Chapter Text
"What?” he asked. “What do you want to say?”
Frustration rolled off her lips with a sigh. Anywhere but his face, her eyes longed for a pattern in the carpet to follow just so she could avoid answering him.
His warm broad palm landed at the base of her head, a thumb that was caressing the soft hair curling just behind her ear guided her to face him. On instinct she resisted and his bicep flexed, making her follow his command.
It was firm and smooth and she stopped breathing, feeling her ribs closing up, holding lungs hostage so that the embarrassing moan from the back of her throat stayed internal. There was nowhere to look but at him: kind, tired brown eyes with a gentle but asking expression; the meticulously cut silver hair that curled just right on his crown and flashed dark, younger undertones when he ran a hand through it; the evening stubble leading her eyes to lips she had been kissing just moments prior.
Eyes alert with patience, with a stroke down her neck, he took her pulse that betrayed the weak charade she had been entertaining.
“Use your words,” he ordered, tipping her chin ever so slightly up. His low voice wandered through the inside of her body like a trembling echo. “Do you want to stop? That’s alright. ”
“No,” she cut him off. Tops of his cheeks were flushed, his chest against hers thrummed with a heart just as fast. She felt a sudden spike of confidence. “No. Do you?”
“No.” He brushed a strand of beautiful black behind her ear as he answered her. It wasn’t rushed like her ‘no’, instead deliberate, confident, just like his hand at her waist. Comfortable and collected in every environment; that’s what he was to her. That’s the feeling she so hungrily absorbed every time she stood near him and now, she was inhaling it together with mint on his breath and lemon and lavender on his skin.
“I want to come in,” she said, finding her hold in his sweatshirt.
He smirked after a moment and reached behind him to open the door. He tucked her close by the waist and took a step inside. “Be my guest, Samira.”
Three weeks ago
Like the Moon chasing the Sun along their fixed axis, the day shift inevitably came to relieve the night shift. Only there was no such thing as an easy hand-off in the ER. Instead, the space momentarily became tight and crowded, crawling with nervous patients and exhausted doctors tracking down fresh doctors to hand off said nervous patients.
Jack Abbot thrived in that chaos, yearned for it some nights. When voices screamed over one another and machines beeped and three student doctors were hunting him down through corridors filled with gurneys, that was when Jack’s hands were steady.
He needed them to be, as he was now wrist deep inside the chest of a man who staggered through the door with three holes through his torso.
“I need another unit,” he called and a nurse appeared with a bag of blood, administering it to the patient while an attending continued chest compressions and another nurse continued bagging.
“I’m tired," yelled the attending.
“I got it!" Like a well oiled clockwork, the attending doctor stepped away and Dr. Mohan took his place, new blue gloves soiling with blood as she resumed compressions. Jack stole a glance her way, then bounced back to his hands cauterizing a bleed.
“Dr. Mohan,” he acknowledged her.
“Dr. Abbot.”
“Good to have you.”
A beep from the ECG rouse their heads to the monitor. Dr. Mohan ceased compressions and Jack checked for a pulse.
“That’s a pulse there. Got this guy a ticket to the OR.”
When he looked up, the young doctor opposite of him was smiling and it allowed him to feel relief.
The big hand of the clock in the locker room was crawling over the number eight when a familiar full-body weight push opened the door and even more familiar footsteps approached Jack from behind. He was sitting on a bench, rubbing the latex off his hands even when he’d washed them a dozen times.
Robby kicked the backpack by his feet.
“That’s supposed to be on your couch by now.”
“Figured I’d wait in case you fuck up something.”
Robby laughed and sat down next to him. “Not quite as scenic as the roof.”
“How’s the triple GSW?”
Silence stretched between them, the morning rush of nursing home bed checks boiling just outside the door.
“He didn’t make it. I’m sorry,” offered Robby.
Pulling himself together with a sniff, Jack nodded. They sat for a moment, coating the shivering sensation of failure and sorrow in the only thing that helped a little; silent presence. Then he grabbed his backpack and stood up.
“Good luck in the daylight,” he offered.
Robby smiled. “Thanks.”
On the way out the door, he made eye contact with that earnest friendly face of Dr. Mohan but didn’t find it in himself to return an expression of any kind. He left.
A bus ride home, a TV dinner and four lousy hours of sleep later, Jack was sitting on his bed in his underwear, dodging the stray sunlight coming in through drawn blinds.
Whenever the light hit him, he saw the sharp lamps from the ER and heard the clank of a bullet in the kidney tray, the asystole beep.
Some patients stuck around after shift and he would eventually rub them out of his eyes through the day.
Putting on his prosthetic, he stepped into his routine: exercise, a grocery run, light lunch with a police scanner and then, because it was Thursday, his volunteer work at the vet center.
He did realise that he was a hypocrite, was reminded of it on each way back home from the meetings, when he walked through the staff corridor where there were posters with slogans: “Never be ashamed to ask for help”, “You are not alone”, “Give yourself grace". He preached that and more during the group therapies and free medical consultations, but then rode back home alone, to his empty apartment, to nothing but his job that he loved so much in spite of the pain it offered at every turn. His therapist kept reminding him how easy he found solitude.
There was his brother with his family, his nieces and a nephew, but they lived out of state and saw each other only a few times a year. He did wonder sometimes, when he unlocked the door to his apartment, what it would be like to have someone to come home to. Perhaps the sleep wouldn’t be so short and the waking so sudden.
But Jack was a realist and his mind didn’t let him wander too far when he daydreamed; it would be difficult for an ER doctor to find a relationship that didn’t feel second to his job, it would be downright impossible for a nocturnist.
So he sat down in his living room, took off his prosthetic and stashed a pillow under his leg to elevate it, closing his eyes with his head thrown back for just a few precious minutes before he’d pick up his bag and go to work again.
The clank of a bullet. The ECG curve drawing a sharp incline. A salve of bullets discharged in rapid succession. He opened his eyes.
Relationship wasn’t what was meant for him; he already was in one with his job, with every patient that depended on him. It would always win. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t entertain less serious options.
Pulling up his phone, Jack opened a dating app and sank into the cushions, mindlessly swiping at portraits of people who couldn’t treat the cause but could elevate the symptoms. He swiped right once, twice and then his finger staggered as the face of Doctor Samira Mohan was looking back at him.
Taken back, he studied the picture to make sure it was her: a wide smile with closed eyes, arms thrown in the air in a grand gesture, hair spread across her shoulders in a curly waterfall; nothing like her hair pulled back and scrubs at the hospital.
Sometimes a few curly strands of her hair escaped and framed her face. He heard her voice this morning, saw the smile she gave when they brought back the GSW victim - not as wide as in the picture, but just as bright. The patient's favourite, always thorough and brilliant young doctor who had, maybe unbeknownst to her, a knack for making the night shift day shift hand-off something to look forward to for him, staring at him through his Tinder.
It sparked in his mind like a primal instinct: the idea to swipe right. Text her for a day, take her to dinner, bed her and make it a night to remember.
He was immediately repulsed by himself. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered and closed the app. Then uninstalled it.