call me and i’ll come (mel king x frank langdon)
additional tags: former punk drummer frank langdon; missouri mel™️; sending nudes and ~other things~ through the usps to your past parasocial music boyfriend; that same music boyfriend being your present day work crush; women's rights and wrongs; let neurodivergent women be HORNY and SAD!!
It all starts with KiKi Perkins
"Mel, you want to tag team this infected bug bite case? Could be gnarly.” He makes the sign of the cross in a way that was probably offensive to practicing Catholics. "Here's hoping for cellulitis. Maybe abscesses if the patient broke skin.”
She nods, already pulling two pairs of plastic blue gloves from the dispenser, passing it over to him, and attempting for their hands to brush just the tiniest bit as he led the charge into room eight.
All his surefire gusto, however, completely transforms into shocked surprise when he spots the patient.
“Oh, this better not be who I think this is.”
KiKi Perkins, forty-one. Shaved head, snake bite and eye brow piercings, and a patchwork tattoo sleeve down their right arm. Pants rolled up at the knee. Worn in Doc Martens. Legs dangling from the examination table, the dozens of keys attached to the carabiner ring on their hip glinting under the fluorescents.
“Present, unfortunately. Nice to see you, Frank. Wish it was under better circumstances,” KiKi says, with such a thick New Jersey accent that Mel tunes into the sound of each syllable. “Came back with a souvenir from hiking through Allegheny. I wanted to get it checked out before heading back home.”
“You were smart to stop in. Now let’s see the damage,” Langdon says.
They show him the red, pulsing skin rash, spread from the infected bug bite like the eye of a category-five hurricane. “Having any trouble breathing? Mobility issues?”
“Nope, just some leg soreness and trouble sleeping through the night. Still cracks me up that you’re actually a real MD. Real fuckin’ trip. I wish you could have seen everyone’s faces at Vultures when I told them.”
“Vultures?” Mel asks.
“It’s a punk bar in Philly. KiKi’s their sound tech for whenever bands stop in.”
“Yeah, and Frank here was always a real diva every time he did sound check.”
“Personally, I prefer particular.”
Mel’s pretty sure KiKi has cellulitis and mentally calculates the necessary next steps in diagnostics and treatment: blood test panel to rule out a serious infection like MRSA, order a prescription of cephalexin. “You were in a band?”
KiKi snorts. “Honey, he drummed in the band. Fuckin’ packed house every time they toured.” They lean down to where Langdon sits on a stool, lowering their voice while motioning to Mel.
“Do you think your partner here’s ever heard of Crux Inversa?”
Oh.
Oh.
Oh no.
This can not be happening.
Is she caught on camera? Is she being Punk’d?
Did Gloria implement a new workplace provision that suddenly made sure every patient room’s thermostat was set at a hundred degrees?
Is that why her face flushed?
“KiKi, that was so long ago, I don’t think I even remember,” Langdon snaps off his gloves as he swivels to get up from the stool. “I’m going to have Dr. King set up a ten-day script of cephalexin. She’s the best doctor here, by far. Would trust her with my life. You’ll want to take it for the full ten, even if the infection looks like it’s cleared. Hey, Dr. King—”
But she’s already out the door, footsteps squeaking over linoleum.
Dr. Langdon—her mentor, kind-of-maybe friend, work crush, etc.—was the drummer of the now defunct punk band Crux Inversa.
Mel could pinpoint the exact moment she first stumbled across their music: a link on a now 404’d Tumblr post on punkrockmusicshare. Captioned with Appalachanian punk makes my brain go brrrrrrr, it sent her to a YouTube music video of four musicians in black ski-masks playing at a basement party in Morgantown.
They didn’t list any of their names, totally anonymous.
It was two months after her mom died and after she dropped out of Mizzou. Mel needed a connection to other people in the aftermath of combing through Miranda King’s belongings—all the flea market costume jewelry, heavy coffee table books full of picturesque photographs of places she’d never see. The music. So many CDs, vinyls, and homemade mix-tapes featuring bands with names Mel loved reading aloud: Bikini Kill, Lunachicks, Veruca Salt, Poison Girls, Strawberry Switchblade. Posters from when Miranda got to see the bands as they toured through—from St. Louis, Kansas City to Springfield and Columbia.
Finding punkrockmusicshare was akin to being thrown a lifeline, a space to digitally archive all of her mother’s memories and scroll scroll scroll ‘til her thoughts stopped and the pain in her chest evaporated.
She watched the linked Crux Inversa video and then another posted to their YouTube channel (a very respectable 15k subscribers). Their sound maneuvered through a storm of heavy distorted guitar rifts and disorienting baselines and screamed, raspy lyrics about dismantling the system.
But…the drums? Yeah. A drummer with an inclination towards fast combinations of quick doubles, hard pounds of the bass snare, and thunderous rim shots that reverberated through her wired headphones. Her ear drums thumped and she blushed into her open palm as he twirled his drumstick during a key break the middle of the song.
By the end, Mel desperately wanted to lick the beads of sweat that dripped down his neck.
Take those same deft fingers into her mouth, choke on them.
Kiss him through the hole in his ski mask—with tongue.
Bite his lip, his earlobes.
Leave tiny teeth mark scars behind.
Have him pull her hair. Hard.
Bend her over his drum kit and spank her.
What transpired over the next couple of months was something Mel was not proud of. She could, if she wanted, blame the entire episode on grief so raw that it drove her to recklessness; to the overwhelmed responsibility of being the sole caretaker of her sister and a drop-out microbiology student. To the estate sale, where Miranda’s treasures were picked through and purchased, leaving their old house stark, left bare.
But that’s not entirely it.
The whole truth, however, left her feeling much more embarrassed and exposed: it was a full blown crush.
So she liked Crux Inversa’s Facebook page, stalked their website, pirated their discography and used a cassette recorder to make her own tapes. She learned the exact combination of words to type into the YouTube search bar to find videos of their latest basement show. Her focus was solely on the drummer. No one else. Scoured obscure subreddits for any information about their identities until her phone’s blue light burned her eyes.
Absolutely nothing. Snake eyes every time.
At night, after making sure both her and Becca took their nighttime medications and her sister fast asleep, Mel would dance around her room in her underwear. Crux Inversa’s Mottled Mountainsounds LP blasted through her mom’s old walkman. She let the rhythm of the drums be the metronome for the figure-8 motion of her hips until she toppled over in her bed, chest heaving. Grabbing the polaroid camera from her nightstand, she pulled up her t-shirt to right below her chin. Angled it just right to capture her from right above her belly button all the way to her bare breasts; doubly careful her face was nowhere in the picture.
Every day she looked at her naked body in the mirror, she saw another responsibility to take care of.: to feed and water. But when she observed the printed picture, she looked hot. Sexy in a way she rarely felt because she was too tired to feel anything but residual numbness. Mel took another picture, flipped over on her stomach, awkwardly angling and contorting the camera over her head, so her lace-and-cotton-covered ass popped in the background.
There was a P.O. Box address on the band’s website. She spent the entire next week working up the courage to post the pictures with the short letter inside.
I think about you all the time. Now you have something to remember me. No return address on the envelope or signed name at the bottom of her note. Anonymous, just like him.
If she included the pair of panties—white cotton patterned with tiny, purple and yellow pansies—she wore or the pillowcase from the pillow she dry humped to completion after…well, that was nobodies business.
The bathroom sink facet turned on. Mel didn’t hear anyone come inside, still hidden in the stall, trying to work through her mortification and not go down the shame spiral. How am I bringing this up to Langdon?
Hey! You know that band you were in? Do you remember being sent highly illicit and inappropriate pictures and paraphernalia in the mail about eight years ago? Well…that was me! So crazy, right?
Did she need to report this to HR? Would he report her to HR? It would be in his right to. The image of them, Robby, Abbot, Gloria in a sterile conference room, discussing her past harassment of her current co-worker was not great. The fear of them sliding an inconspicuous envelope across the table, surveying her nudes like evidence left at a crime scene. Can you explain these photos, Dr. King.
(It’s deeply messed up, if this scenario played out, how Robby would still find a way to twist it back around on Langdon, make it his fault, and that hypothetical sat like a stone in the pit of her stomach.)
Was he dating his ex-wife when he received her mail? Had she inadvertently cast herself as the other woman in his relationship without realizing? Did Abby hate her? Did he think about her photos while he was with his wife? Maybe she needed to transfer out of PTMC and start looking into another residency placement?
She needs to get out of this stall fast. Mel tries her best to get her body to move, but it’s like a puppeteer untangling the fragile strings of a marionette, clumsy and disjointed. Walking across the small space to the door, she flings it open only to collide head first with Langdon’s solid chest.
“Mel, are you okay? You were in there for almost an hour.”
Mel King doesn’t lie. Always clocked in five minutes early. Didn’t complain when assigned to chairs or when the case isn’t flashy. She does her job well, knew what their co-workers thought about her—innocent, sweet, enthusiastic. Overheard Trinity gossiping to Whitaker that Mel had former church girl vibes to which her roommate definitively agreed. He grew up in rural Nebraska in a large mennonite family; pretty much had a metaphorical PhD in church girl-ology.
Instead of laying the full truth down at Langdon’s feet, a lie bubbles up from her mouth:
“There’s been an accident at Becca’s facility,” and because she is a novice at this whole lying thing, she overplays her hand by blurting out “a fire.”
“What?”
Okay, she can walk this back. She can save this. “A totally small one…a bag of popcorn caught fire in the community kitchen microwave and smoked up the entire first floor. A whole mess! Becca called because she’s very sensitive to smells and needs to go home.”
Not true—if Becca could move full-time into a LUSH to spend the rest of her days testing out fragrant body washes and bath bombs, she would leave their house in the dust.
“Do you need a ride?”
Being stuck in a small space with the guy she mentally—at multiple points in her life—called both her work husband and her music boyfriend? No. Absolutely not. Maybe never again.
“I already have one,” Mel responds too quickly.
“Who”
“Just a guy.”
“You have a guy? Since when?”
“Um…about three months ago,” a totally fake, arbitrary amount of time. “We matched on Hinge.”
Langdon crosses his arms across his chest, stares down at her with those blue eyes that always freeze her in place.
“Mel, what’s going on?”
“I told you what’s happening. I just need to leave and pick Becca up. Family emergency.”
He’s silent for a while…assessing, making a diagnosis, putting together a mental plan for patient care.
“Okay, well, text me when you get home.” If she looked too close, she fears she would crumble the second she clocked his hands clench.
Do you know how many times I’ve masturbated to your music? Do you know, that when I lost my virginity, it was to your drumbeats? Your songs? That when it happened, I imagined it was you.
After she repeats her fabricated excuse to Robby and gets the clear to go home, she walks out the sliding glass doors of the ambulance bay, following the familiar route to her bus stop.
Mel never spots Dr. Langdon—strategically taking his afternoon Marlboro break—against the brick facade of the hospital building, watching her blonde braid disappear into the downtown skyline, thinking about delicate purple and yellow pansies on cotton panties.
