LOVE AT FIRST COFFEE? — brendon park
BRENDON PARK X F!READER | 4.6K
summary ⸝⸝ Brendon Park has built an entire career on being the smartest person in the room. Then he meets you, who makes him forget what he was about to say.
warnings ⸝⸝ coffee shop meet-cute, grumpy x sunshine (?), fluff, pining, brendon yearns, he falls first and harder, jealous! park, park the goldfish bc he can’t keep his mouth shut with her near? (one of my tamest fics tbrh), abbot and shen cameo bc I love them. no use of y/n.
notes ⸝⸝ first official park fic yaay! I do realise I’m supposed to be on a break, but look at him! I genuinely don’t know why it took me so long to write for him, mainly because I've been told that if there's an ortho bro within a five-mile radius, I'll somehow manage to find him? It’s unfortunate that they’re truly horrible tho 💔
⟡ READ ON AO3 ⚚ PITT MASTERLIST
Brendon Park had not looked at anyone twice. Not in his surgical practice, definitely not at a fucking coffee shop of all places.
He'd had his thing in med school. Everyone did. Ill-advised entanglement with another type-A who wanted to win every argument and came close. It ended mutually around final year with shaken hands, which should tell you everything.
Ortho had a reputation and Brendon had leaned into it wholeheartedly. Fast, brutal, precise, and deeply uninterested in anything that didn't have to do with bone mechanics or operative planning.
Park the Shark. He'd heard the name passed between residents in the corridor like a warning, and he hadn't minded. Warnings kept the noise down.
He was, all told, completely fine.
And then he met you. At the hospital coffee counter on a Wednesday morning, over a cup of black americano, and everything went sideways.
The barista set his coffee down and he was on his way to get it. Pretty normal stuff. Stuff that happened everyday.
But before he could get there, there was you, his cup in your grasp, and then between your lips.
He'd opened his mouth to say something. Sharply, probably. The same voice that made interns forget how to speak. But then, you drank.
Your face did something spectacular. Nose scrunching up, eyes going slightly wide, mouth opened like a fish, as though you were offended, devastated, betrayed by a fucking beverage. You stared into the cup for a full second like you were waiting for it to apologize. "Okay," you said, to the cup, mostly. "That's — what is that?"
Brendon stared at you.
"What'd they put in this?" you continued, as if you were workshopping a complaint, a comical lilt to your voice.
In the fifteen seconds of you taking his drink and drinking it, it didn’t occur to you that you’d just consumed something belonging to someone else. The coffee — he didn’t think you’d agree for it to be called a coffee, to be really honest — had shaken you so much that it took you a minute to compose yourself.
When you did, you turned the cup in your hand, read the side and looked up, a sheepish smile on your lips.
As you found him just standing there, gaze locked on you, your eyes dropped between him and the cup. "Oh, it's got your name on it." You had the audacity to look adorable — what the fuck did he just think? "Is this yours?"
Brendon nodded. Fucking nodded.
Embarrassment should not have looked that good on anyone. How could someone look like that while questioning life decisions, evaluating choices that led to this moment?
"Right." You set it down on the counter between, like you were disarming a situation. "Sorry. I genuinely thought — mine's supposed to be a latte and I just grabbed it, I wasn't looking at the name. I'm really sorry."
Dark circles under your eyes, hair pulled back like it was done in thirty seconds without a mirror, lime green scrubs that had no reason looking good, no reason making you look good. Who even looked good in that colour? Who even chose that colour?
You were somewhere between mortified and trying to hold it together, which was fair, because you had just walked up to a stranger's drink and had at it. "Can I at least — I'll pay for a new one, here—"
You were reaching into your pocket and Brendon, who had been on the verge of saying something very reasonable like it's fine, not a problem— "No."
Accidentally spoke in the voice. He didn't always mean to use, it just comes out that way by default, making fourth-year residents straighten their spines. And he’d used it. To you.
You looked up at him with an expression he could only describe as a deer having second thoughts about the road.
He hadn't meant — he wasn't angry. He'd said no out of reflex. Most things he said were out of reflex, and now this person was staring at him like he'd personally threatened her. He had the strange and unfamiliar experience of wanting to walk it back. "I meant—" he started.
But you'd pulled yourself together, apparently deciding that whatever his problem was, it was his problem.
"Okay, no." You held your hands up, like you were placating a toddler. "Noted. For future reference though, why would you get it like that, it's — is this fun for you? Like do you enjoy it?"
He blinked, heat rising up to his cheeks. He could only hope you didn’t notice it.
What you did notice was that he looked clueless and you clarified, "the coffee," you pointed to his cup. "There's nothing in it. I took one sip and I think my tongue is still reeling from it."
"That's what coffee tastes like," Brendon said.
"That's a very sad thing to believe." You stated, completely without malice, which made it worse somehow. A genuine opinion. To make matters worse, you were already looking back toward the counter, scanning for your actual order.
Brendon stood there holding his americano while everyone else and everything else continued their life, including you.
The barista called your name. You went to get it, came back briefly into his sightline, and gave him a small, still-somewhat-mortified wave on your way out the door.
He watched you go and drank his coffee, the same one your lips touched. It tasted exactly like it always did, which was fine, he liked it fine.
Do you enjoy it?
He took another sip. It was objectively bitter.
Lime green. A colour he couldn't immediately place. It bothered him, sitting in the back of his head while he moved through his afternoon.
PTMC colour-coded by department. He knew this. He just didn't have them all memorized, a gap he'd never needed to fill before.
He decided to ask his ward nurse, Delgado, at the end of his post-ops. Casual as he could make it, which for him was still pretty clinical — "lime green. You know which department?"
Delgado looked up from her chart. "Lime green," she repeated, slowly, like she was checking the words for a hidden compartment.
“Yeah.”
“Are we talking about scrubs here, Dr Park?” She had her eyebrows crossed like she was trying to read him.
“Yes.”
“Neonatology,” she answered.
Four floors up, the opposite end of the building, behind two sets of badge-locked doors and a hand-washing protocol longer than some of his procedures. He'd been in there exactly twice in his career, both times for consults that took fifteen minutes and ended in a referral elsewhere.
It made sense. You looked like sunshine incarnate, all airy and beautiful, effortlessly skilful — not that he’d seen you work, but he had an idea.
"Right." He turned back toward the board.
"Dr. Park."
"Mm."
"Are you — Is there something involving neonatology that I should know about?"
A small, unwelcome lurch happened inside his chest. He kept his face the way he kept it in the OR — nothing on it, nothing to read — and he could tell, with horrible clarity, that it wasn't working.
“Something?”
“A case?”
Brendon could see that she’d worded it carefully. "No."
"Okay," Delgado said. "No reason then." She didn't believe a word of it and had decided not to push, which was worse because he could’ve handled an argument. An argument had an end.
Without looking at her, he said, “you can go.”
"I'm charting."
"You can chart elsewhere."
"This is the nurses' station, Dr. Park."
She was smiling. He knew that without even looking. He went back to his board and did not say anything else, hoping this was the end of it.
It was in no way shape or form, the end of anything. It only took him five minutes to look it up. Not you specifically, he wasn’t doing that. Yet, the back of his mind supplied.
He was just reading about fellowship timelines, the NICU admission criteria for some reason? He also learned it’s two or three more years of training, all of it happening four floors above his OR in a unit he had approximately zero clinical reason to enter.
The fact that he even went down this road is embarrassing. But he went a whole another mile.
Clavicular fractures were the most common birth-related bone injury. Unfortunately — now, he hated himself for even thinking the word — they were managed entirely conservatively. Swaddle the arm, follow up in two weeks. It wouldn't require an orthopedic surgeon, much less him, to stand in a NICU looking purposeful.
For about four seconds, he entertained inventing a reason. He got as far as picturing himself walking through those doors in his scrub cap with some flimsy excuse half-formed, and the picture was so stupid — so transparently, embarrassingly stupid — that he closed his laptop immediately.
The hospital was large and your departments were, in practical terms, on separate planets.
You’d been in the coffee shop on Wednesday, which meant you probably used it, which meant theoretically he'd encounter you again just by existing in the building. He told himself he wasn't going to engineer anything, he was just aware of the possibility. That was all.
Two days passed. He did four surgeries including a complicated tibial nail revision that took three hours and came out beautifully, and one very satisfying conversation with a referring physician who had misread an MRI and needed correcting. Normal week, right?
Next day, he got his coffee at six forty, same as every morning, and stood at the counter a beat longer than the transaction required, scanning the line behind him without meaning to. Nobody in lime green. He told himself that meant nothing, took his americano, and left.
Friday, same thing. He noticed himself doing it the second time, which didn't help — like catching his own reflection mid-expression and not recognizing the face looking back.
He didn't see you. Abnormal week.
ER consult. Friday, mid-afternoon. A fracture dislocation that the ER attending had flagged as needing operative planning. Brendon came down at two-thirty, and found Abbot by trauma three looking over a film.
Coming down to the ER wasn't his favorite part of the day. Not the work — the work was fine, usually obvious, usually somebody else's problem until it became his — but the way the place ran, all motion and noise hot under his skin. Abbot, somehow, thrived in it.
They'd gotten through about two minutes of the consult — Abbot walking him through the case, Brendon pulling up the images, the two of them doing back-and-forth of people who'd worked a building together long enough to skip the preamble. Uneventful.
But then the ER entrance on the left side of the bay opened and you walked through it.
Same lime green scrubs and a your Dunkin' cup in hand. Shen next to you, also holding a Dunkin' cup, saying something Brendon couldn't hear from this distance, and you were laughing. Brendon, to his disappointment, noticed it was not a poilte laugh. Your shoulder bumped into Shen’s with the force of it, a fully open-mouthed laugh, and you looked gorgeous.
The sight in front of him was only fogged by the fact that it was Shen who was at the receiving end of it.
The blush climbed before he could stop it, heat crawling up the back of his neck and into his ears. He thanked every god he didn't believe in, that Abbot was still looking at the film and not at him.
Brendon's jaw locked. Back teeth coming together, the muscle in his jaw pulling. He knew it’d give him a headache if he kept it up.
He didn’t really know Shen, not really. Having entirely met him through corridors and in consultations. But in that moment he decided, with an immediate, total conviction usually reserved for diagnoses, that he didn't like him.
Because he didn’t want to stare, he looked back at the X-ray on the tablet. "So the fracture pattern —" he spoke.
"You okay?" Abbot cut in.
Brendon looked at him. Abbot looked like he already knew the answer and was just asking to pull his leg, like most ER attendings.
"Fine," Brendon said. "The fracture is comminuted. Needs ORIF. I’ll book an OR, do it first case tomrorw morning."
Abbot nodded as he scribbled on the iPad. Didn't look fully satisfied with the fine but let it go. Brendon knew that about Abbot — the latter picked his moments.
Brendon looked back at the X-ray.
In his peripheral vision, you and Shen had stopped near the nurse’s station, still talking. You had the cup halfway to your mouth, nodding at whatever he was saying, and then you laughed again, smaller this time, shaking your head. Like whatever Shen had said was ridiculous and you were conceding it anyway.
His molars hurt from pressing down too hard. "ORIF tomorrow, first case," he said again, to the iPad at his hand, to no one.
"You already said that," Abbot noted.
He pulled up the next item on his consult list — a possible Montaggia fracture, a cakewalk for him, nightmare for others. "I'm confirming."
He was not confirming. He had no idea why he'd said it twice.
You'd moved further into the ER now, past his sightline, and he found himself looking at the entrance you'd come through for a second before he caught himself and looked back at Abbot. The latter was watching him like he was trying very, very hard not to smirk.
"Do you need something?" Brendon asked.
"I'm just standing here," Abbot said.
"You're doing something with your face."
"I'm a person, Park, my face does things." Abbot tucked his hands in his pockets. Nodding towards the general direction of where you might be standing, Abbot said, "I didn't know you knew anyone in neonatology."
"I don't," Brendon interjected soon. Too soon.
"Hm." Abbot’s head did a sweep of the ER, probably searching for you, and then looked back at Brendon. "Right."
Brendon put his iPad under his arm, said he'd have the operative plan by end of day and walked back toward the elevator, which took him directly past the nurse’s station, where you had apparently remigrated with Shen, talking to the desk coordinator about something.
He did not slow down.
But in the two seconds he passed within range, he did clock that you smelled like coffee and something warm underneath it, something sweet, vanilla maybe. You didn't notice him, but Shen did and nodded. Brendon nodded back and kept walking, very normal. Walk of a man who was fine.
The elevator took forty-five years to arrive.
He stood in front of it for all forty-five of those years, staring at the closed doors with his hands in his coat pockets, acutely, miserably aware that Park the Shark had just sped up his pace to get past a girl with a Dunkin' and was now standing at an elevator hoping it would hurry up.
Somewhere behind him, he was fairly sure, Abbot was still smiling.
It was a horrible week for the ortho residents. And it wasn’t even Tuesday.
It wasn’t because of the caseload. The caseload was what it always was, a rotating carousel of fractures and dislocations and the occasional spectacular screw-up from another department who'd missed a bone scan.
No, the residents had a terrible week because Brendon Park had decided, somewhere between Friday evening and Tuesday afternoon, that their technique was uniformly sloppy and their pre-op prep was an embarrassment to the profession, and he'd said so. Repeatedly. In front of each other.
It wasn't personal. He thought so and would tell you so, if anyone asked him. No one was brave enough.
His residents just kept standing in his eyeline when he was already irritated, and that was their problem, really.
Delgado, to her eternal credit, had not said a single word about it. She'd watched him tear into a second-year over a chart — like who enters the date wrong? — and kept her face entirely professional. The kid went pale, stuttering through his apology, and Brendon didn’t care.
He'd noticed it himself. The snapping. He was moving through the ward with even less patience than usual, which was saying something. He did a K wire banding, ate lunch at his desk, reviewed post-op films, and at six-fifteen found himself at the hospital coffee counter scanning the room before his order was called. It was mortifying enough on its own, and you weren't there, so it brought double the mortification.
He went back Tuesday. Sat down, which was something he genuinely had never done. He had always taken his coffee to go. There was no reason to sit, the hospital was across the street, he drank it walking.
But this time, he sat. Kept his phone out, drank his coffee and checked his messages. He absolutely did not look at the door every ninety seconds.
You weren't there Tuesday either. Which was fine. People had schedules. Neonatologists especially — the NICU didn't exactly run on a nine-to-five, he knew that much. He'd looked it up. For professional reasons, of course. For someone who’d prided himself for working 24/7, he was humbled real quick.
Wednesday, he sat again. He had a consultation at nine, no reason to rush. He could drink his coffee like a human being who used chairs. He pulled up his post-op notes on his phone, found Abbot's message about a fracture dislocation follow-up, which Abbot didn’t have to do but does it anyway. Abbot was like that sometimes.
When he looked up, his coffee was in front of him. And so were you.
Lime green scrubs, your own drink in your other hand, and you were sliding his cup toward him. The look on your face that said you'd been watching him not notice it for at least thirty seconds. He had been reading an MRI report. A fascinating one.
"I really should get you a coffee," you said.
Brendon laughed. It was him. That was his laugh. Coming out of his face, in a coffee shop, at seven in the morning.
It came out before he could stop it or do anything about it. Just a short, but real sound, surprising him enough that he almost looked around to check if someone else had made it.
You were watching him with that same expression from the first time, like you found him interesting the way you'd find an unusual rock formation interesting. Curious but not unkind. It was doing things to his blood pressure.
"You're still doing that to yourself, I see." You nodded at his cup.
"It's coffee."
"Doesn't taste like it, though." Your nose scrunched up, just like the first time, just as adorable. Did he just say adorable again?
He picked up the cup, took a sip purely out of spite, and looked back at you.
You sat down across from him. Which he had not expected and also had absolutely expected. Two things existing simultaneously, almost fucking him up.
"You're here a lot," you said.
"The hospital's down the street."
"Is it?" You glanced at him, stirring your drink. "Because I've only ever seen you take it to go, and now you're sitting." You took out the stirrer and placed it on a tissue. "Three days in a row."
The back of his neck went warm, mouth opening to say something. Deny it probably, which was stupid and a waste of time. But you interrupted him.
Brendon Park is not someone who’s interrupted. People let him talk, and only think about answering when they’re sure he’s finished.
You, on the other hand, did not care. "You're kinda hard to miss with all the brooding going on."
"I don't brood."
You took a sip of your drink, watching him over the lid, expression doing a tremendous amount of work without saying anything.
He held your gaze. You lowered the cup. "You totally brood. It's an ortho thing, right? Comes with it."
"You know I'm ortho?"
"Everyone knows you're ortho." You said it completely matter-of-factly. Like, yes Brendon, the sky is blue and you’ve got an Ortho bro vibe going on. "You have the whole —" You made a vague gesture in his direction, encompassing, apparently, all of him. "You've got the OR energy."
"Half the people here have OR energy. It's a hospital."
"No, see, ER people have this sort of —" you tilted your head, "— controlled chaos thing. They're always braced for something. But, you walk around like you’ve won everything already. It's very obvious, easy to pick out."
Pick out what? Him from a line-up?
He watched you say all of this with zero self-consciousness, just stating observations, a woman delivering a verdict. He realised his coffee was halfway to his mouth and he hadn't drunk it. You talked about him like he was a case study, and he was sitting there letting you, taking all of it.
"So where else do you brood," you asked, "besides here and the OR?"
"I don't brood."
"Besides here and the OR?" You prompted, dismissing his non-answer.
"The ER… sometimes," he heard himself say it. See, he did not think of saying it, but said it anyway. Crystal-clear experience of a man who had just walked directly into something. He'd had five years of attendings trying to catch him out on rounds. None of them had managed it. You'd done it in under ten minutes, twice, while drinking a latte.
You made a sound. Not quite a laugh, more like an intake of breath with amusement in it. "The ER."
"Consults."
"Right." You traced the rim of your cup with one finger. "Were you in the ER last Friday?"
And… there it was.
He could've said he didn't remember. He could've been very busy, very unbothered, a man who passed through ERs constantly and didn't register the days. He was a surgeon. He was in various hospital departments routinely. There was nothing notable about Friday.
"Yes," his mouth admitted.
You nodded slowly, like something had confirmed itself. "I thought I saw you. You walked really fast."
He put his coffee down. "I had somewhere to be."
"Okay." The word stretched, like you weren’t entirely convinced. He wouldn’t blame it, he wasn’t exactly convincing. An infant could catch him in a lie, and you apparently were their queen. You went quiet for a second and then looked back at him, debating whether to say it or not. Affirmative won apparently. "You saw me with Shen."
It wasn’t a question. And he wasn’t exactly thrilled to answer it. He'd spent five days being awful to residents over it. A little late to play it cool.
"I figured." The amusement on your face was warm rather than sharp, which made the ache in his chest somehow worse. Whoa, whoa, what ache? "We have a thing going, me and Shen. Whoever lost the bet had to do the coffee run. I'd just lost." You paused. "For the fourth time. I'm apparently terrible at predicting admission numbers."
"The fourth time," Brendon parotted.
"In a month. I know." You shook your head, shaking the thought, a soft sigh leaving your parted lips. "I don't know why I keep agreeing to it. Every time I'm like, this time I'll get it right, and then the board goes completely feral and I'm standing at Dunkin' at two in the afternoon getting Shen's ridiculous—" You stopped to look at him, and he had his utmost attention on you. "Anyway. That was just the loser tax."
Loser tax. He sat with this for a second. The whole week reshuffled. Him being a monster to those unsuspecting residents — it’s not like it's unwarranted, but still.
You and Shen, a bet. A coffee run. A losing streak that apparently had nothing to do with the bond between the two of you and everything to do with ER admission patterns, which, if he was being honest, were genuinely unpredictable, nobody could forecast those accurately, it wasn't —
"You walked so fast," you spoke again, this time interrupting his thoughts. He noticed you liked to do that, keep him on his toes. There was a laugh behind it now, delighted almost. "I didn't know an orthopedic surgeon could move like that without a reason."
"I had a reason."
"What was it?" You prodded.
I just couldn’t stand you bumping shoulders with Shen like you belonged together.
His eyes dropped to his coffee at his hand and found you again. You looked back at him. You had the same ‘interested in rock formation’ thing going on, except closer now and clearer somehow. He had the increasingly urgent sense that you knew exactly what you were doing.
"You were with someone.” He sighed.
A smile adorned your lips like you’d won, finally beat him.
Like your mind was displaying in neon, Sunshine neonatologist : 1. Big bad ortho guy : 0.
You let it sit there between you while you took another sip of your drink. "I was getting Shen's order," you said finally. "Because I lost a bet."
"I know that now."
"But you didn't walk fast because of Shen specifically. Did you?"
His molars found each other again. What is with you and asking him impossible questions? Was this like your hobby? Hit the ortho guy until he falls over? At what point in medical school had someone taught you to do this, and could he have a word with them?
Without giving him a moment to recover, you spoke again. "So," you set your cup down, straightened up a little in the chair, met his eyes with an expression so direct it nearly made him blink. "When are you buying me a coffee?"
He stared at you. Staring was not his thing. He assessed, evaluated, and arrived at conclusions. What he did not do was stare, sit with his mouth slightly open like a fucking goldfish.
"That's what you've been trying to do, right?" Your voice was mild, conversational, voice of a woman confirming a meeting time. "For three days. In a row. Sitting here."
The heat that climbed his face was complete, total and immediate, and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. Park the Shark. Sitting in a coffee shop for three days like a golden retriever who'd learned to use a chair.
You laughed. It filled the air and came right back to him. And he thought, sitting there red-eared with his black coffee, that it was the best sound he'd heard all week.
Possibly longer.
He only remembered that you asked a question when you raised your eyebrows. Right. The question. Which he totally didn’t forget when he was staring at your lips and thinking about how they would feel pressed to his.
"I have a nine o'clock," he said. "Seven works."
"That's very early."
"You work in a NICU. You guys are up since five."
You looked at him for a moment and he had no idea what you were looking at. But he sat very still, which was insane on his part. He only hoped he passed whatever test you were conducting. Apparently having looked enough, you picked your cup up, along with the tissue paper and the stirrer you discarded, and stood. "Seven," you said. "Don't brood while you wait."
He watched you walk out. He looked down at his americano. He drank it.
It still tasted exactly like it always did, and he liked it fine, and he was aware, in a dim and reluctant and completely inescapable way, that this was probably not going to be the last time he sat in this coffee shop.
Not by a long shot.
MY MASTERLIST !
extras ⸝⸝ lime green scrubs bc I was forced to wear them during my NICU postings
