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She hasn’t only learned the shape of him, which is the problem. It would be cleaner, easier to parse if she had only traced the mole on the back of his left thigh with her fingertips, and not also the bookshelves in his study.
If she only knew the twist of his mouth, the exhale of his orgasm against her spine, and not which ones had belonged to his wife, or that he has read The Count of Monte Cristo and battered copies of Dan Brown cover to cover on sleepless nights.
It would be cleaner if their scrubs had just been dumped into the dispenser hours apart after opposing shifts, and not folded neatly on top of each other in his laundry room, smelling of the same kind of clean that she can no longer discern as distinctly his or her own scent.
Samira is still learning how to share herself, hell, she’s still learning that she has a self with wants and needs that exist without overhead fluorescents or metrics to guide her day. She lent voice to insane thought to Mel once, felt that there might be a kinship in what was rattling around in her brain that only the younger woman would understand.
Wouldn’t it be easier, she had asked, if you got patient satisfaction scores from everyone in your life? If there was some kind of way to know if you were doing a good job when you wanted to break through from acquaintances to friends? If the barista actually liked it when you tried to make small talk with them?
Mel understood, Mel agreed, but Mel was better at all of this than she was.
The Fourth had rattled them in similar ways.
Mel’s realization that her entire life revolved around her sister, how desperately lonely it was to be a caregiver with no care reflected back on her.
Samira’s realization that without her plan to return to Jersey, she was a punching bag for a man with a receding hairline and an ever receding grip on his mental state, who had demoralised her and demeaned her in every possible way. She was a doctor in a city she had not explored in any meaningful way in the last three years, she was almost entirely friendless.
Did exchanging journal articles with the nightshift attending count as a friendship?
When she sent him a study from AJEM about the daily average step count of residents versus attendings in emergency departments and he had left a pedometer in her locker accompanied by a note asking if she wanted to run the experiment with him, was that?
Was that the equivalent of two normal people watching a movie together and grabbing a beer to discuss it after?
When he lifted his scrub top to show her the matching pedometer he had clipped to his cargo pants at handover, what was that?
By the end of August Mel had started a spicy book club with Kim and Princess; was going to ‘Trinity’ and ‘Dennis’’ apartment on their shared days off; she had bought hiking boots and joined some rambling club who would carpool to the mountains and walk and talk about trees and whatever else people who love the smell of the outdoors talked about.
By the end of August Samira had let two houseplants die; had picked up more doubles; filled out seventeen fellowship applications stretching from coast to coast; had gone to bed with Jack Abbot, and had kept doing it, because it felt good.
Because the static crackle of a police scanner reminded her that he was broken too, just differently, because long, hard orgasms helped her sleep, because sometimes he looked at her, painfully earnestly, and she burned from the shame of being a person. But it made her feel like a person. So she didn’t stop. And they didn’t talk about it.
She also didn’t tell him that PTMC still felt like a prison, that even without Robby in her ear, the countdown to his return loomed so large on her mind that every night before she slept she ticked off another day in her mental calendar.
His absence only served to remind her of his imminent return, and she did not want to welcome him back, she did not want to pretend he had anything to teach her. She knows shame, she knows loss, she knows that he was never and could never be her mentor.
Jack Abbot doesn’t check his email, it’s common knowledge, not something she licked out of his mouth, so she does not tell him and he does not know. His arm is a heavy weight across her abdomen, it is uncomfortable but she doesn’t shift it, because in eleven days she won’t feel this weight anymore.
In eleven days she will have transferred to UPMC Shadyside to finish out her residency.
- -
Four days left and he knows something, he knows and he’s trying to make her say it. She doesn’t know how he knows, but he has to, because otherwise why would he be pressing an envelope into her hand?
She can feel the card beneath her fingertips, but she can feel something else too. The jagged edges of it. She drops it between them on his dining room table like it has burned her. It lands face down. She speaks without looking up.
“But we’re just, this isn’t, you don’t, I—” Her eyes flicker up, she stops. His eyes are so sad, deep pools of disappointment, of hurt? She did that. The look on his face, it’s utterly despondent, and she caused it, but it doesn’t make any sense. “You can’t because we can’t and I just thought—”
“You thought what?” Jack sounds completely defeated, no bite to his words, she watches as he drags a heavy palm across his jaw, over his mouth, shakes his head gently and waits.
“I don’t know.” Now she’s shaking her head, feels her bottom lip tremble, bites down hard to control the movement, but then her arms are flying across her body, blunt nails digging into the meat of her arms. Holding herself steady, holding everything in, physically trying to restrain her emotions. “Everything is too big, and I’m going too far, and this wasn’t supposed to happen and you don’t need me anymore,” she takes a deep breath. “You should get a clean break.”
“You have no idea, do you?” He asks sadly.
“No idea of what?”
“You should open the envelope Samira,” he implores, the duck of his chin, the stretch of his neck. It happens in her peripheral, she knows the shape of him.
She shakes her head, stares at the offending item.
“Okay, okay, I’ll do it for you.” He untucks the flap and slides out the card inside of it. It’s just one simple white page, handmade, folded in half. It’s blank on the outside, he holds it up to her and opens it like a parent displaying a picturebook to a child. There are only numbers written by his hand.
7896
She squints at them, then meets his eyes, can feel the divot in her brow forming. “Seven Eight Nine Six… is this? Is this the pin number for your credit card? I’m so confused, what is happening right now?” Her voice is emotionless, detached, she knows how it will sound to him, but she simply can’t let anything slip past her guard. Still holding herself together, still pushing down the urge to walk out of his door, out of his life like he should want her to do, and to never come back. She’s abandoning him.
“It’s seven thousand eight hundred and ninety-six,” Jack replies.
“Seven thousand eight hundred and ninety-six whats?”
“Steps.”
“I don’t?—”
“From the front door of the pitt to the ambulance bay at Shadyside. I walked it yesterday, that’s how many steps. It’s just over four miles, Samira, it’s nothing,” she opens her mouth to speak but he places his right hand on her left, still curled around her bicep and slowly lowers it from her body.
She feels the transference of some of the stress in her body move from her chest, flood down her arm and just, dissipate where her fingers curl against his palm.
It’s calming. It’s terrifying. She takes a deep breath, pushes it out as slowly as she can, as calmly, as rationally. “You know, you’ve known.”
“Of course I have,” he huffs out a little amused breath, she’s trying to catch up. He’s so steady, always so steady. Except for when he’s not. He’s shown her some of his cracks, she knows him, she realises, he has let her know him for the last month, for longer.
Jack has trusted her since they stood amongst the carnage of that September day and she performed an insane procedure at his urging.
Jack must have trusted her before that, to know she could do it. He doesn’t just know her body now, how to take it apart, he has pieces of her too. He knows that she can’t sleep with jewellery touching her skin, he knows that she broke her ankle playing field hockey when she was twelve, and that she never returned to the sport after she lost her father.
He knows that she loves pears but hates the skin. He knows the superstitions she pushes against that informed her upbringing, had told him one night, their lips a whisper apart, that it's bad luck to ask a person where they are going when they walk out the door.
“I’m not letting you run away from me, I don’t think you want to run, I think I make you feel good, I think we could be good.” He implores, and she allows him to take her other hand, keeps her eyes focused on the wall behind him as he shifts fully into her space, places her palm against his cheek, fingers entwined, forcing her to look at him, hazel eyes searching for a truth in her own.
Her thumb rests on the hinge of his jaw, his dwarfing on top, warm and calloused. “There’s a key in the envelope.”
‘There is,” Jack nods, she feels his swallow.
Samira closes her eyes, her cheeks flame hot, it’s too intimate. “I thought this was just…”
“It’s not, not for me anyway.”
“But I’m leaving,” she tries again, he doesn’t understand. She has to make him understand.
When he speaks again it is a whisper against her ear. Jack has dropped her left hand and is now cradling the back of her head, pressing her into the crook of his neck. “You’re leaving a job, you’ve got a new one, where you’ll shine, I’m sure of it, you’ll shine so fuckin’ brightly there and I’ll walk the eight thousand steps—”
She pulls back to look at him, “I thought it was seven thousand eight hundr—” He smiles and pulls her to his chest again.
“Give or take baby, but that’s not the point. The point is that I’m not done with you, I’m not done with this, whatever it is, but if you want to be, if this is your way of leaving us all behind for your big shiny future then that’s okay, I’ll be okay, you just have to tell me, I’ll follow your lead.”
“I don't want that, I want, I haven’t ever wanted, I don’t know how to want. And I might still leave, there might be nothing for me in Pittsburgh, I might get a job in… I don’t know? Minnesota or California or Texas and I’ll go, I have to go, Jack, I have to be a doctor, I have to. I’ll be gone, this time next year I’ll be gone and I can’t do this, I can’t do this with you if I have to go, I can’t let myself love you and then have to be gone.” There are tears soaking through the thin fabric of his loveworn UWV t-shirt, she is feeling, and it is terrifying.
Jack bands an arm around her back, sweeps his fingers gently up and down the stretch of her spine, curving slightly as she leans her weight further into his chest. “Do you want to figure it out together?”
She grabs onto him tightly then, throws both arms around his neck, allows herself to sob in earnest now, to sink into his touch, to feel the years in the hairs at the nape of his neck, to stand still in a feeling and allow it to overwhelm her, because she is being caught, she is being held in place with care. “Yeah,” she breathes shakily against his neck, “I do.”