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Heather sometimes takes the chance to watch Robby, when he’s attending a procedure or is absorbed in charting and won’t notice her looking.
He almost always wears a hoodie over his scrubs or a long-sleeved shirt under them - purposely hiding the tattoos, probably - but every once in a while, if he’s been gowned up or if someone bleeds or barfs on him, she’ll catch him in his scrub top with his biceps tattoos just visible beneath the sleeves.
Seeing them always makes her feel…tender about him.
The tats are so pretentious and dramatic, really, but they suggest the younger man he’d been: earnest, filled with purpose, alive to portent. Memento mori, amor fati. He has maybe earned the pretentious drama of the tattoos now, or maybe getting them at 22 or however old he’d been was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, but: after hurricanes and humanitarian zones and pandemics and gun violence…few people are more aware of their inescapable death and the myriad ways it could occur than 54-year-old Robby, and few people operate with as much of a sense of calling as he does in the ED, though she suspects his expensive, highly-qualified therapist is helping him, of late, to see that some of what could seem like fate is actually just making the same choices over and over again.
Heather is aware of this for herself, too. She can make different choices if she wants a different outcome. Robby is in therapy, yes, and Robby is medicated (she suspects,) and his mood and behaviour have been significantly steadier even on a rough shift, but that has been true for maybe…five? months, and he has been repressed and avoidant for far longer than that. The unbelievably obvious, best choice is to take a job, post-residency, where Robby is not her ex-in-her-every-day-business, her BOSS, her superior, her anything at all. She does not have to glimpse his tattoos and feel a soft little pang, even in passing, ever again.
It's a choice she’ll have to make in the very near future: she has applied to Presby and she has applied to other (kind of flashy, well-regarded) hospitals in cities nearby and afar (Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, U-M Health in Ann Arbor, UW Medical Centre in Seattle). She has strong recommendations (including Robby’s, which…she knows she’s earned, but...it still feels a little hinky, given that they've had various parts of each other's bodies inside various parts of their own) and a reasonably extensive, well-received publishing record, so she is likely to be accepted to at least one, if not all, of these places. She is willing to move – Pittsburgh has become home, but only because she put in some effort to make it so; she could do it again somewhere else, she knows she could.
She has also applied at PTMC. But. The option to say no here is just as real as the option to say yes to anywhere else, to say yes to somewhere that will finally get Robby out of her daily orbit.
It has been hard to fully douse the little torch she still carries for him, but (as she continuously tells herself) it’s almost certainly not because he is actually all that special but because he’s still always around, with a jokey, whispered aside just for her, with a fresh pair of gloves fired her way from behind his back with a cocky little smirk, but also, eyes locked on her after a tough case, with genuine concern: “hey, you okay?”
She knows he still carries a torch, too. He has backed off on the jealous, territorial stuff – the pointed comments about any halfway-attractive man who speaks to her - and he’s mostly stopped needlessly contradicting her, riling her up just so that she’ll argue with him, which used to be one of his go-to moves for her attention. Possibly that’s his fancy therapist’s input, too.
But: he still gazes at her, and he seems more or less unconcerned when she catches him at it. Still rushes to her side if she calls for help with a case, still gives her the full force of his attention when he gets there. The other day he leaned against her back and reached up over her head to adjust a lamp while she conducted an initial auscultation on a 45-year-old man who had collapsed at work and she had, for the briefest of moments, caught a hint of his deodorant and the slightly sweaty smell it was failing to mask as they neared the end of the shift. It was nothing, the kind of thing that happened all the time, that happened with all of her coworkers a thousand times a day, but even so: she froze, hopefully imperceptibly, jolted into her memories of that smell on his scrubs after a long shift, on his skin when they’d stripped to share a shower, on his broad back when she’d pressed up against it at night, hot under the duvet.
He had stepped back immediately, said “sorry, Collins” and turned to ask Jesse to send off a rainbow. She had looked at the clean line of Robby’s haircut along the back of his neck and the chain of his Magen David just below and allowed herself one extra second to feel everything about his physical presence before calling out her findings: normal lung sounds but irregular heart rhythm, possible atrial fibrillation.
Hers is maybe not such a little torch, however much she tries to discipline and disavow it.
Sometimes she wants him to just make a move. Why won’t he, what’s he waiting for, why be prissy about my residency now, does he really not want to? If he made a move, though, she’d have to decide if she actually wanted to try again instead of just fantasize about it, when trying had broken her heart the first time. Broken her heart, and in a way that had been strange and difficult to withstand, because working with him every day meant that on top of being constantly confronted by the physical presence to which she was still so drawn, she was constantly reminded of how good he was, despite everything. There was something kind and decent at his core that drove him and she could always see it, even at his worst, even when he was snippy and stubborn and arrogant and infuriating.
She can parse the various extraordinary pressures that had been at play, when they fell apart, but those pressures haven’t exactly gone away, and she and Robby are still the same people, whatever they’ve weathered since and whatever revelations they’ve each had while pursuing better mental health. And they’re such grown adults, too – it’s embarrassing to be dancing around each other like this, at their ages. Especially his, she thinks, a little maliciously, but then: she is forty years old and has wasted a great deal of time on men at this point, so she should know better too.
Most of the time she knows that she should make a move, and it should be away from PTMC to a new hospital where she can start fresh as an Attending and never get involved with a coworker ever again.
And yet: his bare arms, his grandiose tattoos. Memento mori. Amor fati.