Chapter Text
Samira doesn’t think she can keep doing this.
She keeps thinking of the end.
She keeps thinking about futility.
She thinks about time; about months all blurred together in a daze of too many feelings left unsaid, of testing boundaries, of tugging at drawn lines and entering private spaces.
Samira is sitting on a tall stool in Jack Abbot’s kitchen in the dim hours of the after night and the before morning, blue soft light coming through the window, dulled edge of cold marble countertop digging on her forearms as she wraps her hands around a lukewarm mug of chamomile tea.
Samira is sitting in the middle of Jack Abbot’s house, surrounded by Jack Abbot’s smell, by Jack Abbot’s belongings, by Jack Abbot’s memories.
And she keeps thinking of the end.
She tries, hard, to think about the beginning. Of this, of whatever this is. And she finds nothing in her brain that explicitly says ‘this is where it all started’, no, she finds a complex timeline of medical procedures performed shoulder to shoulder, of his gentle, calloused hands guiding her into cutting or shoving or pushing or opening or closing and his soft-spoken words of encouragement and praise every time, she finds his eyes glued to her as she walks near him, she finds gazes shared together over disposable cups of coffee, she finds bantering and bickering and laughter, she finds looks of understanding shared over dead bodies and slight brushes of hands as they hand each other things over the hub.
In her mind, it all didn’t begin.
It just was.
This thing she shares with Jack, this beautiful, daunting situation she finds herself in; undernegotiated, unspoken, nameless. It all just existed since the first time they laid eyes on each other and it simply just evolved; from those deep stares and smirks of his to hand-holds and smiles to hugs and kisses to kisses and sex to sex and sleeping at his place four out of seven nights.
But Samira keeps thinking about the end.
She wrecks her brain as she always does with everything and tries to come up with a solution to every possible angle, she tries to imagine every possible scenario and outcome and tries to think about her reaction and action.
But this? With Jack? she doesn’t know.
They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t name it. They didn’t label it.
And maybe, eight months ago, Samira was okay with that. With flowing, with seeing where it all landed.
She let herself, for once in her life, go with the wind, she allowed herself to be flexible and let herself get caught up in the intoxicating haze that being with a man like Jack Abbot produced.
Maybe, eight months ago, Samira thought it would just be something causal, something meaningless between two coworkers who trusted each other enough to let out some steam together.
But now, she finds herself wrapped, entangled in between the tendrils of his life, unable to move, loving every second she spends with him, but hating every moment she has enough time to form a thought.
‘Perhaps Mel and Parker are right’, is the thing she thinks about the most, that perhaps Jack doesn’t do the whole boyfriend-girlfriend-formal-relationship-thing anymore. That perhaps he doesn’t find the idea worth the hassle, maybe because he had been married already once and it ended so badly he doesn’t want to commit anymore.
That is what keeps her awake on nights like this.
She knows she wants it. For fucks sake she wants it so bad.
She knows she has the quiet mornings, the shared breakfasts, she has the cuddles at night and the holds of each other when they share a space. She has his body and the forehead kisses and the comfortable silences while they read and she has some of his time.
But she, shamelessly, wants it all.
She wants dates, she wants rides upstate to that cabin she knows he owns, she wants to introduce him to her mom and her friends and call him fully hers, she wants to completely invade his space and for him to invade hers, she wants to meet his sisters and she wants pictures together posted on instagram, she wants picture frames with both their faces on mantels and shelves, she wants her own set of keys to a place that is theirs, she wants a joint netflix account, their address being the same, she wants their clothes hanging together in a room that smells like both their scents, she wants farmer’s market strolls with their fingers intertwined, she wants matching bands on their ring fingers and hyphenate her last name, she wants the HR form, filled and filed, she wants him, utterly and entirely.
But a man like Jack? A man who looks at life as if it had personally offended him, a man who constantly tried to build himself together over and over again because for him falling apart it’s no longer an option even if it means crawling back to his own skin, a man with nightmares she doesn’t get to see, and friends she doesn’t get to meet, and weird hobbies he doesn’t talk about, and secrets hidden in drawers she can’t open and things shoved in boxes she can’t look at? A man with so many boundaries and limits and walls? He might just want easy. He might just want something that doesn’t ask him for much.
And Samira can’t be that anymore.
She wants so much.
She wants maybe too much.
She wants everything.
And she’s getting tired of not having it.
Samira is used to having things she works hard to get, she has a method, she has perfected it with time, she knows that if she puts in the effort just enough to get what she wants, what she dreams of, she can get it.
But Jack Abbot? Well, her data driven brain hasn’t come up with a way to get him.
And the entire situation is desperate and exhausting. She’s tired of being so engulfed in him, she’s tired of getting tunnel vision every time he gets close to her, she’s tired of wanting and wanting and not getting because he seems just fine with what they have.
Samira is exhausted of being too tied to him. Too in love to function like a normal human being.
Because that’s the conclusion all her gathered data came up to; she is completely, incomprehensibly and desperately in love with Jack Abbot.
Samira stands up, pads around the kitchen island and pours the cold tea on the sink, watching it swirl down the drain, she opens the faucet just enough to rinse the mug and leaves it to dry, she walks slowly towards the living room as the blue hue of the early morning turns golden with sunrise and sighs at the sight of her scrub top haphazardly thrown over the back of the armchair, of her shoes resting next to Jack’s on the entrance, of the open book about respiratory diseases left on the coffee table next to a framed picture of Jack and his late wife.
Samira walks and picks it up.
In the photo they’re both smiling softly at each other, she traces a finger over the printed face of Jack, with less wrinkles and less gray hairs and eyes just so full of devotion. Then her eyes fall on her. On her long and wavy dark hair, on the soft smile that creases the edges of her mouth, on her hazel eyes landing on Jack and she scoffs because it is clear that Jack has a type. She feels something heavy in the back of her throat when she looks at her, because it feels like she’s always watching her.
She’s everywhere, in that house. That was one of the things she noticed the first time Jack invited her over. That she’s everywhere. There’s pictures of her on every wall, on almost every surface, with him or alone, standing, sitting, walking, smiling directly at the camera or looking away from the lens. There are books about law that were hers on the shelves and thriller paperbacks she knows Jack doesn’t read, her keys still hang on the hook by the door, and in the kitchen, untouched on the far left cupboard, sits her coffee mug.
Samira knows a thing or two about shrines, her childhood home had become an altar of her dad, her mom put him everywhere too, on the tables, on the walls, on the garden he used to tend to, she’s familiar with ghosts, and she knows her ghost haunts these very walls. And she’s not an exorcist and will never be.
She leaves the photo on its place and walks towards the bedroom and takes in the sight of shirtless Jack sleeping on his stomach on the bed, arms under the pillow, salt-and-pepper hair all mussled, sheet covering his legs, his freckled back rising with the inhale and exhale of deep sleep, and Samira wants to cry.
Silent as a mouse, she takes off her —his— shirt and grabs her clothes; she dresses without taking her eyes off him, partly to react if he moves, partly to just burn the image of a relaxed, unknowing Jack in her brain, for later use or later torture, she hasn’t decided yet.
She knows what she’s doing is cowardly, she knows she should talk to him. She knows, logically, that if she speaks up about what’s eating at her he will understand, he will try to come up with a solution, because he likes that, to mend, to heal, to fix; but this? This thing Samira thinks about may not have fixing, she knows he will try, very hard, though.
But also she knows that if she wakes him up she won’t say shit, she won’t find the words, she will just stay and let him hold her and let herself fall asleep again with him wrapped around her body and she will let him cook her breakfast, she will allow him to drive her to work and park one block away on the other side of the street and let him wait for her to cross it, wave and leave, and after her shift is over he will walk into the pitt and look at her up and down with a smirk across his face and brush the back of his hand with hers and it all will keep going and they will keep dancing around each other until she ends up in his bed again, wearing his clothes, feeling him between her legs, smelling like him.
She’s weak like that.
Jack shifts on the bed and she freezes with her pants mid way up, he lets out a heavy sigh, hikes up his right leg on the mattress and she softens at the outline of his residual limb under the sheet, Jack moves to hug the pillow he’s lying on and Samira can then notice the black band wrapped around the fourth finger of his left hand.
Her chest tightens, she can’t do this.
She sighs before leaving the room, closing the door just enough for it to not click shut, fighting the urge of kissing him goodbye.
Samira picks up her bag, her scrub top and her jacket and puts on her sneakers, she opens the front door and silently walks out of Jack’s house that is filled with ghosts.
The sun is rising in the west, tinting the sky with oranges and pinks as she walks to the bus stop, once she knows she’s far enough from Jack she texts two people, opens up the PTCM employee website, requests four days of PTO and turns her phone off.
Once she gets home, she strips to her underwear, throws herself on her bed, wraps herself on her duvet that faintly smells of him and finally allows herself to fall apart.