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The thing about medical conferences is that they're notorious meat markets. After presentations have been given and questions have been answered, doctors make their ways to hotel bars. Most of the old guard know each other and the ones that don't are identifiable enough—staying in a certain caliber of hotel in the city, clad in business professional attire, drinking alone until they're not.
Samira's first conference as an attending should have presented a great opportunity to mingle, to find a nice enough guy to buy her drinks and have nice enough sex. She looked nice enough to attract attention, her curls loose around her face, a deep burgundy dress that was professional but still showed more of her shape than her usual scrubs. If she were really interested, she could have easily pulled a faceless doctor back to her room after one to five drinks. Instead, she found herself sitting at one end of the bar, sipping a tequila soda she'd paid for, eyes laser focused on the man sitting at the other end, chatting amiably with a pretty redhead close to his age.
More than one reasonably good-looking man had approached her, offering to buy her a drink and trying to discuss the presentation she'd given on social determinants of health. It was nice of them to offer, nicer still that her attending position at Presby had come with research funding, but discussing the paper she'd worked on for nearly a year with these men was merely an unwelcome distraction from her clandestine eavesdropping on her ex-boyfriend.
She knew she had no right to the jealousy causing the tequila to sour in her stomach. She'd been the one to end things with Jack. After six incredible months of laughter and bickering and the best sex of her life, Jack had worked up the courage to ask Samira to move into the house she spent more nights at than not.
In return, in the face of something shaped so much like permanence between them, she'd panicked and fled. She'd lied through her teeth and told him she only ever saw the thing between them as casual—that it wasn't that she wasn't ready, she just didn't see a future between them long-term. It was a lie and a bad one at that, but it had felt like her only option at that time. Faced with the prospect of losing someone so important to her at some point for reasons out of her control, instead of being brave for him, she'd cut and run.
The worst part had been how understanding he had been. He hadn't tried to change her mind or call her on her bullshit. He'd merely kissed her on the cheek one last time and told her that he understood, that he'd always be there for her if she needed him.
Samira had spent days crying into her pillow in the lonely one bedroom that was almost foreign to her at that point. She'd been too stubborn and too scared to call him and tell him she'd made a mistake. Instead, she'd made the choice to swallow it, to make do with rarely seeing him because they now worked at different hospitals and lived in different neighborhoods.
She knew he'd be here—knew that PTMC was sending him to sit on a panel about combat informed preparedness for EDs in the wake of yet another mass shooting. She'd just hoped she'd be able to avoid him was all.
Instead, she sat nursing her second drink five seats down from him.
He looked infuriatingly good. His silver curls tossed with cream she knew smelled like eucalyptus. It was a rarity that Jack dressed up but he wore well-tailored trousers, a houndstooth blazer thrown over a crisp white shirt. She wasn't surprised by the lack of tie, but she found herself nevertheless driven to distraction by the trail of freckles the undone buttons exposed that she knew gave way to a beautifully defined chest.
He looked almost professorial in a way that her overachieving brain found alarmingly sexy and it seemed she wasn't the only one. The redheaded woman laughed loudly at something Samira didn't quite catch and placed a hand on his thick bicep.
The sight of such obvious flirting, of the woman having the nerve to put her hands on Jack, her Jack, had her rising to stand from her seat without consciously telling her legs to do so. Almost as though compelled, she abandoned her glass to come and stand next to him, adjacent to the woman, her body partially between them. She could smell his woodsy cologne and the sense memory had her eyes fluttering closed for a moment before she could stop them.
"Hey, Jack," she murmured before turning to face the woman, offering her hand. "I don't believe we've met. I'm Dr. Samira Mohan."
The woman looked a little taken aback at Samira's sudden presence but recovered, taking her hand and shaking it firmly. "Nice to meet you Dr. Mohan. I'm Dr. Grace Connelly. I really enjoyed your discussion earlier."
"Oh, that's kind of you," Samira smiled as sincerely as she could manage to the woman who'd had her well-manicured hand on Jack only a moment ago.
"Can she get an Espolon and soda with two limes," Jack called down to the bartender, who nodded, grabbing a glass and preparing Samira's drink of choice.
Jack's hand found the small of her back and Samira relaxed into it without thinking, her brain soft around the edges from the tequila and the comfort of his touch for the first time in months.
"Your presentation was excellent, sweetheart. Not that I'm surprised," he agreed, meeting her eyes.
Her brow furrowed in surprise "You saw it?"
His tone in response sounded hurt "Did you really think I'd miss it?"
"I just didn't see you," she explained. She'd glanced around the crowd before she began but her eyes hadn't found him in her cursory sweep of the room. She hadn't been sure if she was more nervous to find him present or absent.
"I sat at the back—didn't want to be a distraction," he answered, his freckled skin flushing a soft pink in the way that twisted at Samira's heart, leaving her momentarily speechless.
Silence hung in the air between them until it was broken by Dr. Connelly. Jack looked as startled that she was still present as Samira felt. "Well, it was nice to meet you Dr. Mohan. Jack," she acknowledged with a nod of her head before extricating herself from the bar. She looked irritated and disappointed but Samira couldn't bring herself to care.
Jack chuckled, taking a pull from his beer. "Well, you certainly ran her off quickly."
Jealousy surged, overtaking any relief Samira was feeling. "She was very pretty. Do you want me to leave and you can call her back over?" she retorted before taking a sullen gulp of her drink.
"Don't you dare," he smiled fondly and pulled her tight to his side.
Samira exhaled in some small measure of relief at proximity to his sturdy warmth, but it did not entirely sate the unpleasantness that accompanied watching the man she loved chat up another woman.
Her response came out biting. "You sure? A few more minutes of you cracking jokes and I think she'd be an easy pull."
"Yeah," he agreed. "But I seem to have a thing for difficult women."
Samira couldn't find it in herself to be offended at the implication, instead, she found comfort in the fact that at least some part of him seemed to want her.
"I wonder what that says about you."
"Nothing good, probably," he acknowledged with a wink. It was his characteristic Jack Abbot charm, the same charm she was sure he'd used to attract Dr. Connelly's interest in the first place.
"Don't do that. Don't flirt with me like I'm some random in a bar. It might have worked for her, but it won't work on me," she chastised.
He smirked like he didn't believe the lie for a second. After all, she'd fallen victim to that charm on more than one occasion. "I wasn't flirting with her, sweetheart."
"Sure. Of course you weren't. And you weren't going to finish that drink and slide her a spare keycard to your room," she accused. She really had no excuse for the way she kept lashing out but she couldn't seem to stop herself.
"Samira, I wouldn't do that. Not in general, but especially not with you sitting there watching. I would never do that to you." Sincerity burned in his deep hazel eyes and Samira found herself caught in them for a moment before she forced herself to look away.
"Do what to me?" she lied through her teeth. "It's none of my business who you sleep with anymore. What do I care?"
Jack sighed, clearly tired in a way that made him look his age, but his features were still set with kindness. "You're a bad liar, baby. It's true now and it was true three months ago."
"I'm not–” she tried to object.
"Yeah. You are. But or some reason you seem determined to keep doing it anyway. No matter how much it hurts you."
Samira was taken aback, rendered momentarily speechless at being so frankly called out, but Jack continued.
"It would hurt you to see me bring some woman up to my room. It hurt you just to sit and watch us talk. Just like it hurt you to end our relationship," he explained. He was almost detached, as though he were merely remarking on the color of the sky.
"Then why would I do it?" she asked. It was defensive but not an outright denial.
He wrapped his arm around her waist, repositioning their bodies until she was almost surrounded by him.
"Because you think that if you push me away—if you can trick yourself into thinking this doesn't matter to you—you'll keep yourself from getting hurt, but you're actually doing the opposite. Because I love you. And you love me," he explained.
Indignation rose in her throat, her response accusatory."If you love me and you were so sure I was lying, why didn't you come after me."
He smiled, and brushed her curls behind her shoulder, searching her face. His eyes narrowed.
"Because I know you, Mira. You're a stubborn, brilliant, beautiful menace. If I had showed up at your door and told you that you were lying, that you were wrong about us not being a permanent kind of thing, you'd have dug your heels in. You wouldn't have found it romantic. You would have taken it as proof that I didn't know you, that I didn't trust you to make your own choices. You had to get here on your own. I'm not in the business of trying to relocate immovable objects, honey. You're the only truly unstoppable force I've ever met."
Samira's heart went positively molten. She was horrified, embarrassed, and overjoyed all at once at being seen with such brutal clarity. She wanted to tell him that he was wrong about her, about everything, that she'd been telling the truth when she ended things. She wanted to pull him tight and never let go. Instead, she hedged.
"And you think I changed my mind?" she asked as casually as she could manage.
His smile in response was teasing. "I think you sure set your drink down and stormed over here in a hurry when she put her hand on my arm."
She tried to bite back a smile. "You noticed me?"
He tilted his head down so his lips were almost to the shell of her ear and electricity shot through her at having him so close again.
His response was no more than a whisper. "Noticed you? Baby, you're the axis my world turns around. Of course I noticed you."
It took a moment for her to process his beautiful words and another for her to connect dots in her head. She pulled back but only a little, her irritation unable to completely eclipse her desire to anchor herself to the man she loved. "So you knew I was watching and you just flirted with her to what? Make me jealous."
"I did not flirt with her, honey. I just didn't stop her from flirting with me." His explanation was patient, his tone reasonable, but it. was skirting a line. From the look on his face, half cocky, half sheepish, he knew it.
"I thought I was an immovable object. So what was the point in making me jealous?" she sulked.
"Well, it's been a long three months. I would have waited forever, but I figured there was no harm in giving you a nudge. You were sitting there looking so pretty and so resigned when she came over. I figured what the hell. You're an only child. You're terrible at sharing," he teased.
She rolled her eyes. "Oh and like you're so good at it."
"At sharing? Sure. I'm the youngest of four," he shrugged and leaned in close. "At sharing you? Absolutely not."
He brushed his lips across the hinge of her jaw and her legs turned to jelly. Thankfully, he caught her weight with the arm around her waist.
"So where does that leave us," she asked, wide-eyed and a little breathless.
He reached up to twist one of her curls around his finger. "It leaves us in a fancy hotel with nowhere to be until we clock in on Monday."
"I have check out at 10 am tomorrow," she countered just for the sake of bickering.
He saw it, because of course he did , and met her energy. "Mines not until 1 on Sunday. If I ask you to stay in my room, are you gonna bolt on me again?"
She supposed she deserved the ribbing. She rolled her eyes anyway and turned to catch the bartender. "Can you give me that bottle and charge it to his room, please?" she asked with a coquettish flutter of her lashes.
The bartender just laughed like he knew trouble when he saw it. His eyes flicked to Jack in question. Jack, for his part, already looked halfway out the door and just nodded in response, pulling a bill from his wallet, laying a fifty down on the polished wood. "Just give her whatever she wants. It's easier than arguing with her."
He handed over the bottle and Samira smiled up at Jack. "And here I thought you liked that I was difficult."
"I more than like it, baby. Just trying to make his life a little easier," he reasoned with a chuckle, grabbing her free hand and pulling her in the direction of the elevator.
She came to a stop and looked up at him, curious. "But you don't want me to make your life easier?"
"Mira, no amount of difficult with you is as hard as life without you," he answered solemnly.
Samira was suddenly overcome by the feeling of being so completely seen, cherished by this wonderful man, but also guilt at what she'd put him through because she was too scared to face her own feelings.
"Jack I'm so–"
He cut off her apology, pulling her into a deep, dizzying kiss, warm lips moving in sync with hers, one arm wrapped around her, other hand buried in her curls, holding her close. After a moment, he pulled back but kept her tight in his embrace.
"Don't apologize. I meant what I said. I would have waited forever. It's more than worth it to have you," he vowed.
The thing was, she believed him. She knew that he loved her in a grand, forgiving way that she felt unworthy of. She also knew that an argument about whether she deserved that kind of love was one of the few he wouldn't simply let her win in the end. She decided to try and accept it looking up, hoping the truth of it was clear on her face.
"I love you, Jack," she promised, and buried her face in his chest. His arms grew tight around her and he notched his head atop hers.
She felt his deep inhale against her as though he'd long been holding his breath and it was the first real intake of air he'd taken in a while. His body relaxed against hers in what felt like relief.
His lips pressed into her curls and she could hear the smile in his voice when he finally answered.
"That's why it's worth it."