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You hated fourth of July shifts.
They were filled with fireworks injuries, drunk men staring at the space where their fingers used to be, children flushed and trembling, forgotten in the heat by their distracted parents and other heatstroke victims collapsing on sidewalks. It was always the same bunch of disasters.
But this one…
This one was the worst fourth of July since you became a nurse. Louie had died. The word still felt wrong in your mouth, dead, dead, dead. The bed where he should have been had been stripped, disinfected, remade and a new patient had been rolled in within half an hour. The sound of his laugh had been replaced by someone else’s breathing, someone else’s pain. Someone who wasn’t Louie.
The world hadn’t paused to let you grief.
And Langdon came back. You had rehearsed apologies in your head since the beginning of the shift (long before that if you were honest to yourself). I’m sorry Lang. Sorry that you think that our friendship existed until your situation became serious. Sorry I didn’t answer your calls. That I didn’t call back. We were friends. We still are, if you accept. I’m the one who failed you. But when he stood there in front of you, the words refused to surface. There was always a patient waiting, something more urgent than your own guilt.
And as if all of that was not enough, the department had been gifted Oglivie. You were fairly certain that this guy was the incarnation of Satan on earth, sent to test the limits of everyone’s patience and to destroy all of you, Dennis first.
So yes, you fucking hated fourth of July shifts.
And it was only just noon.
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You were halfway through inserting an IV into someone’s arm in the hallway (because of course, there were no beds left) when Robby appeared beside you, waiting for you to finish and standing there, hands in his jacket’s pockets. That never meant anything good. It reminded you too much of the day he told you about the pills in Langdon’s locker. Of the day he told you he was going to leave for three months away on his motorcycle like it was casual and not something that made you and Jack consider slashing the tires.
“What?” you asked, tone clipped, still focused on the vein.
“You’re going to hear this from someone, kid,” he said quietly. “So I’d rather it be me.”
Your stomach dropped before your brain could catch up, a sickening sensation spreading through your body, like his words had pulled all the warmth out of your blood at once. Robby must have seen you pale, because he immediately added:
“Jack’s fine, but…”
Your pulse felt like detonation in your ears. “But what?”
“There was a call from his SWAT team,” Robby said, choosing his words carefully as you finished securing the IV. “Some shots were fired in a house and he brought one of them in. Pretty bad shape but he’s gonna make it.”
“Is he hurt?” you asked, trying to stay controlled, professional.
“Minor. Something near his shoulder, but…he wouldn’t let anyone look at it until his guy was stabilized.”
Of course he didn’t. Of course Jack Abbot fucking didn’t.
Your hands dropped from the patient’s arm, finally turning fully toward your attending.
I want to see him Robby. I need to. I have to make sure he’s okay.
“Where is he?” you questioned instead.
“Trauma five.”
You nodded once, with a muttered “Thanks Robby,” before walking toward there, stripping off the gloves you were still wearing and tossing them into the nearest bin.
You didn’t run. No, worse: you couldn’t run. Running was for codes, meaning that someone was dying. Jack is not coding, Jack is okay, he is fine, that’s what Robby says. That it’s minor. Minor. Fuck, how I hate that word. Minor compared to what? To a body bag?
Your throat tightened as you continued to walk, each step feeling too heavy, like the floor was trying to swallow your legs. You forced your breathing to steady. Inhale. Exhale.
If he were critical, Dana would have made sure the code could be heard by everyone in the hospital. If he were unstable, Princess would have ran up to me. If he were dying…No.
Your hand brushed the wall as you turned the corner towards the room, your fingertips against the cold surface to ground yourself, to confirm that the building was still solid beneath your fingers.
You had to get in there and confirm with your own eyes that he was still breathing and alive, because you couldn’t survive being the one standing in a room and hear Robby say, ‘We did everything we could,’ knowing that Jack’s bed would soon get stripped, disinfected and remade.
You pulled the curtain open and for one brief suspended second, your heart stopped. Not because of what was there, but what could have been there.
It was him. Just him, sitting on the edge of the bed, still entirely dressed up and his hands braced on his knees like he had been waiting, waiting for me? He looked up the second the curtain moved, his hazel eyes locking onto yours.
He is here. Alive. Breathing. He is not being open on a table, not flatlining. I am not gonna see him being zipped into a body bag today.
You stepped inside, closing the curtain behind you, sealing the two of you away from the loud noises of the ER even just for a few minutes.
“Take it off,” you ordered, refusing to let any weakness slip into your voice.
“Hey, sunshine.”
“The vest, the shirt. Don’t make me repeat myself, Jack.”
A faint corner of his mouth twitched despite the circumstances. “Yes, ma’am.”
He reached for the straps first, his movements slowed by the adrenaline leaving his system, the vest ending up on the chair with a heavy thud. Then, he caught the hem of his black shirt and pulled it over his head.
Don’t stare, don’t stare, don’t stare.
His chest was broad, muscles still defined from his years as a soldier and maintained by the whole SWAT ordeal and…fucking tanned, is that what happens when you do the night shift? You get to know what it’s like to feel the sun on your face?
You stepped behind him, checking the aspect of the wound among the lighter scratches. “Don’t move.”
“I wasn’t planning to, specially if you have scalpels nearby. Wouldn’t want to scrape this body.”
You pulled on fresh gloves, rolling your eyes. Up close, you realized that it was shallow: a long red abrasion near the shoulder blade and no blood pouring out of it. That meant no need for stitches, just cleaning, disinfecting, patching and giving a few instructions that Jack would absolutely ignore.
“You’re lucky,” you muttered, pouring saline slowly over the wound, running down his back in thin rivulets and washing away the dried blood.
“So I’ve been told.”
“Funny.”
You focused on the scrape, on dragging the gauze carefully over the torn skin and pressing it down firmly, that’s what I know by heart, to care and to heal, I could do this in my sleep: pressure, clean, protect. if only everything were that simple.
“How’s the officer?” you asked after a moment, forcing your voice to settle into a normal conversation rather than speaking about the abyss of desperation you had spiraled into all the way up to this room.
“Stable,” he replied. “The bullet entered through the neck but I intubated him on scene and I don’t think there’ll be major damage.”
Your fingers paused briefly before resuming. “That’s…that’s good.”
“It is. Officer Hiro is a good man.”
You taped the dressing down carefully, smoothing the edges with your fingertips longer than would be necessary.
“There,” you breathed, stepping back in front of him. “You’ll live.”
That was when the feeling hit you again. The fear. The images of what could have been: the version of this room where he wasn’t sitting on the edge of the bed, the version where you were outside the curtain, listening - or worse, inside it, handing the instruments to Robby, checking the vitals, bringing the defibrillator closer, hearing yourself ask ‘time of death?’ like it wasn’t also yours. The version where you promised everything you had if they would just let him stay, the one where you followed the casket down into Earth because if his body went still, you were certain that something in yours would stop answering too.
He saw it. You didn’t know how, maybe something in your face had shifted or maybe he noticed that you weren’t entirely there, your focus still somewhere past him and the present.
“Hey,” he said softly, but you couldn’t reply.
You were still in that other version of the room, I need another blood bag, clear, we’re losing him, time of death?
His hand came up slowly, fingers wrapping gently around your wrist. “Sunshine.”
That pulled you back enough, your throat trying to swallow a thick ache that wouldn’t quite pass. Without a word, he guided your hand until your palm pressed flat against his chest. Right over his heart, where you felt it immediately: the steady rhythm, the most perfect, fucking stubborn cycle of thuds you ever heard.
He covered your hand with his, keeping them both there, where each beat was dragging you further and further away from the other room, he’s not flatlining, he’s okay, I won’t have to hear silence where his heart should be.
“Still here, okay?” he murmured carefully.
“Don’t…Jack,” you sniffled.
He rose slowly from the edge of the bed, not letting your hand slip from his chest as he stood, leaning forward to rest his forehead gently against yours while his thumb brushed over your knuckles in a repetitive motion. “I’m here,” he said again.
“I know,” you whispered, trying to calm your uneven breaths, to focus on the brush of his breath against your skin and the unmistakable sounds beneath your palms, alive, alive, alive, the word pulsing with each heartbeat.
After a few moments of quiet, he smiled. “I liked this morning.”
You let out a disbelieving breath. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
“I’m very serious,” he replied, pulling back just enough to properly look at you before continuing, softer, “I was in the ambulance and all I could think about was how nice it had been to wake up next to you.”
You blinked at him. “While you were holding pressure on someone’s neck?”
“I can multitask,” he shrugged with the smallest smug smile at the corner of his lips before brushing a loose strand of hair away with the back of his fingers. “And I also thought about last night.”
Heat crept up your cheeks. “Jack.”
“And about…” he murmured, his fingers trailing from your hair to the nape of your neck, his thumb lingering just under your ear, “how I had to keep my shirt on until it was you checking me. Wouldn’t want to explain to Robby how I got those little marks and how his very professional and very sweet nurse is absolutely not that sweet in the sheets.”
Your eyes widened.
He tilted his head slightly, studying the way the redness spread along your neck, his gaze dragging slowing over your face. “But more like…” he continued, voice dropping lower, “a feral cat with very sharp claws.”
You swatted his arm, mortified and glancing toward the curtain. “You’re insufferable!”
“What?” he asked innocently, though the corner of his mouth betrayed him.
“You cannot say things like that in here!” you grumbled.
“Well…you’re the one who started, telling me to take my clothes off the second you walked in.”
“That was on a purely profe-”
Before you could finish your sentence, he leaned in, closing the small space between you, his lips finding yours as his hand moved from your neck to cradle the side of your face, thumb slowly caressing your cheek and silencing the whole ER. You felt the exhale he released into the kiss, almost a sigh as your hand moved from his heartbeat to cling on his shoulder.
When he finally pulled back, he kept his forehead close to yours.
“You were saying?”
You blinked at him, words gone entirely from your tingling lips, like he had just wiped your mind clean.
“That it was…purely professional?” he supplied, his smugness slipping back into his tone now that he seemed to understand that the sadness in your eyes had eased.
“Yes,” you replied, clearing your throat. “Exactly. And…anyone could walk in here.”
You stepped back a little, smoothing down the front of your scrub top while he looked at you, one eyebrow slightly lifted.
“Sunshine.”
“I’m serious,” you insisted, lowering your voice. “We’re not…official to the service. And we,” you gestured vaguely between the two of you, “are not a public spectacle for our colleagues. Between HR who will become a nightmare, Zidan who will start betting pools about how long this lasts and Princess and Perlah sharing it to the whole department before…”
He sat back on the bed, arms folding across his bare chest, looking way too amused as he watched you unravel, which would definitely be easier if he could just put. a shirt. on. seriously, is that too much to ask? there really is no god above or at least none who has mercy on you.
“You can’t just…” you waved your hand, frustrated, “do this in the middle of a trauma bay.”
“Do what?” he asked mildly.
“This!” You gestured again, to his torso.
He glanced down at himself, then back up at you. “Oh.”
“Yes, oh. Put a shirt on!”
“I thought you liked the view,” he smirked. “Isn’t it what you begged for last night?”
You closed your eyes, sighing. “Where is your shirt?”
“Took a spare in my locker. It’s on the chair.”
You turned towards the corner where the vest had been dropped, the spare shirt folded neatly with it.
“You could have put this on when I finished the bandage,” you muttered, grabbing it.
“I was enjoying the lecture.”
You shot him a look over your shoulder, before handing it to him, earning a “Thanks ma’am” as he, careful of the fresh dressing, pulled it over his head.
You gave him a once over, folding your arms, am I…starting to act like him? is that what’s happening? is this how it works? the more time you spend with someone the more you become insufferable like them?
“Better.”
“Disappointed?” he asked lightly.
“Oh immensely, Doctor Abbot,” you replied sarcastically, rolling your eyes okay, no, I’m definitely starting to sound like him, no wonder Dana and Robby are looking at me like I’ve been body-snatched. “How will I survive without the view?”
“I’ll file a complaint to the HR,” he smirked. “What an unacceptable loss of morale from a nurse to an attending.”
“You…” you sighed, stepping closer to adjust the collar of his shirt. “You are a nightmare, you know that?”
“And yet you keep me.”
You inhaled through your nose, trying very hard not to smile. “That is still under review.”
His grin widened as you continued: “Now, stay sit on the bed. Ten minutes. I want to make sure that you don’t get dizzy.”
“Noted.”
“And no more comments about last night in here.”
“Also noted.”
“And keep down the…smirking,” you finished, pointing at his face.
“That one might be more difficult to control.”
“Try.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
You folded your arms, giving him a stern look that most definitely betrayed your fondness, hey you know what? let’s have sex Jack. like…right now, on this gurney, in a room where I thought I’d find you dead. no, I’m not insane, just very grateful that you are alive.
“Good. Now if you don’t mind Doctor Abbot, I have other patients to check on.”
He gave you a slow, exaggerated nod. “Of course. Wouldn’t dream of monopolizing such…invaluable hands.”
You stared at him. “I should be the one complaining to HR.”
He pressed his lips together, though the amusement was still written all over his face.
You turned toward the curtain but paused with your hand on the edge of it, staring at the thin strip of hallway visible through the gap.
“Jack?”
He looked up immediately, all smugness and teasing gone from his voice at the tone of yours. “Yes?”
You didn’t turn fully back around, cause if you did, you were fairly certain that the words would spill out of your mouth without your permission.
“I…” you stopped and tried again. “I wanted you to know that I…”
“Hey.”
The softness in his voice made you finally look at him: he had stood up again and stepped closer, his fingers wrapping delicately around your wrist before lifting it up and pressing a soft kiss to the inside of it. “You don’t need to,” he whispered gently. “We have time, you and I. And you don’t have to tell me today, not if it’s because you were scared, okay?”
You nodded, a quiet, “Okay,” slipping out.
“Now go,” he added, brushing his thumb over your pulse once last time. “Before someone wonders why you’ve been gone this long for a graze on the back of an attending doctor.”
You huffed a breath, pulling the curtain open. “As long as you stay exactly where I left you. Which is on the bed. For still…” you glanced at an imaginary watch on your wrist, “…six more minutes. Five, if you promise to behave.”
“Then it will be six.”