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Why she had convinced herself to try and get laid tonight, Samira was unsure.
Logistically speaking there were real, actual reasons she could point towards; namely, the year long dry spell that led to desperation so severe, she’d ended up renting a tried and true harlequin novel from the local library and getting embarrassingly flustered at the mere opening description of the rugged cowboy love interest.
Twenty pages into the novel and with no smut to be seen, Samira had already gotten herself off.
So, yes- she needed to get laid. Bad.
Thus, she had gussied herself up for a night on the town. Digging out the heels she reserved for weddings, and the universally revered ‘makes my boobs look good’ shirt, she’d tossed a red lip into her bag and went out to meet with Henry. When she’d realized the severity of her situation some three weeks prior, she’d redownloaded Hinge. Henry was handsome enough, matched with her, and didn’t seem like a serial killer. Truthfully, he had all the personality of cardboard. And, most ideal of all? His profile had been set to “looking for short term, maybe more” which meant he was most definitely not looking for anything more.
On January 1st, 2025, Samira had vowed this would be the year she learned to relax. It was the year she’d put an end to the miserable feeling of missing out on the last of her twenties. A good old-fashioned hookup was what normal, not-Samira folks did. Under the guise of resolutions being realized (and still embarrassed at how horny she’d been to touch herself to nothing more than the description of a fictional man’s hands fixing a saddle) she made her way to the Mediterranean restaurant Henry had suggested.
It was lucky Samira had looked at the menu the moment he’d sent it and decided on precisely what to order, considering the restaurant’s clear bid to appear fancier resulted in the dimmest lighting she’d had the misfortune of dining in. Had she known, she wouldn’t have bothered stuffing herself into this shirt and putting up with a too-expensive pushup bra. It was theatre. Pure performance art. Her clothes, the costume, and the hour and a half of Henry talking at her (with the occasional question about if she had siblings or what she did for work, that only served to turn the conversation back to the topic of his own life) was the script.
By the time the bill arrived, Samira was confident Henry’s very successful entrepreneur business was a pyramid scheme- and not even one where he was close to approaching the top rung- and she’d only had to put up with two ‘jokes’ about her paying for the meal with what he deemed her “fancy doctor salary”. It was better than what she’d been expecting and when they ended up in his apartment conveniently right across the street, she was at least getting some sort of physical release. His touch, while amateur, provided the bare minimum amount of sexual release she had been yearning for. Samira had even approached orgasm at one point towards the very end of it all, thanks to her own handiwork being thrown into the mix.
Of course, that’s when Henry had tapped out and left herself to muster up a solo finish with her own fingers. Too exhausted, he’d said. That was some of the best sex he’d ever had, he’d said. He had to get up early tomorrow and she might just want to leave now, for her sake, he said.
Feeling utterly robbed and much stupider for convincing herself the night would’ve gone any other way, she stumbled wine-drunk out the building in all her hair tangled, smudged makeup glory. In all her horny frustration, hot tears stung what was left of the eyeliner on her waterline.
God, she’d been stupid to try this.
Because the universe enjoyed making a mockery of her, and it was about the only way the night (early morning now) could get any worse, she nearly crashed onto the rain-slick sidewalk after descending the final step of his building’s front stoop.
“Oh, great. Of course!” Samira seethed. Planting her right heel on the pavement, she lifted her left leg. The heel of her shoe had snapped.
It was raining, she’d been kicked out of a bad hookup who couldn’t even finish the job, and now she’d have to find a new pair of ‘date’ high heels. Pulling out her phone to concede to clear defeat and swiping at the droplet-ridden screen, she called her roommate, Jacqueline. The moisture on her phone screen made it all much bigger of an ordeal than it had to be but she managed, eventually, to punch in J-A-C and click on her roommate’s contact as it popped up.At the voicemail’s signature beep, Samira spoke, hoping the increasingly loud patter of rain and rumbling thunder in the background would mask her sniffles.
“Hey, Jacqueline. Sorry to bug you, but I went on that date I told you about, and… I need to get home, and I really don’t want to wait for an Uber, because the app’s not loading and my battery’s low and, honestly, if I have to deal with a weird Uber driver on top of the…” She paused. Then, admitting she had no reason to lie to herself, said, “hookup, that I just had? I think I’m actually going to break down. I’m across from Mezzo, the Greek place. Sorry to bug you, just… let me know.”
Samira stuffed her phone into her purse to keep it from getting wet. Everything was closed, and there were no awnings in sight. The more the rain soaked her clothes and hair, and surely led to makeup dripping down her splotchy face, the more the wine’s effects began to turn unpleasantly in her stomach.
Headlights pulled onto the street and right up to her. She didn’t recognize the car, which meant tonight would end with her getting kidnapped. Wonderful. Before she could complete the halfhearted attempt to fish her keys from her purse for self defense, the door opened.
Her previous thought couldn’t have been further from reality. There was a way for the night to get worse and it stood in front of her, in the shape of one Dr. Jack Abbot, Attending Emergency Physician.
Becoming aware all over again of the boob-shirt that, like her skirt, was soaked to her skin, and the makeup she was sure was running, Samira stammered in pure mortification. “Dr. Abbot, I am- I am so sorry, I-“
“Sorry? Don’t gotta be sorry. Here.” The jacket Abbot had been taking off before stepping fully out the car was handed to her. Scanning the building before settling his hazel eyes on her, intense and unexpectedly apologetic, he extended a hand to hold the shoes she’d discarded.
“You alright? Guy didn’t do anything?”
“No! No, God no, nothing like that. He… He didn’t do anything. Even when I asked.” Samira muttered the last part to herself and allowed him to usher her to the passenger side. “God, Abbot, I’m so sorry I accidentally-“
“Mohan, just get in the car.”
“This is so unprofessional, and embarrassing, and I’m sorry I put you in this position-” The door closed before she finished her sentence. By the time he rounded the car and got into the driver seat she was curled into herself in pure shame, draped in his coat and wracked with guilt for disturbing him well past midnight.
The car’s engine rumbled, the heat had been ticked up to match the goosebumps on her skin, and, yet, they did not move.
“Guy really didn’t do anything to you?”
A small shake of her head. “No.” Her voice was uncharacteristically small, the self-assured act she maintained for survival at work now gone. Abbot sucked in a breath, shifting the car into gear.
“Tell me where.”
“You know Sunrise Alley?”
“Got it. You don’t… need anything?” Jack, for all the swagger he might have during daring procedures, was a desperately awkward man at heart. She’d known this, though it had never been quite as clear as it was in this moment. “We can stop-”
“Just need to get home and forget this happened.” Samira took note of the bourbon and vanilla scent that lingered on the coat. The coat he had so stupidly given her, without question, and now sat soaked to the bone as a result of his doing. He hadn’t mentioned it; really, she wasn’t sure he even noticed. No part of her could push from her mind the thought of her next shift. Abbot was not a gossip; at least, not about something of this nature. That much she felt confident about.
However, this was a man she’d come to admire the past several years of her life, as a mentor and (the wine allowed her to admit it this once) as something far more personal. He understood more than anyone in the halls of the PTMC- and certainly outside of them- what made her tick. In fact, he seemed to be cut from the same cloth. The idea that he would now and forever associate her with this night, with the showiest clothes she owned soaked to her skin after an obvious botched hookup, felt like a fatal undoing of the image she’d so carefully crafted. An image Samira had hoped he, most of all, would view as the truth.
Her intelligence, her hard work, had all been flushed down the drain in this one fateful night of fuck-ups, and the universe had decided Jack should be the one to bear witness.
“Doctor Abbot,” His eyes snapped from where he’d been watching her stare out the window to now face forward at the road. Samira hadn’t been quick enough to catch it.
“I’m not… I don’t do this a lot.”
“Mohan-”
“Hookups, I don’t- I don’t want you thinking-”
“Mohan, it’s none of my-”
“I don’t want you to think less of me!” She raised her voice to cut him off. In its wake there was a silence, and a head shake from the man behind the wheel.
“Okay, not that it’s any of my business, or anyone’s,” Jack’s voice was even and slow once he spoke, carefully thinking over each syllable. “But- even if you did this every night- I couldn’t think less of you.”
A bitter laugh bubbled out of an increasingly sober Samira. “If I did this every night? What, do you mean the hookup, or the calling you afterwards part?”
“Both. Either. You’re a smart, beautiful young woman, Mohan. What you do with your free time doesn’t concern me as long as you’re safe.” Even in the face of her shockingly bold hypothetical- and it had been a hypothetical, despite his immediate answer- his words reeked of sincerity. The heater, and not his words whatsoever, returned some of the warmth to her body. “And as long as you keep calling, I’ll keep showing up.”
Samira no longer pretended to be doing anything besides staring at him from across the center console. With good reason- he had that look again. The same look she noticed he wore after their first several shifts together. The same exact shine in his eye that the pigtail catheter procedure had produced. There it was again, not a foot away from her, on the face of the man she’d been in love with for months, silhouetted by the tangerine lamplight outside her apartment building.
The seatbelt retracted into itself after Samira unbuckled. She turned to fully face Abbot, making no move to shed the coat just yet.
“Were you asleep when I called?”
“No. Who’s asleep at midnight?”
“Normal people.” Samira cracked a grin. “Old people.”
“Woah, woah- this coming from the woman who sent me a paper on age discrimination in medicine?” Before he’d even finished she was laughing over his words. Abbot fought the juvenile pride that streaked through his chest and settled for a small smile.
“You should go inside, dry off so you don’t get sick.”
“Yeah- yeah, I’m a doctor.”
“Are you? You know, I think I remember that about you now.” Abbot teased. He opened his door and produced an umbrella that had been tucked into the compartment near his seat. In a grand gesture it opened, though he never used it to cover himself while returning to her door.
Samira joined him under the umbrella, the broken pair of shoes in hand. Here- barefoot (a daring gesture on the streets of Pittsburgh), makeup running down her still rain-dampened face and smudged round her once ruby red lips, curls tangled and clothes a mess- she looked impossibly more beautiful than she ever had to Jack.
In the depth of her brown eyes he found brilliance he’d only known once before. Washed in the lamplight, gazing up at him seconds after she’d unlocked her door and had the option to step inside, she reflected all the beauty that poets had written of and artists had carved into marble for centuries on end; the type of beauty Abbot deemed a myth, while simultaneously craving proof of its existence.
The proof was here on the stoop of an apartment building in Pennsylvania, inches below his face, with a lopsided grin. It was the way in which her fingers so daintily waved after she stepped inside. It was the fact Samira reopened the door moments later without checking to see if Abbot was waiting there for her to pull him inside- and that, of course, he was.