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“How the hell did you end up in this situation?”, Robby, always Robby, is the one to ask the logical question.
“I don’t know”, Abbot answers and if there was someone there, both by his tone and the way his shoulders fell defeated, they could tell he meant it. “It was supposed to be a joke, you know?”
There was a series of occasions that lead to Jack falling in love with Samira. He had always found her cute and an amazing doctor, which, he confesses, might have been the beginning of the problem because ever since then he had a bit of a crush on her –although he wouldn’t dignify the sentiment by stating out loud he was crushing on his coworker. But if Robby hadn’t been mildly injured in a motorcycle accident, that lead to him taking seven sick days, which lead to Jack being asked by Gloria to change from the night shift to the day shift just for those days, which lead to the bet. If it weren’t for all that, he’s positively sure he wouldn’t have fallen in love.
His day filling in for Robby started as his personal hell by having him waking up early, his body way too adjusted to the long night he worked to actually understand on the first hour what was happening, so he drowned the messed up sleeping schedule with caffeine before he even left home, forcing his mouth to stay closed for the time being because he doesn’t really want to be yawning in front of patients.
Jack is early for work, closer to 6am than it it to 7am, but he gets to talk to the rest of the night shift –Emery mocks him on her way to surgery, Parker tells him to hang on, John simply nods to reinforce Parker’s words, refusing to let go of the straw– and he walks to the nurses station to leave his backpack before changing from his street clothes to scrubs. Lena is already there, the night shift charge nurse looks at him with a smile on the corner of her mouth, her red hair a mess that tells him the shift has been less than calm.
“Seeing you arriving this hour is like seeing a giraffe outside of the savannah, hon”, she says, faking a shiver and he has to laugh. “Just unnatural”.
His laugh is cut short when he turns to go to the attending lounge and his eyes focus on a familiar figure. Lean figure, brown skin and pitch black hair in a high bun on top of her head, Samira is wearing scrubs and talking to a patient beside John, into her shift way earlier than she should be, the only resident to have arrived yet because the others have 40 minutes to get to the hospital without being late. He sees Jack staring, raising a brow in a silent inquiry he refuses to answer by looking to his left, only to be caught on his attempt to play nonchalantly by Lena, her glance going from Jack to the woman he had been staring at.
When he comes back from the bathroom in cargo pants and a black scrub top, Lena is talking to Samira about some patient in need of a new IV since she took it off the one she already had. Lena says she’ll find an available nurse to come by in the next minute. “Thank you so much, I’ll be with another patient in the meantime, but page me if Mrs. Johnson needs me?” Samira asks and Lena nods. She seems to notice Abbot there and waves at him. “Good morning, Dr. Abbot”.
“Morning, Dr. Mohan”, he says back, but she’s quickly walking away before he can even ask what she is doing here this early. This close he could see the undershirt she has under the scrub top, the light blue in contrast with the black.
“If you shift your neck a bit more you just might break it, Dr. Abbot”, Lena’s voice is teasing and just then he notices he had been following Samira walking away, his head moving towards the end of the E.R to watch her enter one of the procedure rooms, likely to be with the other patient she previously mentioned, and Jack has to clear his throat and blink before he finally looks back at Lena, who’s staring at him with an amused expression.
“I wasn’t–” he quickly cut shut on his bulshit lie because Lena laughed.
“Oh please, Dr. Abbot” she still calls him doctor no matter how many times he said she should just call him Jack. “By the way you look at that girl… You wouldn’t last a week flirting with Dr. Mohan”.
His eyes narrow. “Are you betting me this, Lena?”.
“You bet your ass I am, hon”. She looks so smug, so certain that he has to fight the urge to roll his eyes. He’s a man, he’s an adult, he is fairly certain he can flirt with one Dr. Mohan and not be a big deal after all. Worst case scenario she shuts him down and he loses some money.
“Fifty?” he asks regarding the amount of the bet.
“Make it one hundred, hon, and we’ll have a deal” she says.
“You’ve got yourself a deal then, Lena”.
What in seven hells am I even doing?, Abbot thinks. Samira is by the nurses station when he finishes the discharge papers of a patient. He can barely hear what she’s saying while talking to Parker in a casual tone, maybe something non work related because both women seem very relaxed to be actually talking about a patient, but he doesn’t bother trying to tune in and hear what she’s saying –maybe, he thinks, he should’ve been, at least then he could have an icebreaker to start a convo with her. It would be easier to start this idiotic flirting thingy while the rest of her shift mates aren’t in yet.
Parker walks away, but Samira stays, getting in front of one of the computers available to get into the charting side of their job as E.R doctors. When Abbot was doing his own residency, like Samira is now, his attending had said that it was of vital importance to take the time to stop the actual doctoring and write down everything that happened with your patient, from which meds had been given to what mood patient was in, just in case the person decided to take a punch against the doctor. His mentor used to say “if you didn’t chart it, it didn’t happen” and he took that seriously from his intern year to the current day. Samira, he thinks, seems to be taking it seriously as well, her face frowning as she concentrates while typing.
“Mohan”, he says, trying to imitate the way she pronounces her name instead of saying it in the wrong way, shifting the emphasis of the syllables. “You’ve got, er, very nice charting skills”.
She lifts her eyes from the screen to his face, looking somewhat surprised and somewhat pleased at the comment. Samira smiles at him as a thank you, her head nodding slowly and she goes back to typing attentively. He would like to be able to pull his eyes away from her, but he finds himself locked in analysing her movements: the way her shoulders move with each breath she takes, the shifting of her head as she tries to crack her neck. Even the way her slender fingers move across the keyboard, pausing for one or two seconds as she tries to remember or choose the right word, then she takes a bite on her bottom lip, only releasing once she starts typing again.
Abbot is taken from the trance only when Lena walks into the nurses station, making him realize he wasn’t being at all subtle about it, but the way she shakes her head makes him understand he did a terrible, terrible job, a weak attempt at flirting really –no wonder Samira didn’t even bother to actually answer, she just thought he was being a good supervisor.
“Dr. Mohan”, he says in a low voice as the rest of the team walk out of the patient’s room. She understands he wants to have a word and stays in, taking off her gloves while waiting for him to speak.
It had been a bad case, worse than one would need to see as early as 9am. The patient, a man with a pet snake, had suffered under the pressure of the python, his pet confusing him for lunch and getting into a hold onto his body, smashing the bones on both sides of his torso. The luck –for the E.R team, not the man– had been that the snake wasn’t attached anymore onto the body, EMTs being able to free the man from the hold still at the patient’s home. However they made that possible –Jack hadn’t had the time to ask– it wasn’t very much to the liking of the patient, who was being able to scream his lungs out about animal cruelty and suing the city.
Nor Jack, Yolanda or nurse Princess had been able to make the man calm down from his hysteric ranting and banting, which was making their job to actually try and figure out the extent of his injuries and decide the course of treatment pretty much impossible. Yolanda even suggested that they put the guy to sleep, which was responded immediately by screaming that he would sue each and everyone of them if that was the case, because he was an American citizen with the right of free speech.
It hadn't been until Samira entered the procedure room, ignoring the undressed guy and all his injuries, going up to the side of his head and presenting herself, making it a first for him hearing her voice higher than the normal. Up until that morning, Abbot had never actually heard Samira speaking an octave higher, not even with the less than ideal patients that every so often would grace them with their presence. But she was now, talking to the guy about her own pet –Clifford, just like the big red dog– and saying she did understand why he was so stressed, but needed to calm down and get the care he needed.
“Look, mister, we need to get x-rays of your chest, just to see if there's a rib puncturing your lung and you're not really feeling it because of adrenaline”, she had said, her voice coming down to a normal tone as the guy stopped being super combative and hearing her out. “I understand you're worried about…”, she made a pause for him to speak the name of the snake. Which was Julius Squeezer, in reference to Julius Caesar, and Abbot couldn't say it wasn't fitting given the situation the guy was now in. “Nice name. You need to get better to get home sooner rather than later and check on Julius”.
She wasn't being sarcastic, not being mean, and had actually thrived where two doctors and a nurse had previously failed. Even if it took a couple minutes, it was still better than the option of waiting down for him to get tired and actually be too bad in the aftermath of his injuries for them to be able to help. It was a team effort after that, but he would only really talk to Samira, looking at her with moony eyes that revealed really easily that he was under a case of doctor crush, ignoring everyone else in the room and only answering questions –pain level, any commodities, any previous surgeries– staring at Samira.
It was good that she came in when she did, because with the result of the x-rays they found that the puncture had been double sided, making it a high risk of pneumonia. The damage was vast enough for Abbot to recommend that they'd skip the chest tube and go straight into surgery. Yolanda, of course, had been more than happy to roll the patient from the E.R to the O.R.
“Dr. Mohan”, he repeats, “You handled this patient extraordinarily well”.
“Oh”, she sounds surprised, as if she had been waiting for a slap on the wrist instead of a compliment. “Oh, Dr. Abbot, thank you so much”.
“You have a dog?”, he can't help but ask. “Clifford?”
“Ehr, my childhood dog”, she says, sounding embarrassed. “He was more of a guard dog for the rest of the family, but for me it was my puppy”.
“Very nice”, he says and clears his throat. “Keep up the good work, doctor”.
“Thank you, doctor, I will”, Samira looks at him and smiles a bit before leaving the patient room to go to the next.
Jack walks into the hospital the next morning half an hour later than the previous day, not because he hadn’t woken up at the same exact time and left home at the exact same time, but because he chose to stop by one of those indie-small-gentrification-style coffee shops near PTMC, having to brave the line to grab a double espresso for himself and since he was there already picking one iced caramel latte, a drink he knows by working close with Shen almost every night for years on a roll. He picks one for Samira, figuring she’ll be at the hospital earlier –just like him– and he walks faster than he normally would, feeling the plastic edge of his prosthetic pressing against the skin, the cereal bar he keeps it on him in case he gets hungry before he can manage to escape for the rooftop, carrying both drinks on the cup-holder so it won’t burn his hand.
As expected, Samira is there already, he can only see her briefly since she’s with a patient and she has her stethoscope on ears as she moves with her examination after the auscultation is complete, getting the patient history and he has to keep on walking, he can simply stand in the middle of the E.R staring at the resident while she does her job, so he doesn’t. Instead, he stops by the nurses station, Lena’s eyes on him like a hawk, but he waits until she comes out of the patient room, the ceiling lights making her dark circles more evident, but she looks alert while biting on the end of her pen.
“Oh”, she says when she notices him leaning against the desk. “Good morning, Dr. Abbot”.
“Good morning”, he says. Abbot thinks of a hundred different ways to approach this –I bought you coffee seems too weird, can I offer you a coffee seems too formal and wanna a drink seems too casual–, he should’ve thought this through on his way in. “Grab yours”, he ends up choosing, regretting it, but it’s already out. He offers up the cup holder, both cups transparent letting her see the contents of each cup.
Jack definitely should’ve thought this though before because as it is she can really read the names on the cups, but Samira looks genuinely surprised as her hands go to pick the black espresso with a beaming smile. She looks up at him, her face is so mirthful and so pleased. “Thanks, but how did you know I like espresso?”, she says and he has to swallow before coming up with a lie because he didn’t really know that, not before this conversation.
“Lucky guess?”, he shrugs.
“I owe you one”, Samira says and leaves once she spots Dr. Shen heading towards the waiting room, maybe an emergency on chairs. Jack would’ve followed had he not been under the scrutinizing glance of Lena, her mouth tight on the corner as she bites back a comment, but he can pretty much read into her expression right away: he’s really bad at this flirtation thing.
When you work at a place that is filled with people at all times –patients, doctors, nurses, techs, cleaning team, maintenance team, administration, even a tiny room for a few lawyers– it can get a bit overwhelming. You’re never really alone, not even when you can catch a break to use the bathroom. Jack learned pretty quickly that he works better when he can get a few minutes for himself in the middle of the shift, instead of eating his dinner –and now for the rest of this week, his lunch– in the common area reserved for meals, he goes to the roof, just him, his phone and a big pair of headphones that can quiet down the noise of planes flying above and the traffic happening downstairs. Apart from Robby, who’s his friend and doesn’t work on the same shift to be able to interrupt him while he’s decompressing, no one else knows about it, or he thinks so, and he would’ve kept it that way.
But then there’s a drowning case coming, the helicopter arriving in five minutes and nurse Dana asks him if he’ll be the one handling this case and he says yes, saying he’ll need a resident and it is Samira, of course it is, the one to volunteer to go up to the helipad with him for the handoff. They get on the elevator and he notices the anxious way her foot keeps tapping the floor, but says nothing because before he can think of something, the doors open and the wind hits them on their faces, the helicopter approaching but not yet landed.
They work well together, Abbot thinks. The few times Samira had been on the night shift he hadn’t really been that close to see her work, it had been her intern year –at least it’s what he thinks– and she had been mostly working under the supervision of Shen, instead of him, who at the time was a resident at the night shift. But here, now, the way she talks to the EMTs to double-check the course of treatment they applied during their time with the patient and if there’s something they need to know, she’s proactive and takes charge of the situation, as one would expect a senior resident to.
It’s a long process, to resuscitate a drowning victim, from reheating the body with warm IV fluids and heated blankets, checking the heart every so often, making sure the potassium is within limits so you’re not wasting both doctors and nurses time and hospital resources in a person who has no chance at living. Jack watches Samira taking charge of the code and he’s there to help, but she knows where she stands and does her job, checking how many doses of epi had been given already and asking for a redo on the BMP, and she takes on the first round of CPR.
It is a weird thing to think, he knows it the moment the thought pops onto his mind, but it won’t leave. Jack doesn’t think he had ever seen someone looking so pretty doing CPR. Her forehead is sweaty and reflects the ceiling lights, her hair no longer the tight bun it was at the , beginning of the shift, there’s strands of hair falling messily around her cheeks, clinging to her face, she even has her mouth open as she counts how many beats per minute she’s doing, and Abbot doesn’t think he had ever seen someone looking so pretty doing CPR in spite of it all. Because of it all, maybe.
“There”, she says, pointing to the heart monitor where a faint line shows up.
“That’s nothing”, says Dr. Langdon who had joined them. He squints, trying to see what Samira is seeing. “The guy was cold and dead, now he’s warm and dead. Should I call time of death?”
They are both staring at Abbot. He waits a second, looking at the monitor for the reaction to show again and it is faint and it is almost imperceptible, but it is there, so he tells nurse Jesse to charge the defibrillator to 160 and they shock the patient for the first time. It takes three rounds of shock, each with a higher voltage than the previous, and he can tell Langdon pretty much wants out of this case, but Samira hangs on, she gives the patient a squeeze on his hand in between shocks –much like the guy’s heartbeat, it is almost imperceptible, had he not have been staring at her he would’ve missed it. And he lives, with a body temp of 96F, and with the need to be under observation for the next six hours, but he’s alive.
Langdon gives Samira a squeeze on the shoulder, congratulating her on the catch, before walking to get more warm fluids to keep the patient’s body temp stable, and Jack is about to do the same when he notices the way she’s hanging on the bed, supporting her weight –barely supporting anything, her body seems almost limp– and he doesn’t know what comes over him because he’s then supporting her, his arm around her waist and she doesn’t push him away, leaning her side against his. Her back is wet with sweat and she looks pale.
“Samira”, it’s not the time to worry about appropriate titles, at least that's what he tells himself. “Are you feeling like you’re gonna faint?”
“No”, her voice is weak. “Just… I think I have low blood sugar”.
Jack has to count on his head how many hours have passed since the official beginning of this shift and if she had been without anything to eat since the sole coffee, it would be a right differential that her blood sugar is running low. That along with the physical toll of administering CPR, it doesn’t really surprise him to see her like this. “Come with me”, he says.
He doesn’t know if she does go with him because she wants to or simply because she can’t refuse since Jack’s arm is what’s keeping her up, sustaining her weight as he takes on the walk to the elevator, ignoring the few alarmed looks some of the staff throw at his direction. He doesn’t mind it, not right now. The helipad is empty, as he likes, no surge of wind brought with the propellers of a helicopter, just the noise of a live city at noon at a distance –people coming and going to their lunch breaks and whatever else– and the fresh, almost cold air. And now Samira is here with him.
Abbot takes his phone from one pocket and a cereal bar –thank goodness he hadn’t eaten it so far–, hands the bar to her while placing an order on DoorDash, calling Marco right away so he be the one to make this delivery and he gets lost on the flow of it –talking on the phone, choosing the same restaurant as always and doubling the meal–, to the point when he finishes everything, pushes the phone on his pocket once more and turns around, Jack is surprised to see Samira sitting on the floor, her legs crisscrossed as she unwraps the cereal bar, parting in the middle and her hand is stretched up since he’s still standing, offering him half of it.
“You should probably eat the whole thing”, he says and he looks at the floor, Samira’d chose to use the parapet as if it’s the back of a chair, guarding her spine, and she rests her head against the concrete while looking at him. “I ordered for delivery for… us”; it’s a tiny, tiny pause, but he doesn’t know whether or not the two of them count as us.
Samira looks like she wants to say a million different things. “How much do I owe you?” is what she says, not exactly what he’d been expecting. Abbot waves his hand, dismissing it, and he can see the way she purses her lips, maybe swallowing her pride. “Thank you then”.
“You know”, he says, sitting beside her with a low grunt for the effort in accommodating his prosthetic in a comfortable position. “You did an amazing job with the drowned guy”.
“You and me both, Dr. Abbot”. She smiles and Jack has to make an effort not to frown. Samira looks better half cereal bar in and she takes a small bite before turning her head to him. “You don’t do this with the other residents”.
It’s both an affirmative and a question, the way she says it, she waits for his confirmation. Jack swallows his saliva and thinks about it. He likes Parker very much, she’s an amazing doctor, but have always been closer to Emery than ever was to him, and during Shen’s residency they had been buddies, even going out twice or thrice to grab a beer on a game day, even so it never had been more than that. He never excused himself from work to sit at lunchtime with another workmate, let alone on the place he considers to be his hidden spot. Samira is very much right, he doesn’t do this with the other residents, not even with other attendings –and the times Robby finds him here is for a couple, maybe five minutes, always standing, so he doesn’t think it counts, not in the way Samira means it.
And he doesn’t mind it, Jack finds, he doesn’t mind at all having her here with him, her calm demeanor and soft personality, it doesn’t disrupt the peace of the place, if anything it enhances it. He starts to regret the whole bet thing, because for God’s sake he knows Lena is right now: he won’t last a week. He’s been silent for a couple minutes, her question-not-question going unanswered because he simply doesn’t know have a good answer for her, but what better than the truth?
“No, I don’t”, Jack answers back and he doesn’t have to say anything else because the door opens and Marco barges in, stopping altogether when he notices Abbot isn’t by himself, and by then the secrecy haze he had been under, feeling like he could –should– tell Samira about the whole thing.
Robby is a dumb old man, Jack thinks not for the first time this week when he walks into the hospital for another shift that should be his friend’s instead of his. This time he is late –more like on the exact time he needs to be there, but he likes to oversee everything– and he leaves the attendings’ lounge after getting changed into his work clothes, walking the surroundings of the E.R to check if everything is going on smoothly. Garcia and Walsh seem to be on a banter on whether or not to admit a patient to the surgical wing, Dr. Langdon looks at the scene annoyed but nods at Abbot when he notices him.
McKay seems to have a plateful along Javadi, both working on a kid that he can’t really tell what’s wrong, but at least the kid is conscious and replying to them. He’ll be around if anything demands his attention and he waves at Victoria to let her know so, getting a thumbs up in return.
Santos is waiting for the results of an x-ray, doors open, and he can see the very clearly broken arm, the way it bends outwards instead of straight forward and it’s only a case of knowing if they’ll be able to fix it here on the E.R or if they’ll have to wait for ortho and potentially surgery.
“Jack”, he doesn’t know what startles him more: Samira’s face in a red flush, her eyes a little maniac, or the usage of his first name. “I need a hand here, you available?”
“Uh, yeah”, he says, walking with her into the procedure room. “What do we have?”, and this time the we, us, comes out easier.
The only explanation he can think of is the lunch from yesterday. They had spent less than a whole hour there, their phones and pages on sight the whole time in case they were needed downstairs, but it never rang, so they just ate Jack’s regular order –calzones and a can of Coke. They had barely talked really, the sounds of chewing and slurping only being interrupted when Samira hummed in content with the meal and Jack hadn’t been able to hold back a laugh, which resulted in her bumping her leg against his in a protest that only deepened his smile, but it wasn’t really bad because she then grinned as well, her eyes rolling.
“We have a toddler female, 3 year old Missy Williams”. Samira then rambles about the whole set of symptoms the girl presents: high fever for more than 10 days, on the right schedule with all her immunizations, negative PPD, born out of the country but living since she was 1.5, no other travels. Received a treatment with amoxicillin when her mother took her to the Presbyterian a few weeks prior, no change. Weight loss, no appetite, little to none daily urine output. “I was first thought maybe Kawasaki disease, but her tongue looks normal, no rash, no conjunctivitis”.
She takes a phone call while he does an exam on the child, taking her heart rhythm and BP. Missy looks very thin for a 3 year old and at least she is alert and moving all her limbs, following Jack’s hand when he moves it in front of her face.
“Her ferritin is 802, LDH 1354, uric acid 1.2”, Samira says as she ends the phone call with the lab, her eyes meeting his own before talking to the kid’s mother. “We’ll have to wait for a few more test results, but Missy here has a great team looking out for her”.
Samira offers a calming, confident smile to the mother before walking out of the room, Abbot following after he says they’ll be back as soon as possible. His mind is already running around, searching for a differential diagnosis for his kid. With the numbers Samira had from the Lab it was very clear that it wasn’t a case of Kawasaki and instead a case of infectious disease. “You said she wasn’t born here, where is she from?”
“Her father is a diplomat, she was born in Burundi while he was on a mission there”, she seems a bit ashamed, as she always looks, whenever she knows about a patient’s personal life. Jack can’t help but loathe Robby a little bit at this.
“Good catch”, he says. “We’ll have to ask for another BMP, page me when you get the results?”
“Sure”, she says and suddenly she looks very shy. Not ashamed anymore, but shy and he tilts his head. “Everything ok?”
“Yes”, she answers quickly. “Just wanna say sorry for being too informal, calling you Jack in the middle of the E.R, I forget myself”.
“No need to apologize, Samira”, he puts emphasis on her first name, which gets him a smile in return. He feels very pathetic when his heart skips a beat at that.
“Hey”, he says when he finds her at the ambulance bay, despite the place being empty of any ambulances and there’s a clear absence of cigarettes on her hand so Samira can’t claim she was on a smoke break. It just then occurs to him that maybe this is for her what the roof is to him. “How’s little Missy?”
“Hey you”, she answers before his question and smiles at the kid’s name being mentioned. “Little Missy is gonna be fine, Dana found her a spot in pedes”.
It had been an intriguing case and Jack was satisfied for being able to be a part of it, working next to Samira for the whole shift was just an extra. Now it’s 6ish pm and they’ll soon be heading home, but his head is still buzzing from all the thinking he and Samira had put into the resolution of Missy’s diagnosis. Bartonella negative, her hepatitis panel within normal limits, brucella negative. They had then changed from the regular BMP to a blood culture even though the lab team had been fuming at their repetitive tests for Missy alone, but only then they had been able to find the sole cause for the kid being sick: Salmonella Typhi. Having a right diagnosis prompted the mother to hug both Abbot and then Samira, relieved that her daughter would leave the hospital alive. Samira had insisted on clarifying that Missy would only be allowed to leave after the full course of treatment, but Mrs. Williams was too happy to care about staying in the hospital for the following weeks.
“When the Typhus fever test came back negative I was running out of ideas”, he says, leaning against the wall near her.
“Yeah”, Samira says seriously, “It was only because of that that I thought of testing for Typhoid fever, the name was just too close”.
“It was good working this case with you”, he says.
Samira turns to him. She’s a little shorter than he is and she smiles up at him, a little dimble on her cheek and Abbot thinks well, I’m fucked, because if he wasn’t in love before, he sure as hell is now. Samira Mohan manages to look very stunning after a whole shift, her eyes dark and shiny on her face and her dark lips curled into a smile. “It was good working with you as well”, she says, “Jack”, she says his name very tentatively and when he smiles at her, her own smile grows bigger.
She surprises him by fixing the neckline of his scrubs. He hadn't even realized it was messy, pulling the brim so it wasn't tucked in anymore. Samira pats him just a second longer than necessary over the fabric, making sure everything’s aligned and well, before she is no longer touching him and he watches as she leaves him there, going back into the hospital. Jack knows without having to see that she is smiling as she walks away.
I’m really, really fucked.
“How the hell did you end up in this situation?”, Robby, always Robby, is the one to ask the logical question.
“I don’t know”, Abbot answers and if there was someone there, both by his tone and the way his shoulders fell defeated, they could tell he meant it. “It was supposed to be a joke, you know?”
Abbot presses his ear against his shoulder to make sure his phone won’t fall in the meantime he’s pushing the key inside the handle to lock his home before he gets on the way for his fourth day filling in for Robby. He couldn’t talk to anyone else about this shit storm –Lena would laugh at him, demanding payment, Samira, well, she was Samira and his VA friends were more colleagues than real friends. It was down to Robby, the one person who had pretty much caused this, he tells himself this because the other option –taking the blame for his poor decision making– wasn’t one he was ready to face.
Robby, thank heavens, isn’t one to do much judging, not when he’s got his own shit to figure out. Even so, it is a shitty situation and he can hear Robby cursing under his breath as he enters his house. It had been a very weird phone call to make in the morning, but he could see the green dot near Robby’s icon and his friend didn’t take two rings to pick up a call. Abbot had walked slower than he used to, just to be able to say everything –the fucking bet, Samira helping the snake patient, Samira on the roof, Samira doing CPR, Samira touching his chest– and Robby had listened. Then Robby invoked a hell he didn’t even believe in just to make sure Jack knew how much disbelief he was in.
What else was there to say really? Jack hadn’t said that he was suspicious that the flirting had been working a bit too well and now Samira was reciprocating it, but Robby seems to read between the things unsaid –he really is a great human connoisseur– and the way he hums makes Jack rolls his eyes, because he knows what assumptions Robby is making as of now.
“So”, his friend says and Abbot picks up the phone from his shoulder to hear clearly, hanging by the entrance of the E.R, he has a few minutes to spare. “What are you gonna do? Tell her?”
“I guess that’s the only thing to do”, Jack says and he shrugs, the weight of his backpack stinging his shoulders with the movement. “But how do you even tell a woman you’ve been flirting with her because of a fucking bet?”
Jack was going to say more. He was going to go on to ask Robby if in the same conversation he should just blurt out that it wasn’t for the bet anymore, that he was really into it and into her and wanted to take her out for a dinner date, maybe a movie, and stop by her place to make sure she got home safe, maybe a lingering hold of hands, maybe –if he was that lucky– a kiss goodbye. But Jack doesn’t say anything, because from behind him there’s a hem of someone clearing their throat and he knows, without having to turn around, that it is her.
“Dr. Abbot”, the impersonality with which she goes back to calling him by his surname and title makes Jack swallow his own saliva before turning on his heels to see Samira there, her face showing every emotion her voice doesn’t, but she doesn’t hang around for much. “We’ve got a situation, whenever you’re ready”.
How is it earlier than 7am and there’s still chaos over the E.R? Jack only knows that there is and it is a living hell. Not only are there enough patients on chairs, there’s also been an accident in a construction site and the guy is here, half his bones broken and the other half cracked. His workmates stand there and Abbot has to shout to command them to leave and only then he is able to see the patient clearly, exposed fractures and –thank goodness- Samira there protecting his airway, while nurse Perlah starts to make sure every single device is connected to him, an oximeter on the less swollen hand.
It’s a long way to make the patient stable enough to move him from the E.R to the surgical ward, Garcia hovers around like a hawk, stepping in whenever it is necessary and landing a hand, but mostly it is Samira and himself doing most of the heavy lifting with the construction worker, making sure not to move his head too much in case of spinal fracture and Abbot can’t help but look at Samira, the stable way she makes sure to talk to the patient throughout each procedure they perform, the gentle way she disentangles her hand from his grip whenever he gets too scared, clasping his shoulder to let him know everything will be ok.
Samira, of course, notices he is staring at her, but she doesn’t dignify it with a look back, much less with a word in his direction. She’s stone cold and hyper professional during the whole time and when Yolanda finally takes the patient upstairs, Samira is taking off her gown and gloves, Jack approaches her by doing the same. “Samira”, he starts.
“I have to go, Dr. Abbot”, she simply says in return, waiting a beat to see if he’ll say anything that is work related and once he doesn’t, she walks out, pushing the curtains out of her way and leaving his sight. Lena sees it from the nurses station, her expression questioning, but Abbot just shakes his head and goes on about his day, wishing there had been a less disastrous way to have broken that news.
“It started out as a joke”, he starts.
Samira is staring at him, waiting for the explanation.
Abbot wasn’t a man to give up easily, so it didn’t really matter that Samira was giving him the cold shoulder the whole shift, leaving the room whenever it was just the two of them, ignoring any glances he shot her way and pretty much just talking to him whenever it was necessary. He even tried getting an invitation to one case she was handling, in hopes they would be working together like they had during Missy Williams’ case, but she quickly cut his hopes short by saying she would come and find him if needed too.
He didn’t give up, and had walked on her ankles as she left the hospital, arms crossed as she walked the streets in a direction he wasn’t used to himself, but he followed her even so. “Samira, please let me explain. Please”, he had begged four or five times, walking behind her and was beyond surprised when she actually stopped, turning towards him so quickly he almost body slammed her.
“Ok, then, explain”, she had said, her face tired and eyelids low.
“It started out as a joke”, he starts, “But it stopped being one almost immediately, at the first smile from you I was a goner already”.
Jack explains the whole thing, from Lena’s proposal coming from a place of banter much more than a place of harm, simply because even before that and everything that followed, he was already pretty much following her around with with his eyes, at every shift handoff she happened to be in his sight he would lose his concentration in whatever it was he was doing, just for a moment, to be able to look at her. He explains everything, from his feelings changing from the simple, harmless crush to whatever it is now –he won’t say he’s in love, not now– and he is deeply, deeply sorry for the whole thing.
“I know it doesn’t really matter that it wasn’t my intention”, he finishes, “But I never meant to hurt you”.
“Is that all?”, she asks.
“I guess it is, yes”.
“Goodnight, Dr. Abbot”, she says in a low voice before turning around and getting on with her path, it almost vanishes into the night in between speeding cars and honks. Abbot doesn’t follow her again.
It’s weird, he thinks, to get to the following shifts with the certainty that he messed up big with Samira, and that due to that they won’t be spending any more time together, hanging out at the nurses station with him looking over her shoulder to watch her charting, pretending that every little bump of his arm against her is a simple, avoidable accident. There won’t be more working cases with her, watching her as her mind draws to every possible diagnosis, not stopping her thoughts and questions while talking to a patient and being a darn good doctor.
Abbot thinks of the things he didn’t even have to lose because he was a prick going on the easiest route to actually being able to have them in the first place. He thinks of walking hand-in-hand around the town, thinks of midnight kisses and being the big spoon, thinks of writing an article together because her mind amazes him and he would be honored to be her collaborator.
There’s a significant distance between them the next couple days, carefully put there by Samira that avoids each and every place that they would previously shared so heedlessly, now a very vacant space that he would notice throughout the day like a throbbing wound. The rest of their coworkers are either blissfully ignorant or choosing to be and he can't decide if it is for the better or worse that Samira might have not told them what happened. For now, it remains theirs. Also Robby's and Lena's.
Abbot wishes, longs for the night shift once again. More than that, he thinks he'll die waiting for the next session with his therapist –the poor guy will have to hear about Abbot's self sabotaging once more because if he had been a sensible, sensitive man, he would've been straight forward with Samira. It wasn't news to him that she had caught up his mind and eyes ever since, well, ever since before Pittfest, if he's going to be honest, and still he had chosen the worst possible way to act on it. He can't –he won't– hold it against her for being angry at him because it is what he deserves.
Even aware of it, he can't help following her with his eyes as she moves around the E.R, going from one room to the other, helping EMTs roll patients in, collecting hugs from each and every kid she takes in her workload. Abbot can't help it now any less than he could've helped it two, three months earlier. He tells himself it doesn't matter. He tells himself it will pass, as everything else in his life did and he went forward living, but it is different, at least he thinks it is, because at this she is there, a constant reminder, so close and yet so far. All your fault, jackass.
Unlike Robby, he isn't one for big speeches. So when his last day as an attending for the day shift arrives, he doesn't make a big deal out of it, answering in a low voice so it doesn't bring attention from anyone else, each time a resident or med student asks if he really needs to go back to the night shift because he's a great mentor and they want to keep on working with him. Every single one of them but one.
“Maybe I'll see you on a night shift one of these days”, he answers and makes a way to get away from the E.R, fleeing the scene under Dana's amused smile after witnessing each interaction.
He goes to the roof, obviously, because it is the only place on earth a med student won't follow him to and he leans on the edge of the parapet, both arms on the cold concrete as he breathes in the cold night air, the horizon lighting in three hundred shades of yellow and orange and pink as the sun sets down on the west. He closes his eyes just for a second, not even bothering to try and give a chance to the breathing technique his therapist gave him, he just wants to wipe his mind of every thought, shutting his eyelids with such strength that he sees shooting stars, his hands closed in tight fists that his short nails cut into the skin.
“Samira”, he says in a scared tone when he finally turns around and sees her there. God. He hadn't even heard her approaching, hadn't heard the door opening and closing behind her, hadn't heard her footsteps, but she's here. Jack's sure he couldn't invoke her image out of thin air just by wishful thinking. “Dr. Mohan”, he corrects himself when she doesn't answer, reminding himself on what grounds he stands now.
“Are you ok?”, she asks. Her hair is down, in a way he hadn’t seen it ever since the hangout at the park in front of PTMC after Pittfest, and now the wind is blowing the strands of her hair all over the place. She looks insanely pretty, he thinks, even after a whole shift, the only make-up some gloss gliterring on her mouth.
“Yeah, uh, just decompressing after the shift”, half lie, but better than a whole one, also better than to say he came here to reminisce about her. “What are you doing here? Patient arriving?”
“No, hm, no”, she clears her throat and the way she moves her eyes non-stop tells him she's not really sure what she's doing here either. “I guess I wanted to talk to you, Dana told me you'd be here”.
“I'm all ears”, Jack says. He wonders if she really needed to hear from Dana to where he'd be.
“I didn’t come here to forgive you”, she starts.
“Ok”, he answers, without really knowing where this is going.
“I came because you’re leaving the day shift”, she says, her hands inside her pockets. “I came because I didn’t really want the last thing between us to be, well, that”.
“I guess that’s fair”, he says.
“I…”, she seems to be rearranging the words inside her head in the small pause and the silence between them is charged. “I, erm, was mostly angry. At myself, I mean. A little at you too, but mostly me. I kept thinking I should’ve known, I kept thinking… I kept thinking I was imagining, you know, every time you would stop and listen to me, or look at me.”
“You didn’t”, he says in a hurry and then clears his throat. “Samira, you didn’t”, Jack’s voice is earnest and truthful, he won’t lie to her –not anymore. “You didn’t imagine any of it”.
Jack means it. Samira is the realest thing to happen to him in a very long while and he wishes he could’ve done things differently, but everything crashed and burned already, and there’s no use in thinking about what he should’ve done instead of what he can do to make everything better and to make Samira see that he regrets all of it. She finally looks at him and in the sunset light, with wind blown hair and lips parted, she looks as close to the divine as he’s ever seen something. It gives him hope that she’s still here, in spite of it all –in spite of their differences, his mistakes and her reservations.
“Look”, he says, “I’ll regret the way this all went down for a very long time. But I don’t regret that now you know that I want you”.
“Oh”, she says, as if she’s only knowing about it at this very moment, her eyes big and bright, the dark brown of her irises being lightened by the setting sun. “Then I need you to know something”, Samira takes a breath and Jack mimics her before nodding for her to go on. “I don’t think I’m ready to pretend this didn’t happen. Just as I can’t pretend I’m not feeling… something”.
“I can live with that”, Jack says. “I’ve been feeling something for a while now”.
He knows what he’s risking here, very much higher stakes than a stupid bet, and he wouldn’t have it another way because now he’s getting a deal with Samira herself, and he doesn’t mind if he’ll have to wait one week or one month till she moves past his idiocracy, at least there’s hope for something in the future and that’s more than he thought he would’ve gotten. “Come here”, Samira says, pulling him out of his thoughts, her hand on the neckline of his scrubs again, only this time she’s got a grip on him and pulls him closer.
It’s a small kiss, very tentative, very careful, but Jack feels more alive than he felt in ages. It’s a kiss that solidifies a promise, much like a handshake, and he doesn’t do much more than hold onto her waist with both arms, feeling her warmth against his body and he wants to do more –he wants to feel her harder, closer, every inch of her body–- but pushes away from her before the gentle kiss turn into something more, but he won’t risk rush into this and ruin his chances again.
“Walk me inside, Jack”, she says his name near his mouth, her forehead against his, allowing him to even feel the movements from her face as she talks. His name sounds so sweet coming from her he almost shivers, not from the cold air.
He does as she tells him to, walking by her side to leave the helipad, his smile so big for the first time in a couple days, and he has to fight the urge to pull her into another kiss, convincing himself that just the heat of her hand inside his is enough –at least for now- while the remaining taste of her cherry lipstick is still on his mouth.