Chapter Text
6 months later
Mel was right. The Botanic Garden is empty.
Frank sits on a wooden bench, dedicated to a Thomas Robb, 1982-2005, loving brother and son, and knows that he did not dress warmly enough when he peeled himself out of bed this morning. His ass is frozen on the cold hard bench. Dog, on the other hand, is very comfortable in a woolen sweater perfectly his size: a belated birthday present from Dana, who definitely snickered while wrapping it. Frank watches with some amusement as Dog snuffles around in the dirt, tugging at his lead. Apparently something smells really good in the sloping path to the pond. Probably goose shit.
It’s an awful day. The clouds churn overhead in a gray hazy film. The wind stings his face and shoots through the thick denim of his jeans. And the Garden is depressingly empty. He walked the long way to get here from the parking lot. Through the wilted pollinator garden, a frayed and yellow meadow surrounded by stark trees, an unnervingly quiet woodland trail. Dog had fun marking every piece of foliage he saw. But nothing stirred, except for dead leaves pushed around by the wind and the sound of their footsteps crunching through dead leaves. He saw a few workers in the Welcome Center through the glass doors, sweeping floors and managing the front desk, but other than that, it’s a ghost town.
But for some reason he wants to be here more than anywhere else in the world right now.
It feels colder by the water. Frank sees dark reedy plants framing the pond, swaying in the blistering wind. A pamphlet from the welcome center tells him that lotuses only bloom in June through August. Their flat, boat-like leaves move weightless on the surface of the water. And then—
A robin, chest a brilliant flag of red, flutters down to drink.
His breath catches. Dog, maybe sensing the change in the air, starts quietly chewing on a stick.
In the freezing water, it dunks its head down over and over, its little body fluttering. Beads of water flinging through the air.
“Pretty.”
Frank turns his head and there she is.
She’s much more prepared for the weather than he is, he sees. Wrapped up in a big pale blue puffer coat, the hood is up, concealing her hair. He can still make out her nose, bright pink from the cold. Her eyes, slightly watering from the wind behind her glasses.
She is beautiful.
“Yeah,” he says, not about the bird. “Very pretty.”
Dog is delighted. He pounces at her feet, his tail going a million miles a minute. She kneels in the cold damp earth without a care—woolen tights, he sees. A skirt?—and kisses his head with a loud smack. “Hello, boy!” She looks up at Frank, her fingers sinking into the fluff around his neck fondly. Her smile splits open on her round, pale face, wind-chafed and bright. “He got big!”
“And smart,” he says. “He's house-trained now.” He smirks. “Just like me.”
“Haha. Good joke.” She spies the silver tag around his neck engraved with Dog and Frank’s address and her laugh is giddy. “Good Dog!” There’s a moment where they just look at each other and smile.
“Hello, Dr. Langdon,” she says. Her voice, soft, carries over to him.
“Hello, Dr. King,” he says back. She stands and moves to sit beside him on the rock hard, ice-cold bench. Suddenly he feels at least ten degrees warmer. She pulls down her hood, and there she is in all her glory, two braids this time, dark gold from the glaring sun.
It’s strange seeing her outside the walls of the rehab common room. It’s strange, he thinks, seeing her at all. When he was released, rather than a newfound sense of freedom, he found himself buried in paperwork. Balancing his three Narcotics Anonymous meetings per week and his supervised visits with his children. Reviewing waivers and signing agreements faxed over from the hospital, requisites to keep his job. Scrambling to find a therapist who specializes in addiction in active healthcare workers.
Divorce attorney meetings.
It’s a lot. They haven’t spoken outside of text for about six months.
And then, him running on courage he didn’t knew he had, sending a text at a too-late hour:
Hey. Are you free tomorrow by any chance? Would love to go to the botanic garden as promised
“Been a long time,” he says, because the pills have definitely dented his intelligence and all he can do is state the obvious now.
“I’ve missed you,” replies Mel. She says it without shame, with her heart pulsing on her sleeve. “Dana mentioned you’ve been doing well. Better.”
The sound that bursts from him is half-air, half-wheeze. “You could say that. I missed you too.” He dips his head. It’s hard to look at her a little bit. Like trying to squint at the sun, but all you can see is its colorful impression when you close your eyes.
Adrienne, his therapist, says he idolizes Mel too much.
“Just because someone is a good person, doesn’t mean that they have no flaws,” Adrienne told him very sternly during their last meeting. She even removed her readers, so he’d know she meant serious business.
Frank knows that. He’s not a twelve-year-old with a crush on Teacher. He also thinks Adrienne is frankly full of bullshit. At least when it comes to Mel. Because the idea that anyone could look at her and think that she has any kind of flaw at all—that’s beyond him. Yeah, she can be awkward, he allows, miss a social cue or two. But inherently, at the very core of her, in the least cliche way he can possibly say it, she has a heart made out of gold. He just knows it. In the time that they’ve known each other (thirteen hours before he went to rehab, and seven months after that), she found every wall he’s ever had carefully bricked around his heart and burst through them with the gentlest sledgehammer. Just by being her.
“Sorry we couldn’t meet up sooner.” It’s all he can get out, like the air is too thick to handle at times.
Her smile hasn’t shrunk at all during their conversation, even though Frank feels like his tongue is leaden and stupid. Her lips are bright red from the cold. He has to keep staring at her eyebrows, how her nose moves slightly when she speaks, so he doesn’t feel like a creep.
She shrugs. The fabric of her coat crinkles. “It’s okay. I know you need time and space for your recovery. And it’s good you have other people there for you, not just me.”
“Still.” Frank slips his hand inside his jeans pocket, feeling for the penny he’s kept there for a long time. He finds Lincoln’s well-worn grooves, slides them between his thumb and index finger idly. “I wanted to keep our promise.”
Her eyes, big and brown, gleam like a dark pond. “You did.” She looks him over, eyes going from the top of his head to the bottom of his pants. “You’re doing it right now.”
“I’m glad I am.” His heart feels swollen and hot in his chest.
“Your first day of work is tomorrow.” She can’t hide her excitement. It’s obvious from how she fidgets, the lightness in her voice. Frank, who for the past year has been lying to everyone who matters to him, hiding the most grotesque parts of himself, finds this both refreshing and terrifying.
“7 to 7,” he says, and his stomach lurches as the words leave his mouth. The world starts spinning a little, so he has to put his head between his knees and take a second to just feel like shit. “Oh, fuck. I don’t know if I can do it, Mel.”
A warm, small hand, on the middle of his back. He feels it through the thickness of his coat, a calm pressure that begins to rub in circles. “Just breathe,” says a disembodied voice. It’s Mel, he knows it’s Mel, but in his panic, he thinks it might be an angel. “Come on, Frank.”
Two minutes, or maybe twenty years, go by. He forces himself to sit up, regulating his breathing. He’s not having a panic attack, but it feels like more than just nerves. He can barely parse his own thoughts. “It’s going to be fucking awful. I’m going to kill someone. Or steal meds. Or both.”
“Okay…” Her hand pauses in its circles. “Hey. If you don’t want this, if you’re really not ready, you don’t have to.”
It’s a way out. He knows it. He knows he can phone Robby and request an extension and it would be granted, no questions asked. He could check himself back into in-patient. He could pack all his things, empty his savings account, and move to Costa Rica with a new name.
He could do a million things.
“No.” He decides. “I need to be an Emergency Medicine doctor.”
“You are one.” She says it with such certainty. Her hand still presses against his back. It feels good, an anchor, so his head doesn’t fill up with stupid thoughts and he can’t float away on bullshit. “But not if you don’t try.”
Her sweet way of saying grow some balls. “You always know what to say. Like you’re a human Roledex of ‘things to say to people in crisis’.”
“No I’m not.” She sighs. “Yesterday, Dr. Mohan asked me if her date night outfit looked too slutty and I said yes. That was definitely the wrong thing to say.”
“No way.” The laughter catches him by surprise. It always does when he’s around her. He’s not sure why. He knows she’s funny—intentionally. He sees it in the sly way her mouth moves when she speaks. Sometimes it feels like a secret: that no one is supposed to know she’s actually hilarious. “You’re lying. You’re just trying to make me laugh.”
“It worked,” Mel says, smugly pleased. Then she sighs. “But no, sadly, not a lie.”
“You’re really something, Mel,” he says, and means it. He looks at her and sees, suddenly, clearly, the future spread out in front of him. Her hand in his, holding tight, for the rest of their lives. It’s similar to how he felt that awful day, the day they met. He hadn’t understood back then why he was drawn to her. Why he circled her like a planet being pulled into a star’s orbit. They barely knew each other. He didn’t know about Becca yet. He didn’t know her preference for black tea over coffee. Or that she wakes up each Saturday and does a crossword with an old fashioned pencil and eraser. Or how incredible she looks in his bed, exhausted, wet tangled hair around her shoulders, in a FaceTime call, wearing his college t-shirt.
He didn’t know how precious she’d become to him. But somehow, as strangers, they meshed. And Frank just couldn’t bare to look away. Even in the heights of his addiction, he couldn’t pull his eyes off of her.
Frank chocked up the strange consideration he had for her at the time to finally meeting a person who he could teach, impart wisdom on, a blank sheet waiting for color.
He knows now that she has a lot more to teach him than he could ever teach her.
“How many days?” She asks. There’s no morbidity to her question. Just a light in her eyes, like headlights in a dark tunnel.
He pulls out the penny. He doesn’t particularly like the chips they hand out at NA meetings, plastic, with no weight to them, and it feels grotesque searching for similar offerings on Etsy. Like buying his own coffin at a flea market. “180 days tomorrow,” he says and places the penny, warmed from his skin, into the center of her hand. She’s wearing white woolen mittens, he sees with some incredulity. Like a tiny baby lamb. “Uh. When I hit 200, I’ll have two pennies.”
Her mouth is a quirked thing, about to wobble into laughter. “I like that,” she says. “But shouldn’t it be 200 pennies? Or two dollars? Or eight quarters? The numerical value of a penny doesn’t really make sense in this kind of situation.”
He shrugs. “I like pennies,” he says and he knows that reasoning bothers her. But her smile breaks free regardless, and he watches as she reverently hands back his penny. He slips it back into his pocket, where it belongs.
”Is it a lucky coin?”
”I don’t believe in luck.” Frank isn’t really lying. He’s not religious or spiritual. His parents are strict Irish Catholics and Frank was stuck in a pew from ages one to eighteen. When Abby accidentally fell pregnant during his first year as an intern, two forms of contraception failing them, it was no wonder Anne and Matthew Langdon pressured them both down the aisle. It was a makeshift wedding ceremony with little fanfare. So, no God. No devil. No luck. But maybe he believes, in a tiny corner of his black cynic’s heart, that he was fated to meet Mel King. “But it could be a feel-good coin. Just… a coin full of good feelings.”
Mel’s expression goes all soft and gooey, like when she talks about babies being delivered in the ER and the fifty-year-old respiratory therapist who is nice to her on night shifts. “Your good feelings?”
”Sure,” he says, because he’s never really thought about it. “Or the universe’s. Namaste and all that.”
”You don’t believe that.” Mel reads him like a book. “You just don’t want to admit you think about good things while holding your feel-good penny.”
”Well, that doesn’t exactly help my badass reputation at the Pitt, does it?”
There’s a beat. Both of them are thinking about tomorrow, he knows. Her with anticipation. Him, with both excitement and dread.
“I’ll be there with you,” she says.
“Yeah,” and he doesn’t say that the moment he got his schedule, he hunted down her name, hands shaking, hoping that she would be there his first day. “Get ready. I’ll be bothering you all twelve hours.”
“You don’t bother me.” She’s heartbreakingly sincere before she finally gets it’s a joke. “Oh, I forgot. You have a bad sense of humor.”
“It’s actually a great sense of humor, you just need to get used to it.”
“Hmm. Dog’s name tells me otherwise.” And she buries her hand in Dog’s fluffy coat again where he’s panting between her legs under the bench.
“Well, me and Dog have a special understanding,” he says. “He’s seen me at my worst after all.”
Mel shakes her head. “I think he’s seen me at my worst and I still would’ve given him a better name than that.”
“What, tired after a shift?”
Mel thinks for a moment. “Well, that night I rescued him from your house. I ate a slice of pizza naked in front of him. I just got out of the shower and was kind of losing it from hunger. So I think that’s pretty bad.” She looks down at Dog. “Though I don’t think dogs really care about human nudity. They’re nude all the time.”
Langdon stares at her. His brain makes an aborted attempt at imagining—her naked, hair wet, eating a slice of pizza in his house and then sleeping in his bed in his college t-shirt.
“You win,” he says faintly.
Mel frowns. “Are you okay?”
“More than,” and if his voice is a little gruff, she’s kind enough not to mention it.
They sit together after that quietly. The robin moves on. A small group of geese take his place, launching themselves like sturdy boats into the water. The pond isn’t frosted over, he wants to tell her. There’s still life under the surface, waiting to stir when spring arrives.
“Thank you, Mel,” is all he can say. “For being here.”
And she smiles at him. “I like being here with you.”
He knows today isn’t the time. The penny burns in his pocket. 200 days? 300 days? The one year rule? He’s not sure when it would ever be a great time. But when the sky breaks open, white and cold, and the snowflakes catch in her eyelashes, and her breath hitches, he knows that someday—some incredible, unbelievable day—he’s going to kiss her.
And if she kisses him back, he vows to himself that he won’t fuck it up.