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It happened slowly, Jack thinks. Like a frog that doesn’t know better when the pot of water begins to boil, he let his feelings for one Dr. Samira Mohan simmer quietly in the background of night shifts and hand-offs and sutures and motor vehicle accidents and heart attacks and he never stopped to think that he needed to snap out of it until it was too late, and he was pretty sure the idea of her had wedged itself so tightly into some previously-empty space at the center of his heart that there was no removing it without shattering the whole thing.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. He had told her that once. He chuckles as he remembers it now. So smooth, there hadn’t been a single bump in the road to warn him of what was happening. So fast he couldn’t pump the brakes even if he wanted to.
It’s hitting him all at once as he sits on a bench, a beer from Mateo’s backpack in his hand that he’s really only nursing for the social aspect; he was covering a day shift for Robby, and it had been a long day. Along with him and Mateo, Javadi, Langdon and Whittaker had joined them to blow off a little steam.
And, of course, Dr. Mohan. She’d taken her hair down once they left the hospital, maybe to keep the chill in the breeze off of her shoulders. She could have taken his sweatshirt, if she was cold. He had another one in his backpack. She could have taken both if she needed them. The cold wouldn’t bother him nearly as much.
But, he supposed, he was selfishly glad she didn’t. He so rarely got to see her hair down like this. It was usually tucked away in a tidy bun or ponytail, out of the way for intricate procedures, not important enough to fuss over when patient lives were at stake. But now, with the hospital left behind them (though truly only about 300 feet away from where they sat in the park), her curls were out in full force; the muggy evening air was causing them to puff, which he knew from having 4 sisters and a dead wife was actually a “bad” thing, but he found it enchanting, felt his fingers itching to reach out and get lost in the maze of them, to scrape against her scalp and pull her in close and—
Goddamnit, Abbot. Get a hold of yourself.
“I’m gonna start heading home,” Dr. Mohan’s voice cuts through everything else. It always does, doesn’t it? He watches as she rises from where she’d been sitting with Javadi on the curb, crushing her now-empty beer can in the palm of her hand and tossing it in a nearby garbage can.
The way she’s phrased her goodbye strikes him, and he asks a question without thinking about if he should or not. “Did you walk here?” He asks.
“Yeah. I don’t live far. I like to walk when it’s nice out,” she tells him.
“It was nice out when you got here at 7am. It’s late, now,” he points out, trying to keep the chiding tone out of his voice. What right did he have to chide?
“Yeah, well. I wasn’t anticipating a freeway pileup at shift change,” she relents.
“I’ll drive you home,” Jack says, rising from the bench. He would have offered to walk with her, but to her point, they’d had a long day, and his prosthesis was killing him.
“Oh, that’s really not–” Dr. Mohan starts, but he’s undeterred.
“I wasn’t asking,” he says. “Too late to walk home,” he decides. “Anyone else need a ride?” He asks, twirling his keys around on his index finger and looking particularly at Javadi and Whitaker. They were no longer truly the kids of the Pitt, but it still felt like it sometimes, even with new med students and younger residents.
They all assure him that they drove, and he turns back towards Dr. Mohan, throwing his backpack over one shoulder and leading him back towards the hospital, where his car was in the garage.
“I appreciate this, Dr. Abbot, but it’s really not necessary. I’m less than a mile from the hospital,” Dr. Mohan says, all business, although there’s maybe a little blush around the edges as she climbs into his jeep.
“Well then, you’re less than a mile out of my way, and even if it is a small diversion, I’d rather sacrifice ten minutes now than get home and worry if you made it okay,” he says, unlocking his phone and passing it over to her. “Go ahead and put your address in,” he tells her, his voice a rough whisper; there was no need to be any louder in the enclosed space of the car.
She reaches for the phone and their fingers brush. He stops himself from reaching back out for her once she’s got his phone in front of her face. Barely a second of contact and yet it was imprinted on his skin with such certainty.
Once the GPS has started going, Dr. Mohan slips his phone into the mount he has clipped to the passenger-side air vent, and he brings a hand around to the back of her seat to back out of his spot and get them both headed home.
“You did good work today, Dr. Mohan,” he says quietly as he drives. “It got pretty chaotic in there, but your careful workup is the only reason we were able to catch the internal bleed on Mr. Michaels,” he praises. It was one of her many saves that evening. There were plenty of shining moments he could have used to highlight her excellence as a physician. “Attending is so close, I’m sure you can almost taste it.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she replies, dry without being bitter, looking out the window as the city passes by. “But, thank you. I’m glad you were there.”
“You hardly needed me,” he insists.
“It’s a lot easier, when you’re around,” she says. “We make a good team,” she adds, and she sounds almost hesitant.
“We do,” Jack quickly confirms, wanting to bolster her confidence. “But it’s not me that makes you so good at what you do.”
“Maybe just your willingness to see it,” she says, and he can tell he wasn’t really supposed to hear the comment.
“Robby giving you a hard time?” He asks, matching her tone, not wanting to disturb the sanctity of the moment by speaking at anything above a gravelly sort of grumble.
“I’m just not as convinced as you are that this hospital actually wants me as an attending,” she says, feeling foolish for even having spoken it aloud.
“We’d be happy to have you on the night shift. You could switch, if it would be a better fit.”
No she couldn’t, he thinks. Because he’s not sure he’d survive it if she did.
“No, I couldn’t,” she says, and his eyes flick up to her. He hadn’t said that aloud, had he? Her apartment building comes into view, and he pulls up to the curb.
She smiles when she catches his eye, a shy, testing sort of thing. “We wouldn’t survive it, would we?” She asks, leaning in towards him, until she can smell the cologne he’d pressed into the juncture of his neck and shoulder this morning.
Maybe Jack Abbot was a weak man. But her hair was so, so close, now. So he brings a hand up, creeping past the nape of her neck, tanging his fingers into the curls at the back of her head and using the leverage to tilt her face up, so she’s looking at him, all honey-brown eyes and a sly smile he’s spent too much time staring at to still, somehow, get lost in.
She closes her eyes, starts leaning in towards his lips, and suddenly, Jack Abbot realizes that the water in the pot is at a violent, rolling boil.
“We— we can’t,” he manages to wrench the words out from deep within him, though each consonant feels like a puncture wound.
“Right,” Dr. Mohan says, sitting back in her seat. “God, right. I’m so sorry,” she says, shame and bile mixing with the beer she’d had on an empty stomach and threatening to reveal themselves all over the floor of Dr. Abbot’s car.
“Not because I don’t want to,” he says, taking a chance and reaching for her hand. It was showing his cards too much, maybe. But he could tell she was feeling foolish and he couldn’t let her think it was one sided. He squeezes, once, and then drops her hand. Because he shouldn’t, really.
“You… do want to,” Dr. Mohan repeats.
“I have wanted to,” he corrects. “But you’re still a resident for six more months. And I may not be your attending, but I am an attending, and it’s not right,” he says.
“So…” she trails off.
“So… I’ve wanted you for far longer than six months. I can wait,” he tells her.
They orbit each other like planets, crossing paths rarely but somehow always aware of the other’s gravitational pull. He’s either brave or a coward for avoiding her during shift changes. But he’s not avoiding her, not exactly. You can’t avoid someone you’re so painfully attuned to. He just… keeps an eye out. Looks to see if her shoulders are slumping more than usual, tries to ascertain from a distance if there are lines on her face which suggest she’s not sleeping well. He can tell by the way she speaks to Ellis and Shen if the day shift has been particularly hard on her.
A month later, when he’s coming up on two hours into his night shift, he can’t bring himself to ignore her anymore. She’s just left one of the trauma bays, but the patient she’d been speaking with was stable, just awaiting a bed. There was no reason for her to stay, unless she needed to catch up on charting, which she didn’t seem to be doing now. She was at a computer, yes, but she was slumped over it; not getting any charting done at all.
He approaches her slowly, coming up from behind. “Dr. Mohan,” he says quietly, trying not to scare her, but she startles anyhow, turning to face him. “Isn’t it about time you headed home?” He asks her.
His gravelly soft voice scrapes over her insides, and it takes her a moment to realize she needs to respond. Though that could just as easily be her exhaustion, she justifies. “No,” she answers him. “I’m covering for Dr. Toomarian tonight. You didn’t see the schedule?”
“I didn’t,” Dr. Abbot answers, realizing he had been too distracted by the presence of her to realize one of his usual team members was missing. Jesus. “Though, Robby usually tells me when he has one of mine on his schedule,” he makes an excuse, and he’s not sure which one of them it’s for.
“He didn’t,” Dr. Mohan answers. “I’m on a double. I’ll pull it together, I just need another cup of coffee,” she says, starting to stand up. She needs distance from him, from his broad chest and his soothing voice and his piercing eyes looking down at her.
“Dr. Mohan, wait a second,” he calls after her, and she stops in her tracks. She should have guessed it wouldn’t be that easy, but she had hopes.
He crosses to her in three quick steps. “When’d you last eat?” He asks, dropping his voice again, even lower now that they aren’t in the privacy of the staff hub.
She has to actually think about it to give him an answer. “Probably… 2 or 3? I had some fruit. Then a downed pedi-cab came in. Nobody was that hurt but there was like 8 of them all at once and I got busy,” she explains.
“You need to eat, and then you need to get some rest in an on-call room,” he says firmly, resisting the urge to take her by the shoulders and put her back in a chair. Not professional. Not attending behavior, he reminds himself.
“Dr. Abbot, I’m fine,” she says back, her tone equally resistant. “It’s hardly 10pm. I don’t need to rest yet,” she points out. She wasn’t so arrogant to think that she’d make it through a 24-hour shift without a little time in the on-call room, but she didn’t need to be babied.
“Maybe not, but I’d rather you rest when you can get it, not when we’re swamped and you need it,” he points out, tilting his chin down to look into her brown eyes, defiant and slowly softening when she realizes he’s right. He can’t help the smirk that crosses his face at that. “Everybody’s stable, Dr. Mohan,” he says, looking around the various exam rooms, knowing she’s following his gaze and coming to the same conclusion. “This is the opportunity. Go. And eat something, please,” he admits, the last word coming out more choked than he’d like. He doesn’t like the thought of her hungry, or tired, or otherwise ignoring what she needs in order to take care of everyone else who crosses through these doors. He clears his throat and speaks again, so his brief display doesn't hang in the air. “You won’t miss anything good. I’ll page you,” he promises with a wink.
That seems to be the wrong thing, because she stalks off, though he notes that she goes in the direction of the cafeteria, so hopefully she’s at least listening and finding something to eat. He’s tempted to go after her, but he’s been married once before, and learned a few lessons; he throws himself into the shift instead. He’ll find her later, once she’s had some time to cool off.
He takes about an hour to get settled, acquainting himself with the patients currently in the ER, and what they were waiting for to either be discharged or sent upstairs; lab results, meds from the pharmacy, a bed. Once that’s done, he walks a med student through stitching up a pretty nasty leg gash from some yard work. He delays all that he can, until he decides it’s time to go find her, and probably eat crow.
She’s sleeping when he slowly opens the on-call door. Something he’s too scared to name pulls at his chest when he sees her, curled up with her knees to her chest, back to the door. Her hair is down again, her clip placed next to the pillow.
“Sa–” he starts, and stops himself. “Dr. Mohan,” he says quietly, not wanting to startle her awake. She doesn’t stir right away, so he crouches closer to the bunk and tries again. “Dr. Mohan,” he tries again, and she rouses this time, turning towards him, though she doesn’t sit up just yet. His lips pull, but he holds himself together. She looks good like this, cozy and comfortable and warm. “We’re starting to get busy up there. Wanted you to have a bit of time to come back to the world of the living before you needed to intubate anybody,” he explains, handing her the cup of coffee he’d brought down for her in a paper cup.
“You can’t do that again,” she tells him, looking up at him with those brown eyes, still soft and a little glassy from sleep, and he’s about to apologize for doing it, even though he has no clue what she’s talking about.
“Wake you up when you’re on shift?” He asks, sitting at the end of the mattress. Crouching in his prosthetic wasn’t very comfortable.
“Send me off for a snack and a rest,” she corrects, starting to sit up and taking the coffee cup from him. “I appreciate that you care, but it’s not appropriate,” she tells him, finding it within her to be a bit more serious once she’s not laying down.
“I would have sent any doctor down here in a lull if they were working a double,” he assures her. “I am not treating you with kid gloves because I think you need it.” I am treating you like spun glass because I think you deserve it, he mentally corrects, but knows better than to speak it aloud.
“I don’t need it,” she agrees.
“I know that,” he says softly, placing a hand over hers on the mattress. “Making sure you eat was… probably crossing a line,” he admits, curling his thumb under her fingers.
“It can’t happen again,” she turns to look at him.
“It will,” he shrugs, hoping he can charm her into ending this argument with a cheeky little smile. “Seems better to just not lie to you. I care about you. That will happen again.”
Once they survive that first night shift working together, they’re a little more assured that they can keep it professional; they have friendly chats at hand-offs. About once a day, Jack pulls out his phone to text her, and decides better of it. But they cross paths, and neither one avoids the other, and for the next three months and two weeks, not that Jack is counting, it would have to be enough.
Assuming she still wanted him then, Jack thinks to himself as he pulls up to the hospital one morning, squinting against the sunlight. He’s covering for Al-Hashimi, and he’s not used to driving in when it’s so bright.
It’s even brighter in the E.R.; Dr. Mohan is there.
“Dr. Abbot,” She smiles when she sees him. “Wasn’t expecting you this morning,” she says.
“Dr. Al-Hashimi is chaperoning a field trip for her son,” he explains.
“That’s nice,” Dr. Mohan smiles as she works on a chart.
“It is nice,” he agrees, smiling down at her. Nice to get to share a shift with her, that is.
The shift is one of those rare ones that feels like a breath of fresh air. They’re busy, they always are, but things are just going right. He can’t explain it, but he’s sure that the fact that Dr. Mohan is there is a part of it.
“S’it always this slow on day shift?” He teases her at one point as he crosses her path to put in some lab orders.
“Don’t jinx it,” she warns him, but she’s smiling.
“I’m serious. You’re wasting away the valuable years of your education here. At least on night shift, you’ll learn something,” he says, submitting the order and flashing a cheeky grin in her direction.
“If you’re that bored, you can come watch me stitch up a 78-year-old female who cut herself on a mandolin,” she offers sarcastically.
“Yeah, okay. I’ll watch,” he says, starting to follow her.
“You can’t be serious,” Dr. Mohan scoffs.
“It’s my job to make sure you’re properly trained,” he shrugs.
“I’ve been doing stitches since I was an MS3,” she rolls her eyes.
“You could be backsliding,” he quips just because he knows it’ll get a rise out of her,
taking her by the shoulder and turning her around before she could snap out a protest, placing a hand at the small of the back for the briefest of moments before she opens the curtain to the patient bay they’re entering.
“Hi, Mrs. Ropel,” Dr. Mohan smiles. “Now that my colleague, Dr. Whitaker, has numbed you up and stopped the bleeding, I’m just gonna give you a few quick stitches to make sure everything heals nicely,” she explains as she settles in a chair next to her.
“Okay. And who’s this?” Mrs. Ropel asks, looking Jack up and down. She’s just old enough not to conceal that she likes what he sees.
“This is Dr. Abbot. He’s just here to check my work, but rest assured, I have done this many times. You’re in good hands,” Dr. Mohan answers, looking in Mrs. Ropel’s eyes to make sure the older woman is assured before she begins.
The stitches are quick and painless, and Jack nods in approval as Dr. Mohan disposes of the suture kit.
“Thank you, deary. I’m good as new,” Mrs. Ropel smiles.
“My pleasure. Come back if the area gets red, or swollen, or if anything else changes. Do you have any questions?” Dr. Mohan asks.
“Just one, if you don’t mind,” she admits.
“Of course.”
“How long have the two of you been together?” the patient asks, looking between the two doctors.
“Oh, we’re not—” Dr. Mohan starts, but Mrs. Ropel waves her off.
“That’s fine, you don’t have to tell me,” she says with a smile. “But if you’re supposed to be watching her technique,” Mrs. Ropel says to Dr. Abbot. “Next time, you may want to keep your eyes on her hands, instead of making googly eyes at her face.”
“Dana,” Samira asks, peering over the top of the nurses station, where the charge nurse sits behind a desk putting in an order. “Have you seen Dr. Abbot? Robby asked me to get hand-off from him, but I haven’t been able to find him,” she explains.
“Last I saw him, he was in Trauma 2, dealing with a woman who came in from the scene of a pretty nasty MVC. Maybe he went up to surgery?” Dana suggests, though she’s just throwing out a wild guess.
“I checked there. The patient didn’t make it to surgery,” Dr. Mohan says without any sort of sentimentality. It wasn’t cold, it was just a reality of working in the E.D. Sometimes you did everything right, but the patient didn’t arrive in time, or the injuries were too severe, or you just didn’t have the tools or the staffing or— well, the list went on.
Dana sighs. “You didn’t hear this from me, but sometimes when Dr. Abbot has a tough loss, he heads up to the roof for some air,” she tells Dr. Mohan.
Samira cocks her head. It had been a younger woman, yes– but the medics had warned them before the trauma arrived that her chances were low, at least from what she read in the chart. “What was it that—”
“That’s his story to tell, kiddo,” Dana cuts her off. “And since I’m already meddling, I think it would be good for him if you went up there and talked to him,” she says conspiratorily, like she knows something she shouldn’t. But Dr. Abbot wouldn’t have told Dana about the two of them, Samira was sure of it. And besides. Was there even really anything to tell?
“I’ll be back down in a minute,” she says, heading towards the elevators.
He’s exactly where Dana said he’d be, his arms braced against the railing as he looks out towards the sunrise over the city. She approaches quietly, not quite sure how she’ll find him, but he must sense her, because he speaks without even turning around.
“Who told you I’d be up here?” He calls.
“Doesn’t matter,” Dr. Mohan says dryly, coming up to stand next to him, neither one of them looking at the other.
Dana or Robby, he thinks. Probably Dana.
Neither one of them says anything for a moment, and once again, Dr. Samira Mohan can’t help but feel incredibly, woefully, wholly inadequate. How many times had he been a fountain of unending positivity for her in her worst moments, and now he needed that in return and her mind was completely blank, her throat going dry at the thought of whatever might be troubling him.
“Sometimes it catches us off guard,” she manages to choke out. “The ones that touch us,” she admits, feeling foolish for having opened her mouth at all.
He huffs out a little laugh, and her cheeks burn. “There’s a lot catching me off guard these days,” he admits.
She says nothing, just waits him out. Her patience is rewarded when he straightens up.
“I was married, once,” he tells her. “I asked Caroline to marry me when we were twenty years old, which seems crazy now, having lived more than 20 years since I asked her,” he huffs out. He’s smiling at the memory, which she hopes is a good sign. “She was by my side for twelve years’ worth of deployments. Begged me not to go on the last 3, but I just… needed to. I didn’t know why. Still don’t. But I needed to be there, and while I was there, I needed to know that she was at home waiting for me. Which is incredibly selfish,” he shakes his head.
“She was just…” he starts, and stops. “She had this golden blonde hair and she lit up a room like she was the sun, and she had the best laugh,” he says, and he’s back to smiling. “And seven months after I was finally discharged from the army, she died in a car accident,” he explains.
Dr. Mohan draws in a breath. She’d known, of course, that Dr. Abbot had been married and that his wife had passed– that wasn’t a secret. But no one had ever told her how, and she hadn’t asked.
“The patient today–” she starts.
“We see MVCs all the time,” Jack cuts her off. He knows it’s rude, but if he doesn’t get this all out, he never will, and he knows his therapist would tell him to say it out loud. “And, unfortunately, we lose women all the time who were the same age as my wife, who probably also lit up every room they walked into, who have husbands who love them so much and are so, so bad at showing it,” he points out.
“They only started bothering me when I was looking down at them and instead of trying to push away thoughts of Caroline, I found myself thanking God that it wasn’t you on the gurney.”
“Jack,” she breathes out. She wouldn’t realize it until later, but it’s the first time she’s ever said his first name aloud.
“I haven’t—” he starts and stops again. It’s the least certain she’s ever seen him, and she wants to tell him that it’s okay, that he doesn’t always need to know the answer or have the right words, but she knows that he needs to say what he’s thinking without her interruption, so she just reaches across the railing, curling her hand over his and giving it a squeeze.
“I had the love of my life, I was pretty sure. And I was the love of Caroline’s life,” he says, admitting it with the gravity he knows it deserves, even if he, personally, feels undeserving of it. “And that was enough for me. I never went looking for anything else. I didn’t want anything else. Robby took me out every other week for a year in the hopes that I’d meet somebody, and all I did was drink shitty warm beer. But now…” he sighs again, looking out the horizon, then down into the parking lot. “I’m going to do better. It kills me that I didn’t do better for Caroline. But I also think she’d want me to give it a shot,” he tells her.
“I’m sure she would,” Dr. Mohan says quietly.
“It was supposed to be me,” he huffs out a laugh. “I had been deployed once before we got married, and when you’re 18, it feels like summer camp. It’s the world’s shittiest summer camp, but you’re too young to really know better,” he tells her. He finds he actually likes this, likes talking about himself and his feelings and his past, when it’s with her. “But somewhere between deployments three and four, shit actually got real. And I told her, if anything happened to me that she shouldn’t sit around and waste away because I was gone,” he recalls. “And she said the same to me. It was a passing comment, I don’t know if she even really thought about it before she said it, because it was so obviously supposed to be me,” he nearly rolls his eyes.
“She thought about it,” Dr. Mohan decides. “It’s not the kind of thing you say without thinking about it.”
There were very few days in the E.D that called for celebrating. So when the day shift decided to head out to a bar on a Friday night to celebrate Whitaker’s matching into PTMC, so he’d get to stay on as a resident, Dr. Abbot decided to come out for a beer, even though it was his night off. They were all at the usual seedy dive; Langdon, Robby, Whitaker and McKay were holding down a booth while Mel, Santos and Javadi put their names in for karaoke.
And then there was Mohan; perched at the bar. She’d left the booth, claiming she needed another drink, but it was in front of her now; she was chasing the lime in the cup with her little red cocktail straw. He notices her the second he walks into the bar. The chaos in here isn’t unlike that in the ER, and he finds her there every time.
He sidles in next to her, flagging the bartender casually before he looks down at her. “Getting a round for the others?” He asks.
“Just… taking a beat,” she tells him, not even looking up.
“Tough day?” He asks, dropping his voice as low as he can to still be heard.
She’s going to lie. Because to tell the truth would be unprofessional, and it would open up a can of worms she isn’t prepared to deal with, and because E.R. doctors are supposed to brush it off when they have bad days. But she just… can’t bring herself to do it. She doesn’t have the energy.
“Yeah,” she confesses, the word scraping against the ice in her glass, already half-empty.
“Y’wanna talk about it?” He asks, stepping in even closer, so their shoulders brush. He wants to take her in his hands, hold her in such a way that makes her know deep in her bones how treasured and precious and safe she is with him. But he can’t. Unprofessional, can of worms, et cetera.
“No,” she says firmly, finally looking up from her glass, and it catches him by surprise.
“No?” He asks.
“No. I want to have three or four more drinks and celebrate Whitaker even though I don’t feel capable and forget about today until tomorrow morning, when my headache will be a bigger concern than anything that happened at the hospital the day before,” she says, downing the last of her drink and signaling for another.
“Her drinks on my tab tonight,” Jack says, passing a card over.
“Dr. Abbot–”
“We don’t have to talk about it, but any day that bad has earned a couple drinks courtesy of your attending,” he insists.
“You’re not my attending,” she corrects sharply, but not unkindly. Just like she’s painfully aware of it.
“No, but I’m used to picking up Robby’s slack,” he says with a cheeky grin, which she can’t quite return.
As always, when Dr. Mohan says she’s going to do something, she follows through. She goes back to the table and goes through the motions, smiling at the right moments and cheering when Santos and Javadi sing karaoke. She congratulates Whitaker and only slurs a little. No one notices the way she starts to sway and wobble after her third drink, how her fake laughs come a little slower after the fifth. No one else seems to be able to tell that her smile isn’t reaching her eyes, hasn’t all night. But Jack notices. He notices against his will. He always notices.
He slides out of the booth and comes to her side at the end of the night. She doesn’t need to try and stand up for him to know that she can’t.
“Come on, kid,” he says when everyone is breaking apart for the night. “I’m gonna take you home,” he tells her, a stabilizing hand placed against her waist. He tries not to think too hard about how warm she feels underneath his fingers, spread against the ribbed cotton of her underscrub shirt. It was white and green. With little flowers on it. But he wasn’t thinking about that.
“M’okay. I’ll call an uber,” she tells him.
“Your Uber is here, Dr. Mohan,” he says, a little gruff, but he’s not upset, just doesn’t want to argue here in the bar. The last thing he needs is for this to look like he was forcing her into his jeep.
“You don’t always have to come and rescue me,” she slurs as he helps her into the truck.
“You hardly ever let me,” he counters before shutting the door. He picks the conversation right back up once he’s in the driver’s seat. “I’d do it more, if you’d let me,” he mumbles, more for her than for him. He’s not even sure if she’s listening.
“I can put it in the GPS,” she offers, starting to sit up straight, trying to collect herself.
“I remember where it is,” he tells her gently. “Do you want to tell me what happened today?”
“I fucked up,” she confesses simply.
“We all fuck up. It’s emergency medicine, not the SIM lab,” he reminds her.
“Robby was pissed,” she adds. Even in the midst of her drunkenness, she knows to tread carefully. Robby and Jack were best friends, even if they were polar opposite teachers.
“Robby’s always pissed lately. And that has everything to do with Robby, and nothing to do with you,” he says, gripping the steering wheel more tightly than he means to.
“I have an interview with Gloria about the attending position on day shift next week. And it just feels so dumb and futile because there’s no way that Robby will ever allow me to share a shift with him when he’s not required to be my teacher.”
“So fuck Robby,” Jack barks. The edge in his tone is unlike anything she’s ever heard from him; it sobers her quickly.
“Dr. Abbot, I didn’t mean–”
“No, I’m serious. You’re good at this, Mohan. You’re better than good, you’re the future of emergency medicine, and if this hospital can’t see that, I will write any recommendation letter and make any phone call to a program that’s actually willing to acknowledge how lucky they’d be to have you,” he seethes, and he realizes as he rolls to a stop in front of her apartment building that he’s gotten a bit too passionate. “I’m sorry,” he says, trying to find the composure he’s pretty sure he lost the second she took her hair down an hour ago, parking the car and bringing a hand towards his face.
“No, don’t,” she says, reaching for him instinctively, catching his hand before he can pinch the bridge of his nose.
They both realize what they’ve done once their hands are linked, and they’re both powerless to stop it.
“Don’t apologize,” she says, leaning in towards him, so close he can feel her exhales against his bottom lip. They taste like rum and lime and the tortilla chips he’d made her eat. “Not if you meant it.”
“I did mean it,” he whispers, tilting towards her, letting his eyes fall closed. He had to be dying. He was dying, and this was some sort of hallucination his brain had created to keep him from feeling the pain of whatever was causing his untimely demise, because there was no way that her lips were that close to his.
She brings her free hand to sit over his chest, lets it settle there, feeling the restless thrum of his pulse against her palm. She starts to lean in, and he knows it’s not a hallucination, and he doesn’t care, because she’s pressed her lips against his, and he’s gone. He’s been gone the whole time. This was just the last nail in the coffin.
“Samira,” he breathes into her mouth, bringing one hand up to her jaw and the other to her hair, tilting her into him.
She scrambles to unbuckle the damn seatbelt he’d made her put on, pressing up against the center console to get more leverage, so that she’s positioned over him, leaving her right hand against his chest and bringing the left around to the back of his neck, tangling her hair in the curls at his hairline.
Jack had only had one beer tonight; once he saw Mohan he realized he wanted to be present for her when she was ready to talk. Well, they didn’t end up doing very much talking, he thinks as he moves the hand cupping her face down to her waist, where her top was riding up and there was a sliver of delicious warm skin exposed by her hip bone, where his hand fit perfectly. He let her push him backwards against the headrest of the drivers seat, would let her do just about anything he wanted, he realizes. She climbs over the console, starts to settle against him, and he starts to think maybe he really did die, and he just doesn’t mind.
But then his conscience hits him, and he thinks maybe this is some punishment from hell.
“Samira… He says, pulling away, only a centimeter, because that’s all his heart could really take. “Samira, you’re drunk,” he reminds them both. Him more than her.
“So?” She asks, her eyes glassy when she looks at him, and he hopes to god it’s not the alcohol.
“Just so you know, and before you start to feel self-conscious about it, I want to kill myself for making you stop.”
“So don’t make me stop,” she says, winding both her arms around his neck.
He leans in and presses a closed-mouth, chaste kiss to the corner of her mouth. “I hope that in the morning, you’re just as frustrated with me for stopping as you are right now,” he says. “But just in case you’re not. We should stop before we do something we can’t take back,” he says, and it feels ridiculous to say when she’s still perched in his lap, when his hands are on her hips like they belong there.
“I’m gonna be so mean, when you finally take me out,” she threatens, with the first smile of the night that reaches her eyes. Jack lights up inside. “I’m gonna wear something you won’t be able to stop thinking about taking off. I’m going to order dessert, I’m going to drag it out as long as possible.”
“I look forward to it,” Jack smiles. “Let me walk you up.”
Jack Abbot had always known that Samira Mohan could do anything she put her mind to.
She had her attending interview the next week. And as it turns out, her patient satisfaction scores, which were far and wide above those of her peers in the E.D., mattered more than the opinions of one prickly attending who was about to take a leave of absence anyhow. For her first three months, she’d run the day shift alongside Dr. Al-Hashimi, who had mentored her at the V.A. And with Jack’s encouragement, she was leaving her worries about working alongside Dr. Robby for when he got back.
Samira was making good on other promises too, Jack thought as he looked her up and down where she sat across from him in a private little booth at a sushi bar on the other side of the city, away from the hospital. She was wearing a satiny green slip dress, edged in black lace that he was jealous of, for the way it got to kiss her shoulders and the sun-touched skin of her chest. He could feel the wiry straps of her pumps against the back of his calf from where she had her leg straightened out towards him, and she was currently taking sinfully slow bites of the matcha creme brulee they’d ordered to split and he largely left to her.
“You’re not going to eat dessert?” She asks, looking at him with those honey brown eyes that had owned him for months. They look… content. It’s not something he sees in her often enough. He could get used to it.
“Oh, I plan to have dessert,” he leans in across the table, leering at her. Her hair was down. It was the one request he had made, and he was paying for it now. He can’t help himself; he reaches out, twists one curl around his finger.
“You wanna get out of here?” She asks.
This time, when she kisses him in the car outside her apartment, he doesn’t stop her.