Work Text:
Mel doesn’t usually make cookies. Becca liked cupcakes more, so they made cupcakes together. But Becca was at Adam’s house, and Mel saw a rocky road cookie recipe on TikTok and fell in love with the idea. She mixed the dry ingredients, used a hand mixer to cream the butter and sugars. Baking was one of Mel’s favorite winter activities - she found the precise measurement and the working with her hands comforting and reminiscent of practicing medicine.
Mel baked twenty-four cookies and brought them into work. She arranged them in neat rows in a foil pan she brought into the staff lounge. She thought about leaving a sticky note saying Rocky Road Cookies! From Mel, with a smiley face or something, but couldn’t find a piece of paper.
“Incoming trauma. Who’s free?”
“Dr. King, anyone seen Dr. King?” Dana called her name. “I need her for an incoming trauma, two MVC victims, four minutes out.”
Mel ran into the hallway and proceeded to have the worst Monday ever.
A pair of sisters came in from the ambulance bay on gurneys. Mel took the older sister, who was ambulatory and alert, and Dr. Robby, Langdon and a medical student took the younger, more critical sister, who was surrounded by EMTs, nurses and doctors, into Trauma One.
The girl, who looked to be in her late teens or early twenties, had long, dark hair. Her skin was shiny from sweat. Princess put an arm around her and guided her into an empty room.
One of the EMTs that she didn’t know stopped Mel on her way into the room. “Hey, are you going in to take care of the older sister?”
“Mm-hmm.” She nodded and softly smiled to try to be professional.
“Damn. When we got there, she was hysterical, crying, screaming that it should have been her, that she’d die if her sister died,” he said. Mel’s chest squeezed. She thought of Becca. She tried to not think about Becca, so she could focus on her patient, which just made her think about Becca more. “She’s on a crazy amount of Ativan right now,” he joked. “We loaded her up.”
“Can you give me a rough estimate in milligrams of ‘loaded’?” she raised an eyebrow. Despite this being a tough case for her, she did want to know for the sake of her patient. To take the best care of her possible on the worst day of her life. He confirmed the exact dosage. Mel silently thanked the universe that Langdon wasn’t here to hear that exchange. Not that she doubted his ability to separate his personal struggles from his work - she just didn’t want to trigger him or do anything that could throw him off his game and shake his confidence, and he really needed to keep building his confidence right now.
Mel knocked and entered the exam room and asked the girl what her name was. She was in shock, but had no visible injuries except scrapes, bruises and a bloody nose. “Hi, I’m Dr. King. I’m going to help take care of you.” She nodded silently, which Mel understood as consent to continue.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Mel asked while she began setting up an ultrasound.
The patients were rear-ended by an elderly driver that lost control of their vehicle on a slippery side street. The younger sister was behind the wheel and took the worst of the hit.
“We just need to get a few scans to confirm you don’t have any internal injuries, but you should be able to be discharged later tonight. Does that sound okay with you?”
She silently nodded. “Thank you,” she choked out.
“Is there someone we can call to come sit with you? Are your parents close by?” The patient’s face turned from blank to panic. She curled her hands into fists.
“Our mom, um, passed away last year.” Mel’s heart sank. “And our dad was never really in the picture.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Mel paused the exam. She felt like she was talking to an alternate version of herself.
“I can’t- I can’t live without my sister.” Her eyes welled up with tears again. “I need her. I know I’m the big sister but she’s been mine my whole life and I’m hers and we’ve always done everything together. It’s just the two of us.” Mel felt a pit in her stomach.
“Listen, the best doctors in this hospital are working on your sister right now. Dr. Langdon and Dr. Robby are my mentors and they are doing everything they possibly can to help her. I promise.” She nodded, tears falling down her face.
Mel added a psych referral to the patient’s chart to help her manage the safe tapering off the benzos and get trauma-informed therapy, and scheduled a follow-up with the PCP to check progress on both. She cleaned up and bandaged her patient’s scrapes and cuts and cleared her of internal bleeding or neurological injury and asked Dana to move her to an empty quiet room somewhere so she could recover while she waited for her sister to be out of surgery.
“Okay, kid. I got her. You’re way overdue for your lunch, you should take fifteen.”
“It’s okay, I can keep working,” Mel replied. Dana put her hands on her hips.
“King. Fifteen. Now.”
“Okay, got it,” Mel nodded and headed to the lounge. She knew better than to argue with Dana. Everyone did. On her walk back she remembered how much she couldn’t wait to have a rocky road cookie. Until she opened the door, beelined to the kitchenette and saw the empty tray where just a few hours ago there’d been a dozen cookies. Her eyes started watering. And once she started crying, the fear she felt for that older sister came rushing out, and she couldn’t stop. The lounge was empty, so she just let herself cry. Opening the floodgates, so to speak, felt good, in a way. She sank down into a chair and her eyes burned and watered and she took off her glasses to rub them and she realized her glasses were already smudged. Her face in her hands, she let it all go.
And then the door opened. It was Dr. Langdon, looking disheveled and dejected. Panting, she wiped the tears from her cheeks with the bottom of her scrub top and straightened her posture and started to ask “what’s the status of—”
He crossed the room to her. “Mel, what’s wrong?” He got close to her and crouched down to meet her eyes and tried to hide how much it hurt his back by holding his lower spine with one hand while stabilizing himself on the ground with the other.
“The sister. What’s the status of the younger sister?” Before she could finish asking, she realized if Langdon was in the lounge right now, it was likely that…
“She didn’t make it,” he shook his head. “Massive intracranial hemorrhage, which Ellis identified and was prepping for surgery, but she coded before we could get her upstairs. The med student ran the resuscitation for an hour.” The world stopped.
Mel’s heart broke. She started sobbing, and buried her face in her hands again, embarrassed to have Langdon see her like this. She was at work, this was unprofessional, she needed to focus and get back to her patients that needed her to be a rock, be perfect, be their doctor. She was devastated for her patient. She was alone now. Both parents and her sister, gone. If anything ever happened to Mel or Becca, the other would be alone. Forever. Mel was hyperventilating. Langdon moved to sit next to her, wincing at the awkward seating arrangement putting pressure on his lower back. He put an arm around her and tapped at her wrist to try to get her to let him take her hand. She acquiesced and he held one of her hands with both of his. Mel still had her head turned - she didn’t want him seeing her cry, and he didn’t push her to say anything or look at him. She probably didn’t look very cute right now. He massaged her hand silently and interlocked their fingers. She smiled a little. Her crush was holding her hand. Despite how shitty life felt right now, the boy she liked was holding her hand. And she was a girl that couldn’t ignore that.
And then - “She’s a donor. We need to go talk to her sister and see if the parents are here yet.” Mel thought her aorta might be dissecting. She took their joined hands and pressed them against her chest.
Mel couldn’t remember how long she cried, and when she couldn’t cry any more, when there was nothing left, she said, voice hoarse and low, “I’m sorry that I’m upset, it’s unprofessional that it’s the sisters again, I’m so-”
“No, no, no, no,” Langdon hushed her. “It’s okay, baby.” That must be what he calls his kids to comfort them when they cried, she thought. This was so embarrassing, acting like a child in front of him. But she couldn’t care. His words felt warm in her chest. Right now she was sad and just wanted to not be alone. She nodded and settled into his hold on her. She wiped her cheeks again. “Let’s try to get a deep breath in, okay?” She nodded and he wrapped his arms around her holding her together. “Good, good job, sweetheart.” She melted into him and slowly tried to steady her breath, but her heart couldn’t stop racing. She adored Langdon so much. He was so good to her. She couldn’t believe he was being so nice. They counted in their heads, four, seven, eight. Breaths in sync. Four, seven, eight. He rubbed her back in slow circles. His hand was so warm. So were her cheeks, she realized, and smiled a little.
When Mel was breathing more normally, he broke the silence. “Listen, I have a present for you.” She broke away from their hug to look him in the eye. He rubbed the top of her arms, one last intoxicating touch, and stood up.
“A present?”
“Uh-huh.” He nodded, and told her to wait while he fetched it from his locker. Folded in a bunch of napkins (“folded” being a generous term for someone that used no less than a half dozen crumpled napkins to wrap it up), her Rocky Road cookie. Mel’s jaw dropped and she nearly felt her eyes welling up again. She reached for the cookie like it was the One Ring, a holy relic. She smiled, just a little, and it opened up the whole sky. Langdon smiled.
“I ate the second-to-last cookie, and no one ever wants to be the one to take the last cookie, anyway, and I really wanted to make sure you had one, so I took it. I didn’t know if you wanted to save the container so that’s why I left the tray out.” A couple months ago, she’d made a tray of brownies without saving one for herself, and they were gone within the hour Mel spent with her first patients, and she admitted to Langdon how devastated she was she didn’t get to taste her own dang brownies. He remembered. He’d seen her. He always saw her. She took a bite and the dark chocolate and marshmallow pulled her from total despair. She ate the cookie quietly and as slowly as possible to enjoy the taste. He played with the end of her braid.
“Thank you,” she said, and
“Thank you for making these kickass cookies.”
“And thank you, for, you know, taking care of me again.”
“You’re always taking care of other people. I’m honored to have the opportunity to do it for you.” Her heart filled with warmth. He twirled her hair around his finger again, with purpose this time, and her stomach jumped. “Listen, when you’re ready, we’ll go out there, do the shitty things we need to do to help our patients today, survive the next couple hours, then I will drive you home.”
“Oh, I’m okay, I don’t need a ride.”
“Yes, you do,” he insisted.
“I have a car in the garage, remember?”
“The weather conditions are still dangerous out there. They could get worse. And I have a truck. It’s bigger, sturdier. Safer.” She nodded. Who was she to deny herself more time with Langdon? The coworker-turned-friend she wanted to be with all the time? “I will sleep better if I know you got home okay.” She dropped her nose further into her chest, embarrassed by how excited she was - and how relieved she wouldn’t have to get home alone tonight. She could stop fearing for her safety for a little because he was taking care of her. The best doctor she knew. “Please don’t let me worry. Help me sleep better, Mel,” he pouted and said with a bit of the teasing energy that always made her melt.
“I mean, it would be the right thing to do, like, um, it would be safer,” she gave in, sounding like she was asking a question. He squeezed her shoulder, thanking her. Mel prepared herself emotionally for a bit longer in the breakroom, then joined Langdon to break the news to the older sister. Neither of them will be able to forget the guttural noise of her cry when she found out. Mel thought she might be sick when she heard it, until Langdon discreetly laid a hand on her back. For just a moment - just long enough to say, I know, I’m here.
Dana took it easy on them for assignments the rest of the shift. Mel ordered IV antibiotics and set a dislocated shoulder. Langdon sutured a finger and removed macaroni from a child’s ear. They handed off to Ellis and Mohan and finished up their charting in silence.
“Ready?” Langdon approached Mel and asked, backpack slung over one shoulder, navy t-shirt filled out with lots of chest, lots of man, lots of Langdon. She thought about what he’d look like with no shirt on, what it’d feel like to lie her head on his chest. She shook her head to get the image out. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was her very close friend that she was maybe in love with. But there was no way Mel and Langdon could ever be together. A relationship with a subordinate would be a risk for his already-probationary career and a threat to his sobriety and maybe even his relationship with his ex-wife and kids. She refused to be a problem for him like that. Better to just lay low and keep it all in. Keep things the same, just be normal about it. She laughed at herself - she’d never been normal about anything her whole life.
They drove home in relative quiet. The rain hammered against the windows loudly and a soft rock radio station played so quietly it was barely audible. They were both enjoying the silence. They didn’t want to speak or think about the things they’d seen that day. They wished they could forget them entirely.
“Why’d you offer me a ride home?”
“I didn’t like the idea of you driving home alone when you were this upset.”
“Is Becca home tonight?”
“No, she’s at the independent living facility most nights these days. Only when we have a sleepover night.”
“Hmm.” She couldn’t tell what he meant by that. She looked down at her hands.
“Abby has the kids this week, so if you’re not doing anything, and you maybe want to hang out for a while longer, we could?”
“Yes,” Mel said, perhaps a bit too quickly. She was thrilled about spending more time with him. More, more, more.
“Great, do you want to grab something, or make dinner? Have anything good?” She made her cute thinking face where she scrunched one eye shut and tensed up her whole cheek and nose. He liked seeing that face when she was running through permutations of symptoms to identify a patient’s possible diagnoses and checking her hypotheses with clever questions. He told all the interns this year to pay close attention to and study Dr. King’s decision making process if they wanted to be a better doctor. She gave turn-by-turn directions to her apartment on the drive. He loved following her lead. He parked his truck in her parking spot - the parking spot she was assigned by her apartment complex despite her insistence she didn’t need one because she didn’t have a car- and insisted on carrying her bag inside.
Mel showed him around the kitchen and some ingredients she had in her cabinet and fridge, but nothing sounded good. She was about to give up when he opened her freezer and held up the holy grail - a Costco-sized bag of dinosaur chicken nuggets. She nodded and was so relieved she sat down on the couch and threw her head back in exhaustion.
“I need a shower,” she murmured to encourage herself, than remembered Langdon was in her apartment. Making her chicken nuggets.
“Want to do that while you think about what movie we should watch?” Langdon was a little nervous suggesting he stay longer, hoping he hadn’t overstepped. Excitement bubbled up in Mel’s neck and hands - tingling energy.
“Yes, please, thank you,” she scurried off to the bathroom and scrubbed the day away with bar soap and lavender body wash, shaved, moisturized, then tucked herself into her favorite pajamas - a matching set that felt cloud soft and light on her skin. She tended to run hot during the night and found the spaghetti strap top and shorts to facilitate uninterrupted sleep. She emerged from her room to find Langdon hovering over a pair of paper plates (she had paper plates?) on the counter, loaded up with ketchup, honey mustard, and ranch - “I figured if you had them in your fridge, you like ‘em?” She nodded. He even got the memo to not put the dips next to each other to prevent them from contaminating the others and throwing off the ratios or ruin one of her nuggets if she hadn’t liked one of them. The rain continued heavily outside - it sounded like bullets landing on a tin roof. They caught flashes of lightning in the distance in some windows. They were about halfway through Legally Blonde when the TV screen went black and all the lights in the house cut out.
“Shit, the power.”
“Yeah,” Mel agreed, when a burst of thunder made her jump. He reacted instinctively to catch her as if she was flinching from an injury, but just barely missed her skin.
“Don’t worry. Neither of us have anywhere to be,” he reassured her. Mel nodded.
“And does Becca’s living community have safety procedures?” Mel nodded again.
“And you’ve reviewed those safety procedures, and concluded you felt comfortable with the level of protection and confidence in your sister to make safe choices?” Mel smiled. It was like he could read her mind. “Great. So we’re good here.” He patted her on the shoulder. It felt like fire to the touch. But she didn’t move away. She never moved away, when it was Langdon. He wasn’t like other people. She wondered what her brain meant by all of that.
“Let’s light a couple candles, if you have them?” Mel made an affirmative noise and shuffled into the kitchen, retrieving the safety lighter and a vanilla scented candle. Langdon took them from her, set up the candle on the coffee table, and lit both wicks on the first try.
“Do you… want to do anything else? Play cards? Board game? Read a book?” Right, what were they going to do now? It’s not like he was going to leave right now. Not in a storm like this. “Got any of those here?”
“Do I have...?” Mel turned and looked at the seven-foot-tall, overfilled Ikea bookshelf in her living room. She loved books. He smirked. “Joke,” she pointed at him, closed her eyes and nodded. When she opened her eyes, he was beaming. His eyes looked so warm. Mel yawned. “I think I will fall asleep in the middle of a book, but you can read anything you like.” She gestured to the shelf and he got up from the couch to take a look. He put his hands on his hips and squinted at the various titles.
“The Hunger Games! I loved that one in high school.”
“Me too,” Mel agreed. “I was Katniss for Halloween more than once.”
“That checks out.” He laughed and picked up her braid, twirling it around. “You’ve already got the hair.” Her heart skipped a beat. When he dropped her hair, his hand found her back. It was warm and comforting and it only lasted a moment.
“Project Hail Mary, loved that movie.” He shook his head. “Book looks too long.”
“Oh my god.” He reached for the top shelf, all the way to the left. “1776. This is the best.”
“You’ve read it?”
“I’m obsessed with the Revolutionary War. This might be my favorite book of all time. Great taste, Mel. You’ve got great taste.” He started flipping through. “I have to re-read this. Now.” He rushed back to the couch and Mel followed him, feeling the same glee she felt in the moment he told her to STEMI with him, and plopped on the opposite side. She always liked to follow where he was going. He propped his legs up - he was wearing socks with bananas on them - and started reading. She settled in and sat with bent knees touching his feet.He looked up and winked at her, making her heart fall into her pelvis, then continued reading. Mel wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. She pushed back her cuticles. She hadn’t chosen a book of her own, been so distracted by the fact that she’d get to sit and watch Langdon read. Her eyes fluttered shut after a few minutes - it had been a long shift and it was extra dark without the TV or the big lamp on and she was just so tired. She drifted off and wasn’t sure for how long.
“Mel?” She heard a familiar voice, extra quiet and gentle, and felt a hand scratching through her hair. It felt like she was lifted out of sleep, not dropped out of sleep, like her morning alarm did at five-thirty a.m. every day. She blinked and rose up slowly.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he pushed her shoulder back into the couch and she relaxed back into the pillows. “I’m going to head out.”
“What? No.” She was awake now and sat up too quickly for him to react. “Hear that?” she whispered and pointed to the ceiling. “It’s still raining. It’s late. What time is it? How long have you been up?” She looked around trying to glimpse the clock on the oven or microwave, which were still out.
“It’s almost two.”
“It’s not safe for you to drive back,” she insisted. Langdon swallowed.
“Are you sure?” He folded his arms. She nodded. “Okay, I’ll stay.” She physically relaxed her shoulders and smiled. He took a couple of the pillows on the couch and tossed them to the end. “Do you have an extra blanket?”
“Yes, and a nicer pillow, too I think.” She went to her room to get one of the bigger ones off of her bed. Then she remembered - “Langdon, wouldn’t the couch be hard on your back? You should really sleep in my bed.” There’s a risk he’d feel shitty tomorrow if he curled up and twisted his back in an uncomfortable angle the whole night on a thin-cushioned box. It would hurt to pick things up; it would slow him down. But he rolled his eyes.
“Mel, I’m not going to prevent you from sleeping in your own bed. Taking your bed from you? That’d be terrible.”
“I… didn’t say you would be keeping me from my bed,” she looked at her hands and said. Maybe she wasn’t being clear.
“You want to share your bed?”
“Sharing is caring,” she shrugged her shoulders and said, which made him laugh. “I have a queen. There’s enough space. And it would make me feel better to know I didn’t exacerbate the risk of you re-injuring yourself.” He nodded and smiled at the floor. “Please don’t make me worry,” she reminded him of the card he’d played earlier.
“Okay,” he conceded. She showed him to the drawer in the bathroom she kept for when she had overnight guests - extra toothbrushes, a fresh bar of soap, and makeup remover (Mel rarely wore makeup herself - it took so long to scrub off her sensitive skin and was more messy during a trauma than they was worth).
“I have a double XL t-shirt if you want it?” Mel offered. It was the biggest, lightest, softest, loosest item of clothing she owned, a store brand men’s undershirt, for days when she was overstimulated. Becca had a few like it, and Mel copied her. Sometimes on a hot summer day when she was sweating all day running traumas and the AC just wasn’t doing it in her apartment, all her clothes felt itchy and this shirt was the easiest thing to wear.
He threw her a thumbs up, toothbrush in his mouth. Mel looked at how his jaw was dropped, foam running down his chin. He wiped it, making eye contact with her for a beat. She felt it in her gut and hurried away to find the shirt.
“I don’t want to put my outside jeans in your bed, is it ok if I-” Mel froze. He gestured towards his legs. She nodded. She definitely did not want his outside jeans in her bed. So she was going to see his legs. Oh god, she was going to see his underwear. Her heart was racing and her ears felt hot. It was normal to be nervous, right? This was a strange situation being undressed with your colleague, it’s normal to be nervous during strange and unfamiliar situations. This was just unfamiliar. Not dangerous. It was Langdon. He was safe. He was always safe. She handed him the t-shirt, folded in a Marie Kondo rectangle. She turned her back, too nervous to watch him put it on. Her shirt. She would barely see it, it was so dark in here.
She gave him permission to share her bed, her safe space. She felt suddenly vulnerable and wrinkled her nose. “Mel, are you sure you’re okay with this?” he tilted his head and asked with the same directness he asked medical students questions with. Of course he’d noticed her mini reaction. She examined her heart. Of course she was okay with this. She wanted him so badly. In every way.
“Mhm. Yes.”
“Okay. Thank you for having me over. I don’t know if I said that.”
“You’re welcome. I mean, it’s for safety reasons.” It’s all because the trigger to that anxiety attack he saw me have was an MVC caused by this weather, she thought.
“I completely agree.”
“I would’ve been irresponsible to drive.”
“I wouldn’t say that. The Dr. King I know is very responsible.” She shrugged and looked at the floor. “But I would say she struggles to accept help.” She felt warm.
“Well, anyway, I really don’t like to drive in the rain. Or the snow. So thank you. ” He smiled.
“Anytime, Mel,” he said softly. His hair was ruffled like he’d run his hand through it weird.
After washing her face and stumbling through her night routine in the dark, she pulled out her hairtie and ran her fingers through her braid, undoing it, then tilting her head back and shaking it all out. She removed her glasses to get a better comb-through, and when she put them back on, Langdon was staring at her, mouth slightly open. She didn’t know why, and pretended not to notice. He’d never seen her with her hair down. And it was lit only by moonlight and a single warm candle that smelled like coziness and safety and Mel. In her bedroom they were settling into something that felt soft, but at the same time, and in a much more real way than physical, firm.
They crawled under the covers, on opposite sides of the bed, Mel facing away from the window on her side, Langdon on his back.
They were on opposite sides of the bed when they fell asleep, so Mel wasn’t sure why, when she woke up before her alarm went off as she usually did, her head was delicately on Langdon’s chest, his arm resting on a pillow and draped over her shoulder, hand on her upper arm. She had a leg on top of his. Her entire body was enveloped into his. She was so screwed. She wouldn’t be able to extricate herself to get ready for work without him noticing and waking up. She was also freaking out a little because she was all tangled up in Dr. Frank Langdon. And it was nice. It was nice to feel his warm skin on hers. And she leaned into it and enjoyed the warmth and comfort. It activated something primal in her - the feeling of being protected by something bigger and stronger. Craving that feeling was an evolutionary advantage. And that’s her heart rate was gradually increasing - not because she had a crush. She couldn’t have a crush. This was the closest Mel was ever going to get to having him. He was her coworker, he already had a family. But she just wanted it to last a few more minutes, so she closed her eyes and snuggled in a bit closer. It had been so, so long since she’d gotten to hold somebody like this. She wasn’t really a friend hugger, her parents were dead, Becca hated hugs, and every touch at work was a clinical, healing and sterile one. So she pretty much never made physical contact with anyone. If she accidentally bumped into a stranger in public, the unfamiliarity made her nauseated. Mel checked the time on her phone - fifteen minutes before her alarm - and saw a text from Dana.
Hey kid. No need to come in today. Thanks for working a double yesterday. McKay is trading with you because you were covering for her in the morning.
Really? Are you sure? I can come in if it’s busy, I feel totally fine. I don’t mind. Mel peeled at a hangnail.
Really. Stay home and REST.
I will I promise thank you
Langdon already had the day off. Mel turned off her alarm (okay, she just set it for 4 hours later because she had an obsessive fear she could someday be so tired she could accidentally sleep through an entire day if she hadn’t set an alarm) and plugged her phone back in on the nightstand as gently as she could without disturbing the boy in her bed. Mel had a boy in her bed. Touching her. She could hardly believe it. And the fact that it was Dr. Frank Langdon, her mentor, close friend, holding her, who was very recently divorced and very much not hers. She closed her eyes and dozed back to sleep, feeling safe and calm. That was the irony of her relationship with Frank - he was high-energy, short-attention-span, quick-thinking, and spontaneous, and she still felt safer with him than anyone else. She loved keeping up with him in the ER. His presence calmed her down because she knew he always had an eye on her - he was her lifeline, her ally, her backstop. As Mel drifted back to sleep, she thought she might have felt his hand scratching through her hair.
Morning light gently woke them again. Mel’s face was buried in Langdon’s chest, his arm around her. She never wanted to move, ever.
“Good morning,” Mel said when she was ready to admit that she was awake. He inhaled deeply and stretched, then (to her delight) settled back into position holding her. She hummed in appreciation.
“You okay?” he asked, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear.
“How’s your back?” She looked worried. Her pupils were blown. He shifted his weight to assess himself.
“Good, actually. Like, better than usual.” His fingertips found her temples and he stroked them for a moment, then moved onto her hair. The movement of her body closer to him showed him he was doing something right. “I like your bed.”
“I like that you like my bed,” she said. He pursed his lips. Had she said something weird?
He kissed the top of her head, so lightly she could barely tell if it was real. She didn’t know if any of this was real.
Mel realized the living room fan was on. “We have power again.”
“Mm,” he agreed.
“I should text Becca.”
“I can take you to pick her up.”
“No, it’s okay, you don’t have to do that.”
“You don’t have a car. It’s in the hospital parking garage.” She’d forgotten about that. She squeezed her eyes shut and wrinkled her nose. This was inconvenient. This was a problem. She was going to have to ask him for a ride or call an Uber or…
“Mel.”
“Yeah?”
“I can hear you thinking. Don’t worry. You call Becca, we’ll go pick her up and get a cup of coffee and then we can pick up your car.”
“Oh, I have coffee here, do you want coffee?”
“I want you to text Becca.”
“Okay,” she said like she was in pain, and reached over her for her phone. They exchanged a few messages and Langdon waited patiently. She was enjoying basking in all of the Langdon she was getting right now. This was the longest time they’d ever spent together away from the hospital. And she didn’t want it to end.
“Becca said she’ll be ready by the time we get over there and she wants to get Starbucks.”
“Starbucks it is. You ready?”
“Mm-hmm.”
They got out of bed, moving carefully and slowly with their bodies impaired by sleep inertia and soreness from the long day before. But they both knew this day - a day that began this sweet, this safe - was going to be a lot better than yesterday.