you - well, at least they did until now. You’ve never harmed a patient. So why is the head of the department dragging you down here over one sentence? Am I close?”
Morrigan apparently chose not to answer. Instead he stared at the wall behind Robby like he was hypnotized.
“So, here’s the thing, boy: Medicine isn’t only about knowing things. Patients meet us on some of the worst days of their lives. They’re scared. They’re sick. They’re naked. They’re bleeding. They have to trust us with their bodies when they’re at their most vulnerable.” He pushed himself off the wall, stepping closer. “If a woman comes in here - overweight, unwashed, intoxicated, homeless, half-dressed or wearing something you personally find attractive - she gets the same respect. Every time. Not only when somebody important is watching. Or not only when you think she’s attractive enough.”
Robby took a deep breath, trying to lower his voice again. “And if you can’t manage that I don’t care how gifted you are. You have no business becoming a doctor. And you won’t finish your rotation in my department if you keep walking around announcing stuff like that.”
Morrigan looked at him. “You think I shouldn’t become a doctor because of one comment?”
Robby squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “I think you have a choice, kid."
He made sure the student doctor was really listening to him before continuing.
“You can decide I’m an asshole who overreacted and spend the rest of the day feeling sorry for yourself. Or you can accept that somebody finally told you your attitude is a problem before you carried it into residency and became the kind of physician everyone warns female students and nurses about.”
The med student blushed.
“Your choice.”
For a while there was silence. Robby could practically see the wheels turning behind Morrigan’s eyes. Eventually the student took a breath.
“I should apologize to Mrs. Abbot.”
“No.”
“No?” he repeated, confused now.
“She didn’t hear you. And you’re not going to walk into her room while she’s sitting with her sick daughter and repeat an insult she doesn’t know happened so you can feel better about yourself.” Robby shrugged. “Your guilt isn’t her responsibility. You don’t get to hand it to her and ask for forgiveness.”
“... okay.”
“But you will apologize to the students who heard you?”
“Um - what?!”
“You said it in front of them. You made the environment unprofessional in front of them. So you’re going to acknowledge that.”
His face reddened even more while looking down at his shoes. “Um… that’s going to be humiliating.”
“Yeah.” Robby shrugged. “Try to survive.”
Morrigan gritted his teeth. “Anything else, Dr. Robinavitch?”
“Yes.” Robby stepped another step closer. “The next time you look at a woman and feel the overwhelming need to announce whether you find her attractive I want you to ask yourself one question.”
“Um… okay? Which one?”
“Did anyone fucking ask?”
Morrigan swallowed. Hard.
“And if the answer is no try this revolutionary technique.” Robby leaned slightly closer. “Keep it inside your head.”
The med student took a step back and nodded. “Understood.”
“Good.” Robby straightened again. “You know - you’re not beyond fixing. If I thought you were, we’d be having a very different conversation.” He paused for a moment. “Now, go back to work. And if I were you I’d avoid Central seven today. You’re not in Dr. Abbot’s good book today.”
Morrigan nodded and hurried away.
Robby watched him leave and shook his head. “Fucking asshole” he muttered. “Stupid fucking asshole.”
--- --- ---
You wanna keep reading? - Next part is coming soon, I promise.
Dr. Jack Abbot x (female) reader | Dr. Jack Abbot x you
Summary: Robby gives an impromptu professionalism seminar. (Attendance was not optional.)
A/N: I'm no longer updating the taglist because Tumblr has been glitching way too much lately. If you don't want to miss any updates, feel free to turn on notifications for my posts! <3
Link to "You stole my cart" master list (1)
Link to "You stole my cart" master list (2)
Previous chapter: Part 136: I thought an attendings wife would be hotter
--- --- ---
Robby kept his hand on Morrigan’s shoulder as they walked down the hallway. He didn’t say anything which somehow made it way worse. The med student glanced sideways at him. “Dr. Robinavitch, I-”
“No.”
Morrigan blinked. “Um, excuse me?”
“I didn’t ask you a question yet. So right now, your job is to keep your mouth shut and think very carefully about what you’re going to say when I do ask you something. Okay?”
“... okay.”
Robby guided him outside in the stairwell, in front of the family room that was empty right now. Then he removed his hand from Morrigan’s shoulder and folded his arms.
“Tell me why I escorted you here. Tell me what you did wrong.”
The student swallowed hard, his eyes darting around Robby’s face, looking for the right answer. “I… made an inappropriate comment.”
Robby nodded slowly. “What else?”
“I… I… um I didn’t realize Dr. Abbot could hear me.”
Robby stared at him for a moment, speechless, then closed his eyes. “You think that’s what you did wrong?”
“No. I mean-”
“Because if your takeaway is that you should check whether the husband is standing nearby before commenting on whether you find his wife fuckable enough, then this conversation is going to take significantly longer than I hoped.”
Morrigan crossed his arms, his face reddening instantly. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I guess that was exactly what you meant. I think you just realized how fucking stupid it sounds when somebody says it back to you.”
“Dr. Robinavitch.” His voice was a little firmer now, steadier. “I was joking.”
“No.” Robby held up a hand, shaking his head. “Don’t even try to insult my intelligence, kid. You saw a woman walking through this department and decided to announce that she wasn’t hot enough to be married to an attending. If that was a joke - come on, tell me: what was the punch line? Explain it to me. Maybe I just don’t get your sophisticated humor.”
The student glared at him, his jaw working, but he stayed silent.
“Okay, so you didn’t make a fucking joke. You made an unsolicited assessment of a woman’s body. And even if it had been a joke-” Robby continued. “- it still wouldn’t make it acceptable. Calling something a joke doesn’t magically give you a get-out-of-jail-free-card.”
Morrigan stiffened, uncrossed his arms and nodded once. “Okay. I understand.”
“No, you don’t” Robby replied matter-of-factly. “But maybe you will by the time we’re done.”
“We’re not done?” the student blurted out, immediately seeming to regret it.
Robby tilted his head. “Oh. No. We’re not.” He watched him for a moment, letting him become even more uncomfortable. “You know - you’re doing very well. Your medical knowledge is excellent. You retain information, you recognize patterns quickly and your clinical reasoning is better than that of most students at your level.”
Morrigan started smiling when he heard that. Not a big smile. Small. Barely noticeable. But absolutely smug.
Robby noticed it immediately. “But none of that matters if people can’t trust you.”
His smile fell instantly.
“You think being the smartest person in the room is enough?” Robby asked. “It isn’t. I’ve met plenty of brilliant doctors I wouldn’t let anywhere near a patient within my department.”
Morrigan pursed his lips. “I would never say something like that to a patient.”
“And I should believe you on what ground?” Robby replied, watching him closely. “You just said it in the middle of an emergency department. With no hesitation. Don’t try to make me believe that was the first time.”
Morrigan went quiet.
“I mean - you’re right. She wasn’t a patient. But she was the mother of one. She spent the whole night sitting beside her toddler daughter who came in by ambulance with a fever of a hundred and four and respiratory distress. And you looked at her and the most valuable contribution you could make was that you expected an attendings wife to be hotter.”
“I didn’t know any of that!” Morrigan replied impulsively, crossing his arms again.
“You shouldn’t have to.” Robby ran a hand through his hair. “You shouldn’t need a backstory before deciding to treat a woman with basic respect. It shouldn’t matter whether she spent the night beside a sick child. It shouldn’t matter that she’s Dr. Abbot’s wife. It shouldn’t matter whether she’s my friend. It shouldn’t matter that her little girl is my goddaughter.”
Morrigans eyes widened by that last statement.
“She could’ve been a stranger walking in from the parking lot and your comment still would’ve been inappropriate.”
Morrigan looked up sharply. “I’m sorry.”
Robby tilted his head. “Who are you apologizing to?”
“You.”
“Why?”
“Because… um… it was unprofessional.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t say that unprofessional bullshit to me.”
“No.”
“So, who should you apologize to?”
“... Dr. Abbot?”
“You didn’t insult Dr. Abbot either.”
He hesitated. “I think he might disagree.”
“Probably. But the comment wasn’t about him” Robby continued. “His wife isn’t an extension of him. Might be a new concept for you but that woman is her own person. And you reduced her to whether her appearance met whatever standard you decided an attendings wife should fulfill.”
He nodded briefly. “I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then explain it back to me.”
Morrigan took a deep breath. It apparently cost him a lot not to roll his eyes. “It was disrespectful. And sexist.”
“Go on.”
“And it doesn’t matter that I didn’t know any of her background.”
“What else?”
“And that I thought no one important could hear me.”
Robby raised an eyebrow.
Morrigan groaned. “That came out wrong.”
“You think?”
“It doesn’t matter who heard it. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Um.” He grimaced. “Because she’s a person and not something… for me… to rate.”
“Anything else?”
Morrigan thought for a moment. “Um, and talking about women that way could make my colleagues uncomfortable.”
“And?”
“And… and… and if I act like that around colleagues they have no reason to trust that I won’t think like that around patients.”
“That sums it up.” Robby leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “You wanna be a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“You wanna be a decent human being?”
He shrugged. “Yeah?”
“Then start acting like one.”
Morrigan’s jaw tightened slightly. “With all due respect, Dr. Robinavitch, I made one stupid comment.”
Robby shook his head. “And there it is.”
“What?”
“The part where you minimize it because you don’t like being held accountable.”
“I’m not minimizing it” Morrigan shot back. “I’m just trying to explain to you-”
“And I don’t want to hear your bullshit excuses.” Robby looked at him, a little frustrated himself now. “You’re telling yourself this entire conversation is excessive because you made one stupid comment. Right?”
The med student stayed quiet.
“You’re probably thinking you have excellent evaluations. You know the medicine. Your attendings like you - well, at least they did until now. You’ve never harmed a patient. So why is the head of the department dragging you down here over one sentence? Am I close?”
Morrigan apparently chose not to answer. Instead he stared at the wall behind Robby like he was hypnotized.
“So, here’s the thing, boy: Medicine isn’t only about knowing things. Patients meet us on some of the worst days of their lives. They’re scared. They’re sick. They’re naked. They’re bleeding. They have to trust us with their bodies when they’re at their most vulnerable.” He pushed himself off the wall, stepping closer. “If a woman comes in here - overweight, unwashed, intoxicated, homeless, half-dressed or wearing something you personally find attractive - she gets the same respect. Every time. Not only when somebody important is watching. Or not only when you think she’s attractive enough.”
Robby took a deep breath, trying to lower his voice again. “And if you can’t manage that I don’t care how gifted you are. You have no business becoming a doctor. And you won’t finish your rotation in my department if you keep walking around announcing stuff like that.”
Morrigan looked at him. “You think I shouldn’t become a doctor because of one comment?”
Robby squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “I think you have a choice, kid."
He made sure the student doctor was really listening to him before continuing.
“You can decide I’m an asshole who overreacted and spend the rest of the day feeling sorry for yourself. Or you can accept that somebody finally told you your attitude is a problem before you carried it into residency and became the kind of physician everyone warns female students and nurses about.”
The med student blushed.
“Your choice.”
For a while there was silence. Robby could practically see the wheels turning behind Morrigan’s eyes. Eventually the student took a breath.
“I should apologize to Mrs. Abbot.”
“No.”
“No?” he repeated, confused now.
“She didn’t hear you. And you’re not going to walk into her room while she’s sitting with her sick daughter and repeat an insult she doesn’t know happened so you can feel better about yourself.” Robby shrugged. “Your guilt isn’t her responsibility. You don’t get to hand it to her and ask for forgiveness.”
“... okay.”
“But you will apologize to the students who heard you?”
“Um - what?!”
“You said it in front of them. You made the environment unprofessional in front of them. So you’re going to acknowledge that.”
His face reddened even more while looking down at his shoes. “Um… that’s going to be humiliating.”
“Yeah.” Robby shrugged. “Try to survive.”
Morrigan gritted his teeth. “Anything else, Dr. Robinavitch?”
“Yes.” Robby stepped another step closer. “The next time you look at a woman and feel the overwhelming need to announce whether you find her attractive I want you to ask yourself one question.”
“Um… okay? Which one?”
“Did anyone fucking ask?”
Morrigan swallowed. Hard.
“And if the answer is no try this revolutionary technique.” Robby leaned slightly closer. “Keep it inside your head.”
The med student took a step back and nodded. “Understood.”
“Good.” Robby straightened again. “You know - you’re not beyond fixing. If I thought you were, we’d be having a very different conversation.” He paused for a moment. “Now, go back to work. And if I were you I’d avoid Central seven today. You’re not in Dr. Abbot’s good book today.”
Morrigan nodded and hurried away.
Robby watched him leave and shook his head. “Fucking asshole” he muttered. “Stupid fucking asshole.”
--- --- ---
You wanna keep reading? - Next part is coming soon, I promise.
cw: f!reader, pregnant!reader, unspecified age gap, they have a kid
If Jack could go back in time and ask his younger self what his future would look like, he would have never guessed that this is how his life turned out. He was a veteran struggling with his own mind, a widower who missed his wife every day, an amputee, and working one of the most stressful jobs imaginable.
But for all the objective negatives, there were also a ton of positives. He was a home owner, as stressful and awful as his job could be, he did love it and he loved how fulfilling it was. It was where he had met you after all, one of the most surprising yet deeply cherished addition to his life in the last decade. Your night out had unfortunately ended with you joining your friend in the emergency room after a very unlucky catch of her heel in the sidewalk.
You were younger than he was, a lot of people were, but as much as he' tried to dissuade you, and even himself, you were stubborn. You didn't care about his age. You didn't mind his odd working hours and you sure as hell didn't mind how he tried to push you away. You stayed patient, gave him his space when he needed it, and gave him more reassurance than he ever deserved after the useless distance he'd forced between the both of you those first few months of seeing each other.
Five years later and Jack found out there was still plenty of life left to surprise him. You were no longer the woman he was dating with guilt sitting heavy in his stomach, you were his wife. You were the mother of his even bigger unexpected gifts, his kids. A first time dad in the second half of his 40s and soon to be second time dad at 50 years old. Talk about unpredictable life events.
You had waltzed into Jack's life and turned it on its head in the best way possible. For all the bad he'd experienced, you'd shown him that there was still so much good to look forward too — unexpected good, but good nontheless.
Tonight you were waddling across the kitchen, pregnant with your second child, as you worked to assemble dinner for your toddler. He was busy building a castle with his magnet tiles and singing along to Jack's playlist in his seat while Jack walks around the house, gathering his things to head out for his shift.
"Dinner is almost ready, Bub. Ready to set the blocks aside in... five minutes?" You ask the three year old as you slice up his usual serving of berries.
"Five minutes," he nods obediently, eyes focused on carefully placing a triangular tile.
Jack strides into the kitchen, a smile gracing his features at the sight of the toddler at the counter. Jack grabs his lunch bag, one of the many amazing changes you'd made in your time together — making sure he had real food during his shift.
"Alright, I'm off," Jack breathes out, pressing a kiss against his son's temple, "be a good boy for Mama."
"The best boy," the boy nods with a bright smile, leaning in to smack a wet kiss on Jack's scruffy chin.
Jack smiles warmly, ruffling his son's hair before making his way over to you. He presses his lips against your own briefly, "be good, take it easy, get some rest, and do not touch any laundry. I'll handle it tomorrow." He bends at the waist to talk to your bump, hands on either side of your stomach, "be good for your mom."
"Bye, Daddy! I love you!" Your son yells, stacking the magnetic tiles as Jack slings his backpack over his shoulder.
"We love you, babe! Go make—" you're interrupted from your usual farewell by your son.
"Go make that money, honey!"
Jack's eyes widen, his body turning to look at you, but you're looking at him with an identical look of astonishment. "What was that, Bub?" Jack asks with a soft tilt of his head.
"Go make that money, honey!" The boy giggles, eyes alight with pride, "like Mama always says!"
You are hardly doing a good job of holding back your laughter, a hand cupped over your mouth as your shoulders shake while your free hand scoops mac and cheese onto the silicone plate. Jack's face breaks out into an endeared smile of his own, "that's right, Bub. Gotta go make that money for my honeys."
You place the plate in front of your toddler, brushing his unruly curls from his forehead with a gentle hand and a fond smile. You glance up to meet Jack's equally adoring gaze as you lean your cheek against the crown of your son's head, "we love you, Jackie. Be safe."
Jack's heart skips a beat, swallowing down the sudden knot in his throat at the sight in front of him. He nods once, smiling at you lovingly, "thank you. I love you. Both of you."
feedback is appreciated! divider from cursed-carmine <3
Robby pretends he doesn’t care about Valentine’s Day.
That’s how it starts.
He calls it “a corporate scam” three days before. Rolls his eyes when Dana asks what he’s doing for you. Tells everyone at work he’s “not the flowers-and-teddy-bears type.”
And yet.
You wake up on February 14th to the smell of coffee and something sweet.
Your eyes are barely open when you feel the mattress dip beside you.
“Don’t move,” Robby murmurs.
You squint at him. “Why?”
“Because I said so.”
His hair is still damp from the shower, hair darker than usual, and he’s wearing that gray Henley you love. He looks suspiciously put together for someone who allegedly doesn’t care about Valentine’s Day.
You try to sit up anyway.
He gently presses a hand to your shoulder and leans down, brushing his mouth against your forehead. “Stay.”
And then he reaches behind him and brings something forward.
A small bouquet.
Not huge. Not dramatic. But carefully chosen — pink tulips and white roses.
You blink at them. “Robby.”
He shrugs, suddenly shy. “They looked like you.”
“That’s not a real explanation.”
“Yeah, well.” He hands them to you, jaw tight like he’s bracing for impact. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Your chest feels warm and heavy all at once.
“I thought it was a corporate scam.”
“It is,” he says immediately. “But you like scams.”
You laugh, and he visibly relaxes.
Then you notice the tray.
Coffee. Strawberries. A croissant. And a tiny heart-shaped pancake that is very clearly slightly overcooked on one side.
“You made this?” you ask carefully.
“Don’t inspect it.”
You grin. “It’s a little burnt.”
He narrows his eyes. “You’re a little burnt.”
You reach for him, and he lets you pull him down until he’s half hovering over you, half tangled in the sheets. The flowers get squished between you and neither of you care.
“You didn’t have to do this,” you say softly.
His expression shifts.
That teasing edge fades into something quieter.
“I wanted to.”
His thumb brushes along your cheekbone. Slow. Intentional.
“You know,” he continues, voice lower now, “I don’t really need a holiday to love you.”
Your heart stutters.
“But,” he adds, leaning closer, lips brushing the corner of your mouth, “if there’s a designated day to show off that you’re mine? I’m taking it.”
You laugh softly against his mouth.
“Show off?”
“Yeah.” His hand slides to your waist, warm and steady. “You think I don’t notice the way people look at you?”
“Oh my God.”
“I’m serious.”
His tone isn’t jealous — just honest. Possessive in that quiet, grounded way that makes you feel chosen, not claimed.
“I like that you’re with me,” he says. “I like that I get to come home to you. I like that you’re mine.”
Your fingers slide into his hair.
“And I like that you pretend you don’t care about Valentine’s Day.”
He huffs a laugh.
You kiss him first this time.
Slow.
Unhurried.
His hand tightens slightly at your waist, thumb brushing just under your shirt. Not rushing. Just feeling you there.
When you pull back, he rests his forehead against yours.
“I have one more thing,” he says.
“You already did flowers and breakfast. What else is there?”
He smirks.
“Get dressed.”
—
Two hours later, you’re standing outside the little bookstore café where you had your first unofficial date.
You turn to him. “Robby.”
“What?”
“You remember this?”
He scoffs. “I’m not an idiot.”
Inside, there’s a small table by the window. Two coffees already waiting.
And on the chair beside yours?
A tiny wrapped box.
You stare at it. “You’re unbelievable.”
“Open it.”
Inside is a delicate gold bracelet. Simple. Minimal. A small engraved charm.
You turn it over.
My favorite place is wherever you are.
You look up at him, and he suddenly looks very aware of how much he just revealed.
“I know it’s cheesy,” he says quickly. “You can tell me if it’s too much—”
You cut him off by pulling him into you.
He exhales into your hair.
“You’re my favorite place too,” you whisper.
He pulls back just enough to look at you.
“Good,” he says softly. “Because I’m not going anywhere.”
And for a guy who claims Valentine’s Day is a scam…
He holds your hand the entire walk home like you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
Summary: An unexpected visitor leaves the motel room in complete chaos.
Part 13 of the A Good Reason To Keep Going series
Characters: Dr. Michael (Robby) Robinavitch, Jack Abbot (in texts)... and a cat
--- --- ---
Robby crouched down in front of Mr. Abbot, scratching him behind his ears. He started purring instantly, falling onto his sides, exposing his fluffy belly. He closed his eyes and started treading milk against the chair cushion.
Robby chuckled. “Okay, cat, I need to get some food and that diner over the street doesn’t allow pets inside. I know, I know-” he added hastily. “You’re not a pet per se, more like an… emotional support cat but they don’t know the difference, okay?”
Mr. Abbot opened his eyes for a second before closing them again, still purring ridiculously loud.
“So, I go over there, eat something, maybe have a couple of beers and then I’ll be back, okay?”
The cat didn’t care.
“Okay, good. Please don’t commit crimes while I’m gone. I filled your bowl and left the bathroom window open. So, no revenge shitting on my bed.”
Robby stood with a groan, holding his back. “I need to look into nicer accommodations” he muttered to himself. “My back is killing me.”
As soon as these words left his mouth he stopped. Perfect choice of words, Robinavitch. He shook his head, then grabbed the room key and left, while Mr. Abbot blinked at him slowly from the chair.
Two hours later Robby was walking back across the parking leg. He felt good for a change - after a burger with fries, washed down with a couple of beers which gave him a pleasant warm buzz in his chest. He was humming softly to himself while the motel sign flickered overhead. Somewhere nearby he could hear a TV blaring through an open window.
He fumbled with the room key, dropping it two times (and picking up with very creative swear words) when he heard it.
A low, ugly yowl.
Another sound followed - higher this time. Sharp. Angry.
Robby stopped and listened.
There was hissing, then another high-pitched cry.
Cats.
“Oh fuck.”
He started walking faster toward his room. He could hear another hiss cut through the night followed by a loud crashing noise.
“Jesus Christ.”
Robby broke into a jog the last few yards and fumbled with the key for a minute before shoving the motel door open hard enough that it slammed against the wall.
The first thing he saw was chaos. Absolute chaos.
Mr. Abbot was standing on the bed completely puffed up, back arched like one of these silly Halloween decoration, screaming absolute murder at a massive gray tomcat crouched on the dresser.
The fat gray cat screamed back.
Neither of them seemed to acknowledge Robby’s existence because apparently they were seconds away from a duel until death.
“WHAT THE FUCK-”
Both cats froze, the hissing continued low-key. Mr. Abbot was the first to whip around, his enormous eyes flickered to Robby. Then he immediately screamed again - this time directly at Robby like this whole situation was somehow his fault.
“DON’T YELL AT ME!” Robby shot back automatically. “You invited him in!”
The gray cat turned his head around slowly, fixing Robby. He started hissing, slapping his paw into the air towards him. Then he apparently made the decision that this situation was about to escalate and fled through the open door.
A gray shadow, gone in a second.
Mr. Abbot lunged after him with murderous intent.
“NOPE!”
Robby intercepted him mid-flight with both hands before the cat could throw himself out into the night after his new arch enemy. Mr. Abbot lost his mind about this immediately. He twisted in Robby’s grip, yowling dramatically while his tail doubled in size.
“FUCK CAT - it’s over, okay?”
Mr. Abbot disagreed violently, scratching Robby’s arm, trying to free himself.
“HE LEFT!”
The cat craned his head toward the open door. Robby tightened his grip slightly and kicked the door shut. Then he lowered Mr. Abbot on the ground carefully.
“You’re a fucking nuisance” Robby snarled toward him, then looked around the destroyed room in disbelief.
His pillow was on the floor, the fabric ripped. The curtains were half torn down. The motels bible lay on the ground, papers ripped out and scattering around. His bag was thrown over and the contains had fell out.
“How long was this happening?” He turned toward the cat with wide eyes.
Mr. Abbot looked up at him, meowing furiously.
“Oh, come on, don’t lie to me. That’s… that’s a fucking crime scene. Please tell me that gray fucker didn’t pee there.”
Robby stepped closer to a wet patch on the carpet. He closed his eyes for a moment then crouched down and took a whiff.
“Okay, that gray fucker did pee in here.” Robby made a face when the sharp distinct smell of cat urine hit his nose. “That little asshole. No wonder you wanted to murder him.”
He straightened again, rubbing a hand across his face. “We have to sleep in here and now it smells like… like… like a gutter.”
Mr. Abbot was still breathing hard, tiny body tense, ears flicking toward the door every couple of seconds. You could feel the territorial rage and injured pride radiating off of him.
Robby sat down on the bed with a deep sigh. “How you if I’m not allowed to invite strangers into my motel room, neither are you.”
Mr. Abbot stared at him for a moment, then hopped onto the bed, immediately stepping onto his lap. Robby started scratching his ears almost without thinking.
“But I’m proud you didn’t back off” he went on with a shrug. “You don’t have to take shit from anyone. Especially not from a bastard coming into your home just to piss on the rug.”
Mr. Abbot shoved his head under Robby’s arm and started purring. The cat pressed his body against Robby’s belly, still bumping his head into Robby's hand.
“Unbelievable.”
Robby rubbed his free hand over his face, then reached for his phone.
Robby:
Came back from dinner and found the cat trying to fight another cat in the motel room.
Jack:
Is he entertaining an illegal cat fight club?
Robby chuckled softly, then took a picture of the mess that was his room and sent it over. The typing bubble appeared immediately.
Jack:
You sure that was a fight?
Robby tilted his head, blinking.
Robby:
What else could that have been?
Jack:
Maybe you interrupted his date?
Robby looked down at Mr. Abbot, who was purring but still radiated homicidal energy. Then he started laughing, scratching under his chin.
Robby:
Nah. That wasn’t romantic.
Jack:
Don’t know. Orange cat courtship probably looks like attempted murder. (It’s the same with all the gingers, honestly.)
Robby laughed out loud.
Robby:
Too much information, brother. And honestly - he looked ready to kill for territory.
Jack’s answer came immediately.
Jack:
Sounds like typical Abbot behavior.
Robby:
No wonder you don’t have a girl.
This time the answer took longer. Robby watched the typing bubble for a long time before a reply came.
Jack:
Look who’s talking.
Robby frowned, his finger hovering over the screen, unsure what to reply. Another message came in.
Jack:
Send me a picture of your murder kitty. Bet he looks proud as hell.
Robby took a picture of Mr. Abbot, who was, indeed, looking pretty proud of himself. Then he sent it over to Jack.
organising the bachelorette ✓ calming the bride ✓ not fucking the best man ✓
wc: 6.7k
tags: texting, gentleman jack abbot, maid of honour!reader, slowish burn, eventual smut, dating, unprotected p in v, fingering, blowjobs, no age gap mentioned
The wedding had come around far quicker than you expected.
Your best friend had been dreaming about this day since she was fifteen, long before there’d ever been a ring on her finger. She’d planned the dress, decided on the venue and even had opinions on the hors d’oeuvres that would be passed around on silver platters during the reception. By the time her fiancé proposed, she already had a guest list tucked away somewhere and at least three pinterest boards dedicated to centrepieces alone.
So, really, you shouldn’t have been surprised when she ran the wedding like a military operation.
As her maid of honour, you’d been promoted to second-in-command. There were group chats for every task, weekly coffee dates spent debating whether the invitations should be cream or ecru, despite the fact they looked exactly the same, and enough colour-coded spreadsheets to make a project manager weep with pride. She may as well have handed you a headset and started calling you Monica Gellar.
Not that you minded.
You happily accompanied her to cake tastings and offered diplomatic advice when seating plans threatened to reignite decade-old family feuds. Being maid of honour wasn’t just a title to you. It was a responsibility, and you intended to do it properly.
Still, even you had to admit she’d gone a little overboard when your phone buzzed with a notification announcing you’d been added to your seventh WhatsApp group.
bridesmaids x groomsmen 🤍
Apparently this one existed solely to pair everyone up before the wedding.
You frowned at the screen.
It wasn’t exactly as though you needed weeks of preparation to walk down an aisle beside someone. Surely introducing yourselves five minutes before the ceremony would suffice. Clearly not.
Five minutes later a lengthy message from Katy appeared...
hey all! we're only a week away from the big day, so you know what that means… time for matchmakers! 💍
i've dropped a list below of all you lovely bridesmaids and your corresponding groomsmen. i'm pretty sure most of you know each other already, but if not, pleeease make sure you have a chat before next weekend. i don’t want any awkwardness down the aisle!!!
love you all! xoxo katy 💋
A laugh escaped you. Trust Katy to treat introductions like another item on the wedding itinerary.
You didn't have to look far for your name, sat in bold at the very top with MOH next to it. Cute.
Your gaze drifted across the page to the name beside yours.
jack - BM
You frowned again. Katy had said everyone already knew each other.
You didn’t know a Jack.
Curiosity getting the better of you, you tapped on the name to open his contact.
Nothing. No profile picture. No status. Just a phone number and one solitary word.
Jack.
Helpful. You tilted your head at the screen.
“Who… are you?” you murmured to yourself.
For someone important enough to be the best man, he was remarkably mysterious.
You tried to think back to any mention of a Jack. High school? University? Work? Somewhere in passing over the years? But Katy and Matt collected friends wherever they went, the sort of couple who could strike up a conversation in a queue and leave with an invitation to dinner. Jack could’ve been anyone.
Eventually, you decided it wasn’t really your problem.
You’d introduce yourself before the ceremony, exchange the obligatory pleasantries, walk down the aisle together and that would be that.
Your phone buzzed before you’d even set it back down.
An unsaved number. Curiosity won.
Hi. Katy’s orders. Apparently we’re supposed to become friends before next Saturday?
I’m Jack
A smile tugged at your lips.
wow… you’re real
The reply came almost instantly.
Jack:
Last time I checked
Although Katy’s got enough spreadsheets to convince me we’re all just NPCs in this wedding
A laugh escaped you.
So, he was funny.
You saved his contact, half expecting a profile picture to magically appear. But nothing. No photo. No status. Just Jack.
The mystery lived on.
honestly, maid of honour duties are keeping me up at night
Jack:
Can’t say Matt’s got me working quite as hard. Guess I lucked out?
if u fancy swapping the suit for a bridesmaid’s dress, i'm sure we could come to some sort of arrangement...
Jack:
I’m in.
You smiled to yourself.
As first conversations went, this one was surprisingly easy. There was none of the awkward small talk Katy had clearly been trying to avoid. Instead, every message seemed to slot another tiny piece into the image you’d started building in your head.
Funny. Quick-witted. Entirely faceless.
so… how do you know matt anyway?
bit surprised i've never heard of you before today, considering you’re the best man
A typing bubble appeared and disappeared.
Then came his reply.
Jack:
Ouch. That stings a little
You grinned.
Jack:
Kidding. Honestly, I was surprised too. Thought his brother would’ve got the gig
Another pause.
Jack:
I’ve only known him a couple of years. Helped him out after he had that accident a while back
You frowned at the screen.
That accident.
That was one way of putting it.
It's been a horrific three-car pile up. Matt had been trapped behind the steering wheel while emergency services fought to free him. He’d spent weeks in hospital recovering, and afterwards Katy never stopped talking about the guy who’d pulled him from the wreckage, kept him alive until the ambulance arrived and refused to leave his side.
She’d called him a miracle more than once.
Your fingers hovered over the keyboard.
wait
you're that guy
There was a brief pause before his reply arrived.
Jack:
That guy?
the guy who literally stopped matt from dying
Jack:
Guilty as charged
You stared at the screen for a moment.
Well that certainly explained the best man title.
From everything Katy had told you, Matt had made a point of staying in touch after he recovered. What had started as gratitude had slowly turned into an unlikely friendship, one that had clearly become important enough for Jack to be standing beside him on his wedding day.
jesus didn't realise i was texting a real-life hero
His reply appeared almost immediately.
Jack:
Not a hero. Just a doctor :)
It should’ve sounded unbearably cheesy but instead, it was somehow the most impressive thing you’d heard all week.
Another piece of the Jack-shaped puzzle quietly clicked into place.
You woke early the next morning, rolling over to savour the last few peaceful minutes before your alarm dragged you into the day.
More out of habit than expectation, you reached for your phone.
No new messages.
You weren’t sure why that disappointed you.
Last night’s conversation with Jack had been… nice. Surprisingly easy. The kind of conversation that left you smiling at your screen without really noticing.
You slipped your phone back onto the bedside table and got on with your morning, went to work and about your business.
By 10:30, you’d almost forgotten about it.
Then your phone buzzed.
Jack:
Morning
A second message followed almost immediately.
Jack:
Just remembered we’re supposed to spend an entire day together on Saturday
A smile found its way onto your face before you’d even started typing.
bit late to back out now…
His reply came within seconds.
Jack:
Shame. I was hoping you’d be unbearable so I’d have an excuse
You huffed a laugh.
give me time x
The tiny blue haha reaction popped up above your message.
Well. At least he appreciated your sense of humour.
Jack:
I was going to say… we’re spending a whole day together and I don’t actually know much about you
You have my story
hardly!
Jack:
Well the important bits
You rolled your eyes.
what, that you’re a doctor who saves lives? very impressive but limited I'm afraid
i'm going to need more than that
Jack:
Alright then. What do you want to know?
You didn’t even have to think about it.
first celebrity crush. fave drink. best holiday you’ve ever been on. go
The typing bubble appeared almost instantly.
Jack:
Sounds less like getting to know each other and more like you’re preparing for one hell of a date...
Heat crept into your cheeks despite yourself.
answer the questions!!!
Jack:
Sarah Connor
Saw Terminator at the cinema when I was about ten and thought she was the coolest person on Earth
You blinked. That wasn’t the answer you’d expected.
Jack:
Bourbon. I know, I’m painfully predictable
And Italy
Most beautiful place I’ve ever been
You smiled as you read each message, the puzzle coming together piece by piece.
Jack:
Your turn.
afraid i have a meeting now
you'll have to wait 🤗
Jack:
You're a cruel woman
By the time your meeting finally wrapped up, you’d forgotten all about your unfinished interrogation.
It wasn’t until you collapsed onto your sofa that evening, kicking your shoes off with a sigh, that your phone lit up once again.
Jack:
Right
I’ve waited long enough
Pay up
You frowned at the screen for a second before remembering.
Oh. The little Q&A you had going on before you had to slip off to work.
A grin spread across your face as you unlocked your phone.
demanding, aren’t we?
Jack:
I’ve been told patience is a virtue
Unfortunately I work in an emergency department, so mine’s been worn dangerously thin
You laughed.
fine 😤
celeb crush… orlando bloom but specifically POTC orlando bloom
His reply arrived before you could even start thinking about the next answer.
Jack:
The fuck is POTC? Did he have an illness?
You snorted.
pirates of the caribbean you idiot
😭😭😭
Jack:
Jesus I'm old
Anyway, next
...... wow
fave drink spicy marg, a classic?
then best vacation probably greece
went to a tiny island, all white buildings and clear ocean it was unbelievable
A minute passed before another message appeared.
Jack:
You strike me as someone who plans a vacation down to the minute....
You frowned.
excuse me?
Jack:
Colour coded itineries, packing half your closet, arriving to the airport four hours before your flight?
You stared at your phone in mild offence.
who have you been talking to?
Jack:
No one...
Lucky guess?
You were almost annoyed he had you figured out already.
three hours early
and the itinerary is only to get the most out of the vacation
everyone is grateful for it ok
A blue haha appeared over the middle text.
Jack:
Knew it
alright then, mr knows absolutely everything
tell me something about yourself i couldn’t POSSIBLY guess
The typing bubble must have stopped and appeared ten times before finally-
Jack:
I’ve never seen Titanic
Woah too far. Is this a red flag?
get out
Jack:
Never seen Star Wars either
i don't care about that one but titanic ???
where have you been
your name is literally jack did people not taunt you in the 90s
Jack:
They did and that's exactly why I haven't seen it
Fuck that movie, I've heard there was more than enough room on that door
The conversation drifted on from there. You told each other all the important stuff: Jack's first concert was Pearl Jam, the story where you totalled your first car at seventeen, how Jack is a military man but has a deadly hatred of fish.
You'd laughed hard at that. He got you back when you confessed once peed your pants at a Dairy Queen over the age of twenty. He asked for more details and you obviously declined.
Before long, another hour has passed. It felt strange, the idea that you were getting on so well with this man after a mere two days of texting.
You’d never met him.
You still had no idea what colour his eyes were, whether he was tall or short, whether he gestured when he talked or smiled with dimples or laugh lines.
And yet, somehow, the faceless contact labelled Jack was becoming the person you found yourself looking for whenever your phone buzzed.
T-minus four days until the wedding of the century.
When you’d first started texting Jack, it had been because Katy insisted the bridal party got acquainted before Saturday but now, neither of you had mentioned the wedding once.
Your phone buzzed just after seven.
Jack:
Morning
Hope your coffee’s better than mine...
A photo followed. The paper cup balanced on the nurses’ station looked as miserable as the coffee inside it probably tasted.
You laughed to yourself before replying with a picture of your own mug. Unlike his, yours was pink with little blue flowers painted around the rim.
Jack:
Much better
Jealous already
You didn’t know it, but Jack found himself smiling at his phone before he’d even looked at the mug. Instead, his eyes had landed on your hand wrapped around it, the neat manicure and silver rings on your fingers, the tiny glimpse into the life of someone he’d somehow become accustomed to talking to.
Wednesday slipped by in the same easy rhythm the last couple of days had settled into.
You learnt that Jack worked nights, meaning his first message usually arrived just as he was finishing his shift. Every morning you’d remind him that drinking coffee immediately before bed was a terrible idea.
Every morning he’d ignore you.
When you sent him a photo of the sandwich you’d picked up from the deli opposite your office, he told you it was his favourite lunch spot whenever he found himself nearby.
Later that evening, he sent a picture of his dinner.
The logo in the corner of the takeaway bag made you laugh.
no way. that's my favourite thai place!
Jack:
Good taste
i'd say the same to you
It was strange how often your lives seemed to overlap. Favourite cafés and the same takeaways. The same terrible habit of skipping lunch when work got busy.
None of it was particularly significant on its own, but each little coincidence felt like another thread quietly weaving the two of you together.
By the time evening rolled around and Jack was on shift, his messages became less frequent.
You understood that and yet you caught yourself glancing at your phone more often than you cared to admit, almost expecting it to light up.
By Thursday morning, reaching for your phone before you’d even opened the curtains had become second nature.
Usually, Jack beat you to it.
Today, he didn’t.
You decided to take advantage of the rare opportunity.
had the most boring evening last night because SOMEONE decided not to text me
You hit send before you could overthink it. Thirty minutes passed before your phone buzzed.
He was probably drifting in and out of sleep after another night shift.
Jack:
I can only apologise
Think half of Pittsburgh decided to walk into the ED last night
Your smile softened. It was easy to forget sometimes.
Over the past few days, Jack had become the man who complained about hospital coffee, debated which movies were actually classics and spammed your messages with a whole lot of Hahas.
Then he’d casually remind you that his day (or night) job involved keeping people alive.
It was… admittedly rather attractive.
suppose i'll forgive you
The typing bubble appeared almost immediately.
Think it means I owe you a drink?
You grinned.
at the free bar on saturday?
don't spend all your doctor money on me sir
Jack:
I wasn’t actually thinking about the wedding...
Your thumb hovered over the screen as you read the message again.
And then one more arrived.
That’s assuming you don’t hate me in person
If you don’t… I’d quite like to take you out properly
You stared at the words for a moment longer than you’d care to admit.
A week ago, Jack had been nothing more than a name in a WhatsApp group and now, somehow, the thought of meeting him had you smiling at your phone like an idiot.
Then you realised you hadn't replied.
The truth was, you didn’t know how.
One minute you were debating favourite vacations and celebrity crushes, the next Jack was talking about taking you on a date. It wasn’t exactly the direction you’d expected the conversation to take with a man you’d only known for four days and only through a phone screen.
Your thumbs hovered over the keyboard. You typed then deleted it. Tried again and deleted that too.
Eventually, you settled on the approach that seemed to define the two of you best.
Light-hearted sarcasm.
bold of you to assume I’m even going to like you in person?
Jack:
I’m choosing to ignore that
A smile tugged at your lips.
you should x
Jack:
Good
Because I’d already started thinking about where I’d take you
You let out a quiet breath, suddenly very aware of the warmth spreading across your cheeks.
Before you could dwell on it too much, you steered the conversation back onto safer ground.
you're terrible at this flirting thing you know
Jack:
Who said I was flirting?
oh pleeeease
Jack:
Fine
Maybe a little
You spoke again that evening.
Jack was already back at work when another photo dropped into the chat. This one from the ambulance bay.
Darkness had settled over the hospital, the glow from the automatic doors spilling across the wet tarmac outside. He wasn’t in the picture, not really, but when you looked closer you caught the faintest reflection in the glass.
Just enough to make out the outline of his figure standing with one hand in his pocket.
A flash of metal hung around his neck, catching the fluorescent light. His stethoscope, you assumed.
looks exciting!
Jack:
Don’t jinx me
sorry
hope your evening is full of stubbed toes and minor headaches
A blue Haha reaction appeared before his reply.
Jack:
That’s oddly specific
i'm just trying to manifest an easy shift for you
Jack:
Much appreciated
The conversation drifted on long after that, jumping from one meaningless topic to the next any time he managed to sneak a break with his phone.
The last thing you sent him that night was a rambling commentary on the sitcom he’d admitted to watching whenever his head was too fried after work to concentrate on anything else.
You’d finally given it a go and apparently it did the trick.
Between the salon appointment, packing an overnight bag for the wedding hotel and making sure everything at work had been handed over before the weekend, there was plenty to do.
For the first time all week, you let yourself sleep in.
It was nearly nine thirty when you finally reached for your phone to see two unread voice notes from Jack. Both sent at 7:16 a.m.
A smile found you before you’d even pressed play.
Voice message (0:12)
“Just driving home from the hospital. Figured this was easier than texting…”
“You can thank me later for recommending that sleep-inducing TV show.”
You could hear the quiet hum of the engine beneath his voice, punctuated every now and then by the steady click of his turn signal.
For a moment, it felt strangely intimate. Like you were sitting in the passenger seat beside him.
The second voice note was even shorter.
Voice message (0:15)
“One more thing…”
There was a pause, as though he’d almost forgotten.
“Hope you’re wearing comfortable shoes tomorrow.”
You heard him laugh quietly to himself.
“Matt sent me the wedding playlist. I'm definitely stealing you for a dance.”
You replayed that one. Then, before you could stop yourself… you played it four more times.
You texted him back to tell him your heels were six inches high, but you’d endure the pain for him.
There was no reply.
Jack was almost certainly asleep by then, finally home after another night shift, so you slipped your phone into your bag and got on with your day.
There was plenty to keep you occupied.
You packed your overnight bag, headed to the salon for your hair appointment and fielded what felt like a hundred phone calls from Katy, each one another last minute check to make sure everything was exactly as she’d imagined.
Not that there was even much left to organise.
By that evening, you’d checked into the hotel where the bridal party would be staying. Tonight was reserved for celebratory drinks; tomorrow morning would begin before sunrise with hair, makeup and enough champagne to calm eight nervous women before the biggest day of Katy’s life.
Jack, meanwhile, slept through most of the afternoon and thankfully had the night off.
The last thing you wanted was for the best man to arrive straight from the ED looking as though he’d survived the apocalypse.
Matt had organised beers with the groomsmen instead, the plan being for them all to arrive fresh or fresh enough on Saturday morning.
Tomorrow.
The thought made your stomach flutter and now because of the wedding. Tomorrow, you’d finally see him. The anticipation was equal parts exciting and terrifying.
Your phone lit up later that evening.
Jack:
Think I’ve had enough sleep to last me a lifetime today
Consider my wedding prep complete
From your hotel room, you snapped a quick picture of your fresh manicure wrapped around the handle of your overnight bag.
mine too!
A moment later a little pink heart appeared on the picture and you paused. He’d never reacted to one of your pictures before.
Jack:
Is it crazy to say I’m really excited to see you tomorrow?
Your heart gave an inconvenient little flip even though you wanted to play this cool.
i have that effect on people
A few seconds passed before you sent another message.
but seriously… i'm excited to see you too
i's say we’ve followed katy's orders pretty well. hopefully we know each other well enough to survive walking down the aisle together
Somewhere along the way, you’d both forgotten this conversation had started because someone else told you to.
An hour later, you found yourself surrounded by six bridesmaids and one very emotional bride.
The hotel bar buzzed with conversation as spicy margs appeared one after another, glasses clinking together in toast after toast.
To Katy. To Matt. To the years that led them here.
Stories were shared, embarrassing memories dragged back into the light and every so often Katy dabbed at the corners of her eyes before insisting she absolutely wasn’t crying.
You were having a wonderful time.
Even so… your phone remained face up beside your glass.
Every time it lit up with Jack, you found yourself smiling before you’d even read the message.
You spent the evening updating each other from opposite sides of the wedding.
He complained about the groomsmen and you sent him photographs of increasingly chaotic bridesmaids.
He rated the beers. You rated the cocktails.
By the time midnight rolled around, you’d both had enough drinks that the conversation lost some of its usual sarcasm.
A new message appeared.
Jack:
There’s something I should probably tell you before tomorrow
Your smile faded.
Jack:
It’s always the awkward part of meeting someone new… but I’d rather you heard it from me than saw it
A knot tightened in your stomach. Your mind immediately leapt to every worst-case scenario imaginable. Secret girlfriend. Children. Something that would make the last week feel very different.
You swallowed.
okay…?
The typing bubble lingered for a long time.
Jack:
You know I was in the military. Two tours overseas
Well… I was medically discharged after I lost my leg
It’s amputated below the knee
I get around fine, but I limp if I’ve been on my feet too long
I just didn’t want tomorrow to be the first time you noticed
You stared at the screen. For reasons you couldn’t quite explain, your eyes stung. Not because it changed anything but because it didn’t.
You wished, more than anything, that he wasn’t several miles away.
jack :(
if you think that’s going to make me like you any less, you’ve got another thing coming
thank you for telling me. i can’t imagine that’s an easy conversation to have with someone you’ve only just met
if anything… i think you’re even braver than i already thought ❤️
His reply came almost instantly.
Jack:
First of all…
We’re not strangers anymore
You smiled.
Jack:
Secondly…
If I’d known losing a leg was worth a red heart, I’d have mentioned it on Monday
The laugh escaped before you could stop it and a few heads turned around the table.
“Sorry,” you grinned, quickly setting your phone face down. "Carry on.”
Champagne flutes filled, music drifted through the bridal suite and someone was already laughing before hair and makeup had even begun. Katy was first in the chair, as she’d insisted, while you floated between topping up glasses and making sure everyone had actually eaten something.
When she finally stepped into her dress, the room fell quiet.
You’d seen it at every fitting, pinned and clipped and half-finished, but nothing compared to seeing it now.
Pearls scattered delicately across her collarbones, the corseted bodice cinching perfectly at her waist before falling into a lace train that seemed to glide across the floor behind her.
For a moment, all you could do was look at your best friend.
“You are absolutely not crying before I walk down that aisle,” Katy warned, catching your expression in the mirror.
You laughed, blinking quickly.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m… emotional.”
She rolled her eyes affectionately.
“You’re going to ruin your makeup before I ruin mine.”
The bridesmaids slipped into sage green dresses that morning, soft satin catching the light as everyone fussed over zips, earrings and bouquets. Yours skimmed perfectly over your figure, the colour making your eyes appear brighter than usual.
The morning passed in a whirlwind and you barely looked at your phone. There simply wasn’t time.
Somewhere amongst the chaos, Jack arrived with the other groomsmen an hour before the ceremony, but the two of you remained on opposite sides of the hotel.
The calm disappeared as bouquets were handed out and the mother of the bride burst into tears.
As maid of honour, you became the unofficial shepherd, ushering everyone towards the courtyard before anyone had the chance to wander off.
Only when everyone was lined up did you finally stop moving.
You straightened Katy’s veil one last time, adjusted a bouquet and took a steadying breath.
A quiet cough sounded behind you.
“I’m looking for the maid of honour.”
The voice was instantly familiar. Youturned.
Oh. So this was Jack.
Silver threaded through dark hair, a perfectly tailored suit sitting effortlessly across broad shoulders, the sage green pocket square matching your dress exactly. A dusting of stubble framed a smile you’d already decided was dangerous.
He looked every bit as confident as he sounded over text. Maybe more.
His gaze met yours with unmistakable recognition, lingering just long enough to make your stomach flip.
“Heard I’ve got the best seat in the house,” he added. “Walking down the aisle with her.”
You smiled before you even realised you were doing it.
“Ah… my mystery man.”
Stepping towards him, you extended your hand.
“Nice to finally meet you.”
He looked at your hand, then back at you, a grin spreading across his face.
“I think we’ve earned more than a handshake.”
Even so, he took it. His hand was warm.
“Pleasure’s all mine.”
Before either of you could say another word-
“Places!” Katy’s wedding coordinator clapped her hands and everyone hurried into position.
Jack offered his arm without a word and you slipped yours through it instinctively before instrumental version of Bittersweet Symphony floated through the speakers.
You glanced sideways.
“Very Katy.”
He chuckled. “I was thinking exactly the same thing.”
Then the doors opened and you stepped forward together.
Petals lined the aisle, every familiar face turning to watch as you walked towards the ceremony.
Halfway down, Jack leaned in ever so slightly.
“And she thought this was going to be awkward.”
You laughed under your breath.
“Shows what she knows"
The ceremony passed in a blur.
You watched Katy and Matt exchange vows through misty eyes, smiling as Jack stepped forward to hand over the rings.
Every so often, you’d glance across the altar.
Every time, his eyes were already on you.
Then the reception arrived in a flurry of hugs, photographs and champagne.
You barely saw Jack for the next hour.
There were veils to collect, makeup to fix ans guests to direct. Only once everyone had settled into the reception room did you finally escape to the bar.
“Spicy margarita?”
You turned and smiled.
“You remembered. Bourbon?”
His smile widened. “You remembered too.”
The bartender slid both drinks across and for moment, neither of you spoke. You simply looked at each other.
“So?” Jack asked eventually.
“So?”
“Does the mystery man live up to expectations?”
You pretended to think about it.
“The jury’s still out.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Fair.”
“And what about you?”
He took a slow sip of bourbon.
“I think she’s even better than I imagined.”
Heat crept into your cheeks. Thankfully, the music swelled before you had to answer.
Jack set his glass down.
“Come on.”
You raised an eyebrow.
“Dance floor.”
“Bossy.”
“So I’ve been told.”
You laughed and followed him anyway.
The song wasn’t anything special, just another upbeat wedding classic, but somehow that didn’t matter.
His hand settled carefully against your waist as yours rested on his shoulder. Your fingers intertwined.
“I’ve been looking forward to this all week,” he admitted.
“What? The questionable DJ?”
His smile softened. “No.” His eyes held yours.“You.”
The word settled somewhere hot in your belly.
“You must’ve had a very quiet week.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know.”
He smiled again.
“I still meant it.”
You looked away, suddenly fascinated by the fairy lights overhead.
“You’re a good dancer.”
“I practised.”
“You practised?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t want to let you down.”
His thumb brushed absentmindedly against your waist and you felt your heart responde immediately.
Everything around you seemed to fade into the background. The music, conversations, clinking glasses.
There was only him.
His eyes drifted to your lips before meeting yours again. You smirked when you caught him.
“You’re even prettier than I pictured.”
Your breath caught.
“I could say exactly the same about you.”
He laughed quietly. “Best compliment I’ve had all month.”
Several songs later, applause interrupted as speeches were announced.
Reluctantly, you left the dance floor as champagne appeared in your hand and guests settled into their seats.
Then, without a word, warm fingers slipped between yours. You looked down. Jack gave your hand the gentlest squeeze before nodding towards the hallway.
Questioning, you followed.
The noise faded with every step until only distant laughter filtered through the closed doors behind you.
He stopped, turning to face you.
“Jack…” you whispered. “What are we doing? Katy’s going to come looking for us.”
He took one small step closer.
“I’ve wanted to do something for a while.” His eyes dropped briefly to your lips. “I just couldn’t do it in there.”
Your pulse hammered. “Yeah?”
His smile was almost imperceptible.
“Yeah.”
Jack closed the distance between you, soft lips grazing yours in a kiss that felt both so gentle and hot. His thick hands snaked around your waist, pulling your body in and he almost gasped when your fingers found his curls.
He pulled away slightly, forehead resting against yours, lips stained with the pale blush of your gloss and you could've sworn you heard him utter an almost silent fuck under his breath.
"Been thinking about that for too long." He confessed.
"So since Wednesday?" You jibed.
He shook his head, laughing softly.
The main doors burst open, music flooding the hall again.
"We better get back." You didn't want to. You could've stayed here all night with Jack, savouring his taste.
He reluctantly agreed, following you back inside.
The wedding was everything Katy had imagined it to be yet it had been even better for you.
Everyone grew drunk and leery, the music became more danceable and empty shots lay littered across white table cloths.
It was around 1am when Jack walked you to your room. You were tipsy, not drunk, swaying nicely through the hotel lobby with your heels hooked through your fingers.
You stood side by side in the elevator, watching the floors pass in silence, the brush of his arm against yours covered them in goosebumps.
Then you were there, outside your hotel room, fishing for the plastic key strewn into your clutch bag. The door flashed green as you swiped, pushing the handle to open it just a crack.
After everything you'd learnt about Jack, the thing that stood out the most was his chivalry. The true definition of a gentleman. He walked you up here without even a hint at wanting to come inside, no matter how much he hoped you'd ask.
You stood, lip bitten, studying his face with such intent.
Then you kissed him again. This time different to downstairs, hotter and messier, you gripped his shirt until your knuckles paled. Even then, he didn't push you into the room, letting you lead, looking into your eyes for acceptance when you pulled away.
"Need you to come inside." You panted. "Please."
You didn't have to beg, he thought it sweet that you did anyway.
Then you were walking backwards, lips locked, until your calves hit the bed frame and you fell back to sit. Jack towered over you, his hand rising to cradle your face, thumb sweeping from your jaw to bottom lip.
"Beautiful girl."
You sucked his thumb into your mouth, hand lazily draped around his wrist as you pushed it in further. "And a dirty one too." He half laughed before his mouth fell open, watching you work your tongue.
You pulled it out with a pop. He was hard against his trousers, you could see that. Thick outline straining against the material and he jolted into your touch when you started to rub your palm right where his cockhead was.
"Fuuuuck," his head fell back despite your touch being so gentle. You wondered how he'd react when you took him in your mouth.
"Can I?" You whispered, hand tugging at his belt buckle.
He nodded, eyes dark, pupils blown.
You made short work of it, pulling the buckle open to release the buttons and slowly draw down the zip. His shirt was untucked and you could see the light dusting of hair leading south. Suddenly you were aware of the slickness between your own legs.
You freed him from his boxers, a little taken aback by the size of him, swallowing thickly as he stood in front of you. Hard and girthy, tip reddened from your teasing.
With a few slow strokes, you leant into him, tongue darting out to lick the head. His hips jumped, hand in your hair as you took your time. Your tongue trailed down his shaft, swirling the precum away. Saliva fell from your lips and you coated him entirely before taking his cock in your mouth. You held him at the base as you adjusted to his size.
"Jesus Christ baby," your head bobbed slow and deep. "Want me to cum right now? Fuck." He laughed weakly, fist tightening in your hair when he felt the back of your throat tighten around him.
You moaned at the feel, a gargled noise vibrating against skin before you sped up. He tasted so good and filled your mouth completely. You got so carried away, getting your throat fucked he had to pull you off.
"Not gonna cum in your mouth the first time baby," he panted. "Need to feel you properly."
It was the best sex you'd ever had. He undressed you so tenderly, peeled away the sodden panties, not before bringing them to his face, taking all of you in. Fingers danced over your slit, spreading your wetness until your pussy was shaking for something more.
"Jack!" You gasped when strong hands hooked under your thighs, pulling you to the edge of the bed.
His tongue found your clit with ease, licking clean circles so tightly you were panting his name and practically humping his face. You came at the first feel of his thick fingers inside you, he'd worked you so good and proper with his tongue that all it took was a deep curl of his middle finger to send you reeling, back arched, heels dug into his back.
He gave you a minute to come round, hands stroking your thighs, wandering over every inch of skin.
"That was so good baby," he cooed. "So fucking good."
"Need you to fuck me," your breaths were still shallow and hard. "Please Jack, need you inside me."
How could he refuse?
"I'm gonna baby, gonna make you feel so good." He kissed your stomach, hands ghosting your sides and making you shiver. "Just a sec okay?"
Jack turned to sit on the edge of the bed. You didn't realise until he removed his pants the rest of the way, letting them pool to the floor and reveal the prosthetic attached at the knee.
He removed it with such ease, setting it aside and rubbing the skin where it had sat.
When he turned to you, his expression was different.
"Does it bother you?"
You wanted to hold him and never let go.
"Not in the slightest." You came up to your knees, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. Your lips ghosted the shell of his ear. "Want you so bad..."
Jack fucked you til you were shaking. You took him so well, legs wrapped around his back, cock so deep it felt like he was pounding the inside of your stomach.
His moans made you wetter, the way he'd grunt on every thrust, snap his hips into you and cry out, your name being whispered over and over.
"That's it baby, just like that, so fuckin good oh my-" he stuttered, body tensing as he felt his release building. You were closer, seconds from the hardest orgasm you'd had in years, hips jolting up into him, nails dragging down his chest.
"M gonna cum Jack, you're gonna make me c-cum..."
He held all his weight on one hand beside you, sinking into the mattress. The other found your clit again, circling it frantically and in rhythm with his cock slamming into your cunt.
"Come on baby that's it, cum for me, beautiful girl, come on-"
Your vision blurred, muscles clenched, pussy throbbing around his cock. You came on him with a long drawn out cry, head pressed back into the pillow.
You were a sight for sore eyes, pussy oozing, dripping onto the sheets. Jack felt it, pulling out to fuck his fist until he was spurting hot and white over your stomach with a deep, throaty groan.
You could've cum again just from that. The way he pumped his fist, mouth agape, eyes burning into you.
It took a while to catch your breath. Both of you. Then you were laid, head on his chest, on the hotel bed. Your wedding attire strewn across the room, curtains half shut. He kissed your temple and nursed you to sleep with the soft stroke of his hands against your shoulder.
Summary: Pope does not like routines that depend on other people. But when Smurf calls and Lena does not want to go with him, he has to decide whether to trust the careful stranger who keeps showing up with shells, soft answers, and enough patience to follow every rule exactly.
Warnings: grief, child grief, references to parental death, absent/missing parent, complicated family dynamics, Smurf being Smurf, Pope’s trauma/mental health implied, anxiety around safety/locks/routines, mild angst, hurt/comfort, slow burn
Author’s Note: This chapter is still very much about Lena, but it’s also the first real shift in Pope and Reader’s dynamic. Not romance exactly. Not yet. More like trust beginning in the smallest possible ways: locked doors, written-down rules, cut grapes, hall lights, and a text that says someone made it home safe.
Xoxo, Del
| Chpt. 1 |
Pope did not like routines that depended on other people.
Routines were supposed to be clean.
Backpack first. Snack. Beach, if the weather held. Dinner. Teeth. Bed. Locks checked once. Twice. Three times, if his body needed the third. People complicated that. People forgot. People left. People said maybe and meant no. People said tomorrow and disappeared before tomorrow got close enough to count.
Lena did not seem to know that yet.
Or maybe she knew it too well and had decided to believe you anyway. She asked about the yellow shell before Pope unlocked the sliding door.
“Do you think she found one?”
Pope kept his hand on the lock. “I don’t know.”
Lena shifted her purple bucket from one hand to the other. Her backpack was already in her room. Her lunchbox was already on the counter. She had eaten four apple slices without arguing and half a granola bar with only one complaint about the raisins. The order was changing. Pope did not like that.
“But she said she would look,” Lena said.
Pope slid the lock back and checked the beach before opening the door. Public path. Waterline. Neighbor’s deck. No one close. No you.
“She said she would look,” Pope said. “That doesn’t mean she found one.”
Lena considered that. Then she nodded once, serious. “But she’ll still come.”
Pope looked through the glass at the empty beach. He did not answer. Lena stepped out onto the deck as soon as he opened the door. Pope followed close enough to reach her if he needed to, far enough that she would not accuse him of hovering. He was hovering. He knew that.
The castle from yesterday had fallen again, but not all the way. The walls had softened. The moat had disappeared into flat sand. The blue-gray shell was still near the front, half-buried and crooked, like it had tried to hold its place through the night.
Lena crouched in front of it. “The important shell stayed again.”
Pope stopped behind her. “Yeah.”
Lena brushed sand away from the shell with two careful fingers. “It’s very strong.”
Pope looked down at her. “It’s a shell.”
Lena looked up at him. “It stayed.”
Pope looked at the shell. He did not argue. Lena dug the almost-yellow shell out from beside it and held it up. The thin stripe still looked more beige than yellow to Pope, but Lena had decided it counted yesterday, which apparently meant it counted forever.
“This one stayed too,” Lena said.
Pope glanced toward the public path. “Good.”
Lena set both shells in her bucket. “You have to say it better.”
Pope looked down at her. “What?”
“You have to say, ‘That’s good, Lena.’”
Pope stared at her. Lena stared back. He looked toward the water, then back at her. “That’s good, Lena.”
Lena nodded, satisfied, and started digging. Pope crossed his arms and scanned the beach again. No one close. Still no you. Lena packed dry sand into the bucket without flipping it. She knew better now. She was just moving her hands, waiting for the rest of the routine to arrive.
Pope knew the feeling. He hated that too. A few minutes later, Lena’s head lifted. Pope heard your footsteps in the damp sand a second after she did.
“She came,” Lena said.
Pope looked. You were walking along the waterline with your sandals in one hand and your tote bag over your shoulder. Your hair was loose today, moving around your face in the wind. Your jeans were cuffed above your ankles. There was sand on your feet and a book tucked under one arm because your tote looked too full to hold it.
You lifted your free hand when you saw Lena. Lena stood quickly. Pope’s arm moved before he thought about it, not blocking her. Just there.
Lena glanced at him. “I know. I won’t run.”
Pope lowered his arm. Lena walked fast anyway. You slowed before she reached you. You always did that. Pope had noticed. You did not rush to meet her excitement. You let her come to you.
“Hi, Lena,” you said.
Lena stopped in front of you. “Did you find yellow?”
You smiled a little and opened your palm. Pope saw the shell first. It was small, smaller than the one from yesterday, but brighter. Pale yellow at one edge, white through the middle, chipped into an uneven curve. Beside it sat a piece of sea glass. Green. Smooth. Cloudy.
Lena’s eyes widened. “You found one.”
“Almost one,” you said.
Lena took the shell carefully. “No. This one counts.”
Your smile warmed. “Okay. Then it counts.”
Lena held it up toward Pope. “Uncle Pope, look. A real one.”
Pope looked at the shell. Yellow. Small. Chipped. Found because you had looked.
“Yeah,” he said.
Lena frowned. Pope caught it this time. “That’s good, Lena.”
Lena nodded. Then she pointed at your palm. “What’s that?”
You looked down at the green piece in your hand. “Sea glass.”
Lena leaned closer. “What does it do?”
“It doesn’t really do anything,” you said. “It used to be sharp, but the water made it smooth.”
Pope looked at the glass. Used to be sharp. Made smooth. He looked away before the thought could finish.
Lena held out her hand. “Can I have it?”
You looked at Pope. Not long. Just enough. He hated that you still did that. He liked that you still did that.
“Fine,” he said.
You placed the sea glass in Lena’s palm. Lena held it up to the sun. “It looks like treasure.”
“It is treasure,” you said.
Lena looked at the castle ruins with sudden purpose. “Water treasure.”
Pope stored it before he meant to. Sea glass. Water treasure. Green. Lena carried the shell and sea glass back to the flat patch of sand near the old moat. You followed her, setting your tote near the deck steps like you had before. Not too close to the house. Not too far from where you were sitting.
Pope noticed that too.
Lena knelt and placed the yellow shell beside the blue-gray one.
“This is the door,” she said.
You knelt across from her. “Then the water treasure needs a spot.”
Lena looked at the sea glass. “By the moat.”
You nodded. “Good spot,” you said.
“There isn’t a moat yet,” Lena added.
“Then we should fix that,” you replied.
Lena handed you a stick. You took it. Pope stood behind them, arms crossed, and watched the public path. Then the water. Then you. You dragged the stick through the sand, making a wide circle around the space where the castle would go.
Lena leaned forward. “Bigger.”
You widened it. “Like this?”
Lena traced the circle with her eyes. “Bigger,” Lena said.
You widened it again.
Lena pressed her lips together, trying not to smile. “That’s too big.”
You looked at the circle. “Ambitious.”
Lena tilted her head. “What does that mean?”
“It means big in a brave way,” you replied.
Lena considered that.
Then she nodded. “It can be ambitious.”
Pope looked at her. Ambitious. He kept that too. Lena set the green sea glass near the edge of the moat.
“What’s your favorite color?” Lena asked.
You sat back on your heels. “Green.”
Lena wrinkled her nose. “Like grass?”
“Sometimes,” you said. You pointed at the sea glass. “But mostly like that. Soft green.”
Pope looked at the sea glass again. Soft green. He looked away.
“My favorite is purple,” Lena said.
You nodded. “That’s a good favorite.”
“And blue,” Lena added. “But not dark blue.”
“Light blue?” you asked.
Lena nodded. “Like pool water.”
Pope stared at the beach. Purple. Light blue. Not dark blue. Pool water.
You picked up a shell and brushed sand from the edge with your thumb. “I like pool-water blue too.”
Lena looked at you. “Do you like the pool better or the beach?”
You thought about it like the answer mattered. “I like the beach when it’s quiet.”
Lena looked around at the empty sand. “It’s quiet now.”
You nodded. “It is,” you said.
“Is that why you walk here?” she asked.
You nodded again. “Yeah. After class, my brain feels too loud sometimes.”
Lena pressed the blue-gray shell deeper into the sand. “My brain gets loud after school.”
Pope’s eyes moved to her. She had said something like that before. You did not look surprised. You did not make the moment bigger than it was.
“What helps?” you asked.
Lena shrugged. “Sand.”
You nodded. “Sand is good.”
“And snacks,” Lena added.
You smiled. “Also good,” you said.
Lena tilted her head. “And Bunny.”
You looked over at her. “Bunny?”
“My rabbit,” Lena replied.
“He sounds important,” you said gently.
Lena nodded seriously. “He is.”
Pope’s shoulders eased by a fraction.
Lena picked up a white shell and turned it over. “Bunny doesn’t like the beach.”
Your brow furrowed. “No?” you asked.
She shook her head. “He doesn’t like sand,” Lena said.
“That makes sense,” you said.
“He gets dirty,” Lena continued.
You nodded. “Very reasonable,” you said.
Lena pressed the shell into the wall she had started. “He doesn’t like the windows either.”
Pope stopped moving. You kept your eyes on Lena.
“Some windows feel too big,” you said.
Lena nodded. “These ones are too big.”
Pope looked at the house. Too many windows. Too much light. Too exposed. Lena knew.
You handed her another shell. “Then maybe Bunny likes smaller places.”
Lena took it. “Like forts.”
“Forts are good,” you agreed.
“And under blankets,” Lena added.
“Also good,” you replied.
Pope looked back at you. You were not asking questions to get answers. You were asking as if Lena were a person with things worth knowing. He did not like the way that thought sat in him.
Lena dug her shovel into the sand.
“Do you have a bunny?” Lena asked.
You smiled a little.
“No,” you said. “But I had a stuffed dog when I was little.”
Lena looked interested.
“What was its name?” Lena asked.
Your smile grew.
“Button,” you said.
Lena frowned thoughtfully.
“Like on a shirt?” Lena asked.
“Exactly like on a shirt,” you said.
Lena scrunched her nose. “Why?”
You looked down at the shell in your hand.
“Because one of his eyes was a button,” you said.
Lena’s gaze moved toward the house, where Bunny was inside.
“Was he important?” Lena asked.
You nodded.
“Very important,” you said.
Lena dragged the shovel through the sand.
“Did he like castles?” Lena asked.
You considered it seriously.
“I think he liked forts better,” you said.
Lena nodded as if that made complete sense.
“Just like Bunny,” Lena said.
You smiled softly.
“Exactly like Bunny,” you said.
Pope glanced at you. Button. Green. Quiet beach. Brain too loud after class.
Pope’s jaw tightened. He had no reason to keep any of that. He kept it anyway.
Lena reached for the bucket. “We need wet sand.”
You shifted like you were going to stand.
Pope moved first. “I’ll get it.”
You paused. Lena looked up at him. Pope held out his hand for the bucket.
“You need walls,” he said.
Lena handed it over. “Strong walls.”
“Yeah,” Pope replied.
You looked at him. Not surprised exactly. Not smiling like you had caught him doing something nice. Just warm around the edges again. Pope looked away before you could say thank you. He walked down to the waterline and crouched. Behind him, he could hear your voice and Lena’s, easy and low, carried in pieces by the wind.
“Do you like grilled cheese?” Lena asked.
You answered. “I do.”
“With the cheese all the way to the edges?” Lena continued.
You grinned. “That is the best way,” you said.
Pope packed wet sand into the bucket. Cheese to the edges. He already knew that one. He was irritated that you knew it too. When he came back, Lena was explaining the rules of fancy castles.
“Shells have to go by color sometimes,” Lena said.
You nodded. “Sometimes?”
“Not always. Only if the castle wants that,” Lena explained.
You nodded. “How do you know what the castle wants?” you asked.
Lena took the bucket from Pope and looked at you as if the answer were obvious. “You look at it.”
You nodded again. “That makes sense.”
Pope set the bucket down beside her.
Lena peered inside. “That’s a lot.”
“You need walls,” Pope said again.
Lena packed the first tower. You held the bucket steady when she flipped it. Pope watched your hands. You did not take over. You did not correct before Lena asked. You let her try. The tower held. Lena smiled.
“Good,” Pope said before she told him to.
Lena looked pleased. You looked down at the tower, but Pope still saw the corner of your mouth curve. The castle grew slowly. A yellow shell at the door. Blue-gray shell in front. Sea glass by the moat. White shells for the walls. One broken scallop shell, Lena declared, was too fancy to waste on the back. Pope stood close enough to hear all of it. He told himself he was listening for danger.
That was true.
He heard the gulls overhead. The neighbor’s screen door opening two houses down. A car door somewhere near the public lot. The water moving in and out behind him. He also heard Lena say she liked stories that were funny but not too scary. He heard you say you liked scary stories only if you could turn a light on after. He heard Lena say Bunny liked the hall light. He heard you say hall lights were underrated. He heard Lena ask if you had homework again. He heard you say yes, unfortunately. He heard Lena ask if homework was always rude. He heard you say almost always.
Pope kept all of it. Lena’s answers. Your answers. The easy rhythm of question and answer. The way you followed what Lena gave you instead of pulling more than she offered. The way Lena kept giving more anyway.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. The sound cut cleanly through the beach. Pope went still. Lena looked up. You did too, but only for a second. Pope pulled the phone from his pocket. Smurf. His thumb hovered over the screen. The castle sat unfinished at his feet. Lena watched his face. Pope locked the phone and shoved it back into his pocket.
“Keep building,” he said.
Lena looked at the pocket where the phone had disappeared. “Was it Grandma Smurf?”
Pope picked up the bucket. “Walls need more sand.”
Lena did not argue. You reached for a shell and handed it to her.
“This one could go near the bridge,” you said.
Lena took it. “Bridges are important.”
“They are,” you agreed.
Pope walked back toward the water with the empty bucket in his hand. His phone buzzed again before he reached the wet sand. He did not look. Not yet.
Behind him, Lena’s voice carried over the beach. “Do you think green counts as fancy?”
Your answer was soft. “I think it depends on where you put it.”
Pope crouched by the waterline and gripped the bucket hard enough that the plastic bent beneath his fingers. The phone kept buzzing. The routine was not clean anymore.
Pope ignored the phone until he couldn’t. The first call stopped. Then the second. Then the third came before he had made it back to the castle with the bucket. Lena heard it. You heard it.
Pope knew because Lena’s shovel slowed and your hand paused over the line of the moat, but neither of you said anything. That was worse, somehow. He set the bucket down beside Lena harder than he meant to. Wet sand shifted over the edge. Lena looked at the bucket, then at him.
Pope’s jaw tightened. “Use it.”
Lena nodded and reached for the bucket. The phone kept buzzing in his pocket. Pope stepped away from the castle before he pulled it out. Not far. Far enough that Lena would not hear every word. Close enough that he could still see you, Lena, the house, the public path, the waterline. Smurf’s name lit the screen again. Pope answered.
“What?” he said.
Smurf’s voice came through warm and low and sweet in the way that never meant sweet. Pope looked toward the water.
“No,” Pope said.
You did not look at him. Pope noticed that too. You picked up a shell and held it out to Lena.
“Bridge or wall?” you asked.
Lena’s eyes stayed on Pope. You kept your voice calm.
“Lena,” you said.
Her attention came back to you. You tipped the shell in your palm.
“Bridge or wall?” you asked again.
Lena swallowed. “Bridge.”
Pope turned slightly away, but he still watched.
“No,” Pope said into the phone.
Smurf kept talking. Pope’s hand tightened around the phone. His eyes moved to the house. Too many windows. Too much light. Too much space between one lock and the next.
“I said no,” Pope said.
Smurf’s voice changed. Pope went still. Lena pressed the shell into the bridge. Her shoulders were tight now, the easy rhythm from before gone brittle around the edges. You did not force her to keep talking. You only shifted the bucket closer so she could reach it. Pope looked down at the sand. His breathing had gone wrong. He could feel it. Shorter. Harder. Stuck somewhere between his ribs and his throat. Smurf kept talking. The job was not big. That was what she said. Not big. Never big until it was. Never dangerous until someone was bleeding. Never optional once she had decided he was the one who needed to do it. Pope looked at Lena. She was watching him again. So were you. Not openly. Not in a way that pushed. But you were aware of him. Aware of the phone. Aware of the change in the air.
Pope hated that.
“Fine,” Pope said.
Smurf stopped talking. Pope ended the call before she could make it sound like she had won. For a second, he stood there with the phone in his hand and the bucket at his feet and the ocean moving as if nothing had changed. Everything had changed. He shoved the phone into his pocket and turned back. Lena was still kneeling by the castle, one hand around the yellow shell at the door. You sat back on your heels. You did not ask.
Pope looked at Lena. “We’re going inside.”
Lena’s hand tightened around the shell. “Why?” she asked.
Pope’s voice came out too sharp. “Because I said.”
Lena flinched, just a little. Pope saw it. You saw it too. Your face did not change, but your hand stopped moving in the sand. Pope looked away.
He hated that he had put that look on her face.
“Get your bucket,” Pope said.
“Are we going to Grandma Smurf’s?” Lena asked.
Pope’s jaw locked. He did not answer fast enough. Lena knew.
“I don’t want to,” Lena said.
He kept his eyes on the house. “It won’t be long,” Pope said.
Lena looked down at the castle. “I don’t want to go there.”
Pope’s voice lowered. “Lena.”
Her eyes dropped to the yellow shell in her fist. Damp sand stuck to the chipped edge. Pope could take her. He had taken her before. He could put her in the truck, drive to Smurf’s, walk her through the front door, and leave her in a house where everyone spoke too loudly, asked too much, and touched things that did not belong to them. He could do it.
He had done worse things.
Lena’s voice went small. “She can stay with me.”
The words landed like a hit. Pope’s eyes cut to you. You were already looking at him. Not hopeful. Not expectant. Careful. You did not say yes. You did not reach for Lena. You did not make yourself into the answer before he had decided there was a question.
“We can talk about it,” you said. “If that’s okay.”
Pope stared at you. The phone buzzed again in his pocket. You did not look at it. You did not look at Lena either. You kept the question with him. His answer. His house. His rules.
“No,” Pope said.
You nodded once. “Okay.”
That should have been the end of it. It would have been, if Lena had not looked down at the yellow shell in her fist and said, very quietly, “I don’t want to go to Grandma Smurf’s.”
Pope’s jaw locked. That was different. Not because you had asked. Because Lena had. The phone buzzed again. Pope looked at the house. The windows were bright with late sun, reflecting the water back at him in broken pieces. Too many windows. Too many ways in. Too many things he could not watch if he was not there. He looked back at you. You were still waiting. Not reaching. Not taking.
Waiting.
No was still the clean answer. No was still the smart answer. His phone buzzed again. Pope bent down and picked up the bucket.
“Inside,” Pope said.
Lena’s head lifted.
Pope’s voice stayed rough. “Both of you.”
You stood without making the moment bigger. Lena grabbed the blue-gray shell and the sea glass, too, like she could not leave them behind. You picked up your tote from the sand, then bent to pick up your sandals. Pope went up the deck steps first. He checked the door before he opened it. Then he checked the house. Kitchen. Living room. Hallway. No one. He stepped inside and held the sliding door open. Lena came in after him, leaving sand in tiny half-moons across the floor. You stopped at the threshold with your sandals still in one hand. Pope looked at you. You looked down at your bare feet.
“Should I put these on or leave them off?” you asked.
Pope stared at you for half a second. “Off,” he said.
You nodded, stepped inside, and set the sandals beside the door. Not in the middle. Not kicked aside. Beside the door. Pope noticed.
He wished he didn’t.
Lena stood in the kitchen with the shells held against her shirt. “She can see Bunny.”
Pope closed the sliding door and locked it.
“Lena,” he said.
Lena looked at him. “What?”
Pope checked the lock again. “I haven’t said yes.”
Lena’s mouth pressed together. “I know.”
You stayed by the door. Not fully inside. Not fully out. Your tote hung from your shoulder. Your bare feet were still near your sandals, like you were waiting to be told where you were allowed to stand. Pope did not like how much he noticed that, either. You glanced at the counter, then back at him.
“Where should I put my bag?” you asked.
Pope looked at the tote. Then at the counter.
He pointed.
You crossed the kitchen and set it exactly where he had pointed. Lena climbed onto one of the stools and placed the yellow shell, the blue-gray shell, and the sea glass in a small line in front of her. Pope watched the glass roll slightly. Lena caught it with one finger.
“Careful,” Lena whispered to it.
You stood on the other side of the counter.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” you said.
Pope’s eyes moved to you. Your voice stayed even.
“You can ask me whatever you need to ask,” you said.
The phone buzzed again. Pope ignored it. He looked at Lena. Then at you.
“You know CPR?” Pope asked.
“Yes,” you said.
Pope’s eyes stayed on yours. “First aid?”
“Yes,” you said.
Pope glanced at the tote. “Phone charged?”
You pulled your phone from your tote and checked the screen. “Seventy-nine percent.”
Pope held out his hand. “Phone.”
You blinked once. “For my number?”
His jaw tightened. “Yeah.”
You unlocked it and handed it over. Pope took it carefully. It was not his. He typed his number in and called himself. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Pope ended the call and handed yours back.
“Text if anything happens,” Pope said.
You nodded. “I will.”
Pope’s eyes stayed on yours.
“Door stays locked,” Pope said.
You kept your phone open in your hand.
“Door stays locked,” you repeated.
Pope’s jaw shifted. “She stays inside.”
You nodded once. “She stays inside.”
Pope glanced toward the sliding door. “No deck.”
“No deck,” you repeated.
Pope looked toward the darkening strip of beach beyond the glass.
“No beach,” Pope said.
You kept your voice even. “No beach.”
Pope’s eyes returned to yours.
“You don’t let anyone in,” Pope said.
You held his gaze.
“I don’t let anyone in,” you said.
Pope stepped closer to the counter.
“Anyone knocks, you don’t open it,” Pope said.
You did not look away. “I don’t open it,” you said.
Pope’s hand flexed once at his side.
“Anyone says they know me, you don’t open it,” Pope said.
Your voice stayed steady. “I don’t open it.”
Pope looked at your phone, then back at you.
“I’ll text when I’m on my way back,” Pope said.
You nodded slowly. “So I know it’s you.”
Pope’s mouth tightened. “Yeah.”
You typed something into your notes. “Okay,” you said.
Pope stared at you. You had not made him explain it. You had not told him he was being careful in the tone people used when they meant crazy. You had only followed the rule to the place it led.
So I know it’s you.
Pope looked away first.
“You call me if anything changes,” Pope said.
You looked back down at your phone. “I’ll call you,” you said.
Pope’s voice stayed flat. “Anything.”
“Anything,” you repeated.
He liked the repetition.
He hated that.
He liked the way his rules came back in your voice unchanged. He liked that you did not soften them. He liked that you did not round the edges off until they sounded normal.
He hated that most of all.
You glanced toward Lena, then back at Pope. “What can she have for dinner if you’re not back by then?”
Pope stopped. “What?”
You kept your phone ready in your hand.
“If you’re not back by dinner,” you said. “What can she eat?”
Lena looked up from the shells. Pope looked at the phone in your hand. He had been thinking about doors. Locks. Windows. Waterline. Cars. People who might knock.
People who might lie.
He had not thought about dinner.
“Grilled cheese,” Pope said.
You typed it into your phone. “Okay.”
Pope watched your thumb move across the screen.
“And apples,” Pope added.
You nodded. “Apples.”
Pope glanced at Lena. “Or grapes.”
You typed that in, too. “Grapes,” you said.
Pope’s eyes moved back to you. “Cut them.”
You looked up. “In half?”
Pope nodded once. “Yeah.”
Lena frowned from the stool. “I’m seven.”
Pope looked at her. “Grapes get cut.”
Lena sighed and rolled the sea glass under one finger. You did not comment. You only typed.
Then you looked back at Pope. “Anything she can’t have?”
Pope answered immediately. “No soda.”
You typed it in. “No soda.”
He glanced toward the fridge.
“No orange juice,” Pope added.
You looked up. “Stomach?”
Pope stared at you for a second.
“Yeah,” he said.
You nodded and typed.
“No orange juice,” you repeated.
Lena leaned over the counter. “I can have cereal.”
Pope looked at her. “No.”
Lena groaned.
You glanced between them.
“Is cereal not dinner?” you asked.
He looked back at you.
“Cereal is not dinner,” Pope said.
You typed the exact words into your notes. Pope looked at the words on your screen. He liked that too.
You kept typing. “What time is bedtime if you’re not back?”
Pope’s body went still. Lena looked down at the shells. The question sat in the kitchen, heavier than the others. If you’re not back. You did not say it like an accusation. You did not say it like you expected him to fail. You said it like Lena would need to know what happened next, either way.
“Eight-thirty,” Pope said.
You nodded.
“Pajamas before teeth, or teeth before pajamas?” you asked.
Pope looked at you. The question was so small. So specific. So much worse than it should have been.
“Pajamas first,” Pope said.
Lena lifted her head. “Sometimes teeth first.”
Pope looked at her. “Pajamas first.”
Lena made a face, but she did not argue. You typed it in.
“Pajamas first. Then teeth,” you said.
Pope glanced toward Lena. “She can do it,” he said.
You nodded. “Okay.”
Pope looked toward Lena. She was moving the shells in a line now. Yellow. Blue-gray. Green. White. Yellow again. His throat tightened before he could stop it.
“Sometimes,” Pope said.
You looked up.
Pope’s eyes stayed on Lena. “Needs help,” Pope said.
You did not make that tender. You did not make it sad. You only nodded.
“I’ll ask,” you said.
Pope’s fingers curled against his palm. Lena looked at the counter.
“I don’t need help,” Lena said.
You looked at her. “Okay.”
Then, after a second, you added, “If you change your mind, you can tell me.”
Lena did not answer, but Pope saw her shoulders loosen. You looked back at him.
“Does she sleep with a light?” you asked.
“Hall light,” Pope said.
You typed it in.
“Door open or closed?” you asked.
“Cracked,” Pope said.
You looked up. “How much?”
Pope stared at you. Most people would have taken cracked and moved on. You waited. Not impatient. Not embarrassed. Waiting because the amount mattered if it mattered to him.
“Enough that she can see the hall,” Pope said.
You typed it in. “Enough that she can see the hall.”
Lena touched the green sea glass.
“And Bunny,” Lena said.
You looked over. “Bunny in bed?”
Lena nodded. “He sleeps on the outside.”
You tilted your head slightly. “So he can guard?”
Lena nodded again, serious.
You typed it in. “Bunny on the outside.”
Pope looked at your phone. Bunny on the outside. Like it mattered. Like Lena’s rabbit had a job worth writing down. Pope’s chest felt too tight.
You looked at him again.
“What should I tell her if she asks when you’re coming back?” you asked, voice lowered.
Everything in Pope went quiet. The phone in his pocket buzzed again, muffled and far away. Pope looked at Lena. Then at you.
“Tell her I’m coming back today,” Pope said.
You nodded. “You’re coming back today.”
Pope’s voice stayed low. “Yeah.”
You looked down at your phone and typed it in.
“Okay,” you said. “That’s what I’ll tell her.”
Pope held your gaze for one second too long. You were not promising for him. You were not making it softer. You were not making it bigger. You were keeping his words intact. The phone buzzed again. Pope looked down.
Smurf.
His thumb twitched. He locked the screen without answering.
“One hour,” Pope said.
You nodded. “Okay.”
Pope looked toward the hallway, then back at you. “Maybe two.”
You kept your phone in your hand. “Okay,” you said.
Pope’s fingers tightened around his keys.
“I’ll text,” Pope said.
You nodded. “Okay.”
Pope looked at Lena.
“You listen to her,” Pope said.
Lena’s eyes lifted. “I will.”
Pope’s voice hardened. “I mean it.”
“I know,” Lena said.
Pope’s gaze cut back to you. “She doesn’t go outside.”
You nodded once. “She stays inside.”
Pope looked toward the sliding door. “Door stays locked.”
“Door stays locked,” you repeated.
He stared at you. You did not look away. Pope did not know what to do with the clean edges of it. Dinner. Bed. Light. Door. Bunny. What to say if Lena asks. You had built a night out of his rules. Not yours.
His.
You had made him the authority and somehow made it feel less like a weight.
He liked it.
The realization made his skin feel too tight.
Pope grabbed his keys from the counter.
“I’ll text when I’m on my way,” Pope said.
You nodded. “We’ll be here.”
We.
The word hit wrong.
Or right.
Pope could not tell.
Lena slid off the stool and came around the counter.
She stopped in front of him with the yellow shell still in one hand.
“You’re coming back today?” Lena asked.
Pope looked down at her. “Yes.”
Lena’s fingers tightened around the shell. “Promise?”
His throat closed. Promises were traps. Promises were things people used when they wanted to make leaving sound pretty. Lena waited. You did not step in.
Pope crouched in front of her. His knees cracked. He put one hand carefully over the top of her head, not pushing, just there.
“I’m coming back today,” Pope said.
Lena studied his face. Then she nodded. “Okay.”
Pope stood. He looked at you once more. You were by the counter, phone in hand, shoulders relaxed, bare feet still planted exactly where he could see them.
“Text if anything happens,” Pope said.
You nodded.
“I will,” you said.
He opened the front door. Then stopped. He looked back. The sliding door was locked. Lena was inside. You were inside. The hall light was off for now, but you knew to turn it on later. The phone in his pocket buzzed again. Pope stepped outside and shut the door behind him.
He heard the lock turn from the other side.
Once.
Then nothing.
For the first time since the call, Pope breathed.
Inside, you kept your hand on the lock for one extra second.
Not because you thought it would open.
Because Pope had checked it twice, and you understood that the lock mattered.
Behind you, Lena stood in the kitchen with the yellow shell in one hand and Bunny tucked under her other arm. She had gone to get him the second Pope stepped outside, like she needed every important thing in one place.
Lena looked at the front door.
“He’s coming back today,” Lena said.
You turned from the lock.
“He said he is,” you said.
Lena held the shell tighter.
“He said it twice,” Lena said.
You nodded.
“He did,” you said.
Lena looked down at the yellow shell. “And he texted you?”
You stepped away from the door.
“He has my number,” you said. “And I have his.”
Lena seemed to think about that. Then she nodded.
“Okay,” Lena said.
The house felt different without Pope in it.
Not empty exactly.
Still full of him.
His rules. His locks. The way the kitchen seemed to hold its breath because he had left, and everything inside it was supposed to stay exactly where he had put it.
Lena shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
You kept your voice calm.
“Do you want to wash the shells or draw the castle plan first?” you asked.
Lena looked up.
“Wash them,” Lena said.
You glanced toward the counter.
“Okay,” you said.
Lena stepped closer, then paused.
“Uncle Pope said no cereal,” Lena said.
You nodded.
“For dinner,” you said.
Lena studied you for a second, testing the edges.
“Shells can go in a cereal bowl,” Lena said.
You looked toward the cabinets.
“Is there a bowl that is allowed for treasure?” you asked.
Lena considered that with the seriousness it deserved.
“The blue one,” Lena said.
You nodded once.
“Blue bowl for treasure,” you said.
Lena pointed to the cabinet beside the sink.
“It’s up there,” Lena said.
You opened the cabinet she indicated and took down a blue bowl. You did not move anything else. You filled it halfway with water and set it on the counter in front of her.
Lena climbed onto the stool.
You glanced toward the front door once.
Still locked.
Then you looked back at Lena.
“Shells first or sea glass?” you asked.
Lena placed Bunny carefully on the counter, away from the water.
“Shells,” Lena said. “Sea glass is last because it’s treasure.”
You smiled a little.
“That makes sense,” you said.
Lena dropped the yellow shell into the bowl first. Sand loosened from the chipped edge and drifted through the water in thin brown clouds.
You leaned against the opposite side of the counter, close enough to help, far enough to let her do it. Lena watched the sand settle.
“It got dirty,” Lena said.
You looked into the bowl.
“It was outside,” you said.
“Uncle Pope doesn’t like dirty,” Lena said.
You kept your voice even.
“He likes things clean?” you asked.
Lena nodded.
“And straight,” Lena said.
You looked at the line of shells on the counter.
“Straight can feel better sometimes,” you said.
Lena glanced at you.
“Does it?” Lena asked.
You nodded.
“For some people,” you said.
Lena dropped the blue-gray shell into the bowl.
“It feels better for him,” Lena said.
You did not look toward the door. You did not say too much. You only nodded.
“Then we can put things back straight,” you said.
Lena seemed satisfied by that.
She washed the shells one at a time. Yellow. Blue-gray. White. Chipped scallop. Then the sea glass.
When the green piece slipped into the water, Lena’s face softened.
“It looks prettier wet,” Lena said.
You looked at the sea glass in the bottom of the bowl.
“Yeah,” you said. “It does.”
Lena swirled one finger through the water.
“Can we keep them inside?” Lena asked.
You looked at the shells.
“For tonight?” you asked.
Lena nodded.
“So they don’t get lost,” Lena said.
“Sure,” you said. “Where should they go?”
Lena looked around the kitchen like she was choosing a safe.
“By Bunny,” Lena said.
You dried the counter with a paper towel where a few drops had spilled.
“Good spot,” you said.
Lena lined the clean shells beside Bunny. Yellow shell. Blue-gray shell. White shell. Scallop. Green sea glass. Then she adjusted the green piece until the flat side faced up. You waited until she was done before you touched your phone.
“I’m going to text Uncle Pope an update,” you said.
Lena looked at you quickly.
“What are you saying?” Lena asked.
You angled the screen so she could see.
“That you’re okay,” you said. “That we’re washing shells at the kitchen counter. That the door is locked.”
Lena read slowly, her lips barely moving around the words. Then she nodded.
“Okay,” Lena said.
You sent it.
You: Lena is okay. We’re washing the shells at the kitchen counter. Door is locked.
The reply did not come right away. Lena watched the screen for a few seconds.
“He’s doing something,” Lena said.
You set the phone face-up on the counter.
“Probably,” you said.
Lena touched the yellow shell.
“He doesn’t like doing things for Grandma Smurf,” Lena said.
You looked at her. Lena did not look back. She rolled the shell under one finger.
“She makes his face different,” Lena said.
“Yeah,” you said softly. “You notice a lot.”
Lena shrugged with one shoulder.
“He gets quiet,” Lena said.
You nodded.
“Yeah,” you said.
Lena looked toward the door.
“Is he mad?” Lena asked.
You followed her gaze, then looked back at her.
“I don’t think he’s mad at you,” you said.
Lena pressed the shell flat against the counter.
“He sounded mad,” Lena said.
You kept your voice gentle.
“He sounded worried,” you said.
Lena thought about that. Then she nodded once, small.
“He worries a lot,” Lena said.
You rested your hands on the counter.
“I think he does,” you said.
Your phone buzzed on the counter. Lena’s head lifted. You looked down.
Pope: Good. Keep it locked.
You showed Lena the message.
“He said good,” you said.
Lena leaned closer.
“And keep it locked,” Lena said.
You nodded.
“And keep it locked,” you said.
Lena looked toward the door.
“It is,” Lena said.
You picked up your phone.
“It is,” you said.
You typed back.
You: I will.
Then you set the phone face-up again. Lena watched you do it.
“You keep it where you can see?” Lena asked.
You nodded.
“So if he texts, I’ll know,” you said.
Lena seemed to like that. She turned back to the shells.
“Can we draw the castle plan now?” Lena asked.
You pushed away from the counter.
“We can,” you said.
You found paper where Lena said it would be, in the drawer near the fridge. You did not open any other drawers. You took out a few crayons from the box Lena brought from her room, then sat with her at the counter while she drew the first line of the moat in purple.
You looked at the purple circle.
“That’s not water color,” you said.
Lena kept drawing.
“It’s special water,” Lena said.
You nodded seriously.
“Right,” you said. “My mistake.”
Lena handed you the green crayon.
“You can do the treasure,” Lena said.
You took it from her.
“Where does it go?” you asked.
Lena pointed to the space beside the moat.
“There,” Lena said.
You colored a small green oval. Lena frowned.
“Bigger,” Lena said.
You made it bigger. Lena watched your hand.
“Not too big,” Lena said.
You stopped.
“Like that?” you asked.
Lena nodded.
“Good,” Lena said.
You set the crayon down. Lena drew the door next, pressing hard with the yellow crayon until the wax went thick and bright against the paper. Your phone stayed quiet. The house stayed locked. The sky outside the windows softened from late gold to blue.
Lena noticed before you said anything.
“I’m getting hungry,” Lena said.
You looked at the clock on the stove.
“Then we can make some dinner,” you said.
Lena slid off the stool.
“I can have cereal,” Lena said.
You looked at her. Lena looked back at you. She already knew. You reached for your phone and opened the notes Pope had watched you type.
“Pope said cereal is not dinner,” you said.
Lena sighed.
“I know,” Lena said.
You raised your eyebrows slightly.
“Then why did you ask?” you asked.
Lena shrugged.
“Sometimes grown-ups forget,” Lena said.
You looked at the note again.
“I wrote it down,” you said.
Lena looked personally betrayed.
“Rude,” Lena said.
You put the phone back on the counter.
“Grilled cheese?” you asked.
Lena dragged herself toward the fridge.
“With cheese to the edges,” Lena said.
“With cheese to the edges,” you repeated.
Lena looked over her shoulder. “And grapes.”
You opened the fridge.
“Cut in half,” you said.
Lena groaned.
“I’m seven,” Lena said.
You took out the grapes.
“Grapes get cut,” you said.
Lena stared at you.
“You sound like Uncle Pope,” Lena said.
You paused with one hand on the refrigerator door.
Then you smiled softly.
“I’m following his rules,” you said.
Lena looked at the floor.
“Good,” Lena said.
The word was quiet.
You did not make her repeat it.
You made grilled cheese. You cut the grapes in half. You sliced an apple and put water in a cup instead of juice.
Lena ate at the counter with Bunny sitting beside her plate.
She left the crusts.
You did not comment.
Halfway through dinner, Lena looked at your phone.
“Did he text?” Lena asked.
You checked the screen.
“Not yet,” you said.
Lena picked up a grape.
“He’s still coming back today,” Lena said.
You nodded.
“He said he is,” you said.
Lena ate the grape.
After dinner, you washed the pan and the plate you had used. You rinsed the knife and wiped the counter where cheese had melted near the cutting board. You did not rearrange anything. You did not open cabinets you did not need.
You cleaned what you and Lena had touched.
Nothing more.
Then you texted Pope again.
You: She ate most of the grilled cheese, all the grapes, and half the apple. She asked for you once. I told her you said you were coming back today. Door is locked.
This time, the reply came after almost five minutes.
Pope: Good.
Lena was coloring the castle plan when you read it aloud.
“He said good,” you said.
Lena nodded without looking up.
“He says that,” Lena said.
You sat beside her again.
“He does,” you said.
Lena colored one tower blue.
“He means it,” Lena said.
You looked at her.
“I think he does,” you said.
Lena pressed the blue crayon harder.
“He doesn’t always say stuff right,” Lena said.
You rested your hands in your lap.
“No?” you asked.
Lena shook her head.
“He says things like he’s mad, but sometimes he’s not mad,” Lena said.
You looked at the yellow shell beside Bunny.
“That can be confusing,” you said.
Lena kept coloring.
“I know what he means,” Lena said.
You watched her press the blue crayon harder.
“Most of the time?” you asked.
Lena nodded.
“Most of the time,” Lena said.
You did not ask what happened the other times. At eight-fifteen, you checked your notes. Lena saw you do it and sighed before you spoke.
“Bed soon?” Lena asked.
You looked at the screen.
“Pajamas first,” you said.
Lena slid off the stool with great reluctance.
“Sometimes teeth first,” Lena said.
You looked at your notes again.
“Pajamas first. Then teeth,” you said.
Lena made a face.
“You really wrote everything,” Lena said.
You nodded.
“I did,” you said.
Lena picked up Bunny from the counter.
“Uncle Pope has a lot of rules,” Lena said.
You thought about Pope’s clipped commands, his short answers, his rough voice around every rule. Then you looked at Lena.
“I think he really wants to keep you safe,” you said.
Lena looked down at Bunny.
“He worries,” Lena said.
You nodded.
“Yeah,” you said. “I think he worries.”
Lena held Bunny closer.
“Sometimes too much,” Lena said.
You kept your voice gentle.
“Maybe,” you said. “But he listened when you said you didn’t want to go to Grandma Smurf’s.”
Lena looked back at you.
“He did,” Lena said.
“He did,” you said.
She took Bunny from the counter and walked down the hall. You followed at a careful distance, not too close, not crowding.
Her room was smaller than you expected.
Lena’s backpack sat by the closet. A few books were stacked on the floor beside the bed. A blanket had been folded unevenly at the foot of the mattress, and a pair of socks had been tucked halfway under the dresser like someone had started to clean and then stopped. You stayed by the doorway. Lena looked back at you.
“You can come in,” Lena said.
You stepped inside and stopped near the dresser.
“Okay,” you said.
Lena opened a drawer and pulled out pajamas with small stars on them. She held the shirt in one hand and looked at you.
“I can do it,” Lena said.
You nodded.
“I’ll be outside the door,” you said.
Lena looked at Bunny.
“If I need help, I can tell you,” Lena said.
You nodded again.
“You can,” you said.
Lena looked relieved by her own rule.
You stepped back into the hallway and turned slightly away to give her privacy.
The house was quiet.
Not calm exactly.
Quiet.
You could hear Lena moving in the room. A drawer closing. Fabric rustling. A small frustrated sound, quickly swallowed.
You waited.
After a few seconds, Lena appeared in the doorway with her shirt twisted at one shoulder.
“I changed my mind,” Lena said.
You looked at her shirt, then at her face.
“Okay,” you said.
You stepped closer.
“Can I fix the sleeve?” you asked.
Lena nodded.
“Yes,” Lena said.
You untwisted the fabric gently and pulled it into place.
“There,” you said.
Lena looked down at herself.
“Good,” Lena said.
You stepped back.
“Good,” you said.
She went to brush her teeth after that.
You stood in the hall, where you could see the front door from one angle and Lena from the other. She brushed for less time than any dentist would have liked, but she did it. She rinsed. She wiped her mouth on the towel.
Then she looked at you in the mirror.
“He’s coming back today?” Lena asked.
You leaned one shoulder lightly against the doorframe.
“He said he is,” you said.
Lena held your gaze in the mirror.
“What if today is almost over?” Lena asked.
Your hand went still.
Only for a second.
“Then we keep the hall light on, and your door cracked until he gets here,” you said.
Lena looked toward the hallway.
“Enough to see?” Lena asked.
You nodded.
“Enough to see the hall,” you said.
Lena nodded.
“That’s how he does it,” Lena said.
You kept your voice soft.
“Then that’s how we’ll do it,” you said.
Lena climbed into bed with Bunny tucked under one arm.
You stayed by the doorway.
Lena placed Bunny near the outside edge of the mattress.
“Outside,” Lena said.
You looked at Bunny.
“So he can guard,” you said.
Lena tucked the blanket around Bunny first.
“He’s good at it,” Lena said.
You smiled a little.
“I bet he is,” you said.
Lena pulled the blanket up to her own chin. You reached for the lamp.
“Do you want this one off?” you asked.
Lena nodded.
“Hall light on,” Lena said.
You switched off the bedroom lamp. Then you turned on the hall light. The warm glow spilled across the floor. You pulled the bedroom door until it was cracked. Lena lifted her head.
“More,” Lena said.
You opened it another inch.
“Like this?” you asked.
Lena studied the gap.
“Little more,” Lena said.
You opened it slightly.
“This?” you asked.
Lena nodded.
“That’s enough,” Lena said.
You stepped back.
“Okay,” you said.
Lena settled against the pillow.
“If he comes back, will you tell me?” Lena asked.
You looked at her through the cracked door.
“If you’re awake,” you said.
Lena frowned.
“If I’m asleep?” Lena asked.
You rested one hand on the doorframe.
“Then I’ll tell him you asked,” you said.
Lena thought about that. Then she nodded.
“Okay,” Lena said.
You kept your voice low.
“Goodnight, Lena,” you said.
Lena’s eyes were already half-closed.
“Goodnight,” Lena said.
You left the hall light on.
You left the door cracked enough that she could see the hall.
You went back to the kitchen and texted Pope.
You: She’s in bed. Hall light is on. Door is cracked enough to see the hall. Bunny is on the outside. Door is locked.
You set the phone on the counter.
Then you washed the blue bowl.
You dried the counter.
You put the crayons back in the box, but left the castle plan where Lena had placed it, beside the line of clean shells and the sea glass. You folded the paper towel and threw it away. You checked the front door once because Pope had said the door stayed locked, and because Lena was asleep down the hall.
Locked.
The phone buzzed.
You picked it up.
Pope: On my way.
You typed back.
You: Okay. We’ll expect you.
Then you sat at the counter with your textbook open and your notebook beside it.
You read the same paragraph four times.
You were halfway through the fifth when headlights moved across the front windows.
You looked at your phone. No new text. Then you heard the key in the lock.
You stayed seated at the counter, one finger tucked between the pages of your textbook.
The door opened quietly. Pope stepped inside. He closed the door behind him and locked it before he looked at you.
You waited while he checked the lock. Once. Then again.
You did not comment.
Pope turned toward the kitchen. His eyes went to you first. Then the counter. Then the sink. Then the hallway.
You closed your textbook.
“Hey,” you said softly.
Pope’s gaze moved to the hallway again.
“She asleep?” Pope asked.
You nodded.
“She’s asleep,” you said.
Pope stayed near the door.
“Okay?” Pope asked.
“She’s okay,” you said.
You stood from the stool, but you did not move toward him.
“She ate most of the grilled cheese, all the grapes, and half the apple,” you said. “No soda. No orange juice. No cereal.”
Pope looked at the counter. You followed his gaze.
“I washed the pan and her plate,” you said. “Only what we used.”
His eyes moved back to you.
You kept going before he had to ask.
“She asked for you twice,” you said. “Once at dinner and once when she was brushing her teeth. Both times, I told her you said you were coming back today.”
Pope’s jaw shifted. You glanced toward the hallway.
“She was in pajamas by eight-twenty,” you said. “Teeth after.”
Pope did not speak. You kept your voice low.
“Hall light is on,” you said. “Door is cracked enough that she can see the hall. Bunny is on the outside.”
Pope’s eyes flicked toward the hallway. You looked toward the front door.
“No one came by,” you said. “Door stayed locked.”
That was the one that changed his breathing.
You saw it.
Barely.
His shoulders did not drop. His face did not soften. Nothing obvious enough that anyone else would have called it relief.
But something in him shifted. Pope walked past the counter and down the hall. His steps were almost silent. You waited in the kitchen. You heard him stop outside Lena’s room. You heard nothing else for a long while.
Down the hall, Pope stood where you had stood earlier and looked through the crack in the door. Hall light on. Bunny outside. Lena asleep.
When Pope came back, his face looked the same. He stopped near the counter. Pope looked down. The clean shells sat in a line beside Bunny’s spot on the counter.
Yellow. Blue-gray. White. Scallop. Green sea glass.
He looked at them for a second too long.
You reached for your notebook.
“Okay,” you said. “I’m gonna head home.”
Pope’s head lifted.
You reached for your tote at the same time Pope did.
His fingers closed around the strap first.
Yours brushed over his knuckles.
It was nothing.
Less than nothing.
A mistake of timing.
Pope let go like the strap had gone hot.
You pulled your hand back too, not startled exactly, but aware.
For one second, the kitchen went too quiet.
Then you reached for the tote again.
“Sorry,” you said.
Pope looked toward the sink.
“Fine,” Pope said.
It was not fine. It was your hand. That was the problem. His eyes moved to the sliding glass door. The beach outside had gone dark.
“Car?” Pope asked.
You slid your notebook into your tote.
“I don’t have it,” you said.
Pope looked back at you. His face tightened. “You walked?”
You tucked your textbook into your bag.
“From campus,” you said. “It’s not that far after class.”
Pope looked toward the dark windows. “No.”
You paused with the tote strap in your hand.
“No?” you asked.
Pope pulled out his phone.
“Cab,” Pope said.
You watched his thumb move over the screen.
“You don’t have to do that,” you said.
Pope did not look up.
“I know,” Pope said.
You glanced toward the front windows.
“I can take the bus,” you said.
Pope’s jaw tightened. “Dark.”
You looked at him.
The word came out flat. Practical. Final.
You nodded once.
“Okay,” you said. “Thank you.”
Pope looked down at his phone.
“Yeah,” Pope said.
The cab took nine minutes.
You put your sandals on near the door and kept your tote against your hip while you waited. Pope stayed near the front window, not beside you, not close enough for it to mean anything.
Close enough to see the street.
You did not fill the quiet. Neither did he. When headlights passed over the front window, Pope looked at his phone. Then he looked outside.
“Cab,” Pope said.
You stepped toward the door.
Pope moved first.
He opened it and looked out before you could. You stopped behind him. He did not look back.
“Wait,” Pope said.
He checked the car. The driver. The plate.
Then he stepped aside.
“That’s it,” Pope said.
You looked up at him.
“Thank you,” you said.
Pope nodded once.
“Yeah,” Pope said.
You stepped onto the porch.
The night air moved cool off the water, carrying salt and dark and the sound of the beach you had walked in daylight.
Pope’s voice stopped you before you reached the steps.
“Text when you’re home,” Pope said.
You turned back.
His face had already closed.
“So I know the car was right,” Pope added.
You nodded.
“I will,” you said.
Pope stayed in the doorway while you walked to the cab.
You did not look back until you reached the car.
When you did, he was still there. One hand on the door. Body blocking the light from inside the house. Watching.
You lifted your hand once.
Pope nodded.
Then you got in.
Pope watched the cab pull away from the curb.
He watched until the taillights disappeared.
Then he locked the door. Checked it. Checked it again.
The house was quiet behind him.
Lena slept down the hall with the light on and the door cracked enough to see.
The kitchen counter was clean.
The shells were lined up beside the castle plan.
Your text came twelve minutes later.
You: Home. Thank you for the cab.
Pope stared at it.
He typed one word.
Good.
He looked at it.
Deleted it.
Typed it again.
Pope: Good.
He sent it.
Then he stood alone in the quiet kitchen with the phone in his hand, the house locked, Lena asleep, and the green sea glass catching the smallest bit of hall light from down the hall.
Pope had asked you to keep Lena safe.
You had.
He had not asked you to make the house easier to come back to.
pairing: bucky barnes x reader | 10.2k words | modern soulmate au
warnings: explicit sexual content (18+), soulmate bond/past life memories, multiple lifetimes, memory flashes, discussions of war, brief references to trauma/recovery, love at first sight across lifetimes, wedding night smut, destiny vs choice, happy ending
summary: when you and bucky reach for the same bag of lemons at the farmer’s market, the touch triggers flashes of the many lifetimes you’ve spent loving each other. as those memories keep surfacing, the two of you have to figure out what it means to fall in love again in the life you’re living now.
authors note: this is very loosely inspired by everything is romantic by charli xcx, and by “loosely” i mean i took several lyrics, made them devastating, and then built an entire soulmate reincarnation love story around them. many many thank you's for this fic! thank you to @/iamthatonefangirl and @/barnesonly for organizing our bwat summer collab; go check out everyone else's work! thank you to my baby, @/pinksplace for giving this idea and listening to me continuously crash out about it🫶 and a very special thank you to @/buckybsdoll for not only beta reading it, but for also encouraging this fic is indeed NOT buns, and i can do hard things. love you all🩷
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Saturday mornings belong to James Buchanan Barnes.
That is what Bucky tells himself, anyway—what he has been telling himself for the better part of three years, ever since recovery stopped feeling like a cliff edge and started, slowly, cautiously, feeling like a road. Not an easy road, not a straight one, but a road all the same. Something he can wake up and keep walking.
Saturday means the same coffee stand on the corner where the barista with the chipped purple nail polish starts making his drink the second she sees him coming. It means the farmer’s market under the green-striped awnings in the square, where he buys a loaf of crusty sourdough from the old Polish couple in stall fourteen and fresh eggs from the woman who always insists the yolks are brighter in spring. It means peaches if they’re in season, because one summer in Wakanda he had bitten into one so ripe it had run down his wrist and made him laugh out loud in the middle of a field, and ever since then peaches have felt like proof of life. It means flowers some3times, too, if the apartment feels especially bare. Something cheap and cheerful in a mason jar on the kitchen counter. Something that says a man can make a home even if he was taught for years he did not deserve one.
It is a good routine. A hard-won one. Bucky likes the honesty of it, the way these small rituals ask nothing of him except that he show up.
This morning, June sun already warming the pavement, his paper cup of coffee hot in his hand, he feels almost light. The market is crowded enough to buzz but not so packed he gets hemmed in. A violinist near the fountain is playing something bright and quick. Someone’s kid is trying to pet every dog within reach. The air smells like basil and strawberries and the faint yeasty sweetness of fresh bread.
Bucky buys his loaf first. Then tomatoes. Then a bunch of green onions. He pauses at the peach stand, testing one for give with his thumb, and decides they need another week.
By the time he reaches the citrus table, the vendor is rearranging pyramids of lemons in rough wooden crates, their skins bright and dimpled in the morning light. Bucky reaches automatically, already picturing chicken piccata for dinner, and another hand reaches at the same exact moment.
Your fingers brush his.
The world splits open.
One second he is standing in the farmer’s market with coffee on his breath and sunlight on the back of his neck, and the next—
Neon. Laughter. Chapel bells tinny through cheap speakers. Your mouth, painted the color of a ripe cherry, open on a breathless laugh. White satin clinging to your hips. A fake Elvis in a rhinestone jumpsuit grinning around too-big teeth beneath a plastic crucifix bolted crooked over the altar.
Bucky gasps.
The bag of lemons slips from both your hands and tumbles to the pavement, yellow fruit rolling in wild directions as if they’ve been startled too.
The vision doesn’t stop there. Visions of different lifetimes flash through his eyes like he’s watching the life of ten different couples all at once.
A steering wheel under his palms, worn smooth with use. Summer wind through open windows. You in cutoff shorts, feet on the dashboard, singing badly and loudly while the road curls ahead of you like a dare.
White sheets. Lace curtains breathing in a warm midnight breeze. Gold band on your finger catching moonlight where your hand presses against his chest. Your mouth moving against his throat with a broken little sound that is half laughter, half prayer.
A rough cabin wall. Splintered pine under his palm. You in a wool shift with your hair braided down your back, cheeks wind-burned, smiling over your shoulder as foxes cry somewhere out in the dark and a baby sleeps in a cradle by the fire.
Smoke and jazz and blackout curtains. East London. Silk black as sin against your skin. Your hand catching his by the wrist before he can disappear back into the war.
A beach. Bright afternoon. Children shrieking at the tide. Orange drinks sweating in glass pitchers while he kneels in the sand with his sleeves rolled up, helping a little girl press shell fragments into the turret of a sandcastle, and you walk toward him laughing, sunlight at your back so fierce it turns you to gold.
Then all of it is gone.
The market snaps back into focus so suddenly it hurts. Sound crashes in—vendors shouting prices, stroller wheels rattling, the violinist sawing away by the fountain. Bucky stumbles backward a step. Across from him, you catch yourself on the edge of the citrus crate, looking exactly as wrecked as he feels.
Your eyes lock on his.
“Oh my God,” you whisper.
Bucky’s heart is pounding hard enough to bruise. “You saw that too.”
It isn’t a question.
In this world, everybody knows about soulmarks and first-flashes. Knows that when you meet the person your soul is tied to, memory can strike like lightning. Some people get a single image. A porch swing. A train platform. A hand in a hospital room. Some get a rush of several lives at once, enough to leave them reeling for days. Most people dream of it when they’re young. Spend adolescence looking at every stranger a little too long. Wondering when it will happen, if it will happen, whether the person on the other end of them is alive or halfway across the planet or just around the corner.
Bucky stopped wondering a long time ago.
HYDRA did not leave much room for destiny.
You swallow. “That was not normal.”
“No,” he says, voice rough. “No, that was… not.”
The lemon vendor is gathering the fallen fruit with admirable indifference, the kind that says he has seen stranger things at this market and will see stranger still. “You two need a minute?” he asks.
You make a sound that could be a laugh or a near-sob. “Maybe five.”
Bucky buys the entire bag of lemons because it feels like the least insane thing he can do, then follows you blindly toward the edge of the square where there’s a row of benches under a sycamore tree. The shade dapples your face when you sit, and for one unmoored second he knows the pattern of it. Not from now. From somewhere else.
He stays standing until you glance up at him and pat the spot beside you with a shaky hand.
“You’re real?” you ask once he sits.
He almost laughs. “I was about to ask you that.”
You rub your palms over your knees as if trying to ground yourself. You’re wearing denim shorts and a white tank top and sunglasses pushed up into your hair, and you look like someone who belongs to summer. Not delicate exactly, but bright. Alive in a way that makes Bucky’s ribs ache. “I know this is a weird question,” you say, “but are you going to tell me your name, or am I just supposed to keep calling you fake-Elvis-groom in my head?”
“Bucky,” he says automatically. Then, because he has spent years relearning how to offer the softer pieces of himself without flinching, he adds, “James. But people call me Bucky.”
Your mouth curves, the first real smile since the vision hit. “I’m glad to know at least one of us looked better in Vegas.”
He huffs out a breath that is almost a laugh. “I looked good.”
“You looked reckless.”
“That too.”
You tell him your name, and the moment it lands between you something in his chest settles with a frightening kind of certainty. Not because fate says so. Not because the universe stamped your names together in some cosmic ledger. Because the sound of it moves through him like recognition. Like stepping into a room he did not realize he had been trying to get back to his whole life.
For a while neither of you says anything. The market hums on around you. Somewhere nearby, a dog sneezes. Someone drops a crate. Bucky stares at the paper sleeve around his cooling coffee and tries to swallow around the strange thickness in his throat.
“I’ve heard of people getting strong first-flashes,” you say at last, quieter now. “But not like that. That was… a lot.”
“A lot,” he agrees.
You tilt your head toward him. “How many do you remember already?”
He thinks of the chapel. The truck. The bed with the lace curtains. The cabin. The club in London. The beach. “Six,” he says. “You?”
“Same.”
A breeze stirs the leaves overhead. It smells like sun-warmed bark and citrus oil.
“I don’t know what to do now,” you admit.
That, strangely, is what steadies him.
Because Bucky knows that feeling. Knows what it is to be handed something overwhelming and not know where to put it. Knows that survival sometimes looks like doing the next smallest thing instead of solving the whole impossible shape at once.
He glances toward the coffee stand, then back at you. “You want to start with coffee?”
You look at him for one long beat, then laugh softly, incredulously, like maybe you can’t believe that is the question that just saved you from bolting. “Yeah,” you say. “I think I do.”
So that is how it begins.
Not with thunder. Not with immediate declarations. Not with some cinematic collision that resolves every loneliness in a heartbeat.
With coffee. With your hand wrapped around a paper cup. With the two of you sitting at the edge of the market, dizzy on each other’s borrowed memories, learning the outlines of the present slowly enough to survive it.
He learns that you come to the farmer’s market most Saturdays too, though usually later. That you always buy flowers you don’t strictly need. That you live twenty minutes away in an apartment with bad plumbing and excellent light. That you work in graphic design and keep odd hours and have a weakness for peaches even when they’re underripe. You learn that he is in therapy. That he likes routine because sometimes routine is the difference between drifting and staying. That his apartment in Brooklyn is small but his windows face west and the light there in the evening is good. That he cooks. That he bakes bread when the weather turns cold because kneading something until it rises feels like a miracle he can participate in.
He does not tell you everything that morning. Not about HYDRA, not about the winter that lasted decades, not about the names he no longer answers to. But you do not push. Maybe because you can feel, in the strange echoing chambers of whatever ties the two of you together, that he has already been dragged open too many times to count.
When you part, it is almost noon.
You both hover awkwardly by the fountain, neither one wanting to be the first to say goodbye.
“So,” you say, shifting the bouquet of daisies and feverfew you bought somewhere along the way into one hand. “Do soulmate rules say we’re supposed to immediately move in together now, or is there like a grace period?”
Bucky smiles before he can stop himself. “I think there’s paperwork.”
“Tragic.”
He glances at the lemons peeking out of your canvas bag. “You still owe me half of these.”
You grin then, bright and quick and devastating. “That sounds fake.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But it’s a reason to see you again.”
Something softens in your expression. “Okay,” you say. “Then I’ll take the fake reason.”
He gives you his number. You type your own into his phone and hand it back, your fingers brushing his again. No flash this time. Just warmth. Just the sharp, impossible awareness of skin.
“All right, Bucky Barnes,” you say. “Text me when you want to split custody of the lemons.”
He watches you walk away.
At the corner, you turn and look back.
The city seems to hold its breath.
Then you smile at him one more time and disappear into the crowd.
Jesus Christ on a plastic sign
The Vegas lifetime comes back first.
Not all at once. In drips. In flashes that catch Bucky at strange moments over the next few days, as if the memory has been jarred loose and is still deciding how much of itself to reveal.
He is washing dishes on Tuesday night when he looks down at a ring of soap suds circling the drain and suddenly he is twenty-six—or thirty, or some other age in some other body—and the air smells like desert heat trapped in asphalt. He can hear slot machines from the lobby below the motel balcony and your laugh from inside the room, where the air conditioner is fighting a losing battle and you are standing in front of the cracked mirror pinning your hair up with bobby pins you bought from the gift shop downstairs.
“Tell me again,” you say, smiling at him through the mirror, “why exactly we’re doing this.”
Because you had met forty-eight hours earlier in line for dollar margaritas and spent the night talking until sunrise on the motel roof. Because you had missed your flight on purpose. Because he had looked at you over watery eggs in a diner the next morning and known, with the same bone-deep certainty he feels now on a Brooklyn Tuesday in a kitchen lit by one warm overhead bulb, that life was sometimes simplest when it was ridiculous.
Because you had asked if he wanted to get married as a joke and then kept grinning at him after he said yes.
“Tax benefits,” he answers solemnly, sitting on the end of the bed in his borrowed suit jacket.
You laugh. “Romantic.”
“Practical.”
“Liar.”
You cross the room barefoot, white dress swishing around your thighs. It is not really a wedding dress. It is a satin slip from a resale shop with a tiny champagne stain at the hem and thin straps that make him forget his own name every time he looks at you. You stop between his knees and hook your fingers in the lapels of his jacket.
“Tell me not to do it,” you whisper. There is laughter in your voice but something trembling under it too, a softness that asks to be taken seriously. “Tell me we’re being insane and I’ll call it off.”
He looks up at you and feels his whole impossible life narrow into one clean, brilliant line. “I think,” he says, resting his hands on your hips, “that if we don’t do this, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life wondering why I let the best idea I ever had walk out of a motel in Vegas.”
Your expression cracks open into something so nakedly happy it almost undoes him.
The chapel is tiny and tacky and perfect. The plastic crucifix is screwed above a velvet curtain backdrop. The fake Elvis officiant keeps winking like he personally invented love. You say your vows through laughter because your bouquet is made of silk roses that smell faintly like dust and the minister’s sideburn is half detached. Bucky can barely get the ring onto your finger because his hands won’t stop shaking.
Afterward, you run into the sun with your shoes in one hand, your new husband’s name in your mouth as if you were born to say it.
On the sidewalk outside the chapel, there’s a sign for a twenty-four-hour wedding package with JESUS CHRIST LOVES YOU printed above a blinking arrow in red bulbs, and the whole thing is so absurd that you double over laughing. Bucky catches you around the waist before you can fall.
“Mrs. Barnes,” he says into your hair, tasting the words.
You lift your face to his, eyes wet from laughing. “That sounds made up.”
“Probably is.”
You kiss him anyway.
In the present, water runs cold over Bucky’s hands in the sink. He blinks hard and finds himself staring at a plate gone slippery in his grip.
He dries his hands, sits on the edge of the counter, and texts you before he can think better of it.
Got another one. Vegas.
The reply comes so fast it is almost a breath.
me too
Then, after a beat:
did we really get married because the line for margaritas was too long and we needed something else to do?
Bucky smiles helplessly at his phone.
we were committed to the bit
You start texting every day after that.
At first it is practical. Did you remember this detail? Did the chapel carpet have stars on it or was that just me? Do you think the fake Elvis was secretly judging us?
But the practical gives way to easy almost before either of you notices. He sends you a picture of a dog in a raincoat outside the bodega. You send him a photo of the flowers you bought even though your rational brain said you didn’t need them. He tells you when therapy goes badly. You tell him when work is making your eyes cross. By Friday, your name on his screen feels less like a surprise and more like the continuation of something that was already in motion long before lemons hit pavement.
The next Saturday, he finds you at the market before he reaches the citrus stand.
You are standing at the peach table, frowning at a fruit in your hand with the seriousness of someone evaluating a gemstone.
“You know those need another week,” he says.
You glance up and smile in a way that makes his whole body wake up. “I know. I’m being optimistic.”
“Reckless.”
“Wow. You meet one man in Vegas and suddenly he thinks he knows you.”
He laughs, and there is no fear in it this time.
You spend the morning together again. Coffee, bread, flowers. At the tomato stall your shoulder brushes his and warmth skates down his spine, but no memory comes. At the herb table he tucks a stray basil stem behind your ear and your breath catches, but still nothing.
It hits later, when the two of you are leaving the market and pass an old pickup truck parked crooked by the curb, windows down, classic rock spilling tinny from the speakers. You stop dead. So does he.
Your head turns toward him.
His chest caves in around a heartbeat that is no longer entirely his own.
Winding roads, doing manual drive
In that life, you are eighteen and everything feels enormous.
Summer stretches in front of you like a dare. The town is small enough to suffocate if you stay still too long, so you never do. Bucky has a beat-up blue truck with a sticky clutch and a radio that only works when you slap the dashboard in exactly the right place. He teaches you how to drive manual in the abandoned church parking lot at the edge of town, laughing every time the engine stalls because you keep popping the clutch too fast.
“You’re mean,” you tell him, gripping the steering wheel.
“I’m helpful.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Because you cuss like my grandpa.”
You cut him a glare so ineffective it makes him grin wider. He reaches across the bench seat to guide your hand to the gearshift, his palm warm over your knuckles.
“Slow,” he says. “Feel it catch. Don’t force it.”
Outside, cicadas scream in the heat. The sun is dropping behind the trees, turning the windshield gold.
You try again. This time the truck lurches, shudders, then rolls forward smooth as breath.
“Oh my God,” you say, startled into laughter. “I did it.”
Bucky looks at you the way boys in movies are always supposed to look but almost never do in real life—like the sight of you happy is enough to rearrange his whole future. “Yeah,” he says softly. “You did.”
Once you know how, you drive everywhere with no destination at all. Back roads. County lines. Winding stretches of blacktop between soybean fields and creeks and gas stations with flickering signs. You drive because gas is cheap and the cab of the truck is a world no one else can enter. You drive because Bucky’s knee pressed against yours feels better than anything either of you have a name for yet. You drive because being young and in love can make movement feel holy.
Sometimes you pull over on the shoulder just to watch the sky bruise purple over the fields. Sometimes you kiss at red lights until the truck behind you honks. Sometimes you park at the overlook above the quarry and share a bag of gas station peanuts while Bucky tells you all the places he wants to see one day, voice gone soft with wanting.
“Anywhere specific?” you ask.
He shrugs one shoulder. “As long as you’re there.”
You laugh because you think he is teasing. Then you look at him and realize he is not.
The air changes.
He reaches up, pushes a strand of hair behind your ear with trembling fingers. “I know we’re eighteen,” he says, trying for casual and failing spectacularly. “I know people say that means we don’t know anything. But I know this.”
Your breath catches.
Behind you, the truck ticks and cools in the dusk.
“I know,” he says again, “that I could drive with you forever and never get tired of the road.”
Then he kisses you, and the whole wide summer tilts.
The memory drops away while a bus sighs to the curb and someone nearby curses over a jammed stroller wheel.
You are breathing hard. So is Bucky.
“That one hurt,” you say quietly.
He knows what you mean. Not because it was bad. Because it was good in the simple devastating way only youth can be. Because watching some other version of yourself love with that much unguarded certainty feels like pressing a bruise you didn’t know you had.
“You drove stick,” he says.
“I was bad at it.”
“You were terrible.”
You laugh then, startled and watery, and he thinks he would do almost anything to keep hearing that sound.
There is a diner half a block away with cracked vinyl booths and a waitress who calls everyone honey. He nods toward it. “Come on.”
“Is this where we process our cosmic psychic episodes now?”
“Pancakes seem medically necessary.”
So you sit across from each other in a booth smelling faintly of syrup and coffee grounds while the waitress tops off your mugs and pretends not to notice that the two of you keep staring. The market bag rests by Bucky’s boots. Your flowers lie across the seat beside you like a witness.
“You ever think about what it means?” you ask after a while.
He traces a thumb over the seam of his coffee cup. “The past lives?”
“The soulmate thing. Any of it.” Your gaze is steady on his. “Like… are we supposed to just trust that because we loved each other before, we automatically will now?”
Bucky is quiet for so long, the waitress comes by to ask if he wants more bacon.
When she leaves, he exhales. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I think maybe it’d scare me if it worked like that.”
You nod once. “Me too.”
Because obligation is not love. Because destiny without choice starts to look too much like a cage.
Bucky leans forward, forearms on the table. “I don’t want this to be automatic,” he says, surprising himself with the urgency in his own voice. “I don’t want you because of… cosmic paperwork.” Your mouth twitches at that. He presses on. “I want to know you. Now. Here. I want whatever this is to be because we choose it.”
Something in your face softens so completely it leaves him winded.
“Okay,” you say.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” you repeat. “Then we do it the hard way.”
His mouth curves. “Dating?”
“Scandalous, I know.”
He looks at you across the table, sunlight striping the booth through the blinds, and feels a piece of his life click gently into place.
“Yeah,” he says. “Dating.”
The smile you give him then follows him home and waits with him through the week and sits with him at the edge of sleep. It is still there when he picks you up for your first actual date on Thursday, when you buzz him into your apartment building wearing jeans and a green top that makes your eyes look unfair, when he spends ten whole seconds forgetting why he came.
You cook together in his kitchen because restaurants feel like too much too soon. Lemon chicken. Roasted potatoes. Salad with too much parmesan because you insist there is no such thing.
It is simple. It is easy in the kind of way Bucky once would have distrusted on principle. You move around his kitchen as if you’ve already learned its shape. You lean against the counter and steal bites from the pan. You laugh when he pretends to guard the sauce from you and do not look startled when he laughs back.
After dinner, you help him wash dishes. After dishes, you stand by the open window drinking wine while the city breathes warm and loud below.
“I had a nice time,” you say, glancing at him over the rim of your glass.
His pulse kicks. “Good.”
“I’m serious. For a man who hoards lemons as a manipulation tactic, you clean up pretty well.”
He snorts. “I’ll put that on my dating profile.”
“You should. Honest branding.”
He smiles, and you smile back, and the air between you changes.
It is not sudden. Not violent. Just the slow, unmistakable tightening of a thread.
He sets his glass down first.
You do the same.
When he steps closer, you do not move away.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks, because in every life he has ever loved you there has been want in it, but in this one he wants the shape of your yes more than he wants air.
Your eyes go soft. “Please.”
He kisses you carefully at first, because he is not eighteen in a truck anymore and he is not some reckless fool in Vegas with rings in his pocket and a grin too wide for his face. He is a man who has taken years to learn how to touch gently. Who knows what damage carelessness can do.
But then your hand lifts to his cheek and your mouth opens beneath his and the careful part of him turns molten.
The flash hits so hard he breaks the kiss with a gasp.
You are hit by it too. He sees it in the way your pupils blow wide, the way your hand clutches the front of his shirt.
“Oh,” you breathe.
The apartment falls away.
Early nights in white sheets with lace curtains
The room is small and gold with lamplight.
In that life, you have been married for six hours.
Your shoes are by the door. Your veil lies in a pearly heap over the chair back. Somewhere downstairs the last of the wedding guests are still laughing over cake and champagne, but up here the inn is quiet except for the tick of rain against the lace-curtained window and your own uneven breathing.
You stand with your back to Bucky near the bed, fingers trembling where they rest at your throat. The silk of your nightdress skims the backs of your knees. Your wedding band glints like a promise.
He has never seen anything more beautiful.
You are not delicate. Nor candlelight that makes you look like something painted. You are real in all the ways that matter most—nervous and wanting and trying to be brave.
You glance at him over your shoulder, and the vulnerability in your face brings him to his knees faster than reverence ever could.
“We don’t have to,” he says softly.
Your brows draw together. “I want to.”
“I know.” He steps closer, slow enough to stop if you need it. “But I want you to know we don’t have to do anything tonight except be married.”
Something in you loosens. Relief. Love. A tenderness so intense it almost aches to look at.
“I want to be married,” you whisper.
He smiles, cupping your jaw. “You already are.”
“No,” you say, eyes luminous. “I mean like this. Here. With you.” Your breath shakes. “I want tonight.”
He kisses you then, gentle enough to ask, deep enough to answer.
The nightdress slips from your shoulders a little at a time. He learns your skin by lamplight and fingertips, by the soft sounds you make when he touches somewhere that matters, by the way you cling to him when pleasure finally starts to outrun nerves. The white sheets twist around your legs. The lace curtains stir in the open window. Rain cools the room, but your bodies are all heat.
You are not shy for long.
He kisses his way down the column of your throat, your collarbones, the slope of your breast. Your fingers knot in his hair when his mouth finds your nipple and he sucks gently, then harder at the sound that tears from you. By the time he lowers you onto the bed your hair is loose around your shoulders and your face is flushed and he is so hard it hurts.
“Bucky,” you whisper, reaching for him.
“Tell me what you need.”
You laugh softly, dazed with wanting. “You. Obviously.”
He smiles against your mouth, then works two fingers between your thighs and nearly loses his mind at how wet you are for him already. Your hips jerk. Your eyes flutter shut.
“That’s it,” he murmurs. “There you go.”
He takes his time because he can. Because there is no war waiting outside this room, no clock to race. Because after the vows and the music and the endless hands grabbing at you all day, he wants this moment to belong only to the two of you. He strokes you until your body learns the shape of pleasure under his hands. He brings you apart once with his fingers, your back arching off the bed, then again with his mouth until you are clutching the sheets and crying his name into the rain-soft dark.
When he finally settles between your thighs, braced on one forearm, your gaze on his is wrecked and certain all at once.
“You still sure?” he asks, voice gone rough as gravel.
You wrap a hand around the back of his neck and pull him down until your foreheads touch. “I have never been more sure of anything.”
He pushes into you slowly, giving you every inch with a care that feels like worship. The stretch of you around him steals the breath from his lungs. Your mouth opens on a gasp. He stills.
“Okay?” he whispers.
You nod, biting your lip. “Move.”
So he does.
Slow at first. Then deeper when your nails dig into his shoulders and you lift to meet him. The bed creaks softly. Rain taps the window. He kisses you whenever your face crumples with feeling, every thrust turning more desperate as your body opens for him. You cling to him, legs wrapped around his hips, whispering his name like a secret you intend to keep forever.
When you come, it is with your mouth against his throat and tears bright at the corners of your eyes.
He follows with his forehead pressed to yours, his whole body shaking with it.
Afterward, you lie tangled in white sheets gone warm and wrinkled around you, the lace curtains stirring like breath. He draws lazy circles over your stomach while you trace the line of his mouth with one sleepy fingertip.
“This counts as a successful wedding night,” you murmur.
He laughs softly. “Good. I was hoping.”
You turn into him, already half asleep. “Anywhere is home,” you whisper, the words blurred at the edges with exhaustion, “if you’re in the bed.”
He never forgets them.
When the memory releases you both, Bucky is still standing in his apartment with his chest heaving and your hands fisted in his shirt.
The kitchen light is too bright. The city outside the window too loud. He can taste you without ever having had you in this life.
Your face is flushed all the way down your neck.
“Well,” you say after a stunned second, voice frayed. “That was wildly inconvenient timing.”
He laughs once, brokenly, because if he does not laugh he might combust.
“You okay?” he asks.
Your gaze lifts to his, honest and heated. “Ask me in five minutes.”
He brushes his knuckles over your cheek, a touch so careful it is almost absurd after what you both just saw. “I mean it.”
“I know.” Your hand slides down to cover his where it rests against your face. “Yeah. I’m okay. A little overwhelmed. A lot turned on. But okay.”
Heat hits him hard and immediate. He closes his eyes for a second.
You laugh softly. “Right. Sorry. That was—”
“Don’t apologize.”
When he opens his eyes again, your expression has gentled. “Bucky.”
He knows what you are asking. Not just whether he wants you. That is almost insultingly obvious. You are asking whether he can separate memory from present. Whether he can stand in this kitchen and want what is in front of him without letting the weight of every before crush what could be now.
He answers by leaning down and resting his forehead against yours.
“I want this,” he says quietly. “But I want our first time in this life to be ours.”
Your breath leaves you in a rush. So does some tightness in his chest he hadn’t fully realized he was carrying.
“Okay,” you whisper.
He kisses you once more, soft and lingering. Then he walks you home because if you stay the night he is not sure either of you will survive your own restraint, and because there is something holy in wanting badly and still choosing patience.
At your door, you touch his wrist before he can step back.
“For the record,” you murmur, eyes warm, “that other us had very good taste.”
He grins helplessly. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I get it now.”
Then you kiss him quick and disappear inside with a smile that haunts him for days.
The weeks that follow feel like being built from the inside out.
The flashbacks do not stop, but they become less like ambushes and more like weather—still sudden, still powerful, but no longer catastrophic. A scent, a sound, a patch of light can call one up. Sometimes you text each other in the middle of the workday with fragments: did you remember the red truck in the mountain life had one broken taillight? or I think Bucharest-you stole that robe from the hotel. Sometimes a memory arrives whole when you are together and leaves both of you laughing or aching or red-faced in its wake.
In between, you date.
Real dates. Present-tense ones.
You go to a bookstore in Cobble Hill and accidentally spend two hours arguing about whether people who dog-ear paperbacks can be trusted. You sit in the park eating takeout and watch a wedding party take photos under the arch. You make pasta in your kitchen and burn the garlic because you are too busy kissing against the fridge. You let him meet your friends, who like him immediately and try not to look too smug about it. He tells Sam about you over beers and gets stared at for a full ten seconds before Sam breaks into the kind of grin that means Bucky will never hear the end of this.
And slowly, because slowness is another name for mercy, you get used to the fact of each other.
One night in late July, you fall asleep on Bucky’s couch halfway through a movie. Your head ends up in his lap, your bare feet tucked under his thigh, the credits rolling blue light over the room. He does not move for an hour because the weight of you there feels too precious to disturb.
When you wake, drowsy and disoriented, you blink up at him and smile.
“There you are,” he says before he can stop himself.
The words do something strange to the air.
You sit up slowly, blanket slipping down your shoulders. “What?”
He swallows. “Nothing. I just—”
But then the memory comes, not violent this time. Gentle as smoke.
You see it in each other’s faces as it arrives.
Sleepyhead ’cause all the fucking foxes kept me awake last night
The cabin is barely more than one room and a stubborn prayer.
In that life, winter has a vendetta against you. The land is raw and half-finished around you—trees felled and stacked, fields only partly cleared, the nearest neighbors hours away by horse. Everything aches. Your hands, your backs, your hope.
And still, you build.
By day Bucky swings an axe until his shoulders burn and your tiny patch of earth starts, slowly, to look like something that might feed you come spring. By day you mend, cook, scrub, carry water, keep accounts in a little ledger with cramped neat writing, and somehow still find the energy to laugh when the hen gets loose again and wreaks havoc under the table.
By night you sit by the fire mending his shirts while he carves handles for tools and the baby—your daughter, round-cheeked and solemn—sleeps in a cradle made from wood Bucky planed himself.
It is not easy. God, it is not easy. There are weeks when the roof leaks and the wind gets through the chinks in the walls and your flour goes sour and the loneliness of so much open land makes your chest feel flayed raw. There are days Bucky comes in from the field looking so worn you have to bite the inside of your cheek not to cry.
But there is you. There is him. There is the little sleeping weight of your child and the fire and the bed you built with your own hands.
Sometimes that is enough to make hardship look almost like devotion.
One night in early autumn, the foxes scream outside the cabin so long and loud that neither of you gets any real sleep. By dawn you are cross and bleary-eyed, hair half falling from its braid as you stand over the hearth trying to stir cornmeal mush that refuses to thicken.
“Sleepyhead,” Bucky says softly when he comes up behind you.
You elbow him weakly. “I’ll kill you.”
He laughs into your hair and wraps his arms around your waist anyway, his chin settling on your shoulder. Outside, the new fence leans and the world is still cold and demanding. Inside, his body is warm all along your back.
“We’re doing it,” he murmurs after a while.
You blink at the pot. “Doing what?”
“Building it.” He turns his face into your temple. “A life.”
The words are simple. They hit with the force of revelation.
You tip your head back against his shoulder and close your eyes. In the other room your daughter stirs. The foxes have gone quiet. Morning light pushes pale and stubborn through the little window above the table.
“We are,” you whisper.
He kisses your cheek. “Told you I’d build you something.”
You smile, tired and full to aching. “You built me everything.”
The memory fades with the warm dim glow of Bucky’s living room around you.
You are still on his couch, the television a muted wash of menu screens no one bothered to turn off. For a while neither of you says anything.
Then you reach out and lace your fingers through his.
“That one felt different,” you say.
He nods. “Yeah.”
Not youthful. Not fevered. Not all heat and spark and want. That life had been built plank by plank. Through work. Through weather. Through choosing each other when the choosing was made of practical things—fences, soup, babies, roofs, morning fires.
It lands in him heavier than some of the others. Maybe because recovery has taught him what it means to build anything worth having by hand.
“I liked them,” you say quietly. “That version of us.”
He rubs his thumb over your knuckles. “Me too.”
You glance around his apartment then, at the bookshelf he assembled crooked and fixed himself, at the herb pot on the windowsill, at the loaf of bread cooling under a dish towel on the counter.
“You’re doing it too, you know,” you murmur.
He looks at you. “Doing what?”
“Building a life.”
The thing in his chest, scarred and careful and too often braced for loss, goes very still.
You squeeze his hand. “It’s a good one.”
He kisses you then because there is no other answer big enough.
By August, you keep a toothbrush at his place.
By September, there is a sweater of yours folded over the back of one of his dining chairs, two hair ties on his bathroom sink, a half-used bottle of your fancy conditioner in his shower that he is under strict orders not to touch. None of it is dramatic. None of it is announced. The shape of your presence simply grows until it feels absurd to remember the apartment before it.
The flash that takes you next comes in early October, on a rainy Thursday when you duck with him into a jazz bar in the West Village to escape a downpour.
The room is all amber light and low ceilings and cigarette-scarred booths preserved from another era. A singer in a black dress stands by the piano, crooning into a microphone. Bucky goes still before you even make it to the bar.
You know before the memory hits what it will be.
The note hangs in the air.
Then London rushes in.
late nights in black silk in east london
The war has made everything look dimmer around the edges.
Bucky is young in the way only war can make a man young—old enough to be exhausted by it, young enough to still be surprised by beauty. He is stationed overseas for too long in a city stitched with blackout curtains and ration books and the bruise-colored exhaustion of people trying very hard to act as if life is still ordinary.
Then one wet December night, a fellow soldier drags him down a narrow stairwell off an alley in East London and the whole world changes shape.
The club is hidden beneath a tailor’s shop with no sign out front. Music seeps through the floorboards before the door even opens. Inside, the room glows low and gold around the edges, tables crowded close, voices pitched just above the band. Women in silk and men in uniform and civilians with danger in their smiles. Someone is laughing at the bar like the war has never existed. Someone else is dancing with one shoe off.
And there you are.
You should not stick out. You’re not center stage or demanding attention. You’re leaning one hip against the bar in black silk gloves and a slip dress that gleams when you move, listening to the pianist with your head tilted slightly as if you know a secret about the song.
Bucky sees you and forgets how war works.
Maybe he forgets how breathing works too.
“Careful,” his friend mutters, following his line of sight. “That one looks expensive.”
Bucky barely hears him.
When you look over and catch him staring, you smile. Not coy. Curious, amused, entirely too direct. Then you lift your glass in a tiny salute.
He is doomed.
Later, after he has found enough courage or foolishness to cross the room, you tell him your brother runs supplies out of the docks and your mother thinks this place is scandalous and your favorite thing in the world is men who look like they’d fall apart if a woman in black silk talked to them too long.
“I am not falling apart,” he says, already half gone.
You laugh, low and delighted. “No? That’s a shame. You’d be awfully handsome doing it.”
You dance with him before midnight. Then again after. The band slows, the room blurs, and you fit against him so easily it feels less like meeting and more like remembering a step he somehow learned before birth.
Outside, the rain has stopped. The alley smells like wet brick and smoke.
“Are you always this easy?” you ask when he walks you to the corner.
“Only in London.”
“Convenient.”
You stop beneath a streetlamp draped in wartime dimming paint. Your lipstick has worn soft at the edges. His gloves are damp. Somewhere far off, a siren starts and then dies.
“I don’t know how long I’m here,” he says, because war steals the illusion of endless time from a man pretty quick.
You look at him with that same level, fearless steadiness you will carry in every life. “Then don’t waste the nights you’ve got.”
So he doesn’t.
He spends every free hour he can find with you in that black silk East London life. Dancing in hidden clubs. Eating chips from newspaper parcels by the river. Kissing in doorways while the city holds its breath between bombings. Falling in love so fast it would look irresponsible to anyone not living under the same shadow.
On his last night before shipping out again, this time to Bucharest, he finds you in the club after closing, curled barefoot on the stage in your black dress with your knees drawn up, humming to yourself while the pianist smokes by the door.
He sits beside you. The stage creaks.
You do not ask him if he is leaving. You already know.
For a long moment you just lean into him shoulder to shoulder, breathing in the dark.
Then you take his hand and lace your fingers with his as if you have always had the right.
“I hate war,” you say flatly.
“Yeah.”
“I hate that it teaches people to love in a hurry.”
He turns to look at you, but your face is tipped toward the empty room. “Maybe,” he says after a while, “it just teaches people not to waste time pretending they don’t.”
That makes you smile a little, though your eyes shine.
When you finally kiss him, it feels like grief and promise all tangled together.
“I’d have found you anyway,” you whisper against his mouth.
He believes you.
Presently, the jazz bar swims back around you in amber and brass.
Your hand is flat over your heart. Bucky is gripping the edge of the bar hard enough his knuckles ache.
“You were terrifying in that one,” he murmurs.
You blink at him. “Terrifying?”
“You had me done in about twelve seconds.”
Your laugh spills out warm and bright enough to make nearby heads turn. “Good.”
He stares at you, at the woman in front of him and the woman in black silk and the impossible thread between them, and something old in him loosens. That London memory is the first one that brushes directly up against the era he remembers in his bones. The first one that lets him feel, without the cold hand of history around its throat, that he once had youth. Flirtation. A version of himself that existed before damage became the loudest fact in the room.
Later, walking you home under a shared umbrella, he tells you more.
Not everything. Not all at once. But more.
About Brooklyn in the forties. About enlisted men and too much bravado and the way the world sharpened at the edges when war started circling. About the years after, in pieces, with pauses long enough to breathe in between. You listen without interrupting except to ask where it hurts. Not where it happened. Where it hurts. The difference matters so much he nearly stops in the middle of the sidewalk.
At your building, rain dripping from the umbrella’s edges, you cup his face and kiss him like he is something to return to, not something to be rescued.
That night he sleeps six straight hours for the first time in weeks.
The last of the big memories comes in November.
By then, the market has become yours together. Saturday mornings are no longer Bucky’s alone. They are yours in the plural, so natural now he sometimes forgets to be startled by it. Coffee for two. Bread for two. Peaches finally back in season for a heartbeat before the weather turns. Your fingers hooked through one of the canvas bag straps while he carries the heavier side.
At the stall with the glass-bottled lemonades and orange sodas, you reach for a bright neon-orange drink at the same time he does.
The glass knocks against his ring finger.
Sunlight slams through him.
Neon orange drinks on the beach
Salt lives in the walls of that house.
Here, you and Bucky live in a little coastal town where everyone knows everybody’s business and no one minds much as long as you bring enough food to the potluck. The house is white clapboard with a porch swing and chipped blue shutters. Sand collects in the doorway no matter how often you sweep. Wind rattles the windows in winter and smells like sunscreen in summer.
You have children in that life. Three of them.
A girl with your laugh and Bucky’s serious eyes. A boy who climbs everything he’s told not to. A baby still soft at the wrists who rides your hip with one fist full of your shirt.
The beach is five minutes from your front door. On hot afternoons you walk there loaded like pack animals—blankets, towels, snacks, toys, a cooler that bumps against Bucky’s leg every other step, the toddler already whining for the ocean before you’ve even crossed the dune grass.
It is a beautiful chaos. Your favorite kind.
The day memory gives you is bright enough to ache.
The sky is clear blue from edge to edge. Your youngest is asleep under the shade tent with one plump foot sticking free of the blanket. Your son is digging a moat around a sandcastle with all the focus of a man handling explosives. Your daughter, solemn with purpose, is handing Bucky shell fragments one by one so he can decorate the towers properly.
“No, Daddy,” she says with immense patience. “That one goes there.”
Bucky, thirty-something and sun-browned and already half buried in sand because the children have no respect for rank, nods gravely. “My mistake.”
You come down from the boardwalk carrying a tray of neon-orange lemonades in plastic cups, ice clinking. Condensation slicks your fingers. The sun catches on the rims of the cups until they glow like tiny lanterns.
Bucky looks up when your shadow falls across the sand.
Even after years, even with sunscreen on your nose and beach hair whipping your cheeks, he looks at you like there has never been anyone else worth the trouble of sight.
“You’re my favorite person,” he says as you hand him a drink.
You arch a brow. “Even over the tiny tyrants?”
“Depends. Are they giving me lemonade?”
Your daughter takes her cup in both hands and squints up at you. “Mama, Daddy made the castle wrong.”
You laugh. “I’m shocked.”
“It was sabotage,” Bucky says.
The children shout over each other. The baby wakes and starts fussing. A gull swoops dangerously low near the pretzel bag. The tide inches closer. Everything is loud and sandy and sticky and imperfect.
It is paradise.
Later, when the children are collapsing in a sugar crash on towels striped green and white, Bucky stretches out beside you and tugs you down until your head rests on his chest. The ocean hisses and folds itself a few yards away.
“You think,” he says after a while, fingers combing absently through your damp hair, “we’ll ever get tired of this?”
You tip your face up. “The beach?”
“This.”
The life. The family. The ordinary miracle of it.
You can feel the answer in him before he says it. In the steady beat under your ear. In the salt-warmed skin of him. In the children making sleepy, disgruntled sounds nearby because even paradise requires snacks and naps and somebody always getting sunscreen in their eye.
“No,” you say softly. “I don’t think so.”
His mouth brushes your forehead. “Good.”
Because in every lifetime, it turns out, what the two of you build is not grandeur.
It is a table. A bed. A road. A cabin. A dance floor. A beach towel in the sun. A thousand tiny places where love gets to put its shoes by the door and stay awhile.
When the memory loosens its grip, you are back at the market with cold glass sweating in your hand.
You are crying.
So is Bucky, though he only realizes it when you reach up and wipe at his cheek with your thumb.
“That one was rude,” you say thickly.
He laughs through the ache in his throat. “Yeah.”
It isn’t the children, not really. Though that got him. It’s the ordinariness of it. The ease. The way love in that life had settled into the bones of things so thoroughly that joy looked almost plain. A beach day. Lemonade. Sand. A family.
A future.
You look at him with tears still bright in your eyes. “Do you ever think maybe that’s why it keeps happening?”
“What?”
“Us.” You glance down at the bottle in your hand, the impossible orange brightness of it. “Not because we’re destined in some giant dramatic way. Maybe just because every time the universe throws us somewhere new, we keep making the same choice.”
The market blurs around the edges.
Bucky takes the bottle from your hand and sets both your drinks down on the stall so he can hold your face in both palms.
“I think,” he says, voice low and unsteady, “that no matter where I find you, you keep teaching me that a life doesn’t have to be extraordinary to matter.”
You inhale sharply.
He goes on because he has spent too much of his existence losing time, losing names, losing chances to say what needed saying. Because he will not waste this one.
“I loved you in a chapel with a plastic sign. In a truck on back roads. In a bed with lace curtains. In a cabin when we had almost nothing. In London when the whole world was on fire. On a beach with kids climbing all over me and sand in places there should never be sand.” Your mouth trembles around a laugh. His thumbs catch the tears on your cheeks. “And every time, it wasn’t because things were perfect. It was because it was you.”
Your hand covers one of his. “Bucky—”
“In this life,” he says, holding your gaze, “I don’t care what fate says. I don’t care what we were before unless it helps me be better to you now. I just…” He exhales, helpless in it. “I just know I am more myself when you’re in the room. And I want to keep choosing that. For however long I get.”
Something breaks open in your face.
Then you are kissing him in the middle of the farmer’s market, November wind cold around your ears and strangers surely staring and lemons probably within a three-yard radius somehow, and Bucky does not care about any of it.
When you finally pull back, you rest your forehead to his and laugh wetly.
“You took forever to say that,” you whisper.
He blinks. “I did?”
“Yes.” You kiss him once, quick and smiling. “It’s okay. I was going to let you.”
That night you come home with him.
Home, because that is what it is now no matter how recently he learned to say it.
The apartment smells like the rosemary chicken you cooked together and the bread he baked that morning and the cold air that followed you in when he opened the door. Your overnight bag sits by the couch. Your laughter is still in the walls from where you nearly dropped the oranges while making cocktails because he kissed your neck and ruined your concentration on purpose.
There are no visions this time.
No past lives pouring through the cracks.
Just the two of you in the warm gold hush of his bedroom, lamplight soft on the sheets, your sweater slipping from one shoulder as you sit on the edge of the mattress and look up at him.
“This is ours,” you say quietly.
He nods. “Yeah.”
You reach for him.
The first time you make love in this life is not a reenactment of any before. There are echoes, maybe. The same reverence. The same hunger braided with tenderness. But this is its own living thing, shaped by who you are now—older in different ways, scarred in different places, more careful and more certain all at once.
He undresses you slowly, like unwrapping something he intends to keep. You do the same for him, kissing each mark on his body as if introducing yourself to every chapter. When your fingers brush the long scars at his shoulder and side, you do not hesitate. You just look at him for permission and then kiss them too.
His throat goes tight.
On the bed, he takes his time. He is afraid this time, rather he wants to feel every second of being chosen with full knowledge. Your skin under his mouth. Your breath hitching when he drags his thumb over your clit. The way you smile against his lips when he says your name like a marvel. He works you open with his hands first, then his mouth, until you are clutching the sheets and half laughing, half sobbing because pleasure in this body, in this life, feels new and familiar all at once.
“Bucky,” you whisper when he comes back up over you, eyes dark and wrecked.
“I’ve got you.”
You nod, hands framing his face. “I know.”
When he pushes into you, slow and careful, your mouths are open against each other. He feels your body welcome him in inch by inch, feels your legs tighten around his hips, feels the tremor that runs through you when he finally settles deep. It is overwhelming in the simplest way. Not because of memory. Because of presence. Because you are here. Because he is too.
He moves. You move with him.
Outside, the city keeps being itself. A siren in the distance. Somebody laughing on the street. Heat clanking faintly through old pipes. Inside, his bedroom narrows to breath and skin and the soft wreck of your voice. You scratch lightly through his hair and murmur yes against his mouth and he nearly comes from the sound alone. He holds himself back long enough to watch the exact moment pleasure overtakes you, the way your eyes go bright and your body arches up into his with a cry he feels all the way to his ribs.
He follows soon after, buried deep, forehead pressed to yours, your names tangled together in the dark.
Afterward you lie under the sheets while the room cools around you. Your head rests on his chest. His hand drifts up and down your bare spine. The curtains are plain cotton, not lace. The sheets are soft gray, not white. The city outside is Brooklyn and not some inn in another century. It does not matter.
You draw lazy circles over his sternum.
“You know,” you murmur sleepily, “I think I liked every version of you.”
His fingers still for a second. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” You tilt your chin to look at him. “But this one might be my favorite.”
Emotion catches him so hard it almost hurts.
He bends and kisses your forehead because if he tries to speak right then, he will probably embarrass himself beyond repair.
Months later, when winter gives way to spring and then, at last, to summer again, Saturday morning finds the two of you at the farmer’s market under the same green-striped awnings where everything began.
Bucky has two coffees in a cardboard carrier. You have a bouquet of sunflowers tucked under one arm. The bread guy waves. The peach stand is finally, gloriously in season. The lemon vendor clocks you both and grins like he has been expecting to see how this turns out.
“Need a bag today?” he asks.
You glance at Bucky. Bucky glances at you.
Then, smiling, you both reach for the same lemon on purpose.
No flash comes.
There is no need.
Your fingers lace together instead, easy as breath.
The square is bright with morning. The violinist by the fountain is playing something warm and sweet. Coffee steams between you. Peaches perfume the air. Beside you, your soulmate—your chosen person, your present-tense miracle—squeezes your hand.
And because love, in the end, is often this simple, you walk the market together like you have done it all your life.
Maybe you have.
Maybe you will again.
Either way, the peaches are ripe, the bread is warm, and Bucky Barnes is laughing at something you said with his whole face open to the sun.
It is not a dramatic ending.
It is better.
It is a life.
And every ordinary second of it feels, impossibly, like falling in love again and again.
Interlude: Congratulations on successfully keeping a very boring secret
Dr. Jack Abbot x (female) reader | Dr. Jack Abbot x you
Summary: Jack has a moral dilemma over brunch. Robby has scrambled eggs and absolutely no interest in indulging it.
A/N: I'm no longer updating the taglist because Tumblr has been glitching way too much lately. If you don't want to miss any updates, feel free to turn on notifications for my posts! <3
Link to "You stole my cart" master list (1)
Link to "You stole my cart" master list (2)
Previous chapter: Interlude: Your husband is very well connected within the PTMC
--- --- ---
The diner was quite busy which wasn’t unusual for a Sunday morning. The usual crowd. Families, friends laughing over a couple of cheeky mimosas and couples either arguing over coffee or holding hands while looking deeply smug.
Jack sat in their usual booth by the window, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee while he stared at the stack of pancakes in front of him. Across from him Robby was eating scrambled eggs with the appetite of a man who saw his food as a challenge, not a suggestion.
For several minutes neither of them spoke, which also wasn’t unusual. After all they had known each other long enough that silence didn’t need to be filled. And they saw each other frequently enough - at work and outside of it - so there was no great need to catch up.
But today the silence felt heavier, loaded - different. Different enough that even Robby noticed.
He glanced up suspiciously. “Okay. What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Mhm. Yeah, okay, sure.”
Robby waited. Jack stayed quiet.
“You know” Robby continued. “Most people come to brunch because they enjoy talking to each other. Or at least enjoy spending time together.”
“I enjoy spending time with you.”
“Well, okay, maybe I’d believe you if you didn’t look like your dog had just died when you said it.”
Jack rolled his eyes, taking a sip of his coffee, still quiet.
“So.” Robby tilted his head. “Spill it. What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Okay - what are you thinking about doing?”
Jack stared at him.
Robby smiled slowly. “Knew it.”
Jack exhaled and leaned back against the booth.
For a moment he watched someone outside walk past the diner with a dog wearing blinking Christmas antlers.
Then he looked back at Robby. “I haven’t told her.”
Robby frowned. “Told who what?”
“My wife. About the job.”
“What about the job?”
“I haven’t told her that that stupid text you sent her was my idea.”
Robby paused, then shrugged. “Okay.”
Jack narrowed his eyes. “Okay? That’s all you have to say?”
“What do you want me to say?” Robby looked visibly confused now.
“I don’t know. Something useful for a change?”
“Okay.” Robby took another bite of his eggs. “Congratulations on successfully keeping a very boring secret.”
Jack just stared at him.
“What?” Robby asked. “Seriously - it worked out.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Oh, come on, you have to be kidding me.” Robby put the cutlery down and stared at him, stunned. “She got a job in her own field. She’s happy. She’s excited. Her new department is going to be very happy to have her. Everybody wins.”
Jack shook his head and crossed his arms. “She thinks you found the opening and thought of her.”
“I did think of her” Robby shot back.
“After I told you to send it to her.”
“That still counts.”
“No, Michael. It doesn’t.” Jack let out a frustrated sigh. “I feel like I’m lying to her.”
“But you’re not lying to her.” Robby stared at him.
“I’m kind of withholding information. That’s lying. In a way.” Jack swallowed hard.
Robby closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath. “You went to therapy again, right? That therapist is clearly messing with your head, man.” Robby shook his head. “You don’t have to be a hundred percent perfect all the time, you know that, right?”
Jack shrugged. “I’m not gonna lie to my wife.”
“My man, you’re seriously considering rocking the boat even though it all worked out in the end?”
“It’s not rocking the boat” Jack mumbled. “It’s just… I don’t feel comfortable right now. And no, I didn’t even talk about that in therapy. I came to that conclusion all by myself.”
“Boy, okay, that explains it. Maybe run this by your therapist first then, huh?”
“You just said she’s messing with my head” Jack shot back.
“Yeah, but that was before I knew that this idea of yours was born in a very strange corner of your brain.”
Jack let out a sigh. “I’m gonna tell her.”
“And what do you expect to happen?” Robby rubbed his temple. “Honestly? What’s the outcome you’re hoping for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, yeah, how can I not be supportive of such an excellent, well-thought-out plan?” Robby replied, dryly.
Jack looked bewildered. “I’m not expecting anything. I just… want her to know.”
Robby watched him. “Why?”
“Because she thanked you.”
“What now?”
“She kept saying how thoughtful you were. How nice it was that you remembered she was looking for work.” Jack rubbed his thumb over the edge of the table. “And I sat there knowing you only sent it because I asked you to.”
Robby paused. “Okay, so now you’re throwing me under the bus as well?”
Jack groaned. “No!”
“Doesn’t sound reassuring.”
“...I don’t know.”
“Well… okay, I’m making a cultural reference now and you’re not allowed to ask how I’d know about this, okay?” Robby looked at him seriously.
Jack tilted his head. “Um. Okay.”
“Okay, so… when Carrie cheated on Aidan with Big she didn’t keep quiet about it. No, she tells Aidan. And he says to her “I just wish I didn’t know about this.” And then they break up. So… what if telling your wife about this makes you the Carrie here? There’s no need to confess.”
Jack stared at Robby for a long time. “I… um… you know I didn’t cheat on her, right?”
Robby rolled his eyes. “I know. My point still stands.”
“Um.” Jack took a tiny sip of coffee. “I’m honestly a little thrown off track now with you quoting Sex and the City.”
He shrugged. “It was Janey’s favorite show. I watched a ton of it.”
“Mhm.” Jack stared into his mug. “I mean - I get what you’re saying but still… um… no, it’s not the same. I’m gonna tell her.”
“Fine.” Robby groaned. “You’re going to tell her. I’ve clearly got no chance of talking you out of it.”
Jack shook his head. “Nope.”
“Great” Robby muttered into his own mug. “Can’t wait.” He picked up his fork again. “But please, one condition.”
Jack groaned. “I think I’ve agreed to enough of your conditions lately.”
“Good thing I don’t care.” He glanced at Jack. “If you’re going to tell her, tell her before Christmas or after Christmas. I’m not sitting through another Abbot Family Christmas wondering whether you two are about to implode.”
“Since when you are sitting through our Christmas?” Jack raised an eyebrow.
“Um. You remember that you and your wife invited me over on Christmas Day to watch Lizzie open her presents, right?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Jack nodded, pulling the plate with pancakes a little closer. “I mean I have to check with my wife again but yeah, I think that’s still on the table.”
Robby rolled his eyes. “You’re really getting off on that whole wife thing, right?”
“Yep.”
“Great.” Robby threw a napkin at him. “Here, you may need it to clean yourself up if you say wife a few more times.”
Jack caught the napkin, flipped him off, then started eating.
They both ate in silence for a minute.
Then Robby lifted his head. “So… Christmas is going to be completely different this year, huh?”
Jack looked up. “What’s that even supposed to mean?”
“Last year you were one step away from blowing up your relationship because you made a unilateral decision without talking to your wife first.” He shrugged. “This year you’re actually taking time off. You chose to be there. That’s already a hell of an improvement.”
“The bar is on the floor” Jack muttered, then added a little louder: “I’m still keeping something from her.”
Robby sighed. “Yeah, a stupid little white lie that’s eating you alive because you actually give a damn. That’s not the same thing.”
Jack shrugged this time, still not fully convinced.
Robby picked his fork up again. “So this year it’ll only be presents, pancakes and peaceful family time.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “You’re counting yourself as part of our family right?”
“Hell yes.” Robby smiled. “Lizzie is my goddaughter.”
“How could I forget?” Jack rolled his eyes. “And I know you’re making fun of me but joke all you want - I learned my lesson last year.”
“You’re currently asking me whether you should tell your wife about something you deliberately didn’t tell her.”
Jack stared at him. “That’s different.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“I’m going to tell her beforehand.”
“Okay.”
Jack took a bite of his pancakes. “It’s gonna be the perfect Christmas this year.”
“Mhm.”
“Really” Jack added, a little quieter.
“Repeat it a couple of times more and you’ve got me convinced” Robby muttered into his mug.
--- --- ---
You wanna keep reading? - Next part is coming soon, I promise.
Series summary: Robby left for his sabbatical without a thought and you’re left to pick up the pieces. But now he’s back at PTMC and trying desperately to reconnect. Robby learns the truth of how long a year really is.
WC: 1.1k
Tags/Content: unexpected pregnancy, motherhood, past relationship, second chance relationship, slow burn, implied age gap, hurt, angst, reader is high key avoidant, no use of Y/N, possible OC ish, Robby calls reader baby, mental heaviness, lot of swearing, not proofed, consider this a part 1 of 11
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I’m calm.
I can be normal.
Right. Sure.
It had been on the calendar for weeks. Robby’s first overnight with Mason. Right there on “Baby Boy’s” shared Google Calendar.
That didn’t make Mason’s packed bag on your shoulder and the baby carrier in your other hand feel any lighter.
You were doing what you were supposed to. Openly choosing Robby to be in Mason’s life.
Just knock.
Fucking knock.
The door opens just as you’re raising your fist. Robby stood there in an old band shirt you use to steal and a pair of sweatpants.
“Hi.” He says softly. He smiles down at Mason and goes to unstrap Mason from his carrier. “Hey buddy.”
“He’s due for a bottle at eight. He’ll fight sleep around nine. The sound machine sticks.” You list off, matter of fact.
“Okay,” he says gently.
You keep going anyway.
“He likes the green sleep sack more than the blue one. If he wakes up after midnight, don’t pick him up right away. Sometimes he just…”
You stop.
Robby doesn’t interrupt.
He just waits.
“…I know.” He says quietly.
Of course he knew.
He’d been there practically every night for weeks.
“Mason, made you something. It’s in the bag.” You say quickly handing over Mason’s overnight bag.
“Mason?”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“It’s not making it weird.”
“It’s a mug. You know, for Father’s Day. He insisted.”
The silence stretches between you longer than you intended. Robby fights the smile threatening to spill across his face.
“Mason picked it out?” He hums clearly enjoying this.
“You think I’d get you something for Father’s Day?” You hit him with a deadpan. “Don’t doubt your son like that.”
“Right, of course. He has impeccable taste in coffee cups.”
“Damn right.” You clear your throat. “I’m gonna leave now.”
“Okay.”
“He’s good?”
He shifts Mason a little higher against his shoulder.
“Why wouldn’t he be?” He watches you carefully. “You’re his mom. You’re supposed to worry.”
He smiles.
“My job is making sure you don’t have to while he’s with me.”
He says it so simply it almost irritates you.
“I’m supposed to go now…” you say like you’re trying to urge yourself in the direction of the elevator.
“Yes you are.” He says it with that all-knowing smile on his face. “We’ll see you in the morning?”
Why did this feel worse than daycare drop off? daycare had a set time. This did too, but daycare was never overnight.
Fuckkkkkk.
Tomorrow suddenly seems every far away.
You take a deep breath and force yourself to turn on your heels. The elevator door opens. Before it can close behind you, Robby lifts Mason’s little hand in a wave.
“Say bye to mommy.”
Mason blinks sleepily.
His eyes meet yours for the briefest second as a smile tugs at his mouth.
“Love you. See you tomorrow.”
The elevator door slides shut before you can decide who he was talking to.
The apartment is quiet.
Not sleeping-baby quiet.
The kind of quiet where you can hear the fridge running and the sound of your steps on the floorboards.
Usually by now you’d hear the sound machine through the nursery wall. Or Mason’s coos. Or the dryer running because Mason spit up on your clothes five minutes before bedtime.
Nothing.
Was the fridge always that loud?
Could you always hear the neighbor’s tv through the wall?
Huh.
You’d wanted silence for months.
Turns out silence is loud.
You don’t bother turning on the television.
Somehow manufactured noise feels cheating.
Instead, you kick your shoes off and grab the first hoodie draped over the back of a dining chair.
It smells faintly like laundry detergent and rain. The sleeves swallow your hands.
You tug it over your head before dropping onto the couch.
9:07pm
Your eyes drift towards the hallway before you can stop them.
Right about now, Mason usually lets out one offended little cry because he’d rolled onto his side and started to wake himself.
Two pats on his belly.
Maybe a pacifier.
Back to sleep.
9:37pm
You catch yourself listening for the faint rustle of him rolling around in his crib.
At 10:02pm, you make it exactly fifty-five more seconds before reaching for your phone. Mason was fine. You knew he would be. That doesn’t stop you.
Mason pic now.
The typing bubble appears almost immediately.
Robby: Bossy.
A second later, a photo pops up on your screen.
Mason is sprawled in his crib, one first tucked beneath his cheek, mouth hanging open.
The crib Robby built catches in the edge of the frame.
Robby: He’s snoring.
Robby: Pretty sure he got that from you.
You scoff before hammering out a response.
He definitely got your inability to mind your own business.
You stare at it.
Delete.
Too flirty.
He’s lucky he’s cute.
Delete.
Absolutely not.
Whatever.
Delete.
Since when did texting Robby require this much editing?
Three dots appear.
Disappear.
Reappear.
He was doing the same thing.
Robby: You okay?
It’s weird here.
Robby: Yeah.
Robby: it was weird here too the first night I went home without him.
You lock your phone, tossing it onto the sofa next to you.
The apartment falls silent again.
Right.
Now what?
You open the dishwasher.
Close it.
Walked to the fridge the forgot why.
Checked the baby monitor sitting on the counter before remembering it wasn’t plugged in.
You make your way into the nursery before you realize where your feet are taking you. Force of habit. It was your closing night routine.
The crib is empty.
The mobile turns lazily from the air conditioning.
You laugh once.
“Well, that was stupid.”
You climb into bed before eleven.
For the first time in months, you don’t set an alarm for a bottle.
You stare at your phone for a long time scrolling through photos.
Mason swaddled.
Mason and Dana.
Robby holding Mason. His little hand curled into Robby’s shirt. You don’t remember taking that one.
i have many thoughts and all of them are about boyfriend jack abbot!!!
boyfriend jack abbot who comes in after a long night shift and immediately strips down to come spoon you in bed, ditching his prosthetic in record time to maximize the 45 min he has with you before you have to wake up for work.
boyfriend jack abbot who isn’t a great cook but has mastered at least three of your favorite dishes because he likes to leave them on the stove for you on days he leaves for work before you get home.
boyfriend jack abbot who has a secret affinity for yacht rock. you make fun of him for listening to steely dan - he makes fun of you right back for knowing all the words to “sailing” by christopher cross.
boyfriend jack abbot who made you watch tarantino movies with him until you wouldn’t stop pointing out all the gratuitous feet shots and he banned you from watching with him (thank god).
boyfriend jack abbot who has never been out of the country for something not-military related, so you drag him on a trip to scotland and make him do a lochness monster tour with you.
boyfriend jack abbot who always makes sure your gas tank is filled, your oil is changed, and your car maintenance is taken care of.
boyfriend jack abbot who retroactively gets mad at you when he finds out you rode ATV’s in your youth, giving you an hour long lecture on the injuries he’s seen from ATV accidents. he makes you swear on your cats life that you’ll never get on an ATV or an e-bike ever again. you agree (and then kiss him stupid bc of course your ER doctor boyfriend is neurotic about these things)
