summary: you and beau fall deeper in love through all the quiet, ordinary ways you’ve learned to know and care for each other
established relationship
warnings: pure. fluff. soooooo sappy
word count: 2.8k
a/n: based on this request by @zoereyna ! i hope you like it<3
beau maxwell masterlist off campus masterlist
── ᵎᵎ ✦
you had been falling in love with beau for the past few months now, although you hadn’t realized quite how far you’d fallen until you found yourself sitting at his kitchen counter on an ordinary sunday morning, staring down at a runny egg yolk.
you had never told him how you liked them. at least, you were almost certain you hadn’t.
a few weeks after the two of you had started dating, beau had taken you to breakfast at della’s diner. you’d ordered your eggs over easy, but when the plate arrived, the yolks had been cooked completely through. it hadn’t mattered enough to complain about; you’d eaten everything else, picked at the egg whites, and left the chalky centers mostly untouched.
the entire thing had occupied perhaps thirty seconds of your life and you’d forgotten about it before the check arrived.
apparently, beau hadn’t.
months later, you woke in his bed to the faint smell of something burning. you lay still beneath the covers for a moment, listening. beau’s frat was quieter than usual, morning light slipping through the gap in the curtains and falling across the empty side of the bed. somewhere downstairs, a cupboard closed, followed by the unmistakable sound of something metal hitting the floor.
your mouth curved against the pillow at the sound of a muffled curse.
you stayed there for another minute before pulling yourself out of bed. beau’s sweatshirt was hanging over the back of his desk chair, and you tugged it over your head before leaving the room, pushing the sleeves over your hands as you made your way downstairs.
beau stood at the stove with his back to you, wearing gray sweatpants and an old t-shirt. his hair was still flattened on one side from sleep, and he was watching the pan with an intensity that was usually reserved for the final minutes of a close game.
you leaned against the doorway for a moment before he noticed you.
when he finally looked over his shoulder, his eyes moved from your face to the sweatshirt you were wearing. something pleased briefly softened his expression before his attention returned to the stove, “you’re supposed to be asleep.”
his tone wasn’t particularly serious. you could tell from the slight movement at the corner of his mouth, even with his back mostly turned toward you again.
you crossed the kitchen and stopped behind him, slipping your arms loosely around his waist. the warmth of his body seeped through the thin fabric of his shirt as you rested your cheek against his back, “something smelled dangerous.”
beau’s quiet laugh moved through him beneath your cheek. one of his hands settled briefly over yours before he returned his attention to breakfast, and you stayed wrapped around him until he needed to move.
you wandered over to the counter and climbed onto one of the stools instead.
from there, you watched him divide everything between two plates. the toast was slightly too dark, and the fruit had been cut into pieces so uneven that you suspected he’d done it with whatever knife he’d found first.
beau placed one of the plates in front of you before sitting opposite. you picked up your fork and cut into the egg, the yolk spilling slowly across the plate.
for a moment, you simply looked at it.
it was such a small thing that asking about it almost seemed silly. maybe it was a coincidence. maybe beau made all eggs that way.
when you looked up at him, he had already started eating, apparently unaware that he’d done anything worth noticing. when he eventually caught you staring, he paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, “what?”
you shook your head and looked back down at the plate. there was no point explaining it. you weren’t even sure you could explain why something so ordinary had settled warmly beneath your ribs.
instead, you tore off a corner of toast and dipped it into the yolk while beau started telling you about something your brother had done the previous evening.
you learned that beau hated being cold during your first winter together.
this would have been less ridiculous if he weren’t a football player. you had watched him spend entire games outside in weather that left you shivering beneath several layers of clothing, but somehow, according to beau, that was completely different from walking across campus without gloves.
you never received a convincing explanation for why.
still, you began noticing the little signs of it. he always started his car several minutes before the two of you left anywhere. his room was permanently warmer than yours, and he owned an unreasonable number of hoodies for someone who seemed to wear the same three on rotation.
when you slept beside him, he stole your warmth without shame. his hands found their way beneath your shirt whenever they were cold, usually pressing against your back without warning and making you flinch away from him. he always laughed. you always complained, though you never stopped him.
one evening, you waited for him in the stands after a home game.
the crowd had disappeared gradually until the stadium was almost empty. the noise that usually filled the place had faded, leaving only the occasional metallic clatter from somewhere below and the low voices of staff clearing equipment from the sidelines.
you were scrolling through your phone when movement near the bottom of the stands caught your attention.
beau appeared with his duffel hanging from one shoulder. his hair was still damp from his shower, and the cold had already turned the tips of his ears pink.
you stood, slipping your phone into your pocket as he climbed toward you. before he could reach you, you pulled his gloves from your coat pocket and held them out.
beau stopped on the step below yours and his eyes dropped to your hand. for several seconds, he only looked at them.
“you left them in my car,” you explained, suddenly feeling strangely self-conscious beneath his attention, “i figured you’d want them.”
beau took the gloves from you, but his gaze stayed on your face for a moment longer than necessary.
you knew that expression. you had seen it the first time you brought food to the field because he’d mentioned, hours earlier, that he wouldn’t have time to eat before practice. you’d seen it when you replaced the phone charger he kept forgetting in your dorm and when you’d saved a movie because he’d said he wanted to watch it with you.
every time, beau looked faintly surprised. not dramatically, and it always lasted only for a second, before he covered it with a smile or some comment designed to make you roll your eyes.
you never understood the surprise; you thought about him when he wasn’t there. of course you did.
beau pulled the gloves on, flexing his fingers once before reaching for your hand. the warmth of his palm was already beginning to return as his fingers threaded through yours.
neither of you said anything about it as you started down the steps together. halfway to the bottom, beau lifted your joined hands and pressed a brief kiss against your knuckles.
you came from a family where silence was rare enough to be suspicious. growing up as a di laurentis meant learning how to hold a conversation while three others happened around you. your family loved loudly. arguments travelled between rooms, people shouted questions from different floors of the house, and nobody seemed capable of telling a story without at least one person interrupting to insist that something had happened differently.
you loved that about them, but you also occasionally needed the opposite.
beau hadn’t understood that at first. during the early months of your relationship, your quieter days had made him restless. you would catch him watching you from the corner of his eye, trying to work out whether something was wrong or if he’d unknowingly upset you.
the first few times, he’d asked. then he’d asked again ten minutes later, apparently unconvinced by your answer.
eventually, though, he learned the difference. he learned that when you were upset, your silence had edges. your shoulders stayed tense, your answers became shorter, and you pulled away without realizing it. when you were only tired, you moved closer.
after that, he stopped asking.
one afternoon, you arrived at his place after a day that had left you exhausted in a way that wasn’t interesting enough to explain. nothing terrible had happened. there was no story worth telling. you’d simply reached the point where every conversation felt like one too many.
beau opened the door just for you to kiss him briefly and stalk upstairs. by the time he came into his room several minutes later, you had changed into one of his shirts and climbed beneath the blankets. you weren’t asleep. you were simply lying on your side, staring absently toward the wall.
beau stopped near the bed while you waited for the question that would have irritated you despite knowing it came from concern.
it never came. he disappeared again, and when he returned, he had his laptop tucked beneath one arm and two bottles of water in his other hand. he placed one on your side of the bed before climbing in beside you.
that was all.
he found something to watch, lowered the volume, and let you settle against him when you were ready.
your head rested over his heart, one leg tangled between his. beau’s fingers moved slowly through your hair as the light from the laptop shifted across the darkening room.
you barely followed what was happening on the screen. the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath your cheek was easier to focus on.
nearly an hour passed before you spoke, “thanks.”
beau’s fingers slowed briefly in your hair. you felt him look down at you, but he didn’t ask what you meant. his hand simply continued its path through your hair.
you closed your eyes. there was something strange about being known that way. you had always imagined it would be loud. someone remembering every story you’d ever told them, knowing all your favorite things, being able to answer questions about you without hesitation.
with beau, sometimes it was much quieter than that.
you knew beau’s orders at nearly every place the two of you visited regularly. not because you’d ever tried to memorize them. the information had simply accumulated.
you knew which toppings he’d pick off a pizza and which ones he claimed not to care about despite clearly preferring them. you knew he would insist he wasn’t hungry if you stopped somewhere late at night and then spend the drive home reaching into your bag for fries. you knew he always wanted the lime from your drink.
beau, meanwhile, had learned that dinner was never quite finished for you without something sweet afterward.
one night, the two of you were walking back toward campus after eating with friends when beau suddenly changed direction. you followed for several steps before realizing he was heading away from your dorm, “where are we going?”
beau nodded toward the small convenience store ahead. you frowned, thinking through whether either of you had mentioned needing something.
then you remembered the restaurant; everyone had been tired after dinner, and you’d left without ordering dessert.
you looked at him and beau caught the expression immediately, “what?”
“nothing.”
his eyes narrowed slightly, but he held the door open for you when you reached the store.
warm air met you as you stepped inside. you followed beau between the aisles, watching as he walked directly toward the candy without asking what you wanted. he reached for your favorite, held it up briefly in silent confirmation, and dropped it into the basket when you nodded.
the whole interaction took less than thirty seconds.
beau had already moved on, searching for something else, while you remained where you were.
you watched him from the end of the aisle.he was reading the back of a package now, eyebrows drawn together slightly in concentration, completely unaware of your attention.
there was no grand realization. you already knew you loved him. it was simply another quiet moment added to the others, another small piece of evidence that beau carried pieces of you around with him even when you weren’t thinking to ask.
he looked up and caught you watching, his eyebrows lifting in question. you simply shook your head in response and went to join him.
the first time beau told you he loved you, you hadn’t said it back. you’d wanted to. the words had risen immediately, pressing somewhere behind your ribs, but you couldn’t make yourself say them simply because the moment seemed to require an answer.
you loved him. even then, you had known that. you just hadn’t known how to say something so large without feeling as though you were making it smaller.
beau hadn’t made you feel guilty for the silence. he’d watched you for a moment, perhaps seeing some of the panic you were trying to hide, and then kissed you.
later, when you’d tried to apologize, he’d stopped you before you could get very far. he hadn’t needed you to say it because he had. you remembered that for weeks afterward.
the words finally came on an ordinary night.
you were lying together on the couch, half beneath a blanket that had gradually become tangled around your legs. the television was playing something neither of you was particularly interested in, and beau had been drifting toward sleep for the past twenty minutes.
your head rested against his chest. his fingers had been tracing slow circles over your back, but the movement had become increasingly lazy until his hand eventually went still.
you lifted your head slightly to find his eyes closed. his hair was messy from where you’d been running your fingers through it earlier, and there was a faint crease on his cheek from the couch cushion. his shirt had ridden up slightly at his waist, and one of his feet was hanging off the end of the couch.
there was nothing cinematic about him. nothing about the moment suggested it should matter.
somewhere upstairs, something heavy hit the floor and beau’s eyes opened at the sound. after a moment of silence, he closed them again.
you smiled and the words came before you could reconsider them, “i love you.”
beau’s eyes immediately opened again. this time, he looked at you.
you felt suddenly exposed beneath his attention, but you forced yourself not to look away. for several seconds, neither of you moved.
something softened in his face. it was the same expression you’d seen over forgotten gloves and takeout containers, only quieter now. there was no surprise in it this time. only warmth.
beau’s hand moved from your back to your waist, pulling you slightly higher against him before leaning in to softly place his lips against yours. slowly, without turning the moment into anything bigger than it needed to be.
when he pulled away, you rested your forehead briefly against his. neither of you spoke for a moment and you were grateful for that. the words had always felt too small for everything you meant by them, and saying more would only make you aware of all the things you couldn’t explain.
how were you supposed to tell him that you loved him in a hundred places at once?
you loved him in badly cut fruit and perfectly cooked eggs. in the gloves tucked into your pocket before games and the bottle of water waiting on your side of his bed. in late-night trips to convenience stores and mornings when neither of you had anything interesting to say.
you loved the loud parts of him, the ones everyone knew, but you loved the quieter ones too.
the way his hand always found the small of your back in crowded rooms. the way he listened even when you thought he wasn’t. the look on his face when he found you wearing something of his, which he still seemed to think you hadn’t noticed.
you loved how ordinary it had become. falling in love with beau hadn’t felt like one enormous moment. there had been no clear point where everything before became different from everything after.
it had happened slowly, hidden inside dozens of unremarkable days.
beau’s thumb moved once against your waist, bringing your attention back to him. his eyes moved over your face for a moment, quiet and familiar, then he smiled.
it wasn’t the wide grin he wore after a win or the one that usually appeared before he said something designed to annoy you. this one was smaller, “i love you too.”
you settled against him again and he pulled the blanket higher over your shoulder before his arm returned to its place around your waist.
the television continued playing. the house remained noisy somewhere above you while you stayed where you were, listening to the steady beat of his heart beneath your ear and thinking that you could probably spend a lifetime learning all the small ways there were to love him.
jack abbot x f!reader | slow burn, age gap, hurt/comfort, veteran!jack, reader is a paramedic turned ER charge nurse, chronic pain themes, emotional avoidance, pittsburgh winter
The first thing you learn about Jack Abbot is that he lies about his pain levels.
Not dramatically. Not in the way patients lie, theatrical minimizing, hoping you won't notice the sweat on their upper lip or the way they're breathing through their back teeth. He lies the way someone lies when they've been doing it long enough that the lie has become the first language and the truth is the translation. Automatic. Fluent.
You know this because you spent six years as a paramedic before you became a nurse, and paramedics learn to read bodies the way other people read faces. By the time you get to a scene, the body has already been telling the story for minutes, sometimes hours. You learn to listen to it instead of the words.
Jack Abbot's body, on a bad day, says something completely different from what his mouth says.
His mouth says fine, it's manageable, don't worry about it.
His body says the socket fit is wrong today, or the weather changed overnight and the phantom pain is running hot, or he's been on his feet for six hours past the point where he should have sat down. The particular set of his jaw and the almost-imperceptible shift of his weight to his right side are the story, if you know how to read it.
You know how to read it.
You don't say anything about it for the first two months.
You came to PTMC in January, which is, in retrospect, the worst possible time to move to Pittsburgh. The city in January is gray in a way that feels personal, a low flat gray that sits on everything and muffles sound and makes the days feel like they're happening inside a cotton ball. You grew up in North Carolina. You were not prepared.
What you were prepared for was the job, because the job is the one thing that has always been straightforward. You are good at this. You have always been good at this, from your first day on an ambulance at twenty-two to the charge nurse position you'd held at Durham Regional for four years before the particular series of events that led you to Pittsburgh. You don't think about those directly if you can help it. You've filed them under necessary change in the organizational system of your own history.
PTMC's night shift ER is a different animal from what you knew. Bigger, faster, with the specific energy of a teaching hospital, residents everywhere, the constant low-level hum of people learning under pressure. You'd worked in teaching hospitals before. You understood the rhythm.
What you didn't anticipate was the attending.
Your first shift, you're given the standard orientation rundown by the outgoing charge nurse, a woman named Delphine who has clearly been doing this long enough to have developed a personal shorthand for everything, delivered at speed. She covers the board system, the trauma bay protocol, the supply room situation, the attendings. When she gets to Jack Abbot, she pauses in a way that isn't quite a pause, more like a breath, like she's selecting the right words.
"Night shift lead," she says. "Ex-military, Army. Left leg prosthetic, below knee. He'll never mention it, don't mention it either unless he brings it up or it becomes a clinical concern. He runs a tight floor. He's fair. He doesn't raise his voice." She looks at you over the top of her reading glasses. "When he gets quiet is when you should pay attention."
"What does quiet mean?" you ask.
"You'll know," she says, which is not an answer, and turns out to be completely accurate.
You meet him properly at the start of that first shift, in the handoff briefing. He's already at the board when you come in, reviewing overnight census with the precision of someone who has been doing this long enough to read a board the way other people read a sentence. Whole, not word by word.
He's, you notice him the way you'd notice a weather system. Something that occupies space differently from the things around it.
Late forties, maybe early fifties. Dark hair with gray through it, more at the temples. The kind of face that would be called handsome in a way that's about structure rather than prettiness, strong jaw, lines around his eyes and mouth from years of squinting into the sun or the middle distance. He’s in black scrubs, wearing them with the unconscious uprightness of someone whose posture was trained into him young and never quite left.
When he turns to acknowledge the incoming shift, his eyes do the thing Delphine warned you about. A quick systematic read of the room, everyone clocked and filed in seconds. When they land on you, they pause one beat longer. New face. Catalogued.
"Charge nurse?" he says.
"Yes," you say. "First shift."
"Durham Regional before this?"
"Six years before that as a paramedic."
Something registers in his expression. Not warmth exactly, more like the slight adjustment of a person recalibrating an estimate. "Good," he says, and turns back to the board.
That's the whole introduction.
Later you'll understand that good from Jack Abbot in the first thirty seconds of meeting you is the equivalent of a lengthy written endorsement from anyone else.
The first month is learning. Not the job, you know the job, but the floor, the people, the particular language of this specific place.
You learn: Lena at the main desk has worked this floor for nineteen years and knows where everything is, has ever been, and probably will be. Consult her before the supply room. Resident Santos is sharp and combative and improves dramatically when you treat her like the intelligent adult she is rather than a medical student who needs managing. Resident Whitaker is careful and slow and will get there, he just needs more runway than the others. Dr. Parker Ellis is the senior resident who has, apparently, been trying to get Jack to take a vacation for three consecutive years.
You learn Jack in layers, the way you'd learn a complicated patient history. Not all at once, but accumulating, building toward a picture.
He takes his coffee black and too hot, and he has opinions about the ER coffee machine that he has apparently been voicing to facilities since before you arrived. He reviews charts standing up, always, unless it's the end of a long shift and he thinks no one is watching, at which point he will occasionally, briefly, sit. He has a particular way of delivering bad news to families. Not scripted, not the sterile clinical distance some doctors put on like protective gear, but present. Actually in the room with them. You've watched him do it three times in your first month and each time it's the same: he finds a chair, he sits at their level, he doesn't rush the silence.
He is, in ways that are professionally inconvenient, exactly the kind of person you find most difficult to be indifferent to.
You do your level best anyway.
The pain thing comes to a head on a Thursday in February.
The weather has been bad for a week. Pittsburgh winter, which turns out to be a different category of winter than North Carolina winter, with a wet cold that gets into everything and a wind off the rivers that has a personal quality to it, like it knows where you're going. You've been told by multiple people that you'll acclimate. You're skeptical.
The floor has been brutal. A multi-car pileup on 376 sent four traumas in under an hour, and the residual administrative chaos of that is still reverberating five hours later. You've been moving without stopping since the shift started, and you're aware, in the background-noise way you're aware of your own physical state during hard shifts, that your feet crossed the threshold from tired into genuinely unhappy about two hours ago.
You're at the medication cart at hour seven when you notice Jack at the far end of the hall, reviewing a chart. The weight distribution is wrong. He's putting almost nothing on his left side, and the line of his back is carrying a tension that wasn't there at the start of shift. He's been on his feet for the same seven hours, plus whatever time he was here before handoff, and the socket that connects his prosthetic to his residual limb has a tolerance for hours-of-use that you know from six years of working with amputee veterans is finite and individual and frequently ignored by the person most affected.
You finish with the medication cart. You think about it for another minute. Then you go to the supply room.
When you come back, you find him at the hub.
You set a heat pack on the counter next to him, the kind you crack and shake, runs for about forty minutes. You don't say anything. You go back to your charting.
A long pause.
"What's this for," he says. Not a question. The sentence has the quality of someone who knows exactly what it's for and is deciding how to handle it.
"Residual limb pain responds well to heat when it's cold-triggered," you say, eyes on your screen. "Particularly after extended weight-bearing. I've got four amputee veterans in my contacts from my paramedic years and two of them told me that independently."
Silence.
"Your weight's been on your right side for two hours," you say. "I noticed."
More silence. You type something. You can feel him looking at the side of your face.
"I didn't ask for—" he starts.
"You didn't," you agree. "I didn't offer it as a commentary on your ability to do your job. I offered it as a heat pack." You look at him then, briefly, level. "You don't have to use it."
You go back to the screen.
Another pause. Then, in your peripheral vision, he picks it up.
He doesn't say thank you. He goes back to his chart.
You don't expect him to. You weren't doing it for the thank you.
About twenty minutes later, a cup appears next to your keyboard. Coffee, from the good machine at the other end of the floor, not the hub machine. Hot.
You look at it.
You look toward the board, where he's standing.
He's talking to Ellis about a consult. He doesn't look over.
You drink the coffee.
This becomes, without either of you naming it, a language.
Not every night. Not predictably. But the small offerings accumulate, the coffee, the heat pack on the bad days, a granola bar left near your station during a brutal stretch when you haven't eaten since before shift, a specific piece of information relayed in a way that makes your job marginally easier, the quiet appearing at your shoulder on the nights that earn the particular designation of hard rather than just busy.
You do the same back. It comes naturally. Six years of paramedic work teaches you that care is often most useful when it's practical and doesn't require the other person to acknowledge receiving it.
The first conversation that isn't about the floor happens in the break room, five weeks in.
You're eating dinner at eleven PM, or what passes for dinner, which is the depressing collection of vending machine items that constitute nutrition during a long night shift, when he comes in for coffee. He does the microwave thing. He leans against the counter while it runs.
You eat your crackers.
"Durham," he says. "What made you leave?"
He's not looking at you, looking at the microwave, thirty-eight seconds remaining on the display.
"Needed a change," you say.
"From the job specifically?"
"From a version of myself I'd gotten stuck in."
The microwave beeps. He gets the cup. He turns around and leans against the counter facing you now, and the expression is attentive in the particular Jack Abbot way, not performing interest, just actually interested.
"What version," he says.
You consider how much of this you want to hand over to someone you've known for five weeks. Then you consider that you're in Pittsburgh in February eating crackers at eleven PM and your options for honest conversation are limited.
"The version that had gotten very good at the job," you say, "by removing herself from it. Technically excellent. Clinically appropriate. Completely sealed. You do the thing for long enough without adequate processing and it just," you tap the side of your head, "goes somewhere it shouldn't. Calcifies."
He's quiet.
"Paramedic work specifically does something to you," you say. "You're first in. By the time a patient reaches an ER, there's a team, there's protocol, there's structure. On a scene it's you and your partner and whatever you find when you get there. No buffer. You absorb a lot." You pause. "I absorbed a lot."
"And you stopped processing it."
"I stopped having the bandwidth. And then I stopped noticing I'd stopped. And then one day a woman in the waiting room asked me if I was okay and I realized I genuinely didn't know how to answer."
He makes a sound that isn't quite a word.
"You know that version of the problem," you say. It's not a question.
A beat. "I know a version of it," he says. "Different origin. Same architecture."
"Military."
"Yeah."
"When."
"Three deployments. Third one ended the career." He glances down at his leg without looking like he's glancing down at his leg, a micro-movement you'd miss if you weren't watching carefully. "By which point I'd been not-processing for about eight years."
"How'd you get out of it?"
He makes a quiet sound that has some irony in it. "Badly, at first. Then therapy. Then time. Then finding something worth being present for."
"Medicine."
"Among other things."
The break room is quiet. The vending machine hums. From outside the door, the distant sounds of the floor.
"Pittsburgh was supposed to be temporary," you say. "I was going to do a year, get my head right, figure out the next thing."
"And?"
You look at your crackers. "Still figuring."
"How long have you been here?"
"Seven weeks."
"Give it till April," he says. "The city looks different when the gray lifts."
"That sounds like the beginning of civic propaganda."
"It sounds like someone who came here for temporary reasons and then stayed," he says, and picks up his coffee and goes back to the floor, and you sit in the break room for another few minutes thinking about the specific weight of that sentence.
March is when the floor gets to know you.
Lena starts leaving notes for you at the start of shift, small intelligence briefings on the state of the floor, the status of the supply situation, which residents are having good nights and which need watching. Santos, after an incident involving a difficult patient and your intervention on her behalf, starts bringing you coffee exactly once a week in what you understand is her version of a significant gesture. Whitaker asks you questions in the tentative way of someone who has been burned before by asking the wrong person, and you answer them straight, and he relaxes.
Parker Ellis tells you, on a Tuesday in March, that you're good for the floor.
"How so," you say.
"You stabilize things," she says. "Some charge nurses manage the floor. You hold it. There's a difference."
You think about this later. You think about the version of yourself in Durham who was excellent at managing and terrible at holding, and whether Pittsburgh is teaching you something or whether you arrived already changed and the city is just the location of the change.
You think about a lot of things lately that you'd stopped thinking about for a couple of years.
Jack is not incidental to this. You'd be dishonest with yourself if you tried to argue that he was. There's something about the quality of his attention, the specific way he notices without making the noticing a performance, that has begun to unlock things. Things you sealed up and labeled later and then ignored.
You don't know what to do about this, exactly.
You file it under pending.
The night it shifts is a Wednesday in late March.
A warehouse fire on the South Side sends three critical patients in under forty minutes. It's the kind of night that strips everything down to function, no room for anything except the work, the sequence, the next right thing. You've been in these nights before. You know how to move through them.
What you haven't navigated before is moving through one of these nights and simultaneously being aware, in some registered but unaddressed corner of your attention, that Jack Abbot is running on something that isn't all right.
It starts small. The tells are minor. He's been on his feet longer than he should, the cold has been bad this week, the socket issue you've been watching for two months has been a recurring problem and he's mentioned the new fitting exactly once in the dismissive tone of someone who made an appointment and then cancelled it. On a normal night you'd leave a heat pack and a coffee and consider the conversation managed.
This isn't a normal night. This is eight hours of controlled emergency, and by hour six you can see, if you're watching, if you've been watching for three months, that the pain is running high enough to be a factor.
He doesn't show it in the work. That's the thing that makes it worse, in a way. The work is impeccable. The decisions are right, the communication is clear, the patients are managed with the same steady competence that they always are. Whatever he's dealing with, he has put it somewhere else with a proficiency that speaks to long practice.
But you've been a paramedic. You've seen people push through pain until their body stops accepting the instruction, and you know what that looks like in the seconds before it happens.
At hour seven, during a lull between the second and third trauma, you find him at the hub. You don't ask how he's doing. That's not the language.
"I need you to do something for me," you say.
He looks at you.
"Sit down for twenty minutes. I'll cover."
"I don't need—"
"I know you don't need to. I'm asking you to do it for the floor." You hold his gaze. "You're eight hours into a shift that's had three traumas and you've been compensating your gait for the last two hours, which means the socket is causing problems, and if you end up off your feet involuntarily in hour nine because you didn't sit down in hour seven, that's a floor problem. So I'm asking you, as charge nurse, to sit down."
A long pause.
"That was very tactical," he says.
"I spent six years on ambulances. I learned to frame requests so people would take them."
Something almost moves in his expression. "Twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes."
He goes to the break room. You cover the floor. Twenty-three minutes later he's back, and the gait is better, and the tension in his jaw has reduced to something closer to baseline, and he doesn't say anything about it and neither do you.
But at the end of shift, when the floor is winding down and you're both at the hub finishing charting, he says, without looking up from his screen: "How did you know it was the socket and not the phantom pain."
"Phantom pain doesn't change your gait," you say. "Socket fit does."
He's quiet.
"You cancelled the fitting appointment," you say. Not a question.
"How do you—"
"You mentioned it in February. You haven't mentioned it since, and the problem's gotten worse, not better." You save your chart. "I'm not asking you to explain yourself. I'm observing that the appointment would probably help."
A pause. Then: "You're very annoying."
"I know."
"In a," he stops. Starts differently. "It's useful. The annoying."
"High praise."
The almost-sound, the one that isn't quite a laugh. You've been hearing it for three months and you've started to understand that it's the version of warmth he allows himself in professional settings, the suggestion of it, the controlled release. You've started to notice when you prompt it.
You're aware this is information with implications you haven't fully processed.
April arrives and the gray does lift, like he said.
It happens incrementally, a morning here, an afternoon there, the river catching light in a way that Pittsburgh in January made you doubt was possible. The city reveals itself differently in April. Older neighborhoods with the particular architecture of a place built by people who intended to stay. Bridges everywhere, connecting things.
You take a different route to work and find a diner and start stopping there before night shifts, and the routine of it, the specific booth, the same server who brings coffee without being asked after the third visit, grounds something that has been unmoored since January.
You're better, you realize, in April.
Not fixed. Not resolved. But better, in the specific sense of being present in your life rather than passing through it at a remove.
You tell Jack this, one night in the break room, because the break room has become the place where you say the things that don't fit on the floor.
"You were right about April," you say.
He's at the table with a chart, paper, one of the few remaining paper charts, a particular older patient who prefers them and for whom Jack has apparently been maintaining the practice without comment for two years. "Was I."
"The city looks different. You were right."
"Mmm." He makes a note. "How's the diner?"
You look at him. "I haven't mentioned a diner."
"You come in before some shifts with powdered sugar on your jacket," he says. "There's a diner on Penn Avenue that does beignets until four AM. It's the only place within walking distance of the parking structure."
You look at your jacket. There is, in fact, a trace of powdered sugar on the lapel.
"That's —" you start.
"Observational" he says. "Same thing you do."
You sit down across from him. He turns a page in the chart. The break room is quiet.
"How long did it take you?" you ask. "After you moved here. To feel like Pittsburgh was where you actually lived and not just where you were."
He thinks about it. "Two years, maybe. Closer to three before it felt like home."
"What made it feel like home eventually?"
He's quiet for a moment. Then: "People. The floor. Having something that mattered."
"Not the city itself."
"The city's just the container" he says. "What you put in it is the part that matters."
You look at the table. "I haven't put very much in it yet."
"You've been here four months."
"I know. In Durham I had ten years of putting things in. People, places, a version of myself that knew how to be there. Starting over is —" you look for the word.
"Expensive" he says.
You look at him.
"It costs something," he says. "Starting over. People underestimate that. They think fresh start means free, but it's actually the opposite. You pay for the fresh start with everything you built before it."
"Was yours worth it?" you ask. "The cost."
A long pause. He closes the chart. He looks at you with the expression that isn't quite neutral, the one you've seen a handful of times, the careful one, the one that's managing something.
"Most days," he says. "Yes."
The night in April that you file under the night things changed is less dramatic than you'd expect.
It's not a bad shift, particularly. Moderately busy. No catastrophes. The kind of night where you move steadily and finish on time and feel, at the end of it, tired in the clean way rather than the hollowed-out way.
What happens is this: at two in the morning, during a quiet stretch, you're in the hallway outside the storage room and your phone rings with a call you've been half-expecting and fully dreading.
It's your sister in Raleigh. Your mother's been asking about you. It's been three months since you visited. When are you coming home.
You stand in the hallway and have a version of the conversation you've been having for a year, the one where you explain, without explaining, that home is a complicated word right now and that you're figuring things out and that yes, you'll visit, you just need a little more time. Your sister is kind about it. She's always kind about it. The kindness makes it worse, somehow.
You hang up and stand in the hallway for a moment with your hand flat against the wall.
"Bad news?"
You turn. Jack is at the other end of the hall, heading toward you.
"No," you say. "Just family. It's fine."
He slows as he reaches you, reading the hallway the way he reads everything. He doesn't keep walking. He stops, a few feet away.
"You don't have to," he starts.
"I know." You lower your hand from the wall. "My mom wants me to come home for a visit. My sister was relaying the message. Nothing bad happened. I just—"
you stop. You're not sure how to finish the sentence.
"Don't know what home means right now," he says.
You look at him.
"You said in March, starting over costs what you had before. I think one of the things it costs is the easy answer to that question."
Your chest does something complicated. "Yeah."
"That gets easier," he says. "Not because you answer it definitively. Just because you get better at living in the ambiguity."
"That sounds terrible."
"It's better than it sounds."
You lean back against the wall. He stays where he is, which means he's about three feet from you, and the hallway is empty and quiet and it's two in the morning in Pittsburgh and you've known this man for four months.
"Jack," you say.
"Yeah."
"Can I ask you something personal?"
A pause. "Probably."
"After you came back from the last deployment, the one where you lost the leg, who took care of you?"
The question sits in the hallway. He's very still.
"Why are you asking that," he says. Carefully. Not defensively.
"Because you're very good at it," you say. "Taking care of people. Not in the managing way. In the actual way. And I've been trying to work out if that's just who you are, or if someone taught you by doing it for you."
A long pause.
"My platoon medic," he says. "Before I became one myself. Man named Curtis. He had a way of treating the person that had nothing to do with treating the injury. Used to drive the MOs insane. He'd spend ten minutes just talking to someone. Being there. And they'd come through things they statistically shouldn't have come through." He pauses. "I asked him once why he did it that way. He said the body takes cues from being witnessed. That knowing someone is there changes the physiology."
"He was right," you say. "That's documented."
"I know that now." He looks at the floor for a second, then back up. "After I came home the last time, after the leg, no one took care of me, specifically. I didn't allow it. I had a version of that problem you described. Sealed up. Handled." He says handled with the specific irony of someone who has been in enough therapy to know what they were actually doing. "I took care of myself because the alternative meant admitting I needed it."
"How'd you crack that open?"
"A therapist with considerably more patience than I deserved," he says. "And time. And losing enough by refusing to let anyone in that eventually the cost of refusing was higher than the cost of letting."
"What did you lose?"
He's quiet for a moment. "That's the longer story."
"Okay," you say. You don't push.
He looks at you. The careful expression, the managed one, and then, for just a second, something shifts in it. Like a held breath, released.
"My wife died," he says. "Seven years ago. And I'd been so shut down, for so long, that I almost missed the last year of her life because I was performing fine for everyone including her. Including myself." A pause. "I don't, I'm not putting that on the table as a bid for sympathy. I'm answering your question about who taught me by doing it for me. She did. Once I finally let her."
The hallway is very quiet.
"I'm sorry," you say.
"Thank you." Said simply. Not deflecting it, not managing it. Just receiving it.
You stand in the hallway for another moment.
"That's not a shorter story." you say, finally.
The almost-sound. The not-quite-laugh. Warmer than usual. "No." he says. "It's not."
"Thank you for telling me."
"You asked an honest question," he says. "You get an honest answer."
He pushes off from where he's been standing and moves back toward the floor. At the hallway junction, he pauses.
"You should go visit," he says. "Your mom. It doesn't have to mean anything about home. It can just mean going."
You look at him.
"Pittsburgh will still be here when you get back," he says, and turns the corner.
You stand in the hallway for another thirty seconds.
Then you go back to the floor and do your job and don't think about it. Or try not to.
You fail, mostly.
May.
You go to Raleigh for four days, which is the longest you've been away from the floor since January, and which reveals something you hadn't fully understood: you miss Pittsburgh when you're not there.
Not the winter. Not the gray. But the diner and the particular quality of the morning light over the river and the floor and the people on it. Lena and her comprehensive institutional knowledge. Santos and her weekly coffee tribute. Whitaker finding his footing. Parker Ellis's running commentary on everything.
And Jack. You miss Jack, which you acknowledge privately and then immediately file under to be examined later while you eat your mother's cooking and sit on your sister's porch and allow yourself, for four days, to be someone's child and someone's sister and not a charge nurse running a trauma floor.
When you come back, you are, measurably, better. Something that was wound has loosened. Something that was held at distance has been permitted to be close.
You walk into your first shift back and Lena says "welcome back, honey" and Santos gives you a nod that is the Santos equivalent of a standing ovation, and Whitaker tells you about a case he managed well while you were gone with the barely-suppressed pride of a kid showing a parent a test score.
Jack is at the board when you come in. He doesn't turn immediately. You do the handoff briefing, get caught up on the floor status, settle into the shift.
An hour in, he ends up beside you at the hub.
"How was Raleigh," he says. Not looking at you. Looking at the board.
"Good," you say. "It was good."
"Your mom."
"Good. She kept feeding me."
"Sounds right."
"How was the floor," you say.
"Functional. Ellis covered competently. Whitaker had a good week."
"I heard."
A pause. He marks something on the board.
"You look better," he says. Still looking at the board.
"I feel better."
"Good." He caps the marker. And then, still not looking at you: "Pittsburgh felt different with you gone."
You go very still.
He puts the marker in the tray. He still doesn't look at you. The floor noise continues around you, the steady background hum of a functioning ER, monitors, voices, the distant sound of the ambulance bay.
"I'm not sure what to do with that," you say, very carefully.
"You don't have to do anything with it," he says. "I'm just saying it. For accuracy."
You look at the side of his face. The line of his jaw. The gray at his temple.
"Jack," you say.
He turns, finally, and looks at you.
"I need you to be clearer than that," you say. "Because I have been working very hard for five months to be professional about something and if you are saying what I think you might be saying I need you to actually say it."
A pause. Something in his expression moves through several registers, the careful controlled neutral, the managed version, and then the version underneath it, the one you've seen a handful of times. The unguarded one.
"I think about you," he says. "Outside of work. I think about whether you're sleeping enough, whether the diner is open when you need it to be, whether whatever you're still carrying from Durham is getting lighter." He looks at you steadily. "I'm aware of the position. I'm not asking you for anything. I just, you said you needed me to be clear."
You breathe.
"I think about you outside of work too," you say.
The hallway with your sister calling. The four days in Raleigh and the shape of what was missing. The floor at two AM and the particular way he told you the longer story because you asked an honest question.
"I think about how you are the first person in a long time who has not asked me to perform anything," you say. "Who takes me as I am and doesn't need me to be more okay than I am, or less damaged than I am. You make it easier to be actually here. And I don't know what to do with that either, but I'm done pretending I don't know what it is."
He's very still.
"I don't know what this looks like," you say. "Practically. Given,"
"The floor."
"The floor."
"You're charge nurse," he says. "I'm the attending lead. There's no direct supervisory,"
"I know."
"It would require—"
"I know."
A pause.
"I'm not impulsive," he says. "I need you to know that. I don't do things halfway. If this is something, it's something. I can't do the version where it's ambiguous. I'm not built for that anymore."
"Okay," you say.
"Okay?"
"I don't want ambiguous either." You look at him. "I moved to Pittsburgh because I needed to stop being a recording of myself and start being actually present. And whatever this is," you gesture slightly, the small inadequate gesture for the thing you've been building for five months in a language of heat packs and coffee and two AM honesty, "it's the most present I've felt in two years. I'm not interested in backing away from that."
The floor continues around you. Someone calls for a consult at the other end of the hall. A monitor beeps its reassuring rhythm.
Jack Abbot looks at you with the expression that has no performance in it.
"There's a restaurant," he says. "On the North Side. It's good. I've been meaning to," he stops. Tries again. "Would you have dinner with me."
"Not a shift," you say.
"Not a shift."
"When."
"Saturday. You're off Saturday."
"How do you know my-"
"I know the schedule."
You look at him. He looks back. The door, which has been ajar for five months, is open.
"Yes," you say.
He nods. The expression does the thing, the almost-laugh, warmer than you've ever heard it, and then, briefly, the real one. Quiet and genuine and entirely devastating.
"Back to the floor," he says.
"Back to the floor," you agree.
You go in opposite directions. You don't smile until you're around the corner.
Saturday is April in Pittsburgh, which means cool and bright, the city wearing its best version of itself. The restaurant is on the North Side, small and warm, with the kind of menu that takes itself seriously without making you feel like you've walked into a performance.
He's there when you arrive. He's early, you realize. Of course he's early. He's been running tight logistics his entire adult life.
He stands when he sees you, and the simplicity of the gesture does something unexpected to your chest.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi," he says.
You sit down. The server comes. You order wine. He orders water and then looks at the wine and changes his order, and you file this as the first new thing you're learning about him outside of the hospital context. There will be many more of these. The prospect of them is something you haven't felt in a while.
The dinner is easy. Which is not what you expected, exactly. You'd anticipated a version of the careful managed conversation of the floor, the professional language, the deliberate navigation.
But off the floor he is still Jack, still precise, still honest, still the person who answers real questions with real answers, but something has been set down. Some part of the management. He talks about his sister who calls him too often and who he would not trade for anything. He talks about what it was like to go to medical school in his mid-thirties, post-military, post-amputation, in a class full of people a decade younger, and what he learned from that and what it cost. He asks about your paramedic years with the genuine curiosity of someone who wants to understand the timeline of a person, not just the resume.
You tell him about the car accident that started your paramedic career. The one you were first on scene for at twenty-two, the one where you didn't know what you were doing and did it anyway and everyone survived and you sat in the ambulance bay afterward for forty minutes understanding that this was what you were supposed to do. He listens to the whole thing.
"That's how you know," he says, when you finish. "When you can't explain the why and you don't need to."
"Is that how it was for you? Medicine?"
"After the leg," he says. "I needed something to fix things with. I'd been breaking things, one way and another, for long enough. I wanted to be on the other side of it."
"And?"
He looks at his glass. "And it worked. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
He looks at you. "There are still nights."
"I know," you say. "I've seen some of them."
"You have," he agrees. "You see things very clearly. I found it uncomfortable at first."
"And now?"
The expression. The real one. "Now I find it," he considers the word carefully, "restful."
You look at him across the table in the warm light of this restaurant on a Saturday in April and you think about five months of a specific language built of small gestures in a hospital at two in the morning, and how the thing you came to Pittsburgh to find, the presence, the being actually here, has arrived from a direction you weren't expecting.
"Can I tell you something," you say.
"Yes."
"I came here to stop being a recording of myself and I'm not sure when exactly it stopped being a risk, but I think it was early. Earlier than I wanted to admit."
He waits.
"I think it was around the time I started leaving pens near your chart station," you say.
The almost-laugh. The real one. Warm and quiet and brief, and you're close enough now, across a restaurant table on a Saturday night, that it's not at a professional distance anymore.
"Around the same time," he says.
"The heat pack?" you say.
"Before that, actually."
"When?"
"Third shift," he says. "You were in bay seven with a patient who was frightened and escalating and you were completely still. Not frozen. Still. Like someone who has been in frightening rooms before and knows that the stillness is what the other person needs, and who can provide it without it costing them anything in the moment. I'd seen nurses do that before. Not like that."
You don't say anything for a moment.
"And then I walked away and told myself it was a professional observation," he says, dry, "and I was extremely convincing. To myself. For about two weeks."
"Then what?"
"Then you left a heat pack on the counter without making it an event," he says. "And that was harder to file away."
You look at him.
He looks at you.
"Jack," you say.
"Yeah."
"I'm not very good at this part. The saying the thing part. I spent a lot of years being good at everything else."
"I know," he says. "I'm not either. I've been told I communicate like a situation report."
"You don't, actually."
"Only with you," he says. Simply. "Only recently."
The restaurant is warm and the wine is good and Pittsburgh is outside the window doing its April thing, and you reach across the table and put your hand over his.
He turns his hand over.
His thumb moves across your palm, once, and you feel it in your sternum.
"We're figuring it out," you say.
"We're figuring it out," he agrees.
Here is what you know, by the time the summer comes.
The diner on Penn Avenue knows your order. The server, whose name is Gloria, asks after Jack on the mornings you come in alone, because you came in together twice and once is a coincidence and twice is a data point and Gloria has been reading data points for thirty years.
The floor is still the floor. The work doesn't change, the long nights don't change, the particular weight of the hard ones doesn't change. But there is a shift in the architecture of the hard ones. The knowing that at the end of them there is a person who will not require you to perform recovery, who will simply be there while the shift processes through you like weather.
You go back to your hometown in June and this time you don't feel the pull of the departure the way you did in May. You feel it on the return, the Pittsburgh-shaped gravity that has been building since January, that you understand now is not the city itself but what you've put in it.
You call your mother from the airport and she asks how things are going, really, in the tone of a woman who reads her children accurately from two states away.
"Good," you say. "Really."
A pause. "There's someone," she says. Not a question.
"There's someone," you confirm.
You can hear her smiling. "Does he deserve you?"
You think about a man who answers honest questions with honest answers. Who said restful and meant it as the highest thing.
"I think we deserve each other," you say. "Which is different."
"That's better," she says. "That's the right answer."
Jack is on a Saturday morning in July, in your apartment, drinking coffee that is actually hot because you got a machine that does it correctly, reading something, when you come in from your run.
You are, in the clinical vocabulary, a lot. Red-faced, sweaty, approximately nine miles of July heat in your joints.
He looks up. He looks at you. The expression, the open one, the unguarded one, the one that stopped being rare sometime around April, sits on his face with the ease of something that lives there now.
"There's water," he says.
"I see it."
"You look like you ran somewhere unreasonable."
"Nine miles."
He shakes his head. Returns to his book. "Statistically inadvisable."
You get the water. You sit on the other end of the couch, legs folded under you, drink half of it and look at him.
"Jack."
"Hmm."
"I rescheduled the fitting appointment."
He looks up from the book.
"The socket's been giving me problems," he says.
"I know."
"I cancelled twice."
"I know that too."
A pause. He looks at you. The expression is the one that means he's deciding how much to say.
"Thank you," he says. Quietly. "For staying on it."
"You stayed on mine," you say. "The processing thing. The being-present thing. You stayed on it without making it a project."
"That's different."
"It's not."
He holds your gaze for a moment. Then the almost-sound, warm and real.
"Annoying," he says.
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being true."
You lean over and take the book out of his hands and put it on the coffee table, and he watches you do this with the mild expression of someone who is not going to object.
"We have four hours before you have to be at the hospital," you say.
"I'm aware of the schedule."
"Then stop reading and pay attention to me."
The actual laugh, brief and quiet and entirely devastating, the same as the first time you heard it and every time since.
"You're the most presumptuous person I've ever met," he says, and puts his arm around you when you lean into his side, and outside the window Pittsburgh is doing its summer thing, green and warm, the rivers catching the light.
You're learning that this is what it's supposed to feel like.
You're learning it's worth the cost of getting here.
Author's Note:
jack abbot has been living in my head rent free for longer than i'd like to admit, and at some point i had to do something about it. so here we are.
this one is slow and quiet and a little bit about learning to let people see you. if that's your thing, i hope you like it.
for everyone who's been fine. you know the kind.
— with love and an embarrassing amount of feelings about a fictional man
vignettes of your relationship with jack abbot told through the five love languages.
word count: 13k+ ~ warnings/tags: 18+ only mdni, canon level description of injuries, lack of medical knowledge lol, nurse!reader, some angst, fluff, reader has a workplace stalker, no use of y/n, fem reader, heated kissing and implied smut, every cliche jack abbot trope crammed in one fic, some emotional hurt/comfort, ever so slight sugar daddy vibes but not really, slow burnish until it’s not !
author’s note: wrote this same concept for bucky and adrian too. can’t control myself, clearly. here’s my version for jack! big shoutout to my girl @fru1t4fr0gs for reading this 87 times for me over the course of the last month xoxoxo <3
✧˖*°࿐⭒.⋆˖࣪⭑
Words of Affirmation
“Where the hell is Jack?”
A fellow nurse you had asked moments ago only shrugged in response, and Dr. Walsh barely looked up from her computer to mumble your guess is as good as mine.
If anyone were to ask why you’re curious of his whereabouts, you would spew some excuse about needing to ask him a question about the patient who got her hand stuck in a garbage disposal.
But that wouldn’t be your true reason for asking. No, Mrs. Sawyer is currently snoring after maxing out her morphine drip, so for the time being, she’s not your concern.
Jack is your concern.
He’s been quiet. Withdrawn. Solemn in the way that he gets sometimes, but tonight it’s worse than you’ve seen before. He isn’t exactly the most chipper person even on his best days, but you picked up on the minute change in his demeanor from the moment he greeted you at the beginning of the shift.
No one else seems to have noticed. If they have, they haven’t pointed it out.
But you’re hyperaware of him in a way that you have no business being. It isn’t your place to take such notice of him, and yet you do. Sometimes you think that your job would be easier if you only paid as much attention to him as you do Shen, or Robby, or Whitaker, or Santos.
Quite literally anyone else.
“He asked me to keep an eye on the patient in bay three and then wandered off,” Shen sighs. “Saw him going in the direction of the west stairwell when I was on my way back from the break room if that helps.”
“West stairwell?” You mumble under your breath. There’s only one reason he would be walking in the direction of the west stairwell that you can think of.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone up to the hospital rooftop to clear his mind, though you can’t say you’ve ever known of him to do so in the middle of the night.
Especially not without his coat when it’s 25 degrees outside.
Call it a hunch. Something in your gut telling you that he isn’t in the staff lounge, or bathroom, or an empty on-call room. The grating voice in the back of your mind is telling you he’s on that damn roof.
“Hey, I’ll be right back,” you call to Shen as you grab the black Columbia off the back of Jack’s desk chair, walking away before Shen can ask where you’re going.
Before you can think of grabbing your cardigan. Before you can think of anything, really. You haven’t the vaguest idea what you’ll say if your suspicion is confirmed when you open the stairwell door and find him on the rooftop, but you don’t let that stop you from putting one foot in front of the other until you reach the top of the stairs with his jacket clutched to your chest.
When you start to open the door, you pause with your hand on the knob. It crosses your mind that it isn’t too late for you to turn back - to walk back down the stairs and hang his coat on his chair and resume your job before he can ever know that you came up here to check on him.
That would be the smart thing to do. Then you wouldn’t risk crossing any professional boundaries or potentially blurring the lines between the level of concern you would show towards any random coworker, and one that makes your brain turn to static anytime you find yourself in his general vicinity.
But then you recall the forlorn look on his face as he typed up discharge papers at his desk when he thought no one was watching. The way he kept rubbing the bridge of his nose like he had a headache that just wouldn’t go away. How he hasn’t cracked one sarcastic comment in the last eight hours.
That pesky, persistent voice in the back of your mind tells you that he would do the same for you, though you doubt her reliability. She’s been known to tell you what you want to hear.
You listen anyway, and open the door.
He doesn’t turn around or glance over his shoulder at the sound of the creaking door - he doesn’t even flinch, and you have to wonder if he heard you at all over the low howl of the wind. You step out into the cold, mentally cursing yourself for not taking the time to grab your cardigan.
You stop when you reach the guardrail. He stands just beyond it, several feet from the ledge of the building with his hands in his scrub pockets. Light from the full moon reflects off his salt and pepper curls and even from here, you can see goosebumps on the skin of his neck.
“Beautiful moon tonight,” you muse. “Pretty sure it would look just as nice from behind the rail, though.”
His shoulders lift with a faint, amused chuckle. “I can’t give Mrs. Sawyer anymore morphine,” he says without turning to look at you.
You huff a laugh, crossing your arms over your chest to attempt to shield yourself from the cold night air as you will your teeth not to chatter. “Mrs. Sawyer is sound asleep. I’m here for you.”
He finally glances over his shoulder, an expression that you can’t quite read on his face. “How’d you know I’d be up here?”
“Just a lucky guess.” You shrug, then duck between the railing to come stand beside him. He glances down, noticing the coat in your arms at the same moment you hold it out to him. “Thought you’d be cold.”
He stares at you for a moment before accepting it, but he doesn’t put it on as you expect him to. Instead, he takes a step in your direction, stopping right in front of you, and drapes the coat around your shoulders.
Your breath catches in your throat.
“You’re shaking like a leaf,” he murmurs. He reluctantly drops his hands back down to his sides, but doesn’t step away from you.
“That does tend to happen when it’s below freezing outside, doctor.”
He looks like he’s fighting the urge to smirk, but then he looks away, back to the full moon and city lights in front of you. He’s silent for a moment and then sighs. “Today is the anniversary of losing my leg.”
You exhale, your breath clouding in front of your lips. He continues to watch the night sky before him as you watch him. His jaw tenses and he seems to try to swallow down whatever he’s feeling. “Oh, Jack,” you murmur. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
He never talks about his leg. Never calls any attention to it, if he can help it. Doesn’t let it define him. Hell, you didn’t even learn that he’s an amputee until three months after switching to the night shift, when you walked into the break room to find him adjusting his prosthetic.
This is the same man who didn’t hesitate to use one leg to donate his own blood while actively working on a critically injured patient, while his other is in a prosthetic. Of course he hasn’t mentioned the anniversary of the day he’d lost his leg before.
So for him to confess this to you now…that’s not something you take lightly.
Jack shakes his head, still not meeting your gaze. “Most years, it doesn’t even cross my mind. It’s just another day to me. But tonight, when Mrs. Sawyer wakes up, I have to tell her that she’s going to lose her hand. That it isn’t salvageable. I have to deliver the same news that I received on this same day.”
You glance down at the ground. The news doesn’t come as much of a surprise to you. You had seen Mrs. Sawyer’s mangled hand with your own two eyes when she first arrived earlier tonight. She’d dropped her wedding ring down the disposal, reached in to try to grab it without thinking, and the disposal turned on all its own. A stuck switch, electrical shortage, faulty wiring…who knows. In the blink of an eye, her life is changed by one freak accident.
You don’t know the specifics of how Jack had lost his leg, but you wonder if that’s how he had felt, too, all those years ago.
But you don’t ask. Instead, you grab his hand in yours and give it a tight squeeze. The warmth of his palm against yours offers the smallest reprieve from the cold and his hands are far softer than you would have ever expected, but you force yourself to let go when his gaze snaps back to yours.
“I’m sorry it has to be you,” you murmur. “But for whatever it’s worth…if it were me, I wouldn’t want it to be anyone else.”
He exhales, the cold air turning his breath to fog. His lips part, then press together again like he wants to say something but can’t find his voice. The look on his face says it all, though.
I don’t know if I can do this. Not tonight.
“I mean it,” you implore. “It’s going to suck for you to say and it’s going to suck for her to hear. But she has you, and that’s one thing going right for her tonight. There’s only so many people in this world that can relate to what she’s going through, and she gets to have one of them as her doctor.”
He’s quiet for a moment as your words settle over him. Then, the corners of his mouth turn up ever so slightly. It doesn’t quite reach his eyes, but it’s something. “You know, I think the world of you as a nurse…but if for some reason you ever decide to change career paths, you should consider motivational speaking.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” you snort, your cheeks warming at the compliment. “But until then…” You trail off, contemplating your next words. Not wanting to come on too strong while also needing him to know that you mean what you’re about to say from the bottom of your heart.
“Until then, you don’t have to do it alone. I’ll be there when she wakes up. I’ll stay with you while you tell her. If you want, that is.”
Not just tonight, you almost add. Any night. Every night. If you’ll let me.
“And as much as I appreciate this—” You glance down at his coat that still hugs you, “I’d appreciate you coming back inside with me a lot more. She’ll be waking up soon. She needs you. I need you.”
He huffs out a quiet laugh and nods. “Alright. You win. Let’s go inside before you get hypothermia and I have to fill out an incident report.”
He starts to turn towards the guardrail behind you when he pauses, placing a tentative hand on your waist. It's barely there, a featherlight kind of touch - the kind you probably wouldn’t even feel if you didn’t glance down for visual confirmation.
“Thank you,” he murmurs. “For looking for me.”
You shiver. You tell yourself it’s because of the wind.
“Yeah,” you breathe. “Always.”
✧˖*°࿐⭒.⋆˖࣪⭑
Gift Giving
“What are you doing here?” Cassie muses the second she sees you walk through the emergency department’s doors - just loudly enough to draw the attention of Dana, Santos, Whitaker, and everyone else within twenty feet of the nurse’s station. “You haven’t worked on your birthday once the entire time you’ve been here.”
You glare at her, making a mental note to get her back for that the first chance you get.
She knows exactly why you chose to work tonight - and right now, you’re just relieved that he has yet to arrive for his shift and therefore isn’t here to witness this conversation.
“I didn’t know today’s your birthday,” Santos says, seemingly intrigued by the teasing expression on Cassie’s face and the annoyance on yours.
“It’s not my birthday.”
“It’s not her birthday yet,” Cassie clarifies, glancing down at her watch. “But it will be her birthday in approximately five hours.”
“Jesus,” you sigh, staring up at the screen above you to see what kind of shitshow you have willingly walked into by agreeing to cover a shift for Perlah earlier this week. “I’m a big girl. Sometimes big girls have to work on their birthdays. Perlah needed her shift covered, so here I am.”
You omit the fact that you were more than happy to do so because it meant having an excuse to spend part of your birthday with a certain attending that you knew would be on shift, as per usual on Monday nights/Tuesday mornings.
It’s not as if you had any major birthday plans to begin with. Other than getting dinner with Cassie and Samira tomorrow evening, your only plans include binge-watching and bedrotting. Picking up an extra shift tonight interferes with none of that, but…
You do feel a little silly. You wouldn’t dare ever admit it to Cassie, but she’s right. You don’t normally work on your birthday. Someone else more than likely would have been willing to cover Perlah’s shift. You don’t have to be here right now.
But you want to be. As silly - and maybe even a little bit pathetic - as it may be, you want to be.
Unfortunately for you, by the time the clock strikes midnight and it’s officially your birthday, you’ve barely even had the chance to exchange a handful of words with your entire reason for agreeing to work this shift.
Jack has been in the middle of an emergency splenectomy for the last three hours, and you? Lena assigned you the time-consuming, meticulous task of removing hundreds of bits of gravel from a severe case of road rash.
Isn’t that how everyone dreams of kicking off their birthday?
It succeeded in keeping you occupied for a few hours, at least - even if it is the type of mindless work that allows your thoughts to venture into territory they absolutely fucking shouldn’t when you’re picking tiny rocks out of a bloody crater on someone’s leg.
The feeling of Jack’s fingertips on your waist as he stood mere inches away from you on the rooftop what feels like just yesterday.
Him walking you to your car damn near every morning since even though you’re parked farther from the hospital entrance than he is, and the way he hesitates a little longer to say goodbye each time.
All of the times he has shown up to work with two coffees instead of one, and one just so happens to be your go-to order.
And, most recently, the elevator incident just yesterday - when he had oh so casually asked what your plans for your next day off are.
Friday, you had told him. Your next day off is Friday, and you don’t have any plans other than deep-cleaning your apartment and catching up on laundry. He had leaned back against the elevator wall, looking at you in that way that makes your heart behave erratically.
“That’s too bad,” Jack sighed. “Someone should give you something to actually look forward to on your day off.”
Then the elevator came to a stop, the doors slid open, and he walked out like he hadn’t just made you forget how to string two words together.
It wasn’t until hours later, on the drive home after your shift, that you were able to think of what you should have said instead of staring at him with your mouth agape like a fish out of water.
Oh, yeah? And who is someone?
Is that your professional opinion, or personal one?
Let me know when you think of something that I can actually look forward to, then.
But no. You said none of those things, and then found an excuse to stay for nearly an hour after your shift had technically ended so that you wouldn’t make an even bigger fool out of yourself when he would inevitably offer to walk you to your car.
You replay the interaction over and over again in your head the entire time you’re removing gravel from the wound, but finally, you finish.
You’re pulling the bloody nitrile gloves off of your hands when Jack appears in the doorway, still wearing a scrub cap and looking like he could use a few shots of espresso.
“Hey,” you breathe, unable to stop the smile that blooms across your face as soon as you see him. “How did the splenectomy go?”
“He’s going to be okay,” he exhales, tugging off his cap and revealing tousled salt and pepper curls. “He’s in recovery now.” Then, he glances around, as if making sure no one is paying any mind to either of you. “Do you think you could sneak away for a few?” He asks, voice low. “Meet me in the empty on-call room in about ten minutes?”
Your heart thuds in your chest. He’s smirking, but there’s something in his hazel eyes that makes you think he looks a little nervous.
“Yeah,” you nod without missing a beat. “Yeah, of course. Just let me get him some more pain meds and I’ll be right there.” You nod towards the road rash patient scrolling on his phone behind you. “Is everything okay?”
He takes a step back and winks. “Everything’s just fine, birthday girl.”
And then he turns, walking away and leaving you speechless for the second day in a row.
You haven’t even had a chance to remind him of your birthday tonight. In fact, you don’t recall mentioning your birthday to him at any point recently. A few days ago, you told him that you would be picking up Perlah’s shift tonight, but you hadn’t said a word about it being your birthday.
Did Cassie say something to him? Maybe a playful comment as she was leaving earlier about you deciding to work on your birthday? But even so, why would that result in him asking you to meet him in an empty on-call room?
By the time you give road rash guy a maximum dose of Toradol and blurt out some excuse about needing to use the bathroom as you powerwalk past the nurse’s station, your palms are drenched in sweat and your stomach feels like it’s swinging on a pendulum.
You raise your hand to the knob, hesitate for half a moment - just long enough to recall the lilt in his voice when he practically cooed birthday girl - and then, before you can chicken out, push it open.
The first thing you notice is how dim the small room is. Aside from the pale orange glow of a lamp next to the bed, the room is dark.
But not so dark that you can’t see Jack sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a cupcake in one hand and a pocket lighter in the other.
“I would sing to you, but I don’t want to torture you on your special day.” He ignites the lighter, holding the flame to the singular candle until it catches fire. “Don’t tell Dana,” he murmurs, standing up to walk the few feet to where you stand frozen in shock. “I took her spare lighter from her desk.”
You’re at a loss for words - which is quickly becoming the norm for when you’re near him. The only coherent thought you can manage to formulate is that right now, you’re so grateful that Perlah asked you to cover her shift.
You take a step closer to him now that your brain seems to be remembering to send signals to your limbs to move. “Do you always bring the nurses cupcakes on their birthdays, or is this something new you’re trying out?”
He hums a laugh. “Only my favorites. Now go on,” he encourages gently. “Make a wish.”
You hesitate, pursing your lips as you wait to see if he’s joking.
The look on his face makes it clear that he’s not.
And you’re not about to tell him no, so you close your eyes, lean in closer, and blow out the tiny flame while silently wishing for the only thing you have really wanted since you met him.
He hands you the cupcake as soon as you open your eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I could persuade you to tell me what you wished for?”
You huff a breathless laugh. “I don’t think so. Gotta do everything I can to ensure that it comes true.”
“I didn’t take you to be superstitious.”
You shrug, thinking of your wish. Thinking of what he said to you in the elevator yesterday. Thinking of the way he’s looking at you right this second. “I’m usually not.”
It’s true. You’ve never considered yourself to be superstitious. But you aren’t going to take any chances with this wish.
Jack’s gaze lingers on your face for one impossibly long moment before he glances over his shoulder at the bed behind him. It’s only then that you see something that you had been too distracted to notice when you first entered the room and found him holding the cupcake and lighter.
A small gift bag with white tissue paper sticking out of the opening sits on the bed.
“Jack, you really didn’t have to get—”
“I know I didn’t have to,” he laughs lowly, cutting you off before you can finish protesting. “But I wanted to, so I did.”
The already tiny room suddenly feels infinitely smaller. The cupcake alone was thoughtful enough to have your heart performing cartwheels in your chest. Hell, the fact that he even remembered your birthday without you directly mentioning it to him is enough to make you swoon. But all of this?
You’re so fucked. Entirely and irrevocably fucked.
You don’t remember the last time you felt so nervous to open any gift. Not at any childhood birthday party or family Christmas when dozens of eyes were glued to you.
It’s just Jack. There’s no reason to be nervous, you think to yourself as you place the cupcake on the bedside table and take a seat on the edge of the mattress.
Exactly. It’s Jack. Jack, who went out of his way to …bake you a cupcake? Or stop by a bakery on his way to work and buy you a cupcake? And personally pick out a gift for you? And find you the second that he finished performing an emergency splenectomy so that he could give you the aforementioned cupcake and gift in private?
You will your hands not to tremble as you delicately pull the tissue paper from the bag. Jack takes a seat beside you, and even though you don’t meet his gaze, you can feel his stare locked onto your face as he awaits your reaction.
You peek inside the bag, and you see it. Already unboxed. A stethoscope.
But not just any stethoscope. A really fucking pricey stethoscope.
The tubing is your favorite color and your initial is engraved into the bell in cursive lettering.
“Oh,” you breathe, too stunned to remember any of the other hundreds of thousands of words in the English language.
He clears his throat and gives a tiny shrug that does little to conceal how intently he’s watching you. “I know you’ve been using the same one since you first started working here,” he murmurs as you pull the stethoscope from the bag and hold it in your hands as if it’s made of glass. “This one should last you a while.”
You trace the engraved letter with your fingertip. “It’s beautiful,” you whisper, finally looking up at him. “But this…Jack, this is too much. You shouldn’t have spent this much money.”
“It’s not.” He shakes his head, gently shushing you, soft but firm. “I wouldn’t have spent it if I didn’t have it, but I do.”
He smirks, pausing for a second as he takes the stethoscope from you. He leans in, lifting the tubing over your head and looping it around your neck. His knuckles faintly brush your collarbone as the bell settles just over your heart.
“And maybe, selfishly, I’ll enjoy seeing it around your neck knowing that I put it there.”
You exhale a breathless laugh, your skin ablaze at both his words and the timber of his voice. “I’ll wear it every day, then.” Then, feeling brave, you scoot closer to him, closing the remaining distance between you and him until the side of your leg rests against his. “How’d you know my favorite color, anyway?”
Even in the dim lamp lighting, you can see a hint of pink bloom on his cheeks. He grins, the lines around his eyes crinkling. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s only the color of your water bottle, your phone case, your lunch box…”
You laugh to play off how it makes your heart swell that he noticed any of those things.
“And I might have asked Cassie,” he sighs, shaking his head. “Just to be one hundred percent sure.”
The look on Cassie’s face and her teasing comments when you’d first arrived for your shift earlier tonight suddenly pop into your head.
Of course she had known. Damn her.
At least she can keep a secret.
“It’s perfect,” you hum. “I love it. Thank you.”
“You deserve it. Especially since you’ve gotta be here on your birthday.”
You chuckle nervously, looking down at your hands in your lap to avoid his stare. “Yeah, about that…”
You hesitate before continuing, briefly considering regurgitating the same excuse you had tried to feed everyone else about only working tonight because Perlah needed her shift covered.
It isn’t a lie. But it also isn’t the truth.
The stethoscope hanging around your neck suddenly feels like it weighs fifty pounds. It serves as tangible proof that you don’t need to hold back, that he cares about you as much as you do him. That he isn’t going to make you feel silly. That, for whatever reason, he wants to be near you as much as you want to be near him.
“I was happy to say yes when Perlah asked me to cover her shift. I wanted to be here on my birthday. Well…wanted to be with you on my birthday,” you quickly amend.
Jack places his hand over yours with a heartfelt laugh. “I wish you had told me. I would have rearranged my shifts so I’d be off tonight,” he sighs. “I’ll remember that next year. But in the meantime…”
Next year. The words seem to ping pong around in your brain. You glance up at him to find he’s already looking at you.
“You said that your next day off is Friday?”
He’s so close that it’s dizzying. All you can manage is a small nod of confirmation.
“Here’s what I propose, then,” he starts, his thumb rubbing slow circles over the top of your hand, “Friday evening, you let me give you a birthday redo. Unless you’re too committed to catching up on your laundry, that is.”
The words you hadn’t said aloud when you made your wish just moments ago echo through your mind.
“I’m off on Saturday as well,” you hum. “I’m sure the world will keep spinning if I put it off for one more day.”
“Then it’s settled,” he says simply. “Friday night. Birthday redo. You and me.”
“Don’t you…always work on Friday nights?” You ask hesitantly. Every part of you wants to say yes, yes, yes, duh, of course - but in the entire time you’ve worked with Jack Abbot, you’ve never known him to be off on Friday nights.
Something about weekend shifts being more exciting than weekday shifts.
He huffs a quiet laugh that you feel the soft vibration of from where his hand rests atop yours and your thigh brushes against his.
“That’s not for you to worry about,” he murmurs. “Just get through these next few shifts and I’ll take care of the rest.”
✧˖*°࿐⭒.⋆˖࣪⭑
Acts of Service
The following seventy-two hours drag.
You would think that twelve hour shifts would make the days go by quickly, but no. Not when your first official date with Jack awaits you at the end of the week, occupying your every waking thought at work, at home, and in your fucking sleep.
It certainly doesn’t help that Jack refuses to tell you what he has planned for said date. You’ve asked, but every time you do, he just smirks and says he doesn’t want to ruin the surprise.
Anticipation alone, you could probably handle. But anticipation and curiosity? You’ve been slowly losing your mind since Tuesday night.
Now, finally, it is officially Friday. It’s just after midnight, which means you just have to finish the remainder of this shift, go home and get some sleep, and when you wake up it’ll be time to get ready for your date with—
“Your admirer is back.”
Your fingers freeze over the keyboard as you’re working on charting for a patient who came in complaining of urinary pain. You glance up to see Lena looking down at you with what can be best described as an amused grimace.
She steps aside, giving you enough space to look over your shoulder to where an annoyingly familiar face is grinning at you from the bed in bay two.
“Jesus,” you sigh, turning back to your computer screen. “This is his third visit this month. What kind of insane health insurance does he have?” You grumble, more to yourself than Lena.
“Small laceration to the left palm,” Lena explains. “Says he cut it cleaning up glass from a broken liquor bottle. Judging by the way he smells, I’d say he’s telling the truth.”
Now it’s your turn to grimace. Trey - your admirer, as Lena had referred to him - has a habit of stumbling into the ER late at night after drinking too much and sustaining minor injuries that hardly justify a trip to the emergency room.
And every time, he asks for you.
He uses the same pick-up lines every time, stares a little too much, and reeks of whatever alcohol he’s been drinking that night, but he’s always been harmless enough.
This isn’t your first day on the job. You’ve had your fair share of Treys throughout your years working in the emergency department.
“It’s small and shallow,” she continues. “Doesn’t need stitches. Should be fine with some steri-strips, but I can ask Mateo to do it if you don’t wanna deal with him.”
“Mateo has his hands full with the lady with the dog bite that came in about ten minutes ago,” you sigh resignedly, pushing your chair back to stand up. “I’ll just get it over with. If I don’t, he’ll find some other way to fuck himself up enough to come right back here.”
You glance down at your watch. 12:36 am. Just six hours and twenty-four minutes left in this shift.
“Hey, gorgeous,” Trey greets you with slurred words and a shit-eating grin as soon as he sees you approaching his bedside. “I had a feeling you’d be here tonight.”
“This is my full time job,” you quip, not caring enough to try to conceal the annoyance from your voice or facial expression. Even from several feet away, you can smell the stout stench of liquor on him. “So, what is it now, Trey? Lena said something about you getting cut when you tried to clean up glass from a broken bottle?”
“Yeah,” he laughs, drawing out the word. “Clumsy me, right? Total accident.”
“Right,” you deadpan, sliding your hands into nitrile gloves. “Well, let me take a look.”
You take his hand as firmly as you can without technically being rough and turn his palm upwards. It’s exactly as Lena had described - short, shallow, already clotting well - and definitely not worth a trip to the fucking ER. He winces anyway, milking it.
“Ow,” he drawls. “Be careful with me, sweetheart.”
You ignore that, because you’ve become a professional at ignoring Trey and other men like him. You lean in slightly, inspecting the wound for any shards of glass.
“Okay,” you say, all business. “I don’t see any glass, so that’s good. I’m just going to clean it and then close it with steri-strips.”
“Whatever you want. I like when you take charge.” His breath wafts into your face in a thick cloud of cheap vodka and something soured - judging by the mystery stain on the neckline of his t-shirt, you wouldn’t be surprised if it were the stench of his own vomit. You purse your lips in a straight line to keep from making the face you really want to make.
You ignore that comment, too. You reach for the saline, starting to irrigate the laceration. He hisses dramatically.
“Oh, come on,” you mutter. You know you aren’t being professional, but you can’t find it in you to really care. “I’ve had cat scratches worse than this.”
“You could kiss it better,” he slurs, head lolling slightly in a poor attempt at a flirtatious grin.
“Not happening.”
You keep your eyes on the cut as you blot it dry, mentally counting down the minutes until you’re away from him. Mentally counting down the minutes your shift is over and you can go home and crawl into your cozy bed and sleep for hours, and then wake up and take a hot shower and put on something cute for Jack. The only issue with that is you don’t know what you should wear, because you don’t know where you’ll be going or what you’ll be doing—
A flash of silvery curls in your peripheral vision catches your attention. You glance over your shoulder and see Jack standing at the nurse’s station, leaning forward on his elbows, his expression unreadable as he watches you work. He must’ve just come out of trauma, or maybe he’s waiting on lab results; but either way, at this moment, he’s focused on you.
Warmth blooms on your cheeks.
“So…” Trey says, his voice dropping low. “What time do you get off?”
“Not soon enough,” you grumble under your breath, applying the first steri-strip.
“Maybe I could swing by your place later,” he continues, completely ignoring your uninterested, bored tone. “Y’know…hang out. You live at—” He pauses, face scrunching together as he tries to piece the thought together, “—at Carriage Park Apartments, right? In South Hills? You’re…what is it…unit 3B?”
Your blood goes cold and your hands stop moving.
“How the fuck do you know that?” You ask sharply, yanking your hands away from his.
Trey just grins. “Lucky guess, baby.”
It’s not a lucky guess. It’s spot on down to the exact unit.
Instinctively, you take a step back, but he immediately reaches toward you, clumsy but quick, grabbing the tubing of your new stethoscope where it’s draped across your chest.
“Hey—” You jerk backwards, but he doesn’t let you, inspecting the engraved initial on the bell of the stethoscope.
“This is nice,” he slurs. “You always wear this one? Or is it new? I saw on your friend Cassie’s Facebook page that it was your birthday the other day. Maybe it was a gift—”
“Let go,” you snap, trying to keep your voice even. You don’t want to draw the attention of any other patients, but you can literally feel your pulse spiking, hot bile churning in your gut—
But Trey doesn’t let go. His grip only tightens, and at that exact moment, Jack moves.
One second he’s watching like a hawk from the nurse’s station, and the next, he’s at your side, stepping in so quickly and decisively that you barely have time to register what’s happening. His hand clamps around Trey’s wrist - not hard enough to seriously injure him, but with enough strength that Trey’s face contorts in discomfort and he attempts to pull away.
“I suggest you take your hand off of her,” Jack’s voice is low but lethal.
Trey’s glassy eyes blink rapidly up at Jack. “Hey - hey, man,” he stammers. “I wasn’t - I wasn’t doing anything. Just talking to her and - and looking at her—”
“She told you to let go.”
You stand frozen as the interaction unfolds in front of you, your heart feeling as if it’s going to beat right out of your chest and onto the hospital floor.
“I was just joking around.” He says the words so quickly that they all run together. “You don’t gotta - hey, seriously, it’s fine. I’ll go—”
“Dr. Abbot, we’ll handle it from here.”
You vaguely register a security guard’s voice cut through the tension. Two officers appear at the entrance to the bay. You aren’t sure who even called them - knowing Lena, she probably had them on stand by when Trey stumbled in here drunk as a skunk and smelling like one, too.
Jack reluctantly releases Trey’s wrist. The moment he does, his hand finds your shoulder and he begins to guide you backwards, away from the bed and out of Trey’s reach.
“What’s going on here?” One of the guards - a new guy who you’ve never spoken to before - asks no one in particular.
Trey slumps back against the pillows, suddenly appearing very small. “I didn’t fuckin’ do anything,” he mutters, but even he doesn’t sound convinced.
The guards look to you and Jack for a legitimate explanation, which Jack quickly provides. “He grabbed her. She told him to let go, and he didn’t.”
The guard nods. “We’ll take care of it.”
Jack doesn’t wait for the rest. He already has his hand at the small of your back, steering you away from the bay and down a hallway until he reaches an empty consult room.
You don’t even realize just how hard your heart is still pounding until the door clicks shut.
Jack takes a step towards you, but doesn’t crowd you. He raises his hands like he’s going to touch you but stops himself, hands flexing awkwardly in front of him before dropping them back down to his sides.
“Are you okay?” He asks softly, his eyes searching for any obvious signs of physical or emotional distress.
You can’t think clearly enough to answer him right away. Instead, you turn away from him and walk the short distance to the loveseat in the corner of the small room. You take a deep breath in and then exhale, wringing your hands together as you normally do when you’re particularly anxious.
“He won’t be back here,” Jack assures you, watching you carefully from where he stands a few feet away. “Not if I have any say in it. He can risk bleeding out while driving to UPMC Mercy or Presbyterian for all I care—”
“He knows where I live,” you say quietly - barely a whisper, but it shuts him up.
“What?” He asks, though his tone of voice indicates he heard you perfectly fine. “He knows where you live? You’re sure?”
You nod, a fresh wave of nausea washing over you as you recall the satisfied smirk on his face when Trey witnessed your reaction to learning he knows your address.
“Positive.” You grimace. “I don’t know if he has followed me home from work before or what, but he knows where I live. Exact apartment number and all.”
Jack doesn’t say anything for a moment. He rakes a hand down his face, perhaps as stunned by this as you initially were. Your thoughts are reeling, thinking of all of the safety measures you’re going to need to take. You already have a doorbell camera, but you should set up some security cameras inside your apartment, too. An extra front door lock and additional window locks, for sure. A restraining order certainly isn’t a bad idea. There may be a way to terminate your lease early if stalking and harassment are involved - you aren’t really sure. You’ve never fucking been stalked before.
“Okay,” he sighs, sitting down next to you and interrupting your trainwreck of thoughts. “You can’t go back there. Not alone, anyway. After work, you can come back to my place. You can stay as long as you need. As long as you want. We’ll both go to your apartment and get some of your things—”
“Jack, don’t be ridiculous,” you say with a humorless laugh, turning to face him. There’s no hint of uncertainty on his face. You know he means every word he says, but you can’t just take up temporary residence in his home - as tempting as that may sound to you, the last thing you want is to be such an inconvenience before you’ve even gone on one date with the man.
“I can’t - won’t ask that of you. I can get a hotel room for the time being, until I figure out the terms of my lease. Hell, I could stay in an on-call room here for a few nights and I’d be perfectly safe. I know Whitaker did that at one point—”
Jack laughs. Not a humorless, half-hearted chuckle, but full, deep belly laugh. “Honey, you don’t know me if you think I’m going to have you sleeping on a cot in an on-call room or at a hotel where that fucker could follow you just as easily as your apartment.”
He shifts slightly on the loveseat, angling his body toward you. “You staying with me isn’t ridiculous,” he says, quieter. No longer laughing, but his expression is still soft. “It’s safe. And you’re not asking anything of me. I’m offering.”
You drop your gaze down to your hands in your lap. “I’d just…feel bad. I don’t want to intrude. We haven’t even gone on one date yet.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not the point. I don’t care if we’ve been on zero dates or a hundred. A drunk asshole grabbing you and telling you he knows where you live isn’t something that you sleep off in an on-call room.”
You swallow hard. “I don’t want to be a burden,” you murmur.
Don’t want to be a burden, but don’t want to stay anywhere else, either.
You can’t deny it, even to yourself. The second that Jack intervened, you felt safe. Sitting here beside him right now, you’re surprisingly calm given what just transpired. And the thought of going home with him, rather than sleeping in an on-call room or the first hotel you can find? Rather than going back to your apartment where Trey could be waiting for you after your shift? The thought of that brings you more comfort than you’re willing to admit.
His eyebrows lift in disbelief. “A burden?” He leans forward, forearms resting on his knees and his face just inches from yours. “Sweetheart, making sure that you’re safe doesn’t burden me. It matters to me.”
Sweetheart. When Trey had called you the petname, it made your skin crawl. But hearing it from Jack…it’s a term of endearment. Instead of making your skin crawl, it makes your stomach flutter with an entire kaleidoscope of butterflies.
It’s that very feeling that gives you the gentle push you need to say yes.
✧˖*°࿐⭒.⋆˖࣪⭑
Jack and Lena each ask upwards of a dozen times if you’re sure that you’re alright to work the remainder of your shift.
Lena tries to insist that you take an extra long break and eat something. Jack offers to leave work long enough to drive you back to his place so that you can decompress in peace, but you refuse. You don’t have an appetite, and you don’t really want to be alone. You’re sure you would be completely safe at Jack’s, but you don’t want to be left alone with your thoughts. You just want to finish out the last few hours of your shift.
The best thing for you right now is to keep yourself busy, so that’s what you do. You take five minutes to freshen up in the employee bathroom, make yourself a coffee, and get back to it.
That is until the police show up and you, Jack, Lena, and the security guards all have to give statements as to what happened with Trey. You explain his multiple ER visits over the last month alone, how he always asks for you by name, and everything he said and did tonight. They take your statement, and ask if you want to press charges for stalking and harassment - to which you say yes, even though part of you is terrified of how Trey could react once he learns of this. You know it’s the right thing to do.
By the time it’s all said and done and seven o’clock rolls around, it feels like one of the longest shifts of your entire career and you’re beyond relieved for it to be over. So relieved, in fact, that you don’t even feel nervous about going to Jack’s condo until you’re literally walking through his front door.
You hadn’t let yourself dwell on it too much as he drove you to your apartment to collect some of your things. You swore that you were fine to drive your own vehicle and let him follow you, but he had insisted on driving you himself, and you were too tired to put up much of a fight.
As quickly as possible, you threw essentials into a duffel bag while Jack waited patiently in your living room. Hair care products, body wash, toothbrush and toothpaste, a few changes of clothes. Skincare and makeup essentials, perfume, and something cute to wear tonight - you do still have a date this evening, after all.
You were in and out in less than ten minutes.
Jack carries your bag up to his condo for you.
To no surprise, it’s significantly nicer than your apartment. Although you make decent money as an emergency department nightshift nurse, Pittsburgh rent prices are astronomical and you live alone, so you took the first apartment you could find that wasn’t going to completely break the bank every month.
You don’t even want to think about how much this place costs.
It’s damn near exactly how you had envisioned his home to be. There’s very little decor, but there’s still touches of him throughout the space. The large windows have thick blackout curtains - a telltale sign that someone who works at night and sleeps during the day lives here. The espresso machine that he’d been bragging about just last week sits on his kitchen counter. His coffee table is littered with random medical journals and books. It’s the perfect balance of clean and simple yet lived-in and domestic.
“Make yourself at home,” Jack murmurs, placing your duffel bag on the large sectional couch that you’re hovering beside awkwardly. Your heart skips a beat at the word home.
That’s just a thing people say. Make yourself at home - make yourself comfortable. He’s not being literal.
“Tell me what you need,” he says, voice low and warm. “Food? Sleep? A shower? I can make you coffee, breakfast, whatever you want. I don’t normally go to sleep until a few hours after I get home.”
Your stomach all but vibrates at the offer of food. You didn’t eat anything your entire shift. After Trey happened, the thought of eating was entirely unappealing. But now that some time has passed, and you’re away from the hospital, the hunger pains in your belly are becoming hard to ignore.
“At the risk of sounding needy…” You start with a breathy laugh. “All three of those things sound incredible right now.”
Shower, food, sleep. Preferably in that order.
“I’ll make us something to eat while you take a shower,” Jack hums, as if reading your mind. Your stomach does that erupts into hundreds of butterflies thing again that cannot be blamed solely on hunger. He takes a step towards you, placing a light, tentative hand on your waist. “How does that sound?”
It’s a simple question but it makes you lightheaded. You aren’t used to this - having someone take care of you in such mundane ways. Driving you around. Carrying your bag for you. Making you food. Getting you thoughtful, personalized gifts.
Part of you wonders if you’re even deserving of it. Any of it. Especially coming from him. But Jack’s a smart man. Rational. Self-assured. The kind of man who knows what he wants and doesn’t settle for less than that. And though you may not fully understand why…you’re the person standing in front of him with his hand on your waist right now.
You give a small nod. “That sounds good. Thank you.” You smile up at him. Then, remembering you don’t actually know your way around this place, you ask, “Where’s the guest room? I’ll take my bag in there.”
He sucks in air through his teeth. “About that…” He trails off with a shy laugh. “My guest room is currently functioning as a storage unit. You’ll be staying in my room. I’ll take the couch.”
“What?” You exclaim, eyes going wide. “No way. I’m not kicking you out of your bed in your own home, Jack.” You look at the giant sectional beside you. “There’s more than enough room for me on the couch. Get me a pillow and a blanket and I’ll be fine.”
“No way,” he snorts. Then, his other hand finds your waist, too. His chest is just inches from yours and you catch a whiff of something musky. You can’t argue back because you’re too busy remembering how to breathe. “Not happening. I end up falling asleep on the couch more than half the time, anyway. You aren’t kicking me out of anywhere.”
“But—”
“But nothing,” he interjects, gentle but firm enough to make you close your mouth. “You’re my guest. You’re sleeping in my bed. That’s final.”
Maybe it’s his tone of voice, or maybe it’s the look on his face - his words hit you straight in your core. You’re grateful that he can’t feel your skin through the material of your scrubs, because as soon as the words you’re and sleeping and in my bed left his lips, goosebumps bloomed across your flesh.
You dig your teeth into your bottom lip in an attempt to keep your composure. “You need to be careful,” you exhale, grabbing your duffel bag off of the couch. “You’re going to spoil me rotten.”
He smirks, turning to take you to where you’ll be sleeping. “Would that really be such a bad thing?”
✧˖*°࿐⭒.⋆˖࣪⭑
Physical Touch
As if you needed anything else to add to the ever growing list of reasons that you believe Jack Abbot might be too good to be true, he also makes a killer breakfast sandwich.
You’re not ashamed to admit that you took your sweet time in his walk-in, fancy-pants shower, scrubbing every microscopic trace of hospital off of your skin and letting hot water soothe the aching muscles of your back before rejoining Jack in the kitchen.
When you do, bare-faced and donning the first clean pair of sweatpants and t-shirt you could find during your brief trip to your apartment, Jack is already plating up breakfast for you.
You aren’t even really sure what you had been expecting - cereal, maybe? A protein shake? Instant oatmeal? You were so hungry that you hadn’t been very worried about what, but you were still pleasantly surprised when you entered the kitchen to see what he had managed to put together while you were in the shower.
Bacon, fried egg, Gouda cheese, and avocado slices all piled high on a bagel with hash browns on the side.
He watches in anticipation as you take your first bite. Your eyes flutter shut and he lets out a soft laugh.
“Good?” He slides a cup of coffee across the kitchen island to you (decaf, he said, because he knows you’ll be going to sleep soon).
“That’s an understatement,” you mumble around a mouthful of bagel. “Divine.”
You can’t help but think he looks pleased with himself.
He stands directly across from you, eating his own breakfast that mirrors yours. You’re so hungry, and it’s so delicious, that you barely say a word until you take the very last bite. The silence between you isn’t uncomfortable. It feels natural, easy. Like you’ve sat on this very barstool eating breakfast with him after long shifts dozens of times before.
When you’re both finished, you offer to clean up - which earns you an incredulous look, like he can’t tell if you’re joking or not.
“It’s just a few dishes,” Jack snorts, walking around to where you’re sitting. “I think I can handle it.” He leans with his back against the counter, standing right beside you. “You should go lay down. Get some rest. We’ve got plans tonight, remember?”
“Of course I remember,” you laugh. “Although, I still don’t know what said plans are…” You trail off, looking up at him with raised brows and pursed lips, a silent plea for him to finally tell you what tonight’s agenda is.
He laughs, the lines around his eyes crinkling in the way that always makes you feel fuzzy inside.
“And you’ve been so patient.” He shakes his head and grins down at you. “You’ve made it this far. Why would I ruin the surprise now?”
You suppose he’s right. If you’ve made it all week without knowing, you can wait another eight…ten…twelve hours.
Jack walks you to his bedroom door even though you already know the way. He pauses just at the doorway, one hand braced lightly against the frame like he’s debating whether to stay or go. You hesitate too, your fingers grazing the doorknob but not yet opening it.
“Get some rest,” he murmurs. “And if you need anything - anything at all - I’ll be right in the living room. Just say the word.”
For a split-second, you swear he’s leaning in. Just enough to make your heart stutter and breath catch in your throat at the thought of his lips landing on your temple, your cheek, your mouth.
But then the moment passes. He pulls back instead, offering a gentle, almost apologetic smile. “Sleep well,” he whispers.
All you can manage is a small nod before you open the door and slip inside, closing the door behind you. You hold your breath until you hear his footsteps begin to retreat down the hallway. When the soft thuds fade to silence, you release a shaky exhale.
How the hell are you supposed to fall asleep after that?
The answer to that is you don’t.
Though Jack’s bed is plenty comfortable, you toss and turn for well over half an hour and still find yourself wide awake. You’ve been awake for sixteen plus hours at this point. Those sixteen hours have included working a twelve hour shift, learning that you have a stalker and getting harassed at your place of work, and answering dozens of questions from the police - you should have crashed the second your body hit the soft cotton sheets.
But you find that fucking impossible when his pillow smells so much like him.
You can’t stop yourself from inhaling the light, clean scent of whatever detergent he uses mixed with a faint essence of him - something earthy and masculine like aftershave or remnants of his cologne.
It makes the pitch black room feel like it’s spinning around you, the last words he’d said to you echo in your mind.
If you need anything at all, I’ll be right in the living room. Just say the word.
You can admit that it’s more of a want than a need, but he did say anything.
Before you can overthink what you’re about to do, before you can chicken out, you swing your legs over the side of the bed and stand. Then, putting one foot in front of the other, you ease down the hallway as quietly as you can in case he’s already asleep.
He’s not.
Jack’s profile is illuminated by the glow of the television in the otherwise dark room. He’s changed out of his scrubs, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt that mirrors your own attire. His prosthetic is now detached, resting on the floor beside the couch.
“Hey.” He sits up a bit straighter, curiosity and concern etched across his features and in his voice when he notices you stop near the edge of the hallway. “Is everything okay?”
You just nod, and give him a small smile. You can’t bring yourself to speak for fear that you won’t recognize your own voice. You take a few slow steps towards the couch and he glances down to where you twist your hands nervously in front of you. His brows furrow in worry, though his hazel eyes can’t conceal his curiosity.
“C’mere,” he murmurs, patting the empty space right next to him.
But instead of sitting beside him, you stop directly in front of where he’s lounging. His eyes trail upwards, confusion merging into something akin to amusement when you lift one knee onto the couch, and then the other, hovering just over his lap. Your palms land lightly on his shoulders for balance, not yet putting all of your weight against his thighs.
He goes completely still the moment you settle over him, as if the slightest movement from him might send you running back down the hallway. His hands hover at your hips but don’t quite touch. You pause for a heartbeat, giving him the opportunity to stop you if he wants.
But he doesn’t. His normally hazel hues stare up at you, pupils blown so wide that his orbs appear onyx.
That’s all the confirmation you need to close the distance between you.
You lean forward slowly, your nose brushing against his. Your lips ghost over his in the barest tease of a touch that makes wildfire bloom across your neck and down your spine. The anticipation feels like electricity, your pulse thundering in your ears. You can feel his breath fan across your lips, shaky and uneven.
The initial press of your lips against his is feather soft, though his response is anything but. Something between a sigh and groan escapes the back of his throat, kissing you back with a tenderness that makes you melt into him. His hands finally settle against your waist, fingertips gripping the fabric of your t-shirt. Your hands trail from the broad planes of his shoulders to the nape of his neck, tips of your fingers intertwining in the short tufts of silvery curls.
His lips collide with yours in slow yet fervent kisses that could easily get you drunk off him. The faint stubble along his jaw tickles your skin in a way that makes you feel delirious. You think that you would be content to sit here and kiss him all day long, but you also don’t want to seem too eager.
Even if you are.
When you pull back, your lips tingle. Jack follows the movement for a fraction of a second, as if he can’t stop himself from trying to kiss you more. Your forehead rests against his and you exhale a shaky laugh.
“I tried to sleep,” you breathe, voice unsteady. “I really did. But your pillow smells like you and it was driving me fucking crazy.”
Even with only the light pouring from the television, you can tell that he’s blushing. His hands run up and down your sides. “I take it that’s a good thing,” he laughs, voice low.
“Mm-hmm,” you hum. “Indeed. You smell even better up close, though.” You close the distance between you once more. This time it’s the ghost of a kiss, your lips faintly brushing over his just enough to tease.
He peppers light kisses along your jawline. “Is that right?” The words are murmured against the skin of your throat.
Your eyes flutter shut and his name tumbles from your lips.
“Yeah, honey?”
You cup his face in your hands and pull back to look down at him. “Come to bed with me.” It’s intended to be a question, a request - but it comes out more of a breathless command.
His fingertips freeze along your spine. He looks up at you, hesitant. “You sure that’s what you want?”
You nod, the pad of your thumb brushing along his cheekbone. Another small peck to the tip of his nose this time. “I’m sure.”
He seems to search your face for signs of uncertainty. When he doesn’t find any, he exhales a laugh through his nose. “As much as I wish I could sweep you into my arms and carry you down the hallway…” He trails off, wiggling his leg beneath you. “I’m the one who needs a little assistance getting there.”
You follow his gaze to where his prosthetic sits a few feet away. It’s then that you notice a pair of crutches propped against the recliner, undoubtedly for getting around his place when he doesn’t feel like wearing the prosthetic. You ease off of his lap, standing up to retrieve the crutches for him. He pushes himself off the couch as you hand them off to him.
Once he’s balanced, he nods towards the hallway with a small smirk. “Lead the way.”
You do, walking slow enough that he can keep pace with you. Your heart thuds against your ribcage with each step you take, but it’s due to excitement rather than nerves.
Excitement at the prospect of simply listening to his heartbeat and inhaling the scent of his t-shirt as you both drift off to sleep.
Twelve hours ago, you never would have predicted that this would be happening right now. That you’d be in Jack’s condo. That you would shower in his bathroom while he makes you breakfast. That you would sit on his lap and kiss him and crawl into bed together.
It feels surreal. Like you’re dreaming and fully expect to wake up in your own bed at any moment.
When you reach the edge of the bed, you pull the covers back and lie down, scooting towards the middle of the large mattress so there’s plenty of space for Jack to crawl in next to you. He leans the crutches so that they’re within reach of the bed and then lowers himself onto the mattress with practiced ease.
He lies flat on his back, the mattress dipping beneath him. His arm extends outwards in a wordless gesture that opens the space closest to him for you.
“C’mere,” he coaxes, and just like when he’d said that to you minutes ago in the living room, you do. You slip into the space under his arm, tucking yourself into the solid warmth that is his chest. Your cheek settles just over his heart and his arms curl around you, cocooning you against him.
It’s too easy to melt into the embrace that is so new yet already feels so familiar.
You’re both asleep within minutes.
✧˖*°࿐⭒.⋆˖࣪⭑
Quality Time
“All I’m saying is that it would be a lot easier for me to pick an outfit if I know where we’re going.”
Jack’s chest vibrates with laughter against your cheek.
You aren’t sure what time it is. All you know is that you woke up in the exact same spot that you had fallen asleep - in his arms. That, and you feel incredibly well rested.
“How many outfits did you bring with you?” He asks, lips pressed against your temple and voice still raspy with sleep. It’s a sound you could very quickly get used to hearing when you wake up, you think.
“Three.” You lift your shoulder in a small shrug. “Option one is casual. Two is semi-formal. And three is a little bit fancier than two.”
You did the best you could on such short notice and with no knowledge of what tonight’s plans entail.
He hums in contemplation, running a hand up and down the expanse of your arm. “Do you trust me?”
You shift enough to look up at him. He’s smirking down at you. “Of course I trust you.” You roll your eyes. It’s true. You do. Though you can’t say you aren’t suspicious of where he’s going with this.
“How about you show me options two and three and I’ll tell you which I think is the better choice? That way you don’t have to guess what you should wear and you still get to be surprised?”
So that’s exactly what you do.
An hour later, you’re wearing option number two in the passenger seat of his truck. Semi-formal. On the nicer side, but nothing crazy fancy - though you would think it’s the nicest thing Jack’s ever seen by how he’s complimented you no less than a dozen times since you first walked out of the bedroom wearing it.
Just before sunset, he pulls into the parking lot of a cute Italian bistro that you’ve never heard of in a quiet part of town. Osteria del Cuore reads the sign - Tavern of the Heart.
“Ever been here before?” Jack asks, curious lilt to his tone.
“No.” You shake your head. “I haven’t. Have you?” You glance over to him in the driver’s seat to find him already smirking at you with a twinkle in his eyes.
“I have not. No one has, actually.”
You give him a confused look, but before you can question him, he’s opening his truck door and hopping out to walk to the passenger side. Ever the gentleman, he opens your door for you and offers you his hand.
“And that’s because we are the first customers,” he continues when you place your hand in his as you step down.
“First?”
“That’s right. They don’t officially open until tomorrow night, but I called in a small favor.” He opens the front door for you and waits for you to step inside.
Your eyes scan the room. There’s maybe a dozen or so tables in total. Sconces line the brick walls and strings of fairy lights twine around ceiling beams, illuminating the space in a muted amber glow. Each table is adorned with tiny flower bouquets and flickering candles inside glass holders. Bundles of dried herbs hang above an open kitchen window - rosemary, bay, thyme - filling the air with a faint earthy scent in addition to the aroma of fresh baked bread.
It’s warm. Cozy. Homey. Perfect for a first date - but all you can think about is the fact that Jack was not kidding when he said that you’re the first customers. There’s no other patrons to be seen anywhere.
A young woman, presumably the hostess, appears from around the small bar and welcomes you both.
“Dr. Abbot.” She smiles, greeting him by name. “Mr. Moretti is so glad you two could join us tonight. Come with me and I’ll show you to your table.”
Jack motions as if to say after you. You follow her, expecting her to take you to one of the smaller booths for two, but she walks right past them. And then right past all of the tables for larger parties, as well. You glance at Jack in curiosity, but he only places a hand on your lower back in response, giving nothing away.
She leads you both past the bar and down a small hallway, then opens an unmarked door without looking back. You aren’t sure if Jack even knows where she’s taking you, but he makes no objections, so you keep quiet, following her up a short stairwell.
You aren’t entirely sure what you’re expecting - another dining room, maybe. But what you aren’t expecting is the breeze of cool evening air when she opens a door at the top of the stairs.
If you thought the inside was lovely, then the rooftop is something straight out of a fairytale.
It feels like stepping into a secret garden above the city. Like inside, string lights zigzag overhead and candles twinkle on every flat surface. There’s an abundance of lush planters and flowering vines, their leaves rustling in the light breeze. Several tall, outdoor style heaters line the perimeter of the tables, radiating enough warmth to ward off the chilly night air.
In the center of it all, there’s only one table set tonight.
One round, intimate table draped in ivory linen and graced with a small glowing lantern, a mason jar of wildflowers, and two empty wine glasses.
“This is what you consider to be a small favor?” You laugh breathily as he pulls your chair out for you. The hostess places menus on the table before wordlessly departing, leaving the two of you alone momentarily. “A private rooftop dinner at a restaurant that isn’t technically open yet?”
Jack takes his own seat with a small shrug, though there’s a pleased look on his face at the awestruck expression on yours. “I treated the owner’s wife a few months ago. She’d been experiencing on and off again leg pain that her primary care doctor had dismissed as a strained muscle. They came into the ER one night, begging to be taken seriously because she knew something was wrong. Long story short, she wasn’t being dramatic. An ultrasound showed the beginning of a DVT. We got her treated before it turned into anything life threatening.”
Mrs. Moretti - you vaguely recall overhearing Jack tell Robby about the case.
“Her husband was so grateful.” Jack shakes his head with a soft smile. “He told me all about this restaurant that they were in the process of opening - insisted that he owes me a favor and gave me his business card. He made me promise to come by for a free meal as soon as they opened. Which isn’t until tomorrow, but…” He trails off, taking in the scenery around you.
“I suppose saving people’s lives does have its perks sometimes,” you tease, nudging his calf with your foot beneath the table.
A faint dusting of pink appears along his cheekbones. “I wasn’t planning on ever cashing in on that favor, but I drove by here a few days ago and saw the grand opening sign…” Another small shrug, and you can’t help but giggle at how bashful he seems right now. “I’m going to insist on paying for the food, of course. Them letting us have the place to ourselves the day before opening is already more than enough.”
Your entire body is buzzing at the revelation. At all of it - at the thought he put into planning this, at the ambiance, at the romance of it all.
It’s perfect. Absolutely perfect. And so much fucking better than spending your Friday night alone doing your laundry.
“I don’t even know what to say,” you breathe, reaching across the table to take his hand in yours, giving it a gentle squeeze. “No one has ever done anything like this for me.”
Not just this, you think. Everything he’s done for you, big and small. The engraved stethoscope he got you for your birthday, and the coffees that he always brings to work for you without asking. Defending you from a creepy jackass and then inviting you into his home without a second thought. Cooking you breakfast, caring for you, making you feel more safe and loved than anyone else has ever made you feel.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he murmurs. “I just thought it might be nice to be on a rooftop together again. Only under much happier circumstances this time.”
The memory replays in your mind instantaneously - the hospital rooftop, much different than the one you’re on right now. It wasn’t all that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, even if it does feel like a lifetime ago.
Like that night on the hospital rooftop, the moon above you now is also bright and full. And like that night, there’s no one else you’d rather be with.
But now, when Jack smiles, it reaches his eyes. And now, as you hold his hand in yours, it isn’t to console him because he’s having a hard night. It’s simply because you can - simply because you want to hold his hand.
Yes, much happier circumstances indeed.
✧˖*°࿐⭒.⋆˖࣪⭑
Epilogue {….a little more physical touch}
You aren’t quite sure how one night at Jack’s condo turns into two, and then three, then four…but you aren’t complaining.
He certainly doesn’t seem to mind, either.
You’d mentioned going back to your place multiple times. The last thing you want to do is overstay your welcome so early in your relationship, but Jack isn’t having any of that. He has assured you time and time again that the only reason for you to go back to your apartment is to get more of your belongings.
You put very little energy into objecting. You want to be here with him every bit as much as he seems to want you here.
Despite the fact that you’ve been sleeping in his bed for nearly a week, it feels as if you’ve barely seen each other the last few days. Your work schedules normally match up pretty nicely, but due to some people being out on vacation, or sick, or on maternity leave, your shifts have been all over the place this week.
So you’re beyond happy to hear him enter his condo not even ten minutes after your morning alarm wakes you up, knowing that both of you are now off work until tomorrow night.
You’re still laying in bed when he opens the door. Light pours in from the hallway, just enough to illuminate his silhouette.
“Good morning,” you breathe, voice still tinted with sleep. He walks to the edge of the bed and sits down beside where you lay.
“Good morning,” he whispers, leaning over to give you a tender kiss, the faint essence of coffee on his lips. “Did I wake you up?”
“No.” You shake your head, raising a hand to the back of his neck where you lace your fingers through his short curls. “I set an alarm so that I’d be awake when you got home. I missed you.”
You pull him down to you by his neck until his mouth is on yours once more. This kiss isn’t quite as tender as the first - you open to him right away, his tongue slipping between your lips. He braces one hand against the headboard, and the other comes to cup the side of your face, deepening the kiss. You can’t help but release a small moan into his mouth, your thighs clenching together beneath the covers.
He pulls away, as if reading your mind, planting a small kiss to the corner of your mouth with a shaky exhale. “I should probably shower off first, honey.”
You shake your head again like a petulant child being told no. “That can wait.”
Jack doesn’t need any further convincing.
He yanks the comforter away from your body, revealing you to be in only your underwear and an oversized t-shirt. You pull him back to you, crushing your lips to his. His hands grab at your waist, bunching the fabric of your t-shirt around your stomach. He smells sterile, just like the hospital he’s been at all night, but beneath that there’s the familiar scent of his body wash that you’ve quickly become obsessed with.
“Lay down,” you command gently.
He has worked twelve hours while you have been asleep in his bed, after all. You figure taking care of him is the least you can do if you’re going to jump his bones the second he walks through the door.
He looks like he’s about to object, his fingers toying with the waistband of your panties, but you pat the empty space on the mattress beside you and he gives in. Maybe it’s the pleading, eager look on your face or maybe it’s just exhaustion creeping into his bones, but he does as you ask without putting up a fight.
That alone makes you melt. You know that Jack isn’t used to being cared for - in any sense of the word. He’s been alone for a long time. Self-reliant and solitary.
But so have you. And just as it comes naturally to let Jack spoil you, he seems content to let you do the same for him.
He’ll more than make it up to you soon enough, you have no doubt.
He trades places with you, sinking down against the mattress and pillow with a soft exhale. You sit up onto your knees, smoothing a hand down his chest until you reach the hem of his scrub top.
“Can I..?” You ask, tugging lightly at the fabric.
He nods, sitting up slightly and lifting his arms so that you can maneuver both his scrub top and undershirt off in one go. You glance down, noting that he has yet to shed his shoes.
You crawl to the foot of the bed, making quick work of yanking off one, and then the other - leaving one foot and the base of his prosthetic exposed. He shimmies his pants down his thighs, letting you pull them the rest of the way off, tossing them to join his shoes somewhere on the floor.
Your gaze settles where his prosthetic meets flesh. You hesitate, not wanting to assume, not wanting to do something wrong or make him uncomfortable in any way. He notices your hesitation right away.
“I can walk you through it,” he says softly, thumb brushing your cheek. “If you’d like to learn how to remove it.”
The offer hits you square in the chest. It may seem small, but he isn’t just offering to teach you something - he’s showing you that he trusts you enough to let you into a part of his life that most people never see. That he trusts you enough to be vulnerable with you. That you mean enough to him that helping him with something like this could easily become a regular occurrence, so it only makes sense for you to learn how to do it.
You realize, right then and there, that you’re in love with him. And, wholeheartedly, you believe that he’s in love with you, too.
You smile, blinking away happy tears that threaten to spill over.
“Yeah,” you nod. “I’d like that.”
✧˖*°࿐⭒.⋆˖࣪⭑
thank you so much for reading! i love you forever if you comment/reblog <3
spare keys — jack abbot x fem!reader
brilliant idea by @xrandomnevx !! thank you for letting me write this
TLDR summary: Jack has a shit day and asks for his spare key... not in the best way.
warnings: making out, hurt/comfort, angst/fluff, misunderstanding trope
wc: ~2.5k
I've been in a writing slump and this helped ❤️ I have some asks in my inbox so I'll be getting to those now -- sorry to those who've waited!
masterlist
The night shift has a way of binding people together, especially after rough shifts, especially those who’d rather not talk about their feelings despite being on the verge of breaking down.
That’s how you and Jack found yourselves under a shared blanket, warm drinks in your hands, while Grey’s Anatomy plays in the background. It’s trash TV—at least, that’s what you both call it—but you’re so physically, mentally, and emotionally fried that somehow it’s the only show either of you has managed to watch a full episode of.
You’re pretty sure neither of you is actually paying attention. Maybe it’s just an excuse to have the other person there.
You were the first to ask, “You wanna come over?” like it didn’t mean I don’t want to be alone right now. That was a few months ago, and ever since then you’ve been drifting between each other’s places. To the point of even exchanging spare keys.
Jack’s place is bigger than yours. Cleaner. Neat in a way that feels deliberate. Yours—being a resident—is cluttered with takeout menus and mismatched mugs. Jack has his own go-to mug at your place now: a pale green one with a pickle wearing glasses printed on it, the words ”kind of a big dill” stretched across the front.
On the TV, someone is yelling. Someone is crying. Someone is definitely violating at least three hospital protocols.
Jack scoffs quietly into his drink.
“That’s not sterile,” he mutters.
You hum. “It’s television.”
“They’re running a trauma without gloves.”
“They do that a lot,” you say. “It’s kind of their thing.”
“…I don’t really like that Owen guy.”
Your lips press together at Jack’s comment as you turn to look at him because of the irony of Owen Hunt also being a combat medic. “You’re telling me you weren’t like that when you first came back?”
Jack frowns, head cocking back like he’s surprised. “’Course not. You wouldn’t even know I was in the military if I hadn’t told you.”
That earned him an eyeroll. “Jack, you carry a knife with you at all times.”
“Regular people can carry knives anywhere.”
“Regular people don’t.”
He shakes his head, but there’s no real heat in it. His shoulder presses into yours, warm and solid beneath the blanket, and you lean on him with a small smile.
This is how it usually goes—quiet commentary, shared exhaustion, leaning on each other in a way that you can’t really explain. You tell yourselves it’s nothing. Just two doctors who understand how bad it can get. Just convenience. Just habit.
Still, when you’re both gently dozing through the end of the episode, Jack’s hand doesn’t stop moving through your hair. And when Netflix asks if you’re still watching, neither of you move to turn it off.
❦
Jack’s never late for work. Not usually.
But he was having trouble sleeping, and now he’s running on three hours of sleep. He has a piece of toast in his mouth, his backpack in one hand, a water bottle in the other, and his mind stuck somewhere between paperwork and the echo of your laugh from last night.
He locks the door from the inside in a hurry and shuts it.
Halfway down the block, his fingers reach into his jacket pocket out of habit and he stops mid-track.
Nothing.
He pats the other pocket. Then his bag. Then the back pocket of his jeans.
Still nothing.
Jack exhales slowly, tilting his head back toward the sky like it might give him answers. He can see it in his mind immediately: his keys, sitting smug and useless on the kitchen counter, right next to the sink after he finished his coffee.
“Fuck,” he mutters.
He checks his watch. There’s no time to go back. Even if there were, he’d already committed to being late, and that alone is enough to sour his mood. He considers his options, then realizes:
You have a spare.
He sighs in relief. He’ll ask you when he sees you, before the shift starts getting busy.
But by the time he makes it to the hospital, Shen has apparently spewed out the Q-word multiple times, and the board is already lit up. A bus collision on the freeway. Multiple incoming traumas.
Jack doesn’t even have time to put his things in a locker. He sets them down by the nurse’s station and jumps straight into action. He spots you in the crowd prepping for incoming trauma, but you’re pulled in another direction almost immediately.
And it goes on throughout the night.
Every time he thinks, I’ll talk to you now, something else crashes in. He’s being called left and right as the assigned primary emergency MD. And even after the MCI is handled, there are violent patients, a family sobbing in the hallway, a trauma that turns into a code that turns into silence.
Night shifts can be weird and busy, but this is out of the ordinary. And Jack hasn’t had the chance to breathe. He catches himself staring at a monitor for half a second too long, brain lagging before it snaps back into place. He gives an order and has to repeat it because it comes out wrong the first time.
The rest of the shift drags on. By the last hour, his foot aches, prosthetic chafing his skin, and his patience is threadbare, his words sharp by necessity more than intent. And he still has to find you—
“You don’t look so great.”
Ah.
Jack barely lifts his head to look at you.
He pushes himself off the chair after putting his prosthetic back on. He should explain. He knows that. The words line up in his head— I Locked myself out. Meant to ask you earlier. They don’t make it past his lips.
Exhaustion wins.
“Can I get my spare key back?” he asks.
Something feels wrong. But he doesn’t know what.
“Oh,” your reaction is immediate. “Yeah. Sure.”
You don’t look at him as you dig through your bag. The key lands in his palm, cold and heavy. You don’t let your fingers brush his.
“Thanks,” he mutters. He should be glad that he’s no longer locked out of his place, but it doesn’t feel like that.
When he looks up, you’re already gone.
He stands there longer than necessary, spare key clenched in his fist, feeling like he’s misstepped, even if he doesn’t fully understand how.
Shit.
❦
You knew from the start that whatever this thing is between you and Jack, it wouldn’t end in sunshine and rainbows.
You hoped—stupidly—but you’d always known better than to trust hope. People like you don’t get to keep things that felt this steady without paying for it later. And men like Jack Abbot don’t stumble into soft, uncomplicated endings.
You were going to ask Jack to come over to your place last night when he asked for his key back. You saw how wrung out he was during the shift. He barely had anything to eat, and when you gave him protein bars, he’d just put them in his pocket. So you knew he could use the extra care. You could put on his comfort trash movie, make some tea, let him lean on you…
But he asked for his key back instead, and so you got the hint. You left before he could say anything else. Before he could see the tears in your eyes.
Maybe you read too much into the nights you shared together. How could you be so blind? It was just for convenience, it was a habit. It couldn’t possibly turn into something more. Because Jack couldn’t possibly…
You sigh, pinching the bridge of your nose. You didn’t sleep last night.
“You alright, hun?” Lena asks, glancing at you with worry.
“Yeah, just,” You sigh again, “exhausted.”
You haven’t seen Jack since the shift started, but that’s also probably because you’ve been avoiding him and keeping your head down. You move through the ED on autopilot: charting, assessing, responding when your name is called. You don’t linger. You don’t joke. You don’t look for Jack the way you usually do.
But you can’t avoid him completely.
You need to talk to him about a patient. With the patient’s chart in your sweating hands, you approach him slowly.
“Dr. Abbot?”
Jack snaps up to look at you, his eyes more confused on why you just called him that.
You keep a straight face. “I have the lab results for our patient in bed 13.”
He doesn’t tear his eyes away from you, eyes narrowing just slightly. You discuss the results together, professionally, though you refuse to look him in the eyes. And just before you can turn away from him, he grabs hold of your wrist.
That’s when you finally look at him, and you think you might break.
“We need to talk.” He says. “Please.”
You bite your lip and glance around. People are starting to look. Jack starts to notice too and he lets go of your wrist.
“…I’m swamped tonight.” You tell him and walk away.
Jack’s jaw tightens as he watches you leave.
There’s one question that you’re still thinking about and can’t seem to think of an answer. What about your key?
Jack asked for his key back. Why didn’t he give yours back as well?
You could go ask for it back—oh my god. Is that why he wants to talk?
The realization makes your stomach drop.
You bonk your head against the wall. Of course. You’ve misread it. You always do. This was never something that required a conversation—just a cleanup. A return of borrowed things. An ending, neat and quiet.
Not that there was anything to end.
You still try to keep your distance after that. You know it won’t last—nothing ever does in a place this small—but you’re not ready. Not for the look on his face when he hands your key back. Not for whatever careful, considerate explanation he thinks you deserve.
But Jack’s also relentless.
It guts him when he realizes that you’re avoiding him. You don’t look for him anymore. You don’t even look at him when he passes by. And he does that on purpose several times just to get you to do it.
Every time he sees you across the department, his chest tightens with something sharp and urgent. He opens his mouth—and you disappear. Turn a corner. Get intercepted by a nurse. Vanish into a room that suddenly needs you more than he does.
He needs to talk to you. Wants to.
Because after last night, he couldn’t sleep. He thought he’d be well rested by himself but the reality hit him: he missed you.
And he kinda knows why you’re like this. He thinks it’s because he was mean, didn’t talk to you the way he normally would, didn’t invite you over or offer to go to your place after a shift from hell. You probably needed him too, but he was too exhausted with his own shit.
Not to mention the way he asked for his key… he should’ve explained, but he didn’t.
And now you won’t let him fix it.
Now, in the middle of the shift, as he watches your sullen face while charting, Jack’s run out of patience.
Just as you put down the chart, he grabs your hand and leads you to the on-call room before anyone could see.
“Jack??” You curse yourself internally for saying his name.
The door clicks shut behind you, muting the ED slightly.
Jack faces you, but doesn’t sit. He drags a hand down his face, exhaustion pulling his shoulders forward, his voice rough when he finally speaks. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“I’m busy,” you reply, a little too sharp.
“So am I,” he says. Then, quieter, “That’s not what this is.”
Your stomach twists.
He searches your face and continues, “I didn’t ask for the key back because I wanted you out of my life.”
You stiffen.
“I locked myself out,” he says, immediately. “That morning I left my keys on the counter in a rush, and I locked myself out. I meant to tell you before the shift got insane, but it never slowed down and by the time I found you, I was—” He stops, sighing. “I was a mess. I should’ve still said something, but I didn’t… that’s on me.”
You still haven’t said anything, but your shoulders relaxed. A sigh of relief quietly escapes you.
“I heard how I sounded,” Jack continues, quieter now. “I know it wasn’t great. And when you handed it over like that—” He swallows. “I knew I’d fucked up.”
He takes a step closer, towering over you. “I wanted to give you this back.” He brings a key in between you, his key. “It’s yours. If you still want it.” if you still want me.
You stare at the key for a second too long before a shaky, disbelieving laugh slips out. You take it from his hand and tuck it safely into your pocket. Shyly, gingerly, you rest your head on his chest.
“…I thought you were gonna give me my key back.”
Jack also lets out a small chuckle from hearing that. He wraps his arms around you. “You’d have to pry it off of my dead body.”
“Won’t be long then.”
“Rude.”
You laugh, genuinely, in relief, and sniffle. Your arms circling around him.
“You crying on me?” Jack murmurs, resting his chin on your head.
“…no.”
He smiles at that.
“You know,” Jack says before he can stop himself, “After yesterday’s shift from hell, I couldn’t sleep. And I realized… I missed you.”
You lift your head to look at him, eyes sparking from your tears and full of longing. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” His smile is small but sure as he leans down, pressing his lips to yours.
He kisses you softly. Gentle and loving. Your hands slide into his hair, fingers curling at the nape of his neck, and his grip tightens at your waist.
You part for air, and Jack kisses you again, deeper this time—weeks of unsaid things pressed into the way his mouth moves against yours.
You make a quiet sound before you can stop yourself.
That does something to him.
Jack’s grip tightens, his thumb slips under your scrubs to rub circles on your spine, while his other hand comes up to cradle your jaw, tilting your head just enough that the kiss turns slow and consuming, like he’s memorizing you.
You forget where you are.
Your fingers slip under the hem of his scrub top, resting against his skin. He groans softly into your mouth, barely restrained.
“Fuck,” he murmurs, breathless. “We should—”
Knock knock.
You freeze.
Jack goes completely still.
The knock comes again, louder this time. “Uh—Dr. Abbot? You in there?”
You stifle a laugh against his chest as Jack exhales, long and pained, his head tipping back slightly.
“Give me a minute.”
There’s a pause outside. “Sure, doc.”
Jack looks back down at you, eyes warm and unmistakably fond despite the interruption. He brushes his thumb across your cheek, soft, deliberate.
“We’re not done,” he whispers dangerously low.
You bite your lip, heart still racing. “Good. My place after shift.”
You don’t tell him you’ve watched far too many videos of girls kissing their boyfriends, watching them melt like butter in the sun. You definitely don’t tell him you’re absolutely convinced Bucky is going to fail this challenge in the sweetest way possible.
He’s in the kitchen when you find him, back to you, sleeves pushed up, dog tags resting against the thin cotton of his shirt. He’s humming under his breath, focused on the mission of making you tea. Very serious business.
Perfect.
You move quietly, socked feet soft against the floor, and slip your arms around his waist from behind. He stiffens for half a second— old habits, muscle memory— but the second he realizes it’s you, his body relaxes, melting instantly into your touch like it wants to belong there.
“Hey, doll,” he murmurs, voice soft, warm, already smiling even though he hasn’t seen you yet. “Didn’t hear you come in.”
“Hi,” you say, and before he can move, before he can even fully turn—You go for it.
You take his jaw in both hands and kiss him.
Not rushed. Not playful. Just pure, slow affection— lips soft, full of love, nothing but warmth and quiet promise. You kiss him like he’s safe. Like he’s yours.
And oh. He melts. Absolutely melts.
His shoulders slump, all that tension draining out of him like you’ve switched something off. His metal hand curls around your waist instantly, tugging you closer like instinct. His other hand slides into your hair, fingers gentle, like he’s terrified you might vanish if he holds too tight.
He sighs against your mouth.
Actually sighs.
Then he leans into you completely, forehead pressing to yours when you finally pull away, eyes glassy soft and dazed like you’ve just knocked him absolutely senseless.
“Where’d that come from?” he whispers, voice rough in the sweetest way.
You shrug, trying not to grin too hard. “Just wanted to kiss you.”
He studies you for a second, lips curving into the softest smile the one he only ever wears when it’s just you and him, when he feels safe enough to let it show.
“Do it again?” he breathes, already leaning in like you’ve cast a spell on him.
You do, and he melts again.
This time, he makes a small sound in his throat, content, happy, the kind of sound that would absolutely break the internet if anyone ever heard it. His hand cups your cheek, thumb brushing your skin reverently, like loving you is something holy.
When you finally stop, both of you slightly breathless, you can’t help it.
You start laughing.
Bucky immediately frowns, confused, brows pulling together in that adorable way. “What? What’s funny? Did I miss something?”
You grin, resting your forehead against his. “There’s a trend. You’re supposed to not react. You failed so hard.”
He blinks. Then scoffs.
Then does the most Bucky thing imaginable.
“Why would I not react when my girl kisses me?” he says, absolutely offended at the concept. “That’s ridiculous. C’mere.”
He pulls you back in, kisses you again, slower, deeper, absolutely shameless about how gone for you he is.
When he finally lets you go, he smirks.
“Post it,” he murmurs teasingly. “Let the world know I’m whipped.”
You laugh. You don’t post it. But you do kiss him again. And again.
Summary: You surprise Bucky with something permanent
──────── ˚✧₊⁎ ˚✧₊⁎ ────────
He doesn’t see it right away.
It’s late, quiet the kind of night where the compound feels like it’s holding its breath. You’re curled up on the couch with him, your legs tangled with his, his arm heavy and warm around your shoulders. You shift, stretching, hoodie slipping just enough to bare the side of your neck.
That’s when he freezes.
Just below your collarbone, tucked close to your pulse, is fresh ink.
James.
His breath stutters so hard you feel it.
“What,” he whispers.
You look up at him, heart pounding. “I was hoping you’d notice.”
Bucky’s hand comes up slowly, fingers hovering like he’s afraid touching you might make it vanish.
“You didn’t,” he says, voice rough. “You didn’t put Barnes.”
You shake your head.
“That’s not who you are to me.”
He swallows. Hard.
“That name,” you continue softly, “that’s yours. The one people don’t get to take. The one I say when it’s just us.”
Something in him caves in.
“James,” he repeats, barely audible. His thumb brushes your skin right over the ink, right over your heartbeat. “You put my first name over your heart.”
Tears blur his vision before he can stop them.
“I spent so long hating that name,” he admits. “Because it reminded me of who I was before everything went wrong.”
He looks at you, eyes shining.
“Now it just feels like home.”
He kisses the tattoo slowly, reverently like it’s a vow.
From that moment on, he’s done for.
He says your name differently after that, like it means more. Like it’s something he’s keeping safe. His touch is steadier, surer like he finally believes he’s allowed to be wanted.
A week later, he comes to you quiet and nervous, hands tucked into his jacket sleeves.
“I wanna show you something,” he says.
Your stomach flips. “Okay…”
He rolls the fabric back from his wrist.
There it is.
Your name.
Simple. Clean. Permanent.
You stare, breathless. “Bucky…”
“I know,” he says quickly, searching your face. “I thought about it for a long time. Wanted to be sure. But I didn’t want my past on me anymore.”
He meets your eyes, steady and sure.
“I wanted you.”
Your hands shake as you cradle his wrist, thumbs brushing over the ink like you’re afraid it’s not real.
“You did this for me?”
“For us,” he corrects gently. “So no matter what happens, I remember who I belong to. Who chose me.”
You press your forehead to his, tears slipping free.
“James,” you whisper.
His smile is soft, real, and entirely his.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “And you’re written into me now. Forever.”
The symmetry of it the way your bodies now carry each other’s names feels like balance.
summary: clark shows his love for your friendship in many ways. fetching your lunch, carrying your things for you, always being there when you need him- but who could have imagined it would include kissing you on the lips? every casual peck makes your head spin, your heart stammer; until one night, one lingering kiss finally answers all your questions… and then some.
clark kent x best friend ! reader
themes: soo much fluff. clark is hopelessly devoted to you, but you have no idea. you're a cutie who loves fashion. he is adorable, friends to lovers, funny, domestic clark always! barely proofread, but enjoy xx
You’re running late. Again.
For the fourth time this week, and it’s only a Wednesday.
It’s not your fault. Really, it’s not- nothing was going right to begin with, and the outfit you’d initially planned on wearing ended up hanging off your body like loose rags. You had to change three separate times, and still, you aren’t too pleased with how you look today.
The day is miserable- all rain and clouds and grey skies. There isn’t an ounce of sunshine to be seen, not even in you, because your typically upbeat personality has been taken and held hostage by the city around you.
“Perry’s gonna kill you.” Clark greets you, umbrella clutched in his free hand that he immediately holds over you as you join him. He slings your bag smoothly off your shoulder, hooking it over his own instead.
Together, you walk in unison; quick, and sharp, your shoulder bumping into his arm due to the height difference.
“Then we better hurry up, Kent.” you say back, earning a chuckle from him.
You walk through the rain, and you don’t notice the way he ducks his head outside of the umbrella completely. How you don’t veer off the jagged path ahead even though it usually pains you to walk in a straight line, because his hand is hovering on your lower back, careful, steady.
You don’t even question why, when you finally get through those double doors, Clark’s curls are almost soaked and you’re bone-dry.
The elevator ride to the top is comfortable, like it always is with Clark.
“How was your evening?”
“I ate ice cream for dinner,” you tell him absentmindedly, “And I rewatched The Devil Wears Prada.”
His eyebrow quirks up, “Must have missed my invite.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Were you not in a different city last night fighting an intergalactic threat?”
“How’d you know that?”
“I watch the news.”
Clark smirks slightly. Never arrogant or cocky, just knowing. “I still would have come.”
You don’t say anything, busy straightening your shirt and wrapping your coat even tighter around you. When the elevator finally reaches the top of the skyscraper, you’re the first to step out, Clark directly in tow.
Your heels clack against the linoleum floor with a precision that can only come from someone with something to prove; in this case, the fact that you’re late for a good (nobody has to know the truth) reason. Lois looks up for a split second, nodding at you in acknowledgement.
Beside her, Jimmy grins. “What time do you call this?” he jokes.
“Got held up,” Clark lies. You smile inwardly, knowing he was perfectly on time; it was you who couldn’t decide on what to wear this morning, on what rings to pair with what necklaces.
You’d told Clark to go on; I’ll be like, thirty more minutes. I’ll just see you there! You’d said, but of course he refused to listen.
Someone barks your surname. They also bark Clark’s. You don’t even have to turn around to know who it is.
“Sorry, Perry.” You and Clark say in unison, his cheeks flushed crimson, yours still cold from the wind. Thankfully, Perry White seems to be in a good mood today; he just shakes his head in exasperation, a small mutter akin to tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum leaving his lips as he places another cigarette between them and turns around.
Clark pulls your chair out for you, waiting for you to sit before he does the same.
“Close call.” he mumbles, and you stifle a laugh.
It’s a busy day; one that stretches for far too long. You type until your eyes blur and you drink coffee until you can’t even taste the bitter burn of it anymore, but you’re focused.
You’re a great journalist, and you’ve chalked that down to be the very reason why Perry gives you so much grace. Why being late is a bump in the road instead of a fireable offense like it is for most people.
It’s Clark you have to thank for that; being his best friend certainly has it’s perks. He knows better than anyone how to charm the Planet’s infamous grump. Over time, you’ve learnt how to mimic him; be bashful when confronted about tardiness, especially by someone like Perry White, and you’re good to go.
After a couple hours of head-down, zipped lipped quiet, he finally breaks the silence.
“How you holding up?” Clark asks you, head hidden behind his own screen. You can’t see him, but you can envision his lips parting as he speaks, eyes trained on whatever word document he currently has open.
“Surviving. You?” you mumble, fingers wrapped around a yellow highlighter that has yet to land on the page. He lets out a chuckle.
“Counting down the seconds until lunch.”
“Are we going out today?” you pop your head around your monitor then, and Clark doesn’t skip a beat before doing the same.
The sight of him- especially after a long 121 minutes without it- makes something flutter dangerously in your stomach. His curls are unruly, piercing blue eyes only the slightest bit red as he looks at you.
You blink the feeling away, willing it to disappear and not come back for at least a little while.
“You want to? Or I could just grab us those bagels you like from the place ‘round the corner?”
“I can come with you,” you offer, but Clark shakes his head, the corners of his mouth upturned.
“No need. I’ve got you.”
You nod, a thankful smile spreading across your lips as you turn back to your desk. Of course, Clark does the same, and under the table you feel the tip of his shoes nudging against your foot.
Your smile only widens, though you try to hide it with a purse of your lips and a clench in your jaw.
It’s not that you have a crush on your best friend- absolutely not. Crushes, you’ve always believed, are for high schoolers; teenagers in faux love who believe that big, ugly bouquets mean romance, and cheesy, outlandish prom-posals equate to a lifetime of happiness.
No, you’re a little more pessimistic than that. And you’re a lot deeper in than that, because unfortunately for you, Clark Kent continues to be a shining example of the world’s most perfect boyfriend.
Minus the kissing. And the holding hands. Also the freakier stuff like sharing a bed, and hugging each other regularly- who ever said being in love was rational?
He’s kind. He’s patient. He waits hours for you to get ready and doesn’t even scold you for wasting his time, just smiles and stares at you like you’ve already done him the biggest favour by simply existing.
He knows your coffee order off by heart, grabs you a couple of sugars every time even though it’s sweet enough- just in case, he always says. He knows you like your bagels from Leon’s on Tuesdays but every other day, it’s Liberty’s or nothing.
Clark remembers. He cares. So deeply.
He is also in love with someone else.
“Just waiting for her to realise, I guess.” he’d told you once, when you asked him why he hadn’t dated anyone since Lois- all while holding a box of Christmas baubles you were picking from.
And he'd told you that he didn't need to date, not unless it was the person he wanted to be with forever. Clark Kent didn't do casual. To him, time was precious, and he simply had no interest in 'playing the field'.
Though even you had to admit; no matter how big the field, it would be very difficult for anyone on Clark’s future roster to compete with the brilliant Lois Lane.
“What if she never does?” you asked, gesturing for him to pass you another bauble to add to the tree.
It was mid-November, and a random chill in the air had you fixated on getting your decorations up ASAP. Naturally, Clark agreed, even playing pack-mule with you in the store as you collected everything caked in artificial frost and tinsel- even a brand-new tree that he held tucked under one arm as you ran up and down the aisles.
Clark simply smiled, eyes holding a shine as he watched you examine a fragile looking ornament, fingers twirling it in the light.
“She'll figure it out. She always does,” he’d said confidently, “One day.”
“What if she takes forever?”
Clark remained unfazed, “Then I’ll wait.” you just raised an eyebrow, dropping the topic immediately and trying to forget how deliciously romantic he sounded right then and there.
That, was six months ago.
And Clark has yet to introduce you to this mystery girl, has yet to even give you her name; you don’t even know what she looks like.
You supposed it was for the best. For now, you were happy living in blissful ignorance. Just until you got over this silly little love-crush of yours. Or, until you pushed yourself to finally start dating again and could finally forget about this whole thing.
You continue typing, the words blurring together incoherently. By the time 12:30pm comes around, your stomach is grumbling and it’s only the noise of everyone packing up for lunch that breaks your concentration.
Clark is already standing up from his desk, stretching those muscles of his that never go stiff, yet he does it anyway because it’s what everyone else does.
You lock eyes with him as he makes his way around the edges of the table.
“The usual?” he asks. You nod with a grateful smile.
“Please. Take my card-“ you’re already fumbling for your wallet, but Clark shakes his head firmly.
“No need. I’ll be back in ten.” He tells you, and before either of you can register what happens next, he leans down. Smoothly.
And gives you a peck on the lips.
It’s quick. It’s over within a split second. But it still happens; and when Clark pulls back without so much of a stunned look or an apology on his face, you swear you can still feel the plush skin of his lips on yours.
“Text me if you think of anything else you want.” he says coolly, as if he didn’t just short-circuit your entire being.
And he’s gone.
Just like that; he turns on his heel, nods goodbye to a gobsmacked Jimmy Olsen, and heads for the elevator. Leaving you; stunned, shocked, baffled, detonating in your seat.
You don’t move. For a long while, Jimmy mimicks you, eyes wide as his gaze darts between the elevator where Clark was and your desk, where you currently still are. And probably will be for days to come.
Eventually, he wheels his seat over to you.
“What was-“
“I don’t know.”
“Why did he-“
“I don’t know,” you swallow, and with a disbelieving shake of your head, you turn back to your desk, palms flat out on the table as a way of anchoring yourself to it. For a long while, Jimmy doesn’t speak, silently begging you to.
But you can’t. You physically can’t. Because it may have been an accident- it’s not unusual for Clark to give you a kiss on the forehead, an occasional one on the cheek if he’s feeling extra gratuitous. But on the lips?
Maybe he missed. Maybe, you turned your head without even realising it- and maybe, right now, he’s on his way to Liberty’s trying to come up with ways to end your friendship because he definitely knows now, if he didn’t before.
He knows, and he’s disgusted, and you wouldn’t be surprised if he came back with your bagel in a bag and a stern talking to about how you shouldn’t move your head when people lean in for cheek-kisses.
You decide you will never eat another bagel ever again in your entire life. You will be bagel-less and Clark Kent-less and best friend-less for the rest of time and it’s all because you couldn’t control yourself.
But you know you’re being stupid, because Clark is many things. Superman being the most important one of them- he catches rolling pencils before they can fall to the floor, nudges you gently out of the way when rain falls off outer stall canopies so you won’t get wet. He has reflexes that the normal man doesn’t. If you were to turn your head, he’d know, and he’d stop.
So why didn’t he stop?
You’re still frozen by the time he gets back. He has your bagels in their usual printed takeaway bag and he’s flushed from the cold, tie slightly crooked, glasses foggy and slipping down his nose.
He forgets to steady them, the grin on his face pointed so directly towards you that it distracts him completely.
Your eyes widen, hand shooting up instinctively just as they’re on the cusp of clattering to the floor. You push them up for him, the tip of your middle finger barely brushing against the bridge of his nose.
He smiles, crooked. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see Jimmy’s jaw on the floor.
“Thanks,” Clark says softly, and because your heart is going a million miles per minute, you just nod a reply back.
He sets the bagels on your desk, pulls his chair around to sit next to you.
“So,” he starts, getting the food out like he always does. You, first; he unwraps your bagel, sets your sauces out, and drapes a tissue across your lap. “What ice cream did you have last night?”
You tell him, carefully at first, reluctantly, like it wasn’t just vanilla and caramel. But Clark doesn’t catch on.
He just nods, attentive as always. He laughs when you make a joke, tells you in a hushed tone about his new friend in Gotham, Bruce Wayne. He’s an alright guy, bit serious though. And he wipes the corner of your mouth when you get a bit of ketchup on it. But he doesn’t bring up the kiss.
So, neither do you.
Clark keeps kissing you.
And you, well- all you can do is keep pretending you’re not actively malfunctioning every single time it happens.
At first you assume it’s a one-off. A strange, meteorological anomaly- like those fish that sometimes fall from the sky. Weird, very rare, and inexplicable.
But then he does it again the next day.
It’s the same routine: lunch break, Clark grabbing the food, you offering to pay, him refusing like always. Except now there’s a new beat to the choreography; one that involves him leaning in, cupping the side of your elbow like you’re made of spun glass, and giving you a very deliberate, very real peck on the lips before leaving. It’s gotten deeper since the first, you realise.
And every single time, you just sit there like someone unplugged you from the wall.
Jimmy has stopped pretending he isn’t watching. He mostly just gasps now. Out loud. Very dramatically.
Thursday, Clark arrives with two macchiatos and a cinnamon walnut pastry you mentioned liking once. You’re about to thank him when he dips forward and presses- there it is again- a warm, soft peck to your lips.
“Be right back,” he murmurs, like that is the casual part of this exchange.
This time, your confusion is so loud it actually echoes. Beside you, Jimmy drops his pen, and it rolls for three desks.
By Friday, you try to mentally prepare. You puff your cheeks out, slap them lightly, tell yourself that if he does it again, you will absolutely ask him what on earth is going on.
But of course, you don’t. You don’t ask your best friend anything.
Because the second he leans down and those soft lips brush yours in that infuriatingly tender, maddeningly gentle Clark-Kent way, your brain promptly ejects itself out the window.
He walks off, humming, as you slowly rotate in your chair like a malfunctioning Roomba.
Your head is foggy, filled with so many unanswered questions that somehow, feel so far from being said out loud.
Nothing’s changed, oddly enough. Clark still walks you home. Still hovers over your desk, helping you with rewrites and amendments. He still brings you lunch and spends Wednesday evenings watching re-runs with you in your apartment.
He just… kisses you, now. Pecks you, more like, like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
And before you know it, days pass. Days turn into weeks, and naturally- predictably- it gets worse.
Or better. Or whatever this is.
Because now- now, Clark starts doing it not just before lunch. He no longer limits himself, and you still say nothing.
He kisses you goodbye when he heads home for the night.
Kisses you hello when you meet at the elevator in the morning.
He kisses you when he hands you a report you asked for.
And, he even kisses you when you complain about the printer.
Tiny, sweet, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pecks. Like he’s testing you. Like he’s waiting; for what, you don’t know, but what you do know is that you are very close to the brink of explosion.
By the time a whole month passes, your confusion has reached clinically concerning levels. Your Google search history is comical, an amalgamation of confusion and shock before you swiftly swapped to incognito;
do best friends kiss on lips??
signs of short term memory loss
am I hallucinating long-term?
long term hallucination symptoms
group long term hallucination
do kryptonian people greet each other with kiss
You search with a slight hunch, your entire body covering your phone screen in both fear and shame of someone seeing. You’re desperate; completely at your wits’ end, and Clark seems to be none the wiser.
But then, comes the moment everything changes.
It’s late. Everyone else has gone home, and the newsroom is buzzing only with low lights and the distant hum of the city outside.
It’s just you and Clark, finishing up an article he’s been helping you with.
You’re buried in revisions, your brains working in sync as you push through the exhaustion of the last few weeks. You and Clark had gotten better about leaving on time, but with deadlines closing in, staying late wasn’t really optional tonight.
You’re tired, very much so- to the point where pretending like you’re not bothered is a feat in itself. Clark is focused, glasses sliding down his nose as he leans over your shoulder to point at something on the screen.
And then- like it’s the easiest thing in the world- he tilts your chin gently with two fingers and gives you a slow, lingering kiss on the lips.
Not a peck this time. Not a blink.
A kiss.
A real, life-altering, friendship-make-or-breaking kiss that injects electricity in your veins and brings all your dead senses back to life. It’s wonderful. It’s passionate. And above all, it is scary.
You freeze. But instead of pulling back like he usually does, Clark stays there, lips pressed softly to yours, patient as ever. Waiting. Wanting in silence, for you to respond.
So, you do.
Your body moves before your brain can protest, before any part of you testifies against the very notion of giving in- your hand curls into the front of his shirt, you tilt upward, and suddenly you’re kissing him back.
Your lips are slow as they move together; at first, awkward. Then, the awkwardness melts into something familiar, something warm.
And finally, it turns absolutely, heart-stoppingly illegal.
Just waiting for her to realise, his words play over and over- incessant, like a broken record- in your mind.
One day.
You fit together perfectly, you and Clark. Your lips do all the work while your minds fight to catch up. He makes a tiny noise- a surprised, happy sound- and you swear you can feel his smile against your mouth.
You pull back first, breath uneven, eyes wide and stunned in a way you can’t even hide. Your hands are still fisted in the front of his shirt like you forgot to let go.
Your grip doesn't loosen on the fabric, too afraid to disrupt the moment you’re both suspended in.
Clark doesn’t move. He just watches you, chest rising slowly, hope written all over him. You can't speak, so you don't.
But something in your face- the shock, the realisation trying to break through and finally shake some sense into you- makes him smile.
It softens as he looks at you, folding into something heartbreakingly tender.
“I told you…” Clark murmurs softly, brushing a strand of hair from your face with the gentlest touch. His eyes graze your lips again, already hungry for more, “that you’d figure it out.”
i have a problem with overexplaining things and i really tried not to w this fic - tried something different!! hope you liked <33
The apartment was quiet in the sweetest way, filled with the hum of the kettle and the faint flicker of a candle on the counter. You padded back into the living room with two mugs, setting one down in front of Bucky where he sat curled into the couch.
“You’re spoiling me,” he teased as you handed him the other.
“You say that every time,” you smiled, tucking yourself against his side. “It’s just tea, Buck.”
“Not to me,” he murmured, kissing your temple before taking a slow sip. “To me, it’s love.”
You laughed softly, shaking your head, but you felt your chest warm at the sincerity in his voice. That was the thing about Bucky he never said anything halfway. When he loved you, he made sure you felt it in every word, every glance, every absent brush of his fingers.
The two of you melted into the couch cushions, the TV playing something neither of you were really paying attention to. Bucky was far too busy sneaking kisses into your hair and pressing his nose to your cheek. At one point, you stretched out and set your feet in his lap, and he immediately wrapped his warm hands around your ankles like he couldn’t stand not touching you.
Dinner was simple just pasta, tossed together while the two of you bumped shoulders in the kitchen, laughing when you reached for the same spoon. Bucky stole a bite before you’d even plated it, pretending to be innocent when you swatted him.
“You’re impossible,” you said with a grin.
“And hopelessly in love,” he shot back, grinning as he leaned down to kiss your cheek.
The meal ended up eaten on the couch, curled together under a blanket, sharing from the same bowl because Bucky insisted it “just tastes better that way.” Every so often he’d lift a forkful to your lips, his blue eyes soft as he watched you take it.
By the time you made it to bed, you were pleasantly full and impossibly content. Bucky stretched out on his back, pulling you onto his chest, one hand tracing lazy circles against your arm while the other held yours tightly.
“Can I tell you something?” he whispered into your hair.
“Always,” you mumbled sleepily.
His lips brushed the crown of your head. “I never thought I’d get this. A home. You. This kind of peace. And now that I do… I don’t ever wanna let it go.”
You tilted your face up, kissing him softly. “Good,” you whispered. “Because you’re stuck with me forever.”
He chuckled quietly, pressing another kiss to your lips before settling you against him again. “Exactly the way I want it, doll.”
Wrapped up in his arms, the world faded until all that was left was warmth, love, and the steady beat of Bucky’s heart beneath your ear the only home you’d ever need.
Summary: pregnancy makes you irresistible, and Bucky can’t keep his hands off you .
—————————————————————————
You’d lost track of how long Bucky had been between your thighs.
One second, you were lotioning your belly in front of the mirror, and the next he was on his knees, moaning against your skin, licking and kissing you like it was his life’s purpose. His large hands cradled your thighs, your hips, your bump everywhere and it was almost too much.
But not enough. Never enough when it came to him.
His lips dragged over the swell of your belly, up to your ribs, then back down again, his tongue darting out to taste the skin just above your navel. He looked up at you with so much adoration it made your knees weak.
“I’ll never get over this,” he whispered. “You glowing, soft, so full of life. Full of us. You’re carrying everything I’ve ever wanted in this world.”
“Bucky”
His hand slid back between your thighs, parting you gently again. “One more, sweetheart. Wanna taste you when you fall apart just one more time before I make love to you.”
You whimpered as he leaned in again, mouth hot and insistent, licking you slowly and deeply as you gripped his hair and rocked against his tongue. His moan vibrated through your core, and the tension coiled up again fast too fast.
You shattered on his tongue, gasping his name, one hand gripping the back of his neck while the other trembled against the curve of your belly.
He pulled back with a messy grin and glistening lips. “God, I love the way you taste when you’re like this. Like heaven. Like mine.”
He stood, effortlessly lifting you into his arms. “Time for me to show you just how much I love you, baby.”
You clung to his neck, kissing him slow and deep as he carried you to the bed and laid you down with reverence. He peeled your shirt off gently, kissing the round curve of your belly again as he settled between your legs.
He paused just to look at you bare, glowing, and flushed with pleasure.
“My beautiful girl,” he whispered, crawling up your body. “My perfect, glowing, sexy, pregnant wife.”
You blushed, giggling as he kissed your cheek, your neck, your chest paying extra attention to your sensitive breasts, cupping them like they were delicate treasures.
“You’re so full here too,” he murmured, brushing his thumbs over your nipples, lips pressing between them. “God, you’re made for this.”
You tugged at his shirt, breathless. “Bucky. Please.”
He undressed quickly, and when he finally pressed against you, you gasped he was hard and hot and already leaking.
“Tell me if anything hurts,” he murmured, forehead resting on yours. “I’ll stop. I’ll take care of you.”
You nodded, tears pricking your eyes at how gentle he was, how careful.
He eased inside with a low groan, pausing once he was fully sheathed.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “You feel like home. So warm. So good. So mine.”
He began moving slowly, hips rocking into you with practiced control, his hands constantly touching your bump, your hips, your thighs he needed to feel all of you, needed to know you were really here, really his.
“Can’t believe you’re carrying our baby,” he whispered into your neck. “That I get to do this with you. That I get to love you like this.”
You moaned, arching up into him, your belly pressing against his chest.
He looked down, mesmerized again by the way your body cradled his baby. “Look at you. Look at how full you are. This bump” He kissed the top of it while still rocking into you slowly. “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Your nails raked lightly down his back, your body beginning to tremble again from overstimulation.
“I can’t”
“Yes, you can,” he whispered, kissing you hard. “Let go for me. Let me feel you fall apart one more time. You’re safe, baby. I’ve got you.”
You came with a cry of his name, clutching him tightly as he pushed deep once more and spilled inside you with a groan, trembling against your skin.
He didn’t move far just rolled gently to the side, pulling you against his chest, one hand resting instinctively over your bump “God I love you”.
Summary: Bucky notices you haven’t been wearing your wedding ring
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It was one of those quiet Sunday mornings in the Barnes household sunlight spilling through the sheer curtains, the scent of fresh coffee drifting from the kitchen, and the sound of Bucky humming something old-timey under his breath.
You padded into the kitchen in one of his old Henley’s and a pair of fuzzy socks, hair tousled and cheeks still warm from sleep. He smiled when he saw you, his whole face lighting up in that boyish way that still made your heart do flips.
“Mornin’, sweetheart,” he said, pressing a kiss to your forehead as you leaned against the counter beside him. His metal hand slid around your waist automatically, like it always did.
“Mornin’, Bucky.” You yawned, stretching your arms over your head, and that’s when you saw his eyes flick down for just a second. It was subtle, but you caught it. He didn’t say anything. Not right away.
But you knew Bucky Barnes better than anyone, and you recognized that soft flicker of doubt in his eyes before he turned back to the coffee.
You glanced down at your hand. Bare.
You hadn’t meant to leave your ring off not in any significant way. You’d taken it off last week while baking because dough had gotten stuck in the band, and then you’d forgotten to put it back on. It had sat safely in the little dish on your dresser, waiting for you.
But Bucky hadn’t asked about it. Not once.
You stood quietly for a moment, then reached for the coffee mug he’d already poured for you. His back was to you now, but his shoulders were a little stiffer than usual.
“Bucky,” you said gently, cradling the warm mug in your hands. “Can I ask you something?”
He turned slowly, expression soft but guarded. “Of course, doll.”
“Did you… notice I haven’t been wearing my ring?”
His eyes flicked to your bare finger again. He didn’t answer right away. Just gave a small, quiet nod. “Yeah. I noticed.”
You bit your lip. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
He shrugged, and the corner of his mouth twitched like he was trying not to let something deeper show. “Didn’t wanna make a big deal out of it. Figured maybe it was uncomfortable or you needed a break from it. I didn’t want you to feel like you had to wear it for me.”
You walked over to him and reached up to cup his face. His stubble scratched your palm as he leaned into your touch, almost instinctively.
“Bucky. I took it off while I was baking and just forgot to put it back on. That’s it.” Your thumb brushed across his cheekbone. “You think I’d ever want a break from being married to you?”
He looked down at you, eyes soft and unsure in that way that only you got to see.
“I know it’s just a ring,” he murmured. “But when I don’t see it, I guess… part of me wonders if maybe you”
“No,” you said firmly, already reaching for his hand. “I love you. I love being your wife. It has nothing to do with a ring on my finger.” You gave a sheepish smile. “Though I am gonna go put it back on right now.”
You turned to leave, but he tugged your wrist gently. “Wait.”
You paused, eyebrows raised.
He pulled a small box out of the junk drawer behind him. “Since we’re talkin’ about rings…”
You blinked. “Bucky?”
“I saw this the other day when I was picking up your favorite tea.” He opened the box to reveal a delicate chain. “So if you ever don’t wanna wear the ring on your finger, you can wear it on this. Around your neck. Still close to your heart.”
“James Buchanan Barnes,” you whispered, heart full and eyes shining. “You are the sweetest man on this entire planet.”
He grinned, relieved now. “I just love bein’ yours, sweetheart. I know it’s silly to get caught up in a ring, but… it reminds me every day that I get to call you mine.”
You took the chain from him, slipping it on so the ring rested just above your heart. “There. Now you’ve got me twice over.”
He pulled you into his arms, wrapping you up in warmth and familiar safety. “Yeah, but you had me first.”
You kissed him right there in the kitchen, sun streaming in, coffee long forgotten, both of you wrapped in a love that didn’t need gold or diamonds to prove it still sparkled just as brightly. You had slipped the wedding ring back onto your finger that morning. It felt warm again, like it belonged there like it never should’ve left in the first place.
Bucky noticed immediately, of course. You were just getting ready to leave the apartment, he was slipping on his leather jacket when you held your hand out to grab your phone and your ring glinted in the light.
He froze mid-motion, lips twitching into a grin so wide it practically split his face.
“You wore it.”
You looked down innocently. “Wore what?”
“Don’t play with me, doll,” he said, pulling you toward him by the hand in question. “Look at you, showin’ off.”
“I just figured since my very handsome husband gave me the prettiest ring in the world, I should wear it,” you said, eyes sparkling.
“Damn right,” he muttered, and before you could say another word, he dipped his head and kissed the hand with your ring like some old-fashioned heartthrob. “I’ll never get tired of seein’ it on you.”
You leaned into him with a smirk. “You gonna cry again?”
“I didn’t cry the first time,” he grumbled half heartedly, but the way his ears turned pink betrayed him.
The BAU bullpen was quiet, a rare moment of peace between cases. You sat at your desk pretending to look over a file, but your eyes kept drifting to the tall, lanky genius across the room who was pretending not to be watching you back.
It had been six months since you and Spencer started dating. Six months of sneaky smiles, subtle hand touches under tables, and late night phone calls that lasted until one of you inevitably passed out. It was new and private and special something you both agreed to keep just yours for a while longer. The job was intense enough without your relationship being under a microscope.
You had just returned from grabbing coffee when Spencer brushed past your desk, his hand casually grazing your waist a move subtle enough for anyone else to miss but enough to make you bite your lip to hide a smile.
Later, in the conference room, the rest of the team was finishing paperwork, when Spencer passed you a sticky note that simply read:
“File room? Five minutes?”
You glanced up at him, your stomach flipping in that sweet, familiar way. You gave the tiniest nod.
Five minutes later, you slipped into the file room at the back of the office. It was quiet, the low hum of fluorescent lights and rows of criminal files your only company until arms wrapped gently around your waist from behind.
“Hi,” he murmured into your shoulder.
You tilted your head toward him and smiled. “Hi.”
He turned you around, and without another word, leaned in and kissed you. It was slow, warm, familiar his lips soft and his hands careful, always gentle with you. You had kissed him countless times, but the way he always melted into it like it was the first made you fall even harder.
Then
“Oh my god.”
You both froze. Spencer pulled away like he’d been electrocuted. You turned slowly toward the door only to see JJ, Morgan, Garcia, and Prentiss standing there with matching stunned expressions. Hotch, to your horror, was just behind them.
There was a beat of absolute silence.
Then Morgan grinned, wide and teasing. “So that’s why pretty boy’s been walking around smiling like he knows something we don’t!”
JJ was laughing now, covering her mouth. “Wait how long?!”
You covered your face with your hands. “Oh god.”
Spencer cleared his throat and mumbled, “About… six months.”
Penelope gasped, holding her heart. “Are you telling me I missed six months of potential matchmaking glory?!”
“I feel betrayed,” Prentiss deadpanned. “You know how much I love a good slow burn reveal.”
Even Hotch, typically unreadable, raised a single eyebrow. “As long as it doesn’t affect your work, it’s none of our business. But… maybe next time, find somewhere with a door that locks.”
Spencer’s ears were bright red. You leaned your forehead against his chest and groaned. “We are never living this down.”
He wrapped his arms around you protectively and murmured, “I mean… maybe not. But at least we don’t have to hide anymore?”
You looked up at him, his soft smile making everything feel okay. The teasing voices behind you faded as the team drifted back to work, and Spencer bent down to press one last kiss to your forehead.
“Guess the secret’s out,” he whispered.
You smiled. “Yeah but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
Later in the bullpen
Morgan dropped a sticky note on your desk that read “Get a room, you two ”
And JJ just winked across the room.
You buried your face in your hands again as Spencer handed you your coffee his fingers brushing yours, his soft little smile just for you.
Maybe being busted wasn’t so bad.
After the sticky notes and teasing died down, things didn’t change that much except now the team took every opportunity to poke fun at the two of you. And while you acted exasperated, you kind of loved it. So did Spencer, not that he’d ever admit it out loud.
That evening, as most of the team began filtering out for the night, you stayed behind at your desk, tapping away at your keyboard. Spencer, ever the night owl, was seated across the way, going over reports with the kind of quiet intensity that made your heart ache in the best way.
You got up, walked to his desk under the guise of asking about paperwork, and placed your hand on the back of his chair.
“They’ve been unusually tame, don’t you think?” you said softly.
Spencer looked up at you through his lashes, lips quirking into a half smile. “You mean besides Garcia drawing tiny hearts around our photos on the murder board this afternoon?”
You laughed, the kind of quiet, warm laugh that only came with him. “Okay, yeah. That was bold.”
He glanced around the empty bullpen, then reached for your hand. “You doing okay with everyone knowing now?”
You nodded but hesitated just long enough for him to notice.
“It’s just…” you sighed. “I liked having this little secret. It was ours. It felt safe.”
Spencer’s thumb brushed over your knuckles. “It still is ours. Just because they know doesn’t change what this is.” His voice dropped a little, tender and full of affection. “I’m still yours, and now I get to do this without hiding.”
Before you could respond, he gently tugged you down to sit in his lap, arms curling around your waist. You looked around out of habit, but the bullpen was deserted, just the soft glow of desk lamps and the hum of the vending machines.
You leaned in and rested your forehead against his. “I love you,” you whispered.
It tumbled out so naturally, so quietly, like it had always lived there on your tongue, waiting for a soft, perfect moment like this.
Spencer blinked, stunned just a second longer than usual. Then a breathy, almost disbelieving laugh left his lips. “You do?”
You smiled against his cheek. “I do.”
He pressed his lips to yours again, slower this time, more meaningful. “I love you too,” he murmured, almost shy about it but his hands didn’t shake, and his grip didn’t loosen.
You sat there together for a while, tucked into each other like the rest of the world could wait.
The next morning
As soon as you walked into the bullpen Spencer right behind you, Morgan greeted you with a low whistle.
“Well, well, well. Look who showed up together.”
“We didn’t drive together,” you deadpanned. “Just got coffee at the same time.”
“Sure,” Morgan grinned, nudging Spencer with his elbow. “Just don’t start making out in the break room again.”
Spencer groaned softly. “It was the file room.”
“Uh-huh,” Garcia chimed in, popping her head out from behind her computer. “Spence, sweet boy genius, I say this with love you kiss her like no one’s watching. Which is beautiful. And also how you got caught.”
You turned bright red while Spencer awkwardly sipped his coffee like it could hide him from view.
“You two are adorable,” JJ added, walking in and giving you a supportive smile. “We’re happy for you. Just ignore Morgan. He’s jealous.”
“I’m not jealous,” Morgan scoffed. “I’m invested. I expect a full play by play.”
You and Spencer both groaned, sinking into your chairs in defeat.
But when your eyes met across the desk, you both smiled.
The secret was out. The teasing was endless. But so was the warmth the quiet comfort of knowing that no matter how chaotic the job was, no matter how many late nights or impossible cases came your way, you had each other.
Summary: Spencer gets released from prison and decides he can no longer live another day without you by his side
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
You didn’t cry in front of anyone not once. Not JJ, not Emily. Not even Garcia when she pulled you into a thousand hugs during those first few weeks after Spencer was taken into custody.
You couldn’t afford to fall apart. Because if you did who would be strong for him?
You visited every chance you could. You kept your voice steady when you spoke to him, even when his eyes looked so tired and haunted you could barely breathe. You told him about new cases, updates from Garcia, how Henry was doing in school. You wore your best smiles and never let him see the ache.
But behind closed doors , You curled up in his cardigan. You sobbed into your pillow.
You clutched the mug he used every morning like it was a lifeline.
And when you were alone in your car outside the prison, after another too short visit, you’d scream just to let it out. The fear, the rage, the heartbreak.
Because he didn’t deserve this.
And you missed him. God, you missed him so much.
When Spencer finally walked out of prison, he barely made it five feet before you were in his arms.
He’d grown thinner. Tired. But his arms still fit around you like home. You kissed his face, over and over, whispering how proud you were, how strong he’d been, how much you loved him.
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” you kept whispering, like if you said it enough, you could make the pain disappear for both of you.
He didn’t say much that first day. He just kept touching you your hand, your cheek, your hair like he couldn’t believe you were real. Every time he looked away, his fingers found their way back to you. And every time you looked at him, he was already looking at you.
You stayed home for a few days after his release. The two of you didn’t leave the apartment once. You cooked for him, let him pick the shows, read together in bed. You held him when he had nightmares and never let go.
One morning, you found him standing by the window before sunrise, staring out with tears in his eyes.
You wrapped your arms around him from behind, pressing your cheek into his back.
“I’m okay,” he whispered. “I just… I don’t know what to do with all this freedom. But I do know one thing.”
You turned him around slowly, hands on his waist. “What’s that?”
“I’m never letting them take me from you again.” His voice cracked. “I wasted so much time thinking I had more time. But nothing is promised.”
“Spence—”
He dropped to one knee.
“I don’t have a ring,” he said quickly, nervously. “I was going to wait, to make it special. But I can’t wait anymore. I don’t want to waste another second. I need to know you’ll always be mine, because I am already yours.”
Tears welled in your eyes as your hands flew to your mouth.
“Will you marry me, right now? Today? Just us if you want, or the whole team, I don’t care. I just want to be your husband. Please?”
You knelt down in front of him, hands trembling as you cupped his face. “Yes,” you whispered. “Yes, yes, of course, Spencer. I’ve been yours for years.”
Two hours later, in Rossi’s garden you were getting married.
Garcia wore a crown of fake flowers and sobbed through the entire thing.
Rossi stood in the back with a soft smile.
You wore a simple white dress Emily had rushed to grab from her closet, and Spencer wore his best shirt the one you’d gotten him for his birthday last year.
The vows weren’t fancy. They weren’t rehearsed. They were spoken between tears and laughter, whispered promises, and forehead kisses.
When he said “I do,” Spencer looked at you like the sun had finally come out after the longest winter of his life.
And when he kissed you, you knew you’d never have to be strong alone again. Not anymore.
You were home.
He was free.
And you were finally his wife.
Forever.
The first night in prison, Spencer lay awake with your name in his mouth like a prayer.
The bunk was hard, the air heavy. He could still feel your hug the way you held on just a second longer when they led him away. You were trying to be strong. You were always trying to be strong. He hated that he made you need to be.
He kept your face in his head like a reel. The little squint you did when you smiled. The way your hands shook when you were overwhelmed but you always pretended they weren’t. The way you kissed his temple when you thought he was asleep.
He hated that he couldn’t protect you from this.
But worse he hated that you couldn’t protect him from it either.
You came to see him every chance they let you. Dressed in neat clothes, hair pulled back, smiles in place. At first, he thought you were okay.
But Spencer had studied you too long to miss the cracks.
Your eyes were always red-rimmed. You looked thinner. Tired.
And sometimes, when you’d talk about your day, your voice would catch just slightly like you were choking on words you weren’t saying. Like I cried last night or I had a panic attack in the shower or I miss you so much it hurts to breathe.
But you smiled anyway. For him.
You were always strong. For him.
And that’s what broke his heart the most.
He counted days in letters.
You’d leave little notes tucked into books you brought him. One liners. Inside jokes. Sentences that barely filled the margins but filled his chest instead.
“I wore your cardigan all week.”
“Garcia says hi and also to tell you she cried during a cat video yesterday.”
“I love you more today than I did yesterday, somehow.”
He would lie on his bunk and reread them like scripture. Because if he thought too long about what you were going through without him if he imagined you curled up alone in your apartment, trying to breathe without breaking he wasn’t sure he’d survive it.
When they told him he was getting out, he didn’t believe it.
When they put him in clean clothes, when they walked him out the gates, his legs barely moved. Every step felt like waking from a coma.
And then he saw you.
You were standing there in a soft sweater, eyes full of tears. And suddenly the weight lifted all at once. It was over. He was free. You were real.
You threw your arms around him and kissed him like the world was ending.
He clung to you like it just started again.
Back home, he couldn’t stop touching you.
Not in a possessive way. Just… grounding. His fingers in your hair. Your palm against his chest. Knees pressed together on the couch. Your heartbeat was the only thing that kept the dizziness at bay.
That first night, when he woke up gasping, you were already sitting up beside him.
“I’ve got you,” you whispered. You were crying. “You’re safe. You’re home.”
He nodded, but the guilt curled in his chest. Because you were still carrying it all. You still weren’t sleeping. And it hit him like a flood:
He never wanted to put you through that again.
The next morning, he stood by the window and watched the sky change color. You were asleep in bed, tangled in his shirt, peaceful for once. And it was there, in that quiet, that it clicked.
He needed to marry you.
He needed to make it real needed to tether himself to you in the only way he knew how. Not because he thought you’d leave. But because he needed to stay. Permanently. Legally. Eternally.
He didn’t have a ring. He didn’t have a plan. He barely had himself back together.
But he had love. And he had you.
That was enough.
“I don’t want to wait anymore,” he said, voice shaking as he knelt in front of you.
You gasped, eyes wide and shining.
“I want to be your husband,” he said. “Please. Let’s get married today. I can’t be away from you again. I won’t survive it.”
Tears spilled down your cheeks as you dropped to your knees and kissed him, laughing through it.
“Yes,” you whispered. “Yes, Spencer. A million times, yes.”
A few hours later, surrounded by the team, he stood in Rossi’s garden in front of you in a borrowed tie and his best shirt.
You held his hands with that same steady strength you always gave him. But now he could see the relief in your smile.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
When he said “I do,” he meant it in every way possible.
I do choose you.
I do love you.
I do promise never to make you suffer alone again.
When he kissed you, he finally exhaled.
He was yours.
You were his.
And the rest of his life could finally begin.
Spencer had been nervous walking back into the BAU after prison. But walking in with you, as his wife?
That felt… different. Softer. Full circle.
The elevator doors opened and there you were, fingers laced through his, wedding bands glinting under the fluorescent lights like tiny flashes of rebellion against everything the last year had thrown at you both.
Your badge still sat proudly on your hip. His hung newly reissued around his neck.
And your last name, now officially hyphenated with Reid, looked absolutely perfect in the updated Bureau directory.
The bullpen was already buzzing when you walked in case files being shuffled, Garcia talking a mile a minute to Luke over speakerphone but the moment JJ looked up, everything came to a halt.
“Oh my god” she gasped, standing so fast her chair rolled back.
You barely had a second to respond before she rushed around her desk and threw her arms around both of you. “You actually did it!”
“We did ,” you said, grinning. “Last night in Rossi’s garden.”
“With me crying,” Garcia added, appearing suddenly from behind a potted plant like a pastel fairy godmother. “Like, aggressively crying.”
Rossi was next. He gave Spencer a smile, followed by a firm handshake and a pat on the shoulder. “Welcome home. Both of you.”
Emily held your hands up, examining your simple, shining bands. “You two are disgustingly adorable. I hope you know that.”
“They know,” Luke said with a smirk. “They haven’t stopped smiling since they walked in.”
“We haven’t stopped smiling since the wedding,” you corrected.
Spencer just stood beside you, beaming. It was different from the smile he wore for press conferences or lectures. This was his softest smile. The one only you got to see most of the time. Except now? He didn’t care who saw it.
You were his wife. And he was proud.
Later that morning, Garcia showed up in the briefing room with a PowerPoint titled:
Operation: Welcome Back, Dr. and Agent Reid
It had confetti animations. There were cupcakes. A picture slideshow of you and Reid. JJ and Emily brought in a cake shaped like a stack of books. And someone probably Garcia hung up a ridiculous “JUST MARRIED (AND STILL BADASS FBI AGENTS )” banner across the whiteboard.
You and Spencer sat close during the meeting. His hand stayed on your thigh the entire time under the table. Every time he looked at you, he felt that swell of quiet disbelief.
You were his partner in every way now. In life. In work. In love.
After the debrief, he turned toward you with a smile. “How long do you think it’ll take them to stop making heart eyes at us?”
You grinned. “Let’s hope never.”
He leaned in and whispered, “I love you, Mrs. Reid.”
You squeezed his hand. “I love you more, Dr. Reid.”
And just like that, the world after all its chaos, its heartbreak, its time apart finally felt right again.
Because no matter how dark things had gotten, the two of you made it back.
If you’re reading this, it means you’re probably barefoot and gorgeous, standing in front of your dress, wondering if it’s okay to cry before the makeup team even shows up.
(It is. I already did. Twice.)
I was going to wait to tell you all of this when you walk down the aisle but you know me. I’ll cry, forget half of it, and just stand there grinning like an idiot. So here it is, written down. A little piece of my heart, on paper, because you already have the rest of it anyway.
I don’t know how I got this lucky.
I don’t know what I did in this life or the last to deserve someone who looks at me like I’m something soft and good.
But I swear to you, I will spend every single day earning this.
I will protect your heart with both hands.
I will keep your laugh sacred.
I will remind you every morning and every night:
You are my home.
If you’re nervous good. Me too.
Not because I doubt a single thing. But because loving you this much makes everything feel holy.
I’ll be waiting for you.
In the suit. With the hands that still shake when I touch you.
And the heart that’s already yours forever.
Con todo mi amor,
Pedro
____
A Letter On Your First Anniversary
Mi amor,
One year.
One whole year of waking up next to you, kissing your shoulder good morning, hearing you laugh in the kitchen, falling asleep with your head on my chest.
And somehow, it still doesn’t feel like enough time.
I feel like I just met you and also like I’ve known you forever. I think that’s what love does it makes time feel both brand new and ancient. Like I’ve loved you in every lifetime. Like I’ve been waiting for you for centuries and finally, finally, I get to keep you.
You’re my home. You’re my breath. You’re the first and last thing on my mind.
I’ve learned your sleepy noises. Your favorite side of the bed. The way you stir your coffee even when there’s nothing left in the cup.
And you’ve learned me, too.
You see all the quiet, nervous corners of me and you don’t just tolerate them. You hold them. Like they’re worth loving.
I still don’t know how I got you.
I still don’t know how I’ll ever deserve you.
But I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.
So here’s to our first anniversary and all the ones to come.
I’ll love you on our worst days and our quiet ones.
I’ll love you when we’re old and grey and still sneaking kisses in the kitchen.
I’ll love you when your hands are wrinkled, and your laugh lines are deeper, and your hair smells like shampoo and Sunday mornings.
I’ll love you even then.
I’ll love you always.
Yours Always ,
Pedro
____
A Letter When You’re r Pregnant
Mi vida,
I still don’t have the right words for what you are to me but now, somehow, you’re even more.
You’re growing our baby.
I know your back aches, and your ankles swell, and sometimes you cry because you dropped a spoon, and your hormones make everything feel huge but when I look at you, all I see is magic.
You are creating life inside you. Our life.
I still wake up and reach for you like I’m afraid you’re a dream.
And now, I put my hand on your belly and feel something move, and it’s the closest thing to holy I’ve ever known.
I want you to know no matter how tired, overwhelmed, or emotional you feel I see you. I love you.
You’re not just my wife. You’re the mother of my child.
And that will always be the greatest thing I’ll ever witness.
You’re strong.
You’re beautiful.
You’re carrying our future. I already love them but I’ll never stop loving you more.
Yours Always,
Pedro
____
After Your First Argument
Mi corazón,
I don’t know if you want to hear from me right now.
I don’t blame you if you need space.
But I had to write this because my mouth never says the right thing when I’m scared.
And I was scared.
I still am.
I’m terrified of messing this up. Of hurting you. Of becoming someone you can’t look at with the same softness in your eyes.
But I need you to know I love you.
I love you even when we’re angry.
I love you when we’re quiet, when we’re distant, when we’re lost in our heads.
You’re still my home. Even when the lights flicker. Even when the doors slam.
If I said things I didn’t mean, I’m sorry.
If I made you feel small or unloved swear to you, that was never in my heart.
I am not going anywhere.
I am still here.
I still want this.
I still want you.
And I’ll keep showing up not just with flowers or words, but with effort. With softness. With everything I have.
When you’re ready, I’m here.
And I love you.
Yours Always,
Pedro
____
You Write Pedro A Letter
My Pedro,
I don’t know where to start.
You always have the words. You always say the right thing even when you’re rambling, even when your hands shake, even when you don’t think you’re making sense. You do.
But I wanted to try this time. I wanted to put it in writing.
Not because I think you’ll forget but because I never want me to forget.
I never want to forget what it felt like to be chosen by you.
What it felt like the first time I saw you cry when you looked at me in my wedding dress.
The way your voice cracked when you said “wife” like it was your favorite word.
I want to remember how safe I felt when your hands were on my stomach, whispering to a baby we hadn’t met yet.
I want to remember the way you held me when I thought I wasn’t enough and reminded me I was everything.
And I want to say thank you.
For showing up. For staying soft.
For making our house a home, even when the laundry’s piled high and we’ve had cereal for dinner twice in a row.
For kissing me like I’m still new.
For making me laugh when I’m tired.
For making love to me like time stops every time you touch me.
You are the safest place I’ve ever known.
You are everything I prayed for.
And if we grow old and gray and quiet, I hope we’re still writing each other letters.
And I hope you’re still holding my hand like you never want to let go.
I love you, Pedro.
With my whole heart. With every version of me I’ve ever been.
Not really. Not deeply. Not since the mission. Not since Bucky disappeared.
It had been nineteen days.
Nineteen days since you last heard his voice through the comm, low and gravelly with that teasing warmth he only ever used with you.
Nineteen days since he’d said, “I’ll be back before you can miss me, doll.”
He was wrong.
Because you missed him before the jet even left the ground.
You hadn’t been able to sleep in the bed. It still smelled like him. You slept curled on the couch with his hoodie, waiting. Waiting for anything. For the door to knock. For someone to say he was okay. For the damn phone to ring.
But it never did.
Steve and Sam tried to reassure you. The mission had gone dark, but that didn’t mean he was
You couldn’t even think the word.
But your body knew. Nausea, insomnia, cold dread like lead in your lungs. You cried in the shower. You cried in the middle of the night. Then you stopped crying, which was somehow worse.
The house was a graveyard of memories. His boots by the door. The coffee mug with his fingerprint still smudged on it. His toothbrush.
Sometimes, you held it in your hand and whispered, Come home.
On day 20 Steve brought you tea. You snapped.
“I don’t want tea, Steve. I want my husband.”
Your voice broke. So did your knees. You collapsed into his arms and sobbed so hard your ribs hurt.
On day 22 you had a panic attack in the grocery store. The kind that makes your vision go black and your lungs forget how to breathe.
A stranger held your hand until it passed.
You went home, climbed into bed in Bucky’s hoodie, and screamed into the pillow until you saw stars.
On Day 23 You were folding laundry you didn’t remember washing when the knock came.
Three soft raps. You froze.
You didn’t rush to the door anymore. You had learned. Every time you did, it wasn’t him.
But something in your bones this time whispered: Go. Your feet moved on their own.
You opened the door and there he was.
Battered. Bruised. Blood crusted at his temple. Arm twitching like it hadn’t fully recalibrated. Eyes wide. Staring at you like you were the ghost.
He was thinner. Paler. But he was Bucky.
Your Bucky.
You couldn’t move.
Neither could he.
“…Hi, doll,” he whispered.
You launched yourself into his arms.
He caught you like muscle memory.
You kissed him like you were drowning, and he was air. You felt his hands trembling on your face. Felt his lips, desperate and raw against yours. Felt every broken piece of your soul stitching itself back together with every breath he took.
“I thought you were dead,” you sobbed. “I thought I couldn’t—”
“I tried to come back,” he choked out. “They had dampeners. No comms. No exits. I tried.”
“You’re here.” You clutched his shirt. “That’s all that matters.”
And then he cried.
Silent tears on your skin as he kissed your forehead, your cheeks, your mouth. His arms around you like he’d die if he let go.
“I kept your picture,” he whispered. “From our wedding. I looked at it every night. Every time I wanted to give up.”
You kissed him again, salty and breathless.
And you held each other in the doorway like a lifeline.
Because that’s what you were.
Bucky’s Pov
He knew he was going to die by day six.
No food. No comms. His mission partner dead. Trapped in an underground complex with a disabled arm and a fractured rib.
He wasn’t scared of death. Not really.
But he was scared of dying without seeing you again. So he didn’t. He lived. For you.
For your laugh, your voice, the way you kissed the corner of his mouth before he left on every mission.
For the photo in his vest pocket your wedding day. You were laughing, and he was looking at you like a man who had somehow been given heaven.
He slept on cold floors. Fought his way through armed patrols. Bled into his boots. And whispered your name under his breath to remind himself what was waiting.
He lost count of the days.
But he never forgot your face.
When he finally escaped, when the light hit his skin again and the pain caught up to him there was only one place he wanted to be.
Home.
And when you opened that door looking like you’d been shattered and still loved him anyway he knew he’d made it.
“I’m not dead,” he whispered into your hair. “I’m home.”
Two days later, you found him in the kitchen. Shirtless. In plaid pajama pants. Humming to the radio and flipping pancakes with a spatula like a goof and you burst into tears.
Happy ones.
Because this the sunlight in his eyes, the butter on the stove, the safety in your chest this was real.
“I’ll make yours extra crispy,” he said, grinning. “You always steal mine anyway.” You threw your arms around him and kissed him until he laughed.
Later, he ran a bath, just how you liked it.
You slid into the tub together, your back to his chest, his arms wrapped around you. The water steamed around you like a cocoon. You rested your head on his shoulder, eyes fluttering shut.
He traced circles on your thigh with gentle fingers.
“You fell asleep like this all the time before,” he whispered.
“I was never more at peace than in your arms.”
He kissed your jaw. “You’ll never be out of them again.”
You turned, slowly, water rippling, and faced him.
“I love you.”
He cupped your cheek, eyes glassy. “Forever, doll.”
Later, curled in bed in one of his old henleys, you fell asleep with your head on his chest, listening to the rhythm of his heartbeat.
Bucky stayed awake just a little longer, brushing his thumb over your wedding ring.
Summary: Bucky lets down his guard in your arms, wrapped in bubbles, warmth, and love.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
The water was warm. Almost too warm. But Bucky said it helped his shoulder, so you didn’t complain.
The tub was oversized, one of those ridiculous “luxury” upgrades you never thought you’d use. Until now with Bucky’s long legs stretched out under yours, his arms around your waist, and his breath soft against your neck it made perfect sense.
The air smelled like vanilla from the bubbles you’d dumped in without reading the label. A few stubborn suds clung to Bucky’s arm , catching the candlelight and making him look almost ethereal a little less soldier, a little more storybook.
“Comfy?” he asked, chin resting on your shoulder.
You nodded, humming. “You make a good pillow.”
He chuckled, his chest rumbling against your back. “Not too bony?”
“You’re all muscle, Bucky. You’re basically a human mattress. His fingers brushed along your arm, slow and absentminded, tracing patterns into your skin.
For a while, neither of you spoke. You could hear the soft plink of water droplets sliding off the edge of the tub, the muted flicker of candlelight, the slow rhythm of your breathing syncing with his.
“I used to hate baths,” he said eventually, voice low. “Back in the day they weren’t peaceful. It was always rushed. Cold water. Scrubbing down like I was washing off a war.”
You turned slightly in his arms, looking at him over your shoulder. His hair was damp, pushed back from his face, revealing every quiet line of him. You reached up and gently dragged your fingers through it, combing it back.
“But now?” you asked softly.
He looked at you, blue eyes warm. “Now it’s not about scrubbing anything away. It’s just… this. Peace. You.”
You leaned in, kissing the corner of his mouth soft and slow.
“You’re allowed to feel safe, Bucky, you’re allowed to be soft” you whispered against his skin.
He swallowed, jaw tense not from discomfort, but from the emotion you knew he still didn’t always have words for.
“I know,” he murmured. “I feel it. Every time you look at me like I’m not broken.”
“You’re not.”
His eyes closed. “I think I believe you.”
You turned fully now, straddling his lap, careful not to splash water out of the tub. Your arms wrapped around his neck, and he held you like you were something precious. Because to him, you were.
“You know what I call this?” you said, smiling.
He raised an eyebrow. “This? Our bath?”
“Mhm. It’s your bubble armor.”
His brow furrowed. “My Bubble armor?”
“You always think you need to be the tough guy. But in here? You’re just mine. Soft, sleepy, surrounded by bubbles and vanilla. It’s like a forcefield.”
He smiled then a real one, wide and bright, the kind that made you fall in love with him all over again.
“You’re such a dork,” he said, and then he kissed you.
You curled into him, your cheek against his shoulder, water lapping quietly around you both.
In a world that had always taken so much from him, Bucky finally had something the world couldn’t touch.
Peace. Warmth. You.
His bubble armor.
The bathwater had gone lukewarm by the time you climbed out, skin wrinkled and cheeks flushed with warmth. Bucky wrapped you in a thick, fluffy towel without saying a word, gently tucking it around your shoulders like he was wrapping up the most precious thing in the world.
“You look like a sleepy dumpling,” he said softly, brushing a kiss to your temple as you stood on your tiptoe’s to towel off his dripping hair.
“You look like a soggy lion,” you mumbled, still half lost in bath stupor, ruffling his wet curls with both hands.
He grinned, letting you fuss with him. Bucky liked when you touched his hair though he’d never say it out loud. But the way he leaned into your palms told you everything.
Eventually, the two of you made your way to the bedroom, sleepy and wrapped in towels. You tugged one of Bucky’s long-sleeve shirts over your head (it reached your thighs) and crawled into bed while he pulled on a pair of flannel sleep pants and shook out his still damp hair like an overgrown dog.
“Do not shake your hair like that near my pillow,” you warned, pointing.
He smirked. “Oh no. Not your pillow.”
“That’s right. My sacred pillow. You have your own, Barnes.”
“You say that, but I always wake up on yours.”
You couldn’t argue with that. His head always found its way to your pillow and you always woke up tucked against his chest like gravity didn’t apply in your bed unless you were touching.
He climbed in beside you and immediately pulled the blankets up to your chins, wrapping his arm the warm one around your waist and pressing his face into your neck.
“Cold nose!” you squeaked, squirming with a laugh.
He only held you tighter. “You’re my heater. Deal with it.”
You giggled, running your fingers through his hair, slow and soft. His breathing slowed almost instantly, and your heart swelled at the way he melted under your touch the way he only ever truly relaxed with you.
“Hey, Bucky?” you whispered.
“Mm?”
“You okay? Really?”
He shifted just enough to look at you sleepy blue eyes meeting yours in the dim light. “I’m okay,” he said quietly. “I think… I’m happy.”
You kissed the tip of his nose. “You’re allowed to be, y’know. You don’t have to earn it.”
He didn’t answer, but the look he gave you full of something heavy and beautiful said everything.
After a while, his breaths evened out. You could feel his fingers still curled loosely around the hem of your shirt, like he needed the contact even in sleep.
You whispered, just for him: “I love you. So much.”
And maybe, just maybe, he murmured it back slurred and quiet right before the two of you drifted off into the kind of sleep you only get after long baths and being wrapped in love.
