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Dennis feels it in the tips of his fingers.
He feels it in the shudder of his own breath, feels it in the salty dampness gathering at the corners of his eyes, and feels it in the dull, kneeling ache that’s carved itself into his knees over God knows how long. He feels it when he takes a step forward, and just as sharply when he takes a hesitant step back—feels it when he holds still against the cold air and when he lies awake long past decency, staring at a ceiling that has never once offered him anything back.
It’s everywhere he goes and everywhere he refuses to go; it lingers in the empty spaces he keeps trying to fill, and in the crowded ones he escapes as soon as they start pressing in on him. It seeps into all the places he wishes he could seal off, and Dennis, for all his stubbornness, knows he’s long become defenseless to it.
There’s always that involuntary clench in his jaw whenever he pretends he doesn’t feel Robby’s presence somewhere behind him—an invisible pull that tightens his spine like someone deliberately tugging a puppet string. There’s the practiced refusal to meet Robby’s eyes when he asks a simple question about a patient, because Dennis is terrified that if he looks up, something inside him will give way. And then there’s that familiar heat at his lash line again, materializing without his permission, when another shift ends and he trudges back to Trinity’s apartment, his legs dragging behind him as if gravity has singled him out, and his hands shoved deep in his pockets as if he could hold himself together by that force alone.
The wanting sits in him like an old bruise—it’s been sitting there for a while now. It’s deep and tender, and it makes him wince if he so much as brushes against it, blooming outward with the lightest of touches; never too sharp, and never sudden. It’s a slow-rising warmth that borders on pain, and it makes Dennis feel as though he’s standing too close to a fire he refuses to acknowledge, even as the heat keeps itching at his skin, reddening him from the inside out.
Some days, the bruise shapeshifts into a shadow—one that clings to every surface, muting the colors he wants so desperately to hold onto. It follows him constantly, stretching and shrinking, changing shape with every shift of light, yet always recognizable, always unmistakably the same. He hates it most on days like that—when it makes his skin crawl and his throat pinch tight, when the intensity of it feels so much bigger than him, so overwhelming and so inescapable it might as well be stitched into the sole of his being.
And sure—there are also those rare mornings when sunrise gets to sting at his eyes, and his knees don’t grind like rusted hinges the moment he stands; mornings when he tells himself, with that same old pathetic desperation he mistakes for resolve, that maybe someday he’ll outrun this whole mess in his head. That if he just keeps pushing it down, keeps fooling himself that it’s just stress or admiration or whatever harmless label he can stomach, it’ll twist itself back into something manageable. Something ignorable.
But reality never negotiates—his knees ache most days—and the feeling—God, that awful, destructive but addictive feeling—grows like a tide tugging at his ankles, relentless and patient in a way that unnerves him. It wears him down quietly, grain by grain, the way the ocean sands a cliff into something unrecognizable long before it realizes what’s happening
Dennis knows better than to wade deeper; knows he’ll disappear under the surface if he does, knows that if he doesn’t stop himself soon, the water will take him whole with no warning, inevitably.
He wades in anyway—because at this point, that feeling might be the only thing he has left that’s entirely his.
He hates how easily it rises in him—hates the speed of it, the helplessness of it, the way a scrap of Robby’s voice half-heard from across the ER can make something inside him buckle inward like a paper structure soaked through by rain. Hates how a gentle correction, a touch barely more than a guiding brush to move him out of a gurney’s path, leaves him feeling as though his ribs have become glass—thin and fragile, ready to splinter under the warmth of it. And hates how the strong grip of an encouraging hand, steady and grounding, burns through him like it’s been branded onto his skin.
Dennis pretends it leaves an imprint where it laid, and pretends he can feel the shape of Robby’s palm long after the moment ends, even though he hates himself for it.
He hates that he can’t control any of it, and hates, with an uglier honesty, that there’s a part of him that doesn’t even want to.
Sometimes Dennis thinks the wanting must live beneath his skin, threaded through him like veins or nerves—essential to his existence. Because how else could a body react so quickly, so involuntarily, so completely out of proportion to the stimulus? How else could a single syllable spoken in Robby’s voice—just his name, or an offhand question—rearrange the entire architecture of Dennis’s insides as though they were made of nothing sturdier than wet sand?
He hates that it feels automatic—that his body has learned a language his mind refuses to speak, to acknowledge as anything more than a fluke of stress and proximity. He hates the way a fleeting moment of attention, something Robby likely forgets the second it’s over, hits Dennis like weather—unaviodable and uncontrollable, something he can only endure until it passes on its own.
Except it never really passes; it only settles down. It leaves sediments behind, fine and suffocating, so that when the feeling rises again—and it always rises again—it churns everything up in him, clouding him from the inside out until he’s half-convinced he’s breathing silt.
It makes Dennis feel ridiculous, more than anything. Humiliated in a way that feels childish and raw, ashamed of being seen like this in the open. He hardly recognizes himself these days—he’s well aware this isn’t how he’s supposed to be. Wanting shouldn’t hollow him out; shouldn’t make him feel too big for his body and too small for the world in the very same breath.
Yet that’s exactly what it does.
Some nights, Dennis swears the feeling expands inside him like a balloon pressed against the fragile bones of his ribcage, ready to split him open if he breathes too deeply. Other nights, it shrinks him to the size of a thought he can barely hold, leaving him feeling like nothing but a collection of trembling parts held together loosely by the thin thread of Robby’s voice lingering in his memory. The inconsistency makes him dizzy, most of all—this constant swaying between too much and not enough, like a pendulum trapped in a frantic, uneven loop.
Dennis used to think he knew himself. Maybe he didn’t always like what he found between the folds of his brain, but at least it was something familiar, at least it was predictable. But this? This volatile, unreasonable yearning for someone he can’t have, shouldn’t want, and barely knows outside the hospital’s walls? This only reshapes him into a stranger—someone he can’t map, can’t reason with, and can’t settle back into.
He wonders, sometimes—on the worst of nights, or in the rare, reckless moments when he lets his thoughts stray too close to the truth—if Robby can see any of it. If he’s ever noticed the way Dennis’s shoulders stiffen when he stands too close, or how he fumbles a pen when his name is spoken in that tone that’s too easy to memorize. If Robby hears the forced steadiness in his voice when he answers a question he could recite in his sleep; and if he notices the way Dennis lingers just a fraction longer after receiving praise, as though holding the moment in his hands and trying to carve it into himself before it evaporates.
Dennis prays he doesn’t, and he fears he does. Both possibilities terrify him, each in a different, restless way.
If Robby doesn’t notice, then Dennis is alone—terminally and unavoidably alone—with a feeling so consuming it chokes him. Alone with something that hollows him out day after day, shift after shift, with no witness, no release, and no outlet. It means he is invisible in the one direction he aches not to be; means the wanting is a closed circuit, self-devouring, alive only within him and destined to die in him too.
But if Robby does notice—if he’s caught even a flicker of the storm burning behind Dennis’s eyes, then—
Dennis can’t even begin to stomach the idea. The thought alone makes him feel like the floor has tilted under his feet, like the air has gone thin, and like exposure is a blade he’s already stepping onto. He can’t go there—he won’t survive it if he does.
And so he does the only thing possible—he lives with it—because what else is there to do?
He carries the feeling the way some people carry old injuries: calmly, yet resignedly, like a pain that has settled into the bone and refuses to be coaxed out. He folds it into the rhythm of his days until it feels like another organ his body depends on, something he can’t remove without risking collapse. He learns to move around it, breathe through it, and swallow past it, even as it scrapes at him from the inside.
He lives with it because he has to, because letting it surface for too long would undo him in ways he doesn’t yet know how to recover from. And he tells himself—over and over, in the delicate, trembling parts of himself he never lets anyone see—that it’s better this way. Better to be hollowed quietly than exposed loudly. Better to ache in silence than to let the world see the shape of what he wants.
He prays to every God that Robby never sees through him—never catches the tremor in his voice, never recognizes the way Dennis flinches at kindness, and never pieces together the truth sitting like a live wire beneath his skin. He prays Robby keeps seeing him the way he always has: competent, steady, and unremarkable in all the safest ways.
Because if Robby can’t see it, Dennis can pretend for a little longer. He can keep functioning, keep standing, and keep breathing around the bruise that keeps expanding inside him.
Even if it’s going to eat through him—slowly, but relentlessly—until the wanting isn’t just what fills him, but what he is.