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He must’ve looked about as lost and confused as he felt, since Dana caught his wrist with a soft smile on her face. “She called in sick,” Dana said, like she’d been waiting for him to ask.
Frank blinked a couple of times. He wanted to check his phone, see if he’d missed anything. “When?”
“This morning. Fever and some sinus thing.”
“Oh.” He turned back to the computer, clicked in and out of the document he’d opened, typed something that wasn’t what he’d meant to type. “She didn’t- yeah. Okay.”
Dana folded her arms. “You good, Dr. Langdon?” She was smiling at him in that way she reserved for moments when she knew something before he was ready to say it out loud.
He shrugged, plastered on a smile. “Just didn’t know,” he said, which was an objectively stupid answer, but she let it go with a raised brow and a noncommittal noise.
“Let me know if you need anything.”
Frank nodded. Dana walked away.
He checked his phone. No text from Mel.
It made sense for her not to text when she was sick. She also didn’t text every day, not unless there was something to say. Still, the absence of her name on his lock screen sat heavy in his chest in a way that felt disproportionate to the situation at hand.
Which wasn’t a situation at all.
He charted a patient, then another. And another. When lunch rolled around, he decided to eat his sandwich outside on the curb as he scrolled on his phone. He smoked a cigarette, then another when Dana came and joined him for her five minutes.
Frank caught himself hovering by the computer he’s mentally filed as the one Mel frequently uses, eyes going from the seat and down the hall without quite meaning to. He told himself it’s habit. The hours passed measured in vitals, questions, reassurances. Frank listened to lungs, pressed on abdomens, reset two broken fingers while getting cussed out by the owner of the fingers.
By the time his shift wound down, the decision had already settled into him with the same bold certainty as everything else he did. He didn’t label it as concern or yearning or anything so indulgent.
He signed out cleanly, handed things off properly. Told Dana to get some sleep, which earned him a middle finger and a wink. Outside, the air was sharp. Frank drove with the radio off, thinking idly about things that didn’t matter - whether he had milk at home, whether he remembered to cancel the car wash he'd booked for tomorrow - until he pulled into the grocery store parking lot and realized he’s already reaching for a basket.
Stopping at the grocery store, he grabbed two soups because he wasn’t sure which she might want, three kinds of tea, electrolyte packets, tissues, honey, cough drops, painkillers, and a thermometer.
He looked down at his basket halfway through and muttered, “this is insane,” then added a pack of popsicles just in case.
By the time he reaches her building, his nerves had settled into something calmer. He had to buzz her a couple of times before her faint, groggy voice eventually crackled through the speaker.
“... yeah?”
“It’s me,” he said, then added, “Frank. From work.” And he could hear her smile as she replied with a “come up,” before the lock clicked open.
The elevator was slow, and her door was partially open when he reached it. Frank entered, shut the door behind him, and shrugged off his shoes before fully entering. The space smelled warm, like sleep. He made a mental note to open a window at some point.
Mel was standing by the kitchen on the right, arms crossed and wearing a grey t-shirt and sweatpants. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, her nose red and her cheeks looked warm to the touch.
“... Hi,” she said, eventually, because Frank had just stood there in silence, he realized. “Frank from work,” she added with a tired grin.
“I brought supplies.” Holding up the grocery bag, he dumped its contents on the kitchen island.
Mel’s face crumpled into something of a mix of relief and mortification. “You didn’t have to do all that.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s a lot of- are those popsicles?” Frank would have to be some sort of monster to not crack a smile at the light that entered Mel’s eyes. “I’m very disgusting right now,” she added before touching anything.
“Yeah,” he said. “You look awful.”
She elbowed him gently, not much force behind the movement, with a smile on her face. She sniffled, a long, wet thing, and coughed into the crook of her arm.
“You can kick me out, by the way,” Frank offered after putting away the popsicles and the soup. He spared a look across the room and saw the warfare that was her living room: blankets askew, tissues overflowing from the trash bin she’d dragged to the couch, a half-eaten piece of toast on a plate, a hoodie draped over the couch.
Mel didn’t respond, so he grabbed the thermometer and held it out. “Stick it under your tongue.”
She rolled her eyes, and said, “I own a thermometer, Frank.”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“I only have one because of the kids. I wasn’t aware it came with the degree and job. Now, tongue, please.”
Mel rolled her eyes again, which felt very unlike her. It made Frank smile a little. She obeyed like a tired child, and after a moment, the thermometer beeped; he checked it. “Almost 102. Not dangerous, but definitely shitty.”
Mel groaned. The sound did something to Frank, which he decided to push down, since she looked about ready to fall over. He grabbed one of the bar chairs and dragged it out for her. She sat down on it.
“How’s your head?” He asked.
The corner of Mel’s mouth quirked, but she answered, “feels like there’s… too much inside it. Just pressure. Everwhere.”
“Sinuses,” Frank replied quietly. “You’re completely congested.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Frank smiled at her tone. Smiled even more when she looked a little sorry for it, too. “Have you taken anything?”
“No, I feel asleep. Then I woke up and felt worse, so I didn’t want to move.” She rubbed at her face.
“Where’s Becca?” he asked. “Shouldn’t she be here policing your hydration?”
Mel smiled a little. “She’s at the facility,” she said, grabbing some tissues and blowing her nose with truly impressive force. “She’s been texting me every hour.”
Frank smiled, and felt almost guilty for it. “Want me to call her and tell her you’re still alive and breathing?”
There was a beat of silence, and Frank was suddenly nervous he’d overstepped. Then Mel just nodded, mumbling a thank you.
“Want me to heat up some food? I brought soup.” He figured she could hear the sudden nerves in his voice. He wasn’t sure where they’d come from, but they were there.
Mel shook her head. “I need a shower,” she said miserably. “I feel… gross. Like, damp and sticky. And overheated.”
Frank considered her for a second. “I’ll stay out here. If you need me, shout.” He’d said it mostly as a joke, to be overly concerned or something, but she just nodded.
Mel managed to get up and shuffle to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Frank heard the shower turn on, then off, then on again.
While she was off, hopefully not drowning, he tidied the living room: picking up tissues, folding blankets. She’d tried to make tea at some point, he saw by the state of the kitchen, and seemed to have abandoned it mid-steep. Frank dealt with that too.
He called Becca, too.
“Frank the doctor,” she said as a way of opening the conversation. “Are you with Mel?”
“I am,” he said. “She’s alright. She wanted me to call you and let you know.”
Becca was quiet for a second, then said, “does she need to go to the hospital?”
“No, not at all. She’s got a fever and sinus congestion. She’s miserable, but she’s fine.”
“Good. She hates going to the hospital.”
Frank laughed a little. “That’s quite ironic.”
“Make sure she drinks water. And tea. And make her watch a movie on the couch. She likes that.”
“Noted,” Frank replied. “Anything else?”
Becca seemed to think for a moment. There was quite a lot of noise in the background.
“Becca, are you having a party?” Frank asked, a grin on his face.
“Shh! Do not tell Mel. She’ll be very jealous.”
Frank silenced his laugh. “Oh, I’ll make sure not to say a word.”
“It’s a rave,” Becca added matter of fact, which Frank couldn’t help but laugh at, but he covered it with a cough. “Oh, are you also sick?”
Frank shook his head, then said, “no, no. Just something in my throat. You go back to your party- your rave. I’ll let Mel know you said hello.”
“Alright, Frank.” And then she hung up.
Frank smiled down at his phone for a moment, then locked it and placed it on the counter. The shower was still going, but he couldn’t hear much movement from the room. He walked down the hall, then hoped he wasn’t overstepping any boundaries, and knocked lightly on the bathroom door.
“Mel? You alright?”
A pause. Then, her stuffy, exhausted voice said, “define alright.”
“Not drowning?”
“I’m… somewhat horizontal.”
“Well, that’s new.”
“Shut up,” she said, tiredly, without any heat behind it.
He sighed and tried again. “Do you want help?”
Another pause, longer.
“... yeah,” she said finally. “You can come in.”
The bathroom was fogged over. Steam clung to the mirror and walls, and Mel was sitting in the bathtub instead of standing under the shower. Her arms were wrapped around her knees in complete and utter defeat. She was leaning against the side of the tub, head resting on the cool tiles.
She looked back over her shoulder and up at him like she expected judgment. “Standing was bad,” she said. “Sitting was also bad. Everything sucks.
“Okay,” he said simply. “Let’s find an option that doesn’t suck.”
She huffed, sniffled, pressed her wrist under her nose. “I still need to wash my hair. I tried and got dizzy, so I sat down and… now I’m here.”
Frank rolled up his sleeves and knelt beside the tub. He grabbed the shower head, making sure the hose didn’t twist and get in the way. He let it run over his hand, adjusting the temperature until it was warm. “Lean back a little. And look up, please.”
Mel obeyed.
At first he just let the water slide over the back of her head. He gathered her blonde hair down her back, careful not to get anything in her face.
“This okay?” he asked.
“... yeah,” she breathed. “Actually- yeah.”
He rinsed her hair in slow passes. He saw her closing her eyes, the tension in her shoulders easing little by little.
“Thank you for buying all that stuff for me,” Mel said, eventually.
Frank let out a small “oh,”, hands pausing in her hair. “It’s nothing.”
It went quiet in the small bathroom, but Frank didn’t mind it. It was nice just listening to nothing after his day at work. It’d been busy, like it always was. If he’d just gone home, he’d have sat on his couch and scrolled on his phone, watching videos of things he didn’t care about until it was time for him to go to sleep.
Instead he was washing Mel’s hair, in her bathroom, with her in the tub in front of him.
“This is weird, isn’t it?” She asked, like she really wasn’t sure.
“Well,” Frank replied after a moment, bringing himself back. “You’re sick and your hair needs washing. I don’t know how else you expect this to work.”
She sniffled again, but stayed quiet.
Frank turned off the water. He grabbed her shampoo and worked his fingers into her scalp with it. “I’ll just need to work this in for a second,” he said. “Tell me if it’s too much pressure.” It smelled of strawberries.
“Okay,” she replied. She tipped her head back enough to let him each, breathing through her mouth when her nose clogged again.
Frank massages the shampoo into her scalp, slow circles from front to back, careful not to pull. He watched her hands, how they were still loosely on her knees, picking at the skin of her fingers. He was very aware of how she was letting him do this, letting him help her.
He frowned at himself when he noticed the way the angle of her neck made his chest do something dumb and unnecessary. He was a doctor, and also a man who lived in the territory where caution was vernacular. He told himself a dozen practical things: watch for fainting, make sure she’s hydrated, don’t let imagination drift into places it does not fucking exist.
“You do this with your kids?” she asked, eyes half-open.
“Used to,” he said. “They’ve gotten too big by now, I guess.”
She hummed a reply, and he let the water run over her hair again, rinsing the suds out until her hair was silky again. When he turned off the water again, she sagged forward with a quiet groan.
“Let’s get you out,” he said.
“I can stand,” she said, though she didn’t sound all that convincing.
“I believe you. I would just like to reduce the chances of you adding to a fall statistic.”
She shot him a tired glare and reached for his hand. He pulled her up slowly, keeping a steady grip on her elbow.
Doing all of this - carefully slow and gentle movements, guiding her out of the slippery tub and onto the fluffy bathmat - without really looking at her… Frank felt like he was one wrong move from messing something up. Something he didn’t even know what was.
He kept his eyes on her face, on her hands, on her feet. He gave her the towel that was already hanging by the shower curtain and looked away when she let go of him to dry herself off.
Frank looked back when he felt her hand drift to his arm again, and she’d wrapped herself in the towel. Her hair stuck to her forehead, and he itched to brush it away.
Mel’s eyes drifted to the moisturizer on the counter.
“You need it?” he asked.
She made a face. “My skin will revolt if I don’t,” she said, which he found quite funny. But she said it with a sigh and the tired look came over her face again.
“Okay,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he felt, than he ever felt around her. “Sit.”
Mel eyed him for a brief moment, then sat on the closed toilet lid, still wrapped in the towel. He scooped a bit of lotion into his hands, warmed it, and nodded towards her. “Arms.”
“This is embarrassing,” she muttered.
He shrugged, and repeated, “arms.”
She lifted one. Frank knelt in front of her, worked the lotion into her skin with steady, sure motions, moving from her wrist to her shoulders. Then the other arm. The motion was businesslike but thoughtful: there was an economy to the way he moved - enough to do the work and not to overstay an invitation.
Her breathing slowed a little. He tried not to think about her eyes on him.
“You’re good at this,” she said quietly.
“Don’t flatter me,” he said, with a smile to let her know he was joking. He adjusted his position on the floor a little, then rubbed lotion onto her calves, her shins, the backs and fronts of her knees. He paused at her thighs, her hips.
“Skip or not?” he asked, low.
“Not,” she murmured.
So he didn’t.
He was surprised by how steady his hands were, wondered if she could feel how badly his insides were shaking. His hands were beneath the towel, and he was careful not to get too close to anything she might not be comfortable with him… touching.
He cringed a little, tried to keep it off his face.
The towel slipped a little, but she didn’t adjust it. Actually, she opened it fully and let it drop so that she was still just sitting on it. Frank let his eyes stay on her face, and he tried so desperately to read whatever was in her expression.
“Is this okay?” He asked, because he wanted to be certain.
She nodded, then said, “yes.”
He rubbed the lotion on her sides, onto her soft stomach and her warm chest. He wasn’t sure what the hell this situation was. He couldn’t really keep a single, coherent thought in his head for long enough to figure out what it meant. He could feel the edge of something else if he let his mind wander. He did not let his mind wander.
Frank’s hands stayed practical, the way a clinician’s do - the kind of touch that knows parts of the body and the best ways to approach them without inflicting thought. But human hands carry memory and heat and accident; they were not immune to the minor betrayals of wanting. He felt it - brief and bright, the stupid, undeniable tension that registers when a person you have quietly cared for, wanted, is within reach. He swallowed it, focused on the motion: the texture of lotion going from his palms into warm, soft skin. He thought about the nasal congestion, about techniques to avoid vasovagal responses, about the list of signs that would indicate worsening infection.
Mel breathed through it, and it was the feeling of small relief that someone else could do the small, intimate work of taking care of her for a moment.
A flash of memory slid in: her in the ambulance bay three shifts ago, pulling a field patient’s hand as Frank watched from the back, their glances crossing in a quiet agreement about how the world was going to be kept tidy for a minute. He’d left a packet of hair ties in her locket at Christmas, because she always complained about losing hers. She’d bought him lunch at one point when he looked like a man living off Red Bulls and chewing gum. Little debts stacked like plates.
The angle was a bit odd, but he managed to do her back as well. When he finished, he washed his hands and dried them off, not liking the feeling of lotion on his palms much. “Clothes?” He asked.
“I didn’t bring any.”
“I’ll grab you something.” He returned with a clean t-shirt and some shorts. He’d grabbed some underwear, too, placed it on top of the pile of clothes, and held it out to them.
“I can do it myself, Frank,” she said, a tad slowly.
“Can you?”
She stared at him, then sighed.
He knelt in front of her once again, helped her into the underwear. Her hands were on his shoulders as he slid them up her legs. She adjusted them a little as he grabbed the shorts next, then the t-shirt. He kept his eyes low, clinical in his focus, even though the rest of him hummed against daylight impulses that were inconvenient and private.
When she was dressed, he steadied her on her feet. “Food or bed? Or both?” He asked.
“Bed, please.” She let him guide her down the hall, then crawled into bed with a kind of graceful collapse, and practically melted into the mattress. Mel’s hand was on his as Frank sat down on the edge of the bed, and the world trimmed itself to the small friction of fingers against fingers. “You’re not leaving, right?” she asked.
“No.”
She nodded. “Thank you, Frank.” She fell asleep in under a minute.
Frank situated himself in the reading chair near the bed - he’d once noted that it made her room look like a hotel room, but Mel had insisted that it was the best seat in the apartment because of the view. Looking out across the dark late afternoon with the streetlamps glowing orange across busy streets, and then looking back at the bundle of blankets that was Mel sleeping, Frank was inclined to agree.
Some time later, Frank woke to the sound of Mel’s harsh cough. It racked her entire body. He sat up, groggy, hand on her shoulder. She’d twisted away from him, seemed to be stifling the sound into her pillow.
“You okay?” he asked in a murmur. “What do you need?”
“Uhm…” Her eyes were still closed. She grabbed a clean tissue and blew her nose forcefully. Frank thought he heard her mutter a gross under her breath. “Painkillers? My head is…”
He returned with a glass of water and medication, crouched beside her, and waited until she took them. “Slow sips,” he said.
Mel did as she was told, putting the glass on the nightstand and laid back against her pillow with a sigh. “Feels like my skull’s going to crack.”
Frank studied her face for a second, then said softly, “hold still.”
He touched his thumbs to her brow bone, right at the center of her face, massaging gently along her temples, then down her jer. All slow circles that seemed to ease some of the pressure. Her breathing steadied, and the lines across her forehead eased. Her eyes fluttered half-shut.
Her nose began running again, and she made a distressed noise. Frank grabbed a tissue, held it out. Mel took it and wiped her nose, somewhat mortified. He didn’t say anything. Just took the used tissue from her without looking, really, and set it aside.
He resumed the soft massage, working behind her ears, along her chooks. Her eyes slid closed fully this time.
“Thank you, Frank,” she mumbled, but he simply shushed her softly, letting his touch go feather light as she drifted off to sleep again.
They were not people who did grand declarations. Their language had instead been the accumulation of small, unremarked nudges: a packet of hair ties, a split cupcake, a text check-in followed by a midnight hand over a fevered brow. Things added up.
Mel woke with the edge of sleep in her throat and an unpleasant taste in her mouth that she badly wanted to rinse away. She blinked at the ceiling, saw Frank beside her in her favorite chair. The fever made things bright at the edges - a world calibrated to high color and low attention - and in that blur her mind handed her a small thought like contraband: of course he’d stayed. Of course he’d been there.
The idea was both an ordinary and a tremendous comfort.
By the time sunlight had a mind to be useful, Mel’s phone chimed with a text from Becca. There were emojis and talk of pancakes on delivery once the latter returned home from the facility. Frank packed up his bag, tucked the spare shirt into Mel’s laundry, and left a note on the counter that read, in his sharp, tilted handwriting: “Drink some water. Call if different.” It was the smallest sort of tenderness, written in the font of someone who didn’t quite know how else to go about this.