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“So you and me need to have a talk,” Jack said, and Robby immediately felt his shoulders lift toward his ears. Jack usually just launched straight into things, headfirst into the deep end, so the fact that he was prefacing this was concerning.
“Am I going to hate this?”
“Oh, no, trust me, I’m looking forward to this less than you are.”
They were supposed to be having tacos and watching the Pens game. Low stakes, a nice, quiet evening. They’d had a lot of those, over the past couple of years - Jack hadn’t said it out loud, but he’d been babysitting Robby. Robby, for his part, hadn’t minded it overmuch. He liked hanging out with Jack as much and more as he did most other people, and he hadn’t had much interest in going to bars or whatever this past while, especially not after that confrontation about his addictive tendencies with his therapist six months ago.
Man, he really had to stop forgetting just who Jack was. Sure, Jack had been giving him a lot of grace and care, but he was still Jack. He was still an asshole with a terrible, stupid sense of humour. Trust him to have set everything up just right, to have lulled Robby into a false sense of security, just to launch into… Whatever this was going to be.
“Lay it on me,” Robby said, confident that he could do this and not fuck it up too badly. With two and a half years of weekly therapy under his belt, he was sure that he could handle whatever the fuck had Jack looking like he was about to chop off his other foot. Last time Jack had gone all shifty and avoidant like that, he’d… He’d…
Jack had never avoided eye contact like this in all the time Robby had known him.
“What’s troubling you?”
“Been seeing someone.”
Oh.
Well.
That was new.
Jack hadn’t been celibate since Lou died, and that was whatever, Robby wasn’t going to judge anyone for what they did behind closed doors. Thing was, Jack also hadn’t dated since Lou’s death. He’d been barely human for the first year or so, and then he’d plunged head-first into work in a way that would’ve worried Robby more if he’d been paying more attention, probably. Robby couldn’t even imagine how Jack had time to date-
Except he’d been staying away from the hospital on his days off, lately. And he’d used up most of his PTO last year instead of donating it to the residents. Huh. So maybe he had been dating! Maybe he had, and he’d kept it quiet to avoid having a conversation like this with Robby.
He’d ask Cece, except she’d probably block him for asking such a stupid question, and he’d ask Jan, except if Jack had been avoiding him then he’d sure as shit been avoiding Jan.
“Oh yeah? You want to introduce me or something?”
Jack tugged up his pant leg enough to get at his prosthetic, still not looking at Robby. Robby set out their food and had time to go to the fridge and back for some beers before Jack replied.
“Or something.”
Robby checked on Jack’s leg by reflex - a little shadowed by bruising, but nothing too worrying at a glance. Easier to check on his leg than to try and force some eye contact.
“You want to… talk about it?”
“I want to know if you’re going to be cool about this or not.”
“I mean, how’d you meet him? Let’s start there.”
Jack frowned at his tacos - fish. Since when did Jack eat fish tacos? He’d always been a carne asada guy. Maybe his new, uh, boyfriend was broadening his horizons or something.
“Her. I met her at work.”
“Oh! But I thought, after Lou…?”
“I’ve been bisexual this whole time, Rob,” Jack said, visibly struggling for patience. Shit. Okay. Robby could do this. He could do a lot of things, and was working on shutting the fuck up and listening in times of crisis. He was also working on apologising in a timely and respectful manner.
“Yeah, no, sorry,” Robby said, shaking his head. “That was shitty of me. Uh. So, are things serious with…?”
“Yep,” Jack confirmed. He finally looked up, meeting Robby’s eyes. “Been thinking long-term more or less the whole time, but we’ve been talking about getting married when she moves back to Pittsburgh.”
Somehow, Robby had never imagined Jack remarrying. He simply couldn’t imagine anyone but Lou beside Jack, couldn’t imagine anyone but Lou in this house, in the kitchen where Jack and Lou had hosted weekly dinners for their entire marriage, leaning over the back of Jack’s chair during boardgame nights over the holidays-
Well, maybe the issue was that Robby still missed the shit out of Lou. He was still getting used to Lou’s absence. That was his issue, not Jack’s. Robby had to put that aside if he wanted to be a good friend to Jack.
“I know this is weird for you,” Jack said. “I don’t- I’m not expecting you to be magically okay with this, not given who Lou was to you. I just need you to not… be a dick about it.”
“I didn’t realise you were looking for a new partner, I guess,” Robby hedged, not wanting to admit that he was struggling with this. He was, and he’d put that all on his therapist on Tuesday evening, but he couldn’t let Jack know that. “So, at work - so I know her?”
He absolutely had not noticed Jack paying particular attention to anyone, and surely he would have noticed that. Jack played favourites so blatantly that it was kind of charming, but he treated all of his handpicked nightcrawlers (Robby still thought that shit was dumb, even after all the therapy) the same - better than everyone else. He hadn’t flirted with any of the nurses at an above average rate, and he still avoided anyone admin-adjacent like the plague. The only female attendings Robby could remember Jack speaking to like, at all, were unavailable, lesbians, or Walsh.
Who did that leave?
Jack absolutely did not want to be having this stupid conversation. He could think of a million things he’d rather be doing, including his own fucking dentistry, but here he was. Having this stupid conversation. Because he owed it to all concerned parties to get it over and done with.
He couldn’t deny that watching Robby stumble through it all was kind of funny. Sure. But it was also agony.
“Stop running through every woman you’ve seen me speak to in the past year, man, it’s none of them.”
Look, Jack knew himself better than he’d maybe like, after all the years of therapy. He knew that he was a flirt and he also knew that was good at flirting. Right after Lou’s death, once the initial shock of losing him had worn off, Jack had gone on what Cece called a slut run. He hadn’t dared turn to a bottle, in case the bottle turned him into an asshole like their old man, but he’d had to do something - sensory-seeking, his therapist had said, and Fredo, who always had a lot of opinions on Jack’s coping mechanisms, had even kind of approved of Jack having truly outrageous amounts of sex as a means of getting used to Lou being gone. Jack had been meticulously safe and sober about the whole thing, so while Fredo hadn’t gone so far as to call it healthy, sure, he hadn’t disapproved.
So Jack wasn’t surprised that Robby was trying to reverse engineer his way into a revelation. Jack knew how he carried on at work, and he knew how it looked to anyone other than him and maybe Dana, who had never believed his workplace flirting for even a second. Jack, even at his sluttiest, had never once shit where he ate.
Technically, that was still true.
“But you said-”
“I didn’t say she still worked there,” Jack said, and saw the moment where Robby thought but isn’t Ellis gay? before dismissing her as an option. This fuckin’ guy. He was the most intelligent moron Jack knew.
As if on cue - which it kind of was, given Jack had sent a text right when Robby had gone to the fridge for beer - a key turned in the door. Robby, who probably thought that he was still one of only three people to have a key to Jack’s place, jerked his head toward the door like a bloodhound scenting a rabbit.
Being totally fair, neither of Robby’s guesses for this new guest meant good things for him. Cece thought he was an asshole, even if she grudgingly gave him the time of day because he’d been good to Jack when he lost his mind after losing Lou. Jan, Jack’s beloved sister-in-law, who had known Robby his entire life, disapproved of pretty much all of Robby’s life choices and wasn’t afraid to let her disapproval be known.
God, Jan had been incensed at the very idea of Jack moving on. She’d lost her entire mind when, having let herself into Jack’s house with the key Lou had given her for emergencies some three fucking years after Lou’s death, she’d discovered Jack making breakfast for a very mean, very generous dermatologist who’d been so thorough and such a good time that she’d improved Jack’s opinion of her discipline as a whole. Jack had been spared Jan’s presence for a whole six months after her discovery of his betrayal of Lou’s memory.
But anyway, key in the door, Robby like a meerkat peering out of a burrow, the door swinging open to reveal a soft evening and Jack’s favourite person.
“Hey,” Samira said, kicking the door shut behind her because her arms were full of yoga paraphernalia. “I’m gonna grab a shower, Parker’s coming back for me in like, thirty minutes, so I gotta hustle - good to see you, Robby.”
She came across the room, kissed Jack square on the mouth (even slipped him a little tongue, because why not) and then flounced off toward the bedroom with a pep in her step and her dark green leggings showing off the curves of her ass to absolute perfection.
Man, she was the best.
Robby, meanwhile, looked like he’d just been dunked in ice water.
“Mohan?” he wheezed, to which Jack grinned.
“I know, right?” he said. “Isn’t she incredible?”
“Mohan?!”
All this time, and he still couldn’t say her name right. Jack was going to have to get annoyed if Robby didn’t up his game expeditiously.
“Samira and I,” Jack said pointedly, “are very happy together.”
Robby struggled around what to say next, gnawing on his words. Jack ate a taco. There was a little place around the corner from Samira’s apartment in Palo Alto that did the most amazing whitefish tacos, and Jack had been chasing the high of them with every Mexican restaurant in Pittsburgh for months now. These were pretty great, honestly. He’d have to mark them highly in his notes app.
“She’s a resident!”
“Samira hasn’t been a resident in almost two years, man,” Jack said, rolling his eyes. “What, you think she’s been repeating her R4 year since she left the Pitt? C’mon, you’re not that dumb - you know she transferred to Magee. I’m the one who told you that.”
And hadn’t that been a fun fucking conversation. It had been the first in a chain of conversations, really, because Robby couldn’t seem to- not the time.
“I guess I hadn’t really thought about her since then,” Robby snapped. “Jesus, Jack, you could be her father!”
“Hey, I was a student athlete, I didn’t have time to be a teen dad in my… junior? Junior year of high school.”
Jack had spent enough time agonising over being a dirty old man. Samira had seemed so genuinely surprised when he’d raised it as a potential issue that he’d laughed, which had made her laugh, which had sort of defanged it as a fear.
“Is this why you were so defensive of her? Whenever anyone dared criticise her?”
Robby’s face had gone red, and Jack gritted his teeth to keep his cool. He heard the shower turn off and knew he only had to keep Robby quiet for maybe ten more minutes.
“Samira is an extremely talented doctor,” Jack said. “The only attending she answered to during her residency who had trouble seeing that was you. My professional interest in Samira was purely educational, and-”
“And what, you transferred her into Cece’s tender care so no one would call you on how fucking skeevy the whole thing is?”
“Nothing happened between Jack and I until a month before I left for Stanford,” Samira called, sticking her head around the corner, bundled up in her robe and looking all dewy and fresh from her shower. “He waited until I wasn’t a resident at all, never mind being a resident under his supervision. Don’t you ever, ever accuse him of unprofessional conduct, Robby.”
And then she was gone, and Robby was watching the space where she’d been with a slack jaw. Jack was used to being the one looking after her like a loser, so this was kind of nice.
“You and Samira don’t like one another,” Jack said, “and I’ve got a lot of opinions on that, but I promised her I wouldn’t get involved in her shit.”
Frankly, he was of the opinion that Samira’s dislike of Robby was justified, and Robby’s dislike of Samira was nonsense rooted in some kind of weird bruised pride or something, but that opinion wouldn’t help right now.
“So I need you to promise that you can be a grown up about this. If you want to be in my life, you’re going to have to park your shit and learn to be around Samira.”
Robby didn’t say anything, chewing on something that Jack already knew he didn’t want to hear.
Samira, in the bedroom, had music playing, something upbeat. She’d turned it up just loud enough that they’d know she wasn’t listening to their conversation.
“Do you actually have any objection to Samira as my partner beyond our ages and the simple fact that you don’t like her?”
Robby kept chewing. Jack let him. He ate some more of his tacos before they cooled off fully and were ruined, and then he drank some of his beer before it warmed up.
Samira came back through, dressed in a flouncy little dress with her hair all glossy and bouncy around her shoulders. Her legs looked incredible, and when she bent down to kiss Jack again he got the most delicious look right down her tits.
“You sure you don’t want me to come along? I’ll be DD.”
“Nah,” she said, ruffling his hair in a tease, “millennials only. We’re having Crus and Lisa for dinner tomorrow night, though, so if I’m not home by two please hunt me down and put me to bed.”
“Ma’am, yes ma’am.”
“See you next time, Robby,” she said, shrugging into a little jean jacket and pulling her bag up onto her shoulder. “And remember, we’re all grown ups, we can share Jack if we have to.”
“Goodbye, Samira,” Robby said flatly, which only made her grin as she darted out the door in answer to Parker’s impatient toot-toot. Fuck, Jack hadn’t even heard her pulling up. “Have a nice evening.”
“John’s so fucking happy to have her and Parker back in town,” Jack said fondly as the door closed behind her. “Parker’s been back a few times, but Samira’s been so busy that this is only her second visit back-”
“She said Stanford.”
“What? Oh, yeah, that’s where she’s been - her fellowship. Social Emergency Medicince, she got her Masters in Public Health while she was at it. She’s turbo charged in patient advocacy on a structural level now, it’s some of the most interesting shit I’ve ever heard.”
Samira Mohan, BSc, MSc, MD, BCEM. What a big, beautiful, sexy brain. Jack often felt two steps behind her, but hey - what a view.
“Stanford?”
“She had letters of rec from every attending she answered to during her residency,” Jack said, “except one.”
Jack had offered to ask Robby on her behalf, and she’d laughed. So. She also had letters from some of her med school supervisors, and could’ve probably asked her undergrad thesis advisor if she’d needed to. Samira was a memorable student for all the right reasons. Robby looked like he was about to snap, though, so it probably wasn’t the right moment to brag about how impressive she was.
“You said she was moving back to Pittsburgh,” Robby said. “She’s not-?”
“Oh, she absolutely is,” Jack said cheerfully, “but that’s not for a while. Don’t even worry about that, I’ll recuse myself from her panel interview and it’ll all work out fine.”
They were in the market for a couple new attendings, down in the Pitt. Samira would’ve been a home run if it wasn’t for Robby being Robby. Jack, for his part, was pretty much vibrating at the thought of working alongside Samira again, and he knew Baran and John were both delighted at the idea of having her back. So was Jocelyn Kim, who’d been an R4 when Samira was an intern and who’d been the last internal promotion they’d made before John. Jack liked Jocelyn, even though they didn’t overlap much outside of faculty meetings, if only because she had a fun little habit of laughing at Robby when he got pissy in the aforementioned faculty meetings.
Gloria would be thrilled to have a Stanford fellow who’d (mostly) completed her residency at PTMC on board. Any hospital would be thrilled to have a doctor like Samira on their staff, so it was just Robby they’d have to convince.
“None of this is the point,” Jack said. “The point is that Samira’s my girlfriend, and I love her, and I need you to be cool about it. Can you do that?”
Could he? Could he be cool about Jack being with Samira Mohan? Robby wasn’t sure. He didn’t know why this was such a shock. He did know that it wasn’t fair, but he couldn’t help it. Samira Mohan. He’d honestly been relieved when he came back from his sabbatical and she’d been gone, and he’d still been too deep in his own shit to feel bad for that. Maybe he should revisit that.
“I guess,” Robby said, honestly reeling a little from the revelation that Mohan had gone to fucking Stanford for a fellowship - and public health? Jack had said she was applying to the Pitt for the attending positions. Was she going to be even slower now that she’d have more research and studies to back up all her… lingering? “I mean, I guess I’m just surprised. She doesn’t- I wouldn’t have put you two together.”
“Obviously, given you thought my marrying a guy flicked the switch from bi to gay.”
“No, that isn’t-”
“No,” Jack agreed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Shit. He only did that when he was mad. “So tell me what it is, Mike.”
Robby couldn’t say he didn’t like her, and didn’t see her at Jack’s side. He couldn’t say that he didn’t understand what Jack saw in her in the first place.
“I guess I just don’t see how she compares!”
And there it was.
Lou had been one-of-a-kind. Him and Jan had been pulled out of the literal doomsday cult their parents had been sucked into by CPS and sent to live with their grandparents. The Shaffers had lived right next door to Robby’s bubbe, and when Robby’s mom had fucked off to who-knows-where, well, all three of them had landed ass-first into Squirrel Hill around the same time. It had made sense for Lou’s oma and Robby’s bubbe to put their wayward grandchildren out to play together, and by some miracle, it had worked. Lou had been the first friend Robby’d made on their street and the only friend he’d kept, all through school and college and med school and residency.
Sure, Lou had been a few years older than him, but that hadn’t worried either of them. Robby was an only child, and Lou had only had Jan, who’d had a much harder time adjusting to life in the real world and could be kind of weird, so they’d just become brothers, more or less.
Surely Robby’s feelings on this mattered to Jack.
“It isn’t a comparison,” Jack said. “What the fuck is wrong with you? There’s no scorecard for this shit. I loved Lou, and I love Samira. That’s it.”
“C’mon, Jack, it’s not that simple!”
It had never been that simple. Robby had tried enough times to know that.
“It is,” Jack said sharply. “It is. I loved Lou, and I mourned him, and I love Samira. Christ, do you rank everyone you’ve ever dated on some kind of fucked-up scale? Heather comes in above Janey, who’s above Noelle? Is that how you think this works?”
“No, of course not, but-”
“Then what?!”
“You really think she’s fit to fill Lou’s shoes?”
Jack took a deep, slow breath in through his nose.
“I’m gonna have to ask you to leave, Mike,” he said, after a long moment of echoing silence. “I thought you were ready to be an adult about this, but I see that I was wrong. I don’t think I can continue this conversation without saying something I’ll regret afterwards, so, please. Go home. I’ll call you tomorrow and we can… try and talk this through.”
“Jack, come on.”
“Your opinion on Samira does not change my feelings for her. She’s my future, man. She’s it for me. If Lou was still alive, of course things would be different, but he’s not. He’s dead. I miss him, but he’s not coming back. You’ve got to accept that.”
It might’ve hurt less if Jack had hit him.
“You know what?” Jack said, shaking his head now. “This is basically the conversation I expected to have with Jan, whenever she finds out about me and Samira. Well, I guess I’d expect her to scream at me more, and maybe smash some of my shit or something, but I figured she’d be the one telling me I was an asshole for daring to move on. Learn something new every day.”
Ah, shit. Shit shit shit fuck.
“I’m sorry,” Robby said, and meant it. “I shouldn’t have said any of this shit, man, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well, you meant it, which is probably the real issue.”
“I don’t have much family,” Robby said. “Well, none, really, but I had Lou and Jan. Jan on her own is, uh, you know, so maybe I haven’t dealt with Lou’s passing as well as I could have.”
“You spent the first year after his death making sure I didn’t follow straight after him,” Jack pointed out, as if trying to be fair. “Didn’t leave you much time for yourself.”
“Doesn’t make me freaking out on you like this cool,” Robby admitted. “I know she’s not replacing him. I know that.”
“Because you understand that it’s not a question of replacing him, or because you don’t think she could?”
Jack should have just kicked Robby out. As soon as he got weird about Samira, he should’ve kicked him right out the door.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Yeah, you should go, Robby. I don’t think we’re going to figure this out tonight, not when your hate train is going full steam ahead Samira’s way.”
“I don’t hate her!”
“Well, you could’ve fooled just about everyone! Go home, man. Take your head out of your ass, and remember how to be civil to a peer. Jesus, I don’t expect you and her to become best friends, but I do expect you to be polite to her in her own fucking home.”
Oops.
“She’s moved in with you?!”
“Well,” Jack said, “no. But only because she’s still got a couple months left in California. Then she’s moving in here. I told you we were serious about one another so that shouldn’t be a big shock.”
“But here? This is- but- This is Lou’s house!”
“This is my house, which I bought before I even met Lou. Even if we’d bought it together, though, it would still be my house now. Samira moving in doesn’t change the fact that Lou lived here any more than us getting married will erase mine and Lou’s marriage from existence. Robby, brother, you’ve got to grieve him properly.”
Because Jack wasn’t stupid. He knew Robby well enough to know that his personal disdain for Samira was only a part of the issue, and that it was truthfully the smaller part of it. The real issue was that Robby had thrown himself at the problem of Jack’s spiralling mental health crisis in the wake of Lou’s death, and instead of taking time to sort himself out once Jack was back on steadier ground, he’d just pushed everything down until it exploded out of him like a rupturing abscess. Such was Robby’s way.
“All I want in the meantime,” Jack said, hating that he was pleading now. How embarrassing. “All I want is for you to think about your vendetta against Samira, and to be polite to her while you figure your shit out. I need you to park your shit, and I need you to talk to your therapist about this. That’s what he’s for. Please.”
Robby stood up. Jack scrambled for his crutches and stood up too.
“I need to walk this off,” Robby said. “I’ll, uh, I’ll call you tomorrow. Yeah. Sorry again, Jack. Uh. Bye.”
“Robby-”
But Robby was gone, the door slamming in his wake. Well, fuck.
Jack, not knowing what else to do, did what had always proved the right choice in a time of crisis: he called Cece.
“Wait, hang on, the kids are in bed so let me grab Em and I’ll put you on speaker.”
“Nah, don’t- actually, she’ll call me if I’m being a dick.”
“And I won’t? Emery, babe, PJ needs sisterly advice.”
So Jack spilled out his whole tale of woe (pausing to agree that yes, Samira was very funny for condescending to Robby just like he used condescend to her), and then sort of just sat there, waiting for Cece and Emery to adjudicate where he’d fucked up.
“You’re missing some crucial information here, I think,” Cece said at last, after a lot of them murmuring to one another on the other end of the line. “So, like, you know our theory that Robby was in love with Lou?”
Jack was familiar. Cece had concocted it within about an hour of meeting Robby, at dinner to celebrate Lou moving in with Jack. No amount of telling her that Robby was straight had convinced her that she was wrong, and while Jack didn’t necessarily agree, he’d also never completely denied it was possible. But then, he’d been in love with Lou, and hadn’t found the concept of someone else being in love with his then-boyfriend difficult to believe. Whatever.
“There’s an addendum,” Emery said. “We think the reason Robby was never jealous of you and Lou as a couple, despite being in literal romantic love with Lou, because he was also - is also - kind of sweet on you.”
“Oh!” Cece said thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s part of why he was a dick to Samira, when she worked under him. Maybe he saw your crush and was jealous.”
“Subconsciously,” Emery clarified. “I genuinely don’t think that man could introspect his way out of a paper bag, so this is all subconscious.”
“He could also just be an asshole,” Cece said. “His past treatment of Samira would bear that out.”
“Or he could be lonely and sad, and figured the two of you would go to your graves being lonely and sad together,” Emery offered. “If ever there was a man in need of siblings, right?”
“He can have some of ours,” Jack said, which he knew would make Cece laugh, and it did. “Nah, I think option B is closer to it - he’s doing a lot better, but he’s still only really starting to do the hard work at therapy. And I wonder if seeing Samira didn’t… Last he saw her was his last day before his sabbatical.”
“Oh, when he was verbally abusive to her as her superior in the workplace? How hard for him.”
Emery hadn’t been working that day, but it had been her who’d told him (she’d heard it from Garcia who’d had it from Langdon, who’d been in the room) what Robby had said to Samira. Jack had about thrown up to hear that he’d reacted that way to someone having a panic attack, given how many of them Robby had helped Jack through.
“It was a shitty day all around,” Jack said, tired. He was glad he’d called them. “I don’t think he realises that if he doesn’t take his head out of his ass on this one, I’m gone. D’you think I need to tell him that?”
“That if it’s a choice between him and Samira, you’ve already bought her engagement ring? Maybe, PJ. He’s too stubborn to acknowledge a truth that might hurt him without being forced into it. Hell, he’s like that in the workplace, so I can’t imagine how much worse he is in his personal life.”
“You’re not his keeper, Jack,” Emery said, uncharacteristically serious. “You and Samira are so, so good for one another - don’t let your loyalty to him ruin that. Even if you don’t think you deserve to be happy, Samira does.”
Samira deserved happiness. Samira deserved everything.
Well, that settled that, then. Him and Robby would talk tomorrow, and whatever happened happened.
“Hey, honey,” Jack called over his shoulder when he heard a key in the lock. “Lunch is almost ready, you want to put on a record?”
“I can come back, if you have plans.”
Shit, he hadn’t expected Robby to actually talk to him without being cornered like a feral cat.
“Plenty of room for one more,” Jack said. “You eat yet?”
It wasn’t much - a warm chicken salad, some of that focaccia with the olives in it that Samira liked - but there would be enough for at least three more people. Jack had gotten into the habit of cooking to have leftovers years ago, and operated under a permanent it’s fine, I can bring it for lunch mindset. Whatever. He’d freeze the leftover chicken and they’d use the rest of the salad before it went gross.
Robby sat down, very cautiously, at the table. Jack diced up a little more chicken and added it to the big bowl he intended for the table.
“I owe you an apology,” Robby said, rough and quiet. “I kind of lost my temper yesterday. That was uncool. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” Jack said, and meant it. Robby had only learned to apologise about six months ago, so Jack didn’t want to discourage him. “You want to elaborate on it being uncool?”
Jack would have very, very much liked to hear Robby’s elaboration on his uncool shit. Jack, frankly, thought that Robby needed an emergency session with his therapist to unpack a lot of the uncool shit that was clearly clogging up his brain.
“I put a bunch of my shit on you and Samira,” Robby said, looking everywhere but at Jack. “Which isn’t what I meant to do. It just kinda came out like that, and I’m sorry that happened.”
Damn, two apologies! Samira might get one this decade if he kept going like this.
“My professional difficulties with Samira shouldn’t follow me out of the hospital,” he went on, which was a weasley thing to say that Jack didn’t like, but they could circle back. “And I’m sorry for being uh, unkind about her last night. I shouldn’t have said any of that.”
“Your personal difficulties with Samira are also an issue, and I want to talk about both,” Jack said, “but for now I’ll settle for you not being a dick to her. Personally and professionally.”
He pointed at the stack of magazines and papers on the table. There was a recent NEJM near the top, and he guided Robby’s hand right to it.
“Samira’s in there,” he said. “She co-authored with an old friend. Read that, and then tell me you’re justified in your professional shit with her.”
The old friend with whom Samira had co-authored her latest publication (all about racial disparities in emergency maternal care, so of course Cece had bought twenty copies and stapled them to the foreheads of some of her colleagues) was Heather Collins, but Jack didn’t say that. He still wasn’t sure what exactly had gone down between Heather and Robby before she left for Portland, but he knew it was still a sore spot.
For Robby, that was. Heather was thriving, and her kid was a real cutey. She didn’t seem to miss anything about Pittsburgh except maybe Dana, according to Samira’s reports. She’d reached out to Heather after she’d made the decision to transfer out to finish her residency, and what had been a tenuous workplace camaraderie had turned into a genuine friendship. Jack was glad of it. Heather was cool.
Robby skimmed through the article, his shoulders hunched.
“Fuck,” he said at last. “She always was an excellent researcher.”
“Start there,” Jack said. “Rebuild your understanding of her as a doctor from there, without whatever you put on her during her residency. Be fair to her.”
“And she’ll be fair back?”
“It’d be fair for her to slap you,” Jack said evenly. “You were a shitty mentor to her. You were a bully. She doesn’t owe you shit.”
Robby grunted, and started the article over. Jack finished dishing up lunch, finished setting the table, and was just dialling Samira to make sure she was okay when she let herself in.
“Hi, honey,” he said, drawing her in to kiss her hello. “You and Lena have a nice time?”
Lena was Samira’s number one fan, had been ever since she’d overheard Samira admitting to Parker that her mom was kind of an asshole one night. Lena had realised that Samira needed a little coddling from somewhere, and that had grown into Lena insisting on getting breakfast together whenever Samira was in town. Samira, for her part, still seemed a little overwhelmed by Lena’s Lena-ness, the warmth and the affection and the rock steady will that ensured you couldn’t squirrel out of doing hard shit, not on her watch.
Yeah, Lena was awesome. Jack was glad she was in Samira’s corner.
“Lena’s Lena,” Samira said, a big, fond smile on her face. “She- oh. Hi, Robby.”
“Hi, Samira,” Robby said with a thin approximation of a smile. It was a start, Jack supposed. “Good to see you again.”
Samira blinked at him. She noticed the journal open on the table before him, and she said “oh,” very, very quietly.
“Go sit down, honey, lunch is ready,” Jack murmured against her hair. “You okay if Robby hangs around?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He didn’t deserve her. He couldn’t have faulted her if she’d insisted on kicking Robby out, but of course she didn’t.
“Mind if I bring this home with me?” Robby asked, holding up the journal. “I missed this one - it’s good stuff.”
“Between Jack and Cece we’ve got, like, a thousand copies, so help yourself,” Samira said, tucking her hair behind her ears. She was wearing a pair of white denim overalls and a pretty green shirt underneath, and Jack would’ve had a lot to say about those overalls if Robby hadn’t dropped by unannounced. “Heather sent me a special framed edition, too, because she knew I wouldn’t think to do it myself.”
“Next stop, the Lancet,” Jack teased, slipping into the chair next to hers and starting to dish up the salad. “C’mon, dig in - oh, tell Robby about the fish hook.”
“You get many fishing injuries in Palo Alto?” Robby asked, giving Jack a sort of uneasy smile of thanks when Jack tossed a chunk of Samira’s prized bread across the table to him.
“Oh, no, this wasn’t a fishing injury - this was- okay, so, there’s this small-batch fish cannery about an hour away, and they make this huge deal about their fish all being line caught, right?”
Robby managed not to put his foot in it while they ate lunch, and Jack and Samira waved him off after a shockingly trauma-free ninety minutes at the dining table.
“He had an emergency therapy appointment this morning, huh?”
“Oh yeah.”