TENDER IS THE NIGHT ─── jack abbot
summary: you have a perfectly casual, no-strings-attached night out with a charming stranger you met at a bar; only for jack to find out that he's slept with his resident the next morning, and that you’ve made a very memorable first impression on your new attending. (7k)
characters: jack abbot / fem!reader, michael robinavitch, louie cloverfield, rogue sightings from the pittlings
contents: strangers to lovers, one night stand, implied age gap, humor, so much sexual tension, so much flirting, jack abbot being a d1 yearner, heavily inspired by s1ep1 of grey's anatomy cw for medical procedures and inaccuracies, brief mentions of death, r has hair that can be put into a hair tie, smut 18+ (MDNI), slightly dubcon bc of alcohol
( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )
Jack Abbot finds the rest of his whole life in the middle of Sonny’s Tavern, sitting on the third bar stool to the left.
There’s a strange sort of glow about you — one that makes the dingy amber light swaying above your head look almost golden when it touches your skin; one that begs to be immediately noticed because, admittedly, there was nothing more overtly special about you.
You’ve come in wearing a simple baggy sweater and a pair of loose-fitting jeans, as if you’d just thrown something on from your bedroom floor before stopping in for a drink or two. You sit slouched at the bar with your head on your fist, talking to the bartender in hushed tones that go unheard beneath the yacht rock playing overhead.
It is more than apparent that you did not come here to be noticed; but even still, Jack struggles to take his eyes off you all the same.
“Alright, who’s in trouble tonight?” the man announces in place of a greeting, as he steps through the threshold into a cloud of sweet beer, charred hamburgers, and skunk weed.
He’s far too familiar with the faces here for anything else. Sonny’s had been standing for longer than he has, to be fair — he had his first drink here, back when no one cared how old you really were, so long as you weren’t totally stupid about it; he had his first kiss here, too, by the dumpster in an alley from a woman much older than he was, who he revered as some sort of god until he got to med school.
Sonny’s had given him a lot over the years, so Jack figured it was only right that he give back in return.
He’d gotten several of its patrons out of a number of sticky situations over the years. Everyone knew to call him if someone had gotten themselves into trouble — whether that be bathroom overdoses, bar fight aftermaths, or kids with fake IDs who’d drunk their weight in whiskey. They knew Jack Abbot would fix them right up. No questions asked, no money needed, no judgment at all.
Except for today, he hadn’t gotten a single call, nor had he heard a murmur of anything medical-related on the police scanner all afternoon. His day off had been exceptionally quiet, which he thinks is why he struggles to sleep tonight, without the adrenaline crash from a long day forcing him into slumber.
That’s why he comes into Sonny’s for an actual drink, for the first time in a long time — to escape the loneliness of his home for a while, and to down a few beers that’ll hopefully put him to sleep when he inevitably has to return to its emptiness. That’s why he welcomes the racing heart he gets, too, when you glance at him over your shoulder at the sound of his voice.
“Didn’t ya hear?” a familiar voice calls from the booth nearest to the door. “We’re celebrating!”
Jack turns his head to find Louie sitting in the cracked vinyl booth, ahead of two men who seem to be around his age. He nurses a sweaty pint in his sun-kissed hand, with two more empty ones sitting at his side.
If Jack knows anything about Mr. Cloverfield, it’s that he’s already had much, much more than that tonight alone. ‘Cause the last time he saw Louie, he had a BAC of .420, and was walking and talking just fine — aside from the shakes he couldn’t quite get rid of.
“Weren’t you supposed to be taking it easy, Louie?” Jack squints.
“I was,” the older man assures with a lopsided smile that says otherwise. “But now we’re celebrating.”
“Oh, yeah?” he scoffs and walks further inside, ignoring the way his shoes threaten to stick to his hardwood with every step. “And what’s that?”
Louie motions to you with his half-gone beer. “That one’s starting a new job tomorrow.”
Jack’s eyes cut back to you.
You duck away on instinct when his gaze locks with yours, only then realizing how long you’d been staring. You keep your head bowed like a shy child when he slides into the bar stool next to yours, replacing the scent of an ancient bar with the warmer scent of expensive cologne.
“Oh, really?” the stranger hums. “Where at?”
“Nowhere special. Just retail,” you say with a lazy shrug, struggling to find the courage to meet his unwavering stare. “But I just moved into town, so… I figured I’d buy a round for the house.”
You reach for the shot rack ahead of you, where three narrow glasses filled with clear liquid sit in a row. You go to pass one over to the strange man beside you, but he dismisses you with a shake of his head — made of greying curls that match the silver scruff on his jaw.
“Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t have a pretty girl buyin’ my drinks.”
A laugh sputters from your mouth, rolling off your half-numb tongue. “Pretty girl? What— Are you flirting with me, or is this just… your usual level of arrogance?”
“Neither. I’m just… stating the obvious,” Jack says with a cheeky half-smile, shifting on the squeaking leather stool to reach for the wallet in the back pocket of his jeans. He turns to the bartender and wonders aloud, “What’s her tab, Johnny?”
You burn red-hot almost instantly. “Don’t tell him—”
“$94.57—” the older man answers before you can get the words out, then cuts himself off with a weathered look of apology. “—Oh. Sorry.”
You grimace and hide your burning face behind your hands. “God, that’s so embarrassing…” you whine, muffled into your palms.
“Hey. You’re celebrating,” Jack shrugs. “I get it.”
You hear the man’s leather wallet flip open. You peek through your fingers to find him pulling out a heavy credit card. Your features flood with horror when he hands it off to the bartender.
“Oh, no— I can’t let you do that.”
“You’re not letting me do anything,” the older man scoffs, folding his freckled arms along the counter’s edge. “I want to. ‘Cause we’re celebrating, remember?”
You meet his smug smile with an unsure wince.
Jack caves with a sigh. “Okay, you can make it up to me by drinking with me tonight. How about that?”
Your chest warms with a funny feeling that you’d rather blame on the alcohol. You purse your lips to the side of your mouth before he catches you smiling too wide and nod slowly in response.
“Sure…” you shrug, feigning an air of nonchalance you lost the moment the pretty stranger caught you staring. “I guess I can handle that…”
The stranger — he hasn’t yet given you his name, nor do you bother to ask for it — buys you two more drinks after the fact.
You sip slowly at the first one, then forget to taste the second, too busy catching his gaze every time he looks your way. Lingering eye contact had always perturbed you, but not his. You liked it when he held your stare whenever you turned to face him; you liked it even more when you could feel his eyes on you whenever you looked away again.
You give him this smile from time to time, a barely-there sort of smirk that glittered mostly in your eyes, whenever you tilted your chin to peer at him through your lashes. It was as sweet as it was heavy, honeyed and full of gravity, like you knew something about him that he didn’t — like you were searching somewhere deep in his soul.
Really, though, you were just wildly skeptical of him — eyeing him in silence and trying to figure out if he was real, if this was real. How many times have you played this game, old man? you’d ask him if you had the courage. How many hearts have you already broken? Am I gonna regret it when mine breaks next?
You’re not sure, but you let him walk you to your place anyway, and talk him into letting you buy him a donut from the shop across from your apartment building on the way. He tells you it’ll sober you up, even though you aren’t all that drunk anymore; you tell him that he’ll never want anything else once he’s tasted this one, and he fights the urge to make a sex joke.
“Thanks for walking me home,” you tell him through the wad of donut still stuck in your cheek, standing a step above him on the stony stairs to your building. “And for turning out not to be a serial killer.”
Jack balls his napkin of crumbs into his fist. “Well, there’s still time— You know, if you’re disappointed.”
“Eh,” you hum playfully, swallowing through the mouthful. “Maybe just a little.”
“Then I’ll see myself out, I guess…” the man huffs, feigning a morose disposition, and distantly praying you’ll stop him. “It’s getting pretty late.”
Your eyes narrow into thin slits, and it feels like his heart has stopped — like you’re using some sort of secret superpower to steal his breath.
You shake your head and tell him, “It’s not that late.”
So Jack follows you up to your apartment despite his better judgment, drawn to a siren song that he knows is bound to kill him sooner or later.
Your apartment is mostly empty, he finds, considering you had only just moved into it.
There’s a couch, an air mattress, and a small television on a plastic bin shoved into the quaint living room. There’s one chair at the kitchen island, and a sea of boxes on the counter. You apologize profusely for the mess as you weave through the maze of cardboard for the refrigerator. You bring him a chilled bottle of white wine on the way back.
“I’d pour it into a fancy glass or something, but… I don’t have any,” you confess as you plop down onto the couch beside him, which still smells like the house you just bought it from. “I don’t even have cups. Or silverware. I barely even have a kitchen.”
Jack laughs. “You just moved here, and the first thing you thought to buy was wine?”
“Well, yeah,” you shrug like it’s obvious. “I had to get the essentials, obviously.”
“Obviously,” he echoes with a scoff.
The wine is bad. Almost comically bad. He nearly chokes on it when he takes his first sip, like he’s a teenager again, taking his very first ever drink of alcohol. It’s bitter with an extremely sweet aftertaste that coats his tongue long after he’s swallowed it down. But you don’t seem to mind it, though — you drink it like it’s some sort of delicacy, which he knows it must be for you, ‘cause he was young and broke once, too.
He takes slow sips every time you pass the sweaty bottle his way, if only because doing so means putting his lips where yours once kissed.
“So…” Jack starts after you’ve run out of things to say, sitting with his thighs spread and his heavy head tilted against the couch. He licks the sheen of alcohol from his mouth, passes you the wine, and wonders aloud, “What’s your story, huh?”
“My story?” you laugh into the lip of the bottle, curling your legs beneath you to face him better as you take a short sip. “Why do I have to have a story?”
“Everyone has a story,” Jack scoffs. “Think about it— There was something that led you to that bar tonight, right?”
“Most people would call that fate.”
“What about you?” he asks, then follows at the look you give him. “Would you call it fate?”
You think for a moment, then nod your head against your fist. “Yeah… I guess so.”
Jack nods slowly, scruffy cheek brushing the cushion beneath him. “So if I… I don’t know… If I kissed you right now… Would you call that fate, too?”
Your laugh washes over him like drops of summer rain.
“Real smooth…” you croon drily.
“It’s just a hypothetical.”
“Then, no. I wouldn’t call that fate.” You huff and lean forward to set the bottle onto the box you’re using as a makeshift table. “I think I’d call that taking what I want.”
Despite his own forwardness, Jack is still slightly surprised when you close the distance between you, rather than sit back into place across from him. You rest your knees on the sunken cushions instead, and rest your fist on the space between his spread thighs as you lean in closer.
Jack gets a whiff of the perfume on your skin, then the bittersweet alcohol on your tongue, right before your wine-slick mouth catches his own.
He tenses on instinct at the feeling of you, then relaxes with a heavy breath through his nose a second later, when you lick into his parted mouth. It takes him a moment to kiss you back, because he doesn’t realize until that very second that he hasn’t made out with someone in years.
He reaches for you with trembling hands, curling one around your arm and the other around the back of your neck to cradle you closer to him.
You kiss him lazy and slow. You touch him lazy and slow, too, trailing your palms from his scruffy jaw to his broad chest as you straddle his lap. He wonders if you can feel his heart pounding beneath the thin t-shirt he wears — or his cock growing slowly stiff in the confines of his jeans.
He tries to touch you with a similar confidence, with his wide hands resting on your hips, but he can’t seem to stop shaking.
You kiss and lick the thoughts from his brain. He thinks of nothing but the way you feel against him — feels nothing but your warm weight on top of him. He doesn’t realize he’s grinding you over his lap until he feels you moan into his mouth. Then he pulls away with a quiet smack, wearing your spit down to his chin and something honeyed in his eyes.
“We really doin’ this?” he wonders through panted breaths.
You smile with kiss-bitten lips, twirling your fingers in the silver curls at the nape of his neck. “Depends… Do you wanna do this?”
“Depends,” he echoes. “Are you too drunk for this?”
“I’m not drunk,” you scoff. “I’m a big girl— I can hold my liquor.”
Something dark flickers in his heavy eyes.
Your smile widens.
“What about you, huh? Do you think you got drunk off a few sips of wine? Or can you handle your alcohol… big boy?”
Jack feels his chest flare with a white-hot feeling. He forces himself to breathe through it as he jokes back, “Big boy, huh? Are you flirting with me or is this just— what was it you said— your usual level of arrogance?”
“Neither,” you hum with a cheeky grin. “This is me very humbly, and only slightly embarrassingly, asking if you wanna fuck me on that air mattress over there?”
He’s fleetingly stunned by your forwardness but recovers even quicker. He thinks he’d do just about anything you asked of him in this moment, without question or second thought. It frightens him almost as much as it excites him.
“Yeah…” Jack sighs, half-breathless. “Want me to prove it to you?”
You nod until the words catch up to you.
“Yes, please.”
You’re a pair of anxious limbs on the cheap air mattress across the room. Jack can’t seem to stop apologizing — first when his pants are off and you see his prosthetic for the first time — “Sorry,” he’d said, only because it felt like he should, “For what?” you shrugged back, with your bra strap slipping off your shoulder.
He apologized a second time when the flimsy mattress shifted under his weight and sent him toppling gracelessly on top of you; and then a third when he pierced you for the first time, a little rougher than he intended to.
“Sorry. Are you okay?” he wonders, half-strangled, ‘cause you’re gripping his cock like a vice. “Is this too much— Do you need me to—?”
“No, no. It’s okay,” you assured through labored breaths. He had prepped you with his fingers beforehand, to be fair. The orgasm he’d given you with them had you slicker than honey, but hadn’t totally prepared you for the girth of his cock. “It feels good, I promise.”
“You don’t want me to stop?” he presses, just to be sure.
“I’m already close, and you haven’t even moved yet,” you confess through a breathless chuckle. “So, no… I don’t want you to stop…”
The only way he can fuck you properly is on your side. The air mattress gives less under your weight in that position, with you wrapped in his arms and with your leg thrown over his hip. He curls one hand under and over your back while his other digs bruises onto the plush skin of your ass, pulling you into him every time he thrusts inside of you.
Your strangled whines and his grunted moans echo through the expanse of your empty apartment.
“Tell me it feels good,” he pants against you — warm breath fanning over your jaw, nose bumping against your own. “Tell me you want me.”
You obey without thinking, babbling brainlessly.
“Feels so good…” you whine through gritted teeth, digging crescent shapes into the skin of his freckled shoulders. “Want you so bad— Want you to make me cum— Fuck, I want you—”
Want you, want you, want you.
You repeat it like a mantra.
You cum on his cock a second later, and it feels like praying.
The pretty stranger is not next to you when you wake up on the half-deflated air mattress the next morning.
Golden sunlight peeks through the blinds in flaxen streams from where you’d forgotten to close them the night before. You squint your eyes and blink rapidly to clear the haze of sleep, trying to place when the stranger must’ve left. You hadn’t felt him get up, so you figure it must’ve been pretty early — right after he fucked you so good it put you to sleep, maybe.
His clothes are gone. The only trace of him ever being there is the imprint of his body in the tousled sheets beside you, and in the soreness in the very pit of your stomach where you can still feel him inside of you.
A distant part of you misses the stranger, but a bigger part of you is thankful — because the only thing worse than a one-night stand with a stranger you just met, is having to share awkward goodbyes the morning after with a stranger you just met.
“Thank god…” you grumble as you stretch your tired limbs, plucking your phone from its charger on the floor before trudging down the hall for the bathroom. You only vaguely notice that the door is shut, and that there’s a thin strip of light peeking out from underneath it before you swing it open.
“Morning,” a familiar voice greets, gruff and half-muffled.
Your head snaps up from your phone. Your tired eyes go wide when you’re faced suddenly with the pretty stranger from last night — already dressed for the day and brushing his teeth by the sink. Your feet stumble backward on instinct. Your back hits the doorframe as your free hand flies to your pounding chest.
“Oh, my god—”
“Shit. Sorry,” the older man laughs. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He bends at the waist to spit into the sink.
You try to catch your breath.
“I… I didn’t know you were still here… Sorry…”
He scoffs like he’s half-offended by the notion. “I wasn’t just gonna leave. I’m not that big of an asshole…”
Your brows furrow as you tilt your head to the side in a confused sort of look. Because that was sort of the point of one-night stands, after all — the leaving.
“Oh, and I, uh— I found a pack of toothbrushes under the sink,” he tells you. “I hope that’s okay.”
“No, yeah, that’s… That’s fine,” you shrug and cross your arms over your chest. You slouch slightly in place, trying to keep the hem of your sweatshirt from rising and revealing that you’re naked underneath it — ‘cause it still feels a bit weird, even though he got pretty well acquainted with your naked body barely six hours ago. “But, um… I do have to leave for work. Like, super soon, so…”
“You wanna ride?” the man wonders through the orange toothbrush in his mouth. “I can walk back down to Sonny’s. Bring my truck back around.”
“No, that’s— that’s okay.” You shake your head and laugh before you mean to, because so much kindness from a one-night stand feels nothing short of alien to you. “You know, we don’t… We don’t have to do… all this…”
Jack plucks the toothbrush from his mouth. The look of confusion that contorts his scruffy face matches your own as he echoes, “…All what?”
“You know…” you trail off with an awkward laugh. “The whole… song and dance of it all… The pretending we care…”
“I do care.”
“Right. Yeah. But… We’re never gonna see each other after this, right? So… Does it really even matter?”
Jack only then seems to remember that he had only just met you, not even twelve hours ago, and that the night before would very likely be the last time he ever got to touch you. He forgot that very important fact somewhere along the line, and tricked himself into thinking you really wanted this, wanted him. The realization hits him like a fist to the stomach.
“Oh… Right…”
He turns away again, half-mournful, and runs the toothbrush under the faucet. Your bleary eyes dart wildly over the weathered edges of his profile, right before you face twists with mortification.
“Oh, god…” you murmur to yourself. “I didn’t take your one-night stand virginity, did I?”
Jack manages a quiet laugh as he wipes his hands on a nearby towel.
“No. Not— Not really,” he tells you. “I think I’m just a little out of practice, you know? I haven’t been with anyone since I got married.”
“Oh, my god— You’re married?!”
“No!” he shouts, laughing louder at the horrified look on your face. “I mean, I haven’t had a one-night stand since before I was married. And definitely not since my wife died, so…”
“Oh, jeez…” you wince, shifting awkwardly on your bare feet. “Sorry…”
The sorrowful look you give him is the same look he’d been trying to avoid this whole time. It finds him very suddenly wanting to get out of here as quickly as he can.
“I’ll, uh… I’ll see myself out, I guess,” he tells you.
“Okay,” you nod with a wavering smile. “Thanks…”
He pauses mid-stride in the doorway, towering over you as he flashes you an amused look — all furrow-browed and smiling. “For what?” the man scoffs.
“I don’t know, actually…” you laugh. “I don’t know what I said that, I just… I felt like I should, you know? I had a pretty good time last night…”
You trail off, and only then realize that you hadn’t yet gotten his name.
“…Jack,” he finishes for you.
“Jack,” you repeat with a firm nod and a shy smile.
And he’s heard his own name a million times, but something about the way you say it sounds different — like everyone else has been saying his name wrong his whole life; like he’s spent years hearing it in a foreign language, and yours is the only one he really understands.
When he leaves your apartment, it’s with the knowledge that he’ll probably never hear his name the right way ever again.
You make it three hours on your first shift at the PTMC before all hell breaks loose — or, rather, a rollercoaster.
Several carts derail from the tracks at a nearby theme park, injuring everyone on board and many more on the ground below. It sends a sudden influx of patients straight to your emergency department. You do more in an hour than you did in weeks at your small-town hospital back home, where you interned and did the bulk of your residency, which now feels rather lackluster in comparison.
You’re still wearing the bright crimson blood from the emergency thoracotomy you did in the ambulance bay, when the heart of a young boy with a steel rebar through his chest gave out before he could be wheeled inside. You were forced to work quickly to cut through his chest cavity and reach through his ribs for his heart. You knelt on the gurney and pumped manually at the artery while the EMTs wheeled you to the nearest trauma room.
You’re only just finishing the transfusion on the patient when another trauma is called in.
You can still feel the boy’s heart in your hand when you peel off the bloodied PPE, replacing it with a fresher set of gown and gloves, as you follow Dr. Robby to the ambulance bay. You struggle to keep up with the man’s longer strides as he passes through the automatic doors, where the fresh air outside smacks you in the face with its sudden reminder to breathe.
“Holy shit…” you hear yourself huff, still half-dazed from the previous operation. “Is it always this bad? Please tell me it’s not always this bad.”
“It’s not always this bad,” the older man affirms without looking back at you. “But I have seen a whole lot worse than this, R3, trust me— Alright, what do we got?”
Robby peers through the back of an open ambulance parked crooked in the bay. He grits his teeth to help lower the gurney to the ground, and an older man comes into view. He’s bloodied and unconscious, and his camo uniform has been cut down the middle to accommodate intubation.
As you rush to Robby’s side, a familiar voice fills your ears: “My buddy, Officer Hiro, high-velocity GSW— He’s getting harder to bag.”
Another camo-wearing officer steps out when the gurney hits the ground. He stands at the head of the narrow bed, squeezing rhythmically at the intubation bag in his fist. His hand is stained with dark red blood. He’s immediately familiar to you, though in your daze, it’s hard to place from where.
You blink once and realize it’s the stranger from the night before — the one you all but kicked out of your apartment this morning. The man from Sonny’s who cleared your tab, who you shared a bottle of cheap wine with on your secondhand couch, who fucked you dizzy in the center of your flimsy air mattress barely twelve hours ago.
You’re filled with an immediate horror at the sight of him. You think death would be a kinder fate when his gaze locks suddenly with yours.
Jack’s eyes squint the same way yours did, like he’s not sure if it’s really you he’s seeing. They widen with realization a second later, but he turns away without a word, continuing to brief Robby on the man’s sustained injuries while you rush him to the nearest trauma room.
“Help me cut down a 6-0 ET tube,” he tells you without glancing your way.
You’re grateful for his apathy, feeling like you’ve been spared from the awkwardness of being faced with a stranger you were never supposed to see again. You wouldn’t have let him into your empty apartment at all if you knew, much less fucked him on an air mattress. And you maybe would’ve practiced a little more humility before kicking him out this morning if you realized he was gonna be your goddamn attending.
You’re only able to breathe again when you leave his side to cut the tube. The exhale gets knocked out of your legs all over again when you turn to face him once more, finding him wearing a smile that you already know means trouble.
“Fancy meeting you here, by the way,” he squints behind his safety glasses.
“Likewise,” you nod once, gaze averted, as you pass him the clear tube in your gloved fingers.
Jack works with deft hands, utterly concentrated, even despite his nonstop teasing. “That retail gig didn’t work out for you, I take it?”
“Retail?” you hear Robby murmur from somewhere behind you.
Your face burns hot.
“I was let go this morning, actually,” you try to joke, though your wavering voice gives your timidity away. “And I realized I always wanted to be a doctor anyway, so I just… Snuck in here, threw on a coat, and nobody was the wiser.”
You flash him a playful grin, which fades when you get a weird look from the nurses standing just behind him.
“I’m kidding!” you blurt with an awkward chuckle. “I-I’m totally kidding. I’m in R3— I just moved here from—”
“Hey,” Jack blurts, peering up at you from the glasses sitting low on his nose, and saving you from yourself. “Help me out with this ET tube, please?”
“Yes, sir…” you nod and don’t miss the smug grin he gives you in response.
You somehow manage to make it through the rest of the endotracheal intubation without making a total fool of yourself — until Robby catches you on the way out, that is, once Hiro is finally stabilized. He chucks his gown and gloves into the biohazard bin beside the door and asks how you and Dr. Abbot know each other.
Jack answers honestly before you can think to make up a lie.
“We met last night, actually,” he’d said. “At Sonny’s.”
“The bar, huh?” Robby nodded slowly. “Hope you didn’t come in hungover, R3.”
Your mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water, until you were finally able to stammer out a measly, “O-Of course not, sir!”
Robby only laughed. “I’m joking, kid. I watched you keep a boy’s heart going with your hand shoved in his chest cavity… If you’re hungover, I can’t wait to see what you can do sober.”
He claps you on the shoulder before he walks away. You feel an overwhelming sense of relief at his words. Jack’s praise, on the other hand, makes you feel a little like dying.
“Good work back there,” he says, pulling off his gloves with a dull pop.
“Thanks…” you say with a wavering smile that you hardly mean. “But I, uh— I should probably get going, Dr. Abbot. Dr. Al said she needed me for—”
“Dr. Abbot, huh?” the older man scoffs. “This morning I was Jack.”
“Yeah, well, this morning you were a stranger and notmy attending, so…”
Your gaze is stern but glittering still. You tilt your chin to keep his stare when he towers over you — feet spread shoulder length apart, hands crossed behind his back, light eyes peering at you from the bridge of his nose.
Even despite his strong stature, something playful swims in his squinted stare as he jokes, “Would you have taken advantage of me, then? You know, if you knew I was gonna be your boss?”
You shove him hard by the shoulder, arguing in a sharp whisper. “I did not take advantage of you, Dr. Abbot.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” Jack shrugs. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”
You meet his smug smile with a pair of narrowed eyes that dart back and forth between his softer ones — all squishy around the edges with a look that makes your chest feel warm.
“Don’t look at me like that…” you deadpan.
“Like what?”
“Like you’ve seen me naked,” you scold under your breath, brushing his shoulder with yours as you storm past him down the hallway. “It’s not appropriate, Dr. Abbot.”
Jack watches you with a smile, anyway, while you walk away from him with something swift in your step. He can’t help but eye the way your scrubs cradle your body, which he had held in his hands only last night. He can still remember how your ass felt in his palms; how the sweat on your neck tasted on his tongue; how your features crumpled together right before you came for him.
He goes half-dizzy at the memory.
Not appropriate, indeed.
You’re about an hour away from finishing your shift when you nearly lose your first patient.
Everything that came before ceases to exist in that moment.
You had seen death. A lot of it. You had scrubbed in on numerous surgeries where patients flat-lined on the operating table. You’d seen illnesses eat a person from the inside out. You’d seen children try and fail to fight off infections that their tiny bodies just couldn’t handle.
But this time was different — because this time felt like your fault.
Amara was a six-year-old girl who was rushed in, barely conscious, with a fever of 105. By all accounts, she should’ve been your easiest patient of the day — considering the shitshow that preceded her arrival. And you did everything right. Everything that med school taught you.
You wrapped her in ice packs along her major arteries, gave her a cold IV to cool her internally, and did every test in the book to determine the cause of her raging fever.
“I just don’t understand why her fever isn’t slowing down,” you’d rambled to Jack in the break room, where he’d insisted you take a breather, when he saw the moment getting to you. “I’ve done everything right. It should be going down by now, right?”
He’d stopped your pacing with a firm but gentle hand along the outside of your elbow.
“Fevers can be stubborn. You know that,” Jack had told you, ducking down to catch your gaze when you tried to look away. “This isn’t about you missing something, alright? It’s just her body taking time. We can reassess when the tests come back. We’re not out of options yet.”
But then she started seizing, and it triggered an arrhythmia in her heart, and the organ started to fail altogether. She’s flat-lining before you can blink.
You quickly lose count of the minutes you spend doing compressions. You vaguely hear Jack from behind you, telling you to switch positions like you’re supposed to, but you keep on going.
“I got it,” you’d spat through gritted teeth. “I’m fine.”
Your arms grow slowly numb from the strong, never-ending rhythm. Beads of sweat begin to pearl along your forehead, rolling slowly down your temples. You can feel your hair tie slipping from its place, already loose from the long day, before it hits the ground somewhere by your feet. The wild strands fall around your face, billowing with every punched breath from your mouth.
When you feel Jack standing behind you, gathering your hair into his gentle fist, you don’t think about how he was a stranger to you barely a day ago.
You don’t think about what he did to you with the hand he uses to pull your hair back. You don’t think about the awkward exchange from that morning, or the constant teasing all afternoon, or the way you haven’t been able to think without running into thoughts of him.
You think only of saving this girl.
It takes three rounds of epi to get her heart back into a shockable rhythm, and 40 joules to reset it to its natural beat.
Jack helps you off the bed with two firm hands around your arms — because your legs had all but locked into position from the lengthy compressions — and tells Langdon to take over the remainder of the young girl’s care.
“You alright?” you hear the man ask, while you blink the haze of adrenaline from your eyes. He pats you gently on the back, in a silent reminder to breathe. You nod slowly through a wavering inhale, and he smiles at the wordless affirmation. “You ever thought about going into cardiology?”
“That’s not funny,” you deadpan.
“I’m not joking,” Jack scoffs. “I think you might be the heart whisperer, Doc.”
The nickname catches on by nightfall.
Robby tells you to clock out early, that you deserve it, and you don’t push him on the matter.
You don’t say a word, actually, as you trudge to the locker room for your bag and leave through the waiting room doors. The cool night air rushes over your burning skin like silk. Your tired body migrates on autopilot to the park across the street, where two benches sit facing each other, lit only by a single amber streetlamp.
You don’t know how long you sit there by yourself — only that you’ve counted nearly a hundred bricks in the pavement by the time Jack Abbot finds you.
“You’re not thinking about quitting, are you?” he wonders aloud, shattering your train of not-quite thought.
“Hm?” you perk on instinct as your head whips to face him. “Oh. No. Of course not… No one else would take me.”
Jack exhales a quiet laugh at your quip and slides his camo bag from his shoulder. He huffs as he plops down onto the creaking bench beside you, leaving an aching inch or more of space between your bodies.
Though he’s out of the tactical gear he’d arrived in — left now in his baggy pants and a form-fitting undershirt — the scent of blood still lingers on his skin. It’s only partially drowned out by his cologne; the smell of musky leather reminds you instantly of Sonny’s Tavern.
“Well, I’m sure Common Thread around the corner is probably hiring,” he jokes.
You feel yourself laugh for the first time all day.
“I don’t think Common Thread has been around since the 90s.”
“Really?” the older man huffs, crossing his strong arms over his chest and exhaling a punched-out breath. “Jesus… I need to get out more.”
Your eyes dart over the edges of his profile when he turns away. Your gaze grows soft and wet with the apology you’ve been thinking about all day, which rises to the tip of your tongue just now.
“I’m sorry, by the way,” you blurt. “For lying to you last night.”
Jack shrugs. “Who cares? We didn’t even know each other.”
“Yeah, but now we do— And now the rest of our relationship is gonna be built on the foundation of a stupid lie.”
Jack arches a greying brow in your direction. “Our relationship, huh?”
“Our working relationship,” you squint. “I’m not going out with you again, Dr. Abbot.”
“I didn’t even ask if you wanted to go out with me!”
“Well, no, but—”
“So do you wanna go out with me?” he blurts with a smug grin.
“No!” you shout, giggling despite yourself. “It’s not appropriate. We have to draw the line somewhere.”
“Oh, yeah?” he hums. “Where?”
“Here!”
“Right here?”
Jack glances down at where you motion to the space between your bodies. You nod with a poorly held back laugh, and he slides to close the distance between you. You feel almost suffocated by the warmth of his body heat. Your head spins when his thigh brushes the outside of yours.
“So, by your assessment, would you say that I am now crossing that imaginary line?” the older man jokes drily.
“I’d say you’re crossing several lines, Dr. Abbot.”
He meets your smiling eyes with something more serious glimmering in his.
“Do you want me to stop?”
You know that you could say yes and that all of this would be over with. All the teasing, all the lingering touches, all of the everything that came before. You could start over. Clean state. You’d be the R3, and he’d be the attending, and that’d be that. Only now that sounds like a total fucking nightmare. The thought of having any less of him now feels like ripping your own heart out through your chest.
You swallow hard and shake your head. “No… I don’t want you to stop.”
“Good,” he nods.
“Good,” you echo with a firm nod and stupid smile.
“We are clocked out now, you know?” Jack tells you, feigning an air of nonchalance. “I technically wasn’t even working in the first place, so… You know, if we kissed right now, I don’t think it’d violate that many HR policies.”
He catches your eyes flitting somewhere over his shoulder before you quip, “No, but your friends might look at us a little funny…”
Jack glances behind him and finds the rest of the day shift crossing the street together. Their distant chatter draws nearer, and you fight back a laugh when the older man slides slowly away from you — before any of them could catch how close the two of you had been. Donnie arrives first, and places his square cooler in the space between you.
“Dr. Abbot and The Heart Whisperer…” the man croons in place of a greeting. “Here. Take the first beer. You deserve it.”
“Thanks…” you murmur shyly and take the chilled can he motions to you. It opens with a heavy click and a faint hiss. You take a slow sip from it, and nearly forget how to swallow when you feel Jack’s eyes still on you. “Do you… Do you guys do this after every shift?”
“Not always,” Robby answers from the bench across from yours, popping open his own beer with an expert hand. “Usually it’s a lot more lively than this, but…”
“So it’s not always that crazy in there?”
“No, it’s always a little crazy,” Santos quips from where she stands between Mohan and Whitaker. “But today, Heart Whisperer, is what we call baptism by fire.”
“Yeah,” Samira scoffs. “Our first shift was the Pittfest shooting.”
“Oh, shit…” you grimace.
“But the good thing is, I can pretty much guarantee that the next shift will be easier.”
You meet Mohan’s kind smile with a wavering one. “Yeah… I hope so.”
“So, what do ya say, R3?” Robby asks with a smile that’s mostly concealed behind his greying beard. “Think you’ll stick around after today’s shitshow?”
You ponder for a long moment, glancing down at the can you nurse in your lap. You trace the circular edge of the aluminum with your free hand as a smile curls slowly at your mouth.
“Yeah, I think I will…” you hum with a slow nod. “If only because I live right across the street from this really nice donut shop— like the best you’ll ever have, so...”
“So now you have to like it here, huh?” Jack finishes for you, with a knowing squint in his light eyes — because he can still taste your mouth the same way he can still taste the late-night pastry he’d shared with you the night before.
“Yeah,” you smile back. “And it’s crazy because I really wasn’t planning on liking it here…”
“Well, donuts tend to have that effect on people, I’ve found,” he squints behind the beer he brings up to his mouth
“Oh, do they?” you wonder sarcastically.
Jack nods slowly, licking the sheen of alcohol from his mouth. “Yeah, actually.”
“Oh, please, tell me more, Dr. Abbot,” you say, giggling despite yourself.
While you watch Jack talk out of his ass about a statistic he totally made up, you vaguely hear Santos turn to Whitaker and mumble, “Okay, so is ‘donuts,’ like, a euphemism for something, or did this shift make us all ten times dumber?”
