Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The zippered pouch was certainly brightly decorated, with text rendered in a variety of neons and a little anthropomorphized orange that ran through the logo like a cannabis-infused Kool-Aid Man. Mel held it as gingerly as she might a ticking bomb.

The souped-up medical warning label said each gummy contained 25 milligrams of THC, a dose that Mel knew was on the larger side in a clinical sense, if not in a personal one. “And how many did you say your boyfriend took?” she asked, turning the bag over in her hand. She had the sneaking suspicion that the woman sitting in the chair was far from sober herself, but she was physically upright, which was more than could be said for her companion in the bed.

“He took six,” the woman said. She didn’t look up from her phone; she was back to playing the same game she’d been when she’d come in, the one that had forced Mel to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from saying Oh, I love Neko Atsume. “I told him to wait an hour after the first one, but…” She trailed off.

Mel waited a long, conscious moment before prompting. “But?”

The look she got in return was a familiar one: like Mel was a particularly annoying gnat, or else a robot whose malfunction had finally become bad enough to be an inconvenience, both things that she’d herself felt like on more than one occasion. “But he took six? Are you writing any of this down?”

She wasn’t, actually; focused attention apparently wouldn’t count for much with these two. She placed the bag down in the tray and picked up her penlight. “Mr. Nowak, I’m going to examine you now.”

Everything seemed more or less in order: heart rate high-ish, temperature normal, breathing shallow but not shallow enough to make her think that it was from anything other than circling around a panic attack. The worst thing was probably his bloodshot eyes, so red that they made Mel want to wince in sympathy—well, that and the slipping contact with his physical place on the material plane. Not the end of the world, all things considered, but not exactly the best state of mind with which to experience the joys of the emergency department.

“I’m going to get you some lorazepam,” she said, tapping the orders into her tablet. “And some eye drops. I want to keep you here for observation just to be sure, but I don’t think we’re dealing with anything more than too big of a dose. You’re just going to have to wait it out.”

“I’m going to die,” Mr. Nowak croaked, staring up at Mel with his horrifying red eyes.

“Um,” she said. “No? You aren’t, I promise.”

“Then I’m going to kill myself.”

“Please don’t say that,” Mel said weakly. “I don’t—everything will be worse if we have to get psychiatry involved.”

Those red eyes went wide. “You’re sending me to the psych ward?”

“No,” Mel said, hastily pushing her chair away to stand up. “No! Just—stay here. One of our nurses will come back with some medicine. And some water.”

Sometimes, Mel felt refreshed after treating a patient: the life of a doctor could be one of glorious human connection, delivering healing to those who needed it and being rewarded with the knowledge that she had fulfilled her life’s duty exactly as she was intended to do. Other times, she had to actively stop herself from bolting from the patient’s bedside like a skittish outdoor cat. In this instance, she didn’t feel any sort of obligation to stop herself; Mr. Nowak probably wanted her to disappear just as thoroughly as she wanted it for herself. She winced at the screeching noise the curtain made when she ripped it open along its tracks.

Slow days in the emergency department were the worst. Mel had long since learned that she wasn’t supposed to voice this out loud, that people got antsy and anxious when she pointed out what was eminently obvious, but in the comfort of her own mind she could acknowledge the personal distaste. It wasn’t that busy days were better, necessarily, just faster; point A to point B to point C with no time in-between to reflect on anything other than what absolutely needed to be reflected upon. She could leave all her second-guessing for after she was done with her shift. On days like today, there was ample time to fret during the in-between.

And the hits kept coming. Santos was strolling down the hall with her hands in her scrub pockets, eyes like a hawk while she tried to scope out the rest of the floor. “Anything interesting?” she asked, peering over Mel’s shoulder to get her best look at what lay beyond the curtain.

Mel privately thought of herself and Santos as oil and water, or a couple of cheese graters colliding at opposite angles. It was uncharitable for Mel to find her annoying, but she was comforted by her suspicion that the feeling was mutual. There was something very strange about having a colleague whose opinion she more or less didn’t care about; in a way, it was almost liberating.

“Just a cannabis overdose,” Mel said. “He’s not handling it well.”

“Oh, boring.” Bits of her ponytail had gotten loose and fallen down over her face. It looked like she’d had a long shift already, though whatever strain it had put on her didn’t seem to show much beyond the superficial. That was an area where they were demonstrably similar. Mel filed it away as a future opportunity for common ground. “Hey, unless he develops psychosis. That could be fun.”

“Please don’t let him hear you say that.”

Santos gave her that appraising look that she hated to be on the receiving end of, the one that forced her to remember that people had thoughts about her beyond Mel King? She seems competent and completely unobjectionable. “Are you superstitious, Mel?” Santos said, narrowing her eyes. “I wouldn’t have expected that from you.”

Finding herself in distinct danger of being assigned a new thing, Mel felt obligated to act fast. “Kind of the opposite,” she said. “Except for putting hats on the bed—though that one’s less of a superstition and more of a ‘my mom believed it and always got mad at me for doing it’ kind of thing.”

Santos looked at her blankly.

Mel coughed.

“Well, good luck with that,” Santos said.

“You too,” Mel said. “Or—good luck finding something interesting.”

Her usual tactic in moments of profound social discomfort was much the same as her tactic in dealing with uncomfortable patient interactions: to walk away as quickly as possible and hope that the interaction would fade from the other person’s memory much more quickly than it would from her own. It was a tactic that probably would have served her well in that moment, had she the presence of mind to summon it; there was comfort in the stability of known routines.

Instead, several things happened at once.

First: Dr. Robby, rushing past on her left and looking as harried as he always did, with Javadi following in his wake like an equally harried duckling. “We need hands,” he said, much more loudly than Mel personally felt like he needed to. “Crush injury in trauma two, EMS four minutes out.” Prompting Mel to look at Robby, mouth open while she tried to find the words for of course, I’ll be right there.

Simultaneously: Santos, mouth agape in glee and grabbing Mel roughly by the shoulder. “Oh shit,” she said, squeezing Mel’s shoulder hard. “Mel, your stoner’s on the move!” Prompting Mel to look over her shoulder and see that Mr. Nowak had indeed made himself ambulatory and was now shuffling away from his bed and toward some unknown but undoubtedly undesirable destination.

And simultaneously again: McKay and Mohan, hands fixed on either side of a gurney holding an intubated woman whose skin had gone clammy and pale. “Out of the way!” McKay snapped, her long bangs gone askew as she moved. Prompting Mel to jerk her head in their direction and feint toward stutter-stepping herself out of their way.

Consequently: Mel, caught physically and mentally among multiple inputs that presented themselves as equally urgent. To take them sequentially would be entirely too logical, would require her brain to parse a level of information that evidently was beyond her at that very moment.

What Mel managed was this: a half-step forward, almost a skip, the product of get out of the way and get moving and catch your damn renegade patient all at once. Then a pivot to the side, like a boat trying to course correct mid-stream.

Two small movements was all it took. Mel slammed face forward into Robby’s shoulder, making the both of them reel back in surprise. Knocked off her balance, she reached back with a free to find something to stabilize herself with and managed to put her hand on what she hoped to any available god was Mohan’s stomach. She recoiled once more and somehow clutched the railing on the side of the gurney—but her momentum made the gurney shift forward with an abrupt jerk.

Then she heard a crunch.

“Wow,” McKay said with a low whistle.

Mel blinked, then blinked again. Superficially, everything seemed to be in order; she’d lost her balance, not fallen completely on her ass. But something was acutely wrong, even if she couldn’t put her finger on it yet.

And then it hit her. She put two grasping hands up against her face and found that her glasses were no longer there. The world around her had gone from a sharply delineated mixture of people, places, and things to a mess of blurry figures moving in incomprehensible patterns. She couldn’t see.

“Surgery’s waiting on us,” Mohan said. Mel watched a couple of shapes move, including one distinctly horizontal one that could only be the gurney. “Sorry about your glasses, Mel.”

Whatever dam had been holding back Mel’s dread burst in an instant. She couldn’t see them, but she could picture what her glasses looked like, shattered polycarbonate all pathetic on the department floor.

“Robby stepped on them first,” Santos said with a barely contained laugh. “They were toast even before the gurney. Mel, how did you do that? That was like some kind of fucking—Rube Goldberg machine.”

“That,” Robby said, “was an accident.”

Mel hated not being able to see; she couldn’t work out what his expressions meant half of the time anyway, but being without them left her feeling even more socially impaired than usual.

“EMS will be here any minute. We’ve got to get moving,” Robby said, and at least she could hear something like regret in his voice. “Mel, if you’ve got a spare, now’s the time to go get them. Go home if you need to—take all the time you need. Santos, Javadi, let’s go.”

Someone gave her a conciliatory pat on the arm, and then the three remaining figures shuffled out of her field of vision.

“Wait,” she said, though she was pretty sure there was nobody left to hear her. “What about my patient?”

It turned out that Mr. Nowak hadn’t made it very far before being dragged back to his bed by his own girlfriend; he was there now, receiving fluids under Perlah’s careful eye. Mel would have to take their word for it. This was all per Dana, who had found her panic-stricken in the middle of the floor and guided her back to the nurses’ station like Mel was a toddler who had bolted for the nearest shiny object. It wasn’t an apt metaphor, not even in Mel’s own mind. She couldn’t have seen a shiny object if she’d tried.

“You want me to call you a cab, kiddo?” Dana asked.

“Oh, no,” Mel said, wrapping her arms around herself anxiously. “I think I have a spare pair in my locker. I’ll—I’ll go check.”

“You need some help getting there?”

“Muscle memory!” Mel called out as she backed away. “I’ll try not to bump into anything!”

Mel certainly had a spare pair of glasses; she dutifully used her vision benefits every year to get an insurance-covered new pair whether she needed them or not. She probably had at least five pairs squirreled away various places in the little apartment she shared with Becca. The question was whether or not she had ever gotten it together enough to bring a spare pair to stash away at work.

There were certain things, like cleaning out the freezer or sorting through her ever-growing stack of mail, that didn’t fall into the categories of doing her job or taking care of Becca or staying alive and instead fell into an ever-growing grouping of things that Mel would get to eventually. Sometimes she really did get to them; that was the only thing letting her hope that she’d find another pair of glasses waiting for her in her locker, gloriously intact and more than ready to let her get back to work.

She walked to the locker hall with her hands outstretched in front of her to create a buffer zone, one where her hands would meet any obstacles before her face did. Mel was near-sighted to the extreme, but her vision wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t use context clues to help her navigate; she could identify general scrub colors, door outlines, the concept of a pane of glass.

It was gratifying to see just how many of those hazy obstacles jumped out of her way without her having to say a word. It was easier to focus on that than the mortification of knowing that other people had seen her walking around. She was a blind zombie stomping through the emergency department in search of corrective lenses instead of brains.

It was to her benefit that she always reached her locker by counting eight down from the near end of the row. She let the tip of her fingers run across the surface of each of the doors and counted the divots that marked the demarcations between each one before she reached what she sincerely hoped was her locker. When her locker code worked as intended and opened the door dutifully for her to examine the contents, Mel sighed with more relief than she would have expected. Her standards for good luck had diminished somewhere along with her vision.

But good luck only lasted for so long. Each item she pulled out from her locker and held close to her face for examination—several pairs of socks, an uncomfortable bra, a nearly-flattened Clif Bar—took her closer and closer to accepting that there indeed was not a pair of glasses waiting for her to save this situation from turning into an entire ordeal.

She was going to have to get Dana to call her a cab, and she was going to have to stumble out to the front of the hospital and get herself into said cab, and there would undoubtedly be witnesses, and then this was going to become something that people writ large were aware of, just another known thing about Mel King that positioned her as odd, or confusing, or comical, something to joke about in that way she knew was mostly good-natured but never seemed to feel that way, and if she were really unlucky then someone might hide her glasses just to tease her, and—

“Oh, there you are. I was looking for you. Clif Bar break already?”

Mel froze the moment she heard his voice; she didn’t want to turn around to face Dr. Langdon, but there was no way to avoid him without drawing attention to her current predicament. In any other circumstance, she’d have been more than happy to hear him approach; she liked Langdon, felt warm toward him in a way that she tried to avoid analyzing and had been very surprised to realize was, in some respect, more or less reciprocated.

But if looking at his too-handsome face with his too-blue eyes was sometimes unnerving, sometimes made her breath catch in her throat and her heart flutter, then being in his vicinity and not being able to see him at all should have been an improvement, shouldn’t it? One less inscrutable input to try to analyze and anticipate should have been a relief. The logic was there, but the feelings didn’t follow suit. Mel found that she quite liked seeing Dr. Langdon’s face, really. His dissolution in her eyes into an amorphous blob felt like more of a loss than the rest of it put together, even if it was entirely temporary and within her control—and that was just plain terrifying.

She’d wasted too much time prevaricating. The shape that was Langdon had finally come close enough that a few of his features, like his dark hair and the length of his arms, started to come into focus once more. He stopped before they focused any further.

“You’re not wearing your glasses,” Langdon said. Something about the tone of his voice made Mel decide that it was a good thing after all that she couldn’t see him.

“Dr. Robby stepped on them,” she said. “And then they got run over by a gurney.”

“I hope not intentionally,” he said, and if he wasn’t audibly laughing at her, Mel knew that he had to be grinning at her expense, hidden beyond her field of vision.

Something about the indignity of it all threatened to bring tears to her eyes, tears that would normally never come—and if they didn’t, they’d be well enough hidden behind plastic. Now they were horrifyingly on the verge of making themselves plain for anyone’s eye to see but hers. “I thought I had a spare pair of glasses in my locker, but I don’t,” she said, and was proud of how level her voice was. “And now I have to go home in the middle of my shift to get them.”

His blurry figure shifted in a way she couldn’t quite interpret; she thought maybe his hands were coming up, though for what purpose she didn’t know. “Not a light-hearted predicament. Got it,” he said, and Mel felt herself relax fractionally. “Did I ever tell you about the time a patient squeezed massage oil into my eyes?”

Mel winced in sympathy. “Massage oil?”

“You heard me right.” This was what he sounded like when there was a laugh waiting in his voice. “And it was perfumed with god-knows-what, too. Her kid had been drinking it and she brought him in all fucked up and puking. She refused to tell us what was in it—said it was a ‘proprietary formula.’ I tried to take the bottle so we could at least get some labs run and see what she’d put in there.”

“Oh, that’s never a good move.”

“I was still a med student. So, you know, even stupider than I am now.”

She never knew what to do with Langdon’s self-deprecation except elide it to the best of her ability. “Did you ever find out what was in it?”

“Just oil and fragrance. Kid puked a few times and learned his lesson. There was a minute there where I felt like my contacts might fuse to my eyeballs, though.”

“I didn’t know you wear contacts.” Something about it inexplicably buoyed her spirits, like she and Langdon were bound together by a hidden, mutual inability to perceive the world around them.

“I’m the blind leading the blind. Couldn’t see half a foot in front of my face without them.”

He paused, and Mel waited for him to continue, or more likely to decide that he was done with whatever this conversation was and was ready to go back to work, where more interesting things waited for him. “Hey,” he said instead. “How are you getting home?”

“I was going to take a cab,” she said with a grimace. Navigating the bus system without her glasses was beyond even her, but she was loath to drop money on anything else even in an emergency. Her budget had slim room for error.

“I’m going to drive you,” Langdon said, and his tone was so decisive that it took Mel aback.

“Don’t you have to…work?” she said carefully.

“You see how slow it is in here,” he said, and his willingness to admit it out loud made Mel like him all the more, made her tick another tally mark in the careful spot within her marked kindred spirits. “Robby’ll be overjoyed. He keeps telling me I need to get back to being a team player.”

“Thank you,” Mel said, with more emphasis than most people would think was warranted. “I really, really didn’t want to have to call a cab.”

“I know,” he said, and she knew then that he had to be smiling. “Let’s get out of here.”

He grabbed her shoulder, not ungently, then grabbed the other one in kind. She could have walked along in front of him without his assistance, but his hands were warm through her shirt, and she knew without knowing that he’d guide her well and true.

Chapter Text

His hands dropped from her shoulders as soon as they were back near the nurses’ station and the mess of people that Mel could not see but was nevertheless sure accompanied it. This made sense. Langdon was enough taller than her that it must have been uncomfortable to shuffle along behind her with truncated steps. He had to have figured that Mel knew her way around well enough to be left to her own devices. She could still feel his presence hovering behind her; she made sure to take extra long steps to stay out of his way.

“Where’s Robby?” Langdon asked.

Mel opened her mouth to respond with her best guess but was intercepted, because of course Langdon wasn’t talking to her.

“Crush injury in trauma two,” Dana said. Her voice was distinctive enough that Mel could pick her out of a mass of auditory cues sans context; she filed this information away in case it might prove a useful compliment for later. “Why?”

“Mel needs a ride back to her place to get her glasses.” Langdon clapped one of his hands back down on Mel’s shoulder; with no warning, it made her jump. She could feel her cheeks flushing pink when he pulled his hand back just as abruptly. “I hear Robby got pretty violent with the old ones. Can you tell him we’ll be right back?”

Dana made a noise that might have been a snort, and the two of them fell silent for long enough that Mel started to worry that she’d missed some visual cue that they’d forgotten she couldn’t see. She took a stutter step forward then stopped; though she didn’t currently have any glasses on her face available to break, she wasn’t eager to recreate the circumstances that had led to the last pair’s demise. She settled for staring at the disembodied white haze of the ceiling until somebody told her what her next steps were.

“I can still call you a cab, you know,” Dana said. “I’m more than capable of pickpocketing Robby if you need cash.”

Most logically, Dana was joking, but Mel couldn’t dispel the image of grasping a twenty dollar bill in her hand while Robby looked down his nose with murderous intent. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t mind riding with Dr. Langdon. I mean, as long as he doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Langdon said firmly. “After you, Dr. King.”

She managed to avoid obstacles throughout the entire path to the front door of the building. At some point one of his hands came up to rest between her shoulder blades, above where her backpack bounced against her back; Mel only noticed its presence when Langdon felt the need to steer her in one particular direction. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. The great hulking concrete form of the parking structure had mostly existed in the periphery of her awareness of PTMC’s campus. The way to the bus stop lay in the exact opposite direction.

“I’ve never been in here before,” Mel admitted. She could have made it up the building’s stairwells with only the handrail to guide her, but it seemed that Langdon was worried about her missing a step and falling backwards into him where he trailed a step behind her.

“Really?” he said. “Not even when it’s raining? Or snowing? I think I’d kill myself waiting for the bus in winter.”

“I’m very handy with an umbrella.” Even on the sunniest of days, driving induced a particular kind of stress that Mel had never been adept at dealing with. The speeding drivers, the pedestrians hopping out at odd moments, the byzantine networks of one way streets and no parking signs and GPS directions screaming make a u-turn—this was not the domain of Mel King. Life on the bus was comfortingly out of her control. “Mostly I’ve just gotten used to it. I haven’t owned a car since medical school.”

“That might be the bravest thing I’ve ever heard from a Pittsburgh resident.”

Mel was about to start up the next flight of stairs; he wordlessly stopped her with just a press of his fingers against her back and steered her toward the blurry rows of what Mel knew had to be cars. She tried very hard to focus on each of their shapes.

“It’s not that bad.” She could feel herself standing on the precipice of digging a hole she couldn’t quite estimate the size or purpose of. “Becca gets car sick, so we only looked at apartments where we could walk to her day center. And it’s just a couple extra stops to the grocery store, and only one transfer away from work.”

“Eminently practical. I should have known.”

She nodded, but somewhere the words left her. The sounds of each of their steps echoed on the concrete through the empty parking structure.

There was no need to go into what would have followed from there: that that was the full extent of what Mel King did with her time. Work, Becca, sleep, rinse and repeat. It was the sort of thing that she knew was objectively embarrassing, that she had lived in Pittsburgh for over a year and failed to cultivate any sort of meaningful existence outside of that paradigm. She could name every cross street on her route between home and work, but she still needed to carefully study the map on her phone whenever she veered outside of her regular routine—which was rarely.

It wasn’t something she usually felt self-conscious about; it had been her pattern since she was twenty years old, since her parents had died and school and Becca became two halves of her life with need for careful balance and little room to fill in any of the rest. Before Pittsburgh had been Baltimore and before that had been Charlottesville; the locations were different, but the routine was eerily the same, a never-ending parade of too much to do and too little time.

And Mel liked her life, liked her evenings spent building meticulously themed Spotify playlists, laughing with Becca at unrealistic budgets on House Hunters International, falling asleep to Youtube videos about natural hot springs and far-flung mountain ranges she’d never travel to see—but rarely did she offer up such a life for scrutiny from anyone, let alone someone like Langdon, who Mel liked and admired, who’d lived a life interesting enough to have a wife and lose a wife and develop any number of other meaningful contradictions in between.

Eventually Langdon stopped at what looked to be some kind of silver sedan; even if she’d had her glasses, Mel couldn’t have made an assessment much more sophisticated than that. A car was a car. She was struck with the anxious hope that he wasn’t a car guy, that she hadn’t offended him with her disinterest in cars as even a matter of practicality.

“I should have warned you.” He pulled open the passenger side door, which strangely made Mel want to blush. “My car is a pigsty. Might even be considered a biohazard. If you feel any rogue Cheerios crunching under your feet, just know to blame my children, not me.”

At work, he only ever mentioned his children obliquely; usually it was little more than a furtive look at their faces on his lock screen, just another part of his life that he’d severed from work since everything with Robby. It was almost touching to think of the two of them throwing cereal in the back seat.

“I don’t mind,” she said solemnly. She hastily pulled the seatbelt down and locked it into place over herself just in case he felt like she was expecting him to do it for her. “It’ll prepare you for the state of my apartment.”

“I’m glad to know I’m in good company.”

It took her a second to focus her eyes on the glowing rectangle that was coming abruptly towards her face; she gingerly took what ended up being his phone from his hands, careful not to brush her fingers up against his—why that mattered, she didn’t know, but it felt like an oddly important boundary that she should be careful not to overstep—and brought it nearly to her nose to see what he wanted her to look at. He had pulled up Google Maps. Of course. He didn’t know where she lived, because why would he? This was the first time they’d spent any time together outside of the four walls of the emergency department, and they weren’t even out of the hospital yet.

As she typed her address into the search bar, she could feel, rather than see, his eyes on her. “You really are near-sighted,” he said, and she made the decision to be flattered by the wonder in his voice. “I can’t believe Robby stomped on your glasses and left you to fend for yourself.”

“I ran into him.” She liked Robby, who was vaguely terrifying but in a sort of avuncular way that she’d gotten used to; she felt no need to blame him for her own clumsiness. “And it wasn’t really a stomp. More of a stumble. He lost his balance when I bumped into him. And he was on his way to a patient. There wasn’t really a lot of time.”

Langdon had nothing to say to that. Soon he was tapping his keycard to let them out of the garage, and Mel, feeling embarrassed for uncertain reasons, settled in to watch the hazy shapes of downtown Pittsburgh flit past her window and off into the distance. Something Top 40 was murmuring along on the radio at a low volume, and Mel’s left knee bounced where it crossed over the other. It was only a twenty minute ride or so back to her apartment; she hoped it didn’t feel too extensive, that Langdon wasn’t regretting his decision to take her home.

“I can’t remember the last time I came down this way,” he said suddenly.

“Oh,” Mel said, unsure of what the sociable response to that should be. “I hope it’s not—confusing?”

“The day Pittsburgh urban planning defeats me is the day I roll over and die once and for all,” he said. Mel supposed that that was meant to be an assertion of strength rather than a statement of fact. “I just mean—sometimes I feel like the only places I ever go are the hospital and NA meetings. Four times a week and they take up my whole damn night. And then when it’s my nights with the kids? There’s not a lot of time for anything else.”

Mel straightened in her seat, trying not to look too eager, because it wasn’t exactly eager that she was feeling. More curious in a way that she’d tried not to allow herself to be. If Langdon kept references to his children oblique, then any mention of what had taken him from work for those many long months was so rare as to be nearly unheard of. Mel knew why he’d been gone, of course; the rumor mill even made its way to her for some things, and more to the point, Robby had taken each of them aside and talked about Langdon’s new rules and warning signs before he’d come back to work. The contours were there, but none of the shading had been filled in; Mel didn’t even entirely know what it was he’d been caught using, though a couple of muttered comments from Santos had given her a few ideas. He’d left the same day she’d met him, and in a way she was still looking for a way to tell him that she’d liked him then just as much as she liked him now.

“Are the meetings helpful?” she ventured, picking at the hairband wrapped around her wrist so that the elastic sprang back against her skin and grounded her.

He was quiet for so long that she was about to apologize, to trip all over herself for crossing boundaries in that way she never seemed to stop doing. “It’s good to have a routine. And the organizers are nice people, for the most part.”

Mel nodded, not daring to push things any further than she already had.

“There’s a lot of Jesus talk,” he said, voice turning sour. “They don’t say Jesus—it’s all ‘higher power’ this, ‘spiritual journey’ that, but, you know, the Jesus of it all is always hovering around the edges.” She could see the shape of him shift in his seat. “More power to anyone who can get something out of that, obviously. I’m not—I don’t have anything against people who do believe in that stuff. I’d probably be a lot better off if I did. But it’s not for me.”

“It’s not for me either,” Mel said quickly. “We were Unitarian growing up, but only sort of. And there was a lot more talk about, you know, Thoreau or—or Jane Goodall or whoever than anything from the Bible.”

“So you feel me,” he said, and Mel hoped that she’d helped him to relax. “It’s just all a little much sometimes. And it’s the same people over and over again, dealing with the same shit over and over again, so you get sick of the sob stories. My own included.” He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. He was nearly as jittery as Mel was. “I find myself getting judgmental, or feeling better than them, because at least I never robbed my grandmother or drove the wrong way down the interstate. But then I remember that at least most of them are there by choice, you know? Like they actually wanted to change their lives, get better, whatever. I’m only there so I don’t lose my medical license. And then it all starts to feel a bit pointless, you know. Like I’m kicking the can down the line.”

Mel was not a person that most people regarded as a confidant. There was something about her, some ineffable quality that evidently made them veer away and keep things surface level. For a long time, the reality of it had made her ache and twisted her into circles of loneliness, especially when sometimes it felt like she made a confidant of everyone she’d ever met. It was hard to manage her own impulse to overshare even when the hardline boundaries of others made the chasm between them feel all the wider. She’d felt the chasm between her and Langdon, same as she’d felt it with anyone, but in that moment it was a little smaller than before.

“I guess I’ve been saving up that rant for awhile.” They were stopped at a red light; Langdon was looking out the window on his side, and in Mel’s vision he became nothing but the dark shading of his hair. “That was probably too much, huh?”

“Not at all!” Once again, too eager by half, only this time too eager to be heard the way she felt like she’d heard him. “I was just thinking that you shouldn’t sell yourself short. I think one day you’ll look back at this moment in time and you’ll realize that you were a lot stronger than you gave yourself credit for.” She faltered, looking down at her hands that she could not see. “Or that’s how I would feel, I guess. Or that’s how I feel right now. Something like that. I don’t know, maybe that was weird. I’m sorry. I’m going to stop talking now.”

She forced herself to stop on a basic mechanical level. Mouth shut, teeth clenched together. No sound would escape, no matter how strong the instinct was to ramble and try to clarify herself. Langdon didn’t seem to have the same problem even remotely. Mel focused on the way the canvas of her backpack felt where it rested against her arm: rough and scratchy, familiar, distinctly physical and free from all the constraints and pitfalls of verbal communication.

“You’re a very kind person,” he said finally. “Did you know that?”

“I try to be. I mean, I want to be. But you never know. So—thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.”

There was the chasm again. It almost felt like something she might be able to reach across.

Mel’s apartment was on the bottom floor of an old red brick building with white trim and and a sprawling sycamore tree in the front yard. She couldn’t remember the last time she and Becca had had any kind of visitor, and she almost never thought about either the apartment or the building as a whole from an aesthetic perspective. As they pulled up to the parking lot out back by the alley, it occurred to her that maybe she should have put a bit more thought into things.

“You’re welcome to stay in the car if you want,” she said, pulling off her seatbelt before he’d even turned off the car. “It shouldn’t take me more than a minute to find my spare glasses.”

Langdon’s seatbelt clicked and slid back behind him in turn. “What, and miss the chance to see the inner workings of Mel King’s lair?” he said. “I’ll stay behind if you really don’t want me to, but before you get antsy about cleaning up for company, just remember that you’ve been sitting in pulverized snack dust for the last half an hour.”

She would have taken up any other co-worker on the offer. The thought of letting in Robby or Collins or even McKay, who’d once walked around for half a shift with more than one piece of spinach caught in her ponytail, made Mel’s blood more or less run cold. Was Langdon different? Maybe not, but at that moment he felt something like it. Or maybe Mel was just feeling emboldened by her inability to see. “Okay,” she said. “But no snarky comments, please. I’m not an interior decorator.”

“And how lucky we are that you aren’t.”

Having him standing there behind her at her front door made her far more nervous than it had any reason to. It took her a minute to find her keys within their usual pocket inside of her backpack, and for a horrifying moment she thought she may have left them back in her locker at work, that she was going to have to ask Langdon to turn around and take her back again. When the palm of her hand found the cool metal of her keyring, the feeling of relief was nearly dizzying. There was only so much she could impose on one person, especially because she had the sneaking suspicion that Langdon would have cheerfully driven her back, would have insisted on doing it no matter how much she protested.

She couldn’t afford much, not on a resident’s salary, and so the apartment wasn’t much: two modest bedrooms, a shared bathroom, and a living room with what could generously be described as a kitchen. It was hers, though, hers and Becca’s. Even with Langdon there, coming home felt like something serene, like retreating into a place where all the rules and boundaries were not only known but designated by Mel herself, exactly to her liking.

She took a couple short steps into the hallway before she stopped, angling her body toward Langdon even if the low light made him look even less corporeal than he’d looked at the hospital or in the car. “Um,” she said. “Can I offer you a glass of water?”

“Go ahead and get your glasses,” he said. “I won’t make you play hostess until you can see again.”

He didn’t need to tell her twice. Mel opened her bedroom door only as much as she needed to be able to slip inside, and when the door clicked shut behind her, she sat down on the edge of her bed next to the bedside table where she was almost but not entirely certain her spare glasses resided. Holding her breath for no reason at all, she pulled open the drawer and pushed her eye mask, a couple of empty bottles of Ibuprofen, and a paperback fantasy novel she’d given up on 200 pages in until she felt the hard shell of a glasses case buried beneath it all.

The world slid back into focus. The new pair felt a little different on her face than the old ones had, but when Mel swiveled her head around experimentally they didn’t slip crooked along her ears or slide too far down her nose. She was good as new; she was back to baseline. The headache that had been threatening to develop from the eye strain slipped away just as easily as it had come on.

She walked out of her bedroom beaming. It felt like when she’d managed a finicky lumbar puncture, or when her hunch about a patient having neurosyphilis had improbably turned out to be correct: she wanted to show it to Langdon, to make him bear witness even if the only thing she’d actually accomplished was successfully opening a drawer.

He wasn’t still hovering by the front door, which was what she would have done if she’d been in the same situation. Mel realized with a flip in her stomach that he was standing near the boarded up fireplace and had pulled down one of the framed photos that sat above it. It was unnerving to see him in focus once again, like she’d let herself forget what he looked like and now had to come to terms with the reality that he was just as handsome as she’d remembered him to be.

He looked up when he saw her approach. “There’s the Mel we know and love.”

The word love made her stomach flip even harder, though her logical self knew that it was just a figure of speech, something he’d said with little thought or meaning.

“I like that the glasses are a lifelong choice.” He waggled the photograph in her direction. “It’s very cute. Very Mel. Though I have to say, two braids? That threw me for a loop. It took me an entire extra second to figure out which one was you.”

Mel felt very faint; she felt like she understood why there used to be a thing called a fainting couch. There was nothing she could say to that that wouldn’t be mostly incoherent, so she opted to look down at the photo that Langdon held in his hands, though she already knew which one it had to be.

It had been just the four of them, her parents and Becca and Mel, aged eight years old. A sunny day. A picnic blanket. Overpriced ice cream cones on the National Mall with the Washington Monument severe in the background, tourists milling on pebbled sidewalks around the edges. They’d gone to the Air and Space Museum. Becca had cried when she couldn’t touch the Spirit of St. Louis but calmed down when she saw the lunar modules and space suits. Mel got a sunburn on her nose. She’d smiled so hard her cheeks had hurt. Her dad loved his old film camera. He’d asked a passing young woman to take a photograph, but carefully, and she had.

Mel didn’t know at what point the photo had passed into her hands, but somehow she was holding it, not Langdon. She didn’t dare to look up at him; it was safer to keep looking down at what had been her family. “My mom always put my hair in two French braids,” she said, running her thumb over the corner of the frame. “Every morning, even when I was old enough to do it myself. It was our bit of time together. When she got sick, I’d go sit down on the floor next to her bed so she could do it without having to get up.”

“How long have they been gone?” he said. He was close without touching; she could feel bits of heat emanating off his body, could smell something that seemed like the faintest remnants of aftershave.

“Oh.” To her horror, there was a lump in her throat, and it was evident in her voice. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to collapse into him or run right out the front door, ceding her apartment to the embarrassment of this moment forever. “A long time now.”

Her eyes started to blur. Crying was much worse than having her glasses destroyed. There was nobody to blame in this situation except for herself. And worse to cry for no reason, in front of Langdon, though his presence had disappeared from her side. Not emotional enough and too emotional by turns; she had a way of scaring people off, and she always had, even when she was the little girl too happy in the photograph.

Something warm touched her arm. It was Langdon, warm and dry. He was pressing something scratchy into her hand, something she couldn’t even look at because she was too focused on his face, on the barest sensation of skin on skin.

“It’s a paper towel,” he said apologetically. “I couldn’t find your tissues.”

“I don’t think I have any tissues.” Her heart beating wildly and erratically, entirely too fast, a new arrhythmia she hadn’t known was there.

“That would explain it,” he said.

She stood there unmoving, willing herself to lift her hand up and dry her eyes like he wanted to. But his hand was still on her wrist, and she wasn’t ready to pull it away yet, or else she wasn’t sure that she could.

“Your glasses are going to fog up.” He made the decision for the both of them: his hand left her wrist, and Mel was sheepish, embarrassed, could feel her face turning red that he was witnessing her profound inability to function.

But then he was touching her again, only this time his hand was on her face. Mel went perfectly still, like he was a skittish animal who might run off at the slightest of movements, though she felt perfectly capable of bolting on her own accord. His fingers slipped under the arm of her glasses and pulled them forward until they had come off of her face entirely. She went to wipe her face but he intercepted her, caught her hand in his and pulled the paper towel from her grasp to gently dab under her eyes.

Mel knew her face was burning. It didn’t matter that her glasses were no longer there; he was so close to her that she could see every inch of his face, the shape of his lips and the dark curve of his eyelashes.

“There.” Just as gently as he had pulled them off, he pushed the glasses right back onto her face. He stepped back, still in focus. There was the faintest hint of a matching flush on his own cheeks. Mel was mildly amazed that she was still looking at him at all.

She couldn’t quantify exactly what had just happened, only that it had been strange and that she thought she liked it. That was even stranger. She needed to say something; it was her turn to continue the conversation. None of the conversations she’d had before had given her the adequate language for what was supposed to come next. “Would you like a glass of water?” Mel blurted out.

He paused for a very long time. Mel had a way of making people need to do that. She tried to force her cheeks back to their normal color by sheer force of will.

“Do I seem especially thirsty?” he said.

“Well, no. But you said you’d wait to make me play hostess until I had my glasses back. And I have them back now. So I wanted to be sure.”

He ran a hand down his face. When he pulled it away, he laughed and shook his head. “I guess I did say that,” he said.

“We have Diet Coke, too,” Mel said. “Or—would you like some kefir? Though that’s more of a breakfast drink.”

“I’ve learned so much about you today,” he said, threatening to undo all the progress Mel had made in making her blush go down. “But I think I’ll have to take a rain check.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Only so Robby doesn’t have a hissy fit about us being gone too long,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself knowing that he’s waiting back at work to breathe down our necks. And I’d like to enjoy myself next time I’m here. I’d love to sample your Diet Coke collection.”

It wasn’t much of a collection. There was Diet Coke, and that was more or less it. She was about to tell him that, but it occurred to her that he may have been joking. Then it occurred to her that he was talking about coming back here, coming back to her apartment, again, like that was a thing that they might do. “You’d like to come back again?” she said, just to be sure.

“If you’ll have me,” he said.

“I would,” she said. She wanted to ask him if he was sure, just one more time, just in case, but previous experience told her that that wasn’t usually well received. Though she had a feeling if anyone would prove her differently, it would be him. “I mean, yes. You can come over anytime.”

That was too far, too bold, but he didn’t seem to know it. “I’m going to hold you to that,” he said. “In the meantime, is there anything else you want to grab here before you leave? Backup pair in case Robby steps on these too?”

It wasn’t a bad idea. Now that she could see again, fishing around in her room for another old pair only took her a matter of seconds. She placed them carefully in the bottom of her backpack, then went to meet Frank by the front door, feeling oddly light, oddly giddy, like she could see and not see all at once.

He was leaning against the front door with his keys in his hands. “I had a thought,” he said.

“What kind of thought?”

“Well,” he said. “We need to go back to work. No question about that.”

Mel nodded. This was the exact same thought that he’d already had before, but it seemed impolite to point that out.

“But there are a lot of ways we could get back. I don’t know about you, but I like taking a different route to and from. I was thinking maybe we could take the scenic route. It might take a little bit longer. Maybe even twice as long. Would you mind that?”

Somewhere around the time she’d lost her glasses, Mel’s life had turned completely surreal. There were so many things she was going to have to tell Becca later. “I wouldn’t mind,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind at all.”