Work Text:
But if you ever get the notion / That you need me, let me know
'Cause it's just two hours to get there, babe / I can make it back about an hour or so
Hold you close against my skin / I need a little warmth on a night so cold— Jersey Giant, Tyler Childers.
☾⋆ ✧ ⋆☽
Samira Mohan knows herself well enough to sense when it feels like it might get bad again.
It starts like this:
When she putters around her new studio apartment, so different from the one back in Pittsburgh, the soft footfalls of her steps begin to echo around the resounding emptiness.
Now when she cooks — so used to portions made for two people to share under low lamplight, glances bouncing off each other’s cheeks — half of it ends up in the bin, a never-ending cycle of refrigeration and heating, freezing and thawing. No appetite, but an endless amount of recipes, sent over iMessage, sandwiched between medical journal entries.
Even her countless encyclopaedias seem to gather dust under the metaphorical storm cloud hovering over the 400 square feet to her name.
This is what you wanted, she tells herself over and over. And it is, has been more than she could ever want and given her exactly what she needed. Baltimore is new; it is fresh blood waiting to be mopped up by EVS, and it is hers for the taking. Without any nickname to follow her around, or a barely persevering attending to dole it out.
But one thing does not come without the other, and so by leaving all of that behind, she knows what else she has lost out on. Friendship, camaraderie, community. Yeah, maybe, Samira wasn’t the best at extending those bridges and making sure they stayed erect, but there had been a desire for it. It was all slowly coming together; nights out with Santos and Whitaker, days spent thrifting with Victoria. It all crept up on her without looking, and God knows she wasn’t, eyes always laser-focused on the charting board. Even Jack, whose name she whispers now under her breath, Jack, Jack, Jack, whom she couldn’t believe had wanted her back with such voracity it still shocked her to think about.
But life isn’t solely what you allow it to be, its fragility depends on the network around you, and after a series of poor decisions, some of her own and some out of her control, she had to leave.
Packed up her shit and got the hell out of Dodge, so to speak, to set foot in Baltimore, Maryland. It wasn’t the knife in her back like it seemed to be in the beginning, especially not once she got there.
Driving along the open road, alternating seats with Jack when his prosthesis grew too sore, windows down, listening to some folk song on a crackly radio station. It felt like something she could carve out for herself.
She didn’t want to seem like one of those girls who depended on their man for everything, and she wasn’t. But to herself, she could admit the quiet relief of constantly having someone in her corner. She had joked about it with Jack some months before the night she spent with Gary and Amma, but her mother’s refusal to show any interest in her had stung. She was her daughter, ephemeral as that label was to Kayal Mohan; she had still grown in her womb and slid out into her waiting arms, and she didn’t even care about where she was going or where she might end up.
If you run into assholes every day, then... Then, yeah, she guesses she was the common denominator.
She wishes he was here now, in her bed with the mulberry-coloured cotton sheets she bought brand-new so she didn’t have to lug any more baggage from Pittsburgh than she had to, and not four hours away, doing God knows what, away from her.
They hadn’t even called in what she feels to be months, but knows to be 17 days. Not for lack of trying, way past any kind of wary honeymoon phase where they don’t want to bother the other person. They called each other constantly.
But then Jack would be on a TEMS run, or she would be fast asleep, knocked out by back-to-back shifts, or maybe he would be grocery shopping with no service and by the time he got a missed call, she was already in the shower.
Once, she had called Jack at 6 a.m. on the dot as planned, waking up slightly earlier than needed and waiting till the digits on her iPhone changed, and he had just about stepped into the ambulance bay to take it, thumb sliding to the left and opening the screen to her effervescent face, his teeth digging into his bottom lip as he took her in. Then a 4×4 had screeched in, tire marks singing the road and leaving an acrid taste in the back of his throat.
Out tumbled two gunshot wounds and one severed pinkie, major blood loss across the board, and their faces fell in synchronised sorrow. That scheduled Thursday would not be their awaited reunion. Samira had sighed and told him to go, his promise to call her back soon escaping through clenched teeth.
And he had; Jack Abbot was a good man who stuck to his promises, but by the time he managed to peel bloodstained gloves off and familiarise himself with the sharp tang of hand sanitiser again, she was three hours into her shift and there was no chance he would be able to catch her soon again.
Such were the woes of completely opposing shifts and too much reliance on work to know when to call it quits.
Logically, she also knows Johns Hopkins Hospital is only four hours away by car, and they’ve both done the drive down enough times to know the route blind. It’s not even particularly far, objectively speaking. For a long-distance relationship, it is a tolerable distance, same time zone and everything. She could leave right now and be there in time for dinner. But then Jack would be leaving for his shift, and she would be all alone again.
Pittsburgh remains within the radius of a life she could technically reach, but even so, four hours is long enough for a person to become theoretical, and she feels it chipping away at the bonds she tried so hard to forge. Sure, the residents still have their group chat, but there are only so many new inside jokes she could ignore, so many times she could stomach bearing witness to the horde of thumbs-up reactions to a new Saturday night plan she was not invited to. Her old life that she had spent so long wishing away, disappearing in real time; physically attainable, emotionally elusive.
There is a catharsis in her brewing till it begs to be let out, overloading the seams and rupturing her fabric. She knows this feeling, is intimate with all the complexes she’s sure the PTMC resident psychologist could diagnose her with had she ever paid him a visit, but is no more comfortable with it than she is with the prospect of loneliness.
And isn’t that the rub of it? She thought that maybe all this ennui was symptomatic of an unfulfilled social life, an over-packed work schedule and very little else but—
You can take the girl out of Pittsburgh and still something will remain. And she is just so very tired of being lonely.
God, she sounds pathetic, wallowing in her self-pity but feeling too satisfied by it to do anything about it. She needs to stop drinking red wine, she thinks; it does nothing for her but make her sad and ruminative. She is halfway through a fantasy of getting up and changing into yoga pants, maybe going for a run to burn some energy, when a shrill alarm takes her right out of it.
No, not an alarm, she realises, but her ringtone. The dulcet tones of Bruce Springsteen start to croon out a melody, but she is already flying across her room to catch it before it fades out into silence.
Her fingers borderline shake as she grips her phone way too hard, and the screen shifts to cinnamon-sugar facial hair, freckled skin and the kindest eyes that have ever looked her way.
“Hi, baby,” a slow drawl like an espresso shot filtering through into an open mug.
“Jack? Jack!”
Her mouth stays open even as her throat clicks on the last syllables of his name, pure unadulterated shock.
“In the flesh. Or, in pixels maybe.” He winces at his own lame joke, but she can see her expression mirrored on his.
Her head shakes gently, side to side, as she looks upon him.
“I don’t understand, aren’t you meant to be at work right now? You’re in your kitchen?”
“Well,” he says as the phone moves closer to his face and his eyes narrow. “Now where is that damn camera button you showed me…”
His voice trails off as his screen flips, a bird’s-eye view of his feet, one encased in pale skin and one made of carbon fibre, aluminium and titanium. She watches him pad down to his bedroom and lift the phone as he clears the doorjamb.
She doesn’t understand what she’s looking at, at first. He looks to be in the process of … rearranging his go-bag? His apocalypse station, she calls it, but then she sees socks and boxers laid out, a couple of fitted T-shirts stacked on top of each other, and she thinks she even spies a roll of condoms tucked underneath a box of Band-Aids.
"What are you doing, Jack?”
“Do you think this is too much to bring for 5 days? Or, well, technically 7, but I figure today and next Saturday don’t count considering I have to drive back and—”
“Jack. You’re rambling.”
The screen flips back to his slightly red face.
“Oh, sorry. Didn’t I say? I took a week off. I’m driving up to you now. I should be there before 12.”
A shocked silence before she finds the words to fill it.
“What? You’re— What? Did we plan this? I don’t remember…” She half starts to open their text thread before he interrupts her.
“I decided 3 days. I’m sick of not seeing you, Samira. I hate it.”
“Since when do you take time off? And a week?”
“Since now. Since we haven’t seen each other in months. I mean, we haven’t even got the time to Skype nowadays.”
“FaceTime, Jack.”
“Right. FaceTime. I can change that. And I decided we should have a week together at least. Is that okay with you, ma’am?”
“No, it’s fine, I just …”
This was what she wanted. She wanted to see him in the flesh and not pixels. So why did it feel so… jarring?
His face flickers through no fault of technology, a slight dim in the ultra watt of his smile.
“What about the team? I mean, the residents, don’t they need you? A week is extortionate, it’s just me—”
“Samira. Sit down, baby. Now, who’s rambling?”
She does, in a daze.
"What’s going on? I have to admit, when I planned this in my head, I didn’t think ‘no, it’s fine’ would be the response I would get.”
“Oh shit, sorry! I didn’t mean fine, it’s just…”
"Hey. You’re okay, you can talk to me. What’s going on in that head of yours?”
She’d rather walk down 9 miles to Fort McHenry by foot than tell him that she’s been missing him and tearing herself up about it because she doesn’t know how to process it. She already feels so young compared to him sometimes—knows she’s a woman in her own right, too, she’s almost 30 goddammit—but she worries about seeming immature.
He’s already had an entire life before her: Angie, so full of love, the stable domestic kind where you don’t have to worry that the other is starved for affection because it’s so freely given.
“No, it’s nothing. It’s nothing. You’re really coming?”
"I’m really coming, sweetheart. You’re excited, aren’t you?”
“I am! Jack, I am so excited! I was considering driving myself down, but I thought you would probably be leaving for work anyway.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t going to tell you, wanted to do the rom-com thing of surprising you, but … is that a whole bottle of wine?”
She catches herself halfway through raising the bottle to her lips, forgetting the weirdness of the visual.
“Oh... yeah … it’s the same one we almost finished last time you were here. There wasn’t much left in it.”
“Mira…”
"Ja-ack,” she singsongs back, vague irritation sparking in her. His neck turns slightly, head shifting to the side.
"You know what red wine does to you, baby.”
“And what does it do?”
His eyebrow cocks. “Makes you sad.”
She hated being known so well, hated the assumption that she wasn’t in control and that he could read it so easily on her.
She rolled her eyes before her lips turned up.
“It does not make me ‘sad’, and it's just a little bit. You’re the one who left it behind last time, so really I’m just cleaning up after you.”
“Ouch. Makes you mean to your boyfriend too.”
“Maybe he deserves it, seeing as though he hides things and then springs them on me at the last minute”
“If it counts, I have it on good authority that he wanted to tell you the second he booked PTO.”
“Can you ask him when he’s planning to get on the road, then? I have plans for him.”
“If you leave me a messa-”
“Okay, no more third person, please, I lost track.”
He barks out a laugh at this, missing his lady something fierce. Ever since she left 8 months ago, its been his constant state of being, this yearning mess he never thought he’d be, but then there it is, the thrum of needing her coursing right through him.
They sit for a while in the same familiar silence they occupy in real life, comfortable and then suddenly unnerving. To Samira, at least, who is starting to feel a little like a goldfish in a glass bowl, trapped yet on display.
“Stop looking at me like that.” she whispers.
“Like what?”
"Like you know something I don’t.”
His expression softens, his teasing demeanour dampening.
“I do know something you don't.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“And what would that be?”
“That you don't have to pretend you're fine with me. You have two choices: tell me now over the phone or tell me later when I'm with you in person. Either way, Mira, we’re talking about what’s got you feeling like this.”
“How do you know that I'm feeling like that?
She means for this to come out in the same tone as the last 5 minutes of their conversation has been - jokey, teasing and only slightly acerbic- but it leaves as something much more timid, breath barely leaving her as she voices it. He wastes no time in replying to her.
“Because I know you. And I love you. And I’ve been exactly where you are now and you've said the same things to me.”
She should say I love you back, she’d mean it, but she really cant talk about this because the wine paired with whatever she’s been feeling for the last 17 days is unravelling her and she’s seriously reconsidering that psych referral now and then it just kind of comes running out of her mouth without any input from her brain —
“Take off your shirt.”
"…What?”
She’s rolling with it now, she is a woman in STEM and she knows what she wants.
“You heard me. You’re not leaving till 7pm, right? So, take off your shirt.”
“Samira.”
“Don’t say my name.” She resists the urge to tack on a please at the end. The curves of her name always sound so revealing in his mouth, their syllables like a master key to whatever lurks inside her. It’s not what she needs right now.
“All you have to do is what I say. We have time.”
She feels like begging, would beg if it didn't mean dropping this façade and seeing everything else crumble down with it. There’s a hint of desperation cording around her voice and it makes her sound unsure and she’s ill with it. The unsureness, the fingernails bitten down to the quick, the constant second-guessing, the need for assurance she’s still a real girl.
“We do, but I’m not sure this is - We should talk abou-”
“Do you not want me anymore?”
His face shatters into pieces that glint off the LED of her screen.
“Samira, baby, of course I want you. I want you so badly, you don’t even— I want you in my bed, in my hands. I want you in my home when I’m cooking dinner. I want you like this and every other version of you. I just don’t want you to feel like this is something we have to do now because you want a reaction.”
All the fight leaves her then, and suddenly she is stripped of any vim that was corrupting her. She knows, she knows that he wants her and loves her, would cherish her in sickness and in health if they thought it was the right time, has said it to her again and again just because he wanted to, proved it tenfold, but there’s this selfish thing in her that needs fed and satiated, always hungry like some caged fighter dog and is it really selfish if she’s just a girl wanting love? And affection? Is it really selfish to want so much of the one thing she has been deprived of, been depriving herself of for so long now that she has it between her fingers?
“I’m sorry. God, I’m— I’m sorry, Jackie. I don’t know what’s gotten into me, it’s like this thing has taken over me, and I’m trying to get myself back but the harder I try— I just can’t…”
“Hey,” Jack says softly, and there’s no distance in his voice even if there are miles in everything else. “Baby, don't apologise. Breathe with me, Mira. Just for a second. I’ve got you.”
She hears more than sees a faint rustle on his end, as he sits down on the foot of the bed and places his phone on his nightstand. The air is quiet between them, even as tears gather in her waterline. The world they live in always feels like it’s moving too fast for anything gentle to survive in it, but somehow he always makes room for her despite it all. How could she ever question that?
“I’m here,” he adds, quieter now, like he’s trying not to spook a wild horse, “Even if I can’t touch you right now. I’m not going anywhere. Talk to me.”
Something in her chest loosens at the steadiness of his statement and the way he doesn’t flinch from the edges of her unravelling, complexity made so simple. She swallows hard past the lump of barbed wire in her throat, wipes at her face and lets herself sink back into the mattress.
“I just miss you. I miss what life used to be,” she admits, honest in a way that never comes easy. “It gets loud in my head when I’m alone like this, and then I get mad that I need anything else when I’m the one who chose to leave. I’m the one who chose not to put down roots for so long, just so it could all be easier when I did eventually move home. And then I went and did it anyway. But then I get mad because… fuck, Jack! I love my life here now! No-one calls me Slow-Mo, no-one thinks that I’m constantly wasting time. I get to be someone else, and it's a version of me that’s always been there. I have friends here, ones that I don’t have to live vicariously through on Instagram, and we go to farmers' markets and museums and all kinds of galleries, so I don't know why it feels like this. I don't know what I want, and I'm scared I won’t ever. That it’ll always be like this.”
“Mira, baby. Thank you for being honest,” he says immediately, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to try to understand her. “I’m not going to undermine you by saying I know exactly what you’re going through. I’ve never been publicly ridiculed at my job by someone in a position of power whom I trusted. But you are so much more than what everyone else thinks of you. You are not ‘Slow-Mo’, and you don’t have to be anyone else you feel like you’re not."
"Also,” he continues, “I think you’re allowed to miss your old life without wanting it back. And I think you’re allowed to love Baltimore without pretending Pittsburgh didn’t mean anything to you. Those things can exist at the same time, Samira. They don’t cancel each other out.”
“But I chose this.”
“You did.”
“So I don’t get to complain.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Her head whips up from where it was drooping down to look at him.
“You chose to leave. You didn’t choose to feel things. It’s the human condition to get restless and bored and feel unfulfilled. It’s not a moral failing on your part. When I keep myself up all night listening to the scanner on my days off, do you think I’m a lesser person?”
“No, no, of course not, Jack.”
“So why would you think that of yourself?”
She has no answer to give him that isn’t rooted in some childhood trauma she’s sure 80% of the world has.
“Samira Mohan, you are the most generous, most giving person I’ve ever known. I’ve seen you bleed yourself dry for patients no one else took a second look at. I wish you could see that, and extend that same courtesy for yourself. You don’t have to have it all figured out. No one ever does — hell, I’m pushing 50 and I still don’t know what to do with myself, but you didn’t make some blood oath to never miss anybody again just because you moved four hours away.”
“I should’ve.”
“It probably would have made your life easier.”
She laughs despite herself, and the melodic tinkle of it, like wind chimes echoing through the air on an autumn morning, is music to his starved ears.
“Thanks for that.”
“I mean the rest of it, though. You’re not doing something wrong because you’re homesick. And for what it’s worth, I think you can want Baltimore and Pittsburgh and me and your friends and your farmers markets and whatever museum you’ve deemed worthy this week.”
“I do like museums,” she says through drying tears, nose a little bunged up.
“I know, baby. You send me approximately forty-seven photographs every time you go to one.”
“They’re educational.”
“Last time it was a vase.”
“It was a historically significant vase, though."
“It was beige.”
“It was Byzantine.”
“It was Byzantine and beige, then.”
She laughs again, brighter and heartier each time, and thinks only him. Only he could make her laugh just as easily as he coaxes the truth out of her, a feat no one else has ever been able to accomplish. It comes out wet around the edges, but it’s for them regardless.
Jack watches her for a moment.
“See?”
“What?”
“You’re still you. You don’t have to kill the version of you that existed before Baltimore. And you don’t have to keep choosing between things just because you’re scared that wanting both means you’re indecisive.”
She looks down at the wine bottle and wipes beneath one eye with the heel of her palm, irritated by the wetness there.
“Sometimes… I don’t know, it— I don’t want to be this person.”
“What person? Samira Mohan? You don’t want to be Dr. Samira Mohan, future of medicine, lover of cats, hater of American country rap?”
“Oh no, all that I’m comfortable with. It’s just hard to admit sometimes that I, too, can be someone who needs people.”
He smiles, but there’s something sad in it.
“Samira, that’s not a character flaw.”
“It feels like one.”
“Well, then. Guess I’ll have to remind you every time I see you how much of a not-a-character-flaw it is. Because you’re stuck with me. For better or for worse, Mohan.”
She does truly feel a lot better, assuaged by his words and the reaffirmation of what she had known. Sometimes, you just needed to hear it from someone else you respect and admire too.
“I guess I do get a little sad on red wine, in the end.”
The lines by Jack’s eyes crinkled, a physical manifestation of all the years of happiness he’s had. She really did love this man, Jack Abbot; lover, brother, son, widower, ER cowboy. And she owed him an apology.
Now that the moment wasn’t so emotionally charged, she felt intense embarrassment at her initial statement.
“Fuck! Did I order you to get naked?”
“Ah yes, you did. Actually, I believe your exact words were ‘Take your shirt off’ and ‘All you have to do is what I say.’”
“Oh my god! I am so so sorry Jack! I don’t know what go into me —”
“Oh please. We will be circling back to that, later. I got full body chills the first time you said it.”
✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧
The rest of the FaceTime is spent aimlessly, no real purpose but to gaze at the other, memorise the valleys of their face like a burned picture behind retinas.
He watches her heat up the lasagne she made yesterday and she watches him pack a frankly insane amount of boxers into one duffel bag.
In a short while, he will hang up the phone and she will feel it in her chest till she remembers that he has not gone where she can't follow, and is on his imminent way to her.
She pictures him sliding the straps of his go-bag and duffel bag onto respective shoulders before lumbering out of his 2 story walk up, and shoving it all in the trunk of his trusty Chevrolet pickup.
He will turn the key in the ignition and his stereo that still takes CD’s will start blasting the playlist she burnt for him before she left. She had never done that before but he mentioned something in passing about growing up finding it the pinnacle of romance. They will keep loving each other in ways the other recognises and ways they have never known before.
His car will ease along the highway, churn of the engine an internal stopwatch to the ticking seconds till he can hold her in his arms again.
She’ll open the door to his tired but tenacious frame, and pull him in till it feels like they will meld together in the hallway outside her apartment.
Later, when they fall together, the rise of her hips meeting his, she doesn’t question if it’s getting bad again, or if it’ll stay good. Not because she knows it will or won’t, but because she knows a storm doesn’t have to be weathered alone. This too can be independence, knowing when to call in reinforcements, trusting yourself enough to know when you need help.
Her heart is a percussion instrument threatening to beat right out of her chest, skitter away like she doesn’t need it thumping the rhythm of his up-and-down strokes all the way through her. He holds her tighter, arms closing around her waist, and then she is thinking nothing at all.
☾⋆ ✧ ⋆☽