Work Text:
Jack isn't really thinking about much of anything as he barges into Trauma 2, hands already out to accept gloves from Donnie. Under the bright white lights of the room, he blinks his eyes a few times, trying to get his vision to focus, squinting through the out of prescription lenses perched on his nose.
He prefers contacts, always, for his shifts, even if his optometrist gripes about how the length of his shifts and the dry air of the ED are terrible for his eye health. But he feels sharper with his contacts, not having to worry about smudging lenses or the frames getting in the way of his peripheral vision. Today, though, after an unexpected spray of spit to the face thirty minutes ago, Jack had been forced to don the emergency pair of glasses he kept in his locker, which he is now realizing are at least two years out of date in prescription strength.
But the ED stops for no one, so, with a shake of his head, he tries to bring the room into focus.
Samira Mohan stands at the head of the bed, flicking a pen light into the pupils of their patient. Even out of focus, she's a vision in her element like this, dark curls escaping from her claw clip, a confident energy to every movement. He astutely ignores the heat that blooms somewhere behind his navel at the sight of her, reminding himself be professional, Robby doesn’t know, her career is more important than you, old man. He pushes the memory of her lips on his, hot and insistent in the February cold outside of Donovan’s, to the back of his mind.
“What do we got?” he says, nitrile snapping over his hands as he comes to a stop at the foot of the gurney.
As she always does, Samira slides smoothly into her case presentation, her focus entirely on her patient. “Presenting with head trauma, unknown source, seems to be localized to the back of the skull. Pupils equal and reactive, but otherwise altered state. Only responds to pain.” She moves from the head of the bed down to the left of the patient, where the sleeve of his shirt has been cut away. “Significant abrasions to the left arm, suspected elbow dislocation.”
Jack follows the pointing of her finger, nodding vaguely at every observation because of course she is right, she is always right. Her movements slow when she reaches the patient’s chest. Jack squints, trying to sharpen his vision through his glasses. “And, I’m not sure about this. There appears to be–”
Mid-sentence, her words stop, a quiet lull falling over the room in the absence of them. Jack waits a beat before lifting his head. He finds Samira staring back at him, lips parted, tongue seemingly immobilized.
“Dr. Mohan?”
She blinks. “Your–” she starts, but still doesn't continue, her stare locked on his face. Her dark eyes flicker over his features, her mouth still parted around unsaid words. Jack lifts a hand, pushing at the bridge of his frames, hoping the adjustment will bring her into enough focus that he can puzzle out the expression on her face.
Instead, there’s the click of teeth as her mouth snaps shut, eyes still dark and hot on Jack’s face. An inkling of worry worms its way into his brain. Jack glances over at Donnie for reassurance, but the other man simply shrugs, shaking his head, eyes flicking from Samira to the patient and then back to Jack.
“Mohan, you alright?” he tries again, taking a singular step in her direction, going to step around the bed. His brain is already flying through possible reasons for her sudden muteness, each one more catastrophic than the last. Acid reflux? Stroke? Aneurysm? Did she prick herself on a needle? Accidentally ingest noxious gas?
But, at his movement, Samira blinks back to life, turning back to the patient and picking back up, mid sentence, right where she had left off. “– a crush-like injury to the sternum. Like he ran into something, or something rammed into him.” She mimes an impact to her chest with her fist, eyes down cast as they track over the patient. Like nothing had happened.
She doesn’t look up, and Jack thinks he sees her brow furrow. “Next steps?” he prompts her, voice cautious, even as he feels Donnie’s eyes flicking between them.
“Ordered a CT for the head, radiology is en route. Called ortho for a consult for the elbow.”
“Excellent. Thank you, Mohan. Could you grab an intern–”
“Yep!” She interrupts him, already pulling off her gloves, taking care to circumvent the patient on the opposite side of the bed from Jack. He tries to catch her eye, but her gaze focuses on her feet. “I'll go find Santos!” Her voice has that fake cheer to it, a tone she hasn't taken with him in months.
“Samira–” he tries, forgetting, for a moment, where they are.
“It'll just be a second!” Jack watches as her form, still blurred from his stupid glasses, pushes through the swinging doors without another word, practically breaking into a jog.
Huh.
Samira is the world’s biggest idiot.
Ok, that is a bit hyperbolic, but, still. She feels like an idiot. She had almost blown her tender, fragile secret, all because Jack had shown up in glasses, of all things.
Her body’s reaction to seeing the tortoiseshell frames perched on his nose had been so visceral, it had rendered her speechless. How many shifts had they worked together, how many cups of coffee had they shared after a shift, and not once had Samira ever seen him in glasses. But something about them, maybe the way the glass magnified the already intense weight of his hazel stare, loosed a hot flood of want through her limbs. Something about them had her inadvisably remembering the hot slant of his mouth over hers, the press of his tongue into her mouth, the steady weight of his grip under her chin outside of Donovan’s a week ago. She couldn’t fight the memory off, not with Jack staring at her, concern etched in the furrow his brow, the squint of his eyes behind the lenses, so she fled the scene as soon as she could.
It might have all been alright, just a resident losing themselves for a moment in the chaos of the ED, except she had proceeded to spend the next three hours avoiding Jack at all costs. She had practically sprinted from Trauma 2, eyes focused on anything except the way Jack watched her from behind his frames, the slight squint to his eyes. After tracking down Trinity and sending her to Abbot, Samira had excommunicated herself to triage, knowing an attending worth anything (and Jack was worth everything, to PTMC and, maybe, to her, too) wouldn’t dare waste the limited resource of their time in triage.
It works. 10 PM turns into 11 PM, and then midnight comes, and Samira feels in control of herself again. She’s only thought about sitting on Jack’s lap and gently pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose like once, maybe twice in the last hour. And only like, twenty times, in the hour before that.
At 12:17, she types the time into the chart she’s working on in the triage room, half listening as one of the night nurses ushers the patient out of the room. She’s waiting for the sound of the door clicking shut again, but it doesn’t come. Puzzled, Samira glances up from the keyboard, and finds Jack Abbot half in, half out of the room, a well-muscled arm holding the door open.
He’s still wearing the glasses. They still make her feel stupid. Fuck.
“Got a second?”
Samira nods, not trusting her voice, not with the way her pulse thunders in her ears. Jack lets himself all the way into the room, door clicking shut behind him. After a glance out of the small window pane in the door, he steps forward, yanking the curtain closed, shielding them from any prying eyes. “You’re avoiding me.” There is a spare wheeled stool in the corner, and Jack lowers himself into it. He watches her for a beat, then kicks closer, the wheels scraping over the tile, until he comes to a stop in front of her, their knees scant inches apart. “Why are you avoiding me, Samira? I thought… If it’s about last Friday–”
“No,” she interrupts. Last Friday was perfect, she wants to reassure him, but her mouth has gone dry at his proximity.
“No?” Samira has to shake her head, not trusting her voice beyond that singular syllable. “Ok, so if it’s not about last Friday, then, what is it? Did I say something?”
She shakes her head again, still speechless under the intensity of his gaze, the way the glasses make it impossible for her to look away. After a beat, he lifts his hand and starts to pull the glasses off, muttering, “Sorry, these make it so–”
Samira’s hand is on his wrist, halting his movements, his skin scalding beneath her palm. The glasses are halfway off his nose, and he has to look over the top of the frames to meet her eyes. He blinks at her. Still at a loss for words, she finds herself shaking her head and using the grip on his wrist to direct the frames back to their rightful place on his face. This close, under the magnification of the lenses, she can make out the blues and greens and browns of his irises.
“Oh,” he breathes, voice rough, breath hot as it fans across her face. His eyes flick down, catching on where her teeth bite into her lower lip. A blink, and then he’s staring at her again. “It’s… Really?”
Samira nods and tugs at his hand until he leaves the glasses where they are, until he drops his hand away from his face. When it comes to rest on his thigh, he flips his hand, palm up, capturing her hand in his calloused one with a squeeze. “Right, ok,” Jack clears his throat. “Jesus. You’re… Jesus, Samira.” His eyes flick towards the curtain, and the door and their coworkers beyond it. “I know we said dinner next week, but–”
“I don’t work tomorrow.” His eyes snap back to hers. She should be embarrassed. Rendered speechless by a pair of glasses, finding her voice just to not so subtly proposition the attending of her shift. It’s so cliche, but she can’t find it in herself to care. “If you wanted…”
He laughs low, incredulous, head shaking. “If I want… You’re incredible, you know that? As if I wouldn’t…” He’s babbling a little, words a little sharp and fast, and it settles some of the frenetic energy that buzzes through Samira’s veins, knowing that she’s not the only one struck a little stupid. “If you want, I have an espresso machine.” A pause, then, “At my house,” as if Samira wasn’t already envisioning pushing him into an overstuffed armchair, legs stretched wide by the spread of his thighs beneath hers. The way the lenses of his glasses might fog from the heat of their shared breaths.
“Yeah. Yes, please.” She doesn’t bother to be shy about it; Jack seems to always see right through her, anyways.
Jack nods at her, squeezing at her hand once before carefully setting it back on the work station. Getting to his feet, he rolls the stool back to the corner before jerking the curtain open, loud in the quiet room. He’s reaching for the door handle when he pauses, turning on his heel, blocking the window with the breadth of his back.
His mouth twitches with a smile as he lifts a hand to tap at the corner of his glasses. “And, I assume, you want me to leave these, yeah?”