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1.
Samira—she’s not dumb. If there’s anything she truly excels in, it’s reading people, her sensors calibrated to the minute twitchings of face muscles and the slightest inflexions in tone. She’ll be the first to admit that it’s exhausting to exist in this way, and that she only really turns it on when she’s dealing with patients, for that very reason. All this is to say that she sees it:
The way that Robby vacillates between light, chipper moods and darker, stormy ones is as predictable as the swing of the pendulum. The way that his insomnia impossibly seems to get worse, as if it wasn’t bad already—she knows this because when she spends a night at his, or him at hers, she often catches him in the middle of the night with bloodshot eyes wide open. The way that he purchases a motorcycle practically screams midlife crisis! and then promptly forgoes a helmet every time he rides it to work.
She notices. She simply doesn’t choose to comment on it because it isn’t, frankly, any of her business. Whatever Robby’s up to, he’s up to. Why would she make it her problem? He’s only (1) her aggravating boss and (2) a guy that she occasionally fucks when things get very bad for both of them. So she keeps her mouth shut.
2.
The fucking doesn’t occur all that often anyway. At least, not nowadays. They’ve not discussed it, but Samira suspects that Robby’s gotten himself into another fling—probably not exclusive, with an inevitably short shelf-life—considering that it’s been a while since he’s hit her up.
Eugh. It leaves a slimy, sour taste in her mouth just thinking of that phrase, her boss ‘hitting her up’ and her responding to it not with a report to HR, but with a text message scheduling for when their next conveniences line up.
They first started hooking up not long after Pittfest, so it’s been a good while since this has been going on. In the earlier days, there was more sheepishness, Robby acting like he’s tormented by the dubious morality of his choices, never letting himself reach for her first but being all too eager once she initiated things. Nowadays, the pretence is gone. All clothes off, just raw, naked flesh. And the thing about the human body is that it’s a bit wonky, a bit silly. Not every corner can be perfectly polished and clean. So seeing all of Robby’s cracks and creases had been helpful in dealing with all the psychological torture he liked to put her through at work.
Ok, maybe she’s being dramatic. What she means is that she likes to think of their string of ill-advised hook-ups as a net positive, especially now that she feels like she’s secure in the aftermath of it all. The worst of it is over. The best of it is over. The frequency of the fucking has dwindled down into a maybe once a month kind of thing, Robby’s not on her ass at the hospital as much as he used to be, and even when he is, she can suppress the curdling in her stomach by imagining his o-face.
Isn’t that supposed to be some kind of trick to mitigate stage fright? Imagine everybody naked? Well, it sure works for her when dealing with her attending.
Maybe she should be concerned that the only satisfying sex she has had in the past year has been with Robby, especially now that it seems like their ‘thing’ is reaching a natural conclusion and she’s feeling increasingly antsy with pent-up sexual energy. When Cassie, honest, open-hearted Cassie, laments about needing to get laid, the first two thoughts that crosses Samira’s mind are: (1) yeah, same, and (2) why on earth would you tell me that. But she doesn’t have enough time or energy to put herself out there to land herself with a mediocre hook-up where she doesn’t properly come, so she stays put.
The trouble with knowing Robby better is that she’s gotten too good at reading him. With her other colleagues, it’s easier to ignore. But try as she might to keep her head focused, sightline aligned to the front, her peripheral vision keeps catching the warning signs that Robby practically drops at every corner.
3.
Once, as Samira was about to head home after a particularly gruelling shift, she caught sight of Robby in the hospital parking lot. He stood looming over his motorcycle as if in contemplation, with a particularly statuesque immovability. She couldn’t tell how long he had been standing there, staring at his beloved vehicle like it was about to grow teeth and swallow him whole.
The harsh, cutting quality of the streetlight made him look like an actor onstage, pinned under a spotlight. He could’ve started monologuing a dramatic tragedy and he wouldn’t have looked out of place.
Perhaps she should’ve called out, waking him from his stupor. It wouldn’t have been strange to do so, regardless of whether she was in this strange colleagues-with-benefits situation with him or not. She could’ve said goodbye, or goodnight, or see you tomorrow—any of the meaningless pleasantries that are so integral to keeping human relations rolling like a well-oiled machine.
If she did, he would’ve surely looked at her, smiled at her. Kind and warm, his skin pulled into gentle creases as the corners of his eyes fold numerously upon themselves. She had always liked his smile. Even in the moments in which she truly hated him, the insides of her gut broiling with a sharp heat, she could not deny that he had a nice smile.
Samira thought that he was maybe kinder to her these days because his attention was elsewhere. She was not delusional enough to think that their sexual relationship had nothing to do with Robby’s attitude change—intimacy brings a degree of affection, after all—but more than that, he was distracted; distracted with what, she did not know for sure. There was only so much she could read into him.
That night, she didn’t end up talking to him. She stared at him for a bit, a bizarre chain of gazes linking the motorcycle to Robby, Robby to Samira, but she eventually broke from it and moved on. Her shoulders were aching from a long day, and she desperately needed a shower. So she walked on by. She didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.
But if she had spoken to Robby, she thinks she would’ve told him one thing and nothing else: hey, take care of yourself.
4.
Another time, Samira was feeling a little hungry after two rounds of sex, so she went rummaging in Robby’s fridge. It had been long enough since they’ve been hooking up that she felt entitled to do so. She pulled the fridge open; it was near-empty. The cool air brushed past the rows of glass shelves stocked with nothing but a half-drunken beer can, before blowing into her own face.
Look, Samira wasn’t going to pretend to be some whole-food maniac, regular NYT recipe reader, fridge stocked with fresh groceries kind of functional person. But surely this was not normal, especially considering that she vaguely remembered some other time that she had caught a glimpse of Robby’s fridge, when it hadn’t been this bad.
Robby shuffled outside from his bedroom, presumably wondering why on earth Samira was taking so long from her supposed bathroom break.
When she asked Robby about the state of his fridge, half-teasing, half-admonishment, he only stared at her quietly with those wide, wounded eyes. Hidden in the shadowy chiaroscuros of an unlit kitchen, for a very brief moment, she could not read his face at all. That scared her a little. The unknowing, the obscurity. It had been a while since he had been that way for her. She could still smell his naked body on her.
He absentmindedly reached for her, a gesture so casual now that it had been repeated again and again. His hands, wide and warm as usual, stroked circles around her hips and travelled downwards to palm at her thighs. Maybe he was stalling. Maybe he was pondering the possibility of fucking her on top of the kitchen counters.
But Samira held steady, for reasons that she did not know how to articulate. She looked into his eyes, long and hard, her tousled hair falling down loosely around her shoulders. Robby reached to tug lightly at a strand, as if making a joke of it all.
Eventually, he shrugged: “I’m leaving for my sabbatical soon. Don’t want anything to go off.”
Robby offered to order in some food if she was truly peckish. Samira declined.
She didn’t mention how there was still a full month left until the start of his sabbatical.
5.
It’s none of my business, she tells herself. He’s leaving, and she’s leaving. There’s a hollow in her chest that aches, late at night, when she realises that there’s no one who truly knows her in a way she longs to be known, but she doesn’t think probing around Robby’s business is going to do anything to fix that.
The thought of Robby, Robby, filling that hollow is so laughable that she actually lets out an audible chuckle, her throat dry and tight. God, as if.
6.
Robby’s last shift before his long-awaited sabbatical somehow lands on the same day that Samira’s future plans fall apart, all wrapped up in irate words exchanged over the phone. There goes New Jersey, and suddenly, she has nowhere to leave to, but she doesn’t think she could bear to stay.
She barely sees him for the good part of the day. Somehow, their orbits do not line up, and it feels like she’s there when he’s not, and he’s there when she isn’t. There’s a pang in her heart when she realises that, because perhaps she would’ve appreciated a quiet moment between the two of them where they exchange goodbyes. Some kind of closure, maybe. An end to an era.
Immediately, Samira feels stupid for expecting him to, what, give her a special and personalised goodbye because she’s a girl he’s been fucking for a while? She’s acting like a lovelorn teenager, and she’s not even fucking in love. That’s almost worse, in her opinion.
It feels good to find community, her patient tells her, and there’s a brief waver in her answering smile.
Community is not something she has in Pittsburgh, not that she has made a serious effort to try. But maybe, just maybe, she thinks that there was something akin to communion, of understanding, when she was naked under Robby and their bodies were pressed upon one another, moving in rhythm, finding pleasure in tandem, staring at each other with recognition of something kindred.
And for a moment, she’s all too aware of how she’s dreadfully, bitterly alone.
More so now than ever. A state that she did not imagine possible.
She steadies her rushing head and aching heart with a hand pressed against a pillar. That’s when Robby decides to sidle up to her, nudging her shoulder gently with his own.
“Everything alright, Dr Mohan?” he asks, and even now he cannot pronounce her name right.
She wants to cry. Or laugh. Maybe both. She wants to tell him, it’s none of your business, Robby, just as any of your business is not mine. Haven’t they both made such an effort to keep it so?
But she doesn’t say any of that, as always. She only gives a firm, decisive nod, her lips pressed against each other in a thin line.
“Yup. Everything’s great,” she replies.
Robby stares at her, perhaps knowingly. But he doesn’t question her on it, doesn’t probe her further. He merely shrugs, accepting her answer at face value. It’s not surprising in the least. Haven’t they always had their similarities?
When he walks on by, the back of their hands brush against one another, skin against skin, a galvanic shock. It lasts for a moment, and as all things do, it passes.