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Victoria Javadi has long since learned to never ever ever even think to imply that a shift in the Pitt Emergency Department is in any way, shape, or form calm or quiet.
You just don’t fucking do it.
That said, today’s Thursday shift so far has been—let’s call it consistently paced.
It’s only been a few hours, but so far, Victoria has treated a minor case of not-so-safety scissors vs. preschool teacher (the scissors won), a colitis patient that didn’t also belong to her mother who thankfully is across the country at a conference (and still not talking to her, by the by), a teenager who lost a battle with his parents’ toaster oven and ended up with burns on his hands, and a bakery owner who dislocated his shoulder trying to move a sack of flour out of a delivery truck, and had been waiting in Chairs since about 4:30 this morning.
With the preschool teacher stitched up and on her way to have a strongly worded conversation with her student’s parents, Victoria heads over to the hub to pick up another patient. She tilts her head up to get a good look at the board, “Huh,” she says, mostly to herself.
“What’s up, kid?” Dana asks from the other side of the counter, busy tapping away at orders on her computer, her eyes focused on the view through the lenses perched on the bridge of her nose.
“Oh, sorry,” Victoria says, jumping a little at having been heard. “Um, I just noticed on the board that it says Dr. Abbot is currently the physician of record on four different patients. I didn’t realize he came back on shift this morning.”
Dana tilts one of her vertical monitors nearby—one that mirrors the boards above their heads, “Well that’s weird, because he sure as hell ain’t here.”
“Huh,” Victoria says again, but it’s really a Dana problem more than it is a her problem, and she should get a move on, check in with nausea and vomiting in Three, even if she’d really rather not risk her shoes for the second week in a row.
Joy, who is back in the ED for another six-week stint—ha! Take that pathology—just laughs as she comes over, her hands clasped on either end of her stethoscope, “You do realize those are all Dr. Mohan’s patients, right?”
“What?”
“Hit and run victim awaiting ICU bed in Six, infant with conjunctivitis in Pedes, rec league basketball player with broken ankle in Fourteen, and endlessly ironic motorcycle accident in Twenty,” she lists without confirming with the board, with that smugness she usually uses when she deploys that party trick. “All Mohan’s.”
Okay, so the computer glitch is both weird (and still not her problem) and seriously hilarious.
The number of people who lost out on hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on the Abbot-Mohan betting board about them getting together the second Samira’s residency ended and she accepted the junior attending position at PTMC was actually kind of insane.
Princess said something about it being record-breaking, and she’s a little terrified to ask what record it beat.
Victoria’s also honestly surprised it didn’t get back to either of them—more so Doctor Abbot, since he’s about a million times more observant socially, compared to Samira—because the night shift nurses especially were noooooot subtle about it at all.
Speaking off, Samira rounds a corner and to Central, her focus trained on the tablet cradled in her arm.
“Hey Samira,” Dana calls out, catching her attention. “Come here a second.”
She comes over, “What is it? Is everything okay?”
“You notice anything weird about the board today?”
“Uh, no, but I’ve been a little busy. Why?”
Dana points toward the ceiling, “Why does it say that Abbot’s covering all your patients right now?”
Samira turns her wide eyes up to the board, but then Joy pipes back up with, “No, it doesn’t say Abbot’s got those patients, it says S. Abbot’s been assigned those patients.”
They look up at the board in near-unison, and yeah, it does say S. Abbot on each of the patients Samira has been treating.
Weird, since Dr. Abbot’s first name is Jack, which definitely doesn’t start with the letter S.
But—
Samira’s does.
Huh.
Victoria turns her wide, confused gaze back down to Samira, while Joy grins, sharklike, “Samira,” Joy says, amused, though Victoria can’t be sure what she’s amused about, other than the fact that Joy’s sense of humor is—specific in ways she does not always understand. “Is there something you’d like to share with the class?”
Oddly enough, Samira’s jaw ticks, and then she huffs a single, frustrated sigh before she snatches the Spectralink in her scrub pocket and emphatically jams out an extension before pressing it to her ear. She waits, presumably while it starts ringing, the lines between her brows deepening in a way that makes Victoria think about that patient from her very first ED shift, the one with mercury poisoning.
She’s been conscious about her facial movements ever since.
“Hi Brian, it’s Dr. Samira Mohan, down in the ED, how are you?”
Her tone is so sweet, but the look on her face is actually kind of terrifying. Victoria rarely sees her this—yeah, she is incandescently angry for some reason.
“Yes, I just wanted to follow up on our meeting this morning,” she says, and—meeting? The only Brian that Victoria knows of who Samira could have met with would be on the admin floor, Brian Donnelley, from HR. He’s her mother’s least favorite member of the HR staff, because she feels like he looks through her when she’s talking.
“If I remember correctly,” which she does, because Samira’s memory is almost as good as hers. “When we provided you with our marriage license-”
Holy her what now?
Victoria spares a glance at Joy, who looks like she just won the lottery, bouncing from one foot to the other while Samira pointedly refuses to make eye contact with her.
Look, Victoria can do the math, but also like—
Is this real life right now?
“And the updated relationship disclosure paperwork,” Samira goes on. “I indicated that I would not be changing my last name, and that I would be continuing to work under my current medical license, which is for Samira Mohan. Is that right?”
She pauses, presumably listening to Brian’s reply, but Victoria’s pretty sure she cuts off whatever he says when she breaks in with, “Well yes, and it’s so interesting, because I’m standing here in the ED, looking at the board, which is currently listing all of my patients as under care of a Dr. S. Abbot. There is no S. Abbot in this hospital.”
Another pause, and Samira pinches the bridge of her nose, shifts the receiver of the Spectralink out of the way so Brian can’t hear how deeply she’s breathing in an effort to reign in her ire, “Well yes, but after also reviewing all of my current patient’s charts, they do all also show that my auto-signature has been changed to incorrectly reflect that,” a pause, and she gropes for her tablet one-handed. “I’m am looking at it right now, actually. And you do know that it means, with the change in the system of my name, that I am currently operating outside my medical license, which we can’t have happen, unless we want to open up the hospital to a raft of malpractice lawsuits at best, isn’t that right?”
Listening to whatever Brian has to say in response, it doesn’t seem like it’s what she wants, “Yes, but at the same time, I’m not about to put myself and my medical career, let alone the department and hospital at risk of that kind of liability. And not that I want to speak for our Chief Attending, but I don’t think she would want that to happen either. Especially since it’s been getting busier and busier down here in the ED today.”
Samira actually rolls her eyes at whatever he says to that, “Well if you could help me get that rectified at your earliest convenience, I’d really appreciate it. As I cannot currently provide patient care, our wait times in the department are only going to get even longer, which I know the Board of Directors are really looking to find ways to curtail, especially the avoidable ones. I am also going to have to pass on all of my current patient load until I am able to sign off on treatments under my current legal name, which has not changed despite my recent nuptials.”
“Yes, of course. I completely understand that there was a mistake made,” Samira says like she’s biting her tongue on what she really wants to say, which is probably something along the lines of because you fucked it up, Brian.
“I’m going to double check and make sure that we did fill out all the paperwork correctly too. I’ll follow up on this in an email, and I will be copying Dr. Al-Hashimi, along with Diana Mason, just so everyone’s on the same page with what’s going on down here. Yes? Well, of course I will. Oh, no, it’s my pleasure, Brian. Yes. Of course. Thank you so much Brian. I really appreciate your help in getting this rectified as soon as you’re able.”
Samira hangs up with another emphatic press of the End Call button, and shoves the Spectralink back in her scrub pocket with a muttered, “Fucking asshole.”
Victoria knows her eyes are wide as she gapes, because like, holy shit, and finally, Samira seems to realize she’s gotten quite the amount attention from everyone else at Central.
“Hello?” Samira squares her shoulders, putting her attending hat back on. “Don’t you all have patients to see?”
“Well, clearly, you don’t, Doctor Recent Nuptials,” Joy drawls.
The glare Samira favors Joy with is quickly replaced with a neutral line of her mouth at Dana’s pointed, “Samira,” she draws out, clearly amused. “Sounds like the cat’s out of the bag.”
Samira flaps her hands out at her sides, “Okay, fine. Yes, Dr. Abbot and I got married. Happy now?”
“Dude, what the fuck?” Victoria blurts, then claps her hands over her mouth. “Um, I mean--we, just, well, we all thought you didn’t even know you had a thing for him,” Victoria flaps her hands in wordless request for an explanation.
Samira’s jaw drops, and then she shakes herself out of it and rolls her eyes, “I’m not that oblivious,” she mutters, while also explaining nothing.
Somehow, Victoria smothers a snort, because, well, she totally kinda is, “Well, you’re going to tell us how this all happened, right?”
“Well, what? We’re in the middle of shift and no one has time to sit around and gossip, especially when I can’t even see my own patients. Javadi, please keep an eye on Mr. Cavender in Six, and follow up with ortho, see if you can find out when they plan to set and cast Mr. Jackson’s ankle. Joy? Take over with Miss Paisleigh in Pedes, and then grab Dr. Robby and ask him for a hand with Ms. Alvarez in Twenty. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to catch Dr. Al and update her on what’s going on. Dana, do you know where she is right now?”
Dana points Samira to the south wing of the ED, and she turns to go when Student Doctor Lincoln, the MS3 doing a six-week ro through the ED and has been around for all of three days, pipes up, “But why wouldn’t you want to take your husband’s last name?”
“Because Jack Abbot didn’t go through medical school twice!” Samira snaps, then remembers who she’s talking to. “And we’re in the twenty-twenties and a woman doesn’t need to change her last name when she gets married. And I’m honoring my father through my career. Thank you for asking,” she says, and then stalks off, probably to send that strongly worded email.
Victoria stifles a laugh behind her palm, locking eyes with an equally amused Perlah. It’s a good thing her mother wasn’t down in the ED when he asked that. She would have fully ripped him a new asshole.
And unlike some other tall, curly haired med students who have rotated through the ED who shall not be named, Lincoln’s not that bad. A little scatterbrained and seems to have forgotten it’s not nineteen twenty-nine or something, but he’s got spirit.
—
After seeing Ms. Alvarez in Twenty and sending her up to CT, followed by ten minutes in the only storage unit down in the ED that locks to breathe through a panic attack, plus getting the labs back on one of his own patients, it takes Robby another hour before he is able to step away and track Samira down to the break room after the, well, call it a spectacle, at the Hub.
He has a spare second to check his phone on the way in, and finds an email from Samira waiting in his inbox, sent about forty minutes ago. Based on the gossip flowing from all the nurses, it must be her copying him in on that email to the head of HR, a courtesy, even though he’s not the ED Chief anymore.
He doesn’t waste time reading it, not when he can already assume what’s inside thanks to the blow-by-blow retelling he got from Joy, who is extremely smug and must have some stake in the betting Abbot-Mohan board he, even now, can’t wrap his head around and chooses not to think about.
So, it’s likely a sentence-by-sentence rundown of the conversation she had with Brian Donnelley during their meeting before shift, another one for their phone call, and the preview shows attachments that probably feature circles and highlights over the sections Samira filled out about what name she plans to continue practicing medicine under.
She is nothing if not meticulous.
He spots her in the otherwise empty break room, her phone pressed to her ear, but the look on her face says it’s not with someone causing her ire as much as Donnelley clearly has, which—Robby doesn’t deal with him much, especially once he became chief and would just email Diana directly, but he always does seem a bit—misogynistic, at best.
A few feet away from the open doorway and he slows down, can just barely hear her over the din of the ED when she says, “…and I told you I knew he wasn’t paying attention to me at all when I said I wasn’t changing my name.”
He takes another step closer, sees the ring on her finger that wasn’t present this morning during rounds, a forest green silicone band.
“So, yeah,” she presses her left hand over her forehead. “Everyone down here knows, and everybody who doesn’t will probably hear by the time you come in for your shift. I already sent an email following up with Brian and Diana with you CC’d. Just, yeah. Call me when you wake up. Hopefully I’ll be allowed to practice medicine under my legal name by then.”
Samira glances at him out of the corner of her eye, acknowledging his presence, but her shoulders are tense as she turns her gaze to the magnet-covered refrigerator in front of her, “Love you. Bye.”
She hangs up, slips her phone into her pocket as takes the final step into the room, “So,” Robby draws out as he leans his back against the wall next to the door. “That’s some news.”
He’s careful with his words around her, has been ever since he came back from his forced sabbatical that did not include a motorcycle trip up to Alberta, and ended with passing on the responsibilities dumped on him after Adamson died to Dr. Al-Hashimi.
Now they’re technically on the same step in the hierarchy, a decision he had little to do with, but he’s been impressed with her work so far. They’re not close, certainly not the ways they were during the early days of her residency, but they’ve settled on a professional detente that’s worked, well, decently since she joined the faculty.
He can’t help but wonder how much Jack had to do with it, but—is not going to go down that path.
Samira mirrors him, leaning against the counter. Her hands grip the shitty formica hard enough her knuckles go white, so she’s clearly still a little riled up, “Jack and I were going to tell you, tonight at handoff,” she says, calm but insistent, like she remembers how much he still dislikes things being kept from him in his ED, even if it’s not his anymore. “You were at the top of our list after HR.”
They—she more than Jack, most likely—wanted the protection of the hospital’s sanctioning of their relationship before they took it to him.
Robby dips his head in an even nod, “When did all this happen?”
“Um, Tuesday, actually. We picked up the paperwork, found a quiet corner at the Phipps. Just a quick thing, we went to lunch after.”
He never thought of her as someone who would want the big wedding, nor does he think much of what she gets up to outside of the hospital, but Jack’s already been-there-done-that, so it figures that they’d do something quick, under the radar.
There is still a societal expectation to express interest.
“Got any pictures?”
Samira takes a moment, clearly to debate if she wants to or not, before retrieving her phone from her pocket, unlocking it while Robby steps toward her, and she hands it to him, “There’s a bunch, you can swipe through, if you want.”
The first picture is of her and Jack together, forehead to forehead and while she carries a bouquet of red and white flowers between them. Jack’s wearing the suit Robby’s seen him wear to almost every non-black tie hospital event, no tie and the collar of his white button-down open to expose his throat, while Samira’s wearing a short red dress with pretty embroidery and fluttery sleeves. He almost arches a brow at the bold color choice, before he distantly remembers what traditional wedding colors people lean to in India. The smiles on both their faces are incandescent.
He swipes through, the unknown photographer who commandeered her phone capturing their first kiss, followed by another of Emery Walsh looking like she’s in the middle of cracking a joke as she stands between them, apparently their officiant. Knowing her, he can only assume whatever she was saying was about Jack.
Back and back he goes, through pictures of Jack and Samira together, of them with Jack’s family. There’s one of them walking hand in hand through the Phipps’ gardens with Jack’s niece Alice clinging to his side with her arms and legs, cradled in his arm, another of Samira taking a selfie with Jack’s oldest niece, Gracie, and another picture with Gracie and her younger bothers and sisters. Swiping again, he passes a picture of her smiling while Jack’s oldest sister, Erin, touches up her hair, another of them together with his younger sister Amelia, and then his brows arch at the pictures of Samira with members of Nora’s family, her niece Lola and Lola’s three younger brothers.
He gets to the end of the pictures when he accidentally swipes all the way to a screenshotted journal article, and—
“Your mom didn’t come?” He asks as he hands the phone back.
“Amma is,” Samira looks away, takes a deep, slow breath, counting the seconds out before she looks back to him. “Still traveling. We’re going to take her and Omar to dinner the next time she’s stateside.”
He knows, by the look on her face, that she’s waiting for him to throw her mommy issues right back in her face, which—was far from one of his best moments that day, let alone far from one of his best moments with her over her last two years of her residency.
It feels like a cliche when he talks about it with his therapist, but nearly dying was a terrible but great way to for him to see just how far gone he’d been in the years since the pandemic, just how much he pushed down, tried to pretend wasn’t weighing on him, and the way he lashed out at anyone who made him feel like he was looking in a mirror.
Samira especially.
A few weeks after he got out of the hospital, but before he went back to work, they agreed to clear the air about, well, everything they’d gone through during her residency. He’d told her it could be on her turf, with her choice in mediator, and somehow they ended up in Jack’s living room while Samira rightfully tore him a new one and aired her many, many grievances about him.
Jack sat on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table the entire time, annotating a case report.
He probably should have figured out, back then, that there was something going on between them.
“How long have you two been-”
“Less than a year. We just—we didn’t want to wait.”
He does some math in his head, feels weird about what that means, “Please tell me you didn’t get together on the Fourth.”
Samira snorts, rolls her eyes, “Not even close. Even if either of us were at all inclined to have any kind of patriotic anniversary, which we absolutely are not, Jack had other things to focus on, that day.”
Right, when he almost died.
Jack didn’t leave his room on the sixth floor for a week.
“It was after,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate any further on when, he’ll probably never know, not unless he asks Jack and Jack’s willing to loop him in. “We just wanted to keep things quiet as long as we could, until the optics could be a little less-” She cuts off, with a shrug, but Robby knows what she means.
Less like she was sleeping her way through her residency.
“I’m glad for you both,” he says, though if the look on her face is anything to go by, he’s not sure she entirely believes him.
He is though, glad. They deserve to be happy, and if that’s together, then they should be.
“Will you—will you let us do something to celebrate you two?”
Samira’s eyes go wide in surprise, like she didn’t think he’d ever want that, and he reminds himself for maybe the millionth time that he has given her no reason to expect his support, professionally, let alone personally.
“You guys,” Robby breaks off. “You deserve to be celebrated, Samira.”
She slumps back against the counter, deflating just a bit, “Thank you, Robby.”
—
When it comes to the hospital, Samira’s well thought out plans rarely come to fruition in the way she expects.
Honestly, at this point, she should have seen this coming, but the plan this time was so simple it felt foolproof.
Late last week, she talked to Dr. Al about coming in a couple hours late to her Thursday shift, so she could bring Jack breakfast once he badged out of his overnight, and they could have a meal on the roof before heading downstairs to meet with HR at what non-shift workers define as first thing.
They’d go through the usual song and dance about appropriate behavior in the workplace between spouses in the same department, promise to never ever ever have sex in an on call room—look, they got handsy in one once, after successfully stabilizing all nine victims of a nasty highway pileup, but also decided that what HR didn’t know wouldn’t kill them—and then Samira would go downstairs to start her shift while Jack went home to sleep.
At the end of shift, Jack would return for handoff and they would pull Robby aside and break the news of their elopement, and then it wouldn’t matter who else found out and when. People could just know, and Samira could get back to focusing on her job, or something.
But, of course, Brian Donnelley had to go and fuck it all up.
Doctor Samira Abbot, come the fuck on.
(Not that it doesn’t sound kind of nice, sharing Jack’s name. Dr. Mohan-Abbot, well, that’s a title she could happily go by. She’ll probably end up using it socially, but—there’s no way she can erase her father’s name completely, not after all he did for her, how his life, his loss, paved the way to where she is now. Plus, it really would be such a headache to get her medical licenses changed with a new last name that it’s just not worth it.)
To give Brian the tiniest, infinitesimal, amount of credit that he truly does not deserve because this mess was all his fault in the first place, Samira does end up cleared to work under her own name later that afternoon, but it’s after too many hours of hands-off supervision and dragging Dr. Al-Hashimi away from her much-needed admin day to cover for her when a four-car accident caused by a malfunctioning streetlight flooded the ED with patients in the middle of the lunch rush.
Now, the day shift is finally coming to its end, and Samira can almost pretend that the entire department hasn’t been whispering about her all day long, and especially when there’s even a whiff of a moment of downtime.
While she usually charts at one of the workstations by the Hub, today she’s in the corner that Whitaker usually stakes out because he’s at the least risk of being accosted by some kind of bodily secretion. She’s close enough to be only seconds away in case of an emergency, but out of sight which—it’s too much to hope for out of mind, but at least people aren’t rushing at her every five minutes for details about her and Jack’s elopement.
People are dying in here. Time and a place, seriously.
Maybe they should have some kind of casual—thing. Not a reception, that’s the absolute last thing Samira needs to have heaped on her plate. But maybe a casual get-together or something. Robby claimed he wanted to do something on the ED’s behalf. He can plan it.
It’s not something she needs—Amma wasn’t even at her wedding and it was still one of the best days of her life.
A flicker of black in the corner of her eye draws her attention to an approaching—yep, here comes the night shift.
But it’s not her husband—he’s around here somewhere, it’s gotten to the point that she can pretty much pick up on his general presence when they’re both in the department, which is something she can never, ever tell anyone in this hospital.
They’d never let her live it down.
Trinity Santos, endlessly smug, sidles up to her workstation instead, “Well, well,” she holds her hands out at her sides, ever the performer. “Have I heard a story about you today!”
“I am sure you have,” Samira drawls, turning back to her last charts of the day.
It’s too much to hope that Trinity would back off, start in on her shift a few minutes early or something, because she settles against the wall on the other side of her computer, the fingers of one hand drumming on her opposite bicep.
“Do you need something, Doctor Santos?”
Her face goes from smug to put-upon grumpiness, “Oh come on Dr. Abbot. This is the most interesting thing that’s happened in the ED in foreverrrrrrr. Time to cough up the goods.”
“Do not call me that,” she hisses, clicking save on the patient’s chart before Epic can do anything stupid like blank out all her notes.
Samira meets Trinity’s eye, finds hers narrowed at her, “What?”
Trinity shifts forward, sticks out a finger and pokes at Samira’s collarbone until she jerks back, “You’ve been wearing a new necklace for a while, but you don’t wear jewelry in the ED.”
“Trying something new, maybe?”
“Oh yeah,” she snorts. “Something totally new that the old man got you, perhaps?”
“Are you really not going to let this go?”
“Samira,” Trinity steps forward, leans over Samira’s computer monitor. “You eloped with Doctor Abbot and no one knew you knew you had feelings for him-”
“Why do people keep saying that?”
“You can’t just pretend this isn’t a big deal.”
Samira grips the desk, takes a slow, steadying breath, “Of course it’s a big deal,” she sighs again, reaches for the thin gold chain tucked under her undershirt.
Trinity is right, she doesn’t wear jewelry when she’s on shift—there’s so much risk of it being broken or stolen or lost, but Jack found her a long gold chain that she can easily tuck away so it won’t get in the way if she has to do chest compressions, keep hidden and more or less clean.
And on it—
“Ho-ho-holy shit Samira! That is a rock!”
The center diamond is a fair bit bigger than she expected, when Jack mentioned he’d found her ring—Samira’s sure most of the ED staff wouldn’t enjoy the story of how they decided to get engaged, considering how pragmatic it was. They were at his house, he’d asked if she wanted to get married, she’d asked if he really wanted to get married again, and he’d said, yes, of course, with her, and that was really that.
But the ring is just so pretty and she loves looking at it. Yes, she has a band to wear when she’s working that she likes—it’s Jack’s favorite color and he loves seeing her in it—but the ring, he picked it for her, because he loves her.
There’s not much that she’s been given in her life by anyone, just because they love her.
Let alone something completely impractical like a diamond engagement ring.
“Girl you really know how to pick-em,” Trinity says, holding the ring on her palm. “He sure put all that overtime to good use.”
Jack Abbot’s bank account is not a perk to their relationship.
Jack Abbot’s bank account is not a perk to their relationship.
Jack Abbot’s bank account is not a perk to their relationship.
“Thank you,” Samira says instead, taking the ring back and dropping it under her shirt where it thumps against her breastbone.
“So, time to spill the rest. How’d he propose, did he get down on one knee—how does that work with the, you know, the leg thing, and also-”
“What’s it going to take for you to stop pestering my wife, Dr. Santos?”
It takes everything in her not to throw herself at Jack the moment she senses his approach from the other side of the ED, and Samira’s heart does that fluttering thing that she’s still not convinced aren’t palpitations when he calls her wife.
Trinity tilts her head to consider the question, “I get the lead on all the major traumas tonight?”
Finally reaching Samira’s side, but keeping the same amount of professional space they always keep between them, Jack snorts, “Keep dreaming, Reboa,” he flaps a hand at her. “Now get outta here. Pick up a patient or two before we round.”
She smirks, but does as asked, leaving them more or less alone in their corner of the ED.
Jack shifts, but doesn’t edge any closer to her than he would before their news spilled out to their colleagues, “Hi honey,” he drawls, exaggerated in a way he never does at home. “How was your day?”
Samira snorts, “Insufferable.”
“Yeah, well, they’ll get over it.”
Glancing around him, Samira counts three nurses, two lab techs and one Parker Ellis eyeing them with amusement, and she very much doubts that’s going to happen any time soon. She glares, but no one looks away, and she shifts back so Jack’s broad body blocks her from their view, “You talk to Robby yet?”
“Yeah, he said something about you okaying a shindig? He’s happy for us.”
She still can’t really wrap her head around that.
Jack picks up on it immediately, “You believe him, right?”
Samira hits save one more time and logs out of Epic, gets to her feet so she doesn’t have to crane her neck to look at him, “I believe you.”
A look flashes across Jack’s face for just a second, and Samira knows he’s got a lot of complicated feelings about Robby and what happened last year, his relationship with Robby, her relationship with Robby, and how all their relationships will change in light of their marriage.
She gives him a look back, just a little quirk of her mouth, and Jack nods once, decisively. They’ll talk about it later, when he’s not about to start twelve hours of Friday-eve chaos, “Come on,” he tilts his head. “Let me walk you out.”
Samira doesn’t ask if he has time to—that’s just asking the Universe to send in a trauma—and lets him accompany her to the locker room to grab her bag, which he immediately slips from her hand and carries for her to the stairwell.
The look they get from everyone in the ED, a mix of day staff and night staff, are pretty much the same she’s had all day, which will be fun for Jack to put up with all night tonight, and he knows that, if the snort sounding from him is anything to go by.
When the door closes behind them, Samira turns toward the staircase to head up to the breezeway that connects the hospital to the faculty parking deck, but Jack’s hand wraps around her wrist, stalling her. Looking up at him, she arches a brow, and Jack smirks back, tugs her around to the corner under the stairs where the security camera can’t catch, “Pretty sure we were just lectured about not doing things like this,” Samira laughs as Jack wraps his arms around her waist, one hand sliding under her scrub top and the t-shirt under it, while her hands end up sliding up his back.
“If Donnelley didn’t want us to have a moment on hospital property before I go work and you go home, then he should have fucked with your plans,” Jack says, so reasonable, before leaning down and pressing his lips to hers.
She kisses back, but they’re both not stupid enough to send this into making-out territory when they can still be happened upon, and they did get lectured not even ten hours ago about literally not doing this exact thing. When she pulls away, he doesn’t let her go far, and she drops her forehead to his collarbone, “Been waiting to do that all day,” he murmurs, presses another kiss to the crown of her head.
“Missed you too,” she says back, curling her fingers into his scrub top before flattening her hands and smoothing over his traps to get rid of any telltale wrinkles. “I should let you get back before the rumor mill lights up even more than it already is.”
“I promise, they’ll get over it soon,” he insists.
She snorts, leans back to look him in the eye, “You are such an optimist sometimes.”
“Only with you, baby,” he tugs her in to press one last quick peck to her mouth. “All right, off you go.”
—
Four Hours Later
Ellis sidles up next to Jack at the Central, nudges his arm with her elbow, “Hey Doc, why does the board say J. Mohan is treating all your patients?”
Jack looks up at the board, then back down to his tablet, “Oh, for fucks-”
He sighs, scrubs a palm over his face, “I gotta go send an email.”