oh to be sleepily riding jack abbot, tummy to tummy, chest to chest. your soft arms thrown over his strong shoulders, chin hooked over the freckled skin. your head tilts against his, your rich hair rubbing against his silver strands as your ears kiss.
he’s got you in a bear hug— actually stops your movements just to hug you. to feel you in his arms and cuddle for a second because, at the end of the day, jack loves you. tells you every single day… he even tells you now.
left arm wrapped around your torso while his right crosses over to press a hand to the back of your sweaty hair. holding you to his shoulder, you mouth at jack’s skin, sucking and kissing and rubbing your cheek against him as he pulses inside of you. a slow grind, your favorite, causes you to whine out against him.
“i love you, honey. love you so much, my comfy girl. can’ya keep takin me? hm? keep takin’ jackie’s cock? love you so much.”
his eyes are screwed shut as he lifts his hips into you, still holding your head to rest against him. “‘m always gonna take care a’you. never have to worry about anything. know why? daddy loves you, sweet, pretty girl. gimme kiss”
you whine against his mouth, a pathetic, weeping sound, and he loses it more. moving both arms back to your torso, he’s got you in the tightest bear hug, arms squeezing for a second in affection. he rests his cheek on your back, mirroring you, surrendering to all of his intrinsic need.
“say it.” “d-” “say it baby, c’mon. tell daddy.” “love you!” “yeah? you love me?” “yes daddy,” you cry out, slobbering down his back without a care as he fucks up into you. your nails scratch down his back as you hiccup, your tummy sticking together from the heat of the room, you can feel his happy trail rubbing against your lower belly. “i love you so much jack” “i love you- oh my god- i love you more. come on baby, cum for daddy, that’s it… fuck, that’s it.”
afterwards you stay seated in his lap, falling asleep as he lightly rocks you both back and forth. gently, he whispers into the moonlit room, “hey.. lemme see you.. lemme see that pretty face.” and when you pull back to look at him, swaying a bit in exhaustion, his green eyes glitter. a fondness etched into the very fabric of what it means to be a man like jack who loves a woman crosses over his face.
warm eyes, a little smirk as he holds your cheeks with both hands. “you feel how much i love you?” “yeah” you agree, blushing and keening under his attention. he smiles, laughing in the enchanting way only an older man can. “good. can i hold you a little longer? love you so much, kid, can’t get enough of you.”
despite the definite headache and backache waiting to come, you both doze off just like that. with jack’s love leaking out of you as you cuddle into his chest, his arms wrapped securely around you <3
summary: a night out with some coworkers after a medical conference leads to you accidentally texting your attending about how hot you think he is.
word count: 4.6k
contains: smut, oral (f receiving), unprotected sex, reader is a doctor, no use of y/n.
a/n: i know nothing about being a doctor or going to medical conferences but i tried my best here. If something is disgustingly inaccurate plz let me know :)
If you were being honest, you hated these things. Conferences, galas, all of it. You loved being a doctor, it was your life’s passion after all, but it was the incessant obligations outside of the hospital— the networking, the dressing up, the horrid small talk with other doctors— piled on top of your already packed schedule that had you dreading this particular medical conference more than usual.
There was one small silver lining, at least. This time, you had friends.
You’d only begun working at Pittsburg Trauma Medical Center a few months ago, looking for more of a challenge after spending the past few years of your career in dermatology. You didn’t hate it, per se, but you felt deep in your bones that you were meant for more high stakes work.
Not only did the job suit you better, but the people did too. Sure, you’d met some nice people in dermatology, even met your best friend there, but working in the ER surrounded you with people much like yourself. Adrenaline junkies.
Unfortunately, adrenaline junkies and medical conferences did not mix.
That’s how you found yourself at some dodgy dive bar down the street from your hotel the last night of your conference with two of your coworkers, Trinity and Victoria. The three of you had been bored out of your minds at the last lecture of the day, where some old pretentious man droned on and on and onnnnn about medical research that was about 25 years outdated. You really needed a drink.
“Okay, I know we agreed on vodka crans, but I got us green tea shots too. My treat, alright? I fucking need a shot after whatever that lecture was,” Trinity explains as she returns from the bar, setting three drinks and three shots down on the center of the table. You were able to snag some seats in the back corner of the bar, thankfully, because the last thing you want to deal with is any more people today.
“Oh god, it was horrible, wasn’t it? I was just about ready to rip my hair out. Didn’t think that guy would ever stop talking,” Victoria replies as she reaches for one of the shots.
The three of you clink glasses, tapping them down onto the wooden surface of the table before knocking them back.
“God, that’s fucking good,” you wince, the alcohol burning at the bottom of your throat.
The night continues in a cycle of work gossip and ordering vodka cranberries for the table. By the time you guys are leaving, you’re thoroughly buzzed.
You walk back to the hotel together, arm and arm, when you get back onto the topic of work. Feeling a little more truthful than usual due to the alcohol coursing through your system, you decide to tell your friends about an awkward moment you had during one of your shifts last week.
“Oh it was awful, you guys. I was assisting Dr. Abbot with a perforating GSW and he asked me to hand him hemostatic gauze, and I dropped the package all over the floor trying to open it. I’m talking gauze everywhere. I had to rush to get a new one, my hands were shaking like hell when I gave it to him,” you ramble. “And the worst part? He noticed. Pulled me into one of the on-call rooms afterward to ask what was up with me. I was horrified.”
Victoria furrows her brows, and Trinity slows her steps until the three of you are standing still in the middle of the dimly lit sidewalk.
“What’s wrong? Why are we stopping?” you ask, confused.
“Sorry, you were nervous?” Victoria questions.
“I didn’t even know that was possible for you,” Trinity admits, shock displayed on her face.
“I mean, yeah. If you guys had been there, you’d understand. The whole room was tense, you could hear a pin drop,” you explain.
“Don’t think that’s how I’d describe the Pitt, but okay,” Victoria concedes, falling back into step toward the hotel as you and Trinity trail close behind.
“Y’know, I don’t think it was the GSW that had you all worked up. I’ve seen you in action. You’re not one to falter, especially not like that. I think maybe a certain night shift attending has you all hot and bothered,” Trinity prods, landing a playful punch against your shoulder.
Victoria whips her head around at that. “Oh my god. That’s totally it!” she squeals. “Are you guys hooking up? I’ll be soooo jealous, he’s a total silver fox.”
Heat blooms in your chest and creeps up to your cheeks. You’re suddenly very, very hot.
“Jesus, no. I’m not hooking up with him. I’m not even into him, not like that. I can promise you he’s not what made me nervous,” you ramble. “We work a high stress job, it’s normal to make mistakes. And that’s all it was, a mistake,” you babble on, hoping your friends won’t pick up on the fact that you’re lying straight through your teeth.
While the part about not hooking up with him is true, you can’t deny the fact that you definitely have feelings for Doctor Jack Abbot.
It’s all his fault, really. From the start, he was charming. Good at conversation. Never made you feel less than, despite being the newbie of the department.
And it definitely didn’t help that he looked like that. Salt and pepper curls that framed his angular face which was dusted with freckles. Wrinkles around his eyes and mouth that made themselves known when he smiled. Biceps that bulged underneath his scrub top sleeve, which was far too tight considering the size of his muscles.
It got worse once you guys fell into a rhythm, able to work in tandem. Sometimes you didn’t even need words. It only took one look at each other for you to know exactly where he needed you, how to best assist him with a procedure.
If it wasn’t a look, it was a touch. A gloved hand overtop yours, guiding you on where to make an incision. A warm, large hand braced against your back as you intubate. A pat on the shoulder after you successfully stabilize a patient.
But undoubtedly, the worst part was the way he spoke to you. Whether it be a “Nice work, Kiddo,” after a particularly stressful chest tube placement, or a “What’s goin’ on up there?” with a featherlight touch to your temple when you were lost in thought. It was like he could sense what you were feeling before you’d even figured it out for yourself.
Clearly, whatever feelings you have for Dr. Abbot are written all over your face, because Trinity and Victoria seem wholly unconvinced.
“Okay, well if you’re not hooking up with him, then you should be. I’ve seen your dynamic, there’s some clear tension between you guys, babe,” Trinity argues as you finally approach the doors of your hotel.
“Yeah, that’s not happening. Even if I wanted it to, which I don’t, there’s no way he’d be into it,” you explain, the warmth in your cheeks only growing.
Victoria lets out a dramatic sigh as you make your way through the hotel lobby toward the elevators. “And I thought I was clueless.”
“Sorry?” you ask, pressing the button for the elevator. It dings and the doors open, the three of you piling in. You quickly push the button for floor three. You want to escape this situation as fast as possible, if you’re being honest. Your emotions are too heightened from the drinks to be having this conversation right now.
“If you can’t see it, there’s nothing we can do to help you,” Trinity replies. “Anyway, it might not be the brightest idea to sleep with a coworker. We all know how that went for me…”
“Oh Trin it wasn’t that bad. At least she doesn’t work in the same department,” Victoria remarks, then gestures vaguely at you. “Imagine if this hypothetical hookup with Abbot really did happen. She’d have to work with him all the time and he’s her attending. Now that’s bad.”
You groan. “Gee, thanks guys. I feel really supported right now.”
“So you do want to sleep with him then?” Victoria quips.
“No! My god, you guys. I’m done with the conversation,” you exclaim. The elevator finally reaches your floor and you waste no time stepping out into the warmly lit hallway.
“Well, I’ll see you both bright and early tomorrow. Still want to get coffee before the airport?” Trinity asks as she fumbles with her keycard outside of her room door.
Victoria, one door down from Trinity, follows suit in swiping her card. “Sure, how’s 7:00 sound?”
“Works for me, see you guys tomorrow!” you reply with a smile and a wave, making your way down to the end of the hallway to your room.
It hits you as you struggle to get your door unlocked that you’re a lot drunker than you thought. Not enough to warrant a hangover, but inebriated enough that you stumble toward your bed as you kick off your shoes.
After taking a much needed shower, washing away the grime of a long day, and putting on a pair of cotton shorts and a tank top, you cuddle up into bed and check your texts.
There’s multiple from your best friend, Jackie. The one you met when you worked in dermatology.
Jackie: girl i haven’t heard from you all day
Jackie: is the conference terrible
Jackie: so glad i don’t have to go to those lol
Jackie: is dr hottie there at least
You chuckle at her messages. Of course she’d bring him up. She’s the only person you’ve confided in about your attraction to Dr. Abbot, and she’s become obsessed with him ever since. Even gave him that ridiculous nickname.
You swipe back to check your other notifications, reading a text from your mom and watching a Tik Tok that Trinity sent you from her room before you finally go back to reply to Jackie.
Unfortunately, in your inebriated state, your finger slides on your screen and deletes your text chain with her.
“Shit!” you exclaim. At least you remember what she said. You quickly click the “New Message” button and start typing out her name.
j… a… c…
You click on her contact and begin typing.
You: sry i’ve been busy but yes the conference was shit
You: got drinks after im a ltitle drunk lol
You: and yes dr hottie is here thank god
You: i sat behind him during a talk this mornign and had to fight urges to run my hands through his sexy silver hair
You: i didnrt do it tho. i am brave
Sighing, you shuffle in bed so you’re no longer sitting up against the headboard but laying on your side. You reach toward the nightstand and flick the lamp off, filling the room with darkness.
Well, the room is dark until your phone buzzes on the mattress next to you and the screen lights up, emitting a soft glow.
Rather quickly, it buzzes again. You reach for it, expecting Jackie’s replies. While it’s not very late, she’s a night owl through and through, so of course she’d answer you immediately.
Instead, you see two notifications from… Jack Abbot? The only times you’ve ever texted him were about coming in early or that one time you’d forgotten your sweater in the break room and asked if he could hide it in one of the cabinets until your shift the next morning. Why would he be texting you at 11:00pm on a night you were both off?
You unlock your phone and click into your text thread with him.
Jack: I think you meant to send those to someone else.
Jack: I’ll try and sit farther away next time. Wouldn’t want my hair distracting you.
You shoot up in bed, breath catching in your throat. Immediately, your chest is on fire. There’s no fucking way you sent those messages to him.
You: oh my god
You: im so fuckign sorry
You: i was trying to text my friend
Jack: It’s OK.
You: its not
You: its extremely unprofessional
You: im so so sorry
Jack: Stop apologizing.
Your breathing still hasn’t calmed down. You’re mortified. How are you ever going to face him again?
For a minute, there’s no other reply. You debate texting him again, but what could you even say? “I’m sorry I think your hair is sexy”?
Instead, you try to focus on calming down. Everything will be fine. You can blame it on the drinks, even if you’re not really drunk. He won’t know that you’re lying.
Your eye catches on the three little dots at the corner of your text thread. He’s typing again. A lump forms in the base of your throat.
Jack: Where are you?
Confused, you type out a reply.
You: my room
You: why
Jack: How much did you drink?
You: not much
You: a few vodka crans with trinity and victoria
You: im mostly sober now
It wasn’t necessarily a lie. This interaction definitely sobered you up.
Jack: So you’re OK?
You: yep
You: safe and sound
Jack: Good.
Jack: Dr. Hottie, huh?
You: oh god pls dont remind me
You: im mortified
Jack: Don’t be.
Jack: Are you in bed?
Your eyebrows furrow at that last message. At first it seemed like he was just checking in on you, making sure you weren’t stranded and drunk at some shady bar. But what kind of question is that?
You: yes
Jack: Send me a picture.
Eyebrows knitting together in confusion, you open your camera and take a photo of the foot of your bed. You can make out the shape of the chair in the corner of the room and the TV mounted to the wall. You go back to your texts and send him the photo.
You: [1 attachment]
You: see
You: exactly where i said i am
Jack: No, a picture of you.
Oh.
With shaking hands, you swipe back to the camera app, this time flipping it so it’s front facing. You snap a photo of yourself, angling the phone so it captures your face and part of your torso.
You examine the photograph, taking in the pouty expression on your face and noting the way your tank top rides up at your stomach, exposing your midriff. Considering you didn’t put on a bra, you can see the faint outline of your nipples through the thin material.
Without overthinking it, you send him the picture.
You: [1 attachment]
Jack: Jesus.
Jack: You always sleep like that?
Feeling bold, the remnants of your night out still coursing through your veins, you type out a reply.
You: no
You: i usually sleep naked
You: but that feels a bit too exposing for a hotel
Jack: Fuck, sweetheart.
Jack: You have no idea what you’re doing to me.
You: send a pic
You: i wanna see
Heat pools between your legs. There’s no way this is happening. You’ll wake up tomorrow and realize you dreamt up this entire conversation.
An image from Dr. Abbot comes through.
Jack: [1 attachment]
He’s laying in his hotel bed in nothing but his underwear. You can’t see his face, but his chest is on full display. God, his muscles were something else.
But the real star of the show is his bulge, straining hard against the fabric of his boxers. One of his veiny hands rests atop it, and you can’t help but notice the wet spot pooling where his erection sits.
Fuck.
You hold your phone in one hand and slide the other one underneath your shorts and panties, rubbing slow, methodic circles against your core. Your phone pings with another message.
Jack: What’re you doing now?
You: touching myself
You: are u
Jack: Fuck, yes.
Growing warm, you kick the bedsheets aside. Your hand continues to circle, pressure building deep in your belly.
You: wish i could see u rn
Jack: [1 attachment - 0:21]
Oh, God.
Suddenly, everything starts feeling a little too real. You should not be doing this. He’s your attending. You’re sacrificing your career, everything you’ve worked so hard for, for what? One meaningless night?
But the way your hand is creating friction against your clit combined with Jack’s messages have you too horny to care, if you’re being honest.
Nervously, you click play on the video.
You almost regret doing it.
But you can’t look away from the sight of him pumping his cock up and down in the dim lighting of his hotel room.
It’s long, longer than you were expecting. And thick.
You watch as he drags his hand from the base up to the head, uses his thumb to circle the precum that's built up at the slit, and then works it up and down his length.
If the sight of that wasn’t enough, the sounds he’s making have you groaning into your pillow. He’s practically growling, the noises coming ragged from the depths of his throat.
You can’t even think straight, you’re so desperate for more. For anything. Without even thinking about it, you open your phone camera again and start recording.
It’s nothing special, considering how worked up you are. You really can’t even see much since your shorts and panties are still on.
You film as your hand moves underneath the fabric a few times, breathy moans escaping your lips. You pull it out slowly, showing off the sticky mess left on your fingers for the camera.
You: oh my god
You: thats so fucking hot
You: [1 attachment - 0:14]
You: this is how badly i want u
There’s no response for a minute, and you worry that you went too far. Maybe he realized how fucking crazy this whole situation is. Because that’s exactly what it is. Crazy.
Before you can begin to spiral too hard, your phone buzzes in your hand.
He’s fucking calling you.
You let it ring a few times, working up the courage to answer.
With a shaking hand, you click accept.
He doesn’t say anything at first, but you can hear his heavy breathing and the sound of something wet in the background.
“How are you doing it?” he mumbles into the phone, abruptly.
“What?”
“How are you touching yourself? Tell me.”
“Oh, I’m– I’m rubbing circles on my clit,” you can barely make out the words, feeling embarrassed.
“Oh fuck,” he groans. “Slip a finger in.”
“Jack, I–”
“Fuck, I need you to,” he begs. “Please do it for me, Kiddo.”
“O-Okay,” you stutter, lining up your middle finger with your entrance and sinking it in. You release a moan at the sensation, pumping your finger in and out a few times before adding another.
“God, that sound. You sound so pretty when you touch yourself. Can you hear me? Hear me pumping my cock? It wants you so bad, Sweetheart. You have no idea.”
His words make you shudder, more needy sounds escaping from your throat. The sound of his hand working against his length combined with his breathy moans have you bucking your hips into your hand.
“I want you too,” you whimper.
“What’s your room number?” Jack grunts.
“What?”
“I can’t do this. Knowing you’re right down the hall. What room are you in?”
You blink.
“302.”
The line clicks.
He hung up.
You stare at the dark phone screen in front of you, fingers coming to a stop under your panties.
What the actual fuck just happened.
Is he coming here? Like right now?
Suddenly, there’s three sharp knocks at the door. You readjust your panties and shorts and nervously make your way to the door, fumbling to open it because of how hard you’re shaking.
As you expected, Jack Abbot stands in front of you clad in a white t-shirt and a pair of sweats. He’s using his crutches, didn’t even waste time putting on his leg. His left foot dons one white sock. No shoe.
Just looking at his face makes the ache between your legs grow. His skin’s coated in a thin sheen of sweat, curls sticking to his forehead. His breathing is uneven, chest heaving against the tight fabric of his shirt.
Without a word, you open the door wide enough to let him through and he wastes no time heading directly for the center of the room, placing his crutches against the nightstand and sitting on the edge of the bed. You click the door shut and lock it.
“C’mere,” he whispers.
You take one step toward him. Measured, careful. Then another.
“Jack, I don’t know if we should…”
“Fuck, don’t say that. Would you just come here?” he growls.
You move closer until you’re standing in front of him. He reaches for you, placing his broad hands on your hips and tugging you closer to him, between his thighs. His thumbs move back and forth against your hip bone.
“Do you want this?” He asks, quiet.
“Yes.”
“Then let me make you feel good. Please,” he murmurs, pulling you even closer so he can press open mouthed kisses to the base of your throat and down your chest.
You moan into his touch, hands coming up to tug his hair.
“Is it as good as you imagined?” he teases.
“Sorry?”
“Running your hands through my ‘sexy silver hair’? Your words, not mine.”
A laugh escapes from his lips and you groan, dropping your head on top of his so he can’t see how horrified you are.
“Yeah, I’m going to regret that text for the rest of my life.”
Jack brings his hands up from your waist to the back of your head so he can pull you back to look at him.
“I’m not,” he says, maintaining such an intense eye contact that you begin to tremble underneath his gaze. “You have no idea how many times I’ve thought about it. Your hands in my hair. Your mouth on me. How you’d sound when I fuck you,” he whispers, leaning to continue sucking marks on your chest, just above the neckline of your tank top.
You moan at his words. If that’s the case, you should’ve been fucking him for months now.
Something snaps inside of you, and you give up on holding back. You want this. You can deal with the repercussions tomorrow.
You bring your hands down from his hair to his shoulders and push him back slightly on the bed so you have enough room to climb on top of him, straddling his thighs. He moves his hands back to your waist, keeping you stabilized against him.
“Hi,” you whisper.
“Hi,” he responds, breathless.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Fuck, please.”
You dip your head down and hover your lips over his, inches apart. You can feel his warm breath fan over your mouth as he exhales.
Fed up, Jack closes the distance, connecting his lips with yours.
And fuck, he tastes good.
You whimper into his mouth, quickening your pace, desperate for more.
The sound you make causes his grip to tighten around your waist, his kisses becoming sloppier. He darts his tongue out, seeking entry to your mouth.
You swirl your tongue against his and he releases a deep, guttural groan. Your bodies move together, hips grinding over the bulge in his sweatpants.
Between frantic kisses, he manages to lift your tank top over your head, pulling back only to admire your bare chest.
“Been dreaming about these,” he admits, taking his right hand off your hip to palm at one of your breasts. “They’re even better than I imagined.”
You throw your head back as he rolls your nipple between his knuckles. He dips his head and uses his mouth to suck on the other one, and the sensation has you rocking your hips even harder against him.
“So fucking sexy,” he breathes as he swirls his tongue around your nipple. You dig your nails into his shoulder, overwhelmed by his hands and mouth.
He kisses his way back up your chest and neck until his lips connect with yours again, hand still squeezing at your breast.
“Can I taste you?” he groans into your mouth.
You nod against him and he takes that as permission to lift you from his lap and toss you on the bed next to him, head hitting the pillow. You giggle at the sudden movement, Jack crawling above you to keep peppering your lips and jaw with kisses.
He pulls back so he’s sitting on his haunches and fiddles with the waistband of your shorts. Slowly, he peels the fabric down your legs and tosses them aside. He pushes your knees apart so you’re spread for him, ducking his head to kiss his way up your thighs.
“Jack, please,” you beg.
He places a few kisses over the lacy fabric of your panties before he pulls them to the side, face to face with your dripping center.
He licks one slow, agonizing stripe up your core, causing you to buck your hips up in the air.
“Fuck, you taste so good, Kiddo,” he mumbles into your cunt, lapping up the wetness that’s gathered there. He takes his time sucking and kissing at your clit, dipping his tongue into you, building you up to your first orgasm.
“Jack, I–I’m gonna come,” you whine, teetering over the edge.
“Let it happen, Sweetheart. Want you to come on my tongue.”
His words send you over the edge, riding out your orgasm against his mouth as he keeps swirling his tongue inside of you. He continues to leave soft kisses against your sensitive clit as you come down from your high.
Once you’ve settled, Jack kisses his way back up your stomach and chest until you’re face to face.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” you admit, still in shock.
“Me neither,” he whispers, brushing a stray hair from your face and tucking it behind your ear.
“I need you inside of me,” you breathe against him, desperate.
“Fuck, okay.”
Jack makes quick work of removing his shirt and sweatpants, then drags your panties down your legs, exposing you fully to the cool air of the room.
He strips himself of his boxers and pumps his length a few times with his hand, adjusting his position so he can line up with your entrance.
He pushes forward, seating himself inside you down to the hilt in one fell swoop. You moan loudly at the feeling of him, how he fills you entirely.
“Oh God, Jack,” you mumble.
“You okay?” he asks, hesitating to move.
“Yes, God, yes. Please move.”
With a grunt he begins working himself in and out of you, setting the pace. The head of his cock keeps hitting that spongy spot deep inside you so hard that it’s making you see stars.
“Fuck, Jack, just like that,” you babble, clawing at his back to stabilize yourself against his frantic thrusts.
“Jesus, Kid. You feel so good,” he mumbles into your neck. “I’m not going to last. Where do you want me?”
“Inside, do it inside,” you beg.
Those words alone are enough to make him falter, his pace becoming uneven and sloppy as he releases thick spurts of cum inside of you.
The warmth of his release combined with the feeling of his dick twitching inside of you has you hitting your peak, coming again with a garbled moan.
Exhausted, Jack collapses on top of you, head still nuzzled into your shoulder. The two of you are panting heavily, chests heaving against one another.
After catching his breath and leaving a trail of kisses beneath your ear, Jack lifts his head so he can look at you.
SUMMARY: Jack Abbot is not an overly-neighborly person. He has secret nicknames in his head for most of the people on his floor and actively avoids any and all types of neighbor politics. However, he can’t deny his growing fondness for the single mom and toddler in apartment seventeen. (Nor his burning hatred for your baby daddy).
WARNINGS: this series includes a very chaotic reader with an even more chaotic toddler, mentions of abandonment, Jack's inability to consider anything good and worthwhile for himself, eventual smut, friends to lovers, mentions of previous abusive relationships, mentions of mental health struggles, miscommunication, age gap (reader is around 27 and Jack is in his 40's), medical inaccuracies and more.
A/N: I am very very excited to share this series and bring it to life. It started as a very random idea that quickly transpired into a huge story in my head within a matter of minutes. It does touch on some potentially triggering topics but warnings will be given in each chapter!
PAIRING: Jack Abbot x Single Mom!Reader
STATUS: Ongoing
─── ⋆ CHAPTERS ⋆
PART ONE 𖤓♡ — Jack Abbot values his routine and structure. Work, SWAT, gym... and for the past six weeks, spending his Sunday mornings admiring the enigmatic single mom who's apartment balcony sits across from his. [3k]
PART TWO 𖤓♡ — A scuffle in the hall causes Jack to accidentally take Phoebe’s wallet to work instead of his. He gains himself a new nickname amongst the Pitt and finally learns a thing or two about you and your daughter. [7.3k]
PART THREE 𖤓 — A trip to the ED, a retirement meal, and a phone call with Robby. One leaves you up close and personal with your neighbor, one has Phoebe spilling secrets like it's an Olympic sport, and another has Jack realizing he's got a fucking crush on the single mom in apartment seventeen. [7.1k]
PART FOUR 𖤓♡ — Phoebe's birthday party consists of four sets of eyes ogling Jack from the second he enters your apartment, screaming children, your mom noticing something rather interesting, and a night on the balcony that changes the trajectory of everything. [8.7k]
⤷ PART 4.5 𖤓 — You don't hear from Jack for three days after the kiss. But despite being swamped at the hospital, after he reaches out via text, he doesn't stop. [SMAU]
PART FIVE 𖤓★ — When Jack offers his company in the form of a date to celebrate your book release, he gets to understand the inner workings of your mind a bit more. Unfortunately, it does leave him with an ache he has to tend to using nothing but his own imagination. [7.8k]
PART SIX 𖤓★— June 15th
PART SEVEN 𖤓★ — June 20th
PART EIGHT 𖤓♡ — June 25th
PART NINE 𖤓 — June 30th
─── ⋆ EXTRAS ⋆
#APT.17 (a tag for anything related to this series)
SUNDAY FUNK DAY SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
Tag list for this series has grown way too big for me to keep up with so it’s unfortunately CLOSED. You can however follow the #apt.17 tag instead for updates on the series!
SUMMARY: A scuffle in the hall causes Jack to accidentally take Phoebe’s wallet to work instead of his. He gains himself a new nickname amongst the Pitt and finally learns a thing or two about you and your daughter.
WARNINGS: quite heavy mentions of partner loss, some swearing, mentions of dead-beat parents, mentions of very slight sexual content, Phoebe's huge personality and an entire scene for her bowel movements (don't ask just read lmao)
A/N: We are finally getting into the story of them!! It's likely that chapters now will be around this sort of length because I have so much to say and so many ideas. I'm super excited for you to start seeing more of Phoebe's personality and Jack's reaction to it hehe
PAIRING: Jack Abbot x Single Mom!Reader
WORD COUNT: 7.3k
PREV. PART — SERIES MASTERLIST
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
Tom has an extremely punchable face.
Handsome, sure. Defined facial structure, pillowy lips, chocolate brown eyes and dark lashes. But he’s smug, arrogant. The type of man who believes the world owes him something. Far too entitled for his own good and way too narcissistic to ever consider how his actions affect those around him.
He likes to think of himself as the man of any woman’s dreams. And sure, maybe he is. If you’re into pompous pricks who care more about their hair and eyebrows than having a relationship with their child.
Tom’s mouth is moving again, the droning sound of his voice not interesting enough for you to really listen to what he’s saying. You find yourself wanting to gouge out the eyes you once got lost in, pluck every single one of those spindly eyelashes and break every bone you once found beautiful in his repulsive face.
You really find yourself fighting back that urge when he snaps his fingers in front of your face and stares at you expectantly.
“Did you even listen to a word I just said?” He has the audacity to look offended.
Your lips press into a firm line. “If you ever snap your fingers in my face again, I will break every single one and shove them so far up your—”
“Daddy!”
Your jaw clenches for a moment before a smile is plastered on your face for the sake of Phoebe. She crashes into Tom’s legs, wrapping herself around them like a koala. Tom reaches down for her, palms under her armpits to lift her to his chest, enveloping her in a squeeze.
The smile drops from your face the second her back is to you and you’re back to glaring at Tom, a look he’s more than happy to reciprocate.
“Hey, sunshine. How you doing?” His hand rubs across her small back, her face tucked into his neck.
Phoebe’s response is muffled into his skin, but whatever it is gets a chuckle out of the prick. You reach for her overnight bag, extend your arm for Tom to take it. It’s something that you still think is an absolute joke. You shouldn’t have to pack anything for her to go to his house. And yet, he still has nothing for her. No clothes, overnight diapers, toiletries…
“Alright, give Mommy some love.” Phoebe unwraps herself from Tom to reach for you, squeezing you with all of her might as if it’s the only way she can convey how much she loves you.
You squeeze back, gentler but just as much lovingly. “Be good for Dad and have fun, okay?”
Phoebe hums, wiggles out of your hold to stand on her feet. You watch with a chuckle as she smoothes down her outfit; a baby blue tutu and a long sleeved Bluey shirt.
You gave up fighting her on outfit choices a long time ago. No one really warned you that parenting is about picking your battles. You prefer to save yourself a headache by letting her wear what she wants most days.
You wanted her to grow up strong and independent. Instead you’ve created a stubborn little fashionista monster.
Phoebe takes Tom’s hand, an act that hurts and warms you both the same and waves as they leave the threshold of the door.
“Love you, Diva!” She calls out, skipping in a pair of battered booger-green Crocs that she refuses to part with.
“Love you, bestie.” Your reply echoes down the hall until they’re both out of sight and you’re completely alone.
It’s when the door closes that the silence envelops you. Quiet and eerie in a sense that you don’t really know what to do with yourself. The apartment feels off-kilter without her massive personality invading every wall and crevice.
A pout forms on your lips when you look at the mess she’s left. Toys, books, arts and crafts… you consider leaving it out all afternoon and night so you have some semblance of her chaos with you. But the moment your barefoot steps on a piece of LEGO, you’re quick to change your mind.
Only when you’re scooping the evil little pieces of plastic into the box do you realize your mistake. Eyes snagging on a bright pink purse by the front door, you scramble to your feet.
The last time Phoebe forgot her purse, it ended up in a forty-five minute long meltdown. The fear of Tom having to bring her home or not knowing how to handle it is strong enough to make you ignore the pain in your foot when you stand on plastic again.
Your feet move fast as you scoop up the diamante pouch and race down the hall. Phoebe usually forces Tom to take the stairs so she can race him, so if you’re lucky, you’ll catch her just before they make it to the car.
You have a good shot at it, until you’re colliding with something solid and the purse is dropping to the floor at the same time a dark blue backpack does, both contents spilling across the carpet.
“Shit—fuck, I’m sorry, are you okay?”
The voice is rushed, a groan when they lower closer to the ground to rustle through the mix of lipsticks, hair ties and actual male belongings. You blink at the voice, looking up as you finally register it’s a who that you’ve collided with instead of a what.
Jack squats a bit awkwardly in front of you, shoving a water bottle into the backpack unceremoniously. He’s dressed in scrubs again, brows slightly pinched and you finally notice that the green in his eyes is more prominent than the brown in the light of the hall.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again, another groan as he returns to his full height. “I really have to go. There’s an emergency at the hospital. Are you sure you’re okay?”
You blink, rising back to your feet again and nodding. “Yeah. No, I’m fine. Go, I’m so sorry.”
He nods once, offering you a very brief but effective once over, as if he’s double checking, before he’s rushing down the hall and straight for the stairs.
A stab shoots up your foot when you move to walk, a groan slipping past your lips as you grip the purse from its dainty handle with eyes squeezed shut.
“Fuck my life.” You groan.
You know there’s no point in trying to catch up to Phoebe and Tom now. They’ll be long gone down the street and the sole of your foot is refusing anything but the idea of some slippers and a glass of wine.
It’s begrudgingly that you return to your apartment, throw her purse on the kitchen counter and disappear for an hour to soak in the tub. You spend half of that time scrolling mindlessly through TikTok and Instagram reels and the other half scolding yourself for almost knocking a forty-something-year-old man over.
A very fucking attractive forty-something-year-old man.
It’s almost three in the afternoon when you finally decide to stop wallowing in your embarrassment and loneliness. With a bottle of wine—it’s five o’clock somewhere—and frozen chicken tenders for a late lunch, you’ve managed to set up somewhat of a work station on the kitchen island.
The blank word doc mocks you, cursor blinking with every moment you don’t type a single letter. You let your gaze roll away from the screen, take a moment to admire the stacks of hardback books that litter the rest of the counters.
You’re capable. You’re successful. You’re a talented writer and you have the creative capacity to start the final instalment of your trilogy. Yet when you look back on the screen, all you can do is groan.
You have no motivation to write, your foot still feels sore from the LEGO assault and you miss Phoebe. Your eyes drift across the counter to her little pink purse, a pout forming on your lips.
You could call her, just to check in. But you know it’s not worth the hassle of Tom trying to berate you for being a suffocating mother. Stupid prick.
You settle for reaching for her bag instead, grinning at her little plastic lipsticks and fake keys. You dig deeper and still when you find a black wallet instead of a bright pink one.
There’s no chance of it being Tom’s and you don’t have a wallet like that. Retrieving it with a bit more caution than curiosity, you flip it open and smack a hand over your mouth at the same time. The ID is the first thing you see.
Dr. Jack Abbot.
Oh, fuck me.
He’s staring at the camera with a blank expression, but his eyes are anything but emotionless; gleaming with something flirty and mysterious. He looks younger in it—perhaps a shot from five or so years ago—smaller traces of gray in his dark hair. You truly can’t help the way your heart rate picks up. He’s handsome in his ID photo but this man was made to be middle-aged.
There’s no phone number on his ID, nor on any receipts or healthcare cards. You try your hardest to ignore the black card tucked between two debit cards when you finally find a business slip with a number on it.
For the second time tonight, you’re left speechless.
Tactical Emergency Medical Support.
SWAT Physician, Dr. Jack Abbot.
You blink at the flimsy piece of card. Once. Twice. What the fuck?
There’s a number in blocky font on the back, an email address that he likely only uses for SWAT enquiries. Drafting a text to the number is fine until you realize how invasive you’ve just been to his privacy.
Still, your finger only hovers over the send button for a moment before pressing it.
Hey, Jack. It’s Y/N. I’m so sorry but I think I accidentally picked up your wallet instead of Phoebe’s when I bumped into you in the hall! I can come by the hospital and drop it off?
With a sigh, you drop your phone to the counter and slide his SWAT card back into the pocket of his wallet, only allowing yourself thirty seconds to imagine Jack in a full camo set-up. Your fingers brush over the fine leather fabric for a moment, and you don’t mean for it to happen, don’t mean to stumble across it. But your thumb slips against something tucked far behind the cards and a small, folded photo slips out.
It’s worn around the edges, frayed from what you can only assume is his tender touch. A woman. Middle aged and incredibly beautiful and staring something meaningful into the camera as she raises her hand to point at her finger. You realize quite quickly what you’re looking at.
A married woman. Jack’s married woman. His wife. You suddenly feel sick to your stomach for invading his privacy like this, for being so fucking nosy. Most importantly for secretly thirsting over a married fucking man.
You try to remember ever seeing a ring on his finger, cipher through your memory for any hints and flickers of silver or gold in passing. You find none, though that doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps you just never noticed a ring. Or perhaps he wore it around his neck…
It doesn’t matter. Your findings are enough of a reality check to have you gently easing it back to its rightful place, but not strong enough to quell the question of why the photo is kept so discreetly hidden. Not your place to wonder. Perhaps he’s a private person. Perhaps he’s experienced the issue of an accidental wallet swap before and doesn’t want a photo of his precious wife to fall into the wrong kind of hands.
You push the wallet to the far end of the kitchen island and struggle to focus on your original task at hand. Outlining the final book in your trilogy.
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
Jack enjoys chaos that can be controlled. Whether it’s infiltrating a scenario with SWAT or commanding a trauma room, he thrives on the need to be needed. A natural leader, yes. But also a very lonely man that tends to seek his validation in the form of a slight hero complex.
Emma is still visibly shaken, even an hour after the altercation with an extremely uncooperative patient. Young, fresh, eager-eyed and extremely overwhelmed from the events of her rather unfortunate first day.
Jack was the first one in the room when the code word was shouted breathlessly from Perlah’s lungs. Robby had shuffled close behind, restraining the patient while Jack had tended to the nurse, encouraging her to breathe and checking her over for injuries.
She’s yet to fully snap out of the shock, which Jack promises is normal and perfectly okay to experience. Robby’s been watching her like a hawk, worried she may crumble under the events or freeze up on a patient at the most critical time.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go home?” He asks her gently, quiet enough for the others around the nurses desk not to hear.
Emma shakes her head, forcing a polite smile on her lips. But the way she wrings her hands out and picks at the skin around her thumbs suggests otherwise. “No, it’s okay. Sorry, I just—is it always like this?”
Dana smiles, tipping her glasses to the bottom of her nose. “Not always. But, hey, at least you’re initiated, kid.”
A smile cracks at the corners of Emma’s mouth at Dana’s words, a relationship similar to one of a mother and daughter. It reminds Jack briefly of you and Phoebe.
“Alright,” he sighs. “How about a coffee run, then? A bit of fresh air, sunshine… My treat.” Jack reaches into his pocket for his wallet, keeps his tone casual enough that Emma would be doing him a favor by going on a beverage run.
A win for everyone, really. She gets a break without feeling guilty for it and everyone gets a pick-me-up after a long half-shift.
But when Jack retrieves his wallet, he’s met with more amusement than excitement. He frowns, following Santos’ tickled stare down to his wallet. No. Not his wallet. Because Jack’s wallet is sleek and black and leather. And the thing in his hands is bold, fabric and bright fucking pink.
“What the fu—”
Bubbles of laughter surround him and the nurses station, something he’s not quite used to being on the receiving end of. It’s been at least two decades since he was teased so openly and broadly by colleagues. This is the first time it’s been by his subordinates.
“Okay, Diva. Didn’t know you had it in you.” Santos’ words bubble out of her in bursts of breathless laughter, her face turning a pinky shade as she struggles to keep the amusement in check.
Jack turns the wallet in his hands, taking note of the large DIVA in stark white diamontes. He blinks, looks at his fellow doctors, then back down at the wallet again. “Well it’s obviously not mine.” Jack almost squeaks the words of defense, opening the wallet to find a twenty dollar bill and neat handwriting faded into the inside.
PROPERTY OF DIVA PHOEBE Y/L/N.
An exasperated laugh slips from him before he can stop it. It’s bad enough that he’s been unable to keep the two of you from infiltrating his mind over the past few weeks, now Phoebe was following him into work?
Too busy digging into his other pocket for his phone—which, yes, is his—Jack misses the curious glances at the fond expression that creeps its way onto his features. There’s a single text from an unknown number on his locked homescreen. A time stamp of three hours ago, no preview, but he doesn’t need to unlock it to know it's from you.
Robby watches in amusement when Jack snaps the wallet closed and shoves it back into his pocket, swiping up on his screen to open his messages. Robby’s head cocks to the side slightly as he tries to hide his smirk. “So… Do you have another hobby that we’re not aware of?”
“Yeah, I also do Drag on the weekends.” Jack replies dryly, only offering him a brief and expressionless glance.
“Alright, Abbot.” Dana chirps through a lopsided smirk.
Jack can’t help the laugh that he scoffs out. “It’s my neighbors—I mean her toddlers. Bumped into her on the way in, accidentally grabbed the wrong wallets. Guess coffee is on Robby.” He pats him on the back with a dead smile before walking away, fingers moving across the screen.
Hey, we definitely picked up the wrong wallets. Don’t worry about dropping it in, I’ll pick it up. Should be done in a couple hours.
Then another text.
Tell Pheebs Doctor Jack said he’s sorry.
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
You have a slight tendency of getting lost in the creative process of writing. The moment images and words begin to flow into sentences and ooze from your fingertips to the screen, you zone out from the world around you quite quickly.
So, it’s no surprise that you’re a little startled when the knocking on your front door sounds just after 8 in the evening. And it takes a moment for you to realize that you are expecting someone.
Jack stands with a tired smile when you open the door with eyes wide and apology on the tip of your tongue. He looks better than you would’ve imagined after a shift in the hospital, still in scrubs and salt and pepper curls slightly mussed, but you suppose he’s the type of man that just never looks like shit.
“I’m so sorry about this,” you rush out, opening the door wider for him to follow you inside, apologizing profusely for the mix up as you make your way toward the kitchen.
Jack follows slowly, closing the door behind him with a soft click. He takes in your home, warmth and comfort consuming him at how cosy and loved and lived in your apartment is in just eight weeks of living here.
He was right, it is a mirror layout of his. But you’ve decorated with rich colours and mix-match furniture that shouldn’t look right but somehow does. It’s a blend of cohesive chaos, relaxing and comforting and yet overwhelmingly different.
Jack follows to the kitchen, leg aching from rushing on his feet for far too long without a moment's reprieve. He retrieves Phoebe’s wallet from his pocket, fingers tracing the diamonte lettering before holding it out for you as you hold out his.
“Nah, don't worry about it. But I do think I’m going to be called Diva by the Pitt for the next year at least.” He laughs.
You take Phoebe’s wallet from his grip with a laugh, no brush of fingers, no close proximity. It’s only then, because you’re looking for it, that you notice the silver band around his left ring finger.
“What’s the Pitt?” you asked instead.
“Oh, it's just what we call the E.D.” Jack explains, brief but his tone remains friendly. Borderline fond.
You’re tapping Phoebe’s wallet against the palm of your hand. “I had to go through your wallet to try and find your number. I’m sorry. But I found it on your SWAT card?” There’s a lilt in your voice, a little teasing, a bit playful. Enough for it to be perceived, not enough to cross a boundary.
Friendly. Like you’re trying to remind your brain to be when it randomly decides to think of Jack in the middle of the night.
He has the audacity to look a bit bashful at your comment. A feigned nonchalant shrug of his shoulder, a quirk in the corner of his mouth. “My therapist said I needed a hobby.”
“Ah, because the emergency department isn’t thrilling enough.”
Jack laughs at that, not loud but genuine. It’s as if he’s caught himself, eyes skimming across the open living space, noticing the quiet.
“I hope Phoebe wasn’t too upset."
You wave a hand. “She’s fine. She’s with her Dad for the night, so I’m sure she hasn’t even realized she doesn’t have it.”
Jack hums, like he’s taking note of the fact that you’re definitely single. No. No. Stop that. His gaze drifts behind you, lingering on the stuff all over your kitchen counter. Piles and piles of hardback books stacked up around a laptop, a notepad and a bottle of wine.
“So… you read about 80 books when you get a night off?”
You look at the books, back to him with your eyes closed and a pursed lip smile. “Um no, I sign them.”
Jack cocks a brow, a silent question.
You huff a bit self-depricatingly through your nose. “I’m an author.” You say it carefully, like you’re expecting the reaction you usually get.
That’s not a real occupation.
Don’t quit your day job.
Writing silly romances doesn't make you a real author.
For some reason, he’s the last person you want thinking of you like that.
So when a smile stretches across his face, your shoulders start to relax. “Oh yeah? That’s cool. Anything I would’ve read?”
You laugh as you lead him toward the kitchen island. “Um, unless you read a lot of romance, probably not.”
Jack shrugs, hands stuffed into his pockets as he peers at the copies. “I’m not opposed to trying new things. You any good?”
You grow warm, shrug a shoulder. Despite not really giving a fuck what most people think, this part always makes you feel a little nervy. “I have a couple New York Times Bestsellers.”
His head whips to you, impressed or shocked, you can’t really tell. But you watch as he picks up one of the hardbacks to examine it, and you don't miss how his eyes linger on the name at the bottom. “I go by a pseudonym.” You quickly add. “I don’t like the idea of my name and face out there. And I don’t want it to embarrass Pheebs when she’s older.”
“Why would it embarrass her?” Jack asks with pinched brows, flipping the book in his hand to skim over the blurb.
You shrug. “Kids can be assholes. I don’t want her being teased because her mom writes steamy romances.”
Jack laughs at that. God, you’re starting to hate yourself for how much you love that sound.
“You’re a good mom.” He says it with mirth in his voice but the way his eyes bore into yours without an ounce of hesitation, you know he means it.
Your shoulders jab in another shrug, bashful and deeply moved by his comment. You know you’re a good mom, despite what anyone may try to say. But to hear it from him—someone older, successful someone who sees the worst and best in parenting every day…
“I try.”
His eyes remain on you as he smiles, softer now. Like he’s pleased with your response; that you know you’re nothing but the best you can be for Phoebe.
“Well, I will let you get back to your signing. As a Doctor, though, I must advise you to take breaks so you don’t end up with cramps or carpal tunnel."
A laugh escapes you at that, and you find yourself nodding and holding your hands up in surrender. An ache is already forming in your wrists. “Whatever you say, Doctor Abbot.”
He grins something playful, but before he can put the book down, you reach a hand out to stop him.
“Keep it. If you want, I mean. As an apology for the wallet mix up.”
He raises a brow at the offer but makes no attempt to put it down again. “Has it even been released yet?”
“No, so don’t be writing any book reviews until after the end of next month.” You point a finger at him accusingly, to which it’s Jack’s turn to hold his hands out in surrender.
After you see him out and say goodnight, you're left reeling with the realization of what you’ve done. You haven’t just given Jack a pre-release copy of your book. You’ve given him the book that is undoubtedly the most steamiest and unhinged novel you’ve written to date.
And he’s going to read it. He’s going to get an insight to your brain and the sex that your wild thoughts muster up. He’s going to have you in his mind when he gets to chapter 54 and the female main character is on her knees, choking on the first male main character's cock while the other is taking her from behind.
Oh, fuck.
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
Jack can’t sleep.
It’s midnight and his bed is calling his name, but he can’t sleep.
He escaped to the balcony an hour ago with a chamomile tea and the book you’d given him. In truth, he hasn’t been able to put it down since he opened it and read the dedication page.
To the women that have only ever been told they’re too much or not enough, Niko and Az are my gift to you. Happy vibrations ;)
The dedication alone was enough to have his eyebrows and heart rate rising. But when he began the first chapter, he found himself entirely immersed.
Jack can’t get enough of the way you write. The words flow together seamlessly on the pages, witty and flirty and playful in the most poetic and coherent way. Four chapters in, and he’s greedily skimming the pages to know more, to soak in the way your mind works, the way your heart beats for writing and creating.
Yet despite how descriptive and excellently you paint the scenes, all he can really think about is you. In the softness of your own home, the smile on your lips when he managed to make you laugh. Your teasing comments, and playful gaze.
Involuntarily, Jack’s eyes flit from the book up to the balcony across from his. Your curtains are still open, the door closed now but the kitchen light remains on. He watches the brief movements of you moving around inside; sitting at the island and typing, disappearing down the hall, sitting back at your makeshift workstation.
The thought of texting you has crossed his mind more than Jack cares to admit. Now that he has your number, it’s easy and accessible to just… talk.
He argues that he shouldn’t. It’s late and you’re working. But you are awake, and so is he. And he’s reading your book with so many thoughts and observations that he feels a need to be in some kind of contact with you.
As if he’s getting to know your mind and soul through your work, your art. He watches you sit at the island again, rub a hand down your face.
Fuck it.
Jack reaches for his phone and sends a text before he can really think twice about it.
It’s not everyday I get sucked into a book after four chapters. I understand why you’re a bestseller. This rocks.
He cringes at himself. This rocks? But the text is already sent and there’s not much he can do. By the time he puts the phone down, it’s already pinging with a reply.
Just wait until you get to chapter seven. Never too old to learn something new LMAO
He grins at that. Can only imagine what he’s yet to experience if the dedication is anything to go by. The bubbles appear at the bottom of the screen again until it’s replaced with another text from you.
While I have you, Doctor… What's the best thing for constipation?
Jack’s brows raise at the bluntness of your text. Another pings through quicker than he can blink.
For Phoebe, I mean. She’s been a bit uncomfortable so she came home earlier.
He considers the message with a frown. Jack knows it’s normal for children to have a preferred parent when they’re sick. But constipation is usually only discomfort. He can’t help but wonder why Phoebe wouldn’t feel comfortable enough to stay with her father. He supposes you’re her comfort, no matter the problem.
I can come over and check her out?
There's hesitation. A bubble of dots that appear and reappear. As if you're fighting yourself.
I would actually really appreciate that, thank you!!
Do you have a callout rate? I can venmo you 💗
Jack doesn’t dwell on the heart. You’re young, you’re bold. You only mean it in a friendly way. But he does make it clear in his final text that he has not and will never charge for doing what he is trained and qualified to do.
It’s fifteen minutes later that Jack’s got his leg back on, a first aid kit in his hand and knocking on your apartment front door. You answer in a similar manner as you did earlier; slightly wild eyes, messy hair and a tiredness that’s sitting deeper beneath your eyes as the night has gone on.
You pull the door wide enough for him to enter, a flurry of, “Thank you. She’s in bed. She’s never been constipated before,” slipping from your lips as you guide Jack down the hall and toward Phoebe’s bedroom.
He watches you tap on the doorframe, a gentle offer of privacy for the toddler. “Hey, baby. You have a special visitor.”
Phoebe grumbles from her curled position in her toddler bed, but when she sees Jack peek his head into the doorway, she almost bursts out of bed.
“Doctor Jack!” The shriek is loud enough to almost shatter an eardrum, but it only makes Jack grin wide at her. It’s been a while since anyone’s shown him that sort of excitement to be in his presence.
“Hey, kid. Mommy said you’ve got a tummy ache?” He speaks softly as he slowly approaches her bed.
Jack sits a bit awkwardly on the edge, knee protesting at the low angle but he manages and takes a split second to take in the decor of her room.
It looks like Phoebe’s mind threw up. The walls are multicoloured; not pastel but not bright. She’s got her toddler bed against the wall by the door and opposite is a white teepee tent filled to the brim with stuffed animals.
Her drawings are taped to the walls, a small kids vanity in one corner and a large toy box overspilling with dress-up outfits and two Nerf guns. There’s bookcases stuffed to the brim, pink dressers on either side of her closet and a One Direction poster above her bed.
Jack doesn’t quite know what to make of the girl's interior design choices.
Phoebe nods with a pout. “I need to poop but it’s stuck. I think it’s a monster poop, Doctor Jack.”
Jack breathes out a laugh, keeps a fond smile on his face. He can feel you watching from the doorway that you lean against.
“Hm, let’s see what we can do about this monster poop, then.”
Phoebe watches intently when he opens the first aid box and picks up a pair of blue gloves. She frowns, scrunching her little face up in what Jack can only assume is distaste.
“I don’t have cooties, you know.” She states it like she’s offended.
Jack stifles a laugh. “Oh, I know. But I have to wear gloves so I can check your tummy. Can you lift your shirt up a little bit for me, Diva?”
The frown morphs into a grin at the nickname and she nods, laying back against her pillow and tugging her shirt up to expose her tubby little belly.
Jack feels around her abdomen softly, searching for anything abnormal. Her stomach is slightly harder than it should be, but it doesn’t seem to cause her anything but mild discomfort when he presses down on her skin.
“What are her eating habits like, Mom?”
You blink when you realize he’s speaking to you and push off the doorway to move closer, forcing yourself out of the daze you had found yourself in.
“Oh, you know. If she had it her way it would just be cake and pasta forever. I have to sneak veggies into her meals most of the time, homemade fruit smoothies…” Your voice drifts off into something quieter, like you don’t want Phoebe to know you’ve betrayed her.
Jack hums, feeling at the toddler's sides. “Does she drink sodas or anything like that?”
Phoebe shakes her head before you can answer. “They rot your teeth! I only like water, milk and sometimes mommy’s smoothies.”
Jack grins, pleased with her answer and turns back to the first aid kit to dispose of the blue gloves. He reaches for the hem of Phoebe’s shirt and pulls it back down to cover her tummy again.
“What did you eat and drink at your daddy’s?”
She makes a sheepish look at you. “Daddy gave me candy…and those chocolate milkshakes that you don’t let me have.”
You sigh, pinching the bridge of your nose. “Of course he did.”
Jack notices the annoyance in your body language immediately. “If they’re not foods she usually has, it’s not uncommon for it to cause a little constipation. Do you have any prunes?”
You blink, brows knitting. “Um, yes, actually.”
“Try her with two prunes and a glass of water. Hopefully it’ll get things moving by morning.”
You nod, loosing a breath and running a hand over your face. If you weren’t already pissed at Tom for constantly letting Phoebe down with visits, you most certainly are now that he’s fucked with her bowel movements.
Jack waves you off as you excuse yourself to grab some water and prunes, and takes the moment to turn back to Phoebe with a playfully somber expression.
“I don’t know if your mom told you, but I bumped into her in the hall earlier and I accidentally took your wallet to work today instead of mine.”
Her eyes widen, a giggle falling from her lips. “That’s silly.”
He hums, stretching his prosthetic out. “Yeah, now all the doctors are calling me a diva!”
She laughs at that, harder than he’s heard before. A giggle that’s made of pure happiness and sunshine and Jack finds himself realizing that he should’ve fought harder for a child of his own.
“Mommy says we’re all divas deep down.”
He grins, tries to mask the ache that’s beginning to wedge itself back in that crevice in his heart. “Yeah, guess your mom’s right about a few things, huh.”
You re-enter the room with a grin of your own as you hand Phoebe a small plastic dish with two prunes and a cup of water.
“See, Pheebs. Doctor Jack says Mommy is always right.”
She grimaces when she eats the fruit but doesn’t put up much of a fight under Jack's gaze. You have to stifle your own laugh at it. Like she's cursing her new favorite person with just a look. Phoebe animatedly juts her arm out for you to take the offensive dish from her and replace it with the water, which she guzzles down to try and rid herself the taste of the prunes.
“It’s better now!” she declares and Jack has to look away to hide his laughter.
You’re better than him, already mastered the art of suppressing your emotions for the sake of your child and when Jack stands with a grunt, you take his place on Phoebe’s bed to tuck her in.
“Alright, Diva. Bed time for real now, okay?” Your tone isn’t stern but it doesn’t exactly hold any room for argument.
Phoebe huffs as she gets comfortable, reaching for her whale stuffy as she blinks at you. “Can Jack stay for song time with Mr Grasshopper?”
He doesn’t question why the whale is named a grasshopper, something he’s starting to learn not to do when it comes to Phoebe. But he nods, remains just by the door as you pull the covers up to her chin and kiss her forehead.
“What song would you like tonight?”
Phoebe hums, pretends that she’s thinking about it before ultimately deciding on one of her favorite bedtime songs. “The all night long one, mama.”
Jack thinks he’s unfamiliar with all kinds of lullabies. Until you begin to gently sing a familiar tune to her and he quickly realizes that it is in fact not a lullaby and is instead You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC.
It takes absolutely every ounce of self control that Jack possesses to not bark out an obnoxious laugh at the sight before him. Because despite how amusing he finds it, she's drifting into a state of sleep before you’re a minute in.
“Night, bestie.” You whisper as you press a ghost of a kiss to her forehead and slowly stand from her bed.
Phoebe makes a noise that’s a mix of a sigh and a snore, gripping Mr Grasshopper tighter to her chest as she mumbles a muffled “night night, divas,” when you’re sneaking out of her room.
The moment the door closes and your eyes meet Jack’s, there’s a silent agreement that it’s acceptable to laugh at what Jack has just had the pleasure of experiencing.
“I can honestly say that’s the first time I’ve heard a three year old ask for AC/DC as a lullaby.” Jack chuckles as you lead him back down the hall.
Heat licks at your cheeks. “What can I say, she’s got my music taste.”
Jack dips his head as he grins. “Well, it could be worse. She could like screaming music.”
You throw your head back at the joke, the opinion that Phoebe made very clear when she first met Jack two weeks ago. You’re shocked he even remembers that.
“Forgive me if I’m overstepping but I get the vibe you don’t get along with her dad very much.”
You laugh again but it dwindles into a groan. “Is it that obvious?”
“Not to her.” He reassures.
You sigh on a heavy breath, a look of annoyance and exasperation at the very mention of him. “He’s just a… douche. When we first got together I thought his cockiness was… I don’t know— attractive I guess? Then he got controlling and way too egotistical. He knocked me up when I was twenty-three. Told me he didn’t want a kid, disappeared. Came back when he realised I’d made something for myself, had a career.”
Jack almost bristles at how casually you summarise it. Like it’s something you’ve just had to get on with and tolerate. It rubs him the wrong way.
“And now?” He knows it’s not his place but he can’t help the slip of the question.
He watches you chew on the inside of your cheek, notices the way you roll out the tension in your shoulders like agitation is beginning to fester there. “He picks and chooses when it’s convenient for him to see Phoebe. There’s no fatherly bone in his body, not really. He treats her like an inconvenience. But when he does show up, he acts like the fun parent that gives her whatever she wants.”
Jack’s cheek twitches. He would’ve given anything to have been a father, to have had a child of his own with his wife. Men like that make Jack angry.
“She’ll learn for herself when she gets older. Who was actually there for her, who wasn’t.” He offers the same statement your parents have done for years. You know it’s only meant to be comforting, but it does nothing to make anything better.
“Yeah, but I don’t want that for her. You know? She’s an amazing kid. Just wish I could protect her from it forever.”
It’s something you’ve admitted out loud several times and the statement never feels any less loaded than the time before. Phoebe does deserve better.
When you reach the kitchen and catch sight of the darkness outside, you remember just how late it is and how tired Jack must be and Tom is out of your mind as quickly as he was placed there.
“Thank you, Jack. And I’m so sorry for this. Please apologize to your wife for me.”
You don’t miss the way he falters for a brief moment, how something akin to pain flashes across his usually warm eyes. You watch in real time as his shoulders stiffen, when he instinctively reaches for his ring and blinks down at it.
Jack swallows, finds himself realizing that you’ve noticed something he often forgets about. For a split second, he wonders if you might’ve seen the photo of his wife when you rummaged through his wallet for a way to contact him.
“Oh,” He almost chokes on his word, twisting the silver band before he forces himself to stuff his hand into his pocket, the other gripping the first-aid kit. “No, that’s— she’s—she passed. Six years ago.”
Horror slams into like a freight train. Your lips part, eyes widen and you’re suddenly cursing every God and deity for your stupidly big mouth and stupidity. “Jack…I am so sorry! I just—your ring— I assumed—“
“Hey, no.” He waves a hand to cut you off, stuffing it back into his pocket. “It’s fine. It’s okay. I still wear it, so… what’s anyone supposed to think.”
You watch him softly, the stiffness that remains in his shoulders at the topic of conversation. It burns you a bit, that you’ve caused him such discomfort. You know the feeling all too well. When you’re caught out and have no choice but to explain something you’d rather keep close to your heart and bury away from the rest of the world.
Maybe it’s the understanding of the fact that has you reaching into the collar of your shirt to pinch at the silver chain you keep around your neck. Jack’s gaze follows the movement, and when the light catches on the small diamond ring that dangles from the silver, his lips part in a minute way.
“I was engaged before I had Phoebe.” You explain gently, that heaviness that he likely feels now making its way into your own heart. “Not to her dad, but someone else. We were far too young for rings but he—he passed, hit by a drunk driver. I still wear mine too.”
Jack’s shoulders sink as he hears the steady shakiness of your voice; how it holds firm but it’s your tone that wavers just slightly. He finds himself swallowing thickly, huffing out a sigh but selfishly relishing in the fact that you understand the pain of it.
He doesn’t offer an apology. If he’s sick of hearing it, he can only assume that you are too. Because sorry doesn’t bring them back. Sorry doesn’t erase the pain. Sorry is just a way to express pity. And Jack doesn’t want pity. Neither do you, he knows that’s not why you told him.
“It doesn’t get easier with time, does it.”
It’s not a question, rather an observation. Jack can only guess you’ve experienced your loss for around the same amount of time that he has. And while your situations may be a bit different—one being a young engagement and the other being a solidified marriage—it’s pain all the same.
When you offer a shrug, it’s not as unbothered as it might usually seem. It’s heavy and laden with grief that refuses to leave you. It doesn’t haunt, just lingers. In the crevices of your skin, in the hollow of your bones, in the shadows of your memories.
“Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Time just lets you grow around them.”
Jack festers on your words, something too deep and familiar within them. As he watches you tuck the ring back into your shirt, he lets your statement ricochet off the confinements of his mind. No part of his grief has healed, but he has grown. He’s learned to live life again without Moira, learned to find joy and love in the simplicities of life.
Keeping her in his heart doesn’t make him stuck in the past. He’s honoring her and the life they had, just like you are with your lost love. Because despite the loss, you’re both still living. Growing and learning and loving in whatever capacity that you can.
For the first time since he lost his wife, Jack doesn’t feel so alone in his grief anymore.
Neither do you.
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
SERIES MASTERLIST — NEXT PART
Tag list for this series has grown way too big for me to keep up with so it’s unfortunately CLOSED. You can however follow the #apt.17 tag instead for updates on the series!
OKAY, I am eager to hear your thoughts and what we think about Phoebe's very loud personality and her growing attachment to Jack!! I have the most fun writing her little scenes and I promise she will only get bolder and sassier!! Also I felt like the final conversation between reader and Jack is SUPER integral to their relationship. They've both experienced a profound loss and I think it's so important and healthy for them to acknowledge it both separately and together, even as early as now </3
Thank you very much for reading! Feedback really means a lot so I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas for where you think this will go!! Reblogs helps to boost stuff for more people to reach so if you enjoyed it please consider reblogging!!
SUMMARY: Jack Abbot values his routine and structure. Work, SWAT, gym... and for the past six weeks, spending his Sunday mornings admiring the enigmatic single mom who's apartment balcony sits across from his.
WARNINGS: chaotic toddler and reader, mentions of dead beat parents, swearing, slight flirting, Jack being an absolute softie and some of his internalized angst over his wife and the life he never got with her :( also meet cute!!
A/N: I've been so excited to write and share this with you guys and I have SO much planned for this series. The toddler in this is very much inspired by me niece who is also three years old, most of the dialogue for her is stuff my niece has actually said so brace yourselves lmao.
PAIRING: Jack Abbot x Single Mom!Reader
WORD COUNT: 3k
SERIES MASTERLIST
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
Jack Abbot is a creature of habit. Structure and routine are infused within the very makings of him, written in bloodwork and DNA if anyone looked close enough.
He likes to stay busy; working nights at PTMC, helping out as a field medic for SWAT, going for a run every other morning, and squeezing in the gym four to five times a week. And every Sunday morning, when it reaches 10 a.m. and the city lazily turns in motion, Jack sits out on his balcony with a mug of coffee and tunes into a half hour episode of his favorite show.
The single mom in apartment seventeen.
Large windows that offer a clear view of the inside of your apartment; a mirror layout to his, like all complexes in Vanguard Plaza, but furnished in the most eclectic and chaotic way. The building wraps in a U-shape, your balcony doors propped open, and just like every Sunday, music pours through your kitchen and drifts across the barely thirty-foot space to Jack’s balcony.
The first Sunday that Jack noticed the presence of new neighbors, you were blaring nothing but Tame Impala. Week two was Fleetwood Mac. Week three was a mix of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Adele. Week four was filled with anything and everything country, and last week consisted of Paolo Nutini.
This morning, it’s Nelly Furtado’s entire discography.
Like every Sunday, Jack sits and listens. Echoes of loud giggles and shouts of singing from two sets of healthy lungs. Watches from a distance; ungraceful twirls, obnoxiously playful dancing, until a small body is standing on the counter and dancing too.
The girls in apartment seventeen have wiggled beneath his ribcage and into a secret crevice of his heart. The place that warms every time he hears the laughter, every time he watches the most wholesome mommy-daughter time.
He doesn’t know your name, nor your daughters. But he knows you love music, that it’s bled into your child in the most copy and paste way. She dances like you, uses wooden spoons for microphones, chopsticks for drum sticks, and her imagination for an electric guitar.
It makes Jack’s heart swell and sting at the same time.
His wife didn’t want children, a decision that he always told himself he was okay with. They were both slight workaholics, both too selfish to give up the idea of financial freedom. She didn’t think she’d be a good mom, no matter how much Jack disagreed. And then she died.
Left Jack with nothing but fading memories and a big house that felt too suffocating until he sold it five years ago. He keeps her photo in his wallet, a frame on his nightstand, his wedding band around his finger. Six months married and then she was gone. They didn’t even make it on their honeymoon.
Perhaps that’s why he relishes these Sunday mornings. He knew he’d never have that life with his wife, he knows he most probably won’t ever…but it’s a secret desire he wishes for. So he tucks it deep away, close to his chest, close to his wife.
The bitter coffee doesn’t chase the ache away. It still festers beneath his ribs, an itch that he can’t rid himself from. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Time just allows you to grow around it.
Jack allows himself five more minutes in the captivity of apartment seventeen before retreating back inside in search of sleep.
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
“Phoebe, Grandma's on the phone!”
You hear the tornado of flat feet smacking against the floor before you even finish your sentence. Your mom laughs on the screen, a screech of excitement tearing through the three-year-olds throat as she barrels onto the couch and snatches the phone from your grasp.
“Hi, Diva.” She beams wide, panting for breath and attempting to swat the sweaty hair from her face. “Are you coming to my house to play today?”
You bark out a laugh at that, her unashamed favoritism when it came to your mom.
“Not today, pickle. Grandma is on vacation with Grandpa, remember?”
Phoebe huffs and nods. “Can you bring me back a fridge magnet?” She asks instead, a question both you and your mom saw coming.
Your eyes dart over to the refrigerator. Covered in magnets and drawings and post cards… you’ll have to do some reorganising if she wants to fit another one on there.
“Absolutely, I’ll even bring you back some new shoes.”
Your eyes roll fondly when Phoebe’s lights up, an excited squeal falling from her lips as she nods her head vigorously. You press a kiss to her head before leaving her on the couch, pulling the phone closer to her face to speak.
Their conversation is a muffled background noise as you start to clean up the mess of her toys, the thirty-something articles of clothing strewn across the floor from her fashion show this afternoon. Plastic princess heels, a tiara, fairy wings…you’re sure she has a pirate’s outfit somewhere in the mess, too.
Your eyes flick to the time flashing on the microwave. 16:30.
Your shoulders drop, heart sinking. Thirty minutes late, you can try to hold out hope. But when it gets to the hour mark, you know it’s yet another no-show. Another night of tears with Pheebs and fast thinking on your part to distract her.
You learnt your lessons months ago. You know better than to tell her when she’s supposed to be seeing him. It only sets her up for disappointment and resentment. Let her come to the decision about him when she’s old enough to understand. Not when she’s three, upset and feeling like he doesn’t want to spend time with her.
You’ll shelter her from the truth of him for as long as you possibly can.
Throwing her outfits into her dress-up box in the corner of the lounge, you turn to your daughter with a heavy heart and the brightest smile you can muster.
“Alright, Diva. Go put your shoes on, let's go out for pizza.”
Phoebe doesn’t even offer your mom a goodbye. She throws the phone to the side of the couch and leaps to her feet, little legs scurrying toward her bedroom to no doubt retrieve the bright pink Crocs she’s recently become obsessed with.
You reach for your phone, sharing an exasperated laugh with your mom before she settles and tilts her head at you through the screen.
“What’s the excuse this time?” she asks.
You sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine. No calls or texts, just a no-show.”
Your mom’s lips form into a thin line, a look of disapproval that only ever seems to be reserved for him. “I take it Pheebs doesn't know?”
You shake your head, toeing your own shoes on as you wait for her. “No, I stopped telling her when she’s supposed to be seeing him months ago. Unnecessary upset, you know?”
Your mom hums, a contemplative look crossing her features. When she notices the disappointment in your eyes, she softens. “You are all that she needs, baby.” She reassures you. “I know you’re trying to do the right thing by her, and you are. But when she’s older, she’ll realize it for herself.”
Shoulders sagging and heart aching, you sigh again. “I know, it’s just not fair on her. Wish I could shield her from it forever, you know?”
“I know, but you are doing fantastic. Me and Dad are so proud of you.”
It’s a struggle to blink back the tears. In truth, you likely wouldn't have coped at all if it weren't for your parents. You were young when you fell pregnant, just shy of turning twenty-three. No real job, no real qualifications. Still living at home and accidentally knocked up by a douche of a boyfriend you were trying to figure out how to break up with.
But your parents…they were a rock for you. They supported whatever decision you wanted to make. They let you stay at home until you had the money to move out, took you to every appointment, helped you turn your dad’s office into a nursery without a hint of annoyance.
Your mom held your hand when you were rushed into hospital to deliver Phoebe, and she sang to you softly when you had to go in for emergency surgery.
Your parents were the ones to encourage you to go back to college. They were the ones to babysit while you worked for your degree, when you had last minute interviews and meetings. And they were the ones you thanked and celebrated with when you finally made it.
When your first book got published and made its way to a New York Times Bestseller within the first week of its release, they were the ones you celebrated with. It was their mortgage you paid off with your very first cheque.
It was only at that point that Tom decided he wanted to be in Phoebe’s life again. That he had apparently made a terrible mistake and wanted to be a ‘family’. You’d allowed him access to his daughter but denied him ever having any access to you.
“Get out of that brilliant head of yours.”
You blink as your mom’s voice drifts you back to the present and you smile, slightly wonky. “Have a cocktail for me and keep Dad away from the dirty martinis. I doubt half of Cabo wants to hear his Elvis impression.”
She barks out a laugh at that, blowing kisses to the phone and promising to call back tomorrow before hanging up.
“Mommy!?” Phoebe calls out to you from her bedroom.
“Coming!” You call back, feet slowly moving you down the hall toward her bedroom. Stopping short with a sigh when her next words echo from her room.
“I pooped my pants again.”
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
Phoebe’s tummy is filled quite comfortably with a veggie pizza and three scoops of chocolate ice cream. A dinner of champions, in her humble opinion, and a day well spent with you.
Her legs bounce her along the marble floors of the complex entrance, a skip in her step which is slightly making you regret that third scoop of ice cream. A sugar rush right before bed is not something you have the energy for.
“Hold up for a moment, baby. Mommy needs to check the mailbox.”
Her sassy huff is the only response you get, but she listens. Trudges back to your side with less enthusiasm than before. You can hear her clicking her tongue and jumping on the spot when you unlock your designated box, rifling through some letters and the package you’ve been eager to receive.
The first print of your newest novel.
It’s not until you’re locking the box back up that you notice Phoebe isn’t to the left of you anymore. Instead, she’s to your far right with her hands behind her back and her small neck craned up to meet the gaze of a middle-aged man walking toward the main front doors.
“Hi, my name is Phoebe." Her small voice speaks at his legs and the man stops short at the sound of it.
His neck whips down to her, a small kiss of amusement pulling at the corner of his mouth before it morphs into a friendly smile. Jesus Christ.
He blinks at her. “Well, it’s nice to meet you Phoebe. I’m Jack.”
His voice is like slowly crystalizing honey. Soft and smooth yet a slightly raw register as he lowers his tone to address the toddler. You swallow as you watch, a little taken back by the sight of him.
Salt and pepper curls with a mostly salt stubble, slightly tanned skin and bulging biceps that threatened to tear through his––is that a scrub vest—
“Are you a doctor?” Phoebe asks the question aloud that you silently ask in your head.
Jack smiles, nods his head and reaches to pinch the ID badge clipped to the pocket of his pants. “I am.”
You realize yourself then, tucking the mail under an arm and moving to approach the two. Your hand comes to rest on Phoebe’s shoulder and Jack’s eyes lift up your body before settling on your face.
“Sorry, she’s a bit of a social butterfly. She’ll chat your ear off all day if you let her.” It’s a slightly nervously laugh that bubbles from your throat and you’re completely unsure why.
You don’t get nervous. Not usually. But it’s also not every day that your daughter is introducing herself to a hot older man who happens to be a fucking doctor. More than that, and maybe it’s just his age, but it’s also not every day that you meet a man with such intense eye contact.
The moment his gaze meets yours, it doesn’t look away.
Jack laughs breathily, offering an open palm just above Phoebe’s head. “Nothing wrong with that. I’m Jack.”
His tone holds a flirty lilt—light and airy and far too comfortable for someone you’ve just met. Your palm meets his in a gentle greeting, skin rougher than yours, palm bigger than yours. You shake his hand with as much mirth as he does to yours.
“Y/N, this is my daughter, Phoebe.” You say softly, retrieving from his hold and resting your hand back on her shoulder again. “I think you’re the first normal neighbor we’ve met. We only moved in like six weeks ago.”
Jack’s smile widens just an inch as his hand moves to the strap on his backpack, his laugh something understanding, like you already have an inside joke. “Seventeen right?”
Your brows pinch slightly, head tilting. “Yeah… how—”
He points a finger to the ceiling. “I’m fourteen. Your balcony is opposite mine,” he turns his attention to Phoebe with a playful smile. “I’m pretty jealous of yours and mommy’s Sunday morning parties. They sound like a lot of fun.”
Color stains your cheeks but Phoebe grins at that. “We call it Sunday Funk Day. Music, chores, and pancakes for breakfast,” she counts them off on her chubby fingers, her tone slightly bordering authoritative, but Jack only seems more entertained.
“I didn’t realize we had the music on so loud… I’ll keep it down next time.” You apologize quickly. Another thing out of the norm for you. But you’ve been trying to teach Phoebe to be a bit more considerate of other people the older she gets.
Jack waves you off with a scoff. “No way, it’s nice to have a neighbor with good music taste. Not like apartment twelve.” He says the last part a bit quieter, like he too doesn’t want to influence your daughter with his less than kind opinions.
Your eyes widen, the sound of a scoffed laugh scratching the back of your throat. “Is that the crazy bird lady?” You mirror his pitch.
Jack’s lips part. “So that’s what that noise is. I’ve been calling her Chirpy in my head for the last six months.”
You laugh louder at that, stopping yourself just short of snorting. The way he speaks makes you feel strangely warm. His words and voice are relaxed, lazily drawled together with a slight accent that you can’t quite place.
Phoebe scrunches up her nose. “Mommy says people can listen to what they like, but I don’t like screaming music.” She shakes her head.
Jack has to stifle a laugh, expression mirroring yours as you close your eyes and take an exasperated but fond breath. “While I agree with your mommy, I have to say that I agree with you too, kid.”
An insistent buzzing echoes through the silence between you. You notice the brief movement of his hand cupping his pocket, realize that he’s being paged or called but too polite to check or excuse himself.
You squeeze gently on Phoebe’s shoulders. “Okay, we need to get you bathed and ready for bed and I think Jack needs to go to work.”
He offers a tight-lipped smile, one that doesn’t reach his eyes but doesn’t feel forced. His eyes flick between you and Phoebe, a soft look of fondness relaxing his features for a moment. “It was nice to finally put names and faces to the lovely singing voices I get to hear.”
You smile warmly, albeit a little bashfully, before guiding Phoebe to your side to hold her hand. Jack lets his gaze fall on you again, warmth in his smile as he offers a slight nod.
“Have a good night.” His voice is tender and soft, heavy with security and you don’t understand how it feels so foreign and familiar at the same time.
“You too,” you say softly, turning at the same time he does to go your respective ways.
Phoebe turns her full body to look at him, hand waving frantically in the air. “Bye Doctor Jack!” She shouts at him, despite there being only a ten-foot distance between them.
You turn just in time to see Jack do the same, a small wave of fingers over his shoulder as he shouts back softly, “Bye Phoebe.”
Then he’s gone out of the complex doors and you’re ushering Phoebe into the elevator, unaware of the small smile that curls at the corners of your mouth.
“I like Doctor Jack.” Phoebe hums, pressing the button she has learnt for your floor. You smile down at her as the doors close and the elevator begins to hum and shift.
“Yeah? What do you like about him?”
She shrugs a shoulder, uncommittingly and swipes hair from her face. “He has kind eyes.”
Blinking slowly at her, your heart seizes. You find yourself wondering how your daughter comes up with some of the things that she does, how attuned she is to the people around her and the way her judgement of character grows every day.
You barely know the man, yet you can’t help but agree.
“Yeah, baby. I guess he does.”
─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
NEXT PART
Cute little meet cute for our single mom, Phoebe, and Jack!! I am almost busting at the seams with excitement for what I have planned for these guys; little moments and big!! There will lots of tiny hidden references in this series that I would love to know if you guys pick up on, and I also have a very comical and painful scene that I've already written for later on in this series hehe.
Thank you very much for reading! Feedback really means a lot so I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas for where you think this will go!! Reblogs helps to boost stuff for more people to reach so if you enjoyed it please consider reblogging!!
The tag list for this series is open so if you'd like to be tagged in future parts, please let me know!! <3
summary: jack gets jealous when he watches another doctor tend to you.
warnings: fluff, swearing, age gap, reader is 28, jack is 50, jealous jack
words: 786
a/n: soooo i had some time so this is out early! this is gonna be part of a sugar daddy series so please let me know if you want to be tagged. hope you guys enjoy xo
Your relationship with Jack Abbot started off unconventional and uncomplicated, he had just been a rich benefactor. He’d watched you at your two jobs, one of them being the diner he frequented before work and the other was the coffee shop he sat in after. He’d watch you work your ass off, but you were still struggling.
After your shift one night he had proposed the idea of him helping you with school and your bills. And in return? All he wanted was a few nights of your time, to take you on dates and to hospital fundraisers, he was lonely. You were okay with that, so what if the devastatingly handsome doctor didn’t want to kiss you?
You’d managed to shove your feelings down, that was until you saw a paparazzi photograph of him with a beautiful woman, a woman his age. Jack had found you that night, crying at the bus station. He wiped your tears and told you the woman was his sister. That was the night he had kissed you and everything changed. Three years on, you were in your last year of school. You weren’t quite Jack’s girlfriend, but you belonged to him.
On one random Tuesday in April, you found yourself sitting under the fluorescent lights of the hospital with what you hoped wasn’t a broken hand. Jack was currently away at a hospital conference and he was due back the following day. You knew that he would want to know you were at the hospital but what could he do from miles away?
A young doctor popped his head in before walking over, he looked twitchy and nervous, he must have been an intern.
“Hi, I’m Dr Whitaker, what seems to be the problem?”
“Um,” you wince as you move your hand, “I fell in Pilates and my hand really, really hurts. I think it might be broken.”
“Damn, Pilates is brutal,” he chuckles.
You flush as you feel a wave of embarrassment wash over you, “I tripped on the way into class.”
Dr Whitaker smothered his laugh with a cough as he typed some information into the system before wheeling over, “let’s take a look.”
He gently took your hand but before he could get much further, the door swings open. You gasp as you see Jack in the doorway, though he’s not looking at you. His dark eyes are trained on Whitaker.
“Whitaker,” his voice is deathly quiet, “Robby needs you in trauma one.”
“But, I,” Whitaker started.
“I said go, now. Go be useful somewhere else,” his eyes flash, his voice so deadly that Whitaker quickly scrambles out of the room.
Without a word, he walks over and kisses you. Hard. When he pulls away, he cups your cheek and kisses your forehead, “what are you doing here?”
“Came back early to surprise you, needed to drop something off here first,” he mumbles against your skin, “got here just in time to see Whitaker with his paws all over you.”
“He was just doing his job.”
“Sugarplum, his job,” he starts, gently rotating your wrist, shooting you an apologetic look when you wince, “was to assess the damage, not cradle your hand like it’s a fuckin’ art piece,” he presses a kiss to your wrist, “just a bad sprain, angel.”
“You were mean to him,” you pout. Jack pauses as he looks up at you, “mean?” he scoffs “you’re mine, sugarplum.”
“Does he know that?” you knew everyone that Jack worked with but you hadn’t recognised Whitaker. He must have been new.
“No,” Jack grumbles, averting his eyes.
“You should apologise to him.”
Jack barked out a laugh, his eyes crinkling. His laughter abruptly stopped when he looked back at your face.
“You serious?”
“Yep,” you raised an eyebrow at him as you sat back on the exam bed, just waiting. Sometimes Jack had to be reminded that people had feelings.
With a huff and a roll of his eyes, he stalked out of the room, the door banging behind him. You had a perfect view through the glass. You watch Jack walk up to Whitaker who was charting, he obviously wasn’t needed in trauma one. Jack spoke with him, gesturing with his hands as he glanced at you, after a couple of minutes, they shook hands and Jack walked back to you.
“Done?” you grin as he grumbles and wraps up your hand.
“I’m taking you home, smartass,” he helped you up, “got a present for you.”
“Last time you said that, I had to take the morning after pill.”
He laughs as he holds your good hand, “I promise it’s safe this time,” he kisses his cheek, “missed you Sugarplum.”
pairing — michael robinavitch x fem! doctor! reader
summary — you’ve always had a problem integrating yourself into situations, not quite understanding how other people do it so easily. you spend a lot of time in your own head, and can confirm it’s not always a lovely place to be. it’s one of robby’s favourite places to be, if you’d just let him make space.
word count — 8.6k words
warnings — reader is very lonely, brief brief mentions of panic attacks, ermployee/boss relationship, age gap (robby’s early 50s reader’s late 20s), mentions of child loss (not reader or robby, she has a 7 year old patient who doesn’t make it), probably cringe and melodramatic but who cares
note — sorry for falling off the face of the earth whoops!! started working on this + an abbot fic + a carter fic (yay) and got tunnel vision i hope it’s long enough that it makes up for my absence <3333
The human body is mostly even.
It comes with a lot of pairs; eyes, lungs, hands, they’re all paired all the way down to the chromosomes. Bilateral symmetry develops in the womb, most human beings are reflections of each side, separated vertically. A line right down the spine - not perfect mirrors, but close enough to the naked eye.
It shows in the way you examine newcomers. Two pupils needing checking, breath sounds are equal, two hands able to grip the same. But you don’t treat pairs. One patient at a time - well, two every hour as Robby loves to remind you. One heart, tachy but normal. One consciousness, words slurring under the morphine. One person who arrives whole and will leave uneven.
The body wants to be divisible by two. You’ve wondered why that is. Why one heart failing feels louder than two lungs breathing.
Or, in the case of the fourteen year old girl you have sitting in North-5, one lung breathing and one lung hypoventilating. You’re looking at her x-rays now, knowing you’re going to have to get her into surgery and bracing yourself to tell her parents.
“They’re lungs.”
Robby is standing behind you, squinting down at you under the flickering hospital lights. He’s not wearing his glasses, so you almost want to hit him back with a quip about how does he know they’re lungs, old man. Your mouth is dry and you sit there for too long that it wouldn’t be witty if you did say it.
“You okay, kid?” He presses when you don’t respond.
You know you’re being strange, can’t help it when you feel like this (though exactly what this is, is up for debate. Amongst yourself), and you have to scramble to say something. “Yeah, hi. Sorry. Lungs.” Your voice sounds strange. Too soft. Inauthentic.
“One’s got a pneumo?” He asks.
You nod, practically shoving the pictures into his hand. “Yeah, I’m getting her up to the OR now.” He examines the lungs for a moment, long enough that you think something must be wrong. Confidence in your diagnoses is something you struggle with - you assume (there’s still that voice in the back of your head that tells you confidence isn’t the problem, instead it’s the diagnoses that need working on). Every time Robby or Abbot or even Shen, who doesn’t really feel like your boss, checks over your work your pulse starts rushing like they’re going to decide you’re actually such a bad doctor that there’s no point in you even completing your residency so you might as well go home now.
“Good, yeah, she needs it.” Robby nods affirmingly, passing you back the images. His eyes linger on you for a second longer than they should. You’re the one who has to break eye contact, not liking the way that his eyes seem to bare straight into you.
You don’t like it when Robby looks at you, not like that anyway. Not in like, a HR violation way, just like he’s examining you in a way you aren’t ready to be seen in.
“We’re going to round for handoffs soon.” He speaks up again, softly. “You’re off the rest of the week aren’t you?” Robby’s voice goes high at the end of his sentence and he shoves his hands in his pockets.
You really do like Robby, there’s a reason you turned down the night shift residency offer you got from Gloria. It had been a tempting offer too.
It’s a rare moment of quiet in the ER, and you’re hoping silently to yourself it stays that way. Not daring to actually utter the hope, not wanting to jinx it. You’re not necessarily superstitious, but you’re not going to utter the Q-word so close to the end of your shift.
“Yeah, three whole days off.” You try and say it casually, but the words don’t sound right coming out of your voice. You have a lot of different voices, a lot of pitches and tones. You genuinely have no clue which one is your natural state.
Robby sounds even when he talks, a sound you could pick out with your eyes closed. “That’s good. You deserve it, you’ve been running on fumes.” There’s a tenderness that catches you off guard. Robby’s not a mean boss, he’s exceptionally kind. But he’s also not comforting if he doesn’t think you need it, not the type to throw out pleasantries for pleasantries sake. “Any good plans?”
It’s not something you’ve thought about, it feels kind of pathetic to admit. Like, having plans is actually something you haven’t considered. You work long hours, about sixty most weeks, so it makes sense that on your few precious days off you like to spend it resting and recuperating. Catching up on your laundry or your sleep, or even a TV show that everyone is talking about. Those things are just as important as going out and seeing friends.
If they’re easier and more accessible, then that’s just an added bonus.
“Uh,” you have never felt more unnatural than in this moment. You’re certain Robby can tell you’re not being entirely truthful, as if he has some sort of innate sense for when people are doing things for the first time. It’s the teacher in him. “Yeah, maybe. I’m not a hundred percent sure what I’m doing yet.”
You feel so transparent it’s as if he’s looking directly through you. Perhaps he is - already looking for ways out of the conversation, ways to speak to someone more interesting. Someone who isn’t pretending to maybe have plans.
Someone who regularly had plans wouldn’t be embarrassed to admit they don’t have plans. It could be cool, casual: “No, not this weekend. I have a date with my couch and some take out.” Instead, you’d given what feels like the only wrong answer to a question about yourself.
“I hope you have a good time,” Robby nods at you.
The ER is cold, especially at night, especially in December. You’d discarded your jacket when you had entered, worried about being sweaty so early in your shift. Going to get it feels silly now, like you’d made the wrong choices.
Most of your coworkers make something of their scrubs. Javadi has a collection of pastel hoodies she rotates between, jewellery more often than not sitting under the neckline of her top. Santos has tattoos and wears graphic tees under her scrubs rather than just the standard block colours. Mel doesn’t even usually wear scrubs, instead opting for one of her own shirts without the added layer.
Your scrubs are standard, your undershirt is black, your winter coat is thrifted and warm but a neutral navy. You’d liked it when you bought it, but you feel silly whenever you wear it.
You slip it on at the end of your shift, grabbing your backpack. You can hear Santos and Mateo chatting amicably about how a music artist they both listen to is coming to the city the week after next and how they both have tickets and are thinking of coordinating.
You shut your locker, keenly aware of the other people in the room and even more astute to the fact that none of them are looking at you.
You slip out the doors, not bothering to untangle your earbuds until you’re down the street.
I’m not cold, I’m not cold. The woman singing has a lovely voice. It hits you like thorns down your ears, scratchy and uneven in a way that is only beautiful. The burn masks the sting of your eyes. Take my hand, take ahold.
—
You take the train to and from work. The station is close enough to your house that the dishes in your kitchen cabinet rattle when a particularly zealous one goes past. You were told when you moved in that eventually you wouldn’t even notice the noise - it would become apart of you and you would absorb it and be able to go about your day.
You wake in the late hours of the night from the tremors, convinced you’re going to die.
You’re not entirely sure what time the train stops running. You never check the time in the moment.
The apartment you’ve lived in your entire residency has been good to you. You had applied for a lot of places, starting out in Allegheny west and eventually settling for Bethel Park. It’s nice and small, not too much to clean after a long week. You’re on the third floor so laundry is a bit of challenge lugging your basket to the basement but you also get a fire escape which is nice enough that you like being so high up.
Days off have become a sort of anomaly in your life. You never quite know what to do with them. Your coworkers always have plans, both together and separately, you’ve noticed. Santos and Whitaker live together, the nurses all seem close, even Robby and Abbot talk about going to the Pirates games together.
You walked a lot when you first moved in. Pittsburgh has been your home for the last eight years - from student housing in Oakland during med school, then into your current place - but it hadn’t always been.
There are lots of pretty places close to your apartment. Even more the further you walk, corner stores and community gardens. Sometimes you leave your phone at home and just wander, taking note of each and every street. Every facade, every storefront, every alley. It all stayed in your head. You could recreate the city in your sleep. Well, the city within an hour’s walk of your apartment.
The deli on Library road is open when you finish work. Sometimes you get off the Blue early and go sit in the stark white of the fluoros. The floor is linoleum, speckled with colours too small to identify but you know they’re there.
You sit cross legged by the window at one of the two tables in the shop. It shakes under your elbow every time you shift, and the guy behind the counter, nametagged as Jeffrey, eyeballs you strangely every time it makes a noise.
Your sandwich is misshapen in your hands. Red and white paper wrap up the second half, ready for you to stash it in the work fridge behind one of Langdon’s Redbulls. It’s printed real small on the bottom of the laminated menu they’ve taped to the table - $4.99 for a sandwich with a random assortment of ingredients on it. You’ve always been indecisive, this had felt like a nice way to make a choice without making a choice.
They pick something different every time, condiments, vegetables, protein, even fruit sometimes. Once they’d given you one that included both mangoes and ranch. That hadn’t been your favourite.
The one you have now is nice, though. Mozzarella, turkey, chips for some crunch, some other stuff you haven’t really cared to identify, all on pumpernickel. You’re not working tomorrow; you might eat both halves now.
There’s an empty chair on the other side of your table that you’ve dumped your bag on. It’s meant for two people, and sometimes when it’s a bit busier than just you and Jeff you feel bad for taking it. You’ve got nowhere else to be though, and you’d like to sit and eat after twelve hours of not getting to do either.
You don’t usually come on your off days, but you’d felt like you were going crazy holed up in your apartment all day. You’d done your laundry, washed all your matching scrubs and the few other clothes you wore. Tidied, caught up on your Instagram feed, and when you’d gotten to the bottom of the Hulu menu without anything jumping out at you you’d shoved on your shoes without another thought.
It’s late, Friday night, and people are coming home from the clubs. You’re not particularly close to any, but the people who go there don’t seem to mind. Small gaggles stumble in every once in a while, giggle over the menu, and order an egg and cheese that they’ll probably barf up before they get home.
God, you sound bitter.
You gather your things when you finish the first half, can sense a group of drunk guys weighing up the effort of coming inside from where they hang out across the street. One of them is smoking a cigarette, and the other three seem to be caught up in a heated discussion.
It’s not snowing. You toss up taking the bus the rest of the way back. You’d walked here.
You hear your last name, ‘doctor’ preceding it, and whirl around. On a very rare occasion you’ll get recognised on the street - people don’t tend to forget the person who saved their life, or their daughter’s or brother’s or cousin’s life.
You’ve never seen Robby outside of work, not wearing the standard Pitt black scrubs. He looks nice in a collared plaid button down with a thick fleece over it and the top few buttons undone. You’ve never seen him wear jeans before. In your head Dr Robinavitch doesn’t exist in the same world where jeans also exist.
You don’t know what to say to him. You end up saying nothing. Robby doesn’t even bat an eye at your silence - used to your oddness, the way it seeps into every interaction.
“Thought that was you.” He’s smiling, wide and crooked like he does on the rare occasion he has a reason to. “What’re you doing out here so late by yourself? It’s almost midnight.”
“Dinner,” you say lamely, holding up your wrapped up sandwich.
He looks at the checkered lump in your hand then back at your face. He looks different in the dark, the planes of his face look more severe in the light of the hospital. Maybe that’s why you like the harshness of the deli, so bright it brings you right back to work.
“You always eat so late?” He asks. You feel silly with your coat hitting your chin, your work shoes, and your sandwich in your hand. You look like a doctor - a med student. Robby looks like a man.
The sensory feeling of the paper in your hand is suddenly too underwhelming and you can’t stop yourself from digging your nails in - needing a desperate anchor of your hand. You’ll regret that later when you go to eat it and it’s smushed, but later doesn’t matter more than the underwhelm in your palm.
“I work in the ER,” you point out. His hands are in his jacket pockets but one of them is clutching an opaque white plastic bag with something heavy weighing it down. Robby laughs, crinkling the handle of the bag in his hand in his pocket. “What are you doing here? Didn’t you work today?”
He nods like he’d already forgotten about it. Like it did not matter to him in a moment he was not actively experiencing it.
“Abbot’s sick- not bad, just all stuffed up.” He gestures vaguely with the hand not holding the bag at his nose/mouth area. “Only thing that ever makes him feel better is soup from PJ’s.” He nods down the street from the direction he’d just come where a neon sign is just being turned off.
“What a diva.”
Robby laughs again. “Yeah, he’d never admit it. Rather suffer in silence.”
It feels like the wrong thing to have said. You don’t know Dr Abbot well enough to make jabs at him, especially not to Robby.
You want to be out of this situation, it all crushes you at once. You’re in the dark, fifty minutes from your apartment, talking to somebody whom you intrinsically do not understand. You are a hollow body, your skin is translucent and you can see every organelle and every shift of the movement of your organs. You can see all the hallways and gears and caves in your anatomy. Every link in every chain that tugs on each and every thought that spins through your head. How your life started from birth to now and a timeline for why every facet of your personality and your soul has ended up the way that it is.
Robby is solid, and in front of you, and you will never understand him.
You’ve broken your nose trying to walk through him - he will remember this about you for as long as the two of you know each other. That you put your words where they do not belong, and that you think Jack Abbot is a diva.
Robby opens his mouth to say something.
“I should head home,” you jab your thumb somewhere behind you. You live in the direction Robby is standing. You’ll loop around the block to avoid passing him. “I’ll see you at work, Robby. Hope Abbot feels better.”
When you circle the street, Robby’s gone. The walk home is long, the walk up the stairs to the third floor is longer. You arrive home a little before one in the morning. You don’t bother with the lights, coming to sit on the floor in the kitchen. The clock blinks on the oven with each passing minute.
It lights your skin up red, and if you look close, you can see the flow of your blood.
You unwrap your sandwich.
—
Shen’s on the next time you work. He greets you casually, a “good morning” around a drink from his water bottle and barely gives you a second glance. Your shift passes without incident - the other doctors treat you normally, when you speak they listen. Javadi initiates small talk with you and you do your best to return the sentiment.
At one point Santos reads a 9 as a 6 aloud to you and gives you a look. “Whoops,” she snickers, looking at you like the two of you share some sort of secret.
You like Santos. The two of you are about the same age, you’re only a few years older than her, the same number of years further into your residency. The two of you talk sometimes between patients, but that’s bound to happen when the two of you spend so much time in an enclosed space.
She has a way of making everything feel like an inside joke. You know she struggled a little when she first started, hitting the wall with the other doctors when she first started her residency. You wouldn’t know that now, seeing the way she interacts with the rest of the people here. Her and Whitaker are so close they’re practically in a sitcom, Shen’s taken a special liking to her, and you’ve even seen her and Mel giggling by the lockers after shifts.
The two of you barely speak about anything that isn’t work. Which is fine, she’s your coworker, you guys don’t have to be speaking about your personal lives. But she has this soft little spark about her like she’s created a world to be in and it’s the most important place to be.
“That thing you did with the guy in Central 13?” She sidles up to you towards the end of your shift, hanging behind the monitor you’re using to finish up the chart for that very patient. She lets out a heavy breath. “Wow.”
You’d inserted a double lumen tube during an intubation. Nothing super fancy, but you know that Santos probably hasn’t done a whole lot of intubations in general. Shen had raised his eyebrows at your suggestion but hadn’t stopped you, and when you’d finished he’d grabbed your shoulder and squeezed, muttering a “sick, good job,” and then heading out.
You look up, genuinely startled. “Thanks.”
“I’d never even heard of the thing you did,” she doesn’t let up. “I wouldn’t have thought to do it. That was really cool.” Her voice drops and she looks down at your hands. You’ve gotten compliments before, but all from people above you in the food chain, Langdon, Abbot, people who are kind of obligated as your educators to give you praise. Santos is a PGY-1, so unless she’s sucking up you’re not sure why she’s being so nice. You’re not high enough up that sucking up would be worth anything.
You have fifteen minutes of your shift, no incoming ambulances, nothing urgent in chairs, all your patients are stable.
You feel sick - not the type of sick that would get you sent home, or even to the staff lounge. It’s normal at this point. You genuinely don’t remember a time you haven’t felt like this.
“You’re only an intern,” you say, trying to be empathetic without sounding condescending. “You’ll get there.”
She nods, low and slow. She’s already got her jacket on, thick and leather and dark brown. Santos watches you finish up your chart and you try to shake the feeling of being observed.
“I’m, uh, I think I might head down to the Hills,” she leans her elbow on your table. “There’s this bar on Liberty street. They do live music sometimes, they have a killer plate of nachos, some cool cocktails.”
You log out of the system and stand from your chair. You’re about to round and want to head to your locker first. “That sounds great.”
Santos smiles at you, shoving her hands in her pockets. She bounces when she walks and she follows you on your way to your locker. “Yeah, I found it right when I started here. I’ve been trying to get Samira to go with me but I don’t think she likes me much.”
You open your locker. Coat on, backpack on, shut locker, look back at her. You really like Dr Mohan; she’s kinder than most of the other doctors, and the two of you started on the exact same day so you’ve always felt like a special kinship with her.
“She does,” you tell her honestly. You think she does. You don’t know Samira very well - if she disliked Trinity she probably wouldn’t be telling you about it. “She just prefers to keep to herself I think.”
Santos nods, rocking on her heels and biting her top lip. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, I think there’s only so many times you can ask someone to hang out and have them say no before you gotta accept they’re just not into it.”
She’s not wrong. It’s very much something you have to play by ear, you’ve learned. Some people are busy, some people don’t know how to say no without worrying about sounding impolite.
People are gathering for rounds, you can see at the end of the hallway. It’s the only thing standing in front of you and a huge nap. Santos is digging in her locker for something.
“I hope you have a good time,” you tell her earnestly. “Nachos sound great, I might have to get some on my way home.” You feel nauseous. The idea of eating anything, let alone a bunch of cheese and meat, makes your stomach turn. You just want to be home. You miss your couch.
Santos doesn’t say anything as you walk out towards rounds. When she reenters the room, she doesn’t join you, she comes to stand shoulder to shoulder with Mel.
—
The little girl in Trauma-2 is going to die.
Today was meant to be a day off. Robby’d called you a little after five, apologising for waking you and asking if you could come in to cover. You’d said yes, sitting out on your fire escape and painting your nails. They’re clear - it stops you from biting them.
It had been a fairly quiet morning. Most people won’t spend their Saturday in the ER waiting room unless they really have to so you have slightly less of the patient type that maybe didn’t have to come into the ER at all.
Then the ambulance had dropped her off a little over a half hour ago, and you’ve been fairly convinced that she’s not going to make it since you’d seen her.
You were the primary doctor on the case only because you were the only one around at the time. Now, Robby and Collins are there, and they’ve taken over. Robby practically shoved you out of the room and told you to take a break.
You’re sweaty. You’ve ducked into the bathroom to swap your long sleeves for a t-shirt under your scrub top and taken a well earned cry into the mirror.
Robby’s standing outside Trauma-2 like he’s on guard. The girl’s parents are out in chairs, and you really don’t want to have to be the person to tell them. You know Robby will do it if you ask, but you don’t want to have to ask. Don’t want to have not yet asked, don’t want to ask, don’t want to have asked.
The time will pass anyway. You just wish you didn’t have to get pushed along with it.
“Ah-ah,” Robby snaps as sharp as he can without any real bite. You’re hovering in the doorway to the room, watching as Collins works on her. “You’re not going back in there.”
You failed to save her. You are the reason that two parents have lost their only daughter. He’s not mad - can’t be mad that you did your best to save someone who couldn’t be saved. But sending you in there when you’d already done no good would be a waste of time. A change in tactic, a change in doctor, is probably necessary.
“Well where can I go?” you snap back, much harsher than he’d been. You want him to tell you, don’t want the mistake to be yours. Working in the ER and being mostly self guided you feel a lot of aimlessness. The pulling behind your navel that dulls to a low throb most of the time, signalling when you’re making a bad choice. Making Robby tell you what to do means that feeling goes away, just for a little.
Robby gets this look about him sometimes, when he’s tired and trying to brush someone off without them asking him what’s wrong. “You can get some air.” He raises his eyebrows, tone light and sarcastic. He lifts an arm to point out through the dark tunnel of night streaming through the open ambulance bay.
Your feet move on autopilot, taking you out into the cold. Your arms hurt from the change of temperature, but you made the choice to take your long-sleeves off, so you don’t complain about it even internally.
Robby follows behind you just close enough for you to hear him. “Are you okay?” He puts the emphasis in strange places in his sentences sometimes. In the middle instead of one of the edges.
You nod. “Yeah, Robby, I’m fine.”
It’s quiet in the way outside only is right when you step out into it. The noise from the ER bleeds into your veins and when the ambulance bay doors shut behind you it takes getting used to the difference. It almost feels like submerging yourself, for a brief second the world shifts, and then it goes back on kilter.
Robby looks at you for a long time. You still do not understand him, he’s impossible to get a read on. He could be waiting for you to say something.
“I’m parking you,” he says finally.
Your mouth drops open. “P-parking me?”
“Doctor’s orders.” Robby nods with finality. “Stay here. I’ll come and get you.”
You want to shout something back at Robby as he goes inside - angry with him and grateful for him both at once. How dare he not think you’re up to doing your job? You’re not, but you don’t want him thinking that.
You watch an ambulance pull up, both the paramedics ignoring you as they haul a gurney in through the doors. They know enough about the job that it’s clear you’re not waiting for them.
It was her birthday in three days. You’d seen it on her chart right when she first came in, the little girl who would be taking her final breaths inside the room you’d have to continue working in. Her life would end in that room. How many had? How many had died where you were standing?
Surely, with how long humans had been inhabiting the earth, someone had died on this spot. People had stood here and spoken. Perhaps a bed had been placed here, centuries before the hospital was even conceived of. A couple had laid in the grass, hand in hand, watching as the untouched space stretched on.
In a hundred years, would someone stand on this exact spot again and cry as you were trying not to?
She was seven years, eleven months and twenty-seven days old. You don’t even remember what you were doing that long ago. The thought dredges you up, lifts you like the moment right before the fall, when you’re anticipating. Awaiting another birthday.
The human body comes in a lot of pairs, a lot of symmetry, a lot of even numbers. And then suddenly it can be zero. Reduced to nothing but the meaning someone else gives it. A period, a full stop.
You take a shuddering breath in. It’s a morbid way to think of your own life, but you wonder sometimes what will continue to happen when you finally take your last breath. The last breath is usually out. An even way to close. Nothing remaining, no leftovers.
Robby’s hand finds your shoulder. “Hey, kid.”
You don’t know how long you’ve been out here.
“I’m ready to go back in,” you say, because you feel like you’re meant to be. You’re not sure if you’ve ever been ready to go in.
Robby just shakes his head gravely. “It’s 7:03, you are officially relieved from duty.”
Relieved. It’s such a strange word. You feel like you’re bordering on pretentious. You wonder who the first person to ever say the phrase was, and how it got picked up enough that it’s commonplace now. If they had to explain themselves, or if the other person knew what they meant by it.
Relieved implies a weight lifted from you. A lightness. Perhaps you left it in Trauma-2.
Robby follows you as you grab your stuff from your locker. You’re acting on autopilot. Tonight you will not get food on the way home. You will take the train, you will walk home, you will shower and change and climb into bed and you will wake up the next morning with your alarm. You do not have the capacity to make any more choices for yourself.
When you step back out through the ER doors, you can see Princess, Jesse, Whitaker and Santos sitting on the benches. You’ve never been to their after work wind-downs, but you’ve heard enough people usually go that it’s fair to assume there will be one after whatever shift you’re finishing.
Robby is still behind you. “Hey,” he says. His backpack is slung over one shoulder. He’s wearing a thicker jacket than you’ve ever seen on him. It suits him. “Come on.”
You follow him. “Where are we going?”
“Dinner,” he says simply. “You haven’t eaten this afternoon, and I know how tempting it is to just want to go to sleep. You need food.” He walks like he expects you to follow behind him; you do without complaint. The sureness required to make an assumption about a coworkers needs and to be correct, you don’t think you could ever muster it.
You walk for almost fifteen minutes, which is less than you usually walk, but by the end your cheeks are red and you’re trying to quiet your breathing. Robby walks faster than you, with a difference bounce, smoother and softer. You’re slower but it’s stilted. Unbalanced - sometimes your left knee behaves funny. He walks like where he’s going is the most important place to be, and you’d believe it.
He stops in front of a place you’ve never seen before. A diner, real and busy, not an out of the way spot only he knows about from his wanderings. A staple; there are families here.
“Hey,” you say as you reach the door. Interrupting the flow, trying to pause. A period, a moment, or whatever you’d been thinking less than half an hour earlier. Your feelings never make sense when you’re not actively experiencing them. It’s why you could never get into journaling. “You know you don’t have to-”
Robby doesn’t even let you get the words out. “I want to.”
Want is harder to argue with than obligation. It shuts you up in a way you’re not fond of.
The lights are golden, warm in a way your eyes have to adjust to after the bright whites of the hospital, and there’s a handwritten sign taped to the inside of the window advertising that you can get four pierogies for a dollar.
Robby leads you inside without another word. It smells like coffee and oil, and it’s louder than you’d expected. You’re not a huge fan of noise, but working in a hospital you’ve gotten used to it. You realise with a start that it has been so long since you’ve heard volume that stemmed from love. Parents chastising their kids for giggling too loud. a group of high schoolers that look like they’ve just come off stage from a school play - taking up two booths and beaming like they’ve just headlined the Tony’s, couples on dates.
“You come here a lot?” You ask as Robby sits down at a booth in the corner.
He nods. “The food’s good, and they don’t look at you weird if you order something and can’t eat it.”
The vinyl squeaks with every shift of your legs, but it’s loud enough in here that it doesn’t make you feel self-conscious. Noise born from love, it wraps you in it.
“Get whatever you want,” Robby says like it’s a no-brainer. You know instinctively that he’s not offering to pay for your dinner - though he probably would if he thought you’d want that. You don’t. Him paying obligates you to order, eat and enjoy something. He’s telling you to ignore the conscious thought, all the brain stems, all the lines shooting off in a mind map - focus on the core idea. The want. It gets clouded by the mind sometimes.
“Soup is not a food,” he says helpfully. “Not right now at least.”
“I know that,” you say, defensively. You don’t want soup, and you know he’s suggesting you eat something solid, but it slips out before you can question why. The soup they have on the menu seems semi-clear, more like broth. Incorporeal, translucent. The essence of a food. Robby’s steering you away from it like he knows how you feel about things that are concrete. Your ego hasn’t quite recovered from trying to barrel through him with your assumptions the last time the two of you were alone together.
“I’m sorry,” you say it because you are, not because you think you should be. The two feel indistinguishable sometimes. You should be sorry, so you are. You’re not sure where the line comes but it’s somewhere between you and Robby. “I’m not good at this.”
“Eating?” Robby asks.
“Being a person after work.” Or before work, or during work. But admitting that means drawing attention to it, and you’d rather him think you’re oblivious. “I’m… sensitive.”
Robby doesn’t say any of the usual things; you’re not sensitive, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. You really like him for it.
He leans forward, elbows on the table. He’s not looking at you like he’s your attending. He looks completely different in warm lighting; different in the way the noise is coated with affection. It suits him. “I like that about you. It’s not a character flaw, you know that right?”
You snort before you can stop yourself. “Yeah, okay, put it on my performance review.”
“I will,” he says dryly. When Robby laughs the sound feels like it’s had holes poked in it, gravelly and messy, the punctures letting something soulful out with the sound. “Second guesses her authority figures.”
You huff. “Wow.”
“I’m dedicated to accuracy,” he says seriously.
The waitress understands you both immediately; the scrubs, how you’re kind of leaning on the table. Robby slaps down a ten and orders twenty pierogies and a cup of coffee. You flounder under her gaze, having not even looked at the menu, and Robby smiles at you in a way that feels conspiratorial and not polite.
“Can I get like, half of what he got?” You ask. “Is that a thing?”
She nods kindly and takes the menus from your table, ducking back into the kitchen.
With everything between you out of the way, Robby leans forward more. “One time, after a rough shift, I took apart my kitchen cabinets just so I could feel myself putting them back together. To prove I could.”
You mirror his posture. “This feels infinitely healthier.”
“Low bar, but I’ll take it.” You clasp your hands together to keep from picking at your nails.
Robby gets you talking without you realising. First about work, then about not work. You’d read something, probably way back in college, about how some sculptors, instead of taking a block and adding their intricacies to it to make their art, they’d instead sculpt away from the finished product until all they had was art left. That’s how talking to Robby feels as you get your dinner. You talk about everything until all that is left is the little girl in Trauma-2.
“You did everything right,” he says, right when you need it. “No one could have saved her.”
“Doesn’t matter,” you shake your head. “I still didn’t.”
Robby looks at you very seriously. When he speaks, it is firm. Solid. “It mattered. It mattered that when she closed her eyes she wasn’t alone in that room. It mattered that her parents knew someone was fighting for her, that someone cared about someone that was theirs. The outcome isn’t the only metric that counts.”
You feel heat behind your eyes. “You really believe that?”
Robby nods, serious and stern, leaning forward to take your hand. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it.”
The food arrives, sitting between you two like something to share instead of something to separate you both.
Loneliness eats at you on your worst days. You thought you knew how it felt to be real and truly lonely, and then you moved to Pittsburgh. You’re not homesick, per se, more sick for a life you feel belongs to you. You miss being tied to places, no one here holds memories with you in them.
At home, you can walk down Main street and practically provide director’s commentary: There’s the cafe I lost my scarf in when I was a kid, there’s the movie theatre I saw that in, there’s the restaurant that didn’t hire me in high school. You miss being somewhere where you are as much a part of the place as the culture is a part of you.
In Pittsburgh, you cease to exist the moment you leave a place.
“I’m really glad that I got to steal you from Abbot,” Robby says through a mouthful of decaf. “I know you got offered a night shift spot, and I have to admit I was a little worried for a bit. I thought you would take it up.”
That had been a long time ago, back when you were just starting your second year of residency. It was a really tempting offer. You’d declined it because, at the end of the day, you really love the people you work with, even if they exist in the bubble of the ER.
“I thought about it,” you admit, ripping apart a pierogi in your hand. “But, to be honest, I’ve been feeling kind of… isolated?” You muse over your word choice. “Sometimes I feel so small in this city, and I figured being asleep when most of the people who live here are awake would just take me out of it that much more.”
Robby chews slowly, using it to formulate a thought. “You leave a very strong first impression.”
You blink. If you were eating you probably would have choked. “Excuse me?”
“Abbot’s always talking about you whenever you work a night,” he says, like it’s something worth holding on to, not to keep but rather to let you follow him as he keeps going. He looks so tired, always older after a shift than before one. It looks good on him, he wears age handsomely, and you wonder - not for the first time - how he fares. It feels inappropriate to think of your boss that way, especially just because he’s being so nice to you. “You were the first one that really got through to Santos, you two are clearly close” Are you? That makes you sad, that you’ve missed a closeness that you haven’t understood. It feels like something you will never get back. You have missed it. You will miss it.
She hit a bit of a wall when she started, you’d been able to see that. You wonder, for the first time, how many times she had broken her nose trying to walk through you.
“And I…” he flushes, scratching the hair at the back of his neck. “I worry about you.” It lands, heavy and warm.
He worries about you. That should make you feel worried - what have you been doing to worry him? Instead, it strikes you right in the heart. Worry, as gnawing of an emotion as it is, requires space to hold it in.
Space you take up in his chest when you are not in the room.
“You don’t have to,” you say. “I’m a hard person to be around a lot of the time.”
Robby, to his credit, does not correct you. This whole conversation he has spent not saying the things you are ‘meant’ to say to someone confiding in you, and each time he has said exactly what has sparked something in your chest cavity.
“You’re worth the effort, though.”
You laugh, startled and a little breathless. “You make it sound like I’m like, a piece of IKEA furniture or something.”
“A kitchen cabinet,” Robby jokes.
Robby relaxes against the vinyl, and pushes one of the containers of pierogies towards you. It sits heavy inside you as you eat, and you feel like maybe it’s filling something inside you that you didn’t realise you didn’t have. Closer to whole than you have felt in a while - almost like you’ve forgotten. Further away from zero.
He talks more than you do, and you believe it’s a kindness. He tells you a story of a med student he had years ago who insisted on calling him Dr Robinavitch - you never realised you didn’t know Robby’s first name until that very moment, and you can tell he also realised that. “One time he had a patient throw up on him and he threw up in response.”
You’re deadpan. “Probably picked the wrong career path, I won’t lie.”
He laughs over his coffee. There’s a pile of napkins between the two of you, helping with the oil of your hands as you eat with them, not even noticing it through the conversation.
“I mean, I’ve been there,” you say, wiping your hands for the fifteenth time.
You’ve been there for almost an hour, unworried. The sign above the counter says they’re open past midnight, so you don’t have to worry about them closing while you’re sitting here. Robby’s been looking at you with soft eyes and pink cheeks for the better part of thirty minutes.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “Worst thing about you is your terrible self-esteem, you’re great, shut up.”
You laugh. “Bedside manner is dead,” you say, pushing your plate away from yourself, full and happy. “And we killed him.”
“Why is bedside manner a man?” Robby asks. “That feels unlikely.”
You leave a little after nine. Robby walks to the train with you and then gets on without saying anything. You have no idea where Robby lives, but you know he walks to work. The two of you share a bench, thigh to thigh. Neither one of you mention where you are at any point, how close your respective places are, where you both need to go.
You probably do the less walking than any night in recent memory. The city has shaped itself around your solitude, your routines, almost crushing in the way it attempts to fold itself around you.
When you stand on the T, he stands with you. He’s so close, he smells like something warm and heavy, and he seems to be drinking you in. He laughs at almost everything you say, even when you don’t mean for it to be funny.
The conversation stays steady, it doesn’t lull like you’re always terrified of. They’re not your strong suit, speaking with people. It comes with a feeling of sparity, it’s easy to feel like you are the remaining essence. The human body is naturally paired, but your human experience is roughly singular.
Robby walks with you like he wants to share the same space.
You think a lot about numbers. Odd being defined almost lazily, as though no one could bother to think of a better descriptor, not being divisible by two. You wonder, in your quietest nights, if you were to be split open, would you be divisible by two? You feel often like a remainder, not to be dramatic. But everyone else seems to gravitate naturally to other people, snapping together like magnets.
It’s something you’d always struggled with. You’re not sure what people clock about you that solidifies it. You don’t just feel uneven, you feel odd. It’s something that festered behind your ribs when you were a child and as you grew, so too did it. The version of the word lodged in your bones. Like there is a correct way to be a person, everyone else learned it - learned it enough to know which rules to follow and which to break. It takes a deep and intimate knowledge of how something works in order to go against the norms and have it still work, and it feels like everyone you’ve ever met is able to do that.
And people notice. They’re not cruel, that’s almost worse. They’re not trying to judge, but pattern recognition dictates that it is human nature to notice when something is off.
Robby’s arm brushes yours and he makes no effort to move away. Two feet on the pavement, two people walking together. Your footsteps are half a beat after his.
You wonder how long until he sees the error. A small part of you hopes he has already - that this is him noticing.
Robby says something—you don’t catch all of it—and you answer a second too late, your words stepping on the edge of his sentence. He doesn’t seem to mind. He never seems to mind. That almost makes it worse, how easily he accommodates you, like you are something fragile or precious instead of incorrect.
“This is me,” you say as you reach your apartment building. You have no idea how Robby is getting home.
He sighs morosely. “Are you sure?”
You look up at your window, pretending to think. “Pretty sure.” He squeezes the top of your arm and in moving his hand down, almost touches your fingers. “I don’t think I’ve ever had someone walk me home before. It’s not something I usually do.”
“It doesn’t have to be a thing, if you don’t want?” His tone lightens at the end, and you’re high enough on the night air that you are determined to interpret it in good faith. Him prioritising your comfort. You become acutely aware of the space between you — not empty, exactly, but loaded. Charged. Like something left on overnight.
You shake your head. “No, I liked it. I just…” you’re going to end the night being vulnerable. Robby has done nothing to indicate he does not like you. You will not be the kind of pathetic person who argues with someone when they show they like them. “Is it selfish to say I want to matter to someone?”
Robby steps impossibly closer to you. “Not selfish at all. In fact, bare minimum.” His gaze drops to where his breath is fogging the air between the two of you. It’s freezing. You don’t feel so silly in your thrifted winter coat. “I would go as far to say you already do.”
Robby looks different under the glow of your street light - different than at work, different than at the diner. You think you might start to understand him. He is still direct in front of you, solid and unmoving. But he shifts in the light: kitchen cabinets with their doors taken off.
There are so many things you could say to him. Thank you. I’m sorry. Please don’t forget me when the sun comes up and it’s loud again and I am still quiet.
You think of all the times you have spent standing in this very spot, feeling temporary in your own life.
Robby falters. You realise with a start it’s not the first time you’ve seen him do that. If anyone had asked three hours ago you probably would have answered as honestly as possible that you’d never seen it. How many times had it happened and you hadn’t seen it?
“Can I-” he stumbles over his words. Reconsiders. “Do you want me to kiss you?”
You feel rooted to place. The honesty of his voice hurts. “Are you asking permission or if I have the audacity?”
He laughs and you feel it against your face. “The first one.”
Robby smiles, warm and unmistakably fond. When he kisses you it’s soft and coursing with something you can’t name. He tastes like decaf coffee that you didn’t realise was shitty now you’re still tasting it almost two hours later. You can feel his beard against your face and the scratch is electrifying. You’re just two people. His hands settle into your waist, palms against your scrub top under your coat. It’s just the two of you and the quiet hum of the city you live in.
“You should get some sleep,” he mumbles against your mouth. He lets you kiss him for another few minutes, seeming like he’s indulging himself more than letting you have what you want. It’s dizzying, the idea of being wanted, and by someone like Robby.
The kind of guy you think might’ve liked you even if you didn’t like him back.
You’re working tomorrow. You’re pretty sure he is too. You hope, as well, that Santos is and that she’s in a good mood. The seed of an idea plants itself within you hopefully, and you decide tomorrow will be the shift you ask if she maybe wants to get drinks after work. The thought of her saying no terrifies you, but the thought of her saying yes terrifies you a little less than you’d first thought.
“I’ll see you soon,” he pulls back, flushed and seemingly just as enthralled as you. Soon. Continuously. “Text me when you get up there, need to make sure you’re awake enough to lock your door.” He doesn’t walk away until you’re up and locked away in your apartment.
The oven clock blinks at you as you turn the overhead lamp on. You shoot him a door’s locked text that he heart-reacts to.
The train rushes past. It rattles the handles of your drawers and the doors of your cabinets.
the sunshine of the night shift, all cookies and lavender, loves to make the grumpy, sassy, silver fox attending smile through attempts at flirting and baked goods. but what happens when he asks a certain replacement attending for drinks and the sunshine dims?
—angst. hurt/comfort. fluff ending. reader can be described as plus size but no specified race. age gap (reader is in her late 20s, early 30s, our grumpy man in his late 40s, early 50s). medical inaccuracy.
part two coming soon !
thank you to @cafekitsune for the lovely divider!
"Are those croissants?"
"Better yet, they are vanilla cream stuffed croissants."
The unsubtle smell of your new croissants wafted through the air, alerting almost everyone of your presence that came with new baked goods like a package deal. All the pittlings, as you so dearly called them, looked up as Dana playfully scoffed at the obscenely mouthwatering croissants which you brought in.
"Trin, wait—"
"Nope!"
"No, no, no! You stole all of the cookies last week!" Matteo came running, hands already up to defend the desserts as Trinity opened up the lid of your container before you could even reach the nurses' station.
"What about me—I'm literally her favourite—"
Dennis almost tripped trying to catch up as you gave custody of your beloved croissants to one of the hands trying to poach them away. You walked up to the nurses station handing a secret stash to dana and lena, your mama nurses, before grinning at the scene in front of you.
"You're spoiling them." Dana scolded, without any bite. She also knew how much they deserved it, and how you were too sweet to actually stop treating the youngest of the pitt.
You gave her a side hug. "They deserve something after busting their asses here, especially under Robby. God knows what's up his ass these days. How many times did he yell at Samira today?"
Dana and Lena scoffed, "Almost told her she didn't belong here again."
You rolled your eyes. This wasn't new at all. You made a mental note to check up on the girl yourself.
You looked at them in front of you. Matteo, Trinity and Dennis were already battling against each other and somehow Langdon had already gotten away with two pieces—one for Mel, obviously—and then Shen's invading hands also won the match.
Your heart warmed at all of them.
"You done distracting my staff, nurse?"
A buzz of electricity shot through your spine at the deep, gravelly voice. You turned around on your heels, a sly grin adorning your face, cheeks bumped up to meet his almost smirk and beautiful hazel eyes.
Dr. Jack Abbot. Your grumpy, sassy, hot attending. Your personal mission.
"So you agree that I'm distracting?"
Javadi made a choked noise that sounded almost like chortle while covering her mouth.
He huffed at you, crossing his arms on his chest. You had to keep your eyes from drifting to the muscles on his big arms taut against his broad chest.
"Bribing my students with baked goods? That's distracting."
"You know, its crazy—all I keep hearing is that you find me a.k.a my cooking is distracting, doc."
"Yeah? Well that's medically compromising—you should get your ears checked."
You rolled your eyes, your grin unwavering by his dry quips. "Well, what's medically compromising is your appetite, Abbot. Say, when was the last time you tried any of my distracting goods?"
He raised his eyebrows, "Why? You want me distracted too, nurse?" His voice dropped a decibel, as if the whisper was a secret meant to only rile you up. Your cheeks immediately turned pink, dusting the tips of your ears as well.
Your grin faltered. His almost came into view.
"Very subtle—" Shen coughed up, very unsubtly as your intimate moment with the attending came crashing. Jack took a quick look at your face; pink cheeks and ears and the confidence of the sunshine he managed to falter. A prideful feeling almost bloomed in his chest—only he could affect you like this. Fluster you like this. A small smile was about to make to his face, but was he about to let you win?
"Okay, back to work everyone! Santos, you still have to finish those charts!"
He moved away from your space, the warmth lingering in your heart. But you saw it—he almost gave in.
"Well, sunshine—you almost made it. take the win, will ya?" Dana's voice rang out in the back. but you shook your head, your lower lip getting caught between your teeth, leaning back onto the counter, watching your grumpy attending order around. "Never giving up on this, Dana. Not until he actually smiles, or even laughs."
"God, when will you both stop?"
—
It all started during a particularly, mercifully uneventful night at the pitt.
You, including almost everyone at the pitt, had their eyes glued on the screen with dollars on stake. Will the stupid teenagers who stole their professor's car, with a brake fail, be caught by the unwitting police? Or will they crash? In who's vicinity? Presby or will they have to save lives in the pitt, yet again?
You had put 40$ on presby and he had snorted. "You're optimistic."
"You should try it sometimes—might just make your grumpy face prettier, old man."
Whittaker's eyes widened, Trinity side eyed Perlah and Princess who were looking like they just found gold, Jesse and Donnie stopped incessantly organising the crash cart in case the car did crash in the pitt's vicinity and Dana and Robby smirked at each other.
Amusement etched onto the attending's face and it was a thrill you never stopped chasing. "C'mon, even the grumpy dwarf in snow white smiled, doc—what's stopping you?"
He just shook his head at you, huffing at the comment and walked off. You watched him walk away with his back towards you and accepted the challenge. "One day or the other, I'm gonna make you smile, Abbot—maybe even laugh—you'll see!"
He raised his eyebrows at you and leaned back onto a wall with his arms crossed on his chest, making something thunder inside your body. "We'll see about that, nurse. But first, you might want to look at the screen."
The police had caught them.
—
After that day, you brought in your best food and your best lines. But somewhere along the way, it stopped being just about seeing him smile. I mean, obviously you wanted to see him smile, almost concerned it would make your heart stop, but Jack Abbot started to mean something more.
Seeing him everyday, looking into his soulful eyes, his stupid soft voice while talking to patients and the almost smile he gives you during your shenanigans bloomed a deep, warm, ridiculously fuzzy feeling which had set itself somewhere behind your sternum.
Even if it got a huff out of him, a scoff, a smirk that burned its way through the small space in between you both to between your legs or just raised eyebrows.
So, you never stopped flirting. Never stopped baking. Never stopped chasing his smile. It became your dream. Because you knew it would be breathtaking to see it, feel it and know that you were the cause of it.
So, you were here, with a hop in your step, making your way towards the man.
"And I thought these dull hospital lights could never make anyone look good, but here you are, proving me wrong, Mr. Grouch."
He didn't even look up from the chart he was assessing. "Don't you have patients to check up on?"
"Don't you have some smiling to do?"
He turned to look at you and the warm feeling started to spread through your body, unwarranted. He was about to quip back, his mouth opening slightly when—
"19 year old, GSW to the chest, head trauma, pulse is thready—"
Jack's shoulders and jaw set itself tight, as if bracing for whatever was about to come next. he kept the chart back with a thud, going around you, hand brushing on your lower back. "You're with me. Smiling later." He said, lowly, breath fanning your ear.
"Promise?" Your voice had gone heavy.
You gulped as you both walked towards the gurney, his hand still on your lower back, a small comfort before heading into the storm. He glanced back at you, before getting to the boy after you gave him a nod of readiness.
"Trauma 2 is open!" You heard princess yell.
You took a deep breath before going in, hoping this one will turn around. Everyone is here. Jack is here.
It was going to be okay.
—
Your hands trembled.
Your breath was stoic. It didn't dare to move the air between you or the resident still doing cpr.
Jack glanced at his watch. "Stop."
His voice had lost its sharpness but it still held authority. It honeyed through the trauma room, reaching you. But it didn't warm you up like it usually did. His concerned face was focused at the year 2 resident who was starting to hyperventilate. She still kept going.
He glanced at you. You understood what he needed. You moved forward, your body numb. "Sweetheart, you need to let go. Its okay, its going to be alright—"
"No!" She shrieked. You heard Jack calling her name. "He was younger than me—" She whispered.
Jack stepped forward and gripped her shoulders. "Its okay, doctor. Let go. Look at me—I need you to breathe."
Her hands went slack. The machine beeped mercilessly. "Time of death, 5.57 am."
You circled your arms around her as she fell, weeping into your chest.
"shh, I know. C'mon let's get you out." You whispered, your voice sweet as sugar, your soul numbing as the machine beeped.
Jack looked at you but you avoided his gaze. Your hands were trembling, your vision was blurring and your heart was trying to punch its way through your body. Your brain couldn't take it. But you still took care of the people around you. You squeezed donnie's hand on the way out because you knew his kid was also a teenager. You promised princess a treat because you knew she was not going to eat after this. You took care of the resident in your arms because you knew she wont be able to sleep after this.
His gaze burned on your back as it followed your figure through the overbearing walls of the pitt.
After, you got the resident settled, you were about go off to take a breather when Ellis called your name. "Hey! The kid in trauma 2, do you mind calling his parents and informing them?" Your heart ached and flashbacks of another trauma, another death, another set of parents losing their whole world burned in your mind. But you nodded.
"Hello? am I speaking to Mrs Shah?" You introduced yourself, "I'm speaking from Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center—"
Immediately the questions started, the panic, the desperation, the devastation. You sighed, your exhaustion and anguish slipping out. You tried to explain the urgency, that they needed to come immediately. Your hands shook as you hung up and closed your eyes.
You tried to busy yourself, checking up on other patients, but your mind still wandered away to the boy. The sorrow of another soul departing, another young life you couldn't save, another injustice was too heavy. The grief set in your bones.
It was a reminder of how this job got harder. These walls sometimes seemed too hollow, too empty, with the losses all of the doctors had faced. This department wrung people out with its cruelty. You were expected to move on with no time to process everything.
That's where Jack came.
Being with him, bantering, flirting, joking—it gave you joy—something that the E.D could never steal. He made working and just being there easier, as if the air got much more breathable around him. You were almost addicted to the giddiness you felt around him. his salt and pepper curls, his teasing voice with you, his dry sarcasm, the way his black tee stretched around the muscles on his back and biceps—
"Excuse me? We were called in urgently? We are looking for our son? Neil Shah?"
The grief crashed down on you. Your eyes turned glassy again and tried to look for any other nurse or even Jack so that you wouldn't be in this position. Not again. Not where you have to inform the parents that their beloved child has passed away. Not where you have to hear the wails of the mother and denial of the father.
You sighed in defeat and led them to an empty room. Slowly, you explained what had happened. How their son had passed away. "I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. and Mrs Shah. Truly."
They had started crying, asking you questions, Demanding answers to truths you didn't know. Until one question. "How did he get shot?"
"He—" Your voice broke, but that's when you felt a warm, steady hand on your shoulder. Your beacon of comfort. You immediately recognized it. "I'm Doctor Abbot—I performed the surgery on your son. Nurse, could you please assist Dr. Kwan with a consult in south eight?"
Your heart filled with gratitude. He gave you an out. And you took it. You nodded but not before mouthing a thank you to the man in front of you. He squeezed your shoulder before holding the door open for you and your heart squeezed. Why did he have to be so kind?
You took a quick glance towards him before getting out. You felt you could breathe.
That did not long last.
"Can you believe he did that? I mean, if I was in his place, I would never put my life on the line—for a girl i just met? That was so stupid—"
You took a sharp inhale and jerked your head to the voice. "How dare you? Just because you don't even have an ounce of the bravery, the courage and the empathy that he had, doesn't mean you get to call it stupid, you—"
Before you could go up to him and slap him, strong hands grabbed you, wrapping around your torso, with no harshness but just comfort coursing through.
"Ogilvie, if you don't have even 1% basic empathy or haven't heard the phrase 'dont talk ill of the dead' I suggest you drop out of medical school and go back to 3rd grade."
You shoulders visibly relax at the voice and at his fingers which softly caressed your chubby love handles—this man was not helping you keep cool. Heat travelled up your neck when you felt his chest rumble with some instructions he gave to the resident in front of him.
Jack called your name and his hands travelled to your shoulders. "Come on, let's go—"
"What? what about the consult—"
"That was a lie—"
"You dog—"
"Come on, you nuisance. Let's get you a breather."
—
"The roof?"
"You'll see."
The door busted open and strong gust of wind hit you in the face. And there it was.
You gasped and your hands went to Jack's forearm. "Oh my god."
"Oh my god."
"Come on, you wanna see the sunrise?"
"Well, at least ask me for a cup of coffee first, old man. You losing your touch already?" He gave you a deadpan look. "But of course, if you insist."
He took you to the railing. "I've heard you go even beyond the railing..."
Jack gave you a side eye. "Oh come on, you really believe anything really stays in the box at this hole?" He still did not entertain you. "Please, Jack?" You gazed up at him, with your best puppy eyes.
"Alright. But only this time."
He ducked and got across first, holding out his hand for you, fingers gently taking your palm and helping you cross the railing. "Thank you," You softly murmured, the touch growing the warmth in your chest. the sunrise had only taken its footing—the soft blue of the sky was slowly lighting up. "So," You took a deep breath, "why did you bring me to your sacred space?"
"Sacred space? Really?" Jack scoffed.
"Everybody knows its where you and Robby come to make heart eyes at each other—" He grunted and you let out a soft laugh. "Come on, tell me." You whined.
"I saw you." He spoke. "After–after you realized he was gone, after we declared the time of death. your hands were trembling," Your breath hitched. "Your breaths were small, your voice was—" You looked away. His gaze bore deep into your eyes, trying to probe out the vulnerability gently, and his voice was too tender, too warm, almost wrapping you up in their saccharine like blanket. "The point is, you still took care of everyone. Donnie, Princess, the resident—"
"Someone has to. I just choose to. Nobody forces me to, Jack." Your voice gets small.
"And when will you let yourself take care? When will you take a breath?" Your breath hitched. "You're the sunshine of the dark side, sweetheart. We don't want you fading out while you take care of others." He syruped.
You hoped it would stay dark so that he couldn't see the red on your cheeks, the heat crawling up your neck and how you couldn't trust your own voice anymore. But you braved on.
"um, I dont know if you know this, doc, but I shifted to nights for a reason other than one grumpy teddy bear," You let out a giggle when jack let out an annoyed huff, "there was a girl, 19, just like today's kid. She was abducted and tried escaping, but the abductor shot her. She was brought in, I was a part of the surgery and despite everything, despite Robby busting his ass—she–" Your voice broke and you gripped the railing. "She almost escaped it, but...her parents were angry more than heartbroken. Her mother threw things at the father, he yelled back and I tried to calm them down, but h-he pulled me in, threw me in the wall and said I was too incompetent, I couldn’t save his daughter's life."
You inhaled sharply. "He killed himself 2 months later."
"Look at me."
"Jack—"
He pleaded your name. "That was not your fault. It will never get easy, I know that...too well. But you learn to live around it, but I need you to understand that it was not your fault."
You nodded. "How do you live with it?"
"Before returning to Pittsburgh, before my...leg, in Afghanistan—we used to get this street food. It used to be sold at nights and we used to switch routes and trade fucking mattresses and anything just to have a chance to get it. Its called kolcha. It used to be heaven in the hell we were put in.
I used to see my brothers get blown up, losing their lives, civilians losing a sense of humanity after the way everyone treated them. But there are soft joys that help the grief. that helped me live. Stopped me from..." He trailed off, a pensive look forming on his face.
Your hand clasped around his on the railing. He gazed up at you, your eyes already on him, so honeyed, filled with care and admiration, with so much compassion, he didn't know what to do with it.
You both just gaped at each other. Your hearts filled to the brim. Getting lost in time.
Suddenly, a ray of sunlight reflected in Jack's hazel eyes and you broke your contact, a gasp forming on your lips as you tore your eyes away to marvel at the jawdropping sunrise.
The sun was officially peeking up. Its rays bounced off skyscrapers made of glass, lighting up the small alleys of the street. The orange and yellow shades painted the horizon and you almost died right there. "Its so beautiful..."
The sunlight was colouring your skin, your giddiness coming out with the sun.
"Will you take care of yourself, sunny?"
You let out a sweet giggle. "Sunny?"
"The sun clearly loves you." He murmured softly before tucking in a strand of hair fallen haphazardly on your eyes, blocking him from the view.
"Hmm, you're going soft on me, old man. Or are you just manipulating me so that I won't tell anyone that your grumpy attitude is a hoax and you're just a big ol' teddy bear?"
He snorted and let out a soft smile.
Your heart jumped.
"Oh my god!" you gasped and pointed. "Oh my god! You smiled!"
"Come on, sunny. Let's get you inside before you tragically die due to slipping while celebrating something that never happened—"
"Excuse me—" You scoffed but let him lead you onto the safer side of the railing, his hands on your shoulders, sliding down to your hands to steady you as you come over.
"Try convincing Robby that you did it—"
"Oh fuck off, you are just a big, fuzzy, loving teddy bear inside—"
His smile burned through you, in your heart.
And as you predicted, you could never forget it.
—
The next day, there was a new skip to your walk as you entered the pitt. You had spent your day trying to calm down your heart every time you reminisced what happened on the roof. Your skin would jump with goosebumps and your cheeks would immediately redden. So you distracted yourself in the best way.
You walked in with a box in your hand. The aroma of the newly tried recipe made everyone turn their heads. But this time you refrained from giving in to your beloved pittlings' puppy eyes.
Lena and Dana raised their eyebrows. "What's got our sunshine happier than before?"
"Nothing." You squealed softly.
"Mhm." Lena hummed. But mama nurse knew you too well. She knew all of you too well. "You know, you spent an awful lotta time on the roof yesterday. And what's that in the box you're tryin' so hard to keep away?"
"Its for Jack." You murmured. "He mentioned this food he had when he was in Afghanistan—"
"Didn't Dr. Abbot take you up on the roof yesterday?" Joy chimed in.
"What!?" Trinity yelped.
"Excuse me?" Dana took her glasses off and left them on the counter with a thud.
"Are you serious?" Matteo asked you, with her eyes wide open as Princess squealed to Perlah. "i knew it! may utang ka sa akin ng 50 bucks!"
Donnie gave you a pat on the back, like he was proud of you. "W–wait—guys—"
"What's going on here?"
You closed your eyes and sighed in defeat. The voice, the man, the mchottie who had you in trouble. Ellis leaned up on the counter with a dangerously smug look on her face. "Well, we were just talking about sunshine here and yo—"
Your eyes widened and embarrassment crawled up your veins in your neck, swirling anxiety in your brain with all the ways this could go wrong. "Okay! Everybody go back to work, now! Trinity, go home. Ellis, your labs for the 33 year old lady in north five are here and Matteo—"
She peered at Matteo with her glasses slid down till her nose, staring at his phone dreamily, who straightened up, as if he was caught with a scandal. "—do us all a favour, keep the yearning for Dr. Javadi aside and get. back. to. work!"
Everyone scrambled off. You gaped at her with a grateful look in your eyes. "You are amazing."
You turned around to look at the man you've been—shamefully or shamelessly you didn't know—thinking about the whole night and your jaw almost dropped. The sight was marvelous.
Jack abbot in gear.
Camouflage pants and a tight black tee.
"Take a picture, it'll last longer." He dryly quipped at you.
Before you could reply, a gurney came bursting through the bay. "55 year old man, cardiac arrest—"
You felt his whole body reset and bracing like it always did. "Sunny, you're with me—"
"Sunny?" Shen asked, a knowing, smug look adorned his face as his eyes jumped from him to you. Your whole body flushed. He was going to be your ruin. Jack ignored Shen's absolutely valid inquiry with the excuse of the patient in front of him. But you're frozen.
He still remembered your conversation.
Did he think about it again and again and again like you did?
Your heart did not stop pumping blood but your brain stopped producing logic it seems.
"Sunny? You still with me?" Hus rough yet gentle voice coaxed you out of your thoughts and reminded you of the situation at hand. You cleared your throat and just nodded wordlessly, hoping no one would notice the red on you face.
How will you survive this man?
After sending him off to surgery, Crus looked between the both of you, as if he could sense the electricity between you, the tension, the undying sense of something happened here and just these two are in denial. "That was smooth."
Jack raised one eyebrow at him, amusement etched onto his face. "What was?"
Crus cleared his throat. You stilled. You knew what was coming. Crus did not stop. "You two make a good team."
You shot him a glare that seemed somewhere between 'i will kill you' and 'please don't make my life hell'. He saw it, noted it, considered it.
And threw it in the trash apparently. "Just saying. Everyone saw it inside. Its like you both were in sync. Unstoppable. Inevitable—"
Don't say it.
"—made for each other."
Shen made a choked sound and Ellis pursed her lips, trying to contain her giggle. Beside you, Jack stilled.
"Sunny makes it easier. Made for the night shift." He grunted out.
"Don't make it sound dramatic." He signed on some discharge papers and handed them to Lena. His hand brushed against yours. "Bye, sunny." he murmured softly against your cheek and left you. All by yourself. To process what just happened.
"So, sunny?"
"Shut up, guys."
You turned around and walked towards the supply closet, nothing but an excuse to ditch the conversation that you are about to face.
They followed you like little ducklings.
"What happened to you guys on the roof?" Crus asked.
"Nothing happened—and how do you know?"
Ellis scoffed as if the notion of anything staying a secret in this hospital was absurdly ridiculous. "Come on! tell us—"
"Nothing happened guys and shush!" You glared at them. They peered on you with curiosity as your body shook with embarrassment? Humiliation? Adrenaline? The mere thought of Jack abbot and you on the roof?
Shen slurped on his stupid watered down coffee. "You should go for it."
"I will stab you—"
"No, he's right! At least then your sexual tension in between emergency traumas will not traumatise us."
"Excuse me?"
"Please—even the unconscious patient can sense it!"
You huffed and crossed your arms as if it could save you from this conversation and put on a mask of denial. "That's not even remotely true. besides—I don't like him!"
The three of them stared at you. "Yes, and Shen doesn't live on caffeine." Ellis deadpanned. "You cant deny something we see literally everyday. You banter, flirt, tease and even cook for him! Didn't you make something specially for him today?"
Crus gasped dramatically. "Whaaaat?"
You rolled your eyes. "Its not that big of a deal."
"Yes, it is." The three of them chimed in unison. Your eyes fell on their faces, their relentless questions and sighed in defeat. You scrunched your face, closing your eyes for just a second and then squinting at them. "Am I that obvious?"
"Yes—"
"No—"
You pursed your lips and raised your eyebrows at them. "Seriously?"
They gave you wordless looks almost meant to serve with pity, empathy, hope. You don't know. "Listen, you just made this afghan food for him which I know you've never even heard of before. You try to make him smile everyday and there is this embarrassingly obvious sexual tension in between you. Don't think that the ED is half blind to miss the looks you give him."
You sharply inhaled.
"Hey, there's no harm in going for it—he will say yes. If he doesn't, that's his loss. some other person will get your perfectly baked goods." Ellis assured you.
That's when your brain imagined it—wildly. Not in the unsaid, shy and restrained ways it has been doing for the past months. The vivid image of you and the attending you made smile, together, in each other's arms, happy. Holding hands, requited secret glances, soft kisses, stolen touches, his eyes with a gentleness and passion just saved for you and a love that's not a secret—its known, its seen and understood—but its just for both of you.
Your heart skipped a beat.
Your cheeks blushed furiously.
The three of them smirked, knowingly.
"I—" You gulped and stammered on your words. "I need to be somewhere." Your hands shook and your brain didn't comprehend what you needed, nor did your body and it all was about to go crashing when—
"What are you all doing there? Don't you have jobs?"
Jack.
You didn't whether to sigh in relief or wring your hair out in frustration. This man was going to end you. "You know, sunny also has patients to attend to, rather than hearing you guys bicker or gossip about whatever it is."
You felt heat and humiliation hiking up your neck as you notice the smug looks they give each other before wandering off. "Yes boss."
But not before Ellis winked at you, Crus gave you a smug salute, and Shen slurped away loudly, obnoxiously, knowingly, looking back and forth between you and Jack.
Speaking of the man, he just leaned against a counter, gazing at you, with an unpredictable and unreadable look on his face. "Well, since you're done organising that supply closet for the 4th time, some patients are getting starved of your sunshine. Unless, of course, the supply room is in dire need of your attention, sunny."
Sudden confidence flared in your chest. "Well, cap'n grumps, you could just say you are in dire need of attention. No need to shame my perfect supply room."
Your mouth spoke before your brain you could stop it. His mouth twitched, just slightly, his amusement not hiding under a curtain and a glimmer in his pretty eyes which made you weak in the knees. "Get back to work, sunny." He murmured, head shaking and his shoulders lighter than before.
You almost giggled. "Of course, boss."
You walked away. every sense in your body was tingling, goosebumps on your skin and a fire somewhere in the pit of your stomach and a familiar fuzzy feeling growing stronger beneath your chest.
You didn't know if you were going to survive this man. You didn't know if you wanted to.
—
The next hours of the shift were determined to drain the soul out of you.
There were 4 traumas at the same time and a statewide insufficiency of nurses. So that meant you had to jump back and forth. Chairs was filled and actually overflowing while you had a scarcity of beds so all the nurses were charged with scheduling, organising and moving beds according to the level of emergency and pain patients were facing. Plus, you had multiple patients and a family who had declared that dr. google was more knowledgeable than a nurse.
Amazing.
And you hadn't gotten a chance to even eat.
When you finally got a chance to eat in the breakroom, that's when you saw it. The kolcha. Untouched. Because you wanted him to have the first bite. First taste. Just to see that Heartwarming smile again.
You bit your lip and took a peek outside. Everything had slowed down. Just for bit, you were sure, before another trauma, another emergency, another goddamn patient too obnoxious and blind to only believe what google says pulls you in.
This was the time, you decided.
So, you picked up the box, an extra hop to your walk, as you looked for him.
Jack abbot.
Ellis' words rang in your ears and your heartbeat sped up. Should I do it?
Take the chance, the risk?
"Hey, Lena, do you know where Jack is?" You asked softly, almost bashfully, as she narrowed her eyes at you but then flashed you a knowing look before pointing at a room.
The buzz in your heart and brain intensified as you walked towards him. You were so giddy, it hurt. Your soft smile had turn into a beam. The anticipation had turned to you nervous and exhilarated. You wanted to see his smile, the one he'll give after you give him a kolcha. Will it be a soft and dedicated one, reserved just for you? Will it be a joyous and unwithdrawn one, not shying away from showing his beautiful wrinkles?
Everything made your heart soar.
Your feet slowed down as you got there and you heard voices. His and... Dr. Al-hashimi. She was laughing before Jack spoke.
"So, you want get that beer we talked about?"
You heard Jack chuckle. A vibration that rumbled through his lungs in his chest to the ground that you apparently walked on. You felt as if it had just been pulled underneath you. It was lighthearted, casual—directed at someone else.
The ringing of elation in your ears stopped. Replaced with a haunting stillness.
"Yeah, of course. I would love to."
Your breath stopped in your lungs.
It was casual without any audible or visible awkwardness. You glanced inside only to see Jack smiling, a sly and playful grin, lighting up his whole face. Directed towards her. Not you.
Never you.
You wondered if she made it easy for him. Like you probably never did. His whole body was turned towards her, a casual openness to him that was never reciprocated with you. Your chest tightened. Throat strained. Something in your temples felt like it was being pulled.
Jack asking Dr. Al Hashimi out for beers. Your breathing felt shallow. Why wouldn't he? She was brilliant, kind almost dazzling with every step she took. She carried herself with maturity that only comes with facing warzones and fighting injustice. She never had to take constant efforts to make someone smile. He did it instantly for her.
Your hold on the box full of kolchas loosened.
Your legs moved before your brain processed everything. Your eyes looked into the distance, your thoughts melding, twisting your heart, a suffocating hurt settling deep in your bones.
You just kept walking.
"Hey, hon—you okay?" You heard someone say, but your mouth didn't move, your voice had gone numb. So, you just gave tight smile and gave a wordless nod and moved ahead.
Get back to work. You have patients.
Your body moved, on instinct, but without any soul in it.
He didn't owe you anything, you realized. He never reciprocated your efforts, nor did he respond. He just grunted, shook his head, raised his eyebrows, scoffed. It was meaningless. Fruitless. It was just amusement to him. You felt your heart hitting the pit of your stomach. He probably never even considered it. You were his nurse. He was your attending. You tried too hard it was almost entertaining. The sunshine of the night shift. Overbearing. aAways shining. Never needed anything back.
You were nothing like her.
She was everything he could want.
You never even understood where you left the box of kolchas meant for him. It was discarded somewhere like it never included unconditional efforts, hope and love. Like you didn't just stay up the hours you were supposed to put in for sleep to make something you had never made from scratch, just for him. It was not like he ever tried anything you made.
You just walked to a patient, and gave them a smile.
But it felt foreign on your face.
You asked them what was wrong, checked their pulse, gave necessary meds and equipment to the resident in front of you. It felt mechanical. Your eyes were vacant. Too preoccupied with trying to see the things your heart missed. the hope that you harboured over time, the anticipation and giddiness on seeing him, the fuzzy feeling inside your sternum.
Now replaced with a sudden anxiety. A hollowness.
"There she is." You almost jumped, startled by the intrusion of the voice you were now dreading to listen to. "I was looking for you."
Flashes of his soft smile, the wonderful sound of his chuckle, the casual openness—never meant for you—shattered you. You stood there still, unresponsive.
"Sunny?" Jack asked, oh-so-gently, but it just pricked your skin like needles. Even his soft words had become a sign of betrayal. Was he just dragging you along?
A shaky exhale escaped you but your face remained stoic. Your movements were calculated.
"Lena wants you to talk to this patient, he doesn't agree with any of the nurses, says he wants a 'real, qualified doctor'."
"Okay—"
"—and ortho has your results ready for north five, just sign on those." You said in a clipped tone. Tou couldn’t even look at him anymore. You had to get out of there.
But you could still feel him. His furrowed eyebrows, tensed shoulders, concerned eyes—searching for answers, searching for you. All confused. But you didn't have answers. Not anymore.
So, you left, wordlessly, with your broken heart.
Him, with confusion etched onto his features.
Because you realized that while you looked for him in every room before even entering it, he probably never did.
Today your shift in the pitt started off great but soon became slightly intolerable.
Two words. James Ogilvie.
An R4 at the pitt, same as you. He was newer to the pitt and you, being a seasoned resident here, got the privilege curse of having him with you for the first few weeks.
Honestly he wasn't that bad at first but it seemed like something new came up with him every shift. Truly a thorn in your side.
It also turns out he is definitely into you.
That poses its own issues with him always asking you questions and following you closely every shift.
The worst is the constant flirting. Corny at first but now it's like nails on a chalkboard. It truly is harmless which is why you've never brought up being married or who your husband is.
It's not something you broadcast. But you keep a constant reminder with your wedding ring on a chain that's tucked securely under your scrub top.
Despite wanting to yell, you refrain. You typically laugh off his attempts to joke or flirt with a slight laugh or politely declining advances.
You’re handing him over to Langdon soon anyways.
Only a few more hours.
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
At some point you lose Ogilvie among a series of incoming traumas and don’t bother finding him just yet. He’ll likely find you first.
After finishing a chart, you lay your head on the nurses station counter.
The only thing getting you through this shift is knowing you get to leave early today, followed by date night with your husband. The thought alone has you smiling to yourself.
You glance at the clock and it reads ‘3 p.m.’
“Finallyyy!” you groan as you go to clock out and grab your things.
After you grab your stuff, you're headed to the door when Frank catches your attention from an empty exam room “Woah where's the fire?” he jokes. Okay you might have been moving at a brisk walk, eager to leave and get ready.
“There will be one if I don't get out of here” you huff with a laugh glancing over your shoulder “Ogilvies all yours Langdon!”
He shakes his head laughing “You owe me!” he answers back just as you make it out the sliding doors.
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
It's three hours later and here you are back at the hospital. This time you're happy to walk in knowing it's not for another shift.
You're dressed in an outfit you had just recently gotten, specifically for tonight. Your hair is washed and styled, and you even had time for a light makeup look.
You walk up to the nurses station where you find Trinity, Dana, and Frank.
Dana greets you first. “Look at you hot stuff! Hot date I assume?”
“You’d assume correctly” you laugh, a blush covering your cheeks.
Trinity leans forward on the desk “Does he work here?” curiosity in her eyes.
“Yes actually, he's a surgeon” you smile, giving no more hints.
Your three friends gasp at the new information. “Okay you have to tell us who he is” trinity pleas with anticipation.
“Yeah honey, who's the lucky guy?” Dana chimes in with a smile.
Hmmm. You thought. Let's make this juicy.
You bring up your left hand that is adorned with your wedding ring “My husband”
A bright smile grows on your face as you watch the three around you stare at your hand in absolute shock.
“YOU’RE MARRIED??” Trinity all but yells
She gently grabs your hand to examine the ring closer “SINCE WHEN?”
“Yeah, since when!? You've never mentioned a relationship, let alone a marriage!” Dana says with wide eyes and examines the ring too. “It’s gorgeous though honey” she smiles
Frank still stands in shock, jaw dropped “WOW… talk about plottwist”
“I just know whoever he is, he does not play about you” Trinity says while releasing your hand.
The four of you laugh at her comment until another voice speaks up “Who's married?”
Oh my god. Of allll people.
Ogilvie comes striding up, eyes finding you immediately.
“Holy shit girl, you're hot as hell” he says with a smile, eyes roaming your figure.
Frank comes up to your side “Back off Ogilvie, not happening”
“Yeah dingus” Trinity adds as she joins Frank at your side “and did you not just hear, she's married” she emphasizes.
Ogilvie scoffs “Duh Santos, that's why I asked. But here's the real question” he leans forward slightly towards you “Are you happily married?”
You raise your eyebrows and go to reply but he continues.
“Because this so-called husband of yours isn't even here. What kind of man lets someone as gorgeous as you out of his sight?” he questions with a slight smile, clearly believing he's made a great point.
Before he can continue, a gruff voice speaks up from behind him.
“Who says I do?”
Ogilvie turns around and his stomach drops at who he finds. Brendon Park. The shark. As he was about to quickly find out.
Park stalks up slowly from behind Oglivie, hands clasped behind his back, circling the resident.
“And you wonder if she’s happily married right? I’d say very by the way she can't take her eyes off me, don’t ya think?” He smiles smugly.
He looks directly at Ogilvie “Olive tree was it?”
“I-uh-um it’s uh Ogilvie…” he stutters out.
Park shrugs his shoulders “Same thing and still of no concern to me. The same way my wife is of no concern to you.”
He goes to take a step towards the shell-shocked resident before he's stopped by your voice.
“Hey handsome” you coo at him, gravitating towards him with a hug around his waist. His chilling demeanor slips almost immediately as he wraps you into his chest, as if shielding you from any and everything.
You’re only for him.
“Hey sweet girl” he mutters while laying his cheek against your head.
“Almost ready to go?” You look up at him.
“Yeah baby, just gotta grab my things from the office. Walk with me?” He says while pulling away, hands still holding onto yours, gently persuading you to follow. Of course that was no hard ask. You’d follow this man to the ends of the earth if he asked.
“Why yes Dr. Park, lead the way” smiling softly you let him drag you along, pulling you into his side, arm around your shoulder.
Ogilvie stands there with Trinity and Frank.
“You’re such a dumbass” Trinity breaks the silence .
Frank chuckles at that “Yeah olive tree you just became fish food for the shark”
Ogilvie looks at the couple, still in shock at the fact his fellow resident & never gonna happen crush is married to Brendon Park.
He sighs in defeat “Of fucking course she would belong to the shark.”
WARNINGS: MATURE CONTENT AHEAD (MDNI) - prone bone position, female!reader, lowkey younger!reader (isn’t mentioned but i always imagine it is), established relationship isn’t mentioned but can be read either way
LYRIC: "but i bet we'd have really good bed chem"
────────── ୨ৎ ───────────
"jack you're too deep," you cry out. or at least you try to. because your tongue is pushed up against his. any noise you make gets muffled by the sounds of slurping and saliva between your mouth and his.
"i know baby, i know," he coos back. he tips your jaw upwards to keep the kiss going while fucking his cock slowly into your poor hole, hitting deep. his chest presses against your back with one arm hooked around your neck.
he holds your face so he can control the messy kiss, his other hand clutching your own, holding you while his cock sucks deeper into your velvety walls. your pussy devours his cock, milking him with those creamy walls and making each thrust feel like heaven. he keeps his thrusts short so that he doesn't have to pull back for too long. he hates not having his cock not fill you even for a moment and wants to stay deep.
the thick head of his cock presses firmly against your sweet spot, putting pressure on your insides. you claw pathetically at his arm, you're too full. but he doesn't give you space, instead he stays buried inside, keeping you stuffed to the hilt.
"you can take it sweetheart. come on, be good for me,"
he fucks you fast and rough, punishing thrusts as he forces you to take what he gives. he bullies his way into your pussy, thrusting and thrusting into you until you're slick and soaking all over his cock. he keeps you pinned beneath his weight, chest plastered to your back, using his body to keep your legs to keep you spread open. and when you move your hands behind you, trying to claw at his massive arms, he just lets out a chuckle.
“nah, you’re not getting away that easy,”
he moves to lock a forearm around your throat, his thick muscles squeezing as he presses down harder on you, suffocating you with the weight of his chest. your head is all fuzzy as your vision glazes over, eyes rolled back and seeing stars. he grunts rough and exhales hard, fucking you hard. in this position you are all helpless and at his mercy. a mix of pleasure and pain coil low in your stomach, your poor body aching over all attention he’s giving you. it’s too much. you're all overstimulated and sobbing, whining and drooling. jack rewards your compliance with a drag of his tongue over the side of your neck.
your voice cracks when you beg him to cum inside you, "please."
he responds not with words, but by slamming his cock so deep into your cervix as you moan low and pitiful when you feel the warmth of his cum filling you up.
he whispers into your ear, "that's it, taking it like a good girl,”
summary: when jack abbot runs into you at a bar after your shift on the fourth of july, he teaches you what it means to unwind and you teach him what it means to feel loved again. (6k)
characters: jack abbot / fem!loser!reader, trinity and mel at karaoke, baran al-hashimi
contents: friends to lovers, hurt/comfort, jealousy, age difference, power imbalance, so much yearning, jack abbot hasn't had sex in eight years confirmed cw for mentions of trauma and grief, and smut 18+ (MDNI)
( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )
The bar pulses like a living thing with a heartbeat. The buzzing of a hundred different conversations and the wailing of a distant guitar sting overhead presses hard on either side of you. If you concentrate real hard, you think you can still hear Mel and Trinity butchering another Alanis Morissette song back in the private karaoke room — which isn’t nearly private enough, considering the way their drunken devotion bleeds out into the main hall.
You left them a while ago to order a drink, which melts slowly in the sweaty glass between your fingertips now. You bring it to your lips and try to take a sip, but something in your throat refuses. The taste feels wrong; the burn feels wrong. Actually, the more you think about it, everything feels wrong — like your body is still calibrated to the relentless rhythm of the ER, to the work you can never quite seem to leave behind.
Even now, as your eyes meet your reflection in the mirror behind the liquor bottles, you look like something you don’t quite recognize — dressed in a velvet red number pulled from Trinity Santos’ closet instead of your usual scrubs; with your hair done instead of carelessly shoved back. It’s like looking at a stranger wearing your own face.
“Long time, no see, Doc—” A masculine voice cuts in, so familiar that you wonder if you’ve been thinking about the PTMC so long that you’ve begun to hallucinate your coworkers.
Your head snaps over your shoulder. Your tired eyes widen at the sight of your attending sliding in beside you. Jack Abbot is still donned in his scrubs, you find, as he leans against the bar — black uniform, brown undershirt, and navy pants — like he dressed himself in the dark before he came into work. His freckled biceps strain against the short sleeves as he folds them across the polished wood.
There are two glasses half-full of amber liquid before him. He lifts one in his right hand and eyes you over the top of it. “How long has it been?” he quips with narrowed eyes before taking a quick sip.
You blink away the shock of seeing him here, all casual, like he wasn’t just elbows deep in a trauma with you.
“About…” You lilt and glance at the clock behind the bar. “Half an hour ago, I think?”
His mouth curves with a slow, suspicious smile as his steady gaze refuses to waver. “What are you doing here all by yourself, huh? Gotta hot date I don’t know about?”
You scoff a quiet laugh and turn away, looking down at your untouched glass as you spin it in an anxious hand. “Yeah— If that’s what you wanna call watching Trinity and Mel butcher Alanis Morisette’s entire catalog…”
Your head tilts to your shoulder to flash him a lazy grin, which falters at the edge when you catch his unflinching stare. You clear your throat, remember that you’re talking to an attending, and stammer out, “Uh, what— What about you?”
Jack bounces a lazy shoulder and lifts the glass in his right hand. “This was the nearest place to get a good whiskey, so…” he trails off before taking another sip.
His eyes never leave yours as he peers at you from over the rim of the glass, studying you almost, analyzing you in a way that makes your skin feel too tight.
Your nose scrunches in protest of his staring. “Why are you looking at me like that?” you wonder through a breathless chuckle.
“I don’t know…” he admits, quieter now. “It’s just the first time I’ve seen you out of your scrubs…”
His light eyes flicker over your form again — from your bare shoulders and exposed chest, to where your dress clings to your ass and stomach.
“It’s different…” he hums. “A good different…”
Heat crawls up your neck. You turn away on instinct, finding it very suddenly difficult to meet his stare, as a disbelieving laugh slips from your mouth.
“What are you laughing at?” Jack presses with a chuckle of his own.
“Nothing,” you dismiss with a shake of your head. “I just… I think you might be a little tipsy there, Dr. Abbot…”
“This is only my second glass, I’ll have you know,” he argues, playfully offended. “What? You think I can’t handle my alcohol.”
He straightens slightly and takes a step closer. Still leaving several inches of space between you, though it takes a lot of strength from you not to slide off your bar stool entirely.
“No! I just—” You stumble over yourself as the words tangle on your tongue. “I just feel like you probably wouldn’t be talking to me like this otherwise.”
“I talk to you every day,” he scoffs.
“Well, yeah, but you don’t flirt with me every day.”
His brows raise as something short of amusement flickers across his face. “Oh. So you think I’m flirting with you?”
An awkward silence drops like a leaden weight upon you, like an anvil in one of those ancient cartoons. It knocks the breath out of you accordingly.
“…No,” you answer after a few long moments. “Of course not.”
Your grip tightens on your drink as you turn away from him again. You hardly think twice before bringing it impulsively to your mouth, downing two long sips of the watered-down gin and tonic. Your face screws at the bitter taste and at the burning sensation on your tongue, which turns into a dull sparkle when it settles in the pit of your stomach.
“Well, I was, so…” Jack quips, too casual for his own good. “I guess I’m gonna have to try a little harder now, aren’t I?”
His eyes cut to you, expecting you to laugh at him, or to stammer out another one of your painfully shy replies. You forget to respond entirely, though, too focused on the way the alcohol singes your tongue. (You spend a long moment debating whether or not it’s numb or swelling in your throat with a thousand-yard stare.)
Your silence is not reassuring.
“Unless—” Jack’s voice tightens slightly as he clears his throat. His charming resolve slips as he stammers, “Unless you don’t want me to. Obviously. Then I can just, you know, fuck off—”
“No, it’s not that!” you blurt. “It’s just…”
He leans in, just slightly. “Just what?”
You hesitate for a moment, calculating the words, though they seem to slip off your tingling tongue before you can stop them.
“I feel like I haven’t… learned how to be a real person yet, you know?” you confess with a sheepish, lopsided grin. “Like… People my age are supposed to go out for drinks, and sing karaoke with their friends, and flirt with cute guys—”
You don’t notice your slip-up, but Jack does, and he hides his smile behind his glass.
“But I think I’ve just been working so much that… That I don’t know how to do anything but work, you know?”
“Yeah…” he hums softly. “Trust me. I know the feeling—”
There’s a distant call of his name. A faint “Abbot,” half-swallowed by the thrumming music and surrounding conversation. Your head turns in the direction of the sound to find Dr. Al-Hashimi appearing from the crowd. Her fluffy brown curls are out of their usual clip, languishing now at her shoulders. Her lavender jacket is gone, too, to reveal her lean body beneath her slim scrub top.
You blink owlishly at her for a few moments, unused to the sight of her outside the white walls of the E.D.
“You were supposed to be bringing me a drink,” the woman quips drily, smiling as she reaches for the touched whiskey next to Abbot. “Not holding it hostage.”
“Shit…” Jack exhales. “I’m sorry. I-I got distracted…”
“Dr. Al,” you greet with a waver in your voice. “I… I didn’t know you were here.”
“Yeah, well…” she shrugs. “I heard this was the best place to get a glass of whiskey, so…”
You nod slowly, suddenly unsure of yourself — of what to do with your hands, your voice, with Jack. You swallow hard as your eyes flit wildly between the two attendings standing before you. You struggle to shake the feeling that you’ve interrupted something.
“I’ll, uh— I guess I’ll get out of your hair then…”
You muster an artificial smile and abandon your gin and tonic as you slide off the bar stool.
Jack calls your name, but it gets lost in the crowd that swallows you whole as you disappear out of sight.
You stomach through one and a half more songs that Mel and Trinity shout into the void of the private karaoke room. They take a quick break from “You Oughta Know” to sing a strikingly heartfelt rendition of “Head Over Feet” that very nearly brings a tear to your eye.
It’s not their sloppy singing, exactly, but rather the reminder of how alone you feel just now — the only audience member on the pleather sofa, bathed in the strobing neon glow from the overhead lights, watching the fun from afar while your friends forge an unlikely bond.
While Jack and Dr. Al laugh over drinks together—
You rise abruptly and catch them between verses to tell them you’re heading out for the night. Their protests come wrapped in song.
“But we’re having so much fun!” Trinity whines in drunken slurs, then locks in when the chorus hits. “You’ve already won me over, in spite of me! So don’t be alarmed if I fall, head over feet—!”
The song follows you the entire way out of the bar, where the night air outside washes over you like fine silk. You catch yourself humming the tune as you shrug on the brown bomber jacket you borrowed from Trinity’s closet — just in case you felt the need to hide. You falter when your fingers brush something in the front pocket.
You reach in with a pensive twist to your features, surprised to find a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter shoved inside. You stare at it for several long moments and wonder briefly what it would feel like to smoke one. (You’re unable to shake the impulsive thought from your brain until you’ve done it.)
You pull one cig free and stick the orange filter between your lips. You flick the lighter three times before it finally strikes. You hold your free hand over the flame like they do in the movies and inhale when it finally lights.
You regret it instantly.
Grey smoke billows from your mouth as you cough. You double over on the worn sidewalk like a total loser, eyes watering and chest burning as your lungs rebel against your very poor life choices.
“Those things kill, you know—?” Jack’s voice cuts in again.
(He has a way of finding you in the most embarrassing situations, it seems.)
You blink away the tears in your eyes and turn to find the older man standing just a few feet away with his hands in his pockets. He watches you attentively, with something close to amusement twisting his scruffy face.
“I can tell—” you rasp as your coughing fit ebbs. “There’s no way this is enjoyable for people.”
“Eh,” he shrugs. “It’s not so bad when you get used to it.”
His sneakers scuff the cracked pavement as he saunters over to you, holding his hand out with a glittering look in his eye. “Can I?”
You don’t think twice before passing him the lit cigarette.
“By all means...”
Jack pinches the stick between his thumb and forefinger. He places his mouth around the filter, inhales once, holds the breath, and exhales through his nose a second or more later.
You can’t seem to stop staring at the silver hair on his tilted chin; or the tendons in his corded neck; or the singular vein in his freckled forearm when he snuffs the cigarette out on the brick wall. He drops it into the receptacle there when he’s done.
“So…” He exhales the remaining smoke from his mouth, which leaves in grey wisps that hang in the air between you for a few lingering moments. “I guess you’re headed out now?”
“Yeah…” you sigh. “Guess so…”
He observes the empty sidewalk for a moment before wondering casually, “Want me to walk you home?”
“No, it’s okay,” you shrug. “You’re busy, and I… I only live, like, a block down the road, so—”
“So, then, it’ll be quick?” Jack presses with raised brows.
Your eyes narrow. “…You’re not gonna take no for an answer here, are you?”
Jack shakes his head, lips smoothing into a knowing grin. “Not this time, kid. No.”
The walk back to your place feels borderline suffocating, though you can’t exactly place why. The air is made of thick satin as the heat of the day washes away, leaving something silken and breathable in its wake, as the wind ripples in your dress. Everything smells very distinctly of summer — of dewy grass, and gunpowder from distant fireworks, and the faint sweetness of something that’s just been barbecued.
You can hear the fireworks crackling somewhere in the distance, though you struggle to see them from the buildings overhead. You can feel each thundered boom in your chest, along with the heavy bass of a passing car playing music far too loud as it barrels by.
There’s something oddly peaceful about it. Intimate, even, as your shoulder brushes Jack’s broader one with each step. The silence is not particularly awkward, but you can’t shake the feeling that you should say something. You rack your brain for a conversation starter, and end up blurting out the one thing you didn’t want to say out loud—
“So…” you lilt, tripping over the conversation like a loose wire. “You and Dr. Al…?”
“…Are very good coworkers, yeah,” Jack nods, silver curls turning gold beneath the amber streetlights. He catches your uncertain gaze and shrugs. “She had a tough first day, you know? Figured I’d treat her to a few drinks.”
“That’s nice…” you murmur with an averted gaze.
“It was nothing,” Jack assures you.
Your apartment building comes into view around the corner, painted a garish canary yellow with vivid orange doors, aptly named Sunset Tower. It used to be a motel, you assume from the layout, probably before you were born; and was renovated into an apartment complex likely not too long after you were born.
You don’t think twice before starting up the rusty staircase to your third-floor apartment — not until you notice the slight hitch in Jack’s step as he follows behind you, favoring his prosthetic limb more than he realizes. It must be hurting him, you figure, after being on it for hours at the PTMC.
“Shit,” you huff. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you.”
“Told me about what?” Jack scoffs despite his grimacing as he swings his leg another step. “I can handle a few stairs…”
“I can’t make it up on my own, if you—”
“Hey,” he snaps, a little harsher than he means to, as he glances in your direction. A far-off firework glimmers in your gaze, soft and sympathetic around the edges in a way that makes his chest ache. “I’m good. Don’t worry about me, alright?”
You continue the ascent despite your better judgment, despite the way Jack’s steps lose rhythm just beside you. You catch him stumbling in the corner of your eye when he steps up a beat too early. His prosthetic twists unnaturally, angering the already raging skin of his amputated knee.
You’re at his side without blinking. Your hands reach for his arm, steady him with your fingers cradling his wrist and elbow.
Jack nearly protests, but stops himself short.
You hold onto him the rest of the way up.
Your place is exactly how he imagined it would be — not that he’d been picturing what the inside of your apartment looked like, of course, because he’s not a total creep. He just finds a very apt representation of you wedged with the quaint walls of the old, old building. It’s cluttered but not messy; with numerous blankets and books and potted plants strewn about. There are half-used candles littered on just about every surface, filling the air with a sweet scent of musky-vanilla-raspberry.
The grass green couch pushed against the wall caves under his weight when you ease him down onto it. It smells like a mixture of your perfume and the side of the road you must’ve pulled it from when you moved in.
“Wow…” Jack hums, if only to conceal his wincing as he adjusts himself on the cushion. “Nice place…”
“No, it’s not,” you scoff an awkward laugh and stand to full height above him, adjusting the skirt of your dress from where it had ridden up. “Do you, uh— Need anything?”
“No. I’m good.”
“‘Cause I have some first aid supplies if your prosthetic is bothering you—”
“Really. I’m good,” he echoes. “You don’t mind if I take it off, though, do you?”
“Of course not!” you blurt. “I’ll, um… I’ll go get you some water.”
You scurry the short distance to the kitchen. The hissing faucet pervades the silence as you fill two glasses at the sink, along with the soft clanking of the heavy prosthetic as Jack unscrews it from the limb. You find him massaging the scar when you return.
“Do you— Do you need me to call you an Uber, or…?”
Jack tilts his chin to smile up at you. A playful laugh tumbles from his mouth. “Wow… Trying to get rid of me already, huh?”
Your face floods with horror. “No! O-Of course not! I just— With your leg, I— I don’t want you to walk all the way home, you know?”
“I think I can make it, sweetheart,” he tells you, and only vaguely notices his slip-up. “I just needed a second… Thank you—” He nods in appreciation when you set the water down on the coffee table in front of him.
You keep several inches between you on the sunken couches as you sit gingerly at his side — very palpably tense, like you’re a stranger in your own home. You wring your clammy hands together in your lap as a long silence stretches thin between you.
“And I wasn’t— I wasn’t trying to… kick you out. Or anything,” you add, softer now.
“I know, kid,” Jack assures.
“Good…” you breathe a sigh of relief. “‘Cause I— I don’t want you to leave… Wait, that sounded weird— I just meant that… I like your company. I’m not, like, trying to hold you hostage or whatever, I swear.”
Another awkward laugh spills from your mouth.
Jack’s lip quirks with a smile as he sits up straight again. “I wouldn’t mind it if you were, to be honest…” he hums, only halfway joking. “But unfortunately, I do have SWAT early in the morning, so… If you could free me around 6 a.m, that’d be great.”
“Oh, right,” you scoff and bring your water to your mouth. “The side hustle where you get shot at for fun?”
“It’s good to have a hobby,” Jack shrugs and leans back against the sofa, throwing a strong arm around the back of it, as he studies you with narrowed eyes. “What do you do for fun, hm? Outside of work, I mean.”
You think for a long moment, spinning the glass between your fingers. “…I once watched Love Island for thirty-one straight hours. That was pretty fun.”
Jack snorts. “So what I’m hearing is, you don’t have any hobbies?”
“Work is my hobby.”
“So what do you do to… unwind?”
“…Have panic attacks in the supply closet at work,” you confess. “What about you?”
“Get shot at,” Jack quips in the same gritty tone.
“Well, at least you get to do something outside of the E.D…” you monotone with a far-off stare. “This is the first time in months I’ve been somewhere other than here and the PTMC. I mean, I have my groceries delivered now— I’m too boring to even go shopping...”
“What do you mean?” he scoffs. “You’re young— You should be going out every weekend.”
“Well, I don’t…” you huff mournfully and slouch back against the sofa. The thin sleeve of your velvet dress slips off your shoulder, giving Jack a brief glance of the top of your breast before you adjust it back over your collarbone again.
“What about dates?” he presses with his chin to his shoulder. “You don’t go on any of the apps?”
“Well, first of all, no one calls it the apps. And second of all, god no,” you laugh drily, then flash him a sheepish look from the corner of your eye. “What about you?”
“Nah…” Jack shakes his head. “I haven’t been on a date in about… Eight years—”
“Eight years?!” you blurt before he can properly get the words out, leaning forward with wide eyes. “Jesus. How does a guy like you go around without getting hit on for eight whole years?”
(You’re starting to think those three sips of gin from before are getting to you now.)
“Well, it’s a lot easier than you think,” the older man deadpans. ‘Cause it’s not like he was actively avoiding dates; he just wasn’t exactly seeking them out.
He lost the urge to after his wife died, and then, when the urge to live came back around, he’d catch himself flirting every now and then, but never wanting to do much more than that. Then he blinked, and eight years had passed without him noticing.
Eight years with nothing but his own hand to get himself off — though, it only starts to seem pathetic when you look at it that way.
“What about you?”
“What about me?” you scoff. “The last time a guy showed even a modicum of interest in me was… in med school, probably.”
“Okay, well, that’s just not true,” Jack argues. “That vitrectomy patient from earlier definitely had a crush on you.”
Your eyes narrow in a cynical squint. “He was drunk. With half a bottle rocket stuck in his eye. That hardly counts.”
“Well, I’ve had… About a whiskey and a half,” Jack calculates. “Do I still count?”
The air thins in an instant, or maybe his words have just knocked it all straight out of your lungs.
Your skin burns red hot beneath the dress that feels suddenly way too tight, ‘cause you think he must be joking — that taking the piss out of your obvious crush on him is his idea of playing around.
“That’s not funny,” you tell him with a wavering smile.
“I’m not trying to be funny,” the man insists with a scoff. “I haven’t been funny since 1994.”
Another laugh sputters from your mouth. A real one this time — not the fake ones you’ve been giving him just to fill the silence, or to try to seem less nervous than you really are. It makes him smile wider than he probably realizes.
“There you go…” Jack hums with a proud nod.
“There I go, what?”
“You’re unwinding…”
You scoff, still grinning wide despite yourself. “Am I?”
“Yeah,” he hums. “And you’re doing a great job so far— a solid B-minus.”
“B-minus?” you echo. “I’ve had a 4.0 GPA since I was in fourth grade.”
“Well…” Jack shrugs with a knowing grin. “Better step it up then, kid.”
Something inside you tips in that moment. It’s his teasing, maybe, or just the way he’s looking at you. Either way, you catch yourself leaning forward before your brain has properly thought it through. You close the distance between you in a flicker — brushing a chaste kiss to his mouth before pulling away just as fast.
You can feel your pulse pounding in your throat as you quip, “What does that get me?”
Jack blinks for a second, momentarily caught off guard. He fights the urge to lick his lips, to try and actually taste you. “Probably a couple HR violations?” he jokes after a few moments.
Your stomach drops. You find yourself praying that this old couch swallows you whole, or that the world would just end altogether, because even that would be a kinder fate than this.
“Oh. Shit. I-I thought that— I thought we were... Fuck, I totally misread this whole thing—”
You turn away entirely and drop your face in your hands, utterly mortified.
His laughter doesn’t make it any better.
You feel the sofa caving beneath you as Jack shifts to your side. His hands are warm and softly calloused as they cradle your wrists in a firm and gentle grip, urging them downward so he can see your face again. He ducks his head to meet your wet eyes and flashes you a reassuring smile.
“You didn’t misread a damn thing,” he assures you with a shake of his head, voice lower and smoother than honey. “Of course, I want to kiss you— I always want to kiss you.”
The mournful twist in your features never wavers. “Then why don’t you?”
“Because it’d be wrong,” he shrugs. “I’m your attending. I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I— that I pressured you into something.”
“Well… We both know you didn’t, right?” you argue softly, eyes glittering with hope as they dart back and forth between his. “And, I mean… It’s not like anyone else would have to know. We’re not getting married, we’re just… unwinding. Right?”
“…Yeah,” Jack hums, softer now, with something mischievous squinting his gaze. “Right...”
You’re not making it easy for him.
Jack’s trying not to cum in his pants before you’ve ever even touched him, and you’re making it damn near impossible.
He drags you into his lap when you lean in to kiss him again — for real this time, licking sweetly into his mouth so he can taste you truly — and you knee him right in the thigh before you can straddle him properly. You pull away with a smack when he groans in pain against your mouth.
“Shit…” you pant with his spit still on your lips. “I’m sorry.”
Jack shakes his head until the words catch up to him. “It’s okay,” he assures through uneven breaths, knotting his fingers in your hair to pull you into him once more. He kisses you again, hard, like it’s muscle memory for him — from a life he hasn’t let himself live in a long, long time.
He cradles one hand over the crown of your head and the other just over your spine, where your dress dips down in the back. He keeps your warm weight pressed flush against him while the kiss turns languid and heavy, full of tongue and teeth and spit. You curl your fingers into his greying curls to keep him impossibly close all the while.
You feel his chest hitch with a startled breath beneath you when you grind down over his lap. Your velvet dress rises over your hips from the angle as you move down his thighs and up again — you can feel the ghost of his erection hardening beneath his scrubs with every pass.
There’s a noticeable hesitance in the way you move. It’s not graceful or entirely practiced. It’s laced with a palpable uncertainty, rather, as you struggle to navigate the honeyed moment you’ve stumbled so suddenly into.
And Jack can hardly take it. ‘Cause hasn’t let himself want like this in years; he hasn’t let himself reach out for anything other than his grief or his work. For so long, his life has been defined by restraint and the careful art of not needing anything. And now you’re here, moving clumsily on top of him, completely undoing him.
It hits him all at once, how suddenly sensitive he is, after so long ignoring the touch of another. The friction, the pressure; the smell of you, the taste of you. It’s all too much. He knows he won’t last long if he keeps going this way, so he pulls back.
And he hates himself for it.
“Hey—” He clears his throat when the word comes out a little rough. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he swallows. His glassy eyes dart back and forth between both of yours as he peers up at you through a layer of honey. “Hey, you… You have condoms, right?”
You blink back at him for a long moment, slightly dazed at the sight of your spit on his rosy mouth. You nod with a stuttered breath. “Uh, yeah. Yeah— I think— Somewhere…”
(There’s an unopened box collecting dust under the sink in the bathroom, but he doesn’t need to know that.)
He mourns your warmth when you slide off his lap, rushing off down the hall with your dress still caught around your hips. The sight of your plain cotton underwear cradling the curve of your ass makes his chest tighten as you disappear down the dim hallway. You toe off your shoes halfway down, and the sound of your padding footsteps echoes in the quiet.
“Jesus Christ…” Jack huffs and slouches further into the couch.
He drags his hands down his face and tries to regulate his breathing, tries to think of anything other than the aching erection in his pants. He stares up at the ceiling and attempts to will his body into something resembling composure when you return.
Your dress has fallen back down over your hips, but the right sleeve is still slipping down your shoulder when you stand before him. You’re not sure what to do with the condom in your hand, so you toss it to him over the coffee table. Jack catches it against his chest.
“Take that dress off…” he tells you with a voice like honey. “I wanna see you.”
You try and fail to reach for the zipper, which Mel had helped you with at Trinity’s place before you left for the bar. So, instead, you worm your arms out of the sleeves and shove the fabric down your hips with trembling hands. It hits the floor around your bare feet with a dull thud, leaving you in a heart-patterned bra you’ve had since high school and a pair of plain pink panties.
You’re hardly a thing worth looking at, really, but Jack didn’t seem to get that memo.
He beckons you forward with heavy eyes. “C’mere…” he murmurs.
You take slow, tentative steps towards him.
His calloused hands are warm and slightly trembling when they curl around the backs of your thighs. He leans in to press his mouth to the silk bow in the middle of your underwear, and his mouth waters at the wet spot gathering in the center of the cotton.
His scruffy chin brushes your stomach when he turns to look up at you, lidded eyes glimmering with a desire you didn’t know you were capable of drawing out of a person.
“I wanna make you cum with my mouth,” Jack murmurs. “Can I?”
You nod wordlessly, and can’t shake the feeling that you’re dreaming when his pointer finger hooks through the hem of your panties. You feel a little cold when he slides the cotton to the side, only for him to press his warm mouth there a second later.
Your knees threaten to buckle when his tongue slots through your silken folds, and Jack doesn’t miss a beat. He braces your ass in one wide hand while his other slips down to the bend of your knee, urging you to prop your foot on the couch beside him. Your moan swells throughout your empty apartment at the new angle, which allows him to lick at your sensitive clit with greater precision.
He forgets to take things slow with you, too busy trying to make up for this time. He drags an orgasm out of you like the world’s soon to end, and the last thing he wants to do on this earth is to taste you on his tongue.
You cum on his mouth with your head tipped back and with your fingers knotted in his hair. He’s wearing your glittering slick down to his chin when he’s done with you.
You fall gracelessly into his lap when your legs turn to jell-o. You straddle his waist, ball his shirt into your fists, and bury your burning face into his neck — still whimpering as your high is slow to ebb.
Jack cradles you against him the entire length of your comedown, running his warm hands up and down your spine. His scruff brushes the delicate skin of your shoulder when he presses a chaste kiss there.
“That wasn’t too much, was it?” he pants into your ear.
You shake your head until the words catch up to you. “No… No, it was— It was good…” you stammer through uneven breaths, and pull just far enough away to meet his eyes. “I wanna ride you now… Is that okay?”
And who is Jack to deny you of a damn thing?
You brace yourself on his shoulder with one hand and use your free one to line his bulbous tip at the entrance of your weeping pussy. His cock drools an embarrassing amount of pearly precum — he can feel it all underneath the condom — and he’s momentarily grateful that you can’t see any of it.
You exhale a wavering, punched-out breath as you sink down over him and take a long moment to get used to the distant stinging sensation.
Jack’s grateful for that, too.
His jaw hardens to choke down the groan that rumbles in the bottom of his throat. He tilts his head against the back of the couch and squeezes his eyes shut to fight away the overwhelming desire to explode entirely. He holds you in place when you try to move again, with fingers that threaten to leave bruises on your thighs.
“You okay?” you pant, eyes darting wildly over the pained twist on his scruffy features.
Jack nods, jaw clenched tight. His words come out half-strangled.
“Yeah, yeah. I just… I wasn’t lying about the whole eight-year thing.” He exhales a hard breath through his nose that’s supposed to be a laugh, though there isn’t really a smile to accompany it. “I don’t wanna… I don’t wanna cum too soon, you know? I wanna— make it good for you. That’s all.”
Your fingers brush over his temple and through his silver curls, in a touch so gentle it nearly makes him cum right then.
“It’s already good for me,” you assure him. “I want it to be good for you, too.”
You grind over him with the same hesitance from before, down his thighs and back again, slowly finding your rhythm. Jack’s hands grip hard at your hips, like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered. He can just barely find the strength to keep his eyes open to watch you chase your orgasm on top of him.
His eyes flit from your blissed-out features to where his cock disappears inside of you. The thatch of curls above his cock glistens with your honey — he can feel it wetting the hem of his scrubs from where they’re shoved beneath his heavy balls. You’re bound to cum just as quickly as he is, no doubt.
He can feel it in the way your pussy flutters around his twitching length — in the way your pacing falters slightly on top of him.
“Nuh-huh. Don’t run away from me,” Jack mutters in your ear as he shifts underneath you, slouching further to hit somewhere deep inside of you. He cradles your head with one hand and grips hard at your ass with another, helping you move on top of him.
Your whine gets buried in his sweat-slick neck.
Jack smiles into your hair. “Yeah. There it is, honey. There you go…”
He feels a little proud of himself when he manages to hold off just long enough to feel you cumming around him, twitching against his chest and tugging hard at his silver curls. He follows right after — going rigid underneath you a second later as his cock jerks wildly within your fluttering confines.
His groan mixes with your whining as you milk him of his orgasm, in a sinful symphony that swells throughout your silent apartment.
Then the room goes quiet, with only the sound of your heavy breathing to fill it. You rise and fall with each of Jack’s panted breaths beneath you. Your limbs are loose and borderline boneless; tension ebbs from your body like an unwinding thread. You think you’d turn into a puddle on top of him without his hands smoothing up and down your back, molding you back together again.
It’s the only way Jack can stay anchored, really — with his hands on you, and with your weight settled on top of him. It’s foreign and familiar all the same: the strange absence of urgency he feels underneath you. The way his body, usually wound tight with panic, dissolves in time with yours. For the first time in eight years, he feels his heartbeat finally steady.
Until a far-off firework rattles the walls and sends the two of you jerking against each other.
The honeyed moment shatters in an instant. Jack holds you tighter when you flinch on top of him, laughing through a grumbling moan as you clench instinctively around his softening cock.
“You okay?” Jack mumbles against you, before pressing a brief kiss to your temple.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay,” you nod, half-breathless, as you pull away from him for the first time in several minutes.
You blink away the haze of your dwindling orgasm while Jack swipes drool from the corner of your mouth with his thumb. You lean instinctively into his palm and exhale a breathless laugh.
“I just… I don’t know what normal people do in this situation…” you confess through uneven pants. “Like, I feel like we should… high-five or something.”
Jack scoffs a tired breath but doesn’t say a word.
There’s a fleeting moment, then, where you worry you’re maybe being too much. Your stomach aches with it, too, because you think your stupid half-joke would’ve ruined the moment for anyone else. Anyone other than Jack. His hand slips from your back and lifts lazily for a high-five without a second thought.
You cage your bottom lip between your teeth and clap your palm against his.
Your breathless laughter fills the quiet apartment.
“We make a good team, don’t we, Doc?” Jack hums with heavy eyes.
“Well, you make a good teacher…” you answer sheepishly, pulling at a rogue thread in his scrub top. “You know, helping me unwind, or whatever…”
“Right, well…” Jack trails off, mouth curling into a sly half-smirk as his eyes narrow into thin slits. Your stomach pools with red-hot warmth once more at the look he gives you, then, and at the words that spill from his lips like honey. “I think I still got a few more lessons in the chamber, sweetheart…”
you were a mess; your hair was stuck to your forehead from sweat, your thighs were sticky and dirty from your juices and jack’s cum, and your throat was so sore that all that came out of it were broken moans and quiet whimpers.
despite this, you were still moving your hips in a somewhat sloppy manner, now a little slower than before due to the calloused hands of the man holding onto your hips, trying to slow your movements.
jack himself was a mess too; he could feel yet another drop of sweat trickling down his temple, his breathing growing heavier and heavier, his already limp cock becoming so sensitive that he could feel every single nerve in it—and yet you kept riding him, as if your mind, drunk from the number of orgasms, hadn’t registered that his member is no longer capable of satisfying you.
and jack just growled under his breath, clenching every muscle in his body; he didn’t try to stop you or tell you to slow down, he just gritted his teeth and let you use him like your very own dildo.
and you did exactly that—you fucked him slowly while your lips rested in the hollow of his neck, leaving wet kisses and the occasional bites as he rubbed against that oversensitive spot inside you.
“you're fucking insatiable, aren't you, baby?” he whispered hoarsely, cupping your jaw with his large hands as he studied your fucked out expression.
“it just feels so good, daddy” you moaned into his skin, pressing your body against his, rubbing your hardened nipples against his firm chest, making you tremble and clench your walls tighter around him.
jack could hear just how wet you really were. the squelching sound echoed through the room, reminding both of you of all the times he’d made you gush like a waterfall, and how you’d made him fill you up to the brim.
yet that only seemed to fuel you; like you were moving with the intention of never stopping, even when your puffy, overstimulated pussy was on the verge of numbness.
at that moment, he wondered if he should invite robby to join you.
but the truth was that you’d probably wear the old man out just as much as you’d wear jack out.
hi lovely!!! i have this idea, (well it’s more of a concept…) mom reader who’s dating Jack (not her child’s dad) and the kid calls him ‘dad’ for the first time!!! like he comes to a school event or something when the bio dad again doesn’t show up and yhe kid is so happy and it’s super fluffy!!!
Your daughter has a school program and your ex, her biological dad, is supposed to come and see her as he “promised”. Those promises never meant anything but he still makes them anyways.
The only thing keeping you sane is knowing your boyfriend Jack would love to be here.
You guys have been dating for almost two years now and he has been the man you and your daughter both needed.
——
When you first met him you were afraid he wouldn’t want someone with a three year old kid. You ended up talking about your daughter on the first date so that if he wasn’t interested, things wouldn’t have to drag out.
Surprisingly, Jack was more than accepting that you were a single mom with a young child. He seemed genuinely interested and asked questions and never made you feel small for any of it.
After about the fourth date you felt secure in yours and Jack's growing relationship and you asked if he’d like to meet your daughter or “bug” as you often called her since she loved all things butterflies or lady bugs.
He was elated that you trusted him with this part of your life and told you to meet him at the kids museum.
Bug was quiet at first but as soon as Jack started asking questions about the animals there (which he already knew) she immediately jumped in and started talking with him.
Since then they have been inseparable. She always asks to call him when he’s free, draws him pictures and entertains him with dance shows she decides to do on the spot. He adored her and that was everything to you.
Then after a year Jack asked you both to move in with him into his house. Bug was more than excited and if your daughter was happy then you were more than happy.
That was six months ago and things had been smooth sailing since.
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
You shake your head at the memories.
Jack had been amazing to you and bug and made you both feel like the most loved girls in the world.
Along with your ex potentially showing up, another stressor was Bug had been a bit down because Jack had been busy this week and couldn’t promise to be at her play.
You obviously understood, he was a trauma doctor and hospitals were always busy. You also appreciated that he didn’t make promises to her and get her hopes up.
Your daughter on the other hand had no firm grasp on the reality of his job. She only knew that Jack was a ‘superhero’ who ‘healed the world’ as she would tell anyone who asked her.
——
You’re currently seated in the fourth row, the show starting in ten minutes.
You let out a frustrated sigh. Bug may not be too upset about him not being there but you were more upset that he flaked again with an empty promise to your daughter.
Soon the lights turn off and you watch the stage light up. Your daughter does an amazing job with her lines, only missing a few words.
When the program ends, a teacher guides her closer to where you are and then she runs the short distance to you.
“Mama! Mama! Did you see me?”
A smile grows on your face as you lift her in your arms and hug her tight.
“Yes baby, you did amazing! I saw every second of it. I’m so proud of you bug!”
She goes into a fit of giggles as you pepper her face in kisses.
Suddenly she stops giggling but smiles.
“He’s here! He’s here!”
She points to somewhere behind you and wiggles to be put down. You let her go and you turn as she bolts behind you to a figure coming down the aisle.
Jack.
He’s still in his scrubs and is holding a small bouquet of flowers.
Your heart warms and the smile on your face beams as you watch your daughter run up to him.
He laughs as he picks her up and walks towards you.
“Hey sweetheart” he greets and gives you a brief kiss.
“Hey J. Why didn’t you text me you were here?”
He holds bug on his hip.
“ I didn’t know if I’d make it on time. I went as fast as I could, I don’t even think I looked at my phone.”
Your heart melts at the thought of him not wanting to miss the program.
Bug has her head leaned against Jack’s.
“I told you he’s here mama!”
You lift your hand against your head and pretend to look around.
“Who’s here bug? I don’t see anyone” you say with a slight smile as you ‘look around’.
she gently pats Jack’s chest a few times.
“He’s right here mama! Dad’s right here!”
You quickly turn to the pair with wide eyes. Jack stands there frozen, looking at your daughter and then to you.
She had never called Jack dad before in any form. You would absolutely consider him that for her but never made her feel she had to call him anything other than Jack if she wanted.
Jack’s heart races at the title.
He loved your daughter as if she was his from the start.
Bug looks at you and then at Jack.
“Is it, is it okay to call you that?”
He smiles as he lets out a breath.
“Yeah bug, of course. You can call me anything you want. Whatever’s okay with you babygirl.”
She snuggles into him, laying her head against his shoulder and puts a small hand against his face.
“I like dad best since you’re my dad.”
You're trying to hide your tears.
A few tears fall down his face as he looks at your daughter.
“Okay sweet girl, dad it is” he kisses her on the forehead.
“What's wrong daddy?” she touches one of the tears that falls.
“Nothing babygirl. Daddy’s just really happy. I'm also sooo proud of you, you did great up there today!”
You watch as they both become engrossed in a conversation of how she did her dance without messing up.
He looks over at you briefly as your daughter still talks.
He smiles gently, eyes wet from the tears and mouths
‘I love you’
He hugs your daughter tight to his chest as he answers something she asked.
You can't help but stare at the two most important people in your life.
It's everything you didn't think you'd get to have.
Thinking of Jack Abbot when he meets the readers boyfriend.
“What does she see in him?” He asks Robby.
Robby smirks, “someone has a crush.”
“It’s harmless”
“It’s weird”
“It’s not”
“We’re bickering like a married couple again,” Robby says casually, “she likes him and that’s all that matters.”
Jack shakes his head in disappointment as he watches you trying to warm yourself up by the bonfire.
He walks over casually and hands you his jumper. You take it from him without looking.
He gets you a hot drink, you mutter a casual thank you.
He helps you get to bed at the Airbnb everyone rented for the weekend. You don’t protest his help.
All of this and the boyfriend is nowhere to be seen.
Until one day Jack couldn’t hold back his tongue when he gets a call from Trinity telling him to come pick them up. You were too drunk and too emotionally vulnerable when Jack thinks it’s a great time to have the talk with you.
“He should be the one doing this” he says as he help you up the stairs. “Not me”
“We’ll leave then I didn’t call you” you bite back.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You never do, meant it that way.”
“I’m just saying, he’s the boyfriend, not me”
You finally snap, “stop acting like one then!”
But Jack couldn’t leave because he didn’t want to. He wanted to be here with you.
“Want me to call him for you?” Jack asks softly as he puts you to bed.
“You can try but he blocked my number.” You hiccup through tears. “He dumped me.”
Jack Abbot tries his best to hide his smile as he kisses you goodnight.
hi you!! this is really weird but i got the idea from a movie i watched. so Brendon and reader have been married for sometime, they both work in the hospital and it’s been a rough few months so they’ve been distant…in bed you know, like they don’t do that at all and reader feels guilty and thinks that if they don’t sleep together again he’ll cheat on her if he doesn’t already (of course he’s not)
Your day goes by in a haze. Work was the same as always but you’re distracted.
You’ve been distracted a lot recently.
The last few months have felt heavy. Not only has work been overwhelming but your husband, Brendon, well, that’s been the heaviest part.
Between both of your jobs becoming busier, you both haven’t had much time together.
You both used to have ample time in a week to meet up for lunch, go explore downtown, go out to dinners, have date nights, and everything in between. But lately these things have become dry, especially in the bedroom.
During your five years of marriage, this has never been a problem. Not to this extent.
You didn’t think much of it until it had stopped completely. Some days you were too tired or other days Brendon was tired too or busy working and not home as much.
The few times you had been eager to be under him, it never made it past a heavy makeout and some groping.
You acknowledged it had been a combination of you both not being up to it but then your mind began to wander.
Recently you had been trying to get things back to how they were only to have your advances turned down. Brendon either acted oblivious, was asleep before anything happened or ended up working late.
You thought it had been a mutual disinterest at the time but now?
You’re not so sure.
Was it you?
Maybe he was bored of you?
He did spend a lot of time at the hospital these last few months. And again you guys hadn't had sex in maybe a month or two?
No, no Brendon wouldn’t do that.
Right?
Maybe you could really initiate it. Buy new lingerie, get your nails and hair done.
That could work.
Hopefully it did.
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
The next day is your day off and you decide to put your plan into action.
You get your hair refreshed and styled first. Then you go to the nail salon and pick out his favorite color.
Perfect.
Your last stop was a lavish lingerie store in downtown Pittsburgh. The selection was a bit overwhelming but then you find a winning piece.
It accentuated your breasts and made your ass look fantastic. A bonus was that it matched the color of your nails.
He wouldn’t be able to resist.
Once you’re home you fix your hair a bit and apply a light makeup before changing into the lacy material.
—-
About thirty minutes later you hear the front door unlock from your spot on the bed. You adjust your hair and sit on the edge of the bed, leaning back on your hands.
Heavy footsteps make their way down the hall towards the bedroom.
Brendon steps through the doorway, scrubs in disarray and a slight frown on his face.
“Hey baby” you say gently.
He briefly looks up as he drops his bag by the dresser.
“Hey.”
You’re taken back a bit.
Hey?
Just hey?
You knew things had been a bit rough these last few months but this is the most distant he's ever seemed.
Like he just acknowledged a roommate and not his wife.
You don’t let the dry greeting deter you.
You stand up and walk up to him.
Running your hand up his bicep and the other up on his shoulder.
“Everything okay Bren?”
He huffs a bit sarcastically “Is it ever?”
Ouch.
You bring your hand from his bicep to his face.
“Maybe I could help you relax, hmm?”
You see a ghost of a grin but as soon as it’s there, it’s gone.
“That’s nice but not tonight.”
He gently moves your hands off of him and walks around you to the walk-in closet.
You stand in the same spot for a moment. Your heart drops into your stomach and a chill runs down your spine.
What. Just. Happened.
Is this it?
Does he not find you attractive anymore?
Is he….
Is he gonna leave you?
You hold back the tears and make your way to the ensuite bathroom and lock the door.
Gripping the counter and leaning against it, you look into the mirror.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
One tear falls, and then another.
Then another until you can’t stop them from falling.
You hold both hands over your mouth to quiet the sobs that rack your body.
You back up until you meet the wall and slide down.
Your chest heaves from the sobs and agonizing pain in your heart.
He’s gonna leave me.
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
Brendon cracks his neck as he walks back out from the closet, scrubs discarded and now changed into fresh pajamas.
He sees your side of the bed empty but then sees the bathroom door closed and hears the shower running.
He lets out a sigh and gets into bed as he waits for you. All he wants is to get some rest and have you cuddled up against him.
Brendon knew things had been a bit strained lately and he felt a bit guilty for not being as present in your relationship like usual but things were starting to get better at work and he hoped you guys could get back to normal now.
Today has been rough like the last few months but things would change come his next shift.
He just needed to recuperate from today and then he’d have a good talk with you and apologize. Maybe take you out for dinner and a movie.
He smiles at the thought.
——
It’s been over an hour before Brendon still sees you’re not in bed.
He goes up to the bathroom door and presses his ear against it.
The shower is still on.
Weird.
He can’t hear anything else.
“Sweetheart,” he knocks lightly “you good in there?”
No response.
“Baby?” He grabs the door handle to open it but he finds it locked.
Panic starts to seep into his veins.
“Baby please open the door.”
He’s still met with silence.
Brendon’s heart starts to race as he reaches a hand up on the top of the door frame and grabs the spare key sitting there for emergencies.
Once he has the door open he looks around and then towards the shower.
His blood runs cold.
“Sweetheart!”
He runs to the shower where your naked form is sitting, slumped inside against the wall.
He practically rips the glass door off its hinges as he gets into the shower still fully clothed.
On his knees he grabs you by the shoulders and turns your face towards his.
He’s met with puffy, red rimmed eyes staring back at him.
“Hey, hey what’s wrong baby? Are you hurt? Did you fall?”
His fingers press gently but quickly around your head looking for any blood, bumps or injuries.
You slowly shake your head.
“M’fine” you mumble.
He furrows his eyebrows at your quiet words.
“You’re gonna have to do a lot better than that to convince me. C’mon let’s get you out of here. It’s freezing.”
He scoops up your cold body and sits you on the counter by the sink.
He grabs your favorite fluffy towel and wraps it around you, rubbing his hands up and down your arms to help warm you up.
His heart breaks at your sad demeanor.
“Baby,” he lifts your chin up to look at him “What happened? What’s wrong?”
Tears build in your eyes and your chin trembles.
“Please don’t leave me.”
Then the tears fall as you lean your head into his shoulder.
Sobs rack your body and Brendon holds you, tears building in his eyes.
“Leave you?” He asks confused
“Why on earth would I do that?”
“Y-You don’t want m-me anymore.” You manage to say between the tears.
“What?” he leans you back and gently holds your face in his hands.
“Why wouldn’t I want my wife?”
“You’ve b-been distant. I th-thought maybe we could just have s-some fun tonight but then you didn’t want me a-and I’m scared you don’t want m-me at all. That you want someone else..”
The words completely shattered Brendon’s heart.
Had he really withdrawn from you that much that you felt he didn’t love you anymore?
That you thought he’d leave you?
For someone else?
Fuck.
He had to fix this, quick.
“Sweetheart, look at me.”
Your tired eyes meet his.
“First, hear me and hear me clearly. I’m never leaving you. I fucking love you. So damn much.”
He takes a deep breath.
“Second, I’ve not been honest these last few months. Gloria has been making big cuts. Letting go lots of staff, including surgeons and attendings. I heard my name was up on the list of potential ones to go. It got to me and I’ve been hauling ass every fucking day for my job. I didn’t want to admit that I was scared. I’m supposed to support you and give you everything. Give you the world…I couldn’t let you down.”
A tear falls down his cheek and without thinking you reach up and wipe it away.
“Lastly, I’m so fucking sorry. I’m sorry I let all of that affect our marriage and make you think I didn’t love you. That I’d leave you. I swore in my vows I’d love you forever and I meant that. Every word.”
You sniffle and take a shaky breath.
“Then why’d you turn me down tonight?”
“I was so upset earlier over everything. I found out I’m for sure not getting let go but I was angry. Angry my name was even brought up for it to begin with. I didn’t want to take that out on you in any form, especially sex. But I think I already did with the lack of it over these last few months. Which again I’m sorry. I just was so overwhelmed with everything and didn’t want to force things and fake it with you. I never want that for us.”
He closes his eyes, willing himself not to cry in front of you.
Then he feels you wrap yourself around him.
“Brendon. I love you. You could never let me down. Even if you did lose your job, I wouldn’t think less of you, be disappointed in you or love you any less. I know that stuff can be scary but next time please just talk to me. This is a marriage. I’m here for you as much as you’re here for me. I can’t support you and be there for you if you don’t let me in. If you’re not in the mood for a conversation or sex or anything, just tell me. I’ll always understand. But I really thought you were gonna leave.”
He shakes his head rapidly.
“God no, baby. Never happening.”
“Good. Because I don’t think I’d survive it.”
He grabs your face and kisses you slowly.
“Also I know I didn’t say it earlier but you did look hot as hell. I’m sorry I ruined that for you.”
You chuckle a bit.
“You can make it up to me later Bren. Right now I just want to get in bed and cuddle my husband.”
