Cherie, I just caught up on last night’s Pitt and there is so much Langdon looking sad and vulnerable that it feels like a medical condition in and of itself. I need that man to be self-medicating with food so he can stay on the wagon while self-soothing with some kind of indulgence and I need it BAD. His face when Santos kept shutting him down … when McKay told him she was 9 years sober he looked at her like he was some kind of baby bird! My god. Give that poor man an unhealthy relationship with vending machine junk food STAT
What’s a little sugar if it helps you cope?
Not a blurb, not a oneshot, but a secret third thing in between. Our sweet (pathetic) wet rat stuffs himself throughout the workday. Ily anon.
Wordcount slightly under 2,000. Belly kink, mild stuffing, S2E8 spoilers.
It began with a packet of Donettes.
Six miniature donuts caked in powdered sugar—he thought that sounded indulgent enough to scratch the itch in his brain desperate for comfort. It was like what his father told him when he was small and covered in mosquito bites after an August afternoon on the lake: if you’ve got to scratch something, don’t scratch the itch. Scratch near it. Trick your brain.
Frank thought he was very good at tricking his brain.
Abby had made the world’s nicest breakfast that morning—indulging his sweet tooth with pancakes and whipped cream, then making sure he had more than enough real energy for his shift with bacon, eggs, and avocado—which sat heavily in his belly hours after he finished. A new box of protein bars was tucked in his bag, since he no longer had anything that was his in his locker, and he came into work as energized for his first day back as he possibly could have felt.
And yet, when he was banished to Triage Island, something panicky and cruel gnawed at him.
Remember me? It’s your sense of failure. Missed you, pal.
He inwardly sighed about a half-dozen curse words and stole away to the one quiet hallway in the E.R. It wasn’t empty, no; it was just out of the way. A few medical assistants hustled through, not seeing him. He had maybe two minutes, maybe a hundred and fifty seconds, but he wasn’t sure if that was enough to get the heavy, invisible weight off his chest. Slow breaths felt like dragging a dumbbell through wet sand. He rubbed, hard, the heel of his hand against his sternum.
A few happy beeps and a chime caught his attention. He slowly came to a stop, head slightly turned, and listened while something crinkled and popped. A nurse rounded the corner with a tiny bag of vending machine popcorn in her hand.
She didn’t look at him.
Frank blinked.
That, then, was how he followed the unseen trail to a vending machine he—honestly—had no idea was there, hidden in the depths of not-quite-Triage with about two dozen options of colorful, processed snacks. It was tucked into an alcove that he absolutely would have overlooked ten months ago: chipped tile on the floor, tacky paint on the walls, dust and who-knew-what-else (did they ever find all of those rats last year?) behind it. The buttons themselves were a little sticky and, remarkably, not very faded; instead, they flashed in an enticing blue the moment the sensor noticed someone standing in front of it, staring at it like it was the rosetta stone.
He couldn’t and didn’t want to know what came over him in that moment, and so he didn’t give himself room to think twice before he was tapping $2.99 onto his credit card in exchange for six powdered sugar donuts.
Once it was in his hand, he laughed to himself. He used to beg his mother for these exact ones every time they went to the grocery store when he was a kid. She never relented. When he opened the packet and placed one of the donuts in his mouth, then, it felt like sweet, sweet defiance and comfort—because, hell, no one could tell him “no” anymore.
In between actually treating the boy who’d shoved beads up his nose and charting about it, Frank tried to place why he felt as bothered as he did. He carefully determined that the twisting feeling in him wasn’t a craving—he’d had those, and they tended to present anywhere from a dull, persistent ache to a loud, echoing tunnel that made it impossible to think otherwise—but something unsettled and searching, writhing to be defined.
The words on the screen in front of him began to blur together. He breathed in, held for four, then breathed out, and held for four again. He angled himself to hide sending a text message, and sent Abby the ferris wheel emoji.
She’d said to text her so she knew he was okay.
A second later, she sent back the carousel horse.
This is random. I’m thinking of you.
I hear you. I’m reflecting it back.
He blinked hard.
“Donnie?” He swiveled left, then right, then found the nurse practitioner about three feet away from him, looking at him like he’d just flipped over a full bedpan for fun. “You want to take a couple notes? It’s good practice.”
Donnie gave him a look. “You just don’t want to take your own notes.”
Smiling, yet feeling like his skin was going to vibrate off his body, he edged around Donnie with a pat to his shoulders. “Right. It’s practice for dealing with insufferable doctors and our inflated egos.”
“You are so full of—”
Frank was already speed-walking around the corner, and his pace picked up into something bouncing once he was out of sight. His legs took him back to the secluded vending machine, and it wasn’t until he stood underneath its cheery artificial light did he sigh.
He placed a hand on the glass and tried to take inventory of his feelings. He’d practiced that—noticing sensations—and yet what he felt most pressingly was a fuzzy, slightly electrified sensation, as if he were in the middle of a ball of dryer lint. Grimacing, he decided that something to settle his stomach was in order.
$5 later, he had a bottle of ginger ale under one arm and a bag of pretzels in one hand. Of course, said bag really only filled his palm.
“Yeah, right,” he dryly laughed to himself, before buying a second bag.
He slid down to the floor beside the alcove, mentally promising himself there was nothing to see here, nothing to worry about, nothing weird about a doctor crashing out in the hallway at all.
He wasn’t wrong. That was an upsetting thought for another day.
He started with drawing his thoughts in half the ginger ale. It was only half-cold, maybe just slightly above room temperature, and its sweetness coated the back of his tongue and throat in a sickly way. It should have turned his stomach.
It didn’t.
He simply muffled a returning bubble of carbonation by coughing into his fist. But that was why he bought the pretzels, too, wasn’t it? Ginger to settle his stomach. Dry carbs to absorb the sugar and bubbles. Right. Yes. Of course.
He popped open the pretzels and started with one, then sighed and ate half a fistful. He didn’t really have time for this, he rationalized to himself. His absence, even if for all of three minutes, was probably already raising questions, and god help him if Donnie called attention to the way he sprinted out of there. He ate another fistful, and heat crawled up his neck while his mouthful of heavy, bready carbs and salt inched down his throat.
Tipping his head back, he rested one arm across his bent-upward knees. The ginger ale bottle dangled, its neck pinched between his fingers, and the two bags of pretzels sat on his pelvis while he finished the first one.
And the second. And the soda. He felt better, he had to admit, by the time he stood up with his collection of trash; his stomach was soothed, apart from the very faint press of a snack eaten too quickly, but he’d been in worse places before.
Rooby was ignoring him, Santos was being antagonistic, and he deserved every second of it. A part of him—a cruel part that had only recently begun to redirect itself inward rather than at others—delighted in it.
Yes! Flagellate me!
He texted Abby to ask if Penny’s daycare or Tanner’s kindergarten ever sent her pictures of the kids. He got back a photo of Tanner fingerpainting and another of Penny napping. He then had to take thirty seconds to bury his face in his hands, because he didn’t deserve such adorable children, nor such a ridiculously patient wife.
That was when the afternoon started to spin off its axis.
He was back in the main E.R., and the cyberattack had sent everything to the dark ages. He wouldn’t have called it “going to shit,” if only because the more chaos there was, the more distracted he felt, and the more distracted he felt, the quieter his internal spiral got. He missed being the one people ran to, missed being the senior resident who had the privilege of guiding and instructing, imparting knowledge like he was god—but he found his step, being a worker among workers again.
And then, he spoke to Cassie.
Or, Cassie spoke to him, and he sat there feeling like his world had been flipped upside down and shaken until a few parts fell out.
That may or may not have led to him crashing out in the staff room.
He grabbed two of his protein bars from his locker, a cup of coffee from the stale pot on the counter, and stopped at the staff room vending machine to buy a protein shake before he groaned and bought a chocolate chip muffin to go with it. He also grabbed a fistful of dark chocolate from a bag of Hershey’s mix on the table, which someone brought in for some reason he’d been too trapped-in-Triage to know.
Surely that counted as lunch. Kind of. What time was it, even?
He dumped the protein shake into his coffee and drank half of that in one go. It went down with languid ease, so smooth and thick that it felt less like a coating—like the ginger ale—and more like a blanket. It warmed his belly yet cooled his fingers and cheeks, soothing his body in a way that gently nudged the vibrating parts of himself back to center.
Next came the muffin, eaten in pieces broken off one by one; he tried to notice individual flavors—the chocolate, the egg, the vanilla—but they swiftly began to blur into a sweet cotton candy cloud in his head. The warm bliss of it coiled around him, and he imagined hands running through his hair, over his throat, and down his chest. Present-but-not, he unwrapped one of the chocolates, then a second one, and their richer, creamier sweetness lulled him to sink down in his chair, elbow on the table, and rest his head in his hand.
He sipped the rest of his coffee more slowly, alternating the creamy caffeine with broken-up squares of his protein bars and pieces of chocolate. Slowly, surely, his belly filled, unnoticeable to anyone but himself: he who could feel the effect of what was undeniably a sugar binge in the middle of his workday. All those carbs—simple and sweet, suspended in the one-good-thing of vanilla protein—settled above his hips, pressing forward toward his navel. It was pleasant and soft, quiet and—for the first time that day—calm.
Feeling curious, he adjusted his hips to see how the fullness would settle. It firmly pushed against the waist of his scrubs, which made nerves squeeze in his chest. Fuck, what had he done, eating so much? He could have stopped. He should have stopped. Before, he’d have inhaled a protein bar and been done with it.
Now?
He placed a timid hand on what was decidedly not a gut, but sure felt like it. He pressed his fingers in, and where there might have been a measure of dad-bod give before, there was a never-there-before inch-or-two of his lower belly that felt firm and warm. He wanted to lie down for a week. Preferably with Abby. If he was this hopeless, surely she’d know what to do with him.
