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I.
Samira checks her watch as she speedwalks down the dimly lit hospital hallway, mentally calculating how many minutes of sleep she can manage if she falls asleep the second she lays down in the on-call room. If she’s lucky and there are no further staffing emergencies in the emergency department, she might get a full ninety minutes.
Pushing into the on-call room, Samira has a moment of relief when she sees the darkness that greets her. Thank god, she thinks to herself, she managed to beat–
“Ocupado,” a deep, familiar voice mutters from the twin bed shoved into the corner.
“You’re joking.”
“Mohan. What a surprise.” Samira can hear the smile in Jack Abbot’s voice. She spent four years of medical school trying with varying degrees of success to outperform him and, in the process, seemed to have learned the infuriating intricacies that made up her new co-resident. Despite her efforts over the years to shake him off, he hung around like a persistent cough, just noticeable enough that she couldn't ignore him completely. They hadn’t even matched into the same program and yet here they were, stuck on the same rotation, slipping back into their old competitive ways. Which currently manifested as a competition for the singular on-call room allocated for the emergency department residents.
Whoever thought only one bed would be sufficient for four overtired and overworked residents should be permanently fired and never allowed to work in healthcare logistics again, in Samira’s humble opinion.
Abbot yawns obnoxiously into the dark. “Gotta move a little faster than that if you want the bed, sister. Although…” he trails off and Samira makes the mistake she always makes with Abbot– she humors him.
“There’s probably enough room for two up here. If we snuggle.”
“Gross,” Samira growls back at him before turning on her heel and yanking the door open. She doesn’t need a bed. She can just catch a little rest in the staff lounge, propped between two chairs. It’ll be fine.
“You sure about that? I’ve been told I’m a great cuddler, darling,” Abbot says to her back.
She wants to yell at him for the nickname, one of the endless list he seems to cycle through with her. Instead, Samira reaches out as she slips back through the door, flipping the lights on as she leaves. Abbot shouts indistinguishably in annoyance as the door swings shut and Samira can’t help the cackle she lets out as she paces away from the on-call room.
Ten minutes later, she falls asleep in the staff room wedged between two chairs, smile still lingering on her face.
II.
Samira wakes to a steady vibration against her face, jerking her out of the deep, dreamless survival sleep her body has learned to subsist on.
“Whaaa-” she garbles, trying to find her bearings in the dark room. The on-call room. She’s at PTMC. Her second year of residency, on her emergency department rotation.
Her pager buzzes again, sending Samira scrambling into motion. Her shoes are already waiting for her beside the bed, untied so she can slip right into them in her sleepy stupor, her body running on near perfect autopilot as she ties them onto her feet. Blindly grabbing her fleece off the bedpost, she heads for the door yanking it open in a flurry.
Samira pulls up short when she sees Jack Abbot leaning against the wall opposite her.
“Abbot?”
“Morning, princess.”
She doesn’t even have the energy or brainpower to fight him on this nickname. How is he even here? How would he know that she would be leaving the room right now?
“Did you… How?”
Abbot smirks, crooked teeth flashing as a dimple appears in his cheek. His face transforms with the expression into something some people might consider handsome. Maybe even rougish. Not Samira, but some people. “The nurses love me. Thanks for warming up the bed, sweetheart.”
He takes a step forward and Samira automatically steps to the side, already too aware of their proximity in her vulnerable, sleepy state. Abbot’s arm shoots out and for a second, Samira is certain he is finally going to do it, he is finally going to take her out so he can be the one resident to rule them all. But his hand rushes past her head instead, palm catching the heavy hospital door before it can swing back into Samira’s shoulder.
“Easy there, tiger. Can’t have you taking out my only competition in this place.”
Samira works her face into a glare as she stares back at him. This close, she can smell the sandalwood of his deodorant. “I’m the smartest one here and you know it.”
This has the opposite effect she anticipates. His smile broadens… or softens… or… something. He leans closer, his neck bending so Abbot is eye level with her. Samira notices he still has his summer freckles, even though Pittsburgh has slipped into fall. “Oh, I know. You might even be the future of medicine, Mohan.”
The air around Samira suddenly feels heavy, like before a big summer storm when humidity and electricity seem to gather in the air. It feels dangerous, the precipice of something she does not understand. Abbot has always been an annoyance to her, but generally respectful. The way she imagined a sibling might treat another sibling. But this was different. This felt like something more. This felt complicated.
And Samira did not do complicated. So, reflexively, she jams her palm into Abbot’s sternum, shoving him away from her and storming off towards the ED. “Keep your pager on,” Samira snaps over her shoulder.
III.
Samira is coming off a full three hours of sleep when she runs into Abbot as she exits the on-call room. He is leaning against the wall, a paper coffee cup in one hand.
“Isn’t your shift just starting?” Samira quips at him, glancing down at her watch as she lets the door swing shut behind her. “Sleeping on the job already?”
“I brought you this.”
Samira looks up, startled. Abbot has his hand extended towards her, holding out the take out cup.
“What?”
“This is for you,” Abbot says, slower this time, like maybe the reason Samira is confused is because she literally couldn’t understand him instead of the more obvious reason for her confusion – Abbot has never, not once, gotten her a coffee.
She stares at the coffee for a second. “Why.”
“Can you just take it?”
“Did you poison it?”
“Why would I– We’ve been over this– I just heard you had a rough, shift, ok?” He scrubs a hand over his face, head tipping back to look at the ceiling for a moment. In all their years together, Samira isn't sure if she has ever seen Abbot at a loss for words. He always seems to have something to say, one more word to get in edgewise. She feels a little proud that she has finally worn him down into sweet, blissful silence.
After he gathers himself, he gestures the coffee towards Samira once more. “Can you just take the coffee?”
“Ok,” Samira replies, drawing out the word in a long, suspicious sound, before taking the cup from Abbot’s hands. It’s still warm beneath her palm.
They lapse into silence, Samira watching Abbot, and Abbot watching Samira. It’s so… weird. They annoy each other, they teach each other, they bicker with each other, but they are not, generally awkward with each other like this.
“So…” she starts, right as Abbot says, “Well…”
Samira presses on, hating the unusual tension between them, so at odds with their usual snippy banter. “You're being weird.”
“No, I’m being nice. Like you're always telling me to do!”
“Since when do you listen to anything I say?”
Abbot flinches, like Samira hit him. “I– I listen to you.”
Samira squints a little at him, dumbfounded. For the life of her, she cannot puzzle out whatever game Abbot is playing with her. If he needs her to cover for him, he usually just texts her with wilder and wilder promises or, in some instances, thinly veiled threats to hack into her Anki account and delete all her Step 3 flashcards. He is being almost... sweet today. What other possible motive could he have for this?
“Ok. Well, bye, I guess,” Samira finishes, deciding to put this conversation out of its misery.
She starts off down the hall and hears the sound of Abbot opening the door to the on-call room, listening for the sound of the door closing behind him. When it does, she finally lifts the coffee and takes a sip.
The taste takes her by surprise. It's a latte, with the nutty, delicious flavor of oat milk, and just a hint of cinnamon. It's… perfect. It's exactly how she likes her coffee.
Since when does Abbot know her coffee order?
IV.
If Samira had a dollar for every time her pager woke her from the middle of a REM cycle, she could probably retire before she ever became an attending. Her fingers find the button to still its incessant vibration by feel as she blinks her eyes open in the dark of the on-call. She would kill for fifteen more minutes, but the ED doesn’t wait.
With a grunt, she leverages herself upright, swinging her legs over the bed to stand. Except her left foot presses into something soft and her right catches on something else, sending Samira toppling to the ground, landing hard on whatever is laying on the floor next to the bed.
“What the hell?” Samira groans, confusion bleeding into annoyance.
“Fucking ow,” the trip hazard grunts, jostling beneath her.
Samira tries to scramble off the body beneath her, but her limbs don’t seem to be working quite right. “Who–”
“It’s just me, Mohan.”
“Abbot?”
“Fuck, your elbow–”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I was sleeping, genius” Abbot deadpans. Samira can feel the warmth of his breath against her neck.
She can’t glare at him, so she settles for digging her elbow further into what she assumes are his ribs. Her actions are rewarded with a satisfying groan.
“Why are you on the floor, Abbot?”
“I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“Oh.” Samira lets up from his ribs, staring in the general direction of his face in the dark, slowly becoming aware of the shape and feel of his body beneath hers. There is a bicep beneath one palm, a strong quad against her knee, the steady rise and fall of his chest against hers.
“Would you–” Abbot starts, shifting a bit beneath her, the get the fuck off me implied. “I think you’re on my spleen.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry.”
In a shuffle of limbs, Samira rights herself to her knees, half crawling away until she can properly stand. She looks down at the vague form in the dark, familiar even like this. She should probably apologize for not only ruining his nap but also maybe giving him a deep muscle bruise. Except, she isn’t sure she’s ever apologized to Abbot before. He has always just taken whatever she gave him in stride, no matter how biting or annoying she has been. Nothing she has done has ever seemed to deter him or scare him off, like a moon tracking a steady orbit around its planet, unbothered by the changes in weather or seasons or time.
“Abbot,” Samira starts, but dual vibrations interrupt her. Both their pagers vibrate now.
“Shit,” Abbot groans this time, rustling in the dark as he sits up. “Help me up.”
Still a little dazed, Samira offers her hand in his direction, trying not to react when she feels his warm palm slide against hers as he grips at her. She braces her feet, leaning back as a counterweight so Abbot can lever himself to standing.
He doesn’t step away like she expects. Instead, Abbot stands in front of her for a moment, hand still loosely gripping hers. “You ok?” he asks her, fingers squeezing gently once around hers.
This startles some sense back into Samira, and she steps back quickly, dropping Abbot’s hand. “Yeah, I’m good. I’ll just–” She gestures behind her towards the door, starting to turn. “I’ll see you at the Hub.”
Samira only makes it a step before Abbot says, “Wait,” grabbing her wrist.
Samira’s heart is an unsteady jack rabbit in her chest as she pauses. Everything feels off, like she is still in a dream, nothing quite wrong, but nothing quite right either. They aren’t like this with each other. “What?”
“You forgot your fleece,” Abbot says, thankfully dropping her wrist before he could catch the speed of her pulse. He reaches somewhere behind him, coming back with her fleece jacket. “You’ll freeze out there.” Abbot extends his arms, holding the fleece out to her by the shoulders, the inside facing Samira.
“Oh.”
Maybe she is dreaming, because Samira complies with his implied gesture, slipping one arm into one sleeve, then turning her back to him so she could slip her other arm into the other sleeve. Behind her, Abbot lifts the fleeces slightly, settling it around her shoulders.
They stand in silence for a moment, before Abbot does the unthinkable. He pats at her shoulders, his palms, wide and strong, coming to rest against the tense line of her trapezius muscles. It isn’t that they’ve never touched each other. It’s that they have never touched each other for the sake of just touching each other before. They have always had some purpose, whether it was teaching the other, or annoying the other, or helping the other. This felt almost indulgent.
It scared the shit out of Samira.
She jerks a step away, shaking hands fumbling with the zipper of her fleece until she got it to catch, zipping it all the way up to her chin. “Thanks,” Samira half croaks, hoping Abbot cannot hear the panic in her voice. “I’ll see you at the Hub.”
V.
Samira and Abbot’s shoes scuffle in tandem as they trudge down the employees only hallway, their steps heavy and slow. Samira’s mind is approximately 200 feet away from her body, still in Trauma One, still looking into a gaping chest cavity. She had never seen anything like that; she didn’t know how anyone could possibly recover from that. Every mentor in her life had told Samira that sometimes in emergency medicine, a doctor ends up having to make a patient’s condition worse before they can make it better. But today… That was something else entirely.
Beside her, Abbot is uncharacteristically silent, hands shoved into the pockets of his scrub pants.
Samira pushes into the on-call room out of habit, Abbot on her heels. It’s only when the singular bed comes into sight that Samira pulls up short, realizing their ever present predicament has not changed just because they had a particularly bad day.
“You can take it.” Abbot’s voice is quiet, a little hoarse. Whether from emotion or overuse, Samira doesn’t know.
“No, you should take it.”
Abbot is the one that had to help with opening the chest cavity. He is the one that had to help move a ribcage so Samira could get to the heart.
“No. I’ll be fine on the floor.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“What if we share?”
“I– You– What?”
Samira gestures towards the bed. “It’s not that small. What if we share?”
“Share.”
“Yes,” Samira huffs, stepping towards the bed and toeing off her shoes. “Unless… Do you snore?”
“I don’t think so?” Abbot’s words turn up at the end, uncertain and maybe a little bewildered.
“Ok.” Samira shucks off her fleece, tossing it in the general direction of the desk in the opposite corner, not really caring if it actually reaches its destination. “Then, just share. It’s not a big deal.”
Samira flops herself onto the bed, giving herself one second of prone relief before shuffling to the side, arranging her limbs onto approximately half the bed, one side pressed into the cold cinderblock of the wall. “See?” she says to Abbot, who still stands like a looming shadow figure at the foot of the bed. “There’s plenty of room.”
“Are you–” Abbot’s voice cracks, and he clears his throat before continuing. “Are you sure?”
“Just lay down, Jack.”
She realizes her mistake too late, his given name landing between them like a gambler revealing their hand too early. Now he knows that she has been thinking it. Now he knows she has been thinking it often enough to slip out. Samira expects him to tease her for the mistake, maybe even guess at the truth behind it, but all Jack does is murmur, “Ok,” before he reaches down and takes off his left shoe.
There is a longer pause when Jack reaches for his right. He half-stands, looking towards her in the dark. “Do you mind if I take off my prosthetic? My leg got a little sore.”
“Oh. Of course. Do you need–”
She doesn't know what she's offering. It's not like she has any real experience with healed amputation sites. Thankfully, Jack brushes her off. “No, no. I’m good.”
He turns, sitting on the very edge of the mattress, as if he isn’t about to lie next to Samira on the very same mattress. His scrubs rustle as he pulls up his pant leg and Jack makes a borderline pornographic sound as he pulls off his prosthetic. Samira doesn’t acknowledge it, too afraid of where teasing might lead them in this moment.
After Jack sets it on the floor, he scoots back on the bed, trying to arrange himself beside Samira. She lies perfectly still as Jack shifts, trying to resist the gravitational pull of where the mattress dips beneath Jack’s weight.
“Jack.”
“Yeah?” He sounds out of breath for someone currently laying down.
“Are you even all the way on the bed?”
“I’m fine.”
“Jack.”
“Samira–”
At the sound of her name, before either one of them can regret it, Samira reaches out into the dark, hands grasping at Jack and manhandling him until she can feel his frame is fully resting on the bed next to her. They are both in their scrub tops, the short sleeves allowing the length of their arms to press against each other. His head bumps gently into hers, his curls tickling her forehead, as it comes to rest beside hers on the pillow.
“Bossy,” Jack whispers, the word sounding nothing at all like an insult.
“You like it,” Samira bites back, tipping her face to the side to try to get a look at Jack’s face.
He copies the gesture, cheek pressing against the pillow as he faces her in the quiet dark. “I do,” Jack murmurs, breath still smelling like her cinnamon coffee he kept stealing sips of before they got pulled into Trauma One. “Like it,” he clarifies. “I like you, too, Samira.”
Between their bodies, where their arms are already half tangled together, Samira feels around until she finds Jack’s hand, slipping her hand into his. When he doesn’t pull away, she laces their fingers together, squeezing once.
“I’m glad it was you with me today.”
“You know you can admit you also like me, like a normal person.”
“I’m perfectly normal–”
“Samira,” Jack interrupts, voice softer and fonder than she has ever heard it.
“Yeah?”
“We should sleep. We still have twelve hours left on our shift.”
Samira blinks at him in the dark, wishing she could see the hazel of his eyes. “Ok,” she agrees. “Is it ok if I…” Samira shifts a little, tucking her face into Jack’s shoulder, shifting onto her side. “I’m a side sleeper,” she admits a little sheepishly.
Jack chuffs a laugh, but squeezes her hand gently. “Whatever you need, Samira. Now, sleep.”
“Ok,” Samira murmurs, letting her eyes drift shut. “Don’t let me sleep through my pager.”
“Never have, never will, sweetheart.”
Samira doesn’t dream of chest cavities, or cardiac massages, or screaming alarms. Instead, she dreams of hazel eyes, and cinnamon coffees, and her favorite bench in the park.