Chapter Text
Shift change is Samira’s favorite time of day. That sliver of time when day shift and night shift overlap while handing off patients, two tides meeting in the middle before pulling apart again. She will break traffic laws just to make sure she gets to PTMC early, though the handoff itself is only part of the appeal.
Technically, it happens twice a day. Once in the morning when the city is waking up and once in the evening when it is settling down. For thirty minutes, the ED belongs to both shifts at once. Attendings linger over unfinished charts while residents claim stations and coffee cups. Everyone trades notes, disasters, and loose ends before disappearing back into their respective worlds.
Samira likes the ritual of it. The sense that for a brief moment, the entire department exists in one place. If she is being honest, though, there is another reason she guards that half hour so fiercely. One person in particular who usually occupies it. A man who remains the first thing she looks for every time she walks through the ambulance entrance. Today is no different.
The automatic doors slide open, cool air brushing against her face, and before she even passes dispatch, her eyes are already searching for Jack Abbot.
She beelines to the lockers to stow her bag away and change into scrubs. There is really no reason to hurry; he will still be on the floor for another half hour. But in her mind, every minute away is a minute wasted, when she could be talking to him instead.
He is leaning against the Hub, one ankle crossed over the other, watching the tracking board with Dana. She watches him for all of three seconds before he glances up.
Their eyes meet, and he smiles at her.
There should be laws against that smile.
It’s not particularly dazzling. Jack Abbot is handsome, certainly, but not in the obvious movie-star way people usually mean when they say handsome. His appeal lives somewhere else—in his confidence, his competence, the way amusement always seems to hover beneath the surface whenever he’s looking at her.
A few minutes later, the department gathers around the Hub when handoff begins. He goes through the list of patients on the board, presenting each one concisely and efficiently. Samira tries very hard to pay attention.
The problem is that he keeps looking at her.
Not continuously, of course—that would be insane. But just enough. A glance here, a smile there, a raised eyebrow after one particularly ridiculous consult note. All aimed at her.
It would be easy to ignore if she weren’t already paying far too much attention. She catches him doing it again.
His eyes flick to her. He notices she’s watching, and the corner of his mouth lifts.
She immediately looks down at her shoes like the coward that she is.
At the end of the report, most of the night shift physicians have dispersed. Day shift slowly claims ownership of the ED.
Most attendings leave quickly after their shift. There is always an urgency to escape before the next trauma appears and traps them for another hour. Jack lingers.
Sometimes he stays because there’s charting left to finish, or he gets pulled into conversation, or he just enjoys being a menace.
Samira is reviewing overnight labs, pretending not to be aware of his geographical position in relation to hers, when a paper cup appears beside her.
She looks up and sees Jack standing there. She glances down at the cup and notices that he is holding one of his own. The logo belongs to the small café that sells the good non-hospital coffee a block away.
She narrows her eyes. “Did you buy this?”
Jack looks offended. “No. I fought Shen for it.”
“Nice try,” she says. “Shen drinks Dunkin’ only.”
He rolls his eyes. “I bought myself coffee.”
“You bought me coffee.”
“I accidentally purchased two,” he says casually.
Samira stares at him, and he stares right back. The smile is already threatening.
Finally, she picks up the cup. “Thank you.” She takes a sip, stops with the cup still at her lips, and looks back up. A dirty chai, just the way she likes. “Should I be concerned you know this?”
Jack shrugs. “I know lots of things.”
She takes a few more sips, her eyes still on his as he drums his fingers on the table.
“Get some sleep,” she says eventually, breaking eye contact first.
He slings his backpack over his shoulder. “I’ll consider it. Try not to burn the place down while I’m gone.” The grin he directs at her nearly renders her speechless.
“No promises.”
The annoying thing is that this has become normal. Months ago, she might have stumbled over herself trying to think of something clever to say. Now, the rhythm exists like muscle memory.
A dangerous routine, if she’s being honest with herself.
Jack doesn’t flirt with everybody this way. People claim he does, but they’re wrong.
He’s friendly with everyone. He teases everyone. But he only looks at her like that. And it would probably mean something if she were brave enough to examine it directly. Fortunately, she is a physician and therefore highly trained in the art of avoiding uncomfortable truths.
She watches Jack disappear through the staff exit a few minutes later. The chai is still warm between her hands. She absolutely does not think about the fact that he remembered her drink order, or that he always seems to find her in a crowded department, or the smile he reserves for her and her alone.
Instead, she takes another sip of her dirty chai and opens the first chart of the day, carefully ignoring the warmth spreading through her chest. Some problems are easier to manage when left undiagnosed.
The issue with liking Jack Abbot is that every piece of evidence immediately collapses under scrutiny.
Yes, he bought her chai—Jack buys drinks and snacks for people sometimes. He remembered her order—he remembers everything because he’s smart and considerate. He smiles when he sees her—he smiles when he sees a lot of people. Granted, not exactly like the way he smiles at her, but still.
So when Dana sees the cup next to Samira at a charting station, she smirks. “Abbot spoil you again?”
Samira ignores the sudden warmth threatening to climb into her cheeks. “Maybe you’ll get one tomorrow.”
Dana’s expression says she didn’t ask.
Unfortunately, Dana is not the only one.
Day shift has been making comments for months now. Little observations tossed into conversation and forgotten almost immediately by the people making them. Parker’s raised eyebrow when Jack saves the seat beside him during a conference. The occasional look exchanged between Princess and Perlah whenever they catch Jack and Samira talking longer than strictly necessary.
None of it means anything. At least that’s what Samira tells herself.
Now see, the problem is not that she has a crush on Jack. She accepted that unfortunate reality months ago. The problem is that every teasing remark, every knowing smile, every offhand comment plants the same question in her mind: What if they’re seeing something she’s not?
But worse, what if they are simply having fun with a crush so obvious that everyone else can spot it except the person experiencing it? Coworkers entertaining themselves at her expense because her feelings have become that transparent.
That is the risk she refuses to take. Rejection would be manageable. Even heartbreak would eventually heal. Embarrassment is another matter entirely. She could not possibly stomach the possibility that she had imagined the whole thing.
It keeps her awake at two in the morning, replaying every interaction she has ever had with him. She can survive liking Jack Abbot. What she is less certain she could endure is discovering that everyone else knew it—and that she was the only person who mistook his kindness for something more.
So she treats it like any other problem she does not currently have the bandwidth to solve. When Jack is standing in front of her, smiling at her like she’s the only person in the room, she allows herself the brief, ridiculous rush of happiness. The second he walks away, the professional mask slams back into place.
Jack gets only a few minutes of her irrationality; the rest belongs to common sense.
In a cruel twist of fate, common sense has never stood much of a chance around Jack.
Samira flies through the shift, spending most of her day moving from room to room while attempting to remember that she is, in fact, a physician and not a twenty-year-old with an embarrassing attraction toward a much older man. And for several glorious hours, she succeeds.
Then Jack comes back.
His shift ended hours ago, but he reappears shortly after noon carrying a laptop bag and an expression that suggests he forgot something. He stops by the Hub, then Trauma 1, then dispatch. At least, that is what Samira assumes. She is making a very deliberate effort not to track his movements.
Which is difficult when he eventually materializes beside her workstation.
“I thought you went home,” she says.
Jack glances at the blank screen. “Thought you were working.”
She makes a face. For a moment, they don’t say anything. Jack remains where he is, close enough that she can smell clean soap.
Close enough that Cassie shoots them a look from across the station before pointedly returning to her work. Samira pretends not to notice.
“What did you forget?” she asks.
“My dignity,” he jokes.
Samira snorts. “That implies you had it when you left.”
Jack places a hand over his chest. “I came back here specifically to see you and this is how I’m treated.”
He says it so casually she almost misses the words. Her brain catches up approximately three seconds later.
“M-me?” she says lamely, hating how breathless she sounds.
One corner of his mouth lifts. “I came back for my laptop charger.”
“Oh.”
“Which happens to be near you.”
The smile he gives her should be criminal. Samira looks down at the keyboard before she can do something embarrassing like smile back too hard.
Every interaction with Jack feels like standing too close to a cliff edge. Most of the time she manages to keep her footing…then he says something like that, looks at her like that, and suddenly she’s questioning every conclusion she has spent months constructing.
“Go home, Doctor Abbot,” she says.
“You sound like my mother.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You shouldn’t.”
She laughs. The sound seems to satisfy him for reasons she cannot begin to explain.
Then someone calls his name from BH. Jack pushes away from the charting station and reaches for his bag.
“See you later, Mohan,” he says, rapping his knuckles on the desk.
“Assuming I don’t burn the place down,” she mutters.
And because apparently the universe enjoys teasing her resolve, he winks before turning away.
Samira spends the next thirty seconds staring very intently at the computer’s wallpaper.
Around 18:30, the night shift has begun arriving. The familiar ritual starts all over again. Another tide rolling in as the first one retreats.
Samira should probably be heading home. Instead, she lingers near the lockers, half-listening to the final scraps of conversation drifting through the Hub while she stuffs her claw clip into her bag. The shift has been long but good—busy enough to stay occupied and to keep her from thinking too much.
A familiar voice carries across the ED.
Baran Al-Hashimi.
Samira glances up. Al-Hashimi is standing beside Jack by the scrubEx, one arm folded across her chest. There is nothing remarkable about the scene. Attendings stop to talk to each other after handoff all the time.
Still, Samira’s attention catches on it. Maybe it’s because Jack is smiling again.
“You know,” Al-Hashimi says, “most people would’ve taken the hint by now."
Jack huffs out a laugh. “Most people would’ve stopped bringing it up.”
“And miss the opportunity to harass you?” she shakes her head. “Thursday.”
Jack groans. “You’re relentless.”
“Thursday,” she repeats. “You still owe me a drink.”
Samira’s hands tighten around the strap of her bag. Jack doesn’t even look surprised.
“Yeah, alright,” he mutters. “Thursday.”
Al-Hashimi laughs. “See? Was that so difficult?”
“I was enjoying watching you work for it.”
The exchange lasts less than ten seconds. Nothing about it is secretive or inappropriate. Just two coworkers making plans after work. Samira knows this. She knows it with the rational part of her brain. But, the rational part of her brain has never had much authority where Jack Abbot is concerned.
For a moment, she remains standing where she is.
Jack laughs at something Al-Hashimi says—it’s the same laugh he gives Samira. The same one she has spent months collecting and assigning meaning to. Then the conversation moves on. The world continues turning with complete indifference to whatever minor shakeup is currently unfolding inside Samira’s chest.
It shouldn’t matter.
It shouldn’t matter because Jack is not hers. He is a coworker with an annoying tendency to smile at her in ways that make her forget how to breathe.
He can have drinks with whoever he wants.
Samira busies herself adjusting a strap that does not need adjusting. Maybe Al-Hashimi asked other people, too. Maybe the attendings are going, like a department thing. Maybe she should stop standing here collecting increasingly pathetic explanations.
The worst part is that Al-Hashimi makes perfect sense.
Smart, accomplished, attractive, an attending. Someone closer to Jack’s age and stage of life. A fellow veteran. Someone who doesn’t spend half her waking hours wondering whether a particular smile means anything.
Samira realizes she has been hoping there was something to compete for. It’s a humiliating thought that makes her stomach twist.
A few hours ago, she had been replaying his comment about coming back to see her. Now she is replaying it for an entirely different reason, examining it from every angle until the meaning dissolves completely.
Maybe Dana was right. Maybe Princess and Perlah have been laughing about her for months. Maybe everyone knows exactly what this is—a resident with an obvious crush and an overactive imagination.
Samira turns toward the lockers, disappointment already hardening into something much safer.
Distance.
Distance, it turns out, is much easier to commit to in theory than in practice.
The first shift afterward feels strange. Samira arrives exactly on time instead of a few minutes early. She tells herself that this is a sign of personal growth. She spends the drive to work rehearsing entirely reasonable explanations for her behavior: She is busy. She is tired. She is focusing on patients instead of indulging an embarrassing crush that has clearly gotten out of hand.
All perfectly rational.
Then she walks through the ambulance entrance and instinctively looks for Jack anyway. The instinct annoys her that she spends the next hour overcompensating.
When handoff begins, she pays attention to the tracking board instead of the attending presenting the patients. When Jack glances in her direction, she averts her eyes. When he makes some ridiculous joke about a differential, she pointedly refuses to laugh.
The effort required is absurd.
It would honestly be easier if he would stop looking at her altogether. But he seems determined to continue existing as he always has.
Three days later, he appears beside her at a charting station.
“Morning, Doctor Mohan.”
“Good morning.”
His eyebrows rise slightly. Normally, there would be a joke. Perhaps a sarcastic comment. Something.
Samira returns her attention to the chart in front of her. After a moment, Jack walks away. The interaction lasts less than ten seconds, but she spends the next ten minutes feeling awful about it.
The following shift is even worse, because by then Jack has clearly noticed something. It’s not enough for him to say anything, but she notices him watching her. His gaze follows her around the department like a second shadow.
Every time she looks up, she catches him studying her with a faintly puzzled expression. And every time, she immediately finds somewhere else to be. A patient to reassess, a chart to complete, a nurse to help. Anything. The ED has never lacked opportunities for avoidance.
Unfortunately, Jack possesses years of experience navigating crowded trauma bays and ED hallways. Avoiding him entirely proves impossible.
One night, he drops into the chair beside her during a lull before shift change. The movement is so familiar that for half a second, she almost relaxes…then she remembers.
“How’s your shift?” Jack asks.
“Fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Yes.” The silence.
Eventually, Jack leans back in his chair. “You’re weird lately.”
Her pulse jumps into her throat. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment,” he says dryly.
“I’m choosing to take it that way.”
He continues looking at her, and she continues pretending to read a chart. After a minute, he stands and leaves. She stares at the same paragraph for nearly five minutes without absorbing a single word.
A couple more days is when other people start noticing the absence of Jack and Samira’s routine.
Princess notices first.
Jack says something to Samira near the medication room. It was a harmless joke that should have earned an eye roll and a clever comeback. Samira offers a polite smile and keeps walking.
Later, Princess corners her at the Pyxis. “Did you two have a fight?”
She looks unconvinced when Samira emphatically denies. There is no conceivable universe in which Jack Abbot and Samira Mohan have a fight. They’re not even dating. They’re not anything. What is there to fight about?
The shifts continue. Days stretch into weeks, and the distance becomes habit.
Samira stops lingering after handoff. She stops seeking him out in crowded rooms, and stops allowing herself those stolen moments she used to hoard like contraband.
The irony is that none of it actually makes her feel better. She still notices him and tracks the sound of his laugh and knows where he is without looking. Except now she does all of it from farther away.
Sometimes she catches herself wondering whether he and Al-Hashimi are still getting drinks. The thought always arrives uninvited and unwelcome. She doesn’t actually want the answer.
One evening after checking on her last patient in North 2, she nearly collides with Jack in the hallway. The surprise sends both of them stumbling half a step.
For a moment, they are standing far too close. The old version of her would have cracked a joke, and the old version of him probably would have answered with one.
This time, she mutters an apology and continues walking. She can feel his gaze on her back even after she turns the corner.
That night, lying awake in bed, she realizes that the distance is working. At least technically. She and Jack speak less, they spend less time together, and the flirting has all but disappeared. Everything is simpler and more professional now. And she has never been more miserable.
The ED eventually runs out of places to hide.
The shift itself is busy and provides cover. Ambulances stack up in the bay before midnight. Someone overdoses in a bathroom. A patient arrives convinced they are dying of a rare tropical disease but turns out to have heartburn.
Samira spends the last half hour of the night moving so fast she almost succeeds in forgetting there is an attending quietly observing her behavior.
Towards the end of shift, Dana asks for a procedure cart restock after a particularly messy central line. It should take five minutes—ten minutes at most. Samira volunteers, smiling at Perlah on her way to the supply room.
It is empty when she pushes through the door. Rows of shelves stretch from floor to ceiling containing saline bags, dressing kits, and procedure trays. The scent of cardboard and disinfectant hangs in the air.
Finally, silence.
Samira exhales.
The door opens behind her. She doesn’t need to turn around to know Jack has entered the room. His footsteps stop a few feet away.
Samira focuses very hard on a box of syringes. Maybe if she concentrates hard enough, she can become one.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Jack’s voice is calm. It makes her stomach drop.
She reaches for another package and pretends to read the label. “Nothing.”
“Samira.”
The use of her first name makes her heart skip a beat. He rarely uses it. Usually it’s Mohan—when he’s teasing, laughing, trying to annoy her, Samira means he’s serious.
“Nothing is going on,” she insists.
“Right.” The single word drips skepticism.
Samira keeps organizing supplies and he stands next to the door. The silence stretches. Most people would let it go—Jack does not.
“Did I do something?” he asks. The sincerity in his question, his genuine concern, makes her heart hurt.
Suddenly the situation becomes infinitely worse, because it’s one thing to be angry at someone; it’s another to discover they have no idea why.
“No,” she finally says.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
She swallows. “I’ve been busy.”
“Everyone is busy in an ED,” he counters.
“You’re imagining things.” She grabs #11 blades, a suture packet, ChloraPrep, and Tegaderm.
“I’m really not.”
She turns around then, which is a mistake. Jack is leaning against a shelf now, arms folded across his chest, watching her. She feels her resolve wobble for a quick second, but common sense reappears.
“Please let this go,” she says.
He uncrosses his arms and sticks his hands in his pockets. Even in the dim lighting of the supply closet, she can make out the veins that run along the inside of his arms.
“You’ve barely looked at me for weeks.” The certainty in his voice steals her next response. Apparently he noticed every avoided conversation, every shortened interaction, every time she walked away first. He noticed all of it.
It should make her happy that he noticed, but it makes her sick. Because if he noticed, then he noticed because he cared. And if he cared—
No.
She is not doing this again.
“You don’t have to worry about it.”
“Apparently I do.” The frustration and confusion begins to creep into his voice. “Talk to me.”
The words are gentle, which is somehow the final straw for Samira. Three weeks of distance and embarrassment and convincing herself she imagined everything and wondering whether every smile and every drink and every stupid conversation had meant absolutely nothing.
The pressure finally finds a crack.
“I don’t know, Jack.” The words are sharper than intended. His brows lift. She keeps going. “I got tired.”
“Tired of what?”
She laughs once, a short and humorless sound. “Tired of feeling stupid.”
His expression shifts, confusion giving way to concern. “Why would you feel stupid?”
The answer escapes before she can stop it. “Because I’m tired of being led on.”
The silence that follows is deafening. Samira replays the words and understands what she has just done. Every drop of blood in her body rushes toward her face.
Oh god. Oh god.
Jack doesn’t move. He looks shocked, as though a completely different conversation has suddenly materialized in front of him.
Samira’s stomach drops. She sees the exact moment understanding dawns on him. It’s not what she said—it’s what she meant. The chai, the flirting, the distance, the hurt. The entire humiliating truth compressed into a single sentence. She might as well have handed him a written confession.
“No,” she says immediately.
Jack blinks. “What—”
“I didn’t mean—” The lie dies before it gets halfway out. Of course she meant it. They both knew.
The room feels ten degrees hotter than it did a minute ago. She cannot remember how to stand. Or speak. Or continue existing.
“Samira—”
“No.” This time, the word comes out strangled. Panic has fully arrived. She grabs the nearest box simply because her hands need something to do, then puts it back down. Wrong box, wrong shelf. Everything is wrong.
“I have to go.”
Jack straightens. “Wait.”
She cannot. The door is suddenly the most important object in the universe. She reaches it in three strides.
“Samira, wait.”
Her name follows her across the room. She doesn’t stop. The door swings open, then shuts behind her hard.
Jack remains standing exactly where she left him, motionless. For weeks he has been trying to understand what happened. Why she stopped smiling at him, talking to him. Why she started looking through him instead of at him.
Now he knows. Or at least a part of it.
Samira thought he liked her.
She had looked at everything between them and seen exactly what he meant her to see. The chai, the attention, the flirtatious conversations.
Then something convinced her she had been wrong.
Jack stares at the closed door.