the three times you worry about jack's wedding ring , and the one time he reassures you you have nothing to worry about
written in response to a lovely message from my queen @mrssssmalfoy š
You noticed Jack on your first day.
This was not, you told yourself, unprofessional. It was simply observational. You were new to Pittsburgh, new to this ER, new to the rhythm of the Pitt, and you were paying attention to everything ā the layout, the board, the staff, the way the floor moved. Jack Abbott was simply part of the inventory.
A very distracting part of the inventory, but part of it nonetheless.
He was the kind of person who commanded a room without trying to, which you found both impressive and mildly irritating, because people who did that without trying always seemed to know they did it even when they were pretending not to. He moved through the floor with the focused economy of someone who had been doing this for a long time and had stopped wasting motion, and he ran a trauma with a quiet authority that made everyone in the room better.
You watched him work and thought:Ā good doctor.Ā And then, somewhat against your will:Ā also, objectively, extremely attractive,Ā which was an entirely separate assessment that you filed underĀ irrelevantĀ and tried to leave there.
He found you at the computer bank at nine-fifteen.
"New attending," he said, not a question, appearing at your elbow with a chart.
"I know," you said. "Dana briefed me."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "What did she say?"
"That you were the person to go to if I had clinical questions," you said, "and that you took your coffee black and didn't like small talk."
"Both accurate," he said. "She leave anything else out?"
"She said you were good," you said. "She seemed to mean it."
"She does," he said, and the corner of his mouth did the thing again ā not quite a smile, but the territory adjacent to one. He had, you noticed, gloves on. Blue nitrile, the standard issue. He had presumably just come from a patient room. "Welcome to the Pitt."
You went back to your chart and told yourself, very firmly, that the corner of his mouth was not your business.
He was in and out of patient rooms all morning, which meant gloves on and gloves off at a rate that kept your peripheral vision unreasonably occupied, which you were not proud of but couldn't entirely help.
He stopped at your station at eleven with a question about a shared patient ā clinical, direct, exactly the kind of question Dana had told you to expect ā and you answered it, and he nodded, and then said, with the carefully neutral tone of someone who had thought about whether to say something and decided to:
"You ordered the CT before the labs."
"The presentation warranted it," you said.
"I would have waited for the labs," he said.
"I know," you said. "I wouldn't have. The CT came back positive, which is why Mr. Harrington is in surgery right now instead of waiting another hour."
He looked at you with an expression that was doing something careful.
"I know," you said again, pleasantly, and went back to your chart.
You heard him make a sound that might have been a laugh, and then he was gone.
Not flirting, exactly ā Jack Abbott did not flirt the way other people flirted, there was no performance to it, no obvious effort. It was more like the sustained and specific attention of someone who had decided you were interesting and was acting on that in the most low-key way possible. The questions that were slightly more than clinical. The appearing at your station between cases. The dry comments aimed specifically at you that landed differently than his comments to everyone else, which you noticed and told yourself you weren't noticing.
By the end of the shift you were tired and satisfied in the particular way of a first day that had gone well, and you were also, against your better judgment, thinking about the corner of his mouth approximately forty percent more than was appropriate.
You were getting your jacket from the locker room when you saw him in the corridor.
Jacket on. Badge unclipped. End of shift.
And his hands, finally ungloved after a day of patient rooms and clinical procedure, resting at his sides.
The ring on his left hand.
Gold. Simple. Worn in the way things were worn when they'd been there for a long time.
You looked at it for exactly one second before you looked away, and something that had been building quietly all day simply ā deflated. Cleanly and completely, like a door closing.
You got your jacket and went home and told yourself it didn't matter, because it didn't, because it had been one day and a corner of someone's mouth and nothing more than that.
Part Two: The Conversation
You were professional about it.
This was something you were proud of, in retrospect ā that you had taken the information and recalibrated cleanly, that you had come in on the second day and been entirely, thoroughly professional. Polite. Efficient. Clinical. You answered his questions and asked your own and did your job excellently and gave him nothing that was not strictly necessary.
He noticed within an hour.
You could tell by the slight shift in his attention ā the way it sharpened, the assessing quality of it, the looking-for-something quality that he had about him when something had changed and he was trying to locate the source.
He found you in the break room at eleven.
"You're different today," he said.
"I'm the same," you said, pouring coffee.
"You're not," he said. "Yesterday you told me I was wrong about the CT in a way that wasā" He paused. "Refreshing. Today you've said approximately twelve words to me."
"I've been busy," you said.
"The floor is slower today than yesterday," he said.
"I don't know what you want me to say," you said, carefully.
"I want you to tell me what changed," he said, with the directness that was simply his default setting, the unwillingness to talk around the thing when he could talk directly at it.
You looked at him for a moment.
At his hands, resting at his sides, ungloved right now between patients.
He followed your eyeline.
"I'm notā" You started. Stopped. "It's not my business. I'm sorry if I've beenā"
"Four years ago," he said, simply. "Her name was Claire. She wasā" He paused, and something moved in his expression ā not fresh grief, not the raw kind, but the settled kind, the kind that had found its shape after a long time. "She was good. And she died, and I still wear the ring because I haven't decided not to." He held your gaze. "It's not what you thought."
The break room was very quiet.
"I'm sorry," you said, and meant it completely. "I assumed ā I shouldn't have assumed. I should have justā"
"You didn't know," he said. "You saw a ring and you drew the most reasonable conclusion." He looked at his hand, briefly. "I should probablyā" He stopped. "People make that assumption."
"Does it bother you?" you said. "When they do?"
He considered this, with the honesty he gave most things.
"No," he said. "She deserves to be remembered. The ring isā" He paused. "It's not about moving on or not moving on. It's justā" He stopped again, and for a moment he looked like a man who was trying to describe something that didn't have a clean word. "It's mine to carry."
At the ring, and the hand it was on, and the face of the man who had worn it for four years because he hadn't decided not to and because she deserved to be remembered.
"I'm sorry I went quiet," you said.
"I'm sorry you had to find out like that," he said.
"Dana should have mentioned it," you said.
"Dana probably thought I should mention it," he said.
"She didn't have to," he said, and the corner of his mouth did the thing, and something that had deflated the evening before quietly reinflated, which you noted and filed underĀ deal with later.
And that was that ā the both of them going back to the floor, back to the work, back to the particular ordinary rhythm of the day, except that something had shifted, and you both knew it, and neither of you mentioned it directly, and that was fine.
That was, actually, a very good start.
You had been together for eight months when someone said something about the ring.
Not maliciously ā it was Santos, who said most things without filtering them through a politeness consideration first, who had glanced at Jack's hand during a handoff and said to you afterward, in the break room, with genuine curiosity rather than cruelty:Ā does it bother you? That he still wears it?
You had said no, which was true.
And then you had gone home that evening and looked at his hand across the dinner table and thought about it for the first time in a way you hadn't let yourself think about it, and something small and complicated had taken up residence in your chest.
Not jealousy, exactly. You had turned it over carefully and decided it wasn't that. It was something more like ā uncertainty. The particular uncertainty of loving someone who was still visibly, tangibly connected to someone else, who had a whole life that had happened before you that you could see on his hand every day.
You hadn't said anything.
For two weeks you hadn't said anything, because it wasn't your ring and it wasn't your grief and you had no right to make it about you.
Because he always noticed.
"You're thinking about something," he said, on a Sunday evening, from across the couch.
"I'm always thinking about something," you said.
"Something specific," he said. "You've been looking at my hand."
He looked at you, and his face had the careful quality it had when he was preparing to hear something he might not like.
"Santos said something," you said, finally. "A couple of weeks ago. About the ring. And I've been ā I told her it didn't bother me, which is true, it doesn'tā" You stopped. "I don't want you to take it off. I want to be clear about that. It's yours and she's yours to carry and I would neverā"
"But sometimes I wonder," you said, "if there's room. For me. In all of it." You held his gaze. "And I know that's not fair, and I know it's not rational, and I wasn't going to say anythingā"
"I'm glad you said something," he said.
"I don't want you to take it off," you said again. "I mean that."
"I know you mean it," he said. He was quiet for a moment, turning something over. "Can I tell you something?"
"I've thought about taking it off," he said. "Not because of ā not because she matters less. But becauseā" He paused. "Because you matter. And I've been wondering if carrying her this way means I'm not ā fully here. With you." He looked at his hand. "I don't have an answer. I'm still working it out."
"You don't have to work it out on my schedule," you said, softly.
"I know," he said. "But I want you to know I'm working it out. That it's not ā that you're notā" He stopped, and the controlled thing slipped, just slightly. "There is room," he said. "For you. There has been for a while. The ring isn't about the room."
"Okay," you said, quietly.
You moved across the couch and into his side, and his arm came around you immediately, and you sat there in the particular quiet of two people who had said true things and were sitting with them.
His hand ā the one with the ring ā rested at your shoulder.
You said nothing about it.
Three months later, you noticed it was gone.
Not immediately ā it was a Tuesday, an ordinary Tuesday, and you were in the kitchen making coffee and he was getting his jacket, and something made you look at his hand, and the ring wasn't there.
He came into the kitchen and you handed him his coffee and he took it and looked at you with an expression that was open and slightly uncertain in a way Jack Abbott rarely was.
"Yeah," he said. "I think so."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"Not right now," he said. "Later, maybe."
He nodded. Drank his coffee. And then, before he left, he put the mug down and kissed you ā longer than the usual morning kiss, more deliberate, the kind that meant something specific ā and you held onto him for a second and felt him hold on too.
"Later," he said, against your mouth.
You stood in the kitchen and thought about a gold ring on a left hand and a man who carried things carefully and had decided, in his own time, in his own way, to set one of them down.
Part Four: Emergency Contact
The call came on a Thursday evening.
You were at the stove, the particular domestic calm of a Thursday that had no plans ā dinner on, music low, the comfortable quiet of your apartment, which was in the process of becoming your apartment and his apartment simultaneously in the way that things became shared without any single moment of decision.
Unknown number. Pittsburgh area code.
"Is thisā" A pause, the sound of papers. "Is this Y/N?"
"Yes," you said, and something in your stomach dropped before you knew why.
"This is Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center," the voice said, and the bottom of your stomach arrived somewhere near the floor. "We have a Dr. Jack Abbott here ā he's okay, I want to say that first, he's okay ā but he fainted during his shift and we'd like someone to come and pick him up. You're listed as his emergency contact."
Sitting on the bed with the expression of a man who had been told to sit on the bed and was complying under protest, his arms folded, his jaw doing the thing it did when he was annoyed at circumstances beyond his control. He was in his scrubs still, badge clipped, looking like a person who had very recently been horizontal and had opinions about it.
He looked up when you came through the curtain.
"I'm fine," he said, immediately.
"Hello to you too," you said.
"It was a long shift and I hadn't eaten," he said.
"Sixteen hours," he said.
"There was a lot of incomingā"
"Sixteen hours without eating," you said.
"I don't care how busy the shift was," you said, and your voice came out with more feeling in it than you'd planned, the particular shaky quality of someone who had been scared and was now expressing it as something adjacent to anger. "You fainted. In the hospital. In your own hospital."
"It was a brief loss of consciousness," he said, with great dignity.
"I'm fine," he said. "The labs are fine. My pressure is fine. It was dehydration and low blood sugar and it won't happen again."
At the entirely too-composed face of a man trying to make a medical event into a non-event, and underneath the composure the slight pallor that told you it had been more frightening than he was going to say.
You sat in the chair beside the bed and took a breath.
"Okay?" he said, slightly wary.
"You're going to drink the water on that table," you said, "and eat whatever they bring you, and then I'm taking you home."
"You fainted," you said. "You're not driving."
He looked at the ceiling briefly, in the manner of a man choosing his battles.
You sat there while he drank the water, in the particular quiet of a hospital bay on a Thursday evening, and something was turning over in the back of your mind that it took you a few minutes to fully formulate.
"The hospital called me," you said.
"They said I was your emergency contact."
"When did that happen?" you said.
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the water in his hand with the studied attention of a man who was deciding how to say something.
"A while ago," he said. "After the first few months."
"You changed your emergency contact to me," you said, "and didn't mention it."
"It didn't come up," he said.
"It seemed like the right thing to do," he said, simply. "You'reā" He paused. "You're who I'd want to know. If something happened. You're who I'd want there." He looked at you, the fully open quality of it, no management, just him. "That's all."
Your chest did something enormous and completely unmanageable.
"You could have told me," you said, softly.
"I know," he said. "I wasn't sure how to say it without it beingā" He stopped. "It felt like a lot to put on someone."
"It's not a lot," you said. "It's ā Jack, that's not a lot. That's everything. That's the best thing you could have told me."
"Yeah?" he said, and his voice was quieter than usual, the managed quality of it entirely gone.
You reached out and took his hand ā the left one, bare now for three months, the absence of the ring something you had quietly, thoroughly made your peace with ā and held it, and he held yours back with the immediate certainty of someone who had made a decision a while ago and was living comfortably inside it.
"You scared me," you said. "When the hospital called."
"I know," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry," you said. "Just eat something on your shifts."
"You'll try for three days and then there'll be a busy shiftā"
"And you'll remind me," he said.
"I'll remind you," you confirmed.
He looked at you with that expression ā the open, warm, entirely real one ā and squeezed your hand once.
"Thank you for coming," he said.
"Where else would I be," you said, and it landed the way it was meant to ā as the plain, undecorated truth of someone who had decided, without fanfare, that this was simply where they were.
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