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After the debacle that was her mother and July 4th, Samira takes some time to look into the options her phone provides her, for her own sanity.
She’d known about Hey Siri for ages, but she finds that she can use Siri to reply to her mother when she’s busy, that she can have Siri read things to her while she’s on a walk or driving, that she can even change Siri’s voice to be something less bland.
She takes her time to evaluate the options, deciding eventually on the Irish male voice—if she’s going to have an assistant, it might as well be a man, and he has a lilt that reminds her of Colin Farrell.
Samira finds herself relying on Siri more often than not, after that.
“LOL,” he reads out to her one day, when she’s in the grocery store and Cassie is replying to a story from the last shift she’d missed while taking Harrison on a field trip, which has her literally laughing out loud, dropping the mangoes she’s holding in her hands in surprise at the way he says it.
“Twenty minutes, starting now,” he replies, when she’s simmering sauce later that night and needs a timer.
Even her landlord’s text that there’s a problem with the hot water heater sounds better in his accent. “My brother won’t be able to replace it until Sunday,” he reads to her as she walks out after a shift that wasn’t made any better by her freezing cold shower that morning. “Do you have someone who can let you use theirs until then?”
Samira has the entire third floor of her small building, with her landlord living on the garden level, an accountant residing between them. With a sigh, she says, “Reply. I can shower at work for now. Thanks for the heads up.” She doesn’t bother to check that the text went through, trusting Siri to get the message out.
Santos catches her eye as they make their way toward the ambulance bay, overhearing her. “You’re braving those nasty ass locker room showers? For what?”
She pulls one of her AirPods out, not wanting to be rude. “The hot water heater in my building is busted. My landlord says it won’t be replaced until Sunday.”
Santos wrinkles her nose.
Samira raises her eyebrows. “Yeah.”
“You can use ours, if you need to,” Santos offers. “We’re kind of out of your way, but I dread the thought of the athlete’s foot you’ll have to treat if you shower here. Might get entirely out of control.”
“That’s what happened to me,” comes from behind them, Samira turning to find Abbot with an innocent look on his face. “They couldn’t save the foot. Ate it clean off.”
Samira gives him a look, even as she fails to suppress her smile, then turns back to Santos. “It’s okay. Sunday is only,” she counts on her fingers, suppressing a grimace, “six days away. I can survive until then.”
Santos shrugs, surging forward and calling over her shoulder, “Suit yourself.”
Samira blinks once, starting to put her AirPod back in, but before she can walk away, there’s a soft tap on her shoulder, turning to find Abbot, his face open.
“I know you turned Santos down, but she’s not wrong, the locker room showers are . . . pretty gnarly. If it’s a distance thing, you can use the guest bath at my place, at least while you’re working.”
“Oh—” Samira says.
If she’s honest with herself, she’s not surprised, not really. Ever since she started as an intern, Abbot has had an undercurrent of kindness that she has always found quietly impressive. It’s part of what makes the fact that she’s devastating levels of in love with him even more difficult to bear.
And it’s not like it’s completely out of the blue—they’ve had something that she would consider something like a friendship, since she asked him for the rec letter than secured her place in the geriatrics fellowship at PTMC, saving her from the loneliness and emptiness back in Jersey. To thank him, she’d promised to get him a gift certificate for a restaurant of his choosing, which had somehow turned into him making them dinner while she talked him through her study that she still had hope of finding funding for someday, somehow, which has turned into monthly meetups, ostensibly to keep talking about her research, but for Samira, are really just a poor excuse to spend time with him.
She knows his place is walking distance from the hospital, and that the showers in the locker room have certainly seen better days.
“Actually, that would be—yeah. That would be great, if you don’t mind.”
He gives her a quick smile. “I offered for a reason. I won’t even be in your way, since I’m on the rest of the week. I’ll text you the code to the lockbox.”
She’s on the bus when the text comes through, Siri reading out diligently, “Text from Jack Abbot. It’s one zero two seven, lockbox is to the right of the front door. Also from Jack. And feel free to leave your stuff there for as long as you need, no reason for you to haul it back and forth.”
Samira closes her eyes and actually feels her emotions growing in intensity.
“Reply. Thanks so much, I owe you,” she says and gets off the bus a stop early so she can find some form of recompense, even as Siri reads his latest text to her.
“No you don’t.”
The next morning finds Samira stealing into Jack Abbot’s home like she’s done something wrong, carrying a tote bag full of toiletries, her nicest towel, and two bags of good coffee from the little place she hits up when she feels like treating herself, for the fancy machine he has in his kitchen that she has no idea how to work. She knows that he isn’t there, he can’t be there, because he’s at the hospital, but she still tries to be as quiet as possible for some unknown reason, as she enters his home for the second time ever, walking softly down the hallway and closing the bathroom door behind her silently.
That all goes out the window when she feels the water pressure, letting out a deep, “Oh my god,” her voice echoing around the small bathroom. Is this what an attending salary gets you? If so, Samira is going to start counting the days.
She hangs her towel neatly on the rack, leaves the coffee on the kitchen island with a note of gratitude, and places the key back in the lockbox before her quick walk to the hospital, her hair drying in the sun.
“Thank you,” she says fervently, when he walks up to her before handoff. “You’re a lifesaver.”
He nods with something close to a smile and asks, “Did you hang onto the key?”
“No,” she replies, confused. “I put it back in the lockbox.”
Abbot shakes his head, in a way Samira might take as fond, if she didn’t know any better. “You should have kept it. Here, take this one,” he says, sliding a key off his key ring, over her weak protests, picking up her hand from where it rests by her side, placing the key in her palm and closing her fingers over it, squeezing tight for good measure. “I’ll just grab one of the spares when I get home.”
He leaves her standing there, key warm against her skin, trying not to blush, failing miserably.
She’s a little braver, a little louder the next morning when she enters, walking in like she belongs, key secure on her keychain. She explores a little, snooping in drawers, peering around doors, but draws the line at entering new rooms, even as she’s intensely curious about what his bedroom looks like. She takes a longer shower than the day before, only to be confronted with the scent of coffee wafting toward her when she exits the bathroom, the feeling like she’s done something wrong sliding down her spine once more.
Abbot isn’t supposed to be here. He’s supposed to be at the hospital. He told her he was working.
Why does she smell coffee?
Samira enters the kitchen slowly, carefully, on her tiptoes, only to find a freshly brewed pot from the beans she’d left him, and a note next to the machine.
Had to guess when to set the timer—let me know if I should make it earlier. Half and half is in the fridge.
“What the fuck,” Samira says out loud.
She repeats herself, “What the fuck,” after pouring herself a cup, the coffee leaps and bounds better than what the machine at the hospital spews out.
She can’t let this stand, not if she wants to get a grip on her increasingly escalating feelings. She has to find another way to pay him back.
Fortune smiles on her, as she passes a small bakery on the way to the hospital. The night he’d cooked for them, he’d waxed nostalgic over the bread his wife had made once, how he had never appreciated good bread until then, and now sought it out whenever he could, keeping her memory alive one loaf at a time, and looking back, it was in that exact moment Samira had realized that she was in love with him.
She buys two baguettes, and places both into his arms when she sees him standing at the hub.
“That coffee was for you,” she tells him, and ignores him trying to shove the bread back at her until he leaves.
It’s even more infuriating, then, to find the coffee maker set to dispense another pot at exactly the right time when she walks in the next morning, and a note that has her gasping out loud.
Thanks for the bread. Sandwich in the fridge with your name on it.
It’s wrapped in parchment paper and it really does have her name written on it carefully, Dr. Samira Mohan, and she just knows it’s going to be delicious, if it’s anything like the meal he cooked for her before.
She texts her landlord, asking if there’s an update, because she cannot go on like this, she cannot endure this agony of being in his home, having him make her coffee, make her meals, her feelings unrequited.
“Nothing yet, sorry,” Siri tells her as she walks into the hospital.
“Did you take it?” Abbot asks her as she walks by him, which she doesn’t dignify with a response. “You took it,” he says, smiling, smug.
“I knew it,” Siri reads to her, when she takes a quick break to eat the sandwich, which is, of course, incredible. “Enjoy.”
Samira spends the rest of her shift wracking her brain, trying to figure out how she can one up him, on her next step in this series of increasingly escalating acts of service. The easiest answer is: no longer taking him up on his incredibly kind offer and instead making use of the PTMC locker room and its fungi, but she also can’t bear the thought of pulling back now, not when she finds herself in his home daily, when there’s a pot of coffee waiting for her every morning, when his key sits on her key ring, albeit temporarily; not when it seems, despite all her certainty to the contrary, that he’s enjoying himself.
In the end, it circles around again to the beginning.
She feels fairly confident in her baking ability, the brownies that she’d offered initially famous among her friends, her med school classmates, but bread has always been something she’d been too nervous to tackle.
No longer.
Samira finds a recipe for milk bread that seems foolproof, stays up far too late, but in the end, bakes three loaves that look terrible and two that she finds passable, and for now, that has to be enough.
She wraps them carefully in her own parchment paper, leaving them on his kitchen counter, and tells herself that this is it, this is the end, that it’s Friday, that the hot water heater will be replaced in two days and she doesn’t need to shower on her days off. That she can make it until Sunday, that today is the last day that she will infringe upon his kindness.
That he can’t one up her after this, because she won’t be around for him to one up.
There’s another sandwich with her name on it in the fridge, which she takes, and a pot of coffee that she dutifully drinks a large mug of, savoring each sip, washing the pot and filter carefully, spiraling over the fact that even in his absence, her feelings for him have only grown. She takes his last note, You know the drill, and places it safely in her bag, to keep forever.
She feels an almost physical pang of loss as she slides his house key off her key ring, leaves the key on the kitchen island, and is about to walk back to the bathroom when a text comes through.
“Hey Samira,” Siri reads out loud, “my brother ended up being free today. Hot water will be back in a few hours.”
She breathes out a sigh of relief. “Thank god,” she says to herself, then, a little louder, “Hey Siri, text Jacqueline, I think I’m in love with you.”
“Texting Jack Abbot. I think I’m in love with you,” Siri replies.
“Wait—no—”
Samira frantically swipes at her phone, but it’s too late—Siri is too good. The text has been sent, and, according to her Messages app, delivered. She frantically tries to unsend it, but she isn’t quick enough, as the message underneath the text changes from Delivered to Read 6:15 AM.
On her phone screen, she sees three dots appear, before disappearing, before appearing again. They linger on the screen for a long time, before disappearing once more.
Closing her eyes, Samira says, very quietly, “Fuck.”
She wonders if it’s too late for her to call out of work sick, so she can get her affairs in order before fleeing the country. For some reason, she picks up the bread, like if she takes it with her she can pretend she was never here, or like it can undo what she’s done, but it’s too late, as Read 6:15 AM reminds her.
Breathing out, she places the loaves back down carefully, laughing to herself, because there’s no way she’s losing this war now.
Homemade bread is nothing in comparison to a declaration of love.
By the time she’s gathered her things and done a quick clean of the shower and bathroom, things seem less dire. It’ll be fine. She hasn’t completely blown up their friendship, Samira tells herself. She’ll explain everything when she gets to work, tell him that there’s freshly baked bread at his house. He’ll be happy. They’ll laugh about it. It doesn’t matter that it’s the truth, he doesn’t need to know that.
He’s not actually going to read anything into the text. He’ll understand.
She’s about to sling her tote bag over her shoulder when she hears hurried footsteps outside the front door. A key in the lock, and then Jack Abbot is standing in front of her, panting.
He stares at her.
She stares back.
“I made you bread,” she blurts out, just as he says, “I’m in love with you too.”
“You—” she starts to say, before she has to stop, because what he’s saying doesn’t make any sense. “You’re in love with me?”
He nods, once, the look on his face stricken, hopeful.
Samira doesn’t know how to process this, doesn’t understand why he would say this to her, when it’s so clearly impossible. “I—”
“I mean, I’m sure you could tell, I wasn’t exactly.” He breathes out. “Subtle.”
“It—”
“And I told myself it was too much, with the coffee, and making you lunch, it’s not that I don’t think you’re capable, but you never let anyone take care of you, and you kept going with it, and then when I saw your tex—”
“It was Siri,” she interrupts him, unwilling to let him keep going, even as every word sends a thrill down her spine.
He goes still, and Samira hates herself for causing the look of devastation on his face, but she has to get this out. “I was trying to text my landlord back, the hot water, it’s actually getting fixed today,” she says, trying to make it sound like good news. “And her name. It’s uh . . . Jacqueline.”
He blinks. “Oh.”
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”
“No,” he says, closing his eyes. “No, of course—”
“I, um,” she says, hesitantly, “I made you bread.”
“Of course you did.” He huffs out a laugh that sounds almost like a sob, and shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I never should have—”
“And I’m in love with you too.”
He looks at her then, disbelieving, almost offended. “Don’t,” he says, and there’s pain in his voice. “You don’t have to do that. Don’t try to make me feel better, I should never have imagined that someone like—”
She steps forward, and says, softly, “Jack,” which gets his attention. “That text said ‘I think’.” Her gaze flicks down, gathering strength, before looking up, into his eyes. “But I know that I love you.”
Another step, and she’s very close to him now.
“Do you know how hard it’s been? Being in your house without you here? When you keep beating me at my own game? Like you couldn’t even let me give you coffee, you couldn’t let me pay you back? You had to make the best sandwich I’ve ever had in my life? You clearly know that I can’t just accept things, I never have. But, for some reason . . . it’s different with you.”
Jack smiles, slightly, at that.
Samira twists her mouth. “And this was the only thing I could think of to do with all these emotions that I had nowhere to put. To try and show you how much it meant to me. And I know it’s not ideal and I know it’s not perfect, but,” she shrugs a little and takes one final step, “it’s how I feel.”
She looks up cautiously to find him watching her, eyes soft.
“You made me bread.”
Samira nods.
Slowly, he reaches forward, taking one of her hands into his, so much larger than her own, tugging her gently closer. “And you’re in love with me too?”
She nods once more.
“Oh thank god,” he breathes, and kisses her.
It’s later, once she’s rushed to work and come back, letting herself in with the key that now has a permanent place on her key ring, once she’s finally in the bedroom that she’s been wondering about all week now, that she says, “I won, by the way.”
Jack looks over at her, confused. “How on earth did you win?”
“Declaration of love is an automatic win.”
“That wasn’t you, it was Siri,” he scoffs. “I said I loved you first, that means I won.”
“The hot water is back at my apartment, I could just go—”
He rolls on top of her, pinning her in place, cutting her off with a kiss, then says, “But you know you’re always gonna win, right?”
Samira smiles.