hiii okay so i've had this sitting in my drafts for literal days and i finally decided to just say you know what, let it see the light of day. bad bunny + jack abbot?? god that's EVERYTHING to me, my writing playlist is genuinely unhinged and i pulled inspiration from like 5 different songs for this one.
quick disclaimer: i'm sorry in advance for any grammar mistakes!! english is not my first language, spanish is, so i always write everything in spanish first and then translate — bear with me 🙏 jack abbot has been consuming my entire brain for the past few weeks and i am NOT okay about it. also i desperately need more mel x langdon content on my feed PLEASE feed me. anyway, hope you guys enjoy, besosssss.
myb u should listen: chulo pt2 by Bad Gyal, tokischa and young miko, and that's my ted talk on dr. jack abbot.
Btw i would love be myrna and receive THAT look.
the quiet kind of wanting (or the cruel way tbh)
pairing: Jack Abbot x readernurse.
summary: you are, for all intents and purposes, a splinter under jack abbot's skin. that's what you've assumed for months, anyway. then your mom shows up at 7am, asks the one question you can't answer — and dr. abbot opens his mouth. one small lie. one parking lot. one kiss neither of you was ready for. turns out what looked like cold distance was something else entirely. it just needed someone to say it out loud first.
warnings: jack abbot being an idiot about his feelings (affectionate but also not) · yearning that has a PULSE · he literally treated her like furniture for months and we're supposed to root for him (we do, unfortunately) · angst if you squint and tilt your head · one (1) unhinged parking lot kiss · found-family coded coworkers doing the absolute most in the background · mom shows up unannounced (threat level: high) · mention of fake dating but he meant every word · soft ending that will live in my head rent-free
The problem with Jack Abbot isn't that he's difficult.
The problem is that he isn't. Not with everyone.
I've watched him be patient with residents asking questions they should already know the answers to. I've watched him stay ten minutes past what the job technically required, walking a family member through something nobody asked him to explain. I've watched him with Lena during handoffs — that cadence he has with her, something almost natural, almost human, like words don't cost him the same effort they cost when they're directed at me. I watched him this morning with Shen, who said something low that I couldn't catch, and Jack said something back that could almost pass for humor — effortless sarcasm, zero visible effort — and Shen half-smiled like it was normal.
With everyone else, Jack Abbot is a version of himself I've never been allowed to meet.
With me, it's different.
Fine.
Thanks.
Never my name. Months on the same shift, same floor, sometimes less than three feet apart — Jack Abbot has never said my name voluntarily. He's used it in clinical contexts, when a case required it, when he had to name an action to name a person. But not the way he says Lena's name. Not with that ease of someone who holds another person's name comfortably in their mouth.
In his, mine doesn't exist.
At first I told myself it was because he was new to the shift. Then that he was just like that with everyone. Then the months passed and I crossed off explanations one by one until only the one I didn't want was left.
I bother him. Not in the generic way where two people just don't vibe. Something more specific. Like there's something about me that produces in Jack Abbot a kind of active tolerance — like he has to endure me. Like my presence is an environmental condition he's learned to manage because the job requires it, but that he'd prefer, given the option, not to have to deal with.
I've known this for months.
And still I come back to the same shift, calibrate my presence to take up the least possible space, and do my job with the same precision as always.
What I hadn't done — until last Wednesday — was ask him directly.
It was a bad idea from the start.
I knew it while I was doing it. I knew it as I walked toward bay three where he was reviewing a patient chart with that posture of his, shoulders slightly forward, eyes on the screen, that kind of focus that makes the rest of the world stop existing for as long as it lasts.
I knew it and did it anyway, because I'd been carrying that question around for weeks and sometimes the only way to get rid of something is to get it out.
"Can I ask you something, Dr. Abbot?" I said.
He lifted his eyes from the screen. Looked at me.
"Go ahead," he said.
"Do I bother you? Like — is my presence here genuinely a problem for you?"
The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough to be uncomfortable.
Jack looked at me through that silence with the face that gives nothing away — the same face I've been trying to read from across the hall for months and getting nowhere. And then he said:
"No."
One word. Flat. Delivered with the same efficiency as every other word he's ever aimed in my direction, no added inflection, nothing to tell me whether it was true or just the shortest available answer to exit the moment.
"Are you sure?" I said.
He looked at me in that way of his. The way that could mean anything or nothing.
"Yes," he said.
And left.
He literally turned around and walked toward bay four with his usual stride and didn't look back, and I stood in the entrance to bay three processing what had just happened with the specific feeling of someone who had needed an answer and received two syllables.
Yes.
Like the question was so small it didn't deserve more than that. Like I was so small I didn't deserve more than that.
I ended up doing a quick breathing exercise and moving on.
That night the shift was long in the way shifts are long when nothing goes completely wrong but everything goes slightly sideways — that accumulation of small things, none of which individually would justify the exhaustion, but together they produce it anyway.
Dr. Ellis vanishing at the best possible moment. Shen spending half an hour hunting down his iced coffee with an energy I genuinely admired. Lena managing everything with that calm of hers that makes it look easy even when it isn't. And somewhere between one and two in the morning Jack found me in the break room wearing whatever expression I must have had on my face, and he sat down next to me without asking anything.
"The coffee from this machine," I said.
"Terrible," he said.
"But it's what there is."
"It's what there is," he echoed.
We sat there for five minutes without saying anything. Not the uncomfortable kind of silence. The kind that happens between people who've spent enough time in the same space that they don't need to fill it anymore.
"Better?" he said finally.
"Same," I said.
"Same works too," he said. And left.
Jack walked past the break room doorway at two fifteen.
He didn't come in. Just passed. But in the second he crossed the threshold his eyes moved inward — that involuntary thing eyes do when they register presence before the brain makes any conscious decisions about it — and he saw me sitting there with the terrible machine coffee.
His eyes were on me for exactly one second.
Then he kept walking.
I replayed it more times than I'm going to admit. That one second of his. Like I needed to find meaning in it that probably wasn't there.
Dana caught me in the exit hallway with my jacket on and my bag on my shoulder.
"Someone's looking for you at reception," she said without stopping, already mentally checked into the next shift. "A woman. Says she's your mom."
I stopped.
Not dramatically. Just the amount of time it takes a brain that's been running for twelve hours to process information it wasn't expecting.
My mother.
"Thanks," I said.
And redirected.
The day shift was spinning up with that seven-in-the-morning energy. Mateo and Princess crossing paths at the central station, Perlah with a tablet in her hand, that shift-change rhythm with its own noise and momentum. I was moving against it with twelve hours behind me and my body already on autopilot — that mode that kicks in when the brain knows rest is almost within reach.
I took the long hallway.
That's where I saw them.
Langdon and Mel coming in through the main doors for their shift. Mel still had her badge in her hand, saying something quietly, tilted slightly toward him with the ease of someone who stopped measuring how much space she takes up next to another person a long time ago. Langdon wasn't looking at her — scrolling his phone — but at the corner of his mouth there was something he clearly hadn't decided to show and was showing anyway. At some point between the door and the hallway their arms brushed. Just that. The casual, unconscious contact of two people who don't track the distance between them anymore because it stopped being necessary.
I looked away before either of them could catch me staring.
At least the day shift has more love than I do.
I thought it without drama. Just thought it, and the thought stayed there with nowhere useful to go, like all those thoughts you learn to carry quietly because making noise about them doesn't change anything.
"Hey, good night?" said Mel as she passed me, with that smile of hers that has something genuinely warm in it even at seven in the morning, the kind of person who just radiates something good without trying.
"Long," I said.
She made the understanding face of someone who's had her own long nights and kept moving. I kept moving too, the thought still sitting there, quiet and present, that small persistent thing you learn to ignore because there's nowhere for it to go.
My mother was at reception.
I saw her before she saw me, which gave me exactly a second and a half to prepare — not enough, but it was what I had.
Standing. Black bag. Beige scarf. That posture she has everywhere, like every room she walks into is hers by natural right. Neurosurgeon, seventeen years at the same university hospital, two association awards, the kind of presence that rearranges the air in a room when she enters. That's my mother anywhere. In this place specifically — surrounded by ER staff moving around her with no idea who she was — she was still exactly that.
She saw me.
"I thought I'd come down before I left," she said, instead of hello. "I had a consult upstairs with Dr. Shamsi."
She kissed my cheek, quick, then looked at me. That inventory of hers — head to toe, three seconds, completely involuntary at this point in both our lives.
"You have dark circles."
"It's seven in the morning and I just finished a night shift."
"Still," she said, like my argument hadn't changed anything.
There it was. That word of hers. Still. Like context is irrelevant to the diagnosis.
Her eyes moved over my face another second, then traveled slowly downward.
"Did you lose weight?"
"No."
"Your face looks thinner," she said, tilting her head.
"Mom."
"I'm telling you because I love you. Not to make you feel bad."
I breathed.
"I'm fine," I said. "Really."
She nodded once. Not believing me — filing me away. Then she looked around, that habit of hers of scanning every space she's in without thinking about it, and when her eyes came back to mine they were carrying something I recognized immediately.
Something was coming.
"Are you eating properly?" she said, crossing her arms. "And don't just say yes. Tell me what you ate yesterday."
"I ate."
"That's not an answer."
"Mom, I ate, I'm fine, I sleep, I work, everything is in order."
"Then why do you have that look on your face."
"What look?"
"That one," she said, pointing at me with two fingers. "The same one you had when you were sixteen and carrying something you didn't want to tell me. You thought if you didn't say it out loud I wouldn't figure it out."
I said nothing. There was no useful response to that and we both knew it.
My mother let three seconds pass. Then something in her softened — arms loosening slightly — and she took one step toward me. Just one.
"Thirty," she said. In Spanish. Always in Spanish when she wants it to land without cushioning. She tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear with false sympathy. "At your age I'd already been married two years and you were already on the way. I'm not saying that to pressure you, I'm saying it because I worry. Because I look at you and I see someone who works hard, who's good at what she does, but who comes home alone and never mentions anyone. Your sister says you've been like this for months."
My mother was from one of those families. The ones who still believe love is something you build after someone else makes the decision for you. Her mother had done it with her, and she'd done it with my sister, who was twenty-seven when she showed up one Sunday at the family lunch sitting next to a politician her same age with a smile that was clearly diplomatic commitment and not genuine enthusiasm. My sister texted me that night: i don't even know the name of his dog and I replied run and she said it's too late.
I had to admit the guy was good-looking. That kind of good-looking that's almost inconvenient — the kind that makes you understand why people compare certain men to celebrities without it sounding exaggerated. My sister told me once, in a tone of grievance, that it was hard to be genuinely angry at someone with a face like that, and I told her that was exactly what he wanted her to think, and she said i know and i still can't.
The strange thing is she didn't run. And a year later she texted me: i think i actually love him and that feels like a betrayal of myself somehow.
So my mother's method had an irregular but not entirely disastrous track record, which was somehow worse, because it meant she had real arguments and we both knew it.
"I have a life," I said.
"Like what?" she said, tilting her head.
"Friends. Things. People."
"Things?" she repeated, and in her mouth that word sounded small. Almost sad. "You can't live on work alone. You need more than that. Someone to talk to when you get home, someone who knows how your day went. That's not a luxury, that's basic."
"I'm fine like this," I said.
She looked at me a moment and lowered her voice.
"That's what worries me. That you're fine like this. That you've gotten used to something smaller than what you deserve and you can't even see it anymore because it just feels normal."
I looked around desperately, praying I wasn't about to become the shift gossip. Thankfully the day team was entirely indifferent — except, naturally, for the Princess-and-Perlah situation unfolding in the corner.
My mother straightened her shoulders slightly.
"Are you seeing someone?" she said, looking at me directly. "And don't say it's private because I'm your mother and we've been having this conversation for months. Is there someone or is there no one?"
I opened my mouth.
I closed my mouth.
Because from somewhere to my right, without any warning:
"She's my girlfriend."
I turned around slowly.
Jack was standing a meter and a half away, jacket on, keys in hand, also on his way out after the shift. Looking at my mother with a completely flat expression, like he'd just read a data point out loud that simply existed and required no further elaboration — no inflection, no indication whatsoever that he had just reorganized the next ten minutes of my life. Like he'd said something completely mundane. A lab value. A patient's temperature.
She's my girlfriend.
Just like that. No hesitation. No asking permission.
The silence that followed was the kind you replay afterward, more times than you'll ever admit.
My mother looked at him. Three seconds, head to toe. I watched the exact moment something in her expression shifted — that reorganization I know well, and that this time, for the first time in the entire conversation, wasn't directed at pointing out something I'd done wrong.
She walked toward him with her hand extended and a smile I hadn't seen all morning.
"Nice to meet you," she said.
"Jack Abbot," he said, and shook it. Firm. Not a second of hesitation.
"How long have you two been together?" she asked.
"A while," said Jack.
My mother processed that. Then looked at me, then at him, then back at me, with an expression it took me a moment to place because I don't receive it often.
Approval. Genuine approval, no asterisk, no condition.
"Perfect — when were you going to tell me?" she said. In Spanish, but different. Without the edge from two minutes ago. Just clean and direct — perfect — like it was the simplest thing in the world.
And I said nothing.
I said nothing because there was nothing available that wasn't an error of variable magnitude. I was standing there processing the fact that Jack Abbot — the same Jack Abbot who hadn't said my name voluntarily in months — had just told my mother he was my boyfriend with the same energy he used to read lab results. No hesitation. No inflection. Like it was an established fact that simply hadn't had an opportunity to come up yet.
My mother talked to him. Asked how long he'd been in the ER, whether he liked the work, what the night shift was like — those questions of hers that look small and aren't. Dr. Abbot answered everything with his usual economy and my mother listened with the attention she normally reserves for cases she genuinely finds interesting, nodding here and there, with the expression of someone confirming a suspicion they already had and finding it satisfactory.
At some point in that conversation I became completely peripheral.
My mother and Dr. Abbot talking like they'd met before, or like my mother had decided in the first thirty seconds that she approved and had simply acted accordingly from that point — which was exactly how she operated in every context.
When she left, she shook his hand first.
She kissed me goodbye — longer than the one when she arrived — and looked at me with something that in anyone else I would have called warmth without reservation. That specific warmth of someone who's finally been given news they'd been waiting a long time to hear.
"Take care of yourself," she said. "Eat. Sleep. And call me this weekend, we need to actually talk."
Actually talk. Which meant she wanted details and this lobby conversation had been the appetizer.
"Yes," I said.
"It was a pleasure to meet you," she told Jack.
"Likewise, doctor," said Jack.
And she disappeared through the main doors.
The hospital kept going.
I stood where I was with my jacket on and my bag on my shoulder and the specific sensation of something having happened that I didn't yet have anywhere to put. Like when you receive too much information in too little time and your brain simply decides to process it later, when more resources are available.
Dr. Abbot was still a meter and a half away. He said nothing. Just looked at me, with that patience of his, waiting.
"I'm going to the parking garage," I said finally.
"Me too," he said.
We walked the whole way without saying anything. Not exactly uncomfortable — more like too much sitting inside both of us and neither of us had found the way to get it out yet. I had my bag on my shoulder and the lobby conversation replaying somewhere in the back of my head with that quality specific to things you can't quite believe happened even though you lived them firsthand. I walked slightly ahead, half a step, without having decided to — my feet just moving faster than usual and I wasn't bothering to slow them down. Keys in my hand, gripped harder than necessary. Jaw a little tight.
She's my girlfriend.
Just like that. No hesitation.
We reached the garage. Our cars on opposite sides, which meant the path split at some point and that point was right now, and I knew it and still kept walking until I reached it and stopped.
"Dr. Abbot."
He stopped. Turned.
Something about having him like this — face to face, outside the shift, technically outside the hospital, no patients or protocols or any structural reason to maintain any particular distance — made everything I'd been holding since the beginning of the shift run out of places to hide.
"I didn't ask for that," I said. My voice came out quieter than I wanted but with more edge, and I didn't do anything to soften it. "I didn't ask for anything. I've spent months on that shift calibrating every single thing I say and every inch of space I take up, months thinking I bothered you and learning to function around that, and you just — you reached into something that's mine in thirty seconds without anyone asking you to. And the worst part, the actual worst part, is that it worked. She left happy. Which hadn't happened once in the entire conversation before you showed up, which says something about my life that I'd rather not examine right now in a parking garage at seven in the morning, but here we are."
Jack looked at me. Not interrupting. Not moving. With that calm of his that in this specific moment irritated me more than anything else he could have done.
"I thought I bothered you," I kept going, and I hit the keys against my palm without thinking — that nervous, useless gesture. "I asked you directly and you said no, and I believed you, or I tried to, but everything you did said something else and I sat with that alone for months. And now it turns out you can just show up and tell my mother you're my boyfriend like it's the most normal thing in the world and I don't understand what that was, I don't understand why you did it, I don't understand what I'm supposed to —"
I didn't finish the sentence.
He took two steps toward me.
I didn't see it coming. Or I saw it and didn't process it in time, which is different. His hand found my face before I finished talking, fingers barely grazing my cheek, and he kissed me.
I went quiet.
Not a decision. It was just that his words, mine, everything I was about to say — it all stopped feeling urgent for however long that kiss lasted, which was brief, very brief, the kind that lasts exactly long enough to be completely real and not long enough to know what to do with it afterward.
When Jack pulled back he didn't go far. He stayed inches away, and I saw in his eyes that second before they fully opened — that second you can't fake.
The parking garage in silence.
"I've wanted to do that since the first time I saw you," he said. In that voice of his, no decoration, no inflection, like he was reading a data point out loud that had been sitting there for a while and it was simply time to say it. "When you came onto the shift. First day. You walked through the door like you owned the place and I thought it was going to be a problem."
I looked at him.
"A problem?" I said.
"For me," he said. And didn't elaborate. He didn't need to.
Me with my keys gripped in my hand and something in my chest that I couldn't tell anymore was anger or something else entirely that looked too much like it.
"That doesn't explain why you treated me like I was invisible for months," I said, and it came out quieter than before, without the edge from a moment ago — because the edge takes energy and something in me had just spent all of it.
"No," said Jack. "It doesn't."
And he didn't add anything.
He just stood there looking at me, with that honesty of his that doesn't give more than it has but doesn't hide what's there either, and I stood there processing that Jack Abbot had just told me he'd wanted to kiss me since the first day he watched me walk through that door — said like that, no drama, like someone finally reading out loud something that had been written for months.
Then he raised his hand slowly and moved the strand of hair that had fallen across my face, fingers grazing my temple, and said in that voice of his — but with something different underneath it:
"And it's Jack. Call me Jack. We're supposed to be dating."
I felt my cheeks get warm.
You wouldn't be able to see it, I know, you wouldn't be able to see it — but I felt it completely, that heat that rises from somewhere inside without asking permission, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature.
I said nothing.
I literally could not find anything to say and that hadn't happened to me in a long time.
Jack looked at me one more second, with that expression that never gives information but that this morning had something different in it — something I didn't have time to fully read before he nodded once, slowly, and turned toward his car.
I stayed where I was.
Ten seconds. Maybe more. Bag on my shoulder, keys in my hand, cheeks warm, brain trying to do something useful with everything that had just happened and finding absolutely no idea where to start.
She's my girlfriend.
Call me Jack.
We're supposed to be dating.
I got to my car. Put the key in. Sat down.
And I laughed.
Not a laugh that made any sense. It was that short, disbelieving laugh that comes out when something has no tidy explanation available and your body just picks that because it can't find another mechanism. I covered my mouth with my hand like that was going to help, then put it on my chest, where my heart had been doing something that was definitely not its normal rate for a while now.
Jack.
I started the car.
.
.
Jack Abbot got to his car and didn't start it.
Hands on the steering wheel. Engine off. Mind replaying what he'd done without a single trace of shame.
He'd seen a woman at reception who looked like her in a way that left no room for interpretation. The same honey-colored eyes, the same warm skin, a presence that in her was learned restraint and in the mother was something sharper, more natural — like she'd never needed to learn it. He'd watched her talk and watched the way she stood while listening, that specific posture of hers when she's receiving something that costs her and would prefer it not to show — shoulders slightly tense, gaze held at a fixed point — and something in him had responded before any reasonable part of his brain could.
She's my girlfriend.
And then he'd kissed her.
That had also happened before any reasonable part of him could intervene. She was standing there with that voice she'd been keeping controlled for months and that in the parking garage had stopped being controlled, telling him what she'd been holding since the start of the shift, and he had closed that distance before he could explain why he was doing it.
It had lasted nothing.
It had lasted enough for him to know exactly what he'd been managing from the careful distance of the same shift, same hallway, same space — where it was possible to keep things in their place if you were disciplined enough.
This morning he hadn't been disciplined.
He moved his hand slowly across his chest. That place. That weight that was sometimes his shoulder radiating and sometimes something else, and that this morning hadn't been his shoulder in a while. He noticed his own pulse against his ribs — high, persistently high, the kind of rate that in a patient would have made him ask what was going on.
He knew exactly what was going on.
He'd known for months and he'd managed it with the same discipline he applied to everything else — keep it in its place, don't look at it too directly, do the work because the work continues and that's enough.
This morning that had stopped being enough at seven in the morning in front of a car that wasn't his.
He leaned his head back against the seat. The concrete ceiling. The water stain in the top right corner that had probably been there for years and that he'd looked at enough times to recognize it.
You're her fake boyfriend now, he thought, with the clarity that comes from things without an immediate solution. You kissed her in the parking garage. You moved the hair out of her face. You told her to call you Jack. And the only true part of everything you did this morning is the one part you can't say out loud. Unbelievable. I should have asked her out before I spent months ignoring her like she was a recurring inconvenience.
He held his palm flat against his sternum for a moment — his own pulse pushing back against it, steady, completely useless as information and completely impossible to ignore.
A short, disbelieving smile escaped him at his own thoughts. Jack Abbot had broken routine today. Today he had done what he'd been thinking about for months.
What a day, he thought.
And started the car.
.
.
.
me rn
