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Your love is my turning page - J.A

☆ Jack Abbot x Residentfem!Reader ☆ Read on AO3

summary: The human body has five senses. It took every single one of yours to fall in love with Jack Abbot. (22.6k)

contents: fluff, hurt/comfort, slow burn, jack is a big softie, idiots in love, reader navigates denial in egypt, protective Jack, mutual pining, implied age gap (early 30s reader), friend!cassie, physical assault (à la dana s1), mean!Robby (but gets better), there was one coat, baby Jane Doe situation, medical procedure (cpr), panic attack, pre-s1 to post-s1

a/n: it took a while but it's finally here! thank you for your patience, i really hope it was worth the wait. per usual, i am incredibly grateful for my part-time beta reader and full-time wife @dyingofeverything

Six months. Six whole months working at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, and you had come to the undeniable conclusion that the emergency department there was completely fucking insane.

Not in the entrancing, cinematic, ‘medicine is chaotic but no worries, we are all heroes without capes’ manner that people relished to romanticize on television, oh no. Here, it was a permanent combat – with the lack of stretchers, the budget cuts from the administration, the endless stream of patients who should have been transferred someplace else long ago, the attendings… Or rather, the singular day attending.

Freshly arrived from three years of residency in Boston, you had expected intensity, long hours and exhaustion that sank into the bones, but nothing could have equipped you for Robby, your personal tormentor, who somehow managed to make every shift resemble a test you hadn’t studied for and whose spirits varied faster than a mood ring. One second, he surveyed you as if a resident ought to be conversant with all diagnosis ever recorded in medicine, and the next, a patronizing scoff spilled past his lips as though you were a teenager who had wandered into his service. He was, in every possible sense, a trial by fire.

Thankfully, PTMC had its perks.

Cassie McKay had been one of the first. About a decade older than you and a second-year resident, she had taken you under her wing in no time, slipping into the role of colleague and older sister effortlessly.

More than once, Cassie had aided you in situations you hadn’t yet learned to navigate, particularly when it came to addicts: while others approached them with thinly veiled judgment – if they even dared come close – Cassie had taught you how to read the fright underneath the withdrawal symptoms, how to let silence do some of the work…how to make them feel human again.

And outside the hospital, on the rare days neither of you were being held hostage by the shifts, she had dragged you downtown more than once with her son Harrison, who would tug at your hand until you sampled all the available pierogies and hotcakes, reminding you for a brief moment that even far from your family, there were people making space in their lives for your presence.

Then, there were Perlah and Princess, the undisputed queens of the ER gossip, who happily educated you on its social ecosystem: who was sleeping with whom, which resident had a breakdown in the bathroom, which nurse had nearly punched Park the Shark from ortho…If there was news, the two nurses had it.

And, of course, there was the night shift. Or, as they proudly called themselves, the Night crawlers.

Being drafted onto those shifts occasionally to cover staffing shortages, it hadn’t taken you long to grasp that they operated like an entirely different department, Ellis and Shen being your guides into that nocturnal world. Straightforward and dry-humored, they showed you which vending machine stocked edible sandwiches at two in the morning and which bars around the PTMC weren’t infested with first-years residents.

Also through them, eventually, came Dr. Jack Abbot.

The first thing you noted about him before your first night shift on Thanksgiving Day was his voice.

Low, raspy, unhurried in a manner that compelled the whole room to lean toward it, the sound had echoed in a conspiratorial tone against the walls of the ER, and though you couldn’t discern his figure at first – only the cluster of night staff gathering near the nurses’ station – you found yourself unconsciously stepping closer when his speech commenced.

There was something about his intonation that gave you the urge to listen harder, like the rest of the room had started conversing in a language you suddenly itched to master above all else.

“Alright, team,” he had drawled, sensing a grin on the face you couldn’t yet glimpse. “Tonight’s gonna be ugly, so let’s do what we do best.” A few groans answered him as he let the silence hang a second longer. “C’mon, you know the words.”

The man cleared his throat, and the dry amusement in his tone deepened. “We are the Night crawlers,” he began.

The response came without delay from the rest of them in one united voice. “We are the Night crawlers.”

“We deal with the weirdest and the wildest,” he continued, and you caught Ellis’ eyes then, whom, with her arms crossed and a sharp smirk, had a little of something else in her expression…pride, you realized – to be part of this team certainly, to belong to this odd, scrappy unit that appeared to transmute those painful hours at the hospital in a home.

You could perceive, in the way she glanced at you, how badly she wanted you to experience this too, the invitation so clear it almost made your chest ache. She beckoned her chin at you once, to which you shook your head, not feeling eligible of being part of this strange ritual.

The man kept going. “Because…”

The entire night crew joined him this time, chanting, “Because we are the weirdest and the wildest of them all!”

That was the moment where you had suffered a very petty little twist of envy in your gut. And yes, it had been an absurdly childish thing to resent – this stupid, ridiculous form of belonging wrapped in gallows humor – and you didn’t know it yet, but the more they would recite it throughout the shifts, the more a traitorous fluid that felt close to vitriol would climb the back of your throat.

Fuck, you would end up cursing for the next six months, you wanted a chant too. And the easy camaraderie and the dry jokes and even the way they gave the impression to acknowledge one another’s limits without asking…but no, instead you got Langdon who snapped at you when it was not one of the nurses (a habit he picked up a few months ago and very far from his common temper, or at least that’s what Perlah said) while playing buddy-buddy with Robby, and Collins, who already had a foot halfway through the door of the PTMC. Quite the A-Team.

So yes, of course you had been jea— As you looked up, a pair of hazel eyes found yours through the half-crowded station, and for one suspended second, you had failed to recall anything: what you were doing, what you were thinking, all was gone.

The man – the one who had spoken, you gathered belatedly – was leaning against the nurses’ main desk, grayish curls falling over his forehead. Freckles scattered over the bridge of his nose, down his cheeks, and you could already note them continuing lower, disappearing beneath the collar of his scrubs. Your attention as well as your eyes dropped to his arms.

With rolled-up sleeves, his broad forearms were completely bare, revealing more freckles there too, like painted constellations in shades of brown. His hands were large, blunt-fingered, the kind that probably could operate eyes closed without a single sign of fear.

When your gaze rose once more to his face, you found the beginning of a smirk taking hold there, as if he had noticed every second of your absolutely-not-ogling and deemed it entertaining.

The rest of the room going back in motion, you sensed Ellis saying something, likely your name, but the sound came from far away. “Abbot,” was the first word you finally achieved to hear from her as she glanced between the two of you. “This is the new senior resident I told you about. The one from Boston.”

He pushed off the counter and crossed the short distance leisurely. There was something unusual in the rhythm of his stride, not enough to call it a limp and gone again before you could properly identify it, your attention stolen elsewhere as he stepped beneath the fluorescent lights. Up close, his eyes looked more green than brown, crinkling a little as he smiled.

“Jack Abbot,” he announced, extending a hand that you took.

His palm was warm and calloused, the grip firm without being performative. The contact lasted no longer than any ordinary handshake, but your nerves were unwilling to accept that fact, awareness skittering up your arm in static sparks. Then, you offered him your name, which he repeated, every vowel sounding fuller, every consonant more deliberate, until it no longer felt like the one you had heard your whole life but a newer, better version of it. You found yourself convinced that no one had ever pronounced it so rightly prior to today.

“Boston, hm?” he queried, his head tilting as he folded his arms, the gesture emphasizing his frame and the width of his shoulders. “And why Pittsburgh?”

You glanced at Ellis, hesitant of the approach to carry with him, but she only watched you with open enjoyment, your eyes traveling to the man. “The director of my residency did his here,” you shrugged. “He thought the experience would toughen me, I guess.”

Dr. Abbot nodded slowly, as if considering the wisdom of that decision. “Well then,” he declared, the corner of his mouth twitching, “welcome to the madhouse.”

You surprised yourself by grinning in response. “Thank you, Dr. Abbot.”

He looked like he might add something else, but was interrupted by one of the nurses who called for him to sign off a chart, forcing him to turn away while you stood there, a strange warmth in your chest.

Six months passed, and you unveiled him in pieces.

Jack Abbot turned out to be a phenomenal doctor and an even greater man. Efficient without being showy and sharp without making people feel stupid, he had never once snapped for sport or sneered at mistakes. He corrected, explained when he had time, and more significantly, let the weight of failing emergencies fall where they should: on the work, never on the people straining to do it.

The first time he handed you a scalpel during a procedure, his fingers brushing yours for the briefest second, a thin coil of heat had wound low in your stomach, paired with a rush of your pulse – probably due to the three cups of coffee. Absolutely not because Jack had leaned past you to check a monitor and murmured, “Careful, Boston. You’ve got good hands, but I’d rather not lose a finger tonight.”

That’s the moment where you registered the smallest tremor in your hand holding the instrument, forcing a stammered, “I-yes. Of course. Sorry. Lots of…caffeine.”

He had looked at you for half a beat longer than necessary, a sentiment you couldn’t pinpoint flickering across his face, before he returned to the patient, instructing you calmly to make the incision.

And then there had been the praise.

Which was fine. Perfectly fine. It didn’t affect you at all.

“Good job,” he had insisted after an emergency preeclampsia case, his voice roughened by the exhaustion of a double shift as he added your name, hand resting on your arm in quiet passing as you felt his eyes on you – eyes you had noticed earlier were more gold than hazel that day.

You had snapped your gaze up so fast from the scan you almost gave yourself whiplash. “T—Thank you, Dr. Abbot.” It had been pathetic, criminal even, the way your own tongue had suddenly weighted like lead in your mouth.

Jack Abbot, for his part, had only given a small nod, his thumb brushing once against your sleeve before his hand fell as naturally as it had arrived and moved on to the next patient as if he hadn’t just short-circuited your system.

You had been irritated at yourself for the rest of the shift. Troubled by the way your heart had beaten harder at those two simple words than at any compliment you had received in the last three years, though that, at least, was easily explained: none had done so in a very long time. Annoyed whenever he teased you about the manner your organized the charts, or the fact that you drank your coffee with four sugars and cream, forcing you to look away so he couldn’t notice the reaction it caused.

But again…everything could be explained. Adrenaline. Exhaustion. Sugar rush. Singlehood.

Definitely not the rough drag of his voice when he greeted you personally at shift changes instead of tossing a collective “morning”, finding you first to do so (not Robby – who, to your endless surprise, had turned out to be his best friend, his ‘brother’ in arms. Nor Collins or Dana or Langdon. You. Always You.). It certainly had nothing to do with the way his gaze rested on you after a difficult procedure or a loss, checking silently all along the night that you were fine and no, it absolutely was not about the broadness of the hand that reached for the chart in your hand.

There was nothing to see there. Nothing to feel. Nothing at all.

──────────

I. TOUCH (noun.) – the ability to know what something is like by feeling it with the fingers

When you woke up this morning, your first thought was: it’s going to be a good day.

First, because for once you had opened your eyes without a blaring alarm shredding your skull from the bedside table, courtesy of your day off. And second, because when you stepped out of your small one-bedroom apartment and into the street, the sun was bright enough to make you squint, a balmy breeze brushing your face as a cloudless, blinding blue sky stretched above the line of buildings.

It was the exact kind of June day you had been awaiting for since you moved to Pittsburgh.

Taking the bus downtown with your phone in your pocket and your keys in the other, Ellis’s recommendation was clutched in your hand, the name of the book she swore you would like written in her slanted, impatient handwriting on the back of Shen’s Dunkin receipt.

She had slipped it into your bag two days ago during the change-of-shift report with a pointed look that made arguing impossible. Therefore, as the good friend you were…you went to the library, found the book, and even treated yourself with a cup of coffee to complete the ‘good day’ routine with four creams and four sugars per usual – the kind of drink that Cassie would label as an aberration with a mothering tone while nonetheless having a taste of it.

After that, you set off to your destination: Emerald View Park.

The plan was simple, comprised of a good book, coffee, the sun and twenty-four uninterrupted hours during which nothing was expected of you, where nobody required anything. Where your body wasn’t wound tight, bracing for the next code.

So, you deliberately took your time as you strolled along the tranquil path leading up to the park, the quietude around gradually coaxing the tension from your shoulders. The trees were lush and green, their leaves casting dancing shadows across the sidewalk while one of your hands remained wrapped around the coffee, the other holding your book securely against your side.

Yes, all in all, it was supposed to be a good day.

Until somebody screams.

It detonates someplace ahead of you on the trail, a sharp cry that cuts clean through the air, rapidly joined by another. And another. A moment later, you comprehend what they are shouting.

“Somebody call 911!”

“He just collapsed!”

“Is there a doctor?”

One second you’re there, relishing in the first day of summer in Pittsburgh and the next, you’re sprinting, the book you’ve been holding falling from your palm, soon followed by the cup, who hits the ground and bursts open, dark liquid splashing across the pavement in a brown arc. You barely register it as you approach the origin of the noise, a few bystanders surrounding a man on the floor.

“Sir?” you ask, dropping to your knees beside him. “Sir, do you hear me?”

Your hand travels automatically to his face, tipping his chin upward and checking his mouth for blood or vomit or anything that might obstruct the airway, but no, nothing.

“Sir?” you try once more, louder this time.

The man doesn’t answer, an ugly shade of gray coloring his features. Two fingers slide to the side of his neck, pressing against his carotid artery: no pulse. Leaning down, your ear hovers above his mouth while your eyes stay fixed on his chest, waiting for the rise and fall that never comes.

The doctor in you takes over so abruptly it’s almost frightening. The novel, the drink, the bench in the heat – all of it ceases to exist, replaced by the emergency and every step that has to ensue. You are no longer a woman on her day off anymore: you are a doctor. You are the hands that have to move and the decisions that have to be taken.

“Someone call 911 if it hasn’t been done and tell them we have an unresponsive adult in cardiac arrest,” you shout, barely registering the response from somewhere behind you.

“The dispatcher is on the line!”

“Good. Everyone else, back up. Give me room,” you order, positioning your hands over the lower half of his sternum and locking your elbows, every piece of you now occupied by the counting in your head.

Thirty compressions. Hard, fast enough to save. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Thirty comes quickly, so you tilt his head, seal your mouth over his and give two breaths.

Nothing. Again. Thirty compressions. Two breaths. Thirty compressions. Two breaths.

The world contracts until there’s nothing but your palms and his sternum and the relentless rhythm of a metronome you force into a heart that refuses to beat, striving to keep him here for another minute, another breath.

“Ma’am,” the woman with the phone quavers, voice tight with fright. “The operator says an ambulance is on the way!”

You don’t nod. You can’t. You don’t speak either. You need every second of focus you have, every ounce of oxygen, every bit of strength in your arms. Thirty compressions. Two breaths. Again.

Three minutes speedily become five. Five turn into seven.

The muscles in your arms begin to ache, the strain descending from your trapezii to bury itself along your spine, but still, you never let the cadence falter, holding the man in the world by the force of your hands, refusing to surrender.

You pay no attention to the fire building beneath your skin, to the sweat that runs in rivulets down your temples and along your jaw, nor to the June sun pressing unremittingly against the back of your neck. You even manage to ignore the frantic thump of your heartbeat who pulsates in your ears.

Ten minutes. Eleven.

The tendons in your shoulders feel as if they are being pulled apart one by one, but it’s when the distant wail of sirens threads its way through the trees – faint at first and then swelling until it drowns out everything else – that relief crashes over you, almost turning your stomach.

The ambulance skids to a stop nearby, its rear doors swinging open with a metallic groan as two paramedics rush with a stretcher that rattles over the pavement while you keep compressing, only dimly aware of them kneeling by your side.

“Doc?” one of them – a man you vaguely recognize from your time at the ambulance bay – queries, to which you nod. “Which hospital?”

“PTMC,” you manage between breaths. “Closest one.”

His colleague glances from your hands to the patient’s chest. “You want us to take over?”

You shake your head. “No.” Another compression. “I found my rhythm.” Thirty. Two breaths. “I’m good.” You lift your gaze to meet hers. “Let’s go.”

They exchange a quick look before the stretcher is slide into place alongside the patient.

“On three,” the first paramedic announces, but you scarcely hear him over your own breathing as the man is transferred with swift movements.

Without wasting another second, you climb onto the stretcher itself, one knee planted on either side of the patient’s hips to keep your shoulders stacked over your locked elbows so you can keep the compressions going while the paramedics secure the straps around the patient’s torso and your legs. The doors slam shut. Thirty. Two. The ambulance lurches forward. Thirty. Two.

The city flickers past in blurry strips through the back windows, the only other element you’re capable to register apart from the tremble of your arms – not sufficient to fail you, but just enough to warn how you are still only flesh and blood, capable of collapsing.

The paramedic by your side keeps checking the numbers: oxygen, blood pressure, pulse…nothing.

Fifteen minutes. Eighteen.

Gradually, your body slips into a peculiar state, shutting itself off from the exertion as the discomfort turns distant and abstract, like the sun scorched each and every sensation out of your nerves until all that remains now is the motion. Thirty compressions. Two breaths.

Your wrists are no longer wrists, only hinges, and your shoulders reduced to frayed ropes stretched to their breaking point. Thirty. Two. Again. Thir— You are halfway through another cycle when the ambulance jolts to a stop and the world slams back all at once.

The cold, artificial air of the emergency department crashes over you, shocking your sweat-soaked skin and in an instant, you are returned in the one place you know as well as your own home, with its alarms resounding in the distance and the endless stream of voices and wheels overlapping each other. The stretcher barrels down the hallway, the noise only growing louder with every passing second.

A voice cuts through it, calling your name from the edge of your vision. It’s Langdon, sprinting, brows drawn together in surprise but swiftly discarding the shock in favor of the situation.

“What do we have?”

You force the words out around the effort.

“Man in his forties, I think,” you pant. “Fell in the park. No pulse, no breathing. I’ve been doing CPR for the past…twenty-one minutes. Give or take.”

Langdon’s eyes flick to the patient, then right to you, but before he gets a word out, another voice reaches you from behind him, rough and amused, followed by the scrape of his shoes against the floor.

“Had nothing better to do on your day off, Boston?”

You shouldn’t find solace in that familiar drawl and yet, even half-bent over a man whose life hangs beneath your palms, perspiration cascading into your eyes, the sound of Jack Abbot’s voice settles over you as delicately as a hand at the small of your back in a crowded room, grounding.

Managing a deadpan tone without turning your head, you respond. “Oh, it was my day off?”

The stretcher is pushed into Trauma 1, Collins calling for the crash cart as people swarm into motion around it as they prepare the transition from compressions to the defibrillator and the next stage of the fight.

“Okay, we’re ready,” Langdon announces. “Get down.”

This is when it hits you.

How you’re not moving swiftly enough – no, worse, at all, anchored by the shape of what your arms and legs have been doing for nearly twenty-three minutes under the sun, in the ambulance and through the corridor of the PTMC. Your limbs seem poured from lead, impossibly heavy and stubbornly rigid, muscles cramped into knots that refuse to slacken.

“Get down, now!” He shouts.

“I’m trying!” you snap, and it comes out breathy and frustrated because you are trying. God, you really fucking are.

You also want to prove to Langdon and Robby and every single person in this service that you are competent, reliable, not some rookie day-shift resident who happens to be passing through. No, you are a doctor who doesn’t freeze, doesn’t break. You are here to stay.

Your thoughts are cut short when a firm arm wraps securely around your side from behind, lightly dusted with fine hair, providing your body with the support it has stopped being able to catalyze on its own.

The skin of the forearm is rough under your hand where it seizes on instinct, the muscle beneath clenching as it takes your weight without complaint, feet finally meeting the floor. However, for one terrifying second, the world tilts sideways, knees threatening to fold underneath you, but the arm doesn’t leave, keeping you upright while goosebumps race up your flesh.

The contact lasts only a few seconds, yet it feels impossibly intimate amid the frenzy around you, as though the noise of the trauma bay has receded just to leave the pressure around your waist and the reassuring certainty that whoever is holding you has absolutely no intention of letting you fall.

Turning your head, you discover Jack Abbot there, and your mouth opens automatically. “Thank y—” You don’t get the rest out.

The expression on his face alters in a heartbeat, no trace of humor lingering as his hand tightens at your side, giving way to something sharp and alarmed. A cold thought sinks into your chest: perhaps you are about to pass out right here in the trauma room, in front of everyone, and make a spectacle of yourself on what was supposed to be initially a good day off.

Before it fully roots in your mind, Abbot leans closer and murmurs, “I’ve got you,” taking more of your weight into his body.

Let yourself go, some tired part of you seems to tell, he will not drop you.

The epiphany dawns on you: you are safe in his arms. Not because he is gentle, granted he is. Nor for he is careful, although he is that too. But for the reason that his hold never wavers, backed by the certainty of what his own hands are capable of – inspiring the same faith in you without ever asking for it.

Steering you out of the room, he guides your numb legs into motion while you cling to his shoulder without meaning to, the hallway rushing past in a blur of light and noise. Over Abbot’s shoulder, you catch a glimpse of Robby speaking with Dana.

Abbot doesn’t slow. “Robby,” he calls, calm but unmistakably urgent. When Robby looks up, the former tips his chin once in a silent demand that requires no elaboration.

Robby’s gaze lands on you and he does a visible double take, eyes darting from your face to the arm encircling your waist.

You can practically witness him trying to piece together why his resident is in the middle of the department on her day-off, transported by his best friend and looking like she just run through a furnace.

But Abbot doesn’t afford him time to ask, he simply keeps walking, using his shoulder and the sturdiness of his body to get you in the break room with a minimum of fuss.

Pushing the door open with his free hand, Abbot ushers you toward one of the chairs, only letting go once your weight settles into it. Even then, he doesn’t step away directly, one broad palm coming to rest against the back of the seat, sufficiently close that you can practically perceive its warmth traveling through the worn plastic and into your spine.

“I’m sorry,” you mutter, not sure what you are apologizing for. Collapsing? Making him drag you out of the trauma room? For becoming one more thing demanding his attention on a day where he is already pulling a double?

He dismisses it with the smallest shake of his head, not wasting a single word on an apology he clearly has no interest in entertaining and instead, goes straight to the fridge.

The cold light of it spills across his face as he opens it, washing his features in a cool white tone and softening the tired lines gathered around his eyes – whose hazel shade recedes, replaced by the same greenish-blue sheen as the fragment of comet you once saw while visiting family in Quincy.

Studying the shelves for a few quiet seconds, he shuts the door with an apple juice in hand, sinking to his left knee between your parted feet as he unscrews the cap and holds it out.

A beat passes, yet he doesn’t let go when your hand finds the bottle. His eyes travel across your face, from one eye to the other, lingering on your pupils before dropping briefly to your cheeks, your lips, your neck…

Only when he seems satisfied does he release his grip on the juice.

“Come on,” he murmurs. “Drink this, Trouble. You have to get some sugar in there.”

Trouble. The nickname lands with a little jolt in your chest, but your body is far too exhausted to dwell on it.

Your fingers are still a little clumsy from overuse as you force down a first swallow, then a second, the sweetness of the apple almost startling after the dry ache in your throat.

You manage a weak, grateful, “Thank you, Dr. Abbot.”

Instead of adding another word, he reaches up and, with the back of two fingers, brushes the damp strands of hair away from your forehead where they’ve plastered by the sweat.

The contact is brief, barely there. Just the pads of his fingers brushing at your temple and hairline…but nonetheless, the touch is relieving like a cool cloth on hot skin, eyelids craving to close around the sensation as your body leans instinctively.

But, just as quickly as it came, his hand falls.

“I thought I already asked you to call me Jack,” he smiles.

Oh, that you remember well enough, each single instance of it etched in your mind.

Jack. You want to call him Jack. Jack. Jack. Jack. It’s a nice name. A normal one. You would even say that it’s a perfectly, ordinary irrelevant sequence of sounds that doesn’t make your heart beats faster. Or make you quiver at night when the apartment is too silent and your own thoughts are too loud. And it’s wholly reasonable to do that, after all he is your colleague so…you should call him Jack.

You indulge in another sip of the juice to buy yourself a few seconds and gather some courage. Clearing your throat and inhaling, you finally let his name find its way onto your lips.

“Thanks…Jack.”

Something in his face alters, softening in such a subtle manner that you might have missed it had you been less attentive, concealing the corner of his mouth threatening to curve as he glances down.

That’s the moment where you register, belatedly, how he strives to shift his weight on the left leg, the motion exposing a subtle tremor, a tension in the angle of his stance. The realization dawns on you with a pang of guilt: how he is more run-down than he wants anyone to notice and that you’ve only worsened it by making him carry you and kneel.

You glance at the chair beside you and nudge your chin toward it.

“Sit with me?” you ask, feigning obliviousness. “Just...to make sure I don’t pass out right now?”

He doesn’t even pretend to ponder about it. “Sure.”

Getting up, he pulls the chair close enough that the space between you recedes from view, and you observe in passing – no longer than the blink of an eye – the small exhale of relief that escapes him once he is seated. You know that it would be your case too if you were sixteen hours in a double shift.

“So,” you wonder after a minute, picking absently at the cap of the bottle with your thumb, “if I call you Jack, does that mean you’re finally going to drop the Boston and Trouble thing?”

He leans back, folding his arms across his chest and pretending to consider it with counterfeit seriousness.

“Mm…I don’t know. Trouble suits you, after all. Look at you today.” He gestures vaguely at your entire state. “Day-off. Beautiful morning…” His mouth twists with a dry, knowing smirk. “And still you manage to find your way back here.”

You huff a breath and take one last sip before setting the juice on the table, flattening your hand there. “What can I say? Been missing everyone too much.”

“Oh, everyone?” he echoes, not bothering to veil the amusement warming his voice. “I’m offended.” He tips his head ever so slightly. “And here I thought I had a special place in your heart.”

The words are light, as though he is simply tossing another joke into the room but the way he says them sends a traitorous shiver skittering through your veins, for there is something tucked beneath them that you are far too tired to untangle.

“You know,” you tease, forcing some bite into the words, “for someone who’s supposed to check on a patient, you’re remarkably committed to giving her a hard time.”

“But I am checking on the patient,” he tuts, studying your features with exaggerated professionalism. “Turns out she is responsive, argumentative…very much her usual self, I would say.”

A laugh escapes you despite yourself, all breathless and tired. “You’re impossible.”

“So I’ve been told.”

He places a hand on the table, a few inches away from yours, not touching but sufficiently close that you can sense the possibility of it humming in the space amidst your fingers. The quietude that ensues is comfortable, threaded with the distant noise of the unit outside the break room and the sound of your own breathing finally slowing down.

Throwing a quick gaze to the side, you catch a glimpse of the stretcher rolling to the elevator, the man’s chest finally rising on its own beneath the oxygen mask.

You let out a breath you hadn’t realized you’d been holding before turning back, only to find Jack already staring at you.

He asks, softer now, “Feeling better?”

You nod, despite the term ‘better’ feeling generous. “Yeah. Thanks for the…” You gesture vaguely at the entire situation. “Yeah.”

“No worries. You’re the one who did the most.” Your mouth parts to protest, but he doesn’t give you the chance. “You…” He tilts his head to be certain you hear him loud and clear, eyes never departing yours.

“You’ve done a great job out there. You saved this man.”

It’s almost revolting, really, how these simple, unadorned phrases land hard in your ribcage – probably from the way in which he declares them, like they are undeniable facts. Suddenly, you hate him for it. Hate how he can make words weigh this much. Hate how seen he makes you feel.

Your gaze drops to the table, because there is only so long a person can sit across from Jack Abbot and pretend their body isn’t responding to his voice and hands and attention.

Clearing your throat, you stand a little too hastily, muscles still behaving as if they belong to someone else, yet tarrying suddenly sounds far more dangerous than leaving.

“I should probably go.”

Before you can take a step, Jack’s hand settles around your upper arm. It isn’t meant to block you: there’s no pressure in his hold, no desire to pin you in place – only the gentle oath of a man prepared to catch you if you wobble.

“Text me when you get home, okay?” he breathes.

You look at him, caught off guard. “You don’t have to—”

“I know.” His thumb shifts almost absentmindedly, drawing one slow stroke over your arm until coming to rest once more. “But I’ll worry anyway.”

You try to swallow past the weight gathering in your throat.

“Okay…” The corner of your mouth lifts despite you. “…Jack.”

“There you go,” he rasps, one of his private smiles tugging at his lips. “See? Doesn’t hurt that much.”

Letting out a meek, embarrassed huff of laughter, you are suddenly marooned in the rapid, thudding rhythm of your own heartbeat. “I’ll have to get used to it.”

His gaze lingers on yours for longer than it should, stretching the silence into a suspended moment that neither dares to disturb.

“So will I.”

You blink once, brain tripping over the sentence, then racing back to examine every syllable, every letter, every possible meaning hidden inside those three words. So will I. Used to what? To hearing you call him Jack? To worrying about you? To…this?

But before you can ask, he lets his hand slip from your arm, the warmth disappearing with it only to leave behind the ghost of where his thumb had traced your skin.

Rising to his feet, he folds his hands behind his back as the attending in him returns bits by bits.

“Drive safe, Trouble.”

You release a long-suffering breath through your nose. “And there it is.”

Shrugging but not hiding his smirk, he replies. “Some habits are hard to break.”

You shake your head, grinning helplessly as you toss the juice bottle into the trash, fixing your attention on the mundane task, on the plastic beneath your fingers, on anything to keep your mind from drifting into his So will I. Or the look in his eyes. No, you don’t think about them at all.

You take a step toward the door, another, and it’s only when you reach the threshold that you pause long enough to glance over your shoulder.

He hasn’t budged. He is still where you left him, staring.

You lift a hand. “Bye, Jack.”

His reply drifts after you into the hallway, voice laced with a smile. “See you around, Boston.”

──────────

II. SIGHT (noun.) – the faculty to perceive light, color, and shapes using the eyes

“The heat stroke didn’t cause any brain damage,” you explain, observing the woman’s eyes glisten with terror, a hand clutched around her phone, “your mother is simply confused. It’s often expected in situations like this. But there’s no organ failure either. Now all we need to do is watch her sodium and temperature for a few more hours, and then she should be free to go.”

Her mouth quivers as she glances over your shoulder toward her mother’s sleeping frame, the lines of strain easing only a little at the sight of the older woman lying there, on the path of recovery.

“So…she’s going to be okay?” she chokes out, voice faltering on the last word.

“She will need water, rest, and someone to stay with her for a few days,” you list gently. “But otherwise yes, she’s going to be okay.”

The daughter swallows laboriously, nodding in agreement as you discern the relief submerging her. Free hand flying to her face, she chases the tears that have gathered in the corner of her eyes.

You offer her a small, comforting smile and step back. “If you need anything else, press the call light and a nurse will be there. We’ll keep an eye on h—”

Interrupting you mid-sentence, a voice rises from the doorway, causing for your stomach to plunge like a brick dropped into water.

“Doctor, can I speak with you?”

Whirling around, you find Robby, standing a few feet away, his stethoscope hanging around his neck while his hands clamp the tubing sufficiently hard to blanch his knuckles – a far more telling sign of his state of mind than the clipped smile fixed on his face.

But the worst part isn’t even that brittle mask. No, it’s how tired he looks underneath it.

It’s not the ordinary superficial exhaustion that can be chased with a few hours of sleep and a cup of coffee, but a denser, heavier, tired-to-the-bone kind. One that has soaked into the very marrow of him, weighing down his shoulders and hollowing his eyes until it has become woven into the man himself.

The sort that twists a cold knot in your stomach as you wonder, not for the first time, how much longer it will be before Michael Robinavitch collapses.

You nod once. “Excuse me,” you murmur to the woman, stepping into the hallway and trailing your attending to the nurses’ station.

Robby withholds his words until you’re well out of earshot of the patient’s room, exhaling audibly through his nose as his features settle into that half-exasperated, half-impatient expression you’ve long since learned to interpret without translation.

“What are you doing?”

There it is: no preamble, no sugarcoating, just the characteristic Robby tone you dread.

You stare at him, genuinely thrown. “What?”

Rubbing a hand over his face and dragging it down as though striving to wipe his own irritation, he repeats slowly, “What are you doing?”

You exhale, attempting a peaceful approach despite your spine going rigid. “That woman is my patient’s daughter,” you explain. “She was scared when she got the call. Full-blown panic attack. I had to explain that the heat stroke hadn’t caused any neurotrauma or organ failu—”

“We don’t have time for this,” Robby interrupts. “You think I don’t see her? I do. I see every frightened husband, every terrified son, every daughter waiting for someone to tell them it will be okay. But I can’t stop for all of them.” He rocks his weight from heel to toe, like a human pendulum swinging on an invisible axis. “Because while I’m doing that, somebody else’s mother is still waiting to be treated. It’s a difficult shift, we’re barely getting started, and I need you focused.”

“I am focused!” The answer comes out sharper than you intend, to which he lets out a dry, humorless laugh, shaking his head. “She needed a doctor to explain!”

“Her mother needed a doctor,” he fires back without missing a beat. “She got one, now move on to the next patient. If her daughter wants explanations, she can wait like everyone else.” You open your mouth once more, but he bends until he is eye level with you, making sure you can’t escape the words he wants you to register.

“Stop trying to save everyone’s feelings and start saving lives.”

Those words cut deeper than they should.

Yes, you’re used to Robby’s sharp knives. Used to the condescension and the belittling and the sarcasm that perpetually seems to find the one bruise he didn’t know was there, but most days, you wear it like it’s just another layer of the hospital – one that you can shrug off once you’re home, telling yourself that it’s not personal, that it means nothing as you scrub your body raw in the shower to purge a phantom bleeding.

But this time…it does register. This time the wound is gaping wide.

Maybe it’s because the waiting room is packed, triage already overflowing at eight in the morning, the August heat outside only exacerbating the situation by making people louder, more desperate and impatient. Or perhaps it’s because he says it here, in front of doctors and nurses – your colleagues – who pretend very hard to be absorbed in their work.

You force your shoulders to remain squared, swallowing down the taste of iron at the end of your throat as you give him a flat, “Yes, sir,” spinning on your heel before he can add anything else.

Your lungs feel too compressed. Your skin burns beneath the scrubs. All narrows down into a single need: to scream where no one will witness it.

You head for the stairwell without pondering too much about it, the one that leads to the abandoned wing, but on the way, Cassie, who is typing on the computer, catches sight of your face. “Hey,” she smiles carefully. “You okay there?”

Shit. She has heard it too, you realize.

You plaster on a smile, muscles lock into a painful grimace that arrives a little too briskly to be convincing. “Yep. Perfect.”

Cassie studies you for a few more seconds, undoubtedly aware of your feeble lie, but she doesn’t stop you – only gives the tiniest, compassionate nod with a whispered “Take ten, honey. I’ve got your back.”

You bolt down the corridor to avoid anyone who might pry, the staircase door yielding beneath your palm with more force than intended, metal slamming into the wall with an ugly clang. You stumble inside, chest rising in rapid, shallow breaths, prepared to lash out a scream the second the door closes behin– You stop.

For one disorienting beat, you simply stand frozen, your brain taking a moment too long to make sense of the shape on the stairs.

Jack Abbot.

He is there – which doesn’t make any sense in the first place, considering his shift ended over an hour ago – sitting on one of the lower steps, head tipped against the wall, eyes closed and every line of his face slack with an exhaustion you’ve never seen on him before.

Wearing his usual association of black shirt and camel cargo pants, he sits with the right side of the latter rolled to just below the knee, both hands busy working over the exposed skin of the leg.

No. Not his leg. What remains of it.

The prosthetic rests on the step below him, expert fingers massaging the residual limb, but your brain refuses to process what you are witnessing. Instead, it circles back to the obvious again and again until the clues topple into place like a line of falling dominoes.

The limp in his gait after spending too many hours on his feet. The way he rebalanced his weight whenever he assumed no one was paying attention. The subtle tremor that had run through his other leg two months prior while kneeling in front of you.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. How have you not realized? How have you been blind to something so obvious?

You are a doctor. A competent one, supposedly. The signs had been there all along, laid out under your nose, similar to a trail of breadcrumbs and yet, somehow, your brain had refused to pursue them, too occupied memorizing his hands and voice and the ever-changing hues of his eyes.

Too consumed by the realization, you fail to notice Jack’s lids lifting, studying you for a while and taking in the emotions crossing your face.

“Hey, Doc.”

His voice is low and gravelly from what has clearly been a grueling night, but there’s no alarm in it, no trace of abashment. He makes no move to cover himself, simply contemplates you with a patient expression, and in doing so, leaves you on your own to carry every ounce of the awkwardness yourself.

Spluttering, your hands lift on reflex. “Sorry—I was—Robby—" Shit, that sounds awful. You take a deep breath, the words tumbling out subdued before you can sort the confession. “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah,” he snorts, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I figured.” He pats the space beside him on the step. “It’s not exactly something that comes up over coffee.”

You move on instinct rather than thought to sit next to him, careful not to knock down the prosthetic and letting the two of you be swallowed in the silence and stale air of the stairwell. Folding your hands in your lap, you can’t help but throw a look at Jack, whose penetrating gaze is already fixed on your face.

And somewhere in that look, you recognize it – that same apprehension you have heeded in patients’ eyes, whether in burn victims when visitors arrive or in women after mastectomies: the dread of being looked at differently once a truth is noticeable, of revulsion or pity or discomfort, of the person across from you abruptly deciding to abandon you…the fear of being reduced to the thing that happened to you.

He is bracing for the change in your eyes. Not because it’s you, but because it could have been anyone. That somewhere along the way, the world taught Jack Abbot that this is what people do.

And God, how you hate the world a little more for it.

After a beat, you clear your throat, blurting the first thing that comes to mind. “So…does this make you Steve Austin?”

Jack blinks, recognition clicking into place. “The Six Million Dollar Man?” he asks slowly, as if trying to determine whether you’ve truly lost it.

“Yeah.”

Quiet hangs between you for the briefest moment until it happens: Jack laughs.

No, not the short, amused huff you’ve heard him give Robby or Dana at times, nor the dry chuckle he makes whenever he’s deliberately annoying the Night crawlers. This, is a real laugh – all warm and startled and unrestrained, echoing off the concrete walls of the stairwell.

You fall silent under the spell of a sound you don’t recognize.

It transforms his entire face. The weariness that had colored his features only moments ago seems to dissolve beneath the force of it, washed by an irrepressible grin. Dimples appear where you didn’t know they existed, freckles stand out against the flush creeping over his skin and, in the space of a heartbeat, thirty years slip from his shoulders.

There is no Dr. Jack Abbot. Just Jack.

You can practically picture the teenager he must have been: wild curls refusing to stay combed, a battered guitar slung over his shoulder, scrapped knuckles from climbing where he wasn’t supposed to, the kind of boy next door who always talked himself out of punishment with nothing more than that grin.

“You know Steve Austin?” he asks, still laughing in disbelief.

You shrug, fighting a smile at the oddly intimate gratification of having managed to surprise him. “What can I say? My dad loved old shows.”

Jack cocks an eyebrow, tilting his head with overplayed suspicion. “Are you calling me an old man?”

“Well…” you smirk, glancing pointedly at the artificial leg, then at him. “You know the adage…If the prosthetic fits…”

A snort escapes him before he can stop it. Still shaking his head, he bends to roll his pant leg back over the liner. “Careful, Hotshot. Wouldn’t want to be assigned to triage for a month.”

“That would be some serious abuse of attending privilege, Dr. Abbot,” you gasp, pressing a hand to your chest in mock offense.

“Probably.”

Despite how he delivers the answer with perfect composure, you still discern the amusement lingering around his eyes, giving him away entirely. The corners crinkle ever so slightly, one side of his mouth threatening to betray him until he reins it back in…apparently, he has decided you shouldn’t know how much he’s enjoying himself.

Which is admirable effort. Really. But it fails spectacularly.

You lean against the wall, feeling the last of the tension leak from your shoulders. “I’ll report you.”

“To HR?” he dryly counters. “They already ignore my mails, so…”

You blink at him. “Wow. You write mails?”

“I know,” he deadpans, giving a slow shake of his head. “My carrier pigeon died last month.”

“Poor thing,” you whisper, biting the inside of your cheek in a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to suppress another giggle.

Jack ducks his chin in what is clearly meant to be a solemn nod. “Thank you. He would have appreciated.”

That’s what finally does it. A guffaw bursts out of you before you have the slightest chance of halting it, one hand flying instinctively to your mouth in a hopeless attempt to muffle the sound. Across from you, Jack only drinks in the view with that same toothy grin, as if he had planned this from the very beginning just to get the sound out of you.

It takes a full minute for the laughter to subside, and another for your breathing to recede into a regular rhythm, the last remnants coming out in little huffs each time you catch sight of his expression.

When the silence finally returns, it no longer feels like the previous awkward quiet. It’s gentler. Comfortable.

Jack lets it linger for a few more seconds, gaze drifting to the concrete steps then returning to you. There’s something thoughtful in his expression now, the humor softening at its corners. “So…”

You tilt your head, smile easing. “So?”

“What about Robby?” he elaborates, tipping his chin toward you.

The name catches you off guard. Your fingers tighten intuitively around the fabric of your scrub pants, the jolt traveling all the way to your fingertips. “What?”

“You said his name earlier.” Jack’s brows draw together. “What happened?”

Under the insistence of his piercing stare, your eyes flee to the safety of the chipped edge of the stair beneath your shoes. “Oh.” You swallow. “Um…Yeah.”

He shifts, settling his back against the wall too, one shoulder angling toward yours to face you more fully. The movement is almost insignificant, barely more than a change in posture, and yet it alters the entire space of the stairwell: the quietude narrows until the outside world – the monitors, the voices, the endless rolling of gurneys – ceases to exist beyond the heavy fire door so only the two of you subsist. You feel…naked. Seen.

“So?” he asks once more, quieter this time.

Picking and worrying at the ragged edge of hangnail, you try to decide how much of the truth to offer. “It’s nothing, really,” you reply with a small voice.

Jack scrutinizes you, eyes dragging leisurely from left to right like striving to read what you’re not verbalizing.

“If it really was nothing,” he rasps, “you wouldn’t have barged in here like this, Boston.”

For once, the nickname doesn’t land like a joke, but as a hand held out in the dark. An invitation. Or perhaps a key, turning in a lock you hadn’t realized you’d been keeping shut.

Because yes, you do want to tell him what’s been sitting there in your ribs, all ugly and viscous and impossible to overlook. To complain about Robby. About the words, the tone, the manner he can make you feel twelve feet tall one minute and six inches high the next. You desire, desperately, for someone to reassure you that you aren’t useless or too lenient. That you aren’t disappointing everyone who gave you a shot here.

But Jack and Robby are best friends.

More than that, really. Brothers. The ER cowboys.

They celebrate Chrismukkahs and Thanksgivings together, sit on the rooftop to talk when the unit is attempting to swallow them whole in its orbit. They’ve witnessed each other become partners, attendings, husbands. Watched life take things away just as quickly and carried one another through every milestone in between.

And that, is what obstructs the words at the entrance of your throat.

Because you don’t want to hear Jack excuse it. You don’t want the man who just had you crying with laughter to tell you that Robby is under pressure, that Robby means well, that Robby is hard on everyone, that you shouldn’t take it personally.

The math is instantly done: they have twenty years of friendship behind them, you have nine months.

Two decades of shared shifts and shared grief and shared lives against two hundred and seventy-three days of being a resident-perhaps-friend.

What could your hurt possibly be worth next to that?

It’s nothing. You are nothing.

“What?”

Your head jerks up, only then registering that the last part had slipped out aloud as his entire body tenses at once. Shit.

“No,” you rush to stammer with a bated breath, shaking your head. “No, no, no! I’m not—I didn’t mean—”

His voice drops an octave. “Did he say that?”

The question is so subdued it’s almost worse than if he had snapped it. Even the stairwell feels a little colder at the contact of it, the hairs on your arms rising.

“No!” you blurt out, panicked. “No, he didn’t say—it’s not that, it’s just…” You swallow, draw in a shaky inhale, and finally permit for the truth to drip out of your mouth with no polish left to conceal it. “I don’t know how to stop disappointing him.” There. The truth plain and bare.

Jack’s frown deepens, but not at you – at the thought of someone making you say that.

“Hey, listen to me,” he whispers, paired with your name. Not Boston or Trouble or Doc. Your real name. The sound steals your attention, acutely aware of the fact that he almost never uses your name unless it matters.

His fingers wrap around one of the hands which had been gripping hard on your leg, and though his touch is light, it’s sufficiently steady to cease the tremor you hadn’t even noticed building in your forearm. The pad of his thumb caressing absentmindedly over your knuckles, he continues, “Robby’s biggest flaw…is that when he is drowning, he forgets everyone else is trying to keep their heads above water too.”

He pauses, and that instant lasts an eternity in the span of a single breath. “And you…” His voice changes at the word. Softer. Replete of an emotion you are too cautious to designate. “You are the resident everybody wants around.”

A watery, disbelieving snort escapes your lips. “That’s a terrible lie, Dr. Abbot.”

He tilts his head just enough that there is nowhere else for your eyes to go but back to his.

You hadn’t sensed how close the two of you had drifted together until now, so much so that the warmth of his breath fans over your face each time he speaks. So close that you can note how, under the fluorescent lights, his eyes have shed their usual hazel shade to yield to a rich honey brown instead, flecks of gold catching around the irises whenever he stirs.

“Ellis and Shen ask me every week if they can steal you for nights,” he states plainly. “Collins made a bet with Ahmad that you’d be an attending next year. Langdon trusts your judgment.”

You make a strained little sound. “I don’t think—”

“I trust you.”

He lets a beat pass before adding quietly, every word spoken as if willing to stand behind them for as long as you require him to. “And I’m proud of you. Do you know why?”

When you find yourself incapable of answering, he does it for you.

“Because you never make patients feel stupid. Doesn’t matter if they’re scared, or embarrassed, or angry, or convinced they’re wasting everyone’s time…you always find a way to remind them they’re still a person before they’re a patient.” His thumb dances in slow, abstract circles over your skin, tracing what feel like half-formed letters you can’t quite decipher. “And that’s not something you can teach.”

The words cut through you with the devastating precision of a scalpel, slipping past every defense you’ve stitch shut since medical school – since the first time someone in a white coat who self-proclaimed themselves a professor made you feel small. I trust you is the first incision, clean and deliberate against your chest. I’m proud of you, sinks deeper, dissecting right in between your ribs.

And the worst part is that he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing to you. How he is undoing years of self-doubt, debriding your wounds with nothing more than his voice.

How from now on, whenever Robby will question you, all you’ll think is: Jack believes in me.

“So yes,” he murmurs, blissfully unaware of the turmoil he just formed in your chest. “I’m proud of the doctor you’re becoming.” His thumb brushes unhurriedly over your knuckles once, twice. “But I’m even prouder of the person who’s becoming that doctor.”

The silence that ensues is enormous as you sit there, dumbstruck, conscious of your surroundings at once: the stairwell light humming overhead, the distant voices bleeding through the door, your own breathing which sounds unbearably loud…and, above all, the impossible fact that his hand is still wrapped around yours as if holding your hand is the most natural thing in the world.

Perhaps deciding he has said more than enough, Jack gives your hand one last, reassuring squeeze before guiding it back onto your knee with care, fingers lingering for the briefest moment, reluctant almost, as he releases it with the same care one might use to handle fine china.

Neither of you utters another word.

Instead, he shifts on the step and reaches for the prosthetic resting ahead of him, fitting it into place with the ease of a man who has repeated the same sequence thousands of times.

He pushes himself to his feet with a grunt, smoothing the fabric of his cargo pants over his thigh and descending the few steps to the door.

His hand halts on the handle. “Hey.”

You look up. The corners of his mouth lift into that same boyish, mischievous grin you caught earlier when he laughed.

“If I’m Steve Austin,” he asks, “does that make you Jamie Sommers?”

Before you brain can catch up, he’s already gone, the door swinging shut behind him while you remain where you are for a long time, staring at the empty spot.

Jamie Sommers.

You are familiar with that name. You even know who she is, but still, your hand fumbles for your phone, almost dropping it as you get the search open to be certain.

Jamie Sommers, also known as the Bionic Woman.

And Steve Austin’s love interest.

Oh.

──────────

III. SMELL (noun.) – the ability of perceiving scents through the olfactory system

By the time your Uber turns onto the street leading to the Wintergarden, you are already regretting the dress.

Not because it isn’t stunning – no, really it is. The emerald silk gleams beneath the passing lights of Third Avenue, the fabric cascading in liquid folds over your lap, the sort of dress to mesmerize Matthew McConaughey in a mid-2000s romcom.

The real issue is that stunning doesn’t equal warm.

But that’s a concern that neither you nor Santos had predicted when going shopping two weeks ago. Since then, Pittsburgh has dropped under twenty-eight degrees, the frost sticking to the cars and sidewalks, resulting in a wave of patients coming to the ER with all sorts of chilblains, fractures and even a few lacerations from icicles.

You should have worn a suit like Ellis suggested. Or at least brought a coat despite Santos’ vehement objections about ‘ruining the silhouette’. Or, better yet, stayed in bed with fuzzy socks, tacos and cinnamon grilled stickies while rewatching your comfort show.

Instead, you are on your way to the PTMC Annual Benefit Gala in a backless dress on December fucking 20th.

For this entire fiasco, you hold accountable Santos, who had bullied it into existence.

You still don’t fully know how becoming friends with her occurred. She had arrived three months ago on the day with a sharp tongue and a stare that could probably cut sutures if she tried hard enough. But it turns out that her personality was a wrapped trick, for underneath all of that sarcasm, it took you one look to recognize a woman who would go to war for her loved ones.

So, the moment she notified you on that first day about the pills in Langdon’s locker, you had chosen to listen, to not question. That had mattered. And, when a week later she discovered you were from Boston and christened you Marmee March, you had no choice but to accept your fate.

From that point on, Trinity Santos has treated your life like a project she is determined to improve – tonight being no exception.

When she found out you had been invited to the gala alongside Robby and Jack as the senior resident chosen to represent the department’s efforts throughout the Pittfest shooting, she straight off seized control of your existence, dragging you from boutique to boutique on your day off with Whitaker in tow.

Red dresses had been vetoed pronto. “You are supposed to look fucking lethal,” she had sighed while tossing one back on the rack, “not like Mrs. Claus or a holiday decoration.”

The black ones, rejected with equal disdain. “No, no, no. You are not attending a funeral.”

The only purple one had been held up and scoffed at. “Do you want to look like Barney the t-rex? Because I don’t think you do.”

Even Whitaker, who had seemed so uncomfortable in every store that you felt apologetic on his behalf, proscribed the blue dress you preferred on the grounds that it resembled too much like the pathology department’s scrubs.

In the end it had necessitated an absurd amount of searching to find the one you’re wearing tonight. But the moment you stepped out of the fitting room, Whitaker had gone crimson clear to the tips of his ears while Santos had eyed you up and down, letting out a low, mock-flirtatious, “Damn, Marmee.”

You had known right then and there that the search was over.

Looking at your form in the mirror, you had fleetingly wondered why this particular shade of emerald felt so…right. Familiar. Soothing. It undoubtedly wasn’t because it evoked somebody’s eyes. Absolutely not.

The Uber pulls to the curb, interrupting your restless hands from flattening the fabric.

As you pay and step out in heels that are openly torturing your toes, the cold air assails you pitilessly, sinking icy teeth into your exposed shoulders and the bare length of your spine.

“Fantastic,” you grumble to nobody, gathering the hem of your dress in one hand and clutching your purse in the other as you throw a glance toward the end of the avenue where the glass spires of PPG Place rise amidst the towers.

The city is beautiful in winter, you have to concede it.

The giant Christmas tree radiates in the distance, reflecting its lights across the garlands and accompanied by the unmistakable voice of Sinatra drifting from the hidden speakers all along the sidewalk. Ahead of you, the Wintergarden appears almost chimerical, shaped alike a towering crystal castle, valets stationed at the entrance to open the doors.

The whole town seems arrayed for a holiday. You, meanwhile, are one gust away from death by hypothermia.

Thankfully, as you cross the threshold and hand your purse to the coat check, the warmth shrouds you in a heavy blanket, thawing the goosebumps right off your bare skin. The comfort lasts all of three seconds, up until your eyes are irresistibly drawn to the ballroom at the end of the corridor.

You had expectations for tonight. Yet nothing could have prepared you for a room so breathtaking and ostentatious and…ridiculous, actually.

With its grand display of crystal chandeliers and long tables draped in ivory linen while a live quartet plays for the tuxedos and gowns, the luxury drips in nauseating abundance from every corner. Even the air reeks heavy with it, a fragrant cocktail of jasmine, tuberose and polished wood.

This, is a gala in honor of the people working at PTMC.

A celebration of the doctors as well as the nurses who spend most of their days saving lives, elbow-deep in blood, feces and vomit. A commemoration for those who perform medical miracles on a shoestring budget while the suits responsible for the shortages toast to their own philanthropy with expensive champagne and an air of Debussy.

What a fucking ironic farce.

You are still standing there striving to swallow the lump in your throat when you spot him.

A few feet away, he talks with a bunch of men screaming old-money socialites and executives that you don’t bother to identify, for the room itself narrows down to Jack Abbot the instant you catch sight of him.

He wears a taupe suit with a dark brown waistcoat – the sort of outfit that makes a man seem expensive without aiming to be. The tailored cut broadens his shoulders, defining the solid physique underlying with such ease that your appraisal lingers longer than it ought to.

On him, this color should be illegal. Because at this distance, you can envision how it emphasizes the green-gold in his irises once you are close enough to observe them properly.

As though some invisible string tugs at him, his gaze flicks to the side only to land on you and halt. For a millisecond, he forgets himself, his mouth parting and whatever sentence he had been listening to abandoned someplace in the depths of his mind.

His eyes travel unhurriedly over the emerald green of your dress, its silk varying with every breath you take, and rise along the line of your collarbone to your neck, then higher still, to your face.

Refusing to let this man understand the effect he possesses on your body, you lift an eyebrow in silent challenge.

The reaction is immediate.

Biting his lower lip to contain the smile threatening at the corner of his mouth, he turns back to the circle of men, listening with the appearance of attention. He nods when expected, even offers a brief reply, yet every few seconds his focus wanders back to you of its own accord, as if assuring himself that you are still here.

Just as you are about to drift closer to save him from his predicament, a hand flashes at the edge of your vision.

You turn, only to see there Robby in a midnight blue tuxedo, the bow tie sitting a little too neatly at his throat.

“Care for a dance?” he asks, glancing between Jack and you and the unspoken exchange hanging in the air. “Or…are you busy?”

You blink. It takes several heartbeats for the question to penetrate your brain.

“Um…” Robby clears his throat as your brain persists in flatlining, and the sudden, horrifying realization sets in that you have been gaping at his hand long enough to invite discomfort. “Oh. Yes,” you manage, a little breathless. “Of course.”

You don’t even recall taking it.

One moment you’re dawdling on the sidelines of the ballroom and the next, you’re standing in its center, Robby’s hand at your waist while the other clasps yours as the quartet commences a slow waltz. His grip is cautious, the steps precise, forcing you to acknowledge a point: Robby is a wondrous dancer.

One who looks about as pleased to be at this gala as a cat in a bath.

“I heard from Gloria that your evaluation with the department went well,” he whispers so as not to talk over the musicians.

Your grip tightens reflexively around his fingers. “Really?”

“Mm-hmm,” he hums, stepping you sideways. “The board asked me if I thought you were ready for the attending position.”

You stare at him, practically losing your footing during the next measure of the waltz. “And?”

Robby raises the hand resting at your hip to nudge his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, only to slide it to its previous position. “And I said…” He pauses, maybe weighing the sentence one last time. “…that our hospital couldn’t find a better doctor for the job.”

You are floored. Truly, absolutely floored. Yes, you knew you had a serious chance of being selected – after all, Collins has moved to Portland and Langdon is still in rehab, making you the only internal candidate left. But hearing that Robby had said it out loud, that he had apparently pushed for your application…it constricts your ribcage in a manner you aren’t prepared for.

His mouth twitches at your expression, not sufficient to be labelled a smile.

“I know,” he sighs, directing his focus anywhere but on you. “Shocker.” You yet can’t absorb what he has declared when he continues in a more solemn tone. “But you have to understand something before I leave.”

Leave.

The word lands strangely in the conversation.

You know he means the sabbatical he has talked around the past month, the one everyone keeps deluding themselves is only temporary. But right here, in this room, with this voice…it sounds like a different definition. Sadder. Final.

“I kept throwing you into the deep water because I needed you to know what it feels like when you are the one responsible. How cold it is. How lonely. God—” He lets out a laugh devoid of humor. “Don’t make the same mistakes as me. Don’t let this job drown you. Have a life. Okay?”

As you peer up at him, what catches you off guard isn’t the advice, it’s the pain underneath. All the grief and the guilt of a man drowning in the tide of his own ghosts, consumed by the crushing reality that he couldn’t save Leah, couldn’t save Adamson, and perhaps can no longer save himself.

You nod, not convinced any other response is adequate. “Yeah,” you agree softly. “Don’t worry, Robby. I know.” The corner of your mouth lifts involuntarily. “Jack already gave me the speech.”

The mention of the man draws the first genuine smile you’ve witnessed on his features all evening.

“I’m sure he did.” He guides you through an underarm turn, slowing to not step on your dress. “I’m glad,” he adds after a beat. “That you both have each other when I’m gone.”

A crease forms between your brows. “Robby—"

He shakes his head, cutting off your words before they can ask questions that hurt. “Jack…” he murmurs in secrecy, throwing a look over your shoulder to the doctor in question. “He is a good man. And he deserves good things.”

The quartet concludes the piece prior to a response from you, strings ascending into a final note that echoes in the air for the room to applaud politely. Robby and you offer each other one brief salute, uncertain how you both ended up having this conversation at all, parting for different areas of the room.

Your first instinct is to retrieve a glass of champagne at the refreshment table simply so you can occupy your hands with something that isn’t your own thoughts, but just about two steps on the way, you note that Jack is no longer at his previous position.

Instead, you find him and Caleb Jefferson discussing together at one of the tables, far from the rest of the crowd. The latter spots you first, his face brightening in that easy, welcoming way of his as he beckons for you to come over – which you are more than grateful to comply to, your current social battery hanging by a thread.

Jack rises as you approach, chair scraping over the floor as he gives it to you with a smooth pull, hands hovering near your arms as he ensures you sit without wrinkling the dress.

“You cleaned up nice tonight, Boston.”

Lowering yourself into the chair, you struggle to refrain your smile. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

“Oh no,” he objects with feigned seriousness, palms remaining near for a second longer than necessary. “I had a whole speech prepared.”

Tilting your head up to look at him, you tease, “And what happened to it?”

“You showed up.”

Caleb chuckles outright at that and presents his hand for you to shake. “Is he always like this with you?”

A sudden snort escapes you.

Jack finally sinks into the seat beside you, close enough that your knees brush beneath the table – barely, the contact no more than a whisper through the fabric, but more than enough to snag your attention all the same.

“Yes Doctor,” you reply, going for an amused tone as you glance at Caleb. “I would even say he’s tamed tonight.”

Without missing a beat, Jack reaches for the wine bottle, pouring a glass for you prior to filling his own. “Give me a few minutes to get into the groove.”

Dinner falls into an easy rhythm after that, with Caleb on one side and Jack on the other, who keeps attending to you with no comment.

There’s the breadbasket that migrates across the table until closer for you to reach. And later, when you abandon the mushrooms in a neat little pile at the edge of your plate, he wordlessly scoops them onto his own, replacing them with a spoonful of his rice.

At some point during desert, while the psychiatrist speaks about some new administrative mandate nonsense you are only half listening to, Jack’s arm rests along the back of your chair, his thumb idly brushing the polished wood only inches from where your shoulders meet your neck.

The highlight of the evening comes when the hospital’s chief executive officer, Trent Norris, pauses at your table to commend your ‘promising future’ and ‘the department’s confidence in your trajectory’.

You thank him as gracefully as you can manage, but the real reward is catching Jack covering his smile behind the rim of his water glass.

By the time the ballroom begins to thin around eleven, you seize the opportunity to make a discreet French exit.

Purse in hand, you slip through the doors and into the night, only to stop dead the instant the December air collides with your cheeks and the bare skin of your body, stealing the breath straight from your lungs.

Outside, the snow has been descending for hours, unnoticed behind the Wintergarden windows, burying the street below a thick white blanket that appears to have muffled all of Pittsburgh. Even the Christmas music coming from the speakers farther down the avenue sounds distant.

“Shit,” you curse, a pale cloud of breath fleeing past your lips.

Fumbling your phone out of your clutch, you open Uber and search. Nothing.

You refresh. Still nothing. One more time. The same message greats you: Uber is currently unavailable in your area.

“Shit,” you repeat, resignation supplanting the annoyance.

Wrapping your arms tightly around yourself, you mentally sort through the increasingly terrible options.

Cassie? No. Harrison is with her tonight, and besides, you’re fairly certain that her stupid court-ordered ankle bracelet doesn’t allow her to come this far downtown.

Walking? Absolutely not. At this temperature, you’d die of hypothermia before making it the first mile.

The bus? Probably suspended. If Uber can’t get through the snow, public transportation doesn’t stand much of a chance either.

Go back inside and wait for the snow to—A sudden warmth settles over your frame.

Looking down, you find yourself enveloped in a charcoal peacoat, its weight so comforting it makes you instinctively lean into it. The wool is still heated from the body that had been wearing it only moments ago, and with the coziness comes the scent you’ve begun to associate with one person only.

There’s sandalwood, some patchouli, and underneath both, that one elusive fragrance you’ve never quite managed to identify despite catching it countless times whenever he stood close enough to review a chart over your shoulder or hand you an instrument.

It’s clean. Soothing. Entirely him.

You drink in another breath, completely unbidden.

“You’re gonna get cold,” you murmur without turning.

Jack steps around until facing you. He lifts the collar of the coat a little higher around your neck, careful fingers smoothing the thick fabric so it sits properly over your dress.

“Don’t worry about me,” he says quietly. His gaze flicks over the snow-covered street, then right back at you. “What were you doing?”

You lift the phone still clutched in your hand. “I was looking for an Uber,” you admit, sheepish. “But, um…” You glance at the deserted road where not a single pair of headlights appears through the curtain of flakes. “Yeah. Don’t think it will happen now.”

Nodding, he fastens the front of the jacket one button at a time, tucking you in until you’re swallowed by the wool and the indisputable scent of him. “So…now you’re planning on turning into an icicle?” he teases, sliding his hands down your upper arms as he takes in your shiver.

A breathless, self-conscious chuckle catches in your larynx. “Yep. I thought I would make a pretty snowman.”

“Very.”

The corner of his mouth lifts. “Come on, Trouble.” He nods toward the path that leads to Smithfield Street. “I’ll drive you.”

It takes a second, at worst two, to form the decision. After all your dress is too thin for December, and furthermore after spending hours indoors, your heels are killing your feet, and you’ve reached the point where your fingers and toes no longer quite feel like they’re attached to the rest of you.

“Okay.”

He awaits for you to collect your skirt into one hand and silently offers his arm for you to loop through.

The path to his car is slick from a thin sheen of ice, and you aren’t entirely certain which of you is helping the other stay upright. His gait is uneven on the frozen pavement, careful rather than hesitant, each step placed with the precision of a person long accustomed to adapting to their surroundings.

By the time you reach his SUV, the cold has gone deep into your limbs.

Opening the passenger door, Jack offers you his hand to aid you climb in, closing it cautiously behind. The temperature within mirrors the one outside, the leather seats on the brink of glacial beneath the material of your dress.

He gets in the driver’s side moments later, but right before starting the engine, one of his hands disappears in the direction of his right trouser leg, fingers tweaking the prosthetic into a more comfortable position.

Then, he reaches for the ignition, the engine rumbling to life, and switches on the heated seats.

Relief washes over you with such force that your lashes fall on your cheeks, but you barely have time to enjoy it when you perceive movement in your periphery.

Opening your eyes, you discover Jack leaning over the center console, one arm stretching for your seat belt and guiding the strap with precision so that it doesn’t catch the silk of the gown nor pinch your skin.

He is sufficiently close that the details of his features come into focus: the scattered freckles across his cheeks comparable to a dusting of stardust, the slight irregularity of his upper front tooth while gnawing his lip, the crease between his brows deepening with attention as he works.

But the best part is his eyes. Bathed in the glow of the dashboard, they have shed every trace of green, warming instead into the rich liquor color of a cognac.

The buckle clicks into place.

“There,” he murmurs, his breath feathering alongside your neck.

You peer up at him with a helpless smile. “Hoping for a five-star rating?”

He doesn’t answer. In lieu of a reply, he adjusts the heater a little higher and shifts the car into gear, your grin faltering at his silence.

Had you pushed the joke too far? Maybe it had sounded childish. Maybe he’d only been helping out of courtesy and you’d mistaken kindness for familiarity. Shit, what a way to make the drive uncomfortable.

You part your lips, searching for words to smooth over whatever invisible line you might have crossed, but the apology never departs your mouth. In the blink of an eye, Jack’s hands find yours where they’ve remained folded in your lap, cupping them tenderly to draw them up to his face.

A first breath of warm air grazes over your chilled knuckles, rapidly followed by another. And another.

The sound is barely more than a whisper in the enclosed car, intimate in a manner that ignites a searing ache of desire in your lower belly, made all the more ardent by the fact that he never once looks away.

There is no other noise aside from that and the hum of the heater. No other sensation than the one of your hands coaxed to life.

“More like hoping that my favorite resident doesn’t lose her fingers,” he smirks after another measured breath.

“Favorite?” you echo, forcing a lighthearted tone that can’t quite mask the strained edge underneath. “I thought Ellis and Shen were your favorites.”

His thumbs stroke the backs of your hands in soothing circles.

“They’re my favorite Night Crawlers,” he replies. “Very different category.”

You swallow. “And…what am I?” you hear yourself ask, the question slipping out in a quiet rush.

Jack’s mouth twitches as he lowers your hands onto your lap, his own returning on the wheel. “One day,” he declares. “Maybe. But not tonight, Boston.”

The ride home is serene in the best way, with Christmas songs crooning from the radio and the city gleaming in shades of white under the streetlights. Wrapped in his coat, you sink deeper into it, his scent growing more familiar with every passing mile, until the thought of arriving at your apartment feels disappointing.

It takes a few turns for you to notice how the route is…different. Longer.

Your eyes hover on the avenues and boulevards rolling past the window, up until joy blooms someplace in your ribcage as you register he isn’t choosing the fastest way across town.

He’s making the journey last.

You say nothing. He doesn’t either.

At every red light, he glances at your face, checking that you are still cozy, still warm, still awake. Each time, you answer in your own soundless language: a small nod, the ghost of a smile, a breathed, “I’m good.”.

By the time he pulls up in front of your building, midnight has long since come and gone, fresh snow blanketing the pavement to transform the curb into an ice rink.

Jack is the first to step out, circling the SUV to open your door. He offers his hand, steadying you against the frozen pavement as your heels meet the slick ground, fingers entwining to guide you at an unhurried pace through the weather until you arrive at your building’s entrance.

Reluctantly, you let your hand slip from his to fish your keys from your clutch.

“Thank you so much, Jack,” you begin, turning toward him in the shelter of the awning, the words seeming hopelessly insufficient for all that has occurred over the past hour. “I don’t know how to—”

Lifting one hand, he shakes his head with a smile. “It’s okay. It’s on my way.”

You tip your head and, without granting yourself the chance to reconsider, close the small distance separating you. Your fingertips find the lapel of his waistcoat, pressing the fabric where it has twisted beneath the jacket.

“Liar,” you murmur.

His irises follow the movement of your hand before leisurely climbing to meet yours once more. “You didn’t just clean up nice tonight, you know?”

The blood rushes to your cheeks, all of a sudden fascinated by the snowflakes piling up on the parked cars.

You clear your throat. “Thanks. You—” A sharp inhale. “You looked pretty good too.”

A grin ghosts across Jack’s face. His hands drift to the peacoat that is still on your shoulders, fingertips absently toying with one of the buttons. For the briefest instant, you’re convinced he’s wondering how to ask for it.

“Oh! I’m-I’m sorry,” you blurt, fumbling to unfasten it with clumsy digits. “Take it back.”

But he closes his hands over the fabric with more firmness than previously, halting the motion with a shake of the head.

“No.”

The single syllable is low. Certain. A heartbeat passes.

Then, softer, he repeats, “No.” He draws a slow breath through his nose, his jaw clenching as though wrestling with words that refuse to come.

“It’s…” His eyes flick to yours, and the next sentence seems to cost him something. “Keep it. You’ve just retired the jacket, sweetheart.”

Time stills.

Sweetheart. The endearment hangs there in the winter air between you, startling and gentle at once. Sweetheart. You become acutely aware of the snow collecting at the back of his curls, the faint cloud of each exhale, the unwavering way he’s staring at you now that the word has fled his lips. Sweetheart.

Neither of you speaks. Neither of you moves. Even Pittsburgh seems to have fallen into a reverent silence.

As a lone snowflake lands onto your cheek, Jack lifts a hand without a second thought, brushing it away with the pad of his thumb. The touch is featherlight, yet it lingers just beneath your lashes for some time, reluctant to surrender the contact.

“Get inside,” he breathes, the command carrying the weight of a plea.

You nod, although it takes a second to recall how, for there are a hundred things pressing against the back of your teeth, each more frightening than the last.

“Goodnight, Jack.”

That familiar, private smile finds him again.

“Goodnight,” he echoes, adding your name in a tone that follows you all the way to your apartment door.

Inside the quietude of it, darkness welcomes you.

You leave the lights untouched, allowing the room to remain steeped in blue shadows, the furniture reduced to nothing but shadows and shapes. Your purse slips from your shoulder onto the console, your heels join the floor with two muted thuds, and for a long moment, you simply stand there in the quietude, enveloped in the warmth of the coat.

Only then do you draw it closer, burying your face in the collar.

The scent returns instantly. The patchouli, the sandalwood…that one impossible note impossible to describe to anyone else and impossible to forget once you know it.

You breathe it in once. Twice. Three times.

The fragrance enfolds you so completely that the meaning of home stops feeling like the furniture or the walls or even the city outside your window.

It feels like his jacket draped over your body. Like the memory of his hands heating yours.

And, unmistakably…like Jack Abbot.

──────────

IV. HEARING (noun.) – the special sense by which noises and tones are received as stimuli

Ten o’clock on a New Year’s Eve shift is the most accurate comparison with Prometheus’ torture to ever exist.

No, seriously. If you could pick between a vulture tearing and devouring your liver every day of your immortal existence and drunk teenagers on a rampage in South 15…you would choose those birds of prey any day.

At least they would have the courtesy to be predictable. The teenagers, not so much.

“Stop touching that,” you call across the department for the third time, marching toward them with the tablet tucked under your arm. “If you try to rip that curtain down one more time, I promise you’ll spend the rest of the night on sedatives. And good luck explaining that to your parents.”

One of them lifts his head from a basin, face greenish and pupils sufficiently wide to absorb the fluorescent lights overhead. “We told you, ma’am, we’re eighteen!”

“Sure, sure,” you sigh, examining that everyone’s IV is infusing properly with no backflow of blood into the tubing. “So why are your IDs stating sixteen?”

“Those things are lying!” another one protests, only to be interrupted by a violent wave of nausea that has him gripping tight onto the metal pole for balance as he bends over his own basin.

You turn away to prevent them from testing your patience in a brand new manner, crossing the department in the direction of Central 7 where a patient with second-degree fireworks burns is waiting for you to assess the damage to his palm, your mind running through the treatment plan while attempting to ignore the small cries that have been resounding for the past half-hour.

Constricting items off. Soap. Vaseline. Bandage. Ibuprofen.

Twenty minutes there is all you need before you’re required in West 12 for an elderly man who fell in the bathroom with a possible fractured hip.

Then, there’s the ambulance bay, where a twenty-four year-old woman has a laceration across the forehead. And a suicidal man in Behavior Health 1. A sex accident in North 6. A nasal foreign body removal in Central 11.

By ten fifty, you start to regret every single aspect of your life that led you here tonight, birth included.

By ten fifty-eight, you call the OR for what appears to be the tenth time.

“Hi, it’s me again,” you say into the phone, propping your shoulder against the nurses’ station while maintaining a visual on the trauma bay.

Knowing their lines by heart when they’re overflowing, you monotonously repeat your own. “Yes, again. I know. I’m sorry. I just want to know if the OR is ready for Trauma Two.” You let out a sigh. “I understand that you have other patients, but um…”

You peer through the glass at the patient whose arm has been nearly severed after being struck by a motorcycle, the mangled limb immobilized as best as possible by Shen, blood gushing through the layers of gauze.

“…but I really need ortho to come down like right now.”

The person on the other hand responds words you can’t quite make out over the endless wails of a baby somewhere behind you.

You close your eyes, rubbing the bridge of your nose. “Right. Park. In ten minutes. Thank you.”

Hanging up, you relish the one glorious millisecond of quietude that fills your ears.

A baby’s scream shatters it. Once. Twice. Three times.

Your gaze lands on the North Nurses’ Station where Lena, who’s in charge tonight, stands behind the desk, sorting through a stack of paperwork with one hand and talking on the phone with the other.

“Hey, what’s that crying?” you ask when she finishes her call. “It’s been going on for some time.”

Lena pauses, glancing toward Peds, only to return to you with a drained shake of her head. “A baby Jane Doe,” she explains. “Left at a firework station. No note. No bag.”

Your eyebrows pull together.

“On New Year’s Eve?” you exclaim, looking once more in the direction of the cries.

She sighs, offering you the patient smile of a nurse who’s been through enough in this place to have lost the ability to be surprised by human beings. “Honey, if you think people take a break just ‘cause the clock is gonna strike twelve, you’re in the wrong line of work.”

You exhale through your nose, placing your tablet on the nurses’ station.

“A firework station, you said? A Safe Heaven location?”

“Yeah.” She beckons for you to follow as she walks to the pediatric room, you falling into step beside her.

“The exam showed she’s twenty-one days old,” Lena continues, her voice becoming increasingly difficult to grasp as the baby’s screams grow louder with every step. “Thankfully, the firefighters heard her over the fireworks, so she stayed outside only a few minutes.”

Your stomach tightens. “And physically? How is she doing?”

“Mild hypothermia and some smoke inhalation from the street celebrations, but she’s stable. Wolke finished checking her vitals a while ago so now we’re waiting for CYF to get a caseworker down here, but with holiday traffic…” She pauses, giving you a pointed look. “We both know it’s going to be a while.”

You nod silently, the wailing growing louder still – or perhaps you simply hear it more clearly now that you’re no longer attempting to bury it beneath the rest of the department’s noise.

Lena catches the expression on your face, and the corner of her mouth lifts knowingly.

“But you can try to calm her if you want. Henderson has, but…” She chuckles. “It wasn’t exactly a success.”

Your eyes travel to the glass door, to that tiny shape stirring inside the bassinet, then back to the chaos of the hospital surrounding you.

“Okay,” you agree, already reaching for the handle, but you have a moment of hesitation, turning to Lena. “Um…if someone is looking for me, can you tell them I’m here?”

She pats your arm with a pleased expression. “Sure thing, kid.”

The door shuts behind you in a silent thud.

The first thing you do is switch off the overhead lights, letting the harsh glare disappear until only the illumination from the corridor filters through the glass panel, casting the room in a muted luminosity far more suitable for the small patient inside.

As you sanitize your hands, the baby lies in the hospital bassinet, fists clenched beside her face, her cheeks flushed and damp with tears while her whole body trembles with the effort of making herself heard.

“Hey, sweetheart,” you murmur.

You approach slowly, keeping your voice low so she can register your presence prior to your hands touching her and causing her to startle. When you finally lift her from the bassinet, you are cautious to support her head and neck, drawing her to your chest till the warmth of her body nests beneath your collarbone.

“There you are,” you coo, one hand cradling the back of her head as the other adjusts its support under her bottom and thighs. “I’ve got you. Don’t worry, sweet.”

Her cries don’t ease. If anything, they grow louder, the sharp bawls vibrating straight through your chest.

“That’s okay,” you soothe, swaying from one foot to the other. “You can cry, bug. That’s allowed.”

You arch your spine a little to permit for the hand at her head to travel down the swaddle covering her back, tracing slow circles in between her shoulder blades and sliding upward to stroke gently the fine hair at the nape of her neck. Your thumb brushes along the soft curve of her ear as it resumes to the repetitive motion over her spine.

“I know, I know.”

A hiccup catches in her throat amid the cries as you rock her from side to side, maintaining a measured and even rhythm.

“You were cold out there, weren’t you? Everyone gets grumpy in the cold.” Another wail answers you. “Yeah, I know. I’m not saying you’re grumpy.”

The right side of your mouth raises despite yourself, forcing you to acknowledge that exhaustion has apparently reduced you to having a one-sided conversation with a baby and that, oddly enough, you adore it.

“Although, bug, for someone who’s only twenty-one days old, you have a pretty impressive set of lungs. No wonder the firefighters heard you.” You run the tips of your fingers up her neck, curling them around the soft fuzz of her hair. “That was a very bad place to spend the new year, right?”

As you keep talking, her cries commence to fracture, each new outburst shorter than the previous one, followed by increasingly long pauses where she draws deep shuddering breaths that cause her body to rise against yours.

“There you go,” you praise, veering away from the door to carry her farther into the dim corner of the room. “You don’t have to be scared anymore, I promise. We’re all here for you.”

Eventually, as the minutes pass, the sound dwindles into exhausted whimpers until the next time her mouth opens, it isn’t to scream but to search blindly for something to pacify her – the something in question turning out to be your scrub top.

“Oh no, I don’t think so, sweet,” you laugh quietly, readjusting your arm beneath her until she is more securely nestled alongside your chest, vaguely registering behind you the click of the door opening.

Turning your head, you halt at Jack’s frame standing in the doorway.

For a moment, neither of you says anything.

He has gone downright still, one hand lingering on the handle while the other hangs loosely at his side, and there is a look on his face that sends a strange current straight through your body before you can even begin to grasp the reason.

You have witnessed it in the past.

It’s the same emotion he had worn eleven days ago when you said goodbye at your building’s entrance after the gala: same quiet joy, identical softness around his eyes, same almost imperceptible hesitation, as though he had been on the verge of expressing what was on his mind and, at the very last second, had decided to keep it to himself.

You hadn’t figured out what it meant then. You still haven’t. Apparently, you’re going to keep wondering.

His eyes drag from your face to the baby curled against your chest, snapping back to you.

“Hey,” he finally breathes, barely louder than the hum of the corridor.

“Hey.”

Closing the door prudently behind him, Jack crosses to the sanitizer dispenser, rubbing his hands together as he makes his way toward you, his footsteps deliberately light so he doesn’t disturb the baby.

“Who’s this little lady?” he asks, lowering his voice even further.

“Jack Abbot, Jane Doe.” Tilting your head, you turn to the girl and adopt a conspiratorial whisper that is nevertheless pitched so he can listen to every word. “Jane Doe, Jack Abbot. Don’t worry, sweet. I know he looks like a grumpy old man, but it’s a big lie.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jack smirks, his head tilting just enough to accentuate the graying curls along his hairline.

“Yep.” You sway the baby gently from side to side, fighting the laugh on your lips.

“You’re just an old man.”

One of his hands flashes up to press dramatically over his heart.

“Ouch.” The wounded expression would almost be convincing if the amusement weren’t giving him away. “And here I was going to offer some help.”

You pursue your lips, pretending to weigh the proposition, your gaze deliberately tracing the length of his forearms. “Hmm…” The silence stretches for another heartbeat. “You know what? Good idea. We need to put those muscles to work.”

“That’s more like it.”

The words are supplemented with the faintest huff of laughter, although the teasing evaporates as soon as you start transferring the infant into his arms, both of your bodies turning cautious.

You conserve a hand at the back of her head to support the neck as you guide her to his chest. “Okay, just like that,” you murmur.

“I’ve got her.”

But despite it, you don’t let go instantaneously, and Jack doesn’t appear particularly interested in asking you to.

For several seconds, your palms remain there, overlapping his as you ensure the baby’s body is properly supported along his broad chest, your fingers stroking his knuckles whenever you smooth the swaddle. The contact lasts longer than necessary, neither of you inclined to be the first to break it, until eventually you withdraw your hands, allowing him to sink into the chair beside the bassinet, cradling the baby with delicacy.

He looks down at her.

“Why are you crying, pretty girl?” he asks quietly.

And that is the precise moment when your brain ceases to function, neurons undergoing a structural collapse at the vision filling your irises.

Jack is holding a baby.

Jack-stupidly-hot-Abbot is holding a baby.

You stare at him, unable to help yourself, watching his large hand covering almost the entirety of her back as he rocks her, thumb rubbing gently along the edge of the swaddle while his eyes lock on her face.

Somewhere, in the back of your mind, a small voice gives up pretending.

Fine, you like Jack. That’s no longer a secret even to your brain: you are hopelessly attracted to him.

Except…no. That isn’t quite right either.

Attraction is too simple a word. It makes it sound as though the only thing you desire is his body and nothing else, like the entire problem could be solved by getting him into bed and finally discovering what his hands feel like on your naked skin when they aren’t holding a scalpel.

And yes, you want those things, pretending otherwise has become increasingly ridiculous, but that isn’t the part that frightens you.

What you truly desire are the ordinary things.

How he takes his eggs in the morning, whether he cuts his sandwiches diagonally or straight down the middle, if he steals the blankets when he sleeps or makes sure you have enough.

You find yourself yearning to know what book sits on his nightstand, whether he leaves it open facedown when he falls asleep, what he uses as a bookmark. To know what’s his favorite mug, if he hums while cooking, hates cilantro or even talks in his sleep.

You want to know who Jack Abbot was like before the war and whether he thinks about you as often as you think about him.

And, most dangerously of all, you crave to know if there is a Christmas present hidden underneath his bed with your name on it, just as there is one beneath yours, waiting patiently to—

“Old dream maker, you heart breaker…”

Your thoughts come to a halt at the sound of his voice, Jack singing no more louder than a whisper.

His voice is altered here, the familiar rasp still present but mellowed by the low notes ricocheting in the dim room, distracting you, even for a brief second, from the emergency department awaiting on the other side of the door.

There are no more stretchers and monitors and shouting.

Only the three of you, a bubble drifting through the hailstorm.

He keeps swaying the little girl, who gives a small sigh alongside his chest, her body relaxing further into him.

“Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.” His voice unexpectedly quivering, he clears his throat, almost embarrassed by it, and lifts his eyes to yours before continuing. “Two drifters, off to see the world.”

The baby’s eyelids flutter once, twice, then close.

Something about the words lodges inside your ribcage. Two drifters.

You glance at Jack, at the tired lines around his eyes, at the gentleness in his expression, and for an instant the song sounds less like a simple lullaby meant to soothe a scared baby, but more like…an intimate ode to two people who have spent too long wandering in the dark, only to finally find their shore.

Unable to withstand the raw intensity of his stare, you look away, choosing instead to drag the empty chair and sit beside him.

“There’s such a lot of world to see,” he continues, and you find yourself captivated not simply by the melody, but by every variation in his voice.

Somewhere, between one breath and the next, the exhaustion you’ve been trailing since the beginning of the shift catches up with you, your head growing heavier as you fight it. Unable to resist any longer, your temple finds Jack’s shoulder, the fabric of his scrubs warm beneath your cheek.

“Moon river…” Not shifting away, Jack rectifies his posture so you can rest more comfortably, his head eventually sinking down to rest on yours. His cheek brushes your hair as the final notes leave his throat. “And me.”

The silence that ensues feels full rather than empty.

You remain there for a while, half-curled into the crook of his neck, the baby sleeping, up until you murmur, “Didn’t know you sang.”

Jack’s mouth curves, his breath fanning over your hairline.

“I used to be in a band when I was in high school,” he answers, his voice still hushed so as not to disturb the fragile slumber he has coaxed out of the little girl.

Your fingers rise to rest over the swaddle draping her back, brushing his by accident. His hand glides just so that the pads of his fingers find yours, the contact light, yet perceivable from the tips of your nails to your acromion.

“A band?” you ask, lifting your head to look at him without making an attempt to put distance between your bodies. “Really? What did you play?”

“Guitar.”

A smile paints his face as his gaze drops to the baby, his index finger tracing over your own in an absentminded stroke. “My parents were so tired of seeing me hang around everywhere with my Strat.”

You let out a snort, battling the motion it creates for fear of losing the sweet, strange weight of this moment.

“And did you have fans?” you tease.

Jack hums, considering the question with exaggerated solemnity. “Our moms.”

Hopelessly grinning, you are caught off guard when a yawn claws its way out of your throat.

“Sorry,” you mumble, bringing the hand that is on the girl’s back to your mouth to hide it behind your palm as your eyes sting. “It’s the shift. Lots of patients.”

“I know,” he replies gently, and there is something in his tone that forces you to lower your hand and peer at him once more. He hesitates an instant and adds, so quietly you almost miss it “If you want—”

“Two minutes!”

The shout comes from the hub, loud enough to slice through the quiet and break the spell.

You straighten promptly, sleepiness vanishing as you raise your head from his shoulder and whip it around, a smile on your face as voices call out the remaining minutes till midnight. Turning back to ask Jack what his New Year’s resolution is – probably one sarcastic like surviving another year in this department – the words die at your throat.

His eyes are unfocused. Not sleepy, nor tired…elsewhere.

His breathing is peculiar: brisker, shallower, and the fingers that had been laying so delicately over the baby’s swaddle have gone rigid, his whole body drawing taut as though an invisible threat has creeped in the room without warning.

“Jack,” you call him, uncertain. No answer.

The first firework detonates outside.

Jack jolts so violently that the small girl startles, a distressed sound escaping her throat. Driven by reflex, you gather her back into your arms, tucking her face into your chest to muffle the noise while your palm cups her other ear.

By the time the countdown ticks down someplace beyond those walls, you already understand where Jack has gone.

“Ten!”

You snap his name again, sharper this time. “Jack!” Still nothing.

“Nine!”

His expression hardens in a flash, seizing your breath.

Every trace of warmth vanishes from his face like a door has slammed shut behind his eyes, the pupils blown wide until all the hazel you know so well evolves into something darker, distant, unreachable.

“Eight!”

His fingers clamp around the arms of the chair, tendons standing out underneath the skin as his fingernails threaten to puncture the material.

“Seven!”

His jaw locks and you recognize the expression.

Not from him exactly, but from patients carrying wounds that never show up on scans, from soldiers whose bodies recall terror before their minds have time to name it, from a silence born when still hearing the screams on the field.

“Six!”

Pulling the baby even closer, you ensure her small face is nested into the fold of your scrubs to muffle the worst of the noise.

“Five!”

The fireworks begin to rise, each explosion outside reverberating through the building until the noise swallows the very air from the room.

“Jack,” you breathe, aware that his name alone won’t be enough.

“Four!”

His breathing fractures into shallow, jagged pieces – three rapid, desperate inhales that never quite reach his lungs. You comprehend now that he isn’t here anymore, not completely, that some part of him has been dragged in a place you can’t follow.

“Three!”

Holding the little girl securely, you lift the hand shielding her ear and bring your fingers to his face instead. He doesn’t recoil from the contact, but the muscle in his jaw is rigid under your palm.

“Two!”

Outside, Pittsburgh seems to hold its breath, the whole city suspended in the final seconds leading up to midnight.

And, with Jack still trapped in his trance, your instincts override your reason.

“One!”

The fireworks erupt all at once, accompanied by the distant roar of voices celebrating across the town and bleeding through each wall of the hospital.

You lean forward before he can disappear any further in the darkness of his memory and press a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

The instant your lips touch him, the tension running through his body gives way, the stiff set of his shoulders melts like a knot loosening under pressure, and a long breath leaves him – shaky, pained, and thick with relief.

You retreat only a couple of inches, your hand still on his cheek as you whisper, “Happy New Year, Jack.”

His eyes find yours again, wet and unguarded.

For a second, he says nothing. He simply looks at you, the shade of his irises close to roasted chestnuts in the somber light, travelling between yours as if committing the sight to heart before it can be taken from him by the next explosion outside. Then, his eyelids fall closed and his forehead lowers gently until it rests against yours. You meet him without hesitation, forehead to forehead, breath to breath.

“Happy New Year, sweetheart,” he responds.

You remain anchored there for what feels like hours, neither of you willing to break the spell. Outside the room, the countdown is already a memory, the hospital having resumed its relentless rhythm.

Yet inside this fragile pocket of quietude, the three of you are content to let the rest of the world carry on without you, even for a little while longer.

“Thank you for bringing me back,” Jack breathes at last, the familiar gravel returning to his voice after what must have been an eternity of holding his throat too tight.

You open your eyes, a flutter stirring in your chest when you notice his are still tightly shut.

“Always,” you reply, voice hovering amid a promise and a confession.

The door opens.

You both separate so quickly that your elbow bumps the side of the chair, the baby stirring on your chest without waking, and when you look in the direction of the door, Ellis is already standing in the doorway, her sharp stare taking in everything in a single sweep: the sleeping infant in your arms, Jack’s expression, the distant that has just appeared between you.

One eyebrow rises.

There’s a moment where you are certain she is about to say something catastrophic or embarrassing, but whatever she catches in Jack’s face makes the amusement drain from her own, replaced by practical focus.

“You’re being asked, boss,” she informs him, already stepping back into the hallway. “Polytrauma incoming.”

Jack shifts back into motion.

“On my way,” he answers, and the authority in his tone returns with such effortless force that you remember why the whole department listens whenever he speaks. Long gone is the man who had been singing Moon River to a frightened baby, and in his place stands Jack Abbot, the attending.

However, before he leaves, his gaze drops to the baby snuggled into your scrubs, and the sudden softness in his features feels private, stolen.

He bends to press a tender kiss to the top of her head, then straightens just enough to cup your cheeks with his warm palms. Holding you there, he leans down to brush a feather-light kiss on your forehead.

You strive to ignore how your heart skips.

Jack draws back, a smile tugging at his lips as he turns toward the door. “See you later, my ladies.”

The door closes behind him.

After a long period spent staring at it, you exhale and sink deeper into the chair, adjusting the girl against your chest until her cheek rests comfortably over your heart, lulled by the rhythm of it. And God, how fast it beats.

You look down at her sleeping face, her mouth slack on your top as the rise and fall of her breathing gradually synchronizes with your own, your hand dancing over the swaddle in slow circles.

You wonder if she can perceive how utterly betrayed you are by your own body.

Because this isn’t adrenaline anymore.

Nor coffee, nor a sugar rush, nor any of the other excuses you’ve been feeding yourself for months. This is something else – a something you’ve been refusing to name.

You think of the stolen moments you’ve accumulated without realizing they were becoming precious: the warmth of his hand around yours in the stairwell, the way he made you laugh about The Six Million Dollar Man until your stomach hurt, the coat he placed over your shoulders a fortnight ago that now hangs in your wardrobe and still carries his smell.

You think of the way he says your name, of the dry amusement when he teases you, of the quiet praise he offers when he thinks you need to hear it.

And now, you think of his voice singing Moon River in this room, sufficiently soft to make the entire world fade.

You close your eyes just as the baby sighs alongside your chest.

Outside, the hospital begins another year.

But for once, you don’t care about the noise past these walls, for you’ve finally stopped pretending.

You know.

Your heart beats for him.

──────────

V. TASTE (noun.) – the faculty of perceiving the flavor of substances through sensory receptors on the tongue

The last time you took a swing to the face, you were fourteen.

It occurred at one of your friends’ slumber parties during a game of spin the bottle, which, in retrospect, had been a spectacularly terrible choice for a room full of hormonal teenagers.

You had spun it with one wish: that it would land on Morgan, your best friend whose lips you had wasted an embarrassing amount of time daydreaming on yours. Instead, the neck veered left and came to a dead stop on Rory, prompting his girlfriend, Claire, to deliver a nasty right hook, giving you no time to process what was happening.

You went home that night with a swollen cheek, a bruised ego and an extremely valuable lesson in the art of ducking a punch.

Alas, you discovered eighteen years later that very little had changed, and you were still shit at it, though to be fair, you could blame that on the fact that your hands had been busy taking the guy’s blood pressure when his volatile temper, aggravated by a Penguins loss, tipped into an uglier territory.

And yet, here you are.

Standing inside an elevator with an icepack pressed upon your mouth, staring at your own reflection in the polished metal doors as the floor numbers ascend to the rooftop, wondering how exactly you have gone from soon-to-be-attending to another statistic in an ER incident report, another name reduced to a line on a spreadsheet alongside Dana and who knows how many others.

All because some drunk hockey fan opted to use you as his personal stress toy, his fist knocking something loose inside you that you are far less prepared to treat than the swelling on your lower lip, which is beginning to throb beneath the cold.

You know it isn’t serious, you know that.

The cut is shallow, your teeth are intact, your jaw moves normally, your pupils are equal and reactive…if you were examining someone else right now, you would probably tell them to apply ice intermittently and take a Tylenol for the pain if necessary, then send them on their way.

But the thing is, there’s a vast distinction between recognizing that your body is medically fine and convincing your nervous system that you are well too.

The cold air bites your face the instant you step onto the rooftop, making you regret not taking your – Jack’s – coat from your locker on your way up here. Still, you don’t turn back, choosing rather to cross the few feet over to the railing.

The city lies below you, Pittsburgh glittering under the January sky, the buildings illuminated in scattered squares of yellow and white while headlights thread through the streets like veins. For a few seconds, you simply stand there, one hand gripping the balustrade and the other maintaining the pack in contact with your injured lip.

“Oh, fuck off,” you mutter when you perceive the first tear roll down your cheek.

You wipe it away with the heel of your hand, only for another to follow, and another, drawing a shaky inhale through your nose as you turn your focus back toward the city and try to force your breathing into something steadier.

Those tears aren’t only for the pain, not really, because layered with the throbbing ache in your face and the lingering shock in your nerves is a sentiment harder to quell: the humiliation of recalling how feeble you had felt barely ten minutes ago, thirteen floors down, when one moment of violence had stripped all your training and composure and authority to nothing more than a body striving to protect itself.

You hate that your body remembers every second of it.

Hate that your hands are still trembling and that you needed to walk away from the department so that neither Santos nor Cassie would notice just how profoundly it had shaken you.

But above all, you hate that some selfish part of you wishes someone were here. No, scratch that, not just anyone.

Him.

You yearn for the one person whose presence has become synonymous with safety without ever consciously deciding that it should be. You crave his dry jokes when you’re too angry to laugh, his hands when yours won’t cease tremoring, his voice when your thoughts are too loud.

You want Jack.

The epiphany is still landing someplace soft inside your sternum when the scraping sound of the rooftop door opening reaches you, accompanied by the particular rhythm of his footsteps, a cadence you’ve memorized over the past several months.

You hear him halt several feet behind you.

“You planning on making my life difficult tonight, Boston?” he asks, his voice carrying that familiar amusement, although something underneath it is quieter and far more concerned.

Inhaling slowly, you smear away the evidence of crying before turning your head sufficiently for him to hear you.

“I’m fine,” you manage, straining to keep your voice level through a stiff lip. “You can go back downstairs.”

The footsteps don’t retreat, but advance until his body heat radiates beside you, and, ahead of any protest, his palm closes gently around your wrist.

“Jack, seriously—” you begin, but he cautiously coaxes the icepack from your grip, his touch hovering enough time for you to register the contrast of his hand enfolding your own trembling one.

“Humor me.”

His index finger slips beneath your chin and turns your face fully toward him, the touch filled with such tenderness that it almost hurts more than the punch.

His gaze travels over your mouth, examining the swelling along your lower lip, the small split, the faint smear of dried blood at the corner, only to rise higher and catch on the tears still clinging to your lashes.

And something in him changes.

You have seen Jack exasperated. Have seen him exhausted, haunted, sarcastic, worried, even vulnerable in ways he rarely allows anyone to witness.

But this, is different.

His eyes have always been impossible to categorize, fluctuating between hazel, sage, amber and bronze depending on the light, but tonight every softer hue seems to have been distilled, leaving behind something fierce and close to molten. The green and brown are swallowed around his pupils by burnished gold threaded with copper underneath the rooftop’s lights, like the last embers of a fire that refuse to die even after all around has turned to ashes.

His jaw clenches once, twice. The muscle jumps as if anger is physically striving to force its way out of him and you practically expect it to crack his teeth, but he throttles it, channeling it into a stony expression, infinitely more dangerous than an outburst.

This isn’t rage that burns wildly.

It’s the heat trapped inside a furnace after the doors have been sealed shut, immense and suffocating, held there only because Jack is making a conscious decision not to let it consume the room.

His thumb traces prudently along the edge of your lips, reverently avoiding the bruised skin.

“Who did this?” he asks.

His voice is subdued – so much so that it frightens you more than shouting ever could.

You try to turn your face away, but his finger remains beneath your chin, gentle but firm, refusing to let you disappear from his sight. “It’s nothing.”

“I didn’t ask what you thought it was,” he replies, his gaze never leaving yours. “Who did this?”

As you look back at him, you register for the first time how breathless he is, not enough that anyone downstairs would have noticed unless they were paying close attention, but now that you’ve known him for fourteen months, you can recognize the signs of how tightly he’s holding himself together just to keep his chest from heaving.

He is angry. Furious perhaps. But deep down, something else has taken root.

Fear.

You can see it now, lurking just below his controlled expression, in the meticulous way he tracks your features as though cataloguing every mark, every swelling, every hidden spot that might ache, hunting for injuries you’ve kept to yourself.

He probably picked up your name right before handover, and at the mention of the code Hula Hoop, instantly beelined for the elevator without bothering to press for more details.

Suddenly, you grasp that if you don’t respond, he’s perfectly capable of going downstairs himself and piecing it together.

“An intoxicated man,” you ultimately admit, your voice barely carrying over the wind. “He became agitated during the examination.”

Jack’s expression doesn’t break, his jaw still visibly strained as he returns the icepack to your lower lip, adjusting it with the care of someone terrified that even the slightest pressure might flare your pain.

“Was he restrained or sedated?” he asks after a moment, holding you pinned with his stare. You nod.

“And will you press charges?” Another nod.

“Good.”

The word departs him with an exhale, the tight line of his shoulders easing by the smallest degree, although the residual anger stamped across his features lingers, and you know exactly where it takes root: the man who thought he could lay a hand on you.

Your eyebrows draw together at the abruptness of his relief.

A faint, humorless curve touches his mouth.

“I’m sure Robby wouldn’t have appreciated dealing with a hemorrhagic-shock patient right before the end of his shift.”

Something close to a laugh escapes you, and you place your hand over the back of his, hoping to bleed some of the dormant tension from it.

“He would have definitely kicked your ass,” you murmur, attempting a shaky smile. “Or stolen your leg.”

The joke falls between the both of you.

You know right away that it hasn’t reached your eyes because Jack doesn’t even pretend to smile this time, only observing you with an attentiveness that makes you feel bare, as if he can see where the bravado ends and the hurt begins.

His hand shifts alongside your jaw, fingers spreading unhurriedly until there is room for yours to slide between them.

You seize the chance.

Your fingers thread together, fitting into the spaces amidst his with an ease that feels absurd after months of keeping every shared touch unsaid, the solid back of his hand pressing against the palm of yours as he guides them upward to rest on your bruised cheek.

The heat of his skin seeps through you.

“You don’t have to hide with me, you know,” he murmurs.

The wind weaves through his grey curls, lifting a few strands from his hairline as he takes a slow, deliberate breath, his unblinking eyes centered on yours with an intensity that renders the cold completely irrelevant.

“If you’re hurt, or scared, or angry, or—or even tired, I want to be here for you,” he continues, his thumb tracing a slow path under your eye. “I trust you, you trust me. This is how it works between us.”

You swallow the lump gathering in your throat, pushing the icepack away from your mouth with your free hand. “You make it sound so simple.”

“It is,” he insists softly, his thumb leaving the curve of your cheek to trace the bridge of your nose – a touch so deliberate it feels less like an exam and more like being sculpted into memory, etching every line into the timeless marble of his mind.

You shake your head, unable to look away from him. “It doesn’t feel simple.”

His irises wander across your visage, pausing on your own before falling to your mouth and returning once more.

The sight of it sends an odd, weightless sensation through you, as if gravity has suddenly cut its strings and left the rooftop floating into the night.

“Not with you,” you finish, the confession nothing more than an exhale on his skin.

Something flickers in his expression, an emotion you’ve never quite seen so raw in the past, stripped of the gallows humor he so often uses as armor, causing the blood to rush thick and warm in your veins.

“What does it feel like, then?” he asks.

Your eyes drop to his mouth, tracing the sharp line of his lips and hoping that your brief peeking didn’t betray the surge of desire you just felt, but the subtle hitch in his breathing confirms that he has noticed exactly where your attention went.

“You…” you begin, only for the rest of the sentence to disappear somewhere behind your teeth. “You should go.”

He doesn’t move. “Do you want me to?”

The question hangs a moment.

You remain silent, and Jack doesn’t fill the void for you. He merely waits with a steady, unhurried patience far more crushing than demand or pressure – a tranquility that exposes the truth until it’s impossible to deny you’ve stood on the precipice of this moment for months.

“Because if you want me to go back downstairs,” he adds, wetting his lips with a slow swipe of his tongue. “I’ll go.”

You lean closer to him before your mind can fully catch up with the decision, drawn forward by something deeper than thought till the cold is long forgotten, thawed by the warmth radiating from him.

“I don’t want it.”

His breath catches. “Boston…”

“No,” you interrupt, your fingers tightening around his. “Don’t call me that.”

For the first time since he stepped onto that rooftop, a genuine flicker of joy paints his features. “Okay,” he murmurs. “What should I call you?”

Your heart stumbles at the question, for the truth is already suspended at your lips, an unspoken phantom he recognizes just as clearly as you do, and there’s something so intimate about hearing him say the word aloud. “You know.”

He takes a half-step closer, offering a polite choice to back away, yet his body eclipses the whole of Pittsburgh until his eyes are the only anchors left in existence.

“Sweetheart.”

You bridge the distance in a heartbeat, stopping only when your mouths hover on the verge of touching, your lips parted as you breathe shakily and feel how the heat of his exhale mingles with yours.

His eyes drop once more to your mouth.

“My sweetheart,” he whispers before closing the last inch of space.

The kiss is exceedingly delicate, almost unbearably so, as if Jack doesn’t quite trust the moment yet, like finally holding you after months of glances, guarded gestures and reassuring words might shatter whatever fragile bond has been growing between you.

His lips are warm despite the January air, far softer than you expected, and you can’t be certain if the kiss lasts for a mere second or an entire lifetime.

When he pulls back by barely an inch, your eyes open at the same moment, simply for the joy of gazing at each other.

Surprise fills his expression, beneath which lies a disarming, boyish vulnerability – the kind you’ve caught glimpses of before, like that day in the stairwell, but never quite this close. It’s as though even Jack Abbot hadn’t entirely believed this would happen until he felt your mouth against his.

Neither of you speaks – or even dares to.

You lean forward again, and this time there’s no hesitation.

Whatever self-restraint has tethered the two of you to opposite sides of an invisible line for months ultimately snaps.

His hand releases yours just so his arm can circle your waist while your fingers tangle in the fabric of his scrub top and pull him closer, his other hand cupping the side of your neck.

In the process, the icepack slips from his fingers and hits the concrete with a clatter someplace near your feet, forgotten in the blink of an eye as your free hand finds the curls at the back of his head, your fingers threading through them until an ‘accidental’ tug drags a deep, guttural sound from somewhere starved in his throat that goes straight through your core.

His mouth parts against yours, the kiss deepening as his tongue caresses the seam of your lips, and all of a sudden, everything you’ve spent months trying to explain becomes painfully simple, for you know exactly what you want, and it’s him.

You taste the iron of your blood where your split lip has bled, the salt of your earlier tears, and beneath it all, the unmistakable trace of the coffee he must have had right before his shift.

For a few suspended seconds, nothing else exists – no hospital, no patient several floors below, no bruise.

Only Jack.

You barely notice when your back meets the rooftop railing, but Jack does, of course, and he pulls away just enough to breathe, his arm tightening around your waist.

“Wait,” he rasps, forehead hovering close to yours. “Easy, love.”

He presses another brief kiss to your lips, almost apologetic, adding quietly, “Not there.”

You blink at him, slightly breathless and more than a little light-headed. “What?”

“We are not kissing against this,” he declares with a smile, throwing a glance to the balustrade behind you.

Despite the unbridled hammering of your pulse in your ribcage and your lips still tingling from his, a laugh bubbles up. “Oh, really? Doctor’s orders?”

“Oh yes, absolutely,” he assures you solemnly, resting his forehead against yours as his thumb strokes all along the base of your neck. “Who knows when that thing was installed?”

You glance over your shoulder at the railing and snort. “Good thinking.”

Releasing your hold on him and taking a few steps in the direction of the nearest wall, you leave him behind with a fleeting expression of confusion until you turn around and lean back against the brick, raising your index in a slow, unmistakable gesture for him to come closer.

The confusion vanishes, replaced by that adorable crooked smile.

Within seconds, he is standing in front of you, his arms braced upon the wall on either side of your head, his body so close that you can catch the heat pouring from him.

His eyes roam all over your face without the slightest attempt to conceal how thoroughly he’s devouring you.

“You really are trouble,” he breathes.

You reach up to loop your hands around his neck, and his right arm abandons the wall to lock around your waist, gathering you against him until even the air can’t find a way between your bodies.

“Yet who’s the one who came up here to see if I was all right?” you tease, peering into his eyes.

“Always,” he answers without hesitation.

He holds your gaze for a long moment, his eyes burning amber underneath the rooftop lights, and you suddenly grasp why you’ve spent fourteen months finding excuses to observe them: they have always given him away. Even when his mouth and his jokes and his nicknames didn’t, there always were his eyes to scream the truth.

You meet each other halfway with neither hesitation nor fear anymore, surrendering to the sweet ambrosia of his mouth and the roughness of his stubble against your skin. His hand is firm at your waist, the other rising to cradle your jaw with a tenderness that has always been there.

You have adored the feeling of his hands when they reached for you in that trauma room, adored the sight of him laughing with you in the stairwell, adored the scent of him lingering inside the coat he once placed around your shoulders and adored just as much his voice singing Moon River to a frightened baby in the middle of a chaotic New Year’s Eve shift.

You’ve fallen for every version of him you’ve been allowed to encounter.

But this…this is different.

Because the moment you feel his tongue tangled with yours and his hand finds the hem of your scrub top, you finally discover the one sense you’ve been missing.

And God, how you love the way he tastes.

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