Archive of Our Own

Like every shift that no one would call the Q-word out loud, but everyone would cautiously think was a little slow, Mel found herself in the break room with Samira and Trinity, halfway through a family sized bag of pretzel sticks. The type of snack varied, but the communal snack break was a sacred tradition.

Somewhere along the line Trinity’s not-so-gentle teasing had become gentle and loving bullying, which had become a wine night (which Trinity had moderately gently bullied Mel and Samira into coming over for) where Trinity got a little too drunk and confessed how amazing she thought they were and how she wanted to be friends with them so badly but was afraid she had messed up by coming on too strong on their first day. That wine night had turned into smiles over cases at work, more out of work hangouts, and shared moments in the break room huddled together eating from the same bag.

“So then my mother was all ‘yes, Samira, I’m very proud of you for fulfilling every parent’s dream and giving me a daughter who’s a successful doctor, but when are you going to give me grandchildren?’ It’s like the finish line for making her happy is always moving.” Samira stuffed some pretzels in her mouth to emphasize her point. “I know she loves me, but sometimes it’s hard to feel like she means it when she says she’s proud.”

“At least your family believes you when you tell them you’re single,” Mel said, sneaking her hand back into the bag.

Trinity looked incredulous. “Your family thinks you’re hiding a secret boyfriend or something? You, Dr. Melissa ‘can’t hide a facial expression to save her life’ King, MD?”

“Unfortunately,” Mel sighed. “Did I tell you about the invite I got yesterday?”

The other women shook their heads.

“Every year or two, my family hosts a reunion at this cabin up in the Adirondacks-“

“So it’s not bad enough that your family thinks you’re a liar, they’re also forcing you to drive through fucking Syracuse?”

Samira smacked Trinity’s shoulder.

“Ow! What was that for?” Trinity had the audacity to look indignant, as if she hadn’t interrupted Mel’s story not even a full sentence in.

Samira gave her a look, then in her most professional presentation voice said “please save all questions and derogatory comments about upstate New York for the end of Mel’s story.”

Trinity turned and faced Mel, locking her gaze on her with an intensity she usually reserved for staring at gory injuries. “Right, sorry. You were saying that your family invited you to the pits of hell-“

Samira pointedly coughed.

“I mean, you got invited to this getaway in the Adirondacks.”

“Yeah, we go for a long weekend and the whole family stays in a house together.” Mel picked up right where she left off. Over the last year, she’d gotten used to how Trinity talked and was no longer phased by the constant interruptions for snarky comments. “Usually my invite is just for me and Becca, but this time there was a note in there from my Aunt Carol saying that she hoped I would bring the ‘special someone I’ve kept hidden from everyone.’” She said the last part with heavy air quotes.

“Problem is you don’t have a special someone to be hiding from them in the first place,” Samira noted wryly.

“That about sums it up. Excellent diagnosis, Dr. Mohan,” Mel said smiling.

Samira grinned right back. “Thank you, Dr. King.”

“What if you just found someone to bring?” Trinity asked.

Mel could feel her eyebrows shoot up to the ceiling. She was about to respond when Trinity held up a finger to stop her.

“I know, I know, you’re focused on your career and not looking for a relationship right now. But what if you found someone to bring just for the weekend?”

“Are you,” Mel had to take a minute in the middle of her response to fully process what Trinity was suggesting. “Are you saying I should find someone to pretend to date to get my family off of my back?”

It was Q-word in the break room as they all considered what Trinity had suggested.

Samira was the one to break the silence. “It could work.”

If Mel was surprised at one of her friends trying to get her into a fake dating scheme, she was doubly surprised at her other friend agreeing it was a good idea. “It definitely could not. Like Trinity just said, I can’t keep what I feel off of my face. How do you think I can lie to my family about something that serious for a weekend?”

“Just think about it.” The gears in Samira’s head were practically visible as they turned, looking remarkably similar to when she was coming up with a treatment plan for a complex patient. “If you were bringing along a stranger, sure, it would be a disaster. But if it was someone you knew and were already comfortable with, you could totally convince your family that a friend was more than just a friend.”

Her friends were the worst for suggesting this plan, but her mind was the true traitor. As Samira was talking, instead of coming up with strong counterpoints to refute the argument, Mel’s brain unhelpfully supplied her with image after image. Bright blue eyes staring into hers, reassuring her the weekend would go over smoothly. Deft hands holding hers as they walked side by side into the cabin. Soft hair (at least, Mel thought it would be soft, not that she’s ever thought about running her hands through it before) falling onto her face as they shared a kiss to prove their love to her family but that deep down she knew she would want to be real.

“Who would I take with me?” She asked, trying desperately to push down thoughts of the person she knew she wanted to bring.

“I could do it,” Trinity volunteered.

“What?” Mel squeaked out. Nothing about this conversation had gone the way she was expecting. Not that she had been expecting to get into any of this when the three of them had first popped open the pretzel bag.

“I’ll fake date you any day, Melatonin,” Trinity said with a wink. “If your family thinks you’re lying about having a partner, maybe they’ll be open to thinking you were lying about being into girls the whole time too. Your family aren’t homophobic are they?”

“Um, no, I don’t think-“

Trinity tapped her chin. “Actually, it might work better if they are. You show up with a girl on your arm, they’ll probably leave you alone about your love life for the rest of your life.”

“I appreciate the offer, Trinity, really, but-“

Apparently this was the part of the conversation where Mel wasn’t allowed to get a full sentence out, because Dr. Robby chose this moment to poke his head in the door.

“Alright you three, while I appreciate how well my residents are getting along, I’ve gotta break this up. I’ve got a set of 7 year old twins with matching rashes and, everyone’s favorite, a foreign object needing removal from a rectum. I’ll let you decide who gets what,” he said, slipping back out of the break room.

“Dibs on rash!” Samira and Trinity said, scarily in unison.

Trinity turned back to Mel as she and Samira stood and headed for the door. “You don’t have to decide now, just think about it, okay?”

As the door slammed after them, Mel searched for a chip clip to close the bag of pretzels. She wasn’t sure what she dreaded more: the foreign object removal or the dangerous thoughts that Samira and Trinity’s fake dating plan brought up. It was a testament to the complexity of her feelings that she felt better about the former.
____

If Mel’s first mistake was not shutting down her friends’ plan for her when it first started, her second was thinking that they would let it go naturally. The shift had picked up rapidly after Robby had interrupted their snack break. There had been a nasty three car pileup on 279, multiple burn injuries from a grease fire that a new waitress at a diner had thrown water on, and a string of cardiac arrests, oddly coming in increasingly more severe like a heart attack progression chart right out of one of her cardiology textbooks. Their conversation seemed so long ago that Mel assumed it wouldn’t come up again.

But you know what they say about when you assume.

In Mel’s defense, though, it didn’t come up for the rest of the shift. Not in passing between cases, not in whispered tones while pretending to listen to Robby’s end of shift debrief, and not on the walk from the lockers to their cars. It seemed like Samira and Trinity had let it go for the moment.

Normally Mel was too smart - and too anxious - to fall into a false sense of security.

And yet she didn’t think about the fake dating plan as she sat in her car and turned her post-shift drive playlist. She didn’t think about it as she stopped at Silvano’s and picked up two pizzas. She didn’t think about it as she parked her car in front of Langdon’s apartment building.

Much like the communal snack break, this was another friendship and subsequent tradition that had snuck up on her. His first shift back had been the first time they spoke since her first day, but that had turned out to be such a chaotic shift that she didn’t have time to overthink if she was bothering him or being too much. She had overthought it many, many times in the aftermath, but since they eventually ended up here with weekly pizza nights, she would guess that he had been okay with her hardly leaving him alone.

Mel took a bite of her pizza. “How did Tanner’s game go?”

Usually they picked up the food together on their way home from work, but Langdon had the day off today. This was Tanner’s first year playing little league baseball and Langdon had spent the day watching his son play.

“It’s pretty early to tell,” he said while swallowing a bite. It was like he could never turn off the hospital attitude of eat as much as you can as fast as you can because you never know how long of a break you’ll get to eat. “But pretty soon Abby and I are going to have to face the fact that we raised the world’s most unathletic child.”

Coming amidst the massive upheaval in his life that was the previous year, Langdon’s divorce wasn’t exactly pretty. Still, there was a lot of hope whenever he mentioned the blossoming (re-blossoming?) friendship he and Abby had. The way they were able to put everything aside and prioritize being good co-parents made Mel happy. Well, as happy as anything related to the ex-wife of the friend she had an inappropriate crush on could make her.

“I firmly believe all five-year-olds are inherently unathletic,” she shrugged. “Who knows, maybe he’ll turn out to be an all-star player down the line.”

Langdon leveled her with a look. “You should have seen some of the kids out there, Mel. It’s like they’ve been hitting home runs since they came out of the womb. Is that where we went wrong as parents? Should we have started batting practice sooner?”

“Early specialization in sports leads to worse outcomes, both in terms of injuries and poor mental heath.” She had read some articles about it during her peds rotation in med school after seeing an influx of sports injuries and far too stressed out kids. “So I think you did fine.”

Langdon’s face softened in a way that she was still trying to figure out the meaning of. She knew he made this face a lot when she said certain things, but was gathering more data before drawing conclusions.

“Thanks, Mel. That means a lot.” He cleared his throat, picking up another slice. “While I was at the game, Santos texted me.”

“Oh?”

Trinity and Langdon’s relationship had drastically improved since her first day. When he and Abby had been going through their separation, Dana had asked him what his living situation would be. Before Langdon could say anything about how he was apartment hunting, Trinity - not officially part of the conversation, just passing by and not willing to pass up the opportunity to snark at him - brought up Langdon resigning himself to his divorced fate and living in a van down by the river.

Unfortunately for her, instead of snarking right back, Langdon’s face had lit up like Trinity had handed him a million dollars. Little had she known that yet another way the two of them were more similar than different was their love for classic SNL bits. Trinity running her mouth before her brain - part of what got the two of them off on the wrong foot in the first place, though the blame wasn’t unilaterally hers - had unintentionally been what brought them closer. Thank you, Chris Farley.

They still snipped at each other a lot, but instead of full on yelling matches, it was more friendly barbs. Still, last Mel was aware of, they still weren’t good enough friends to be regularly texting. Langdon saying that gave her the same unease as one of the burn victims from the grease fire earlier saying they were fine because their burn doesn’t even hurt.

“She asked me if I could do her a favor.”

That explained it. Trinity must have asked him to switch shifts with her or something. That was a totally reasonable explanation. So why was Langdon being so cryptic about it?

“She said you needed someone to be your fake date for your family vacation and asked,” he paused as if searching for the right word. “Well, more like she told me that I was going to do it.”

Mel avoided choking on her pizza through sheer force of will. The only thing more embarrassing than Langdon knowing about - and getting asked to participate in - Samira and Trinity’s fake dating scheme would be him having to give her the heimlich right now.

“I’m so sorry.” She coughed, her throat having gone dry between the shock of realization and the remaining bits of pizza lodged in it. “That’s so embarrassing. Even if you wanted to, which why would you, you can’t, so she shouldn’t have even asked you.”

His eyebrows knitted together, pulling up toward the strand of hair that forever fell across his face. “Mel, what are you talking about? I told her yes. And I’m glad she asked me, since someone,” he looked pointedly at her, “decided not to mention it.”

Instead of getting caught up on the way he said he would go as if there wasn’t any other possible choice, Mel decided to focus on something more reasonable, like all of the reasons it would be a bad idea. Starting with the most rational.

“The trip is the 26th to the 29th,” she said. “You have Tanner and Penny that weekend.”

Langdon had requested the weekend off so he could make the most of his time with them and make some memories before Tanner started school in the fall. The excitement on his face when he was telling Mel about all of the activities he had planned was one of the most adorable things she’d ever seen. There was no way he would give up that time with his kids to spend a weekend fake dating Mel. She knew she was important to him, but she also knew that his kids came first.

“Exactly. I already have the weekend off.” Langdon smiled, as if he wasn’t suggesting blowing off his kids as casually as if he were suggesting they try a different restaurant for their next pizza night.

Mel must have made a face upon hearing this, because he quickly added, “I forgot to tell you, Abby texted me too.” He reached into his back pocket for his phone, unlocked it, and handed it to her. “Women I have complicated relationships with have been blowing up my phone all day. I’m surprised I didn’t get a text from my old high school teacher that I matched with on tinder in college.”

Mel wasn’t sure if that was a joke or not. Sometimes it was still hard to tell with Langdon, although she was getting better at parsing out his dry humor.

She looked at the message thread on his phone.

Abby: I know we had everything set up for you to have the kids on the weekend of the 26th this month, but is there any way you’d consider switching weekends with me?

Abby: Jerome’s mom is coming into town that weekend and we’ve been dating long enough that I have to spend time with her while she’s here

Frank: Not seeing what that has to do with the custody arrangement, but go on

Abby: I like Jerome. A lot. But his mother makes me want to kill someone (her or me, I haven’t decided yet)

Abby: And I don’t want the kids to have to go through life without a mom (either because I killed myself or am in jail for murder)

Abby: So please let me bring the kids to use as a buffer and as an excuse to leave events early

Frank: Well, we can’t have both of our children’s parents having committed felony offenses

Abby: Ha ha. Very funny.

Abby: Is that a yes?

Great. So Langdon’s weekend had miraculously opened up. There went her strongest argument for why this was a bad idea. Mel hadn’t made it as far as she had in life without backup plans upon backup plans though.

“Don’t you want to spend your time off from work relaxing instead of being dragged along to something like this?” She passed his phone back to him. “I’d rather stay here, and it’s my family’s trip.”

Langdon’s fingers brushed hers as he took his phone back. “Why would I spend a weekend all alone when I could spend it with you? And I would be texting you the whole time asking how things are going on the trip anyways - this way we cut out the middle man and I can know how you’re doing because I’m there with you.”

One of the things Mel loved about working and being friends with Langdon was that he always seemed to know where her mind was going. It made it amazing to bounce ideas off of him because he’d throw thoughts right back her way. Right now, though, it was kind of awful because he seemed to have a counterpoint to every argument she had.

“But what about the fake dating part? That doesn’t feel weird to you?”

“No,” he said, almost confused as to why she would think that. “Be real with me, Mel, who knows you better than me? Besides Becca of course, but she’s not exactly a viable candidate to fake date. I know you best and could be the most convincing.” The job interview-esque bravado faded after a moment. “Are you uncomfortable with it?”

She thought about it. The fact that she kept trying to find reasons it wouldn’t work certainly made it seem like she didn’t want to go through with it. But deep down, a part of Mel thought it could be almost - was fun the right word?

“I don’t think so,” she decided.

“Okay, great. Then just to add to why I’m right for the job, families love me. Abby’s grandma still sends me a Christmas card. And of course,” he winked in such an overexaggerated way that she couldn’t help but snort. “We all know I’m a great liar. And it’s nice to be able to use my bad qualities to do something good.”

Mel brought a hand to her mouth, then quickly dropped it back into her lap. If she was going to be seeing Aunt Carol soon, she couldn’t have jagged, bitten nails. “I don’t know if good is the right word. I’m not thrilled at the idea of lying to my family.”

To his credit, Langdon immediately course corrected. “Okay, so then we just won’t lie. Thinking it through, we probably weren’t going to have to lie a lot anyway. I’m not going to be lying about how I feel about you,” he coughed. “I mean, how much I care about you: truth. How we met: truth. You’re my best friend: truth.”

Sometimes when he was open with his affection like this, Mel thinks back to the Langdon she met her first day at the Pitt. After that day she thought there was no way she’d ever be able to repay the mentor who told everyone - including her - that she was worth it. She also thought of Frank on his first day back, hunched in on himself and closed off to the world. It seemed then like she might never see him smile again - which would be a shame since his smile was warm like the sun. She wished the version of her from both of those days could see the two of them now. Those Mels would be shocked at how much this Langdon smiled (and how often those smiles were reserved just for her). They would also be in awe of the fact that he saw her not just as an equal at work, but as a best friend.

She didn’t think past Mel would be surprised that (with the exception of Becca, but in Mel’s heart Becca had always ranked above everyone else) he was her best friend too.

“What about the fact that this whole arrangement is predicated on a lie?” While she hoped that one of her points would convince him not to go through with this, a part of her couldn’t wait to see how he refuted this. Just like when they bounced diagnosis ideas off of one another at the hospital, it was almost exhilarating to see how his mind worked.

“That’s fair,” he conceded. “But it’s not based on a lie you told, was it? Your aunt assumed you had a boyfriend, you just didn’t correct her.”

“I did try to correct her. Many times. She just didn’t believe me,” Mel took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. That was what got her into this mess to begin with.

“That’s even less your fault then. She’s just lying to herself.” He didn’t explicitly comment on that being something he’s very familiar with, Mel, but she could read his cheeky smile and know he was thinking it.

She was running out of arguments and was pretty sure he knew that.

“So that’s my willingness to come on this trip with you, my availability to do so, my qualifications for the job, and your moral quandary about lying to your family taken care of. Is there anything else you wanted to address before you accept that this is a good idea?” This next part he said very begrudgingly. “Even if Santos was the one to think of it.”

Mel put her glasses back on. “I don’t think we fully covered your willingness to come on this trip. You said you would, but you didn’t say why.”

The why was what was gnawing at her. No matter how good his counterarguments were, if she put her foot down and said she really didn’t want to do this, Langdon would drop it instantly. Mel knew why she wasn’t doing that. But why was he seriously entertaining this idea?

“Because we’re friends.” He said it like it was the simplest thing in the world. Langdon and Mel are friends, therefore he does anything she asks. Well, she wasn’t the one who asked in this case, but that’s beside the point. “Just like how you brought me groceries last month because I was laid out with the flu and couldn’t even crawl to my kitchen to find a protein bar.”

“I don’t think those are quite the same thing.”

“They certainly are. You’re in a situation where you need something and I can give it to you. We’re friends. Let me wine and dine your family to convince them I’m wining and dining you.” He looked somewhere between the please give me something interesting face he often pulled to Dana when he was trying to get a good case and the faux innocent who, me, I’m not up to anything mischievous face she had seen Tanner pull when he was trying to recruit her to help prank his dad.

It went the other way too. Mel and Langdon are friends, therefore she can’t say no to him either.

Mel gave a slightly overdramatized sigh so she could at least pretend she hadn’t given in as easily as she did. “Okay, let’s do it.”
_____

The drive up to the cabin Mel’s family was renting was almost eight hours, so to get there with a little time to spare to settle in before dinner, Frank had to pick up Mel and Becca around 9 in the morning. He had managed to pack the night before - and hopefully hadn’t annoyed Mel too much by asking her question after question about what he might possibly need. He hadn’t been this nervous about having the right clothes for the occasion since his first date. In what seemed to be the story of his life, though, for every one thing Frank managed to remember to do, he forgot something equally important. Getting into his car to head to Mel’s apartment, he realized the quarter tank of gas he had wasn’t going to be quite enough for the whole drive. He was going to have to fuel up for the trip in more ways than one.

He shot Mel a text letting her know he was on his way and asking what gas station snacks she and Becca wanted.

A full tank of gas later and armed with combos for Mel (pizzeria flavor, not pepperoni pizza, she had told him, yes there is a difference), pizza flavor pringles for Becca (was a preference for ultra processed pizza flavored snacks genetic?), and peach rings for himself (not that he was biased, but they were the best road trip snack of all time), Frank pulled up outside of Mel and Becca’s apartment at a crisp 9:02.

He got out of the car and leaned against the passenger door, pulling his phone out of his back pocket. Frank’s mother raised him better than to sit on his ass while the women he was traveling with carried their own luggage. He had just opened his text conversation with Mel when her front door opened to reveal her and Becca.

Frank slid his phone back into his pocket and rushed forward, reaching for Mel’s suitcase.

“I can carry my own bag, it’s okay,” she protested, not releasing her grip on the handle.

Frank knew Mel was capable of damn near anything. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t do damn near everything if it would make her life even slightly easier. “Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you have to.”

Becca, on the other hand, had none of her sister’s qualms about doing things herself. “Don’t you pay attention to any of the movies we watch? He’s your boyfriend, Mel, let him carry your bag.” She punctuated her point by dumping her duffel into Frank’s arms.

“Thank you, Becca,” Frank said, making gimme hands at Mel until she acquiesced and handed over her suitcase.

Mel didn’t say anything, but Frank thought he saw a hint of a smile on her face as she got in the car while he loaded the sisters’ bags alongside his.

He let out a deep sigh that he covered up with the sound of the trunk closing. He could do this. He could spend the weekend playing pretend as Frank, Mel’s boyfriend. He wasn’t worried about keeping up the facade. After all, it wasn’t that different from his everyday self: Frank, Mel’s best friend who was hopelessly in love with her. He was more worried he would get so deep in pretending to be the former that she would learn about his role as the latter.

Trying to run from his problems had historically failed him, so there was nothing left to do but get in the car and drive.

“You don’t talk about your family a lot,” he said, flicking on his blinker to merge back into traffic, “so fill me in. What do I need to know before meeting everyone?”

Frank knew Mel and Becca had lost their parents pretty young but Mel had never mentioned her extended family before talking about this trip. It was only practical for him to ask who he would meet this weekend. And if he got more scraps of Mel knowledge that he could put onto the highest shelves of his mental library, that was just a bonus.

“Our dad had two siblings,” Mel began. “Carol and Brad. Carol was married to Jerry but he died and she remarried his sister Billie.”

“It’s all very regency romance novel of her,” Becca said. “Carol also gives prolonged and uncomfortably tight hugs, so be warned.”

Frank looked at Mel, who shrugged. “Becca is right. She will try to hug you as soon as you walk through the door and it will kind of be the worst. Anyways, Carol has two kids: Will-“

“Who won’t be coming because his wife is too pregnant to make the drive.”

“-and Lydia, who’s bringing her fiancé, Dylan.”

“They’re both fitness influencers, so if they invite you on a hike, say no. They went hiking for ten hours last year. Ten hours, Frank.”

Becca was coming through with all kinds of sage advice today.

“Then there’s Uncle Brad and Aunt Molly.” Mel’s voice softened. Molly was the only name vaguely familiar to him. “Our mom and Molly were always really close - they always said marrying into the King family bonded them for life. After she died, Molly was the closest thing to a mother figure I had. If by close you mean from a thousand miles away since she and Brad live on the West Coast. If we’d been younger when Dad died too, I think we probably would have moved out there with her.”

Frank wanted nothing more than to reach over the console and squeeze Mel’s hand. He knew she hated feeling pitied when she talked about her parents but it wouldn’t be an I’m sorry, it would be an I hear you and I’m here with you.

Mel had been such a deer in headlights just having the conversation about fake dating him that Frank hadn’t wanted to push it and send her running for the hills by asking what that fake dating would entail. His punishment for not clarifying boundaries sooner was that his hand got to stay firmly on the wheel and not drift anywhere near Mel’s.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mel wrung her hands in her lap, as if beckoning him to take her hand anyways. “Molly and Brad’s son - our cousin, Simon - will also be here with his wife, Janie.”

Becca returned, weaving her commentary in with Mel’s. “Simon and Janie are married but Lydia and Dylan have been together longer, so other than you, Janie is the most recently initiated partner.”

“Simon was the cousin I was closest with growing up. I think you’ll like him and Janie.”

Frank’s breath caught in his throat. Academically, he knew he was coming on this trip to meet Mel’s family. But hearing Mel think about him and her family in the same sentence was something else altogether. That was the kind of thing you said when you were planning a future with someone. Academically, he also knew that his future with Mel began and ended with this weekend. His deepest fantasies were far from academic, though.

“That’s it for the family.” In the rear view mirror, Frank saw Becca pull a set of headphones out of her backpack. “And they’re all going to be very social when we get there, so I’m going into introvert mode.”

Frank shot a look at Mel, who, for all that she worked an extrovert’s job, had an introvert’s heart. “Do you need to go ‘introvert mode’ too? I don’t mind if you need to put on headphones too and not drain your social battery talking on the drive so it can be full when we walk into the lion’s den.”

“I appreciate that but it’s not necessary. You don’t count as a person.”

Frank could feel the dot of tension in his forehead as his brows pulled together in confusion. While Mel’s tone had been positive, that was far from the most complimentary thing he’d ever heard.

“I mean,” Mel rushed, probably realizing how that had sounded, “as a general rule, people drain my social battery. You don’t. Being around you isn’t like being with people, it’s more like being by myself.” She gave him an unsure smile. “Does that make sense? I didn’t mean to imply-“

“I get you.” The smile Frank returned was far from unsure. “And for what it’s worth, you don’t drain my social battery either, Mel. If anything, I think you refill it. Not that surprising, though, since you make everything better.”

Mel had the audacity to blush as if he wasn’t just returning her paying him the best compliment he’s ever received. Scratch what he said earlier, you don’t count as a person was actually incredible to hear.

“And now that you know I’m okay with talking, we should probably talk about boundaries.” Mel sounded uneasy. “You know, since we’re not actually dating but dating tends to involve a lot of things, so we should talk about how we’re going to handle them.”

Frank had been wrong. Mel wasn’t going to run away from this conversation; she was the one to start it. Of course she was. Mel was braver than most people gave her credit for.

“Okay,” he said, not trusting what might seep into his voice in a longer sentence.

Frank wasn’t good at taking what he was allowed. Back before - before the drugs, the fallout, the rehab - if you gave him an inch, he’d angle for a mile. Now the trouble wasn’t getting the inch but finding a way to give it back without outright telling the giver they made a mistake. Mel made him want miles again. Not that he would ever force anything to make her uncomfortable- he’d sooner cut off a number of inches very near and dear to him - but it scared him. How much he wanted and how little he deserved.

“We should definitely hold hands,” Mel said bluntly, breaking him from his reverie. “If that’s something you’re okay with.”

Still not trusting his voice to not betray the depth of his longing, Frank placed his hand palm up on the center console. An invitation, an offering. By some miracle, he kept it from shaking as much as it had the last time he presented his hands to her under a sky lit by fireworks.

“I, um, meant when we’re there, but I guess it would be good practice to start now.” Mel slid her hand into his.

Their hands had touched before. It was impossible not to when they worked in such close quarters. Brushing Mel’s hand felt like lightning, all sparks and jolts and the excitement of danger. Holding Mel’s hand felt like a lightning rod - grounding and down to earth and utterly safe.

“Practice,” he said, reminding himself what this really was - and that it was all it could ever be. “Right. What else?”

“I think I would be okay with you hugging me and putting your arm around me.”

Cruise control was such an under appreciated invention. Frank had never been as grateful for it as he was right now for letting him keep the car steady, giving the illusion he might be feeling the same stability in this conversation. “You think?”

“Well,” she shrugged, “it’s not something we’ve ever done, so I can’t be sure.”

Frank wanted to make her sure. He wanted her to know that his arms would welcome her home and hold her forever if she’d let him. Since that was far from an appropriate response, he went with something different. “Okay. Just let me know if you end up not being okay with it and I’ll stop.”

“As long as you let me know if you’re uncomfortable with anything too, Langdon. I’m not the only one who’s allowed to have boundaries.”

Yeah, that wasn’t going to work. The boundaries part, yes, but the other thing…

“Deal. And as long as we’re on the subject of things we want to happen while fake dating, you should probably call me Frank.”

He’d wanted to ask this of her for a while now. Langdon was impersonal, the name all of his coworkers used. Mel hadn’t been just his coworker for some time now.

“Okay, Frank.” The word was hesitant on her tongue in a way she rarely was around him anymore. Just like she’d become more confident with their friendship, he hoped she would get more comfortable using his given name. It sounded so nice in her mouth when she did. “Is there anything else we should figure out our boundaries on in advance?”

He shouldn’t ask it. He was holding Mel’s hand, he had permission to hug her in the near future, he didn’t need anything more.

It’s something couples do. It’s not unreasonable to want to know how you’ll handle it, the bold, wanting idiot that was his heart said.

He shouldn’t ask it.

“What about kissing?”

“Kissing?” Mel jumped so high in her seat that if his hand and her seatbelt weren’t anchoring her, she might have flown away.

“You know, like-“ he stuck his lips out and made an over exaggerated smooch sound.

“I know what kissing is, Frank.” There was another way she said his name: unimpressed and mildly disappointed in him.

He should probably save examining why that was so hot for another time.

Frank snuck a glimpse at her. When Mel got flustered, she didn’t need someone to save her, but the space to sort herself out until she was ready to say her piece. Despite the mindless stretch of highway they were on, Frank looked intently out the window to give her as much privacy to do so as he could in the confines of the car.

When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet but sure. “Forehead kisses would be okay.”

“Good to know.” Frank was getting Mel King’s official stance on not just kissing, but kissing him and he was more focused than the time he popped a triple dose of his ADHD meds before his O-chem II final sophomore year of undergrad.

“Beyond that, I’m not really sure. It’s not like I’ve never been kissed before-“

Frank was playing whack-a-mole with the curiosity and unfounded jealousy rearing their heads at that because now was not the time.

“-but it’s very situation dependent. How can I say it’s for sure fine now when it might not be when we get into the thick of it?”

“You can’t,” Frank shrugged, hitting his blinker to change lanes. “So it’ll be like they taught us in med school. The answer is always ‘it depends,’ so we’ll let it depend.”

“It’s not like we can just stop in the middle of a hypothetical kissing situation and analyze it,” Mel objected. “That’s going to look unnatural and not convincing at all.”

“We don’t have to check in out loud. If we get into a ‘hypothetical kissing situation,’” he actually couldn’t handle how adorable her phrasing was. “How about this? One squeeze for ‘no, let’s not.’” Frank squeezed her hand once. “Two squeezes for ‘go ahead and kiss me.’” He squeezed her hand twice in rapid succession.

She squeezed his back, once, then twice. “It depends, then.”
_____

Pulling up to the house should have felt comforting to Mel like it did every year. Even if they could be overwhelming sometimes, she loved her family and was excited to see them. This time, though, seeing the green cabin with its wraparound porch and the four other cars in the driveway felt like hearing her MCAT proctor tell her she could begin the test. The game was afoot and her hands were shaking.

Well, her right hand was. Her left hand was still hitched to the warm anchor of of Langdon’s - of Frank’s. Mel hadn’t expected him to still be holding her hand all these hours later, but every time they got back in the car after a break to use the bathroom and stretch their legs, he had reached out across the center console expectantly and who was she to deny the magnetic pull between their palms? It was so kind of him to drive the entire way one handed so she could get practice with their PDA. Mel had adjusted to the feeling of his hand in hers and found that it was just as nice in reality as when she daydreamed about it. Not that that happened frequently - or at all. She just wished the butterflies in her stomach would get the message and adjust as well. Her stomach had been swirling the entire drive and it wasn’t from car sickness.

With a click of the gearshift, Frank put the car in park.

“Hey. What’s going on in that brain of yours?” Frank had a specific tone, soft and gentle when he checked in with her, that would have come across as patronizing from anyone else.

“I’m just a little nervous about the, you know,” she made a vague gesture. Since one of her hands was still in Frank’s, his hand was dragged along for the ride. “The everything.”

“Is there a specific part of the everything that’s got you freaking out, or is it the everything everything?”

What had her the most nervous and what she was freaking out about were two different parts of the everything. Mel was most nervous about faking the relationship in front of her family. Both because she didn’t like the idea of lying to her family and because she’d never had much of a poker face. As for what she was freaking out about, well, Frank had asked if he could kiss her and she had told him he could. He hadn’t in the moment, because he was driving among other reasons, but it was on the table now. Who wouldn’t be freaking out?

“A little of both,” she settled on saying. “I know how ridiculous this sounds since fake dating is what we agreed to, but it’s weird, right? The faking it part?”

Frank met her eyes. Looking into that tremendous blue, she felt both pinned down to a table and hoisted up onto a pedestal. “I know you don’t like that faking it means deceiving your family but we’re not lying. We’re just being us and we’re pretty good at that.”

If only he knew how little she would have to lie in front of her family and how much she would have to when the two of them were alone.

Frank knocked on the back of her headrest to get her sister’s attention. “You ready to get this party started, Becca?”

Becca pulled her headphones off her ears. “I don’t think party is the right word but let’s get the hugging and introductions out of the way.”

Getting their items out of the trunk of his car, Frank looked like an instruction manual on how to ignore every piece of ergonomic advice the physical therapist he saw for his back would give. He loaded up both of their bags onto his right shoulder and reached out to her with his left hand.

“Absolutely not. You can either hold my hand or my bag,” she said, leaving no room for argument. Or trying to, at least. The pout sneaking onto Frank’s face that he couldn’t have his cake and eat it too was carving out some wiggle room.

“Fine,” he grumbled, handing her bag over. His pout melted into a smile when she took his hand in return.

And now they weren’t just holding hands in his car but out in the world where anyone - especially her family - could see.

Any hope Mel had of making a quiet entrance and sneaking up to their room was extinguished when they ran into Aunt Carol as soon as they entered the house.

“Oh, Melly, Becca, I’m so glad you made it!” Carol rushed from the kitchen to the foyer to hug both of them in turn. Mel was happy to see that - while still happening - Becca’s hug was far shorter than it used to be, to the point where Becca could tolerate it. “And you must be Mel’s mystery man!”

“Frank Langdon, ma’am. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He was all meet-the-family charm as he stuck his hand out to Mel’s aunt.

“Oh, honey, none of that now, we’re huggers,” she said, pulling Frank in for a hug of his own. “Everyone else is freshening up in their rooms before dinner, so you got here just in time to drop your bags and head down to the table.”

Halfway up the stairs, Mel snorted as she heard Frank whisper to Becca that she was right about the prolonged uncomfortability of Aunt Carol’s hugs.

Becca peeled off to the room she and Mel usually shared on these trips. Mel kept going and guided Frank to the room that would be theirs for the next few days.

The room wasn’t much. A large bed took up most of the floor space, leaving just enough room for a pair of nightstands and a patch of carpet to access the attached bathroom that shared a wall with the door to the hallway.

It wasn’t that Mel was surprised there was only one bed - after so many summers here growing up, she knew the place like the back of her hand. She was more surprised that she had forgotten to mention it before when they were talking about what they were comfortable with doing.

She chanced a look at Frank whose eyes widened as he took in the space, then quickly adjusted. Mel wondered what he was thinking to cause that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it expression.

“Do you prefer the right or left side?” He asked it in a way that gave no indication to what those thoughts might have been.

“I’ll take the left if that’s okay with you. I like being further from the door.” Mel set her bag on the floor by the wall and knelt to dig out her stuff. She wasn’t a full unpacker on trips but she wanted to get her pajamas set out on the bed now so she didn’t have to hunt for them later tonight.

“Good with me.”

The fact that she was looking in her bag, not at him, and that she had something to do with her hands helped her ask the question. “Are you sure you’re comfortable sharing the bed?”

If he wasn’t, she could work around it. She could always use the other twin bed in the room she shared with Becca. There would be no good explanation for it if someone caught her sneaking between rooms, but Mel would rather stumble her way through that than make Frank feel like he had to share a bed with her.

“I’ve shared bed with friends on vacation before, it’s no big deal.” He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, like it didn’t have her heart racing that in a few hours she would be sleeping with Frank Langdon (not in that way, but she was on edge enough without adding thinking about that way to the mix).

Yeah, sure, sharing a bed was no big deal in the same way that them hanging out outside of work for the first time was no big deal. In the way that sharing a couch and gradually inching closer with each and every movie night was no big deal. The way that everything about this trip was no big deal.

“Yeah, sure, it’s no big deal,” she said, standing up to take some of her toiletries into the bathroom.

Frank changed the subject as she passed by him. “Meeting Carol was one family member down, the rest to go. Anything I should do different for everybody else?”

Mel eyed the bathroom counter and decided to put her things on the left side of the sink. From what she’d seen of Frank’s bathroom, she was pretty sure he wouldn’t have a preference for where his stuff ended up.

“Don’t do anything different. Just be yourself and they’re going to love you as much as I do.”

Frank didn’t say anything and as she stepped back into their bedroom, she saw he was standing frozen by the wall.

“Frank?” She asked, standing in front of him. “Are you okay?”

He ran a hand through his hair, sending a few locks wildly askew, which Mel narrowly stopped herself from reaching up to fix.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good.” He put a hand out for her. “Ready to get going?”

“Just because I said we should hold hands doesn’t mean we have to do it all the time. You can take a break from putting in the fake dating work.” To clarify, Mel was greatly enjoying the amount of hand holding happening and if it was in any way possible, would never let go. Not that that was an out loud thought.

Frank grinned at her. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, right?”

If it wasn’t for his hand in hers pulling her out the door, it would have been Mel’s turn to stand frozen in place at something the other had said.
_____

Frank knew that the idea of lying to her family didn’t sit well with Mel, so as he was introduced to each aunt, uncle, and cousin (and tried to remember what Mel and Becca had said was notable about each of them), he thought through how to be as truthful as possible when the questions started coming.

“So, Frank, what do you do for work?”

“I’m an emergency medicine doctor, just like Mel.” Nailed it. First question down, no stretching of the truth needed. He knew the rest wouldn’t be so easy.

“Does that mean you two met at work? Or was it a Romeo and Juliet situation between two ERs?” Mel’s cousin Lydia asked.

“We met at work,” Mel said. “Frank was the senior resident on my first day at PTMC.”

Frank thought Mel could maybe stand to sound a little less like she was reciting their story off of flash cards, but he knew she was nervous about tonight and trying her best.

“Ooh, office romance,” chimed in Dylan, the cousin’s fiancé.

“Something like that, yeah,” Frank agreed. “We’re great partners in the trauma bays and it turns out we’re not half bad outside work either.”

Mel’s Aunt Carol was next, in the same tone of voice Frank imagined she’d used in the conversation with Mel that had started this whole scheme. “How long have you two been together? Mel’s been so tight lipped about her boyfriend that we don’t know anything.”

Somehow Frank managed to tamp down his laugh at that, knowing full well why Mel was so recalcitrant on the subject.

“Like Mel said, we met on her first day, but we didn’t start getting serious,” getting serious being a very deliberate word choice as opposed to saying dating, “until about a year ago.”

Frank looked to Mel for confirmation that she was okay with this story. Thankfully the power of the patriarchy was on his side here, making it cute and charming for him to not remember key details of their relationship and need to check with his girlfriend about them instead of making it seem like they were confirming their cover story. It was bullshit that so little was expected from men in relationships, but he was making it work for them here.

Mel nodded, instantly picking up that he was talking about when they started to become friends. Of course she picked up on it - their brains were basically made to work in tandem. “Yeah, it was a few months after you came back from your leave.”

His leave was another careful word choice instead of that time you almost lost your job but somehow managed to mostly work though your issues and claw back some dignity to redo your senior resident year.

“But Mel had a crush on him since day one,” Becca added.

“Becca!” Mel sounded scandalized, as if having had a crush on her now boyfriend was something to be embarrassed about and not part of the natural progression of a relationship.

“What? You came home talking about how ‘Dr. Langdon is so nice’ and ‘he has floppy boyband hair.’”

Frank knew from meeting Becca on his first day back that Mel had talked to her about him after their first shift. He didn’t know that was what she had told Becca though.

Then again, he didn’t know how involved in the fake dating thing Becca was. He figured that was between her and Mel and hadn’t asked. Maybe Becca was playing along to help sell the relationship. But there was a chance that - just like in the car when she was telling him about the family members he would meet - Becca was yet again providing him with insider information about one of the Kings.

Mel looked like she wanted to crawl under the table and die. As a medical professional sworn to do no harm, Frank couldn’t allow that, so he fought the grin off his face.

“Aw, it’s okay, sweetheart, I’m glad you thought I was nice. And liked my hair.”

His response got some chuckles from everyone at the table. It made Mel’s blush worse, though. Well, he couldn’t win them all this weekend.

He’d forgotten to ask if she was okay with pet names, so calling her sweetheart had been a gamble. It fit with his vow to tell the truth, though. Mel was nothing if not sweet and she was his heart.
_____

Mel meant what she told Frank on the drive up. He really didn’t drain her social battery. Unfortunately the rate at which he replenished it couldn’t quite keep up with the rate her family drained it, so she was hoping for an early bedtime after dinner.

I want to be done with people, Becca had said once the dishes were cleared. Mel couldn’t agree more.

Her aunts and uncles had joined Becca in the early flight upstairs. She was trying to catch Frank’s eye and get him to notice how much she wanted to be done with the day, but just as he turned to look at her-

“How are we feeling about a bonfire?” Dylan asked the group.

“Great idea, babe!” Lydia exclaimed. And then, in a tone that hadn’t changed since they were kids, “last one to the fire pit is a rotten egg!”

Despite all of the cousins now being grown adults, everyone raced out to the backyard. Mel, quite used to being a rotten egg, lingered.

Frank stayed back with her, also on his way to rotten egg-dom at this rate. “Hey, it seemed like you wanted to go to bed. Are you okay with this? I can always go out there and say we’re going to pass.”

Not only had he noticed that she didn’t want to keep peopling, but he also was willing to make excuses on her behalf so she didn’t even have to own up to wanting to quit peopling. Mel could honestly cry right now from the relief of being known like that, but she held it in, settling for a thick swallow instead.

“No, I’ll be okay. We should go out there.” She nodded, probably more to convince herself than to convince him. “I only get to see everyone once a year, so I want to take advantage of that.”

“Are you sure?” His question wasn’t paired with his condescending I know better than you face that, while rarer these days, still sometimes came out among the med students and younger residents. Instead it was a face Mel had taken to calling his why won’t you let me help you? look. She saw it a lot, especially on days she was burning the candle from both ends, but she’d never admit he was right to worry. Something something pot kettle.

“Yeah,” she nodded again, although she was pretty sure it looked less convincing and more like a nervous tic. “Yeah, I’ll be okay. I’m just going to go brush my teeth first, then I’ll be right out.”
_____

Ten minutes later - two minutes for brushing her teeth, two minutes and thirty four seconds of listening to “Savage” to hype herself up, roughly a minute and a half for the round trip from the kitchen to the bathroom in her and Frank’s shared room, and the remaining three minutes and fifty four seconds of looking in the mirror and reminding herself that she’s faced much worse situations than a bonfire with her cousins - Mel made her way out the patio door.

Dylan had built the fire up to a nice height. In the fading dusk light, she could see that the fire pit was surrounded by four Adirondack chairs occupied by her cousins and their partners and a bench partially occupied by Frank. She walked to the bench and sat down, curling her legs up under her as she sat.

As a finishing touch, she laid her head against his shoulder. Physical touch was something they talked about in their planning session on the drive up. Frank had told her he was okay with it and thought it would help sell their relationship. He had proven it since they arrived, keeping one arm around her shoulders or a hand in hers the entire time. She figured leaning on him was completely within the safe zone.

What was not within the safe zone was the hey, baby that accompanied the kiss on the top of her head as she settled down. They hadn’t discussed pet names. Mel hadn’t thought he would be a pet name person, so she hadn’t bothered to bring it up. As proven by the earlier sweetheart incident, she was wrong. Up until two weeks ago, though, she wouldn’t have thought he’d play along as her fake boyfriend either, so maybe she shouldn’t be basing her plans on what she thought she knew about Frank Langdon.

Mel moved her face from resting against his shoulder to his neck in a move that she hoped came off as affectionate, but felt like retreating into ostrich mode. She felt him stiffen up for a moment and was about to move away - desire to hide her face so she could process his words be damned if it made him uncomfortable - when he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her tighter against him. With a shuddering exhale he relaxed and she went back to her guilt free hiding.

“You two are absolutely adorable!” Lydia fawned. Normally Mel found a lot of what Lydia had to say overexaggerated and unnecessary, but this response was reassuring. It meant that likely no one else could see the thought bubble coming from her head that just read baby, sweetheart, baby on loop.

“So, Frank, speaking of how adorable you and Mel are, the cousin council has something we have to ask you.” Between her position in Frank’s neck and his position across the fire pit Mel could barely see Simon through the flames, but his voice carried clearly. “Why Mel?”

She felt Frank tip his head in confusion. “Why Mel?” he repeated.

Lydia was the one to answer. “Yeah. You’re a pretty attractive guy, successful, good job. You could have any woman you want. So why choose our Mel?”

Frank’s soft snort at successful had practically turned into a growl as Lydia finished. “Excuse me?”

Mel straightened up, getting ready to tell Frank it was okay, when Janie spoke up.

“What I think Simon and Lydia mean to say is that we all know why Mel is special and why anyone would be lucky to have her, but what stands out to you when you look at her?” She was sitting closer to Mel and Frank than Simon was, so Mel could make out her face. “It’s a King family thing. They asked me the same question when Simon and I first started dating.”

“I got it too” Dylan chimed in. “I said it was Lyd’s fire that made me fall for her.”

Frank ran the hand not around Mel’s shoulders through his hair. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I took that the wrong way.”

“No, don’t be. Simon and I kind of butchered asking that,” Lydia conceded.

“Will is usually the one who does it, since he met Ashley before we met our partners, but since he’s not here we’re having to fill in. And besides,” Simon added cheerfully, “it’s great to know that if we were shitty people who were insinuating what you thought we were, that you’d defend Mel’s honor.”

“With that in mind, let’s try again: why Mel?” asked Lydia. “And if you need a minute to think, Mel can answer ‘why Frank?’ first.”

“I can? I mean,” Mel coughed, realizing her family were all looking at her expectantly. “Yeah, I can.”

She couldn’t. She really couldn’t look at her family while spilling her heart about the reasons she was in love with her fake boyfriend. Even if he was here in a real boyfriend capacity, she would have had a hard time telling it to anyone else. So she turned to look at Frank for the exact reasons she was about to articulate. His eyes met hers and she was transported back to the PTMC break room being given a harbor during a storm, a thousand pieces of gravel during a bad shift.

“He never made me feel bad about myself.” For the second time that evening, Frank’s eyebrows lifted. Whatever he’d been expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. “He’s never made me feel weird or bad or wrong or different.”

Frank pulled away from her, removing his arm from her shoulders. Before Mel could get too far down an anxiety spiral about what she said that made him draw back, he shifted on the bench so he was completely facing her.

“Why Mel?” he asked. “Mel makes me feel seen in a way I don’t think anyone ever has. She looks at me and sees not just the man I am and all the mistakes I’ve made, but the man I can be, the man she makes me want to be.”

Mel was pretty sure the fire hadn’t tripled in size and completely consumed her without her noticing, but that would certainly explain how her entire body felt like it was burning right now.

“The day we met,” he continued. His eyes hadn’t strayed from her face once. “I had to leave my shift early. I was having some, um, family problems and needed to go. We ended up in a situation that was all hands on deck, so I came back for a little while. I’m standing there working on a patient in the middle of the hallway and all of a sudden over the yelling and crying, I hear a voice say ‘you’re back!’ I look up to see Mel and in that moment it’s like she stared into my soul, weighed it, and found me worthy. She met my eyes and smiled and all of the chaos around me stopped.”

At some point, Mel knew her jaw fell open, but she couldn’t risk missing a single word to divert any of her attention to close it.

“It still happens. Whether it’s during a crazy shift or when we’re alone at home, she looks at me and the rest of the world fades away.”

The world had faded away for her too. She forgot he said all this to answer a question from her family. She forgot they existed, forgot anything existed except for her and Frank.

Until her family’s reactions broke through.

Dylan whistled. “That was straight poetry, my man, holy shit.”

“That might be the best answer any new King partner has given to that question,” said Simon.

“Don’t be ridiculous, honey,” Jane replied. “There’s no ‘might be.’”

“I think the premarital counseling Dylan and I are doing must be working, because my old reaction would have been to pick a fight that he’s never talked about me like that,” Lydia joked.

Mel was dimly aware that the conversation moved on in the background, but she couldn’t make out a single word. All she could focus on was the featherlight touch of Frank’s lips as they grazed the shell of her ear.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mel.”
_____

Sometime between baring his heart to her family and the fire dwindling down to just embers, Mel had fallen asleep. Frank felt her go still against him and glanced over to see that her eyes had closed and her head had fallen against his shoulder again, but this time at an angle that looked pretty uncomfortable. With a little bit of maneuvering - going ever so slowly as to not wake her up - Frank managed to get her laying down with her head in his lap.

Looking down at her sleep softened face, he realized that this was a version of Mel he hadn’t seen before. He’d seen tired Mel and bone-deep exhausted Mel (both of which tended to emerge at work) and even sleepy Mel (mostly featured at her apartment towards the end of a movie they were watching or after talking late into the night), but never Mel once sleep had taken her. Frank knew it was such a cliche to say that sleep made someone look younger, so he wasn’t going to say it. If he was going to be sappy, he was at least going to be original about it. No, sleep didn’t make Mel look younger, but it certainly made her look more peaceful. She looked unguarded in a way she rarely let others see. He wished she could stay like this forever. Not asleep - if she was asleep forever, how would he get to talk to her - just at peace. He wished he could always give her this type of calm.

Frank wasn’t good at sitting still. It was why he worked in emergency medicine where it was okay to get distracted from sitting down and charting because there was always a new emergency to handle. To satisfy his need to fidget without waking Mel by moving, he started running a hand through her hair. He knew that for some people, it helped them sleep more and hoped that was true for Mel.

She started shifting and his hand stilled. But then Mel’s head pushed up into his hand, as if to say why’d you stop. Frank got the message loud and clear. He let his hand resume its journey, throwing in some scratches at the nape of her neck. He was rewarded with a quiet hum that he felt more than heard.

He was grateful for how dark it had gotten between the sun setting and the fire starting to burn low. It would be so embarrassing if anyone else could see the cartoon hearts that were surely swirling around his head right now.

Frank hadn’t told her this - too focused on keeping up a facade of cool and collected to ease some of her worry - but he had been a little nervous about interacting with her family. Sitting in front of the fire and chatting idly with her cousins, Mel draped across his lap, he realized there was no need for the worry. He could stay in this moment forever.

“Anyways, I’ll get off my soapbox now, but long story short, artists have ‘frivolous’ things like only green M&Ms in their riders to make sure people read them and that their safety is being looked out for, not because they’re ‘drama queens.’” Janie worked as a manager for a concert venue and had been telling them what it was like working behind the scenes. Frank had really enjoyed listening to her talk about her job.

“I never,” Dylan paused for a big yawn, “thought about it that way.”

“I’m going to hope you’re yawning like that because it’s late, not because I was boring you,” Janie joked.

“Definitely the former,” Dylan replied. “I would love to hear more, but not as much as I would love to be in bed right now.”

“Should we call it a night?” Simon asked.

Everyone gave some form of nod or verbal agreement and began working their way out of their chairs.

Frank looked down at Mel who was still out like a light. It seemed a shame to wake her, but she would sleep better in a real bed. He would too. As much as he longed to stay out here holding her and stroking her hair until daylight, he knew that if he spent the night on this bench his back would be fucked in the morning. And wouldn’t that be something to have to explain to her family.

Frank moved his hand from Mel’s head and brought it to her shoulder, shaking her as gently as he could. “Mel, sweetheart, you’ve gotta wake up. It’s time to go to bed.”

Despite his best efforts to give her an easy waking, her head shot up into the air. “Hmm? What?”

As she blinked rapidly, trying to orient herself, Frank knew that the swirling hearts around his head had been joined by cartoon birds chirping like he was a damn Disney princess. If he hadn’t been before, watching Mel wake up, he knew he was well and truly twitterpated.

(Last time Tanner and Penny had stayed with him, they had watched Bambi together. He and Abby weren’t perfect at co-parenting, but they agreed to raise the kids on the classics.)

He saw understanding dawn on Mel’s face as she saw the others moving toward the house. “How long was I asleep?”

“It’s around 1:30 now, so probably an hour or two. I’m not sure when you drifted off.”

Frank stood up and extended a hand down to Mel to help her off the bench. She took his hand and stood, letting him guide her into the house. The blind trust with which she let him move her moved something in him.
_____

“I’m going to take a shower before bed.”

Frank looked up from digging through his suitcase for his pajamas. Mel, of course, had laid hers out on the bed before dinner, so she had no need to do the same.

“I just hate smelling like smoke,” she explained. As if she had to justify herself to him.

“Do you want me to shower before I get into bed too?” He was hoping to collapse into bed, but he could hold off if it would make her more comfortable.

“No, that’s okay, but thank you for asking.” She gave him a small smile. “It’s mostly just if I can smell it on myself that it’s a problem. But do you want to brush your teeth before I shower so you don’t have to wait for me to be done?”

“Yeah, for sure, let me grab my stuff.” He found his toothbrush and toothpaste in his bag and went into the bathroom.

Inside, he found her toiletries already neatly lined up on the counter. He’d seen how she organized her bathroom at home, but it was interesting to see how her items maintained their position and orientation to one another on this foreign counter. You could tell a lot about someone from how they laid out their toiletries. Mel’s were arranged with almost surgical precision. His - except when he tried to straighten them out when Mel came over so she didn’t see how bad his bachelor pad, as Dana called it, was - tend to fall wherever they landed. He put some toothpaste on his brush, then tried to set the tube on the counter in a way that looked intentional.

He examined himself in the mirror as he stuck the toothbrush in his mouth. His eyes were a little red from the smoke, but other than that he looked okay. He survived the day without any major mishaps thanks to the considerable amount of self-control he developed over the last year. Looking back he realized he might have been a little too touchy with Mel considering how against physical contact she usually was, but she hadn’t said anything or seemed put off by it. And telling everyone that she stared into his soul and found him worthy might have been a little less subtle than he would have liked. So his self-control was a work in progress. That’s what recovery was all about, or so his therapist claimed.

The biggest test of self-control is still to come, his brain reminded him. Mel had said she was fine sharing a bed. And the bed was big enough that they could each stay on their own side. But he could only control what he was conscious of. What if he rolled over and pulled her to him in his sleep? What if he pushed her off of the bed? What if she felt his morning wood when they woke up? What if he stole all the blankets and she was left shivering all night? He’d never been a blanket hog before, but what if he spontaneously became one?

He realized he’d been running his toothbrush over the same three teeth during this what if spiral. He ultimately chose medical school over dental school, but even without a dental degree he knew that couldn’t be good for his gums.

Frank spit into the sink and rinsed his mouth. He could do this. Maybe Mel would take her time in the shower and he would be asleep before she was done. Then he wouldn’t have to overthink her getting into bed with him.

“All yours,” he said opening the bathroom door.

Mel was perched on the very edge of the bed, practically hovering over it, looking intently at her phone.

“Mel?”

Her head jumped up. “Oh, sorry, yeah. Thank you. I was just letting Trinity and Samira know how the first day went.” She stood, grabbed her pajamas from the bed, and went to the bathroom.

Of course she was texting Santos and Mohan. Santos and Mohan, the ones who suggested this fake dating plan, the ones who asked him to accompany Mel. Santos had been the one to ask him - and by ask, he meant demand and bulldoze him until he agreed - not Mel. While it was clear Mel was happy to have him here, that was different from inviting him in the first place. It made things feel less real.

Of course, they’d never been real in the first place. That’s what the whole scheme was predicated on. It was hard to remember that sometimes. Hard to separate the truth (that he was here as a friend doing Mel a favor) from the fantasy (that when she looked at him, touched him, talked about him to her family it was because he was here as here real boyfriend).

He was a doctor. He should be good at differentiating between real evidence and misinformation.

So why couldn’t he ignore the traitorous thoughts telling him that this could be real, that this was real?
____

Sleeping with Frank had been a study in contradictions. Being in bed with him made her heart beat too fast to fall asleep. Being next to him calmed her down in a way that had her drifting off immediately. Mel was glad they hadn’t woken up in a compromising position. She was disappointed he spent all night respectfully on his side of the bed. She wanted him to stay asleep so she could keep observing him in an unusual state of stillness. She wanted him to wake up so she could see him with his usual spark and energy.

As she studied his sleeping face - less tension in his jaw, less movement in his eyebrows, less everything that made his expressions his - Frank’s eyelids fluttered open.

“See something you like?” His voice was deep and gravelly from sleep and Mel absolutely certifiably could not handle it.

“I was just trying to make sure I wasn’t waking you by getting up but clearly that didn’t work since you’re awake now, so I’m just going to go downstairs and grab breakfast, and that’s usually a pretty chill grab and go type thing so don’t feel like you have to rush to get down there at a certain time or anything, and yeah, I’ll see you down there.” By the time she reached the end of what felt like a year long run-on sentence, she was sure her voice was high enough to double as a dog whistle.

Mel practically lept out of bed, barely pausing to grab her phone from the bedside table. She hadn’t planned on going down to breakfast in her ratty t-shirt and sleep shorts but she had to get out of their room. Now. There was a difference between knowing that increased mucous production left people with lower voices in the morning and hearing Frank’s morning voice. If she stayed in bed any longer she couldn’t be held responsible for any gravely tone related bad decisions. Thankfully she’d been so nervous about sleeping in the same bed as Frank that she’d left her bra on overnight, so her pajamas were family friendly.

Mel looked around as she made her way downstairs. Becca’s door was still closed, which wasn’t surprising considering her sister wasn’t big on the concept of breakfast - or mornings in general. Most of the other bedroom doors were cracked open, suggesting their inhabitants were long since awake. Checking the time on her phone, Mel realized she and Frank had slept in quite a bit.

Simon was the only one in the kitchen when she made it down. “I just made a new pot of coffee, so it should be ready soon.”

“Thanks,” she replied, pulling a bag of bagels out of the cabinet. She put two in the toaster, one for her and one as a sorry-you-woke-up-to-me-staring-at-you-like-a-total-weirdo bagel for Frank.

“Frank seems great,” Simon said, fiddling with his empty mug. “Are you two coming hiking today?”

“He is. Great, I mean.” Convincing her family without lying was going to be easy if they kept giving her softball questions like this. Frank was great, next question. “And as for hiking, I think so? I’ll have to ask him when he comes down.”

“Sweet! Lyd and Dylan left already for their own hike, so it’ll just be you two, Jane and I, and Mom.”

The bagels popped out of the toaster and Mel put them on a pair of plates. She dug into the fridge for some cream cheese. “Are Billie and Brad not coming?”

“They’re out golfing. And I heard Carol mention being up for some ‘Christmas in July,’ so I think she and Becca are having a movie day today.”

While Mel had her gripes with Carol - the primary gripe, of course, being what had gotten her and Frank into this situation in the first place - she was grateful at her willingness to watch movies with Becca so Mel could have an Elf-free vacation.

The coffee machine beeped its readiness just as Mel finished shmearing the bagels. She and Simon traded places, her going to the table to drop off the food and him heading to the counter to refill his mug.

Coffee procured, Simon made his way toward the back deck. “Once you and Frank are done eating, let me know and we can head out.”

“Will do,” she said, crossing paths with him again as she went to the coffee machine to pour cups for herself and Frank.

No sooner had she taken them back to the table than Frank ambled into the kitchen, freshly showered and setting her heart freshly beating into overdrive.

“Good morning.” He pulled out the chair next to hers at the table. “Is this for me?” Frank gestured at the second plate and mug.

“It’s not Red Bull on an empty stomach like you usually have for breakfast but I hope it’s okay.” Mel was aiming for a joke but Frank’s close proximity put an unplanned warble in her tone.

“Everything about being here with you is okay, Mel.” He tore into his bagel, seemingly unaware of how much his every movement, every word was making Mel more and more tachycardic.
_____

Since Mel and Frank had gotten to the house last, it only made sense for him to drive to the state park for hiking so no one else had to move their cars.

Every time Frank shifted his gaze to check his passenger mirror, he caught a glimpse of Mel’s legs in his peripheral vision. She was wearing black athletic shorts that were already pretty short, and only getting more so as they rode up her thighs because she was sitting down. It was driving Frank a little bit crazy.

Intellectually, of course, he was aware that Mel had legs. He’d seen them before, plenty of times, when she changed into soft looking pajama shorts for movie nights at her place. In fairness, her legs had driven him more than a little crazy on those occasions too. Maybe it was the context that was making a difference. Some primitive, possessive part of his brain making the connection between herbare legs and the seat of his car. Or possibly it was that this was the first time he’d seen her legs out in the real world, not in the cozy world of her apartment where they were the only two people who existed. Either way, Mel’s legs were out and Frank was keenly aware of it.

He was going to do something about it that was either the best idea he’d ever had or a shockingly stupid decision. Funny how that sentence could describe a lot of choices he’d made in life.

Frank shifted his grip on the steering wheel from a crisp 10:00 and 2:00 - it wasn’t how he normally drove, but he wanted Mel’s family to see how responsible he was where her safety was concerned - to having his left hand at 6:00. His right hand wandered over the center console and came to rest on Mel’s thigh, just above her knee. And just because he could, he gave her leg a little squeeze.

Mel tensed under him for a fraction of a second, then relaxed. It took a lot of effort not to whip his head around to see the look on her face. Instead, he glanced over at her under the guise of checking his mirror. He was rewarded for his effort with the blushing smile on Mel’s face.

Because he possessed the ability to be a rational person when the occasion called for it, Frank did not crash the car, slam the breaks, or give any indication through his driving ability that he was rattled to the core by how pleased Mel appeared to be at his touch. Because one of the skills he learned in rehab was how to compartmentalize - his therapist had actually wanted him to do the opposite, but some coping skills stuck better than others - he absolutely did not think of other scenarios where he made her very pleased by touching her. Those went into a box that was going to stay firmly locked until this trip was over and he was alone in the privacy of his own bed.

Frank pulled the car into the park, named after Mount Something-or-Other, and found the parking lot nearest the trailhead.

“Shoot,” Mel said as she stood up from the car. “I forgot sunscreen.”

The Frank of a couple years ago might have asked what the point of sunscreen when it was overcast out. That Frank was an idiot who hadn’t had his life graced by the endearing practicality Mel King brought to everything.

“I might have some in the glovebox.” In truth, there should have been a bottle or two rattling around the backseat but those had been removed last week in the same car cleaning spree that had taken out mountains of wrappers and a full box worth of loose Cheerios.

“If not, I have some,” Molly offered. “You can take the kids out of the nest but not the sunscreen out of the bag.”

Frank was freshly sunscreened and standing by waiting for the others to be ready when a blur of pigtails made her way in front of him. The little girl was clearly planning on running across the parking lot. Frank could tell as she was in motion that gravity had other plans for her. As the girl’s motion went from forward to downward, Frank’s dad instincts kicked in and he reached forward to keep her upright.

A young couple dressed in hiking gear - the girl’s parents, he assumed - ran over.

“I’m so sorry,” her mother said, slightly out of breath. She turned to the girl in Frank’s arms. “Ava! What were you thinking?”

“Mommy, there was a butterfly.” Ava pointed in the direction she’d been running as she walked over to her parents.

The girl’s father nodded at Frank. “Good catch, man.”

“No problem,” Frank shrugged. “My youngest is about her age, so I get it. It seems like as soon as they’re up and moving, they’re determined to get back onto the ground, mostly by falling.”

“Well, thank you again for stopping her from making it to the ground. Let’s see if we can make it back to the car this time.”

The family turned to walk off in the other direction, Ava’s hands held firmly within those of her parents this time.

“I didn’t know you had kids, Frank,” Molly said inquisitively.

Shit. Another thing he and Mel hadn’t talked about - and he was slowly realizing that maybe they hadn’t gone over the plan for this in anywhere near enough detail - was the topic of his kids. Tanner and Penny were the bright spots in his life and he wouldn’t trade them for anything. That being said, having two kids from a previous marriage didn’t exactly fit into the perfect boyfriend image. Frank knew Mel would never want him to be ashamed of his kids but where did that leave him here?

“He has two kids. He’s an amazing dad.”

Apparently it left him with a funny feeling in his chest from hearing Mel affirm he’s a good dad. No time to analyze that, though, because if dad instinct #1 is to catch kids when they’re about to fall, dad instinct #2 is to show off gratuitous photos of his kids to anyone who will look at them.

Frank pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it up. His lock screen was a picture Mel had taken of him asleep on the couch with Tanner and Penny climbing on him, their boundless energy not expended the way his was after a day at the Fort Pitt Museum. “Tanner is almost 6 and Penny is 3.”

“Oh, they’re so precious,” Janie cooed.

“I miss when the kids were that little,” Molly said.

“Mooom,” Simon groaned, proving that no matter how grown up you were, your mom talking about you as a little kid would always turn you back into a mildly petulant teenager.

“Yes, yes,” Molly conceded with trace amounts of sincerity. “You and Mel are wonderful adults and I’m so proud of who you’ve become. But you were so cute when we brought you to the cabin as kids.”

Simon and his mom continued to lovingly squabble as they made their way to the start of the trail with occasional interjections from Janie and Mel. Frank didn’t have a lot to say for the first part of the hike. His head wasn’t in the clouds; it was in this parking lot a year in the future. Molly saying the family has been coming up here since Mel was a child got him thinking about having his own children here. He imagined a future trip where he and Mel were the couple chasing their daughter through the rows of cars.

The thought stopped him dead in his tracks. When he and Mel went out with his kids, it wasn’t lost on him that from the outside they looked like a family going on an outing together. But to think of Penny as their daughter and Tanner as their son, here on vacation with Mel’s family - their family - was almost too much.

As always when he was too deep in his head, Mel was there to pull him out. He looked up from watching his footing on the incline of the trail - and back to reality instead of the dream life he was watching in his mind - to see her looking red with exertion and gorgeous nonetheless. Her cheeks were flushed the same way they got when the two of them rushed to the ambulance bay for a STEMI. Here as at the hospital, Frank couldn’t look away.

Mel’s voice was breathy in a way that was also getting locked in his Thoughts for Later box. “Are you doing okay?”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “Just enjoying the view.”
____

Mel loved the air at the summit. Though they were only a few thousand feet off the ground, they might as well have been in a different world. She’d hiked this particular mountain before but the panorama of forest views and a few other nearby peaks never failed to take her breath away.

Speaking of taking her breath away, Frank had slung an arm around her now that they were taking a break from the hike to lazily take in the sight at the top. Mel’s lungs were yet to get the memo that they could take a full breath under these circumstances.

“It’s beautiful up here. I see why you love it so much,” Frank said.

“Some people like to see different places every time they vacation, but this is what we keep coming back for. We have pictures from up at the top here every year.” Aunt Molly pulled her phone from the side pocket of her leggings. “Speaking of, picture time! Everyone gather up!”

“I can take one of all of you,” Frank offered.

Molly objected before he could move his arm from Mel’s shoulders. “You’re family now, Frank, we can’t have the family photo without you. I’ll just prop my phone against my water bottle.”

After the full group picture, Molly snapped some of Simon and Janie together. It would have been suspicious if Mel didn’t want photos with her boyfriend too, which was how Mel found herself here, trying to avoid looking like an awkward prom picture.

She had never felt the most natural in pictures and she felt even less so trying to pose in this unnatural situation. Frank, on the other hand, was unfairly photogenic and didn’t seem to share her issue.

“Do you trust me?” Frank’s voice was gentle but he was wearing his up to something look. The same look he sported when doing something he shouldn’t be, like cherry-picking cases at work to give himself (and often her because more often than not, he would ask her to do the case with him) something interesting to do.

“Of course.”

Mel felt like she was falling until strong arms caught her and she realized Frank pulled her from standing awkwardly next to him into a dip.

“Don’t worry, baby.” His face was close enough that silky strands of his hair brushed her forehead. Her breath caught in her throat. “I’ve got you.”

“Finish the job,” one of her family catcalled. Mel couldn’t rip her eyes away from Frank’s to see who.

Frank looked down at her. How do you feel about this hypothetical kissing situation? he seemed to be asking.

How did Mel feel? She felt like she was on fire, her skin prickling and burning up despite the cooler temperature at the mountain’s peak.

She squeezed his arm where she had gripped it when he pulled her into the dip. Frank gave the slightest nod and started to pull back. They’d talked about it, but it was still very sweet that if Mel wasn’t okay with what was happening, he would stop even if it would break the illusion.

Mel felt like she was on fire, but more importantly, she also felt like she was tired of pretending she didn’t want Frank Langdon to kiss her.

Before he could pull away too far, she squeezed his arm again. Go ahead and kiss me.

Frank went still, then reversed his motion to bring his face to hers. The flames intensified as he drew closer, soothed only by the smooth expanse of his lips against hers.

It wasn’t her first kiss, but it might as well have been for how dazed it left her, chasing after his mouth as he pulled away and lifted her back up to standing. Mel should have been embarrassed at the public affection and the whistles it drew from their audience, but being embarrassed about it would mean having the capacity to think of anything except that soft pressure against her lips, which Mel currently did not.

Before the group started their descent, she sent the picture to Samira and Trinity.

Mel: Does this look convincing enough?

Samira: That looks perfect!

Trinity: Only way it would look more perfect is if someone pushed him off the mountain

The hike back down was fairly uneventful - at least it was out in the real world. In Mel’s mind, the hike was a two hour replay of one specific event. And, maybe possibly, two hours of imagining doing it again, especially in other situations where it didn’t end so quickly.

The ground had flattened out, only a short walk back to the trailhead and parking lot to go when the sky opened up. In exchange for the rain holding off for most of the hike, it seemed like it was coming down with a vengeance for the last little bit.

Molly, Simon, and Janie picked up the pace. Mel joined them, breaking into a slight jog, not that going faster was going to keep her drier.

She turned to look for Frank and saw that he wasn’t keeping up with the rest of them and had slowed to a walk.

“Are you okay?” Mel asked, slipping into triage mode. “What happened? Did you roll an ankle? Is it your back?”

Frank’s eyes remained intently on her as she hurried back to him. “So are you gonna let me kiss you in the rain or what?”

Mel glanced over her shoulder and saw her family had rounded a corner toward the parking lot. They were fully out of eyesight now, so why was Frank still putting on the act?

Some of her cotton candy brain must have melted through her ears in the rain because she looked up at him and nodded. What else was she supposed to do? She’d gotten a taste of how Frank kissed and she wanted more.

As Frank began to lean down, Mel looped her arms around his neck. If she only got to kiss him for a limited time, best believe she was going to make the most of it.

Cold rain pelted her but Frank’s face was warm against hers. Frank’s hands drifted to her waist, perfectly proper in their placement. He had played the part of the gentleman to her family perfectly. Mel couldn’t help but wish he would be a little less so.

She tugged on his neck, trying to pull him into deepening the kiss. Frank continued to kiss her slow and gentle and cautious before pulling back into a smile. It would be infuriating if it wasn’t so endearing.

Mel kept her arms in place, looking up at Frank. “We should probably head to the car with everyone else.” There was no one else around to overhear but she couldn’t bring herself to speak above a whisper.

Frank stared at her with a look of - awe was the only word that came to mind. “Yeah, we probably should.”
_____

Frank wasn’t sure what everyone else saw when he offered to do dishes after dinner but he saw a moment of relief. Not from Mel’s family; he was having a surprisingly good time with them over dinner, sharing stories from the ER (having curated the perfect selection of stories to thrill a non-healthcare crowd without bringing the mood down with the realities of what he and Mel see everyday) and talking a big game about how the Penguins were going to crush their respective teams (when really he’d been a Pittsburgh fan long enough to know they’ll choke out before playoffs like they always seem to). No, he needed the relief from his own mind. From the traitorous hopeful collection of neurons that dared to ask what if. What if he could do this again? What if he could spend a weekend every summer with Mel’s family? What if one day they could be his family too?

What if he could kiss her again? Fuck, maybe the impulsive side of him that had asked - then asked again - was on to something. The look on her face - a mix of surprise, satisfaction, and indignance over him ending the kiss so soon - was burned onto his eyelids. The shocked gasp she made when he first pressed his lips to hers would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.

The bite of the hot water and clanking of silverware as he loaded the dishwasher were almost enough to ground him. Almost.

He felt someone enter the kitchen and looked over his shoulder to see Molly grabbing a dish towel.

“Need a hand drying?” she asked.

“Sure,” he lied. Another portrait of the domestic life with the Kings he would never truthfully get to have was the last thing he needed right now.

Molly leaned against the counter next to the sink, “I heard from the kids that you had one of the best answers to ‘why your partner’ that they’ve ever heard.”

There were a number of things Frank had said over the course of his life that he was embarrassed of. His mind frequently played and replayed a montage of all of them when he wanted to fall asleep. While it may have been a bit over the top and rom-com-esque, nothing he said about Mel last night made the cut for the late night embarrassment highlight reel. It had helped win over her cousins, sure, but more importantly it was the truth.

He handed a now clean pot to Molly. “I was in a rough place when I met Mel. She saved me.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. I’m sure you saved yourself too.” Molly reached down to put the pot in a low cabinet.

“Maybe a little. But I wouldn’t be where I am today without Mel.” In more ways than one.

“Mel’s grandmother died three years ago,” Molly said. Frank wasn’t sure if this was going to connect to what he said about Mel or if Molly was giving him a rather morbid out from the conversation getting too emotional. “She left things for everyone but one thing she didn’t leave in the will was her engagement ring. She gave it to me and told me I was supposed to give it to whoever I decided was worthy of our Mel.

“So is my judgement correct? Are you good enough for Mel?”

As it turned out, Molly’s statement was both very related and going to make the conversation more emotional, not less.

Frank would be lying if he said he had never thought about putting a ring on Mel’s finger. Thinking about dating her was dangerous. There was so much potential for it to go wrong, for it to ruin the most important friendship he’d ever had. Thinking about marrying Mel was far enough into fantasy land for it to be safe. Frank was enjoying his trip to the Adirondacks but the fantasy land where he was married to Mel was his favorite place to vacation.

But the whole point was that it was a fantasy. Molly was offering him something that would make it solid and heavy and real. And while he longed to take it, he couldn’t. Because someday there would be someone who would be good enough for Mel and they would need that ring.

“No.” Frank’s voice had tangled into a knot in his throat. “I’m not a good enough partner for Mel. I’m not even really her partner.”

Molly raised her eyebrows, wordlessly beckoning him to elaborate.

He was grateful for the dishes in the sink so he had something to do with his hands as he spoke. “Mel said Carol didn’t believe her when she said she didn’t have a boyfriend to bring on the trip and asked me to come and pretend to get everyone off her back.”

“Sounds like Carol,” Molly snorted. “I love my sister-in-law but pushy is an understatement.

Frank choked a laugh.

“I’ll save the ring for you for later, then.”

“What?” Did Frank need to refer Molly to an audiologist? Didn’t she hear him say they weren’t dating?

“I heard you loud and clear,” she said calmly. “You’re not dating my niece. Yet. That’s fine. But what’s not fine is you thinking all of us are stupid.”

Frank sputtered, not even able to form a real sentence. “What?” he asked again.

“You either think we’re stupid enough not to notice that how you’re acting about Mel shows how you really feel or you’re wasting your career saving lives when you could be making it big in Hollywood. And even if you were able to fake all of this, Mel certainly couldn’t.” Molly looked him up and down, assessing. “You really don’t see how Mel feels about you, do you?”

“Mel is my best friend.” Frank clung to the truth he knew. Because if Molly was implying what she seemed to be…

What if? the traitorous part of his brain repeated.

“You seem like a pragmatic man, maybe you’d care for some examples?”

He nodded.

“When Mel was a junior or senior in college, Brad and I went to visit her and she brought the young man she was seeing at the time to dinner with us.”

Nothing about this conversation felt logical, so Frank supposed the irrational wave of jealously creating in his stomach at the thought of Mel seeing someone else almost a decade ago was par for the course.

“He called her ‘baby’ and I watched her cringe out of her skin.” Molly smiled at the memory. “You said it to her when you were taking pictures at the top of the mountain and she just smiled. And Lydia told me how last night at the fire pit, you called her ‘baby’ and she nuzzled into you.

“Speaking of which, the fact that I’m saying ‘Mel’ and ‘nuzzle’ in the same sentence is astounding. She doesn’t let anyone touch her casually. You’ve hardly let go of her the entire time you’ve been here. So I’ll hold onto the ring for now, until you’re ready, but I’m not changing my mind, the ring is going to you.”

Frank knew how conversations work. One person says something, the other responds. Molly had said her piece, now it was his turn. He was so dumbstruck with the presentation of evidence that Mel might feel something for him that he couldn’t play his part. “I-“

“I’m sorry if it’s too soon after your divorce. You might not even want to get married again, so I’m sorry if this is overstepping.”

“No, no, no,” Frank rushed to correct her. If there’s one thing he couldn’t allow, it was anyone thinking he didn’t want to marry Mel. “It’s not that. And I wasn’t trying to insinuate that any of you are stupid for not seeing how I feel about Mel. But I am telling you you’re wrong. I’m not good enough for her.”

Molly hit him with the eyebrow raise of the century.

“I’m a mess,” he continued. “If I’m better now, it’s only because of how much Mel helped put me back together. But I have so much baggage and I don’t want to make my problems her problems. She deserves better than me.”

Molly paused, contemplating her words before responding. “That’s the first thing you’ve said or done that’s made me think you aren’t right for her.”

Frank didn’t think he was ever going to know how to reply to anything in this conversation.

“Do you know what Mel hates?” Molly asked.

Finally, a question he knew the answer to. “In varying order of importance, I’d say her top three are being in a room with people yelling, black olives (even though she loves the green ones), and not being able to wash her hands after touching something bad.”

Molly’s gaze made him feel like a med student all over again, giving a confidently wrong answer to an attending’s question and about to be on the receiving end of a teaching moment that will haunt him in the middle of the night for the rest of his life.

“All of that is true. But she also hates when people make decisions for her.”

He felt his jaw start to drop in a way that was only possible under the laws of anatomy in some of the cartoons he watched with Tanner and Penny. “I need to go find Mel.”

Molly smirked. “I bet you do, Frank. I’ll finish the dishes, you go find her.”
_____

Mel looked up from the game winning trick to see Frank rush into the living room looking frazzled.

As Carol, Billie, and Simon turned toward him, he schooled his face into a mask of charm. The storm in his eyes and bouncing of his feet betrayed his cool and collected facade.

“If you’ll all excuse me, I need to borrow Mel for a few minutes.”

“You can take her for good,” Aunt Billie laughed. “There’s only so many times a woman can stand to get euchred in one night and she’s done it quite enough.”

Mel’s mind began to race as she handed her cards to Billie and followed Frank up the stairs. Did something happen to his kids? Had there been another MCI at work that they were eight hours too far away to help with?

“Do you want to sit down?” He gestured to their bed as if there was anywhere else for her to sit in their room.

She sat. He didn’t. Frank paced back and forth in front of her, hands alternating between messing with his hair and dropping to his sides.

“Frank, are you okay?”

“What? Yeah, no, never been better,” he replied, reaching the end of the room and turning on his heel to start another lap.

Somehow Mel didn’t believe him. “You’re scaring me.”

As if her words cut his marionette strings, Frank stopped pacing and stood in front of her. If he wasn’t exactly calm, he was magnitudes less frantic than he’d been a moment ago.

“I didn’t lie,” he said.

“I didn’t say you did?” They didn’t lie to each other - except for hiding the giant crush she had on him but Mel considered that more omitting than outright lying - so of course he didn’t lie to her. But didn’t lie about what?

“I didn’t lie when I told your family that I love you because you make me feel seen. And I didn’t lie when I told your Aunt Molly that you saved me and I wouldn’t be here as the person I am without you.” She almost wished he’d go back to pacing because his stillness was more unsettling.

“When did you talk to Aunt Molly?”

Frank was speaking so frantically fast that if she wasn’t so well versed in talking to him, she wouldn’t have been able to find the spaces between his words. ”Just now. She tried to give me your grandmother’s engagement ring to propose to you, but that’s not the point.”

“She what?” Mel all but shrieked.

“Tried to give me your grandmother’s ring,” he repeated. “But like I said, that’s not the point. The point is I never lied to your family and I never lied to you. I never lied when I said that I like hanging out with you and Becca, that I care about you, that I like being your friend.” He started to lose speed like a deflating balloon. “Actually, I lied to you once.”

Mel forced herself to take a deep breath and try to fix the way her wheels were spinning out of control. Frank was freaking out, so she couldn’t be the one freaking out right now but what could he have lied about that was getting him this worked up?

“I lied when I told you I would come on this trip with you as your fake boyfriend because I was your friend and that’s what friends do. Obviously I didn’t lie about coming, since, you know, I’m here, in the flesh, but I lied about why. It’s not just because I’m your friend. It’s because I want this. I want you. I want to be the one to calm you down when you’re freaking out about plans. I want to hold your hand in front of your family and know I’m the only person you let touch you like that. I want to kiss you and make you blush redder than the sunburn you won’t get because you’re meticulous about wearing sunscreen even when it’s cloudy. And I want it to be real.”

Mel wasn’t going to be able to process all of this. “Then why,” she swallowed, both because her throat was feeling rather thick at the moment and to buy herself more time. “Why do it like this?”

“Because I’m scared and I’m selfish. I was too scared to ask you to make it, make us, real and too selfish to not pass up an opportunity to pretend. I can’t drag you into my bullshit life, but I can pretend to live in this one where you love me despite the divorce thing and the drugs thing and just about every other thing there is.” He let out a big exhale and waited.

Mel realized he had said all that he had to say. There was a lot to tackle in everything he said, so she focused on the piece she could handle easiest. “You know as well as I do that neither your addiction nor divorce is a moral failing.”

Frank gave her a wry smile. “Even if they aren’t, I’ve got plenty of other moral failings to go around. And this is exactly the problem. You look at me and you see the good and I’m not the person you think I am. You deserve the good man you see, not the one I am.”

Mel knew she wasn’t always the best at reading social situations but she was pretty sure that reminding him of the fact that he told her family he loves her because she sees the person he could be, not just the one he is wasn’t what Frank wanted to hear right now. So she tried something different. “You know I hate people deciding things on my behalf. And it sounds an awful lot like you just decided we don’t get to be together because you think I deserve better.”

Frank bit his bottom lip - which, side note, was so not the distraction Mel needed right now - and nodded. “Thats what your aunt Molly said right before I realized I needed to come talk to you and then completely fucked up this conversation.” He dropped to his knees before the bed. Before her. “And I know I made a decision about what you want for you and justified it in my head and I’m sorry for that. I really am and I hope you can forgive me. But now I’m here to ask you what you want. And I’m here hoping, on my knees begging that what you want is me.”

Mel watched as he knelt and looked up at her. “You should get up. Kneeling on the wood floor isn’t good for you.”

Frank stood up but the open, wanting look remained on his face.

Mel realized she didn’t give him a real answer. ”You could still do it for real, you know. Be on this vacation with me as my real boyfriend, not my fake one. We still have one more day.”

Frank started to smile but she could see him fighting it down as if he couldn’t be happy until she explicitly told him he was allowed to be.

“I decided that you were what I wanted a long time ago.” She stood up, closing the distance between them. “For an emergency medicine doctor whose job relies on making split second diagnoses based on the smallest clues, your observation skills could use some work.”

Either his smile was growing bigger or his resolve to fight it was diminishing. Either way, Mel took that to mean he might be starting to get the point. “And what is your diagnosis, Dr. King?”

“You want to be with me. I want to be with you. We should be together.” She took one of his hands from where it had been hanging limp at his side.

Frank smiled in earnest now. “And the prognosis?”

“Terminal.”

If she thought he was smiling fully before, she wasn’t prepared for the way his entire face lit up.

He reached a hand up to her cheek, but left it hovering, just barely not touching her. “I’d like to kiss you now, if that’s alright with you.”

“Interesting treatment plan, Dr. Langdon. What dosage are you prescribing?” She squeezed his hand twice.

Emboldened by her handheld permission, he brought his hand closer to fully caress her cheek. “Daily, probably PRN, but we’ll start with this one.” And he brought his lips to hers.
_____

Getting ready for bed as a real couple was pretty similar to doing so as a fake couple. As Frank was in the bathroom brushing his teeth, Mel sent a quick update to the group chat.

Mel: Bad news: the fake dating plan fell through

Trinity: Oh no, Melancholy, what happened?

Samira: I swear, I’m gonna kill Langdon

Trinity: Isn’t that usually my line?

Mel: Good news: I don’t need a fake boyfriend, I have a real one

Samira: OMG SHUT UP NO WAY

Trinity: If I’d known your fake dating would turn into real dating, I would have fought harder to be the one to go with you ;)

Samira: I thought you had a date with the cute occupational therapist from the ICU this week?

Trinity: What’s that got to do with anything?

Samira: True, Mel is the catch of all catches

Samira: And Langdon BETTER appreciate that

Trinity: [image attachment: screenshot of a Venmo transaction. $20 paid to Samira Mohan for “fuck Langdon (in a different way than Mel wants to)”]

Trinity: Didn’t think Langdon had it in him to get his head out of his ass this fast

Mel: Apparently my Aunt Molly have him a rectocraniectomy, so she’s the one Samira has to thank

Mel: For profiting off of a bet on my love life

Mel: Because my friends are the worst

Trinity: But you love us though

Mel: Of course I do <3

Samira: Full details when you get back?

Mel: Of course!

Trinity: Maybe not FULL details. There are some things about Langdon I never want to know

“What are you smiling about?” Mel’s boyfriend asked her as he climbed into bed beside her.

As she put her phone back on the nightstand and plugged it in, she could acknowledge that it might be a little juvenile how excited she was getting over calling Frank her boyfriend. It didn’t make it less true. “I’m just really happy.”

“Well if my girlfriend is happy, then I guess everything is alright.” Clearly the feeling about updated word choice was mutual.

“You really love calling me your girlfriend, don’t you?”

“Just you wait, sweetheart,” Frank said with a shit eating grin. “When we get back to Pittsburgh, I’m going to shout from the rooftops that Mel King is my girlfriend.”

“Sounds like an HR nightmare.” And also kind of dreamy.

“Worth it if it makes you smile like that every time I say it. My girlfriend.” He kissed her forehead. “My girlfriend.” He kissed her nose. “My girlfriend.” He kissed her lips.

Neither of them did a lot of talking after that. A lot of kissing, on the other hand…
_____

Mel had looked downright angelic when she had fallen asleep on him at the fire pit the night they got in. Just-fell-asleep Mel breathed softly onto him and unconsciously cuddled into him in the most endearing way. Still-asleep-in-the-morning Mel woke Frank up with what seemed like half the hair on her head in his mouth, snoring in his ear, and morning breath that could probably be used as smelling salts in a pinch.

Frank wanted to wake up like this every morning for the rest of his life.

He must have drifted off again, because the next time he woke up Mel was gone. The bathroom door was open, so she wasn’t temporarily out of bed, but up for good. Looking at the clock, neither of them had slept in as much as yesterday.

Frank debated trying to go back to sleep, but figured he could either be alone in bed or with Mel wherever she was. The choice was no choice at all, really. He didn’t rush to get ready, but if his pace was a little faster than usual, could he really be blamed? He had a beautiful woman waiting on him.

More like he was waiting on seeing a beautiful woman. No matter how much Mel liked him (which, side note: Mel liked him!), she was too independent to wait around for him. Which probably explained her absence from their room.

As he made his way through the hallway to the stairs, he saw that Becca’s door was half-open. Through the gap, he could see Mel and Becca sitting on the bed talking softly, heads close together. Frank imagined that over the years the King family stayed in the house, many a morning had started like this for the sisters. He couldn’t hear anything they were saying, but he half-suspected, half-hoped that Mel was telling Becca that she and Frank were together for real. He more than half-hoped that Becca would be happy with that news.

Downstairs was deserted. It seemed that he, Mel, and Becca were the first ones up. Or at least the first ones to leave their rooms.

In the kitchen Frank put on a pot of coffee. When it was ready, he poured himself a mug and went out to the deck. The sun was still rising and it made a wonderful view as shades of pink and orange lit up the trees the back of the house was nestled into. Maybe his counselor had been onto something with that whole finding beauty in the little things thing.

The sky had almost entirely been taken over by the crisp blue of a perfect summer day when the door slid open and Molly emerged from the house, her own coffee in hand.

“Good morning,” Frank greeted her as she took a seat in the deck chair beside his.

“I bet it is for you.” She took a pointed sip. Clearly nothing got past the women of this family. “So what crock of shit are you going to try to sell me today?”

“I’m sorry- what?”

Molly chuckled. “Well, yesterday you tried to tell me that you and Mel weren’t in it for the long haul, so I was wondering what lie it would be today. Maybe that the sun rose in the west rather than the east this morning?”

“I, um.” Didn’t Frank have letters after his name that meant he was supposed to be smart? What good were those doing him now?

“I’m just messing with you, kid. I’m happy you and Mel talked it out.” She gestured at him with her mug. “But you’d better be ready on the next King family trip, because you’re getting that ring.”

Thankfully, before his brain had time to stall out and leave him floundering for a response for the third time, the house door opened again and Mel came out.

She shut the door and turned to drop a kiss on Frank’s forehead. They had been affectionate in front of her family yesterday, but her showing him affection now that it was real affected him on a whole other level. Even something as relatively chaste as a forehead kiss might as well have been Mel putting up a sign saying hey everyone, I choose Frank Langdon to be the object of my affection! The resulting grin on his face must be a matching billboard saying this woman owns my heart!

Before she could find a chair of her own, Frank snuck an arm around her waist, which pulled her off balance enough that she had no choice but to fall halfway onto his lap.

Mel swatted his shoulder. “I could have spilled hot coffee all over you!”

“You wouldn’t have. You’re way too talented for that.” He added when she’s gently scolding me for doing something dumb to his already long list of times Mel looked adorable. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

“We could go on another hike. There’s a lake about 15 minutes from here if you want more of a beach day. We could go into town.” She ticked each option on her fingers.

With Mel perched on his lap, he had to look up to see her face. The morning sun forged a halo of gold where it struck her hair. His own personal angel. “I’ll be happy with anything as long as I get to spend the day with you.”

It’s a statement that would be true for the rest of his life.