Archive of Our Own

Robby feels it coming through a sharp little sting somewhere behind the bridge of his nose. Then comes the gathering ache in his throat, and the watery sting in his eyes, and he thinks, with no small amount of exhausted disbelief: for fuck’s sake, not again.

This’ll make it three times already that he’s cried today — or perhaps four. Maybe it’s already been four and this will make it five, if crying when nobody sees you still counts as crying. He has, in truth, lost count somewhere along the ugly stretch of this fourteen-hours-and-counting shift. Somehow, that seems worse, he thinks. Crying at work is the kind of thing a man ought not lose count of.

He was, of course, supposed to be gone by now and several hours into the official start of his sabbatical. This thought has come to him with increasing frequency as the day has dragged on: should’ve been gone by now, could’ve been gone by now, I wouldn’t be dealing with this bullshit if I was already gone by now. But his motorcycle is still parked in the ambulance bay, not carrying him north, and his first stop in Toledo, which seemed such a small distance when he first planned this trip two months ago, seems worlds away now.

By now, there should be nothing but asphalt ahead of him and Pittsburgh miles behind. Instead, there’s the hot sting of tears pooling in his eyes, and the dull ache in his knees, and the sterile white lights of the empty OR he finds himself standing in, and there is nowhere else for him to look but at Jack Abbot.

Historically, that’s never been a problem. It is, in fact, usually very easy to be around Jack Abbot. It is usually the easiest thing in the world to be the subject of his glances, to share silence and chaos with him, to lean on him and talk to him and not have it cost a thing. Hell, Jack might be the only person on the planet Robby could ever say that about — the only person whose company always manages to lodge something back into place inside of him instead of snatching something out. But today has been one of the worst days of his life — an impressive feat, really, given the caliber of bad days Robby has had in the past, which have included but are by no means limited to his mentor dying under his watch, the worst mass casualty event Pittsburgh has known to date, the death of his grandmother in ‘92, and a particularly disastrous bar mitzvah.

If he could take a step back and think about it objectively, Robby might’ve found it impressive that the day before his sabbatical has managed to rise so quickly up the ranks of his worst days, given how high a bar the others have set. But today’s shift has certainly made a strong case for itself: an abandoned infant on a dirty bathroom floor first thing in the morning, Duke having a condition he almost certainly won't seek treatment for, and Al-Hashimi starting her tenure as his replacement by having seizures on the sly. But appreciating the achievement of this astronomically bad day would require Robby to still have a sense of humor intact and that dried up a few hours ago.

He’s been a misery to be around. He knows it. He’s been spiteful and spitting and mean to everyone about everything, picking and prodding at every tender place he can find, his own included, and he’s got half a mind to keep digging himself deeper into that particularly mean-spirited grave, to lie down in the proverbial dirt and heap it over himself by the handful except —

Except Jack is still talking to him. And they’re alone together.

“Life can be unbearable,” Jack tells him. “ It can be brutal, and ugly, and heartbreaking, but it’s also beautiful, and — and hilarious.” He glances down, breathes in slow, and when he stares back up at Robby, his eyes are wet. “And that woman today and her baby; they’d both be in the morgue if you hadn't been here.”

Jack’s voice catches, wavers, cracks. Robby watches his throat move as he swallows. It is such a small betrayal of feeling that he almost wishes he hadn’t noticed it, but they’re standing so close to one another now that there’s nowhere for either of them to hide.

“That’s us,” Jack says, and his voice is rougher now. “That’s you and me. That’s what we’re here for.”

Us. You and Me. We. Robby nods, blinking rapidly to keep the tears away. He does not know what it is about hearing Jack talk this way that nearly breaks him. He does not know if makes him a bad person that it is these words, this this idea of them both serving some kind of unit, that makes the knot in his stomach tighten and twist — not the mother, not the child. Perhaps, at this point, trying to guess at what makes him a bad person is paramount to agreeing to play a game with a losing hand. 

“The most important things I've ever done in my life have been in this hospital,” Robby says, managing to spit out the truth after a moment. “Nothing will ever matter more than what I've done here, but it’s killing me, Jack. You - you know how they say that a part of you dies when you lose someone you love? I'm not convinced that a part of you doesn't die every time you see a fellow human pass. And I've seen so many people die that I feel like it's leaching something from my soul.”

Jack gives him a knowing look. Of course he understands. Jack always does, and that’s half the goddamn problem. All the ugly, private things Robby tries to bury into some deep recess inside of himself always seem to rise to the surface whenever Jack looks at him.

He steps closer and Robby tenses, but does not move away. 

“Go on a cruise, man,” Jack says. “You feel exhausted, worn out? Go on this sabbatical of yours and pick up a hobby. Knock off this helmetless motorcycle shit. That's death-wish behavior and, believe me, it won't solve a thing.”

There’s something tucked inside those last words, some question Jack has enough grace to not him outright. Robby hears it anyways, senses that this is the part where Jack wants him to deny what it looks like he’s after. He’s grateful he doesn’t ask, grateful Jack doesn’t make him answer it. But when Jack looks at him, he does so as if he’s searching Robby’s face for some tell, as though the answer might be written on his face anyway. It’s such a tender look. It’s honest, almost pleading, and Robby suspects that if he spends too much time standing here in the full warmth of Jack’s attention, letting himself be looked at like that, it might be enough to start him up again.

And he’s already so damn tired of crying.

“I’m tired,” Robby tells him, because it’s the truth. “I’m tired of being a role model. I’m tired of feeling like I can’t get ahead. I’m tired of all of it.”

“Okay," Jack says. "Okay, that's alright. You just - you need to get away for a while and you need to get some help.”

Robby looks down at his feet rather than look at him. He knows this already, of course. He has known it in the abstract for months, maybe years, in the same way people know all manner of things about themselves but never have any real intention of fixing.

Jack must intuit the skepticism Robby feels. “I mean it. You've got to take care of yourself. The rest is part of the work, and you need this place as much as it needs you.”

“I don’t know, Jack,” he says. He wipes the back of his hand against his cheek and it comes back damp. “This place just takes, and takes, and takes.”

“Yeah. But it gives back just as good as it takes, doesn’t it?”

“Brother, I don’t know if I’m getting anything back these days.” He swallows hard against the ache in his throat, blinks fast in some futile attempt to keep more tears from coming, and breathes in slowly. “Am I fucked up?”

“Absolutely,” Jack answers, so quickly and so honestly that it manages to make Robby smile. “But nobody works here as long as you and me and doesn't get screwed up. There’s no way to get around it. The damage’s inevitable, you know that, but you’ve — I don’t know, you’ve gotta find somebody to help you dance through the darkness.”

For a second Robby only stares at him. Then, despite everything, something like a laugh works its way up through his sore throat. “Did you just make that up?”

“Maybe it’s a song lyric,” he admits, faintly embarrassed. “Maybe my therapist says it, I don’t know.”

Robby laughs again, properly this time. It feels good to laugh, despite everything.

Jack watches him, something softening in his eyes. “Look, don’t make me look stupid, alright? You’ve got to come back to us in one piece.”

Robby has just enough time to furrow his brow before Jack is moving toward him, getting one arm around his shoulders and the other around his back and pulling him in against his chest. Robby’s own arms come up on instinct and without a second thought.

“I’m still your emergency contact,” he reminds him, “and I do not want to be contacted.”

Jack holds him a little closer, shifting so slightly in the way he holds him that it’s almost imperceptible except for the way that it brings them cheek to cheek. He’s impossibly warm, and he smells faintly of sweat, and Robby can feel his breathing, soft against his skin. Unthinkingly, Robby allows his hands to spread over Jack’s back, fingers skimming against the firm solidity of the muscle there as he counts the rise and fall of each of Jack’s breaths beneath his palms — one, two, three, four and all the while they stay that way, unmoving.

Then, Jack turns his face and kisses him.

It is such a small, unthinking thing that Robby might’ve almost mistaken it for a figment of his imagination: a brief, chaste press of Jack’s lips on his neck, just below his ear. There’s no heat to it. That, perhaps, is the strangest part about it — Jack kisses his neck as if through sheer force of habit, like he’s done it a hundred times before, like this is something they’ve always done.

It isn’t. Nobody, in fact, has kissed Robby there in a long time, actually.

A small shiver works down his spine. Robby would think to be more embarrassed about it if only he were thinking at all. Instead, he draws back just enough from Jack’s arms to look at him, but not enough to pull out from his grasp completely. Their faces are close enough now that Robby can see the faint wash of a sunburn across Jack’s face from being out in the blistering July heat today, can see the hazel brown in the otherwise green of his eyes, and then — then his gaze slips down to Jack’s mouth.

He has known Jack for ten years. He has seen this face so many times he could picture Jack with his eyes closed, could draw him from memory if only he knew how to draw. He knows so well the crooked tug of these lips when Jack makes some cocky joke, the way they twist and purse when he’s focused on the work of his hands, and the thin hard line of them when he’s angry.

Somehow, it’s never occurred to Robby to think about kissing these lips until this very moment. And, he realizes now, there may very well not be another chance.

His hand comes up before he has entirely decided what he means to do with it, settling against Jack’s cheek and making him go very still. His face is warm to the touch. Wonder, that — the hospital runs so cold and Robby is half-sure it’s the cold of his palm that Jack reacts to, a little shift in his body at the touch. He moves his thumb, carefully, carefully, to skim where the line of his jaw meets his ear. It’s a gesture that feels enormous enough on its own, so big it ought be impossible, more intimate than it has any right to feel.

All the while, Jack just looks at him.

Robby could take his hand away. He doesn’t. Jack could shrug him off, but he doesn’t do that, either. Instead he stays where he is, there in Robby’s palm, in his arms, warm and strangely pliant. Robby watches his mouth part around a breath he does not hear, despite the scant space between them, and for one surreal, suspended moment, the world seems to whittle down to just this, just him, and this impossibility that sudden feels possible, tangible, so close it’s nearly —

“Dr. Abbot?”

Somewhere behind them, there’s a knock on the glass plane of the door.

Robby drops his hand the way a child pulls aching fingers away from a hot stove. Jack steps back just as fast, hastily enough that the heel of his shoe catches against the floor, making a skidding sound.

Nazely, thank god, has the wherewithal to give them a few seconds before she peeks her head through the doorway. “Ellis told me to get you. You’ve gotta check this out, some dude just pulled up and he looks like he blew half his face off!”

Her eyes are wide, and she’s a little breathless, but not because she saw anything. Robby is sure of it. Besides, there was nothing to see. Nothing technically happened. Not really. She closes the door behind her, gone just as quickly as she came, and the blinds shudder and rustle against the glass of the door for a few seconds afterward. Robby watches them until they stop and, through his periphery, Jack’s profile is a blur pointed in the same general direction.

They have to look at each other eventually. When they do, the silence between them stretches and yawns.

Jack clears his throat. “That, uh — that’s — I should probably —”

“You should, probably,” Robby agrees.

Jack watches the general commotion from where he stands: a clamor of people converging around what must be the aforementioned patient, Nazely among them now, and while Robby can’t quite see through the crowd, Jack must manage it because his face pinches. “God, I really hoped she was exaggerating,” he says, and there’s a little breath of laughter in it now, some welcome attempt at humor. “You walk away for a second and that’s exactly when they wheel in a guy who’s blown his nose clean off. How could you not love this place?”

Robby smiles, or tries to.

Jack makes it all the way to the door before stopping again. His hand closes around the knob and he pulls it open, but instead of walking through, he lingers there. “Look, we should probably talk, yeah? About — well, about everything, I guess.” He looks at him for a moment, a flash in his expression that’s strangely unreadable, until it’s easier, more open, an olive branch. “We’ll talk in the morning, when I’m off and you’ve got some sleep in you, yeah?”

Robby swallows hard. “Sure thing,” he says.

“You are gonna go home and get some sleep,” he says. It’s not a question.

“Absolutely.”

Jack studies him for a moment, probably waiting for something more. When he doesn’t get it, he says: “I’m serious. You’d have to be crazy to go on a long ride after a day like this. It’s hardly cooled down outside, for one thing, and the amount of drunk drivers on the Fourth —”

“Jack,” Robby interrupts. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll take one last lap around the floor, tie up some loose ends, and then I’m headed home.”

Some of the tension in Jack’s shoulders ease, but not completely. He’s got one hand on the doorknob still, one foot literally out the door, but he’s still anchored in place. There’s something there in his expression, some thought there, some thing he’s debating on whether or not to say — but what exactly it could be, Robby can’t hasten to guess. Worry? Suspicion? Remorse?

Whatever it is, Jack keeps it to himself.

“All right,” he says finally. “I’ll catch you first thing tomorrow.”

Jack gives him something approximating a smile and Robby returns it. Then he’s gone, pulling the door shut behind him. Robby doesn’t follow him out. Instead, he gives himself the luxury of a few seconds of silence and scrubs a hand over his face, eyes shut tight as he soothes his palm over them.

He stays like that for another second, hand dragged down over his mouth now, trying to work backward through the last five minutes and finding absolutely nothing there that makes any more sense of what happened — what almost happened — the second time around. They’re friends. They’re practically brothers. They’re straight, not to mention, or at least he thought they were, thought Jack was, thought —

“Jesus fucking christ,” he groans. He drops his hand, takes a deep breath, and shakes it off.

He has to talk to Dana before he goes. He has to clear out his locker. He has about a half dozen things that require his attention if he ever wants to leave this hospital tonight and none of them involve hanging around in an empty room trying to figure out why in the hell he nearly kissed Jack Abbot.

When he steps outside, he walks straight into Langdon. Because of course he does. And by the time Langdon is finished laying into him, whatever awed disbelief he still felt floating around in his chest has been thoroughly stamped out by irritation. And then, somehow, he finds himself with Baby Jane Doe, bouncing her in his arms, talking to her in the dark.

She’s so young, so small, an almost infinitesimal weight tucked against his chest and in the dark of that room, he thinks of families, and children, he thinks of what he told Mohan in the ambulance bay, rightly betting that she’d think it a lie. He thinks of Jack. He thinks of the way he looked before Nazely opened the door and broke whatever had gotten into them.

A fever dream, except he was awake. A figment of his imagination, except it happened. An impossible thing Robby didn’t think he wanted until he felt, without knowing how, or why, or from where, that he wanted it.

In the end, he does indeed go home to his apartment. His bags are waiting by the front door exactly where he left them that morning. It’s such an easy thing to grab them and go, so quick a task that he doesn’t even bother turning the lights on to do it.

He doesn’t actually make it to Toledo. He only manages to put 75 miles behind him on the I-76 W before a Super 8 in North Jackson, Ohio becomes a compromise he’s willing to make. This particular kind of indignant stubbornness – the kind that carried him through med school and residency and sabotaged no small number of his romantic relationships — is, it turns out, a young man’s game.

When he wakes up in the morning, he knows it's later than he would’ve liked.

Rolling over in the small, cheap bed he’d paid for sometime after midnight, Robby blinks slowly at what looks much too bright to be early-morning sun filtering in through a gap in the curtains. It was the stripe of sunlight cutting through that gap, landing directly across his face, that woke him.

He gropes blindly toward the nightstand until his hand finds his phone. The screen lights up to tell him it’s 10:47, that there’s some kind of heated back-and-forth happening on a work email he’s been CC’d on, and that he’s got two missed calls from Jack.

He holds his thumb over Jack’s name on his phone.

He should shower first, he thinks. He should brush his teeth, find some coffee, and do whatever small things he can to feel like a living, functioning person again before he subjects himself to whatever this impending conversation with Jack has got in store for him.

He swipes at the screen of his phone to go to his email inbox instead, opening it unthinkingly and out of sheer force of habit. There’s some kind of crisis happening between the folks in trauma surgery, if his cursory skim through the email chain is anything to go by and that — well, that’s a hell of a lot easier to dig into than whatever it is Jack’s got to say to him. It isn’t until he’s halfway through the fourth message — Walsh has written as per my last email for the second time already — that he remembers he shouldn’t actually be reading any of this. This isn’t his to deal with anymore.

No work, he inwardly reminds himself. No replying to emails, not reading emails, no taking calls. That's the entire point of this thing he's doing. No work. What’s this trip for if not to get away from his goddamn work? He swipes out of the email chain. He sets an out-of-office automatic reply to his emails, closes out of the app, and drops his phone on the bed.

Coffee and food, he reminds himself. He needs to shower, and get dressed, and make sure he doesn’t leave his only charger plugged into the wall or the only pairs of shoes he brought for this trip under the bed. These, he thinks, are not distractions. He does not think of them as distractions, despite the gnawing, unacknowledged sense that this little mental list of meandering tasks offer a convenient excuse to not use his phone, to not call Jack back.

He washes his face in the bathroom and does not think of him. He tries to do something to salvage his hair and he gets dressed, and he does not think of him. None of this, he tells himself, is avoidance. It’s only practical. Common sense. Check-out, after all, is at eleven.

Somewhere past the Ohio state line, Robby pulls off at a gas station, takes out his phone, and calls Noelle.

He wonders what it says about him that, when he calls her to tell her what’s on his mind, she isn’t surprised. There’s a pause after he gives her the usual spiel: I’m not in a good place for anything serious right now (which is perhaps a little redundant, given the fact that they never agreed to anything serious, not even anything exclusive). It’s not fair to make you wait for me (except she didn't agree to wait for him, didn't even entertain his admittedly empty invitation as more than a joke). Still, what follows it is not the reaction he’d been bracing for, neither shock nor sorrow nor anger. She just sighs.

She says, almost blithely, “well, I knew what I was signing up for. We were in it for a good time, not a long time." 

“Noelle, that isn’t fair,” he says, not really knowing what it is he’s protesting, only that he doesn’t want that to be the last word on their concluded relationship.

“What? I’m agreeing with you. We had a good thing. It's over.”

Through the phone, Robby hears a faucet turn on — water running, the clatter of what sounds like dishes. “I wasn't just in it for a good time. That makes it sound - I don't know, like I was using you." 

“I know, I know, you weren't,” she says, in the way you say anything to get someone to stop talking. “Look, Robby, you probably know this and if you don’t, somebody should have the decency to tell you — you have a reputation, okay? Anyone who starts up with you, they know there’s an expiration date on the tin. Good luck if you make it three weeks, let alone three months. I gave it the ol’ college try but, well — you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?”

Robby frowns. He does not want to be compared to an old dog. He does not want to hear that he has a reputation, either, or that his dating life (or lack thereof) is the subject of idle conversation. But he swallows the impulse to protest.

“I’m sorry,” he says instead. “I really am. I never set out to hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” Noelle sniffs, casual as anything. “I’m fine." Then, after a moment of silence, he hears a breathy life, a little chuckle, with no real humor it. "I know somebody who’s gonna be happy, though. Have you told him yet?”

Robby waits. When it becomes clear she intends to make him ask, he goes: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on.”

“I’m serious. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying Abbot couldn’t have been more obvious yesterday if he tried.”

Robby’s stomach churns. “What do you mean?”

“That look he gave us when I came to say goodbye to you? That Friday he came over to your place and I was there, you remember that? He’s always hated me.”

“He does not hate you.”

“Robby, at this point, you can stop trying to be nice about it.”

“He doesn’t,” Robby insists. “He’s just — Jack’s just like that, sometimes.”

“With the women you date?”

“With people,” Robby corrects. He stops, searching for the right way to say what comes next. “He’s quick to make his mind up about people, alright? There’s no rhyme or reason to it, half the time. He just — once he’s made up his mind about something or someone, it takes him a while to change it.”

“Alright. So he decided he hated me quickly,” Noelle answers. “My point stands.”

“What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t mean anything. He’s like that with half the people I date. ”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. The faucet shuts off and, in the absence of the running water, Robby can hear the sound of movement, a cabinet opening, glass clinking. “You ever ask yourself why that is?”

Robby opens his mouth to answer, but Noelle saves him the trouble. “Good luck with your vision quest, Robby,” she tells him. “You drive safe out there, you hear?”

“Noelle —”

“I mean it. We all wanna see you back in one piece,” she says and, wonder of wonders, she means it. There’s a weariness to her voice, but beneath it a real sincerity, a real tinge of something like sympathy.

When the call ends, Robby locks his phone and looks at the dark screen, where he catches his own face looking back up at him. He tucks it away into his pocket, listening to the rush of cars on the highway, so thunderous it’s almost difficult to hear himself think.

You ever ask yourself why that is?

He hasn’t. There are, Robby thinks, probably good reasons for that, but he can’t conjure up a single one. Across the lot, a car pulls away from one of the pumps, red taillights shrinking towards the highway until the car disappears into the expanse of road ahead. Robby watches it go until there’s nothing left to watch, then puts on his helmet and follows.

The coffee in Angola, Indiana is better than the slop he paid less than five dollars for in North Jackson. The diner he settles on before checking into his next motel feels like the place that time forgot: off the highway and mostly empty, vinyl booths and laminated menus that offer every cuisine imaginable and a very, very, very affordable special on the seafood. He goes for a sandwich instead. Robby orders a side of home fries with his meal because the waitress recommends them, and asks for a cup of coffee — not so much because he’s tired right now, just a few minutes before sunset, but because it might be a worthwhile experiment to see how much bad coffee the midwest has to offer before he makes it to Canada.

He brought a book for the quiet moments of this trip: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s in his bag, which he has next to him.

He takes out his phone instead.

There are no missed calls. No text messages, except some spam texts and a message from the hotel where he’d booked a reservation for in Toledo: leave a review, it tells him, of the experience he did not have at their four-star hotel because he was sleeping, instead, in a 2.5-star motel off the side of the road in a town he’d never heard of.

This means, of course, that there are no new texts or calls from Jack. Which is fine, Robby thinks — it’s just fine. There’s no reason why Jack should call him again after two failed attempts, unless what he was calling about was an emergency. Besides, after his night shift, Jack might be resting. He might be busy and Robby, after all, is on sabbatical. Jack knows he’s on sabbatical, and after what happened yesterday there are probably several very good reasons for Jack to leave him alone, even if he’s not sleeping or otherwise occupied.

He checks Facebook. He checks the weather. He checks his email without opening any particular message, which he decides then and there does not count as violating the “no work” rule he’d established some hours before, and then puts the phone down beside his silverware.

There isn’t much to look at in this place. The waitress, edging close to seventy and wobbling, is refilling somebody’s coffee, and outside the parking lot is cast in the soft wash of the twilight hour, cool blues and greys under a dimming purple sky.

His food hasn’t come yet. His mind wanders, sluggishly, to Jesse. When he picks his phone back up again, he googles Victoria Javadi.

Importantly, this does not count as work. He isn’t checking on the hospital, after all, nor is he answering an email or trying to sus out how the department survived its first day under Al-Hashimi's watch. He is just looking up a person he happens to know, which people do every day for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with work, and finding her public profile on a social media platform he has not downloaded, but works fine enough on internet explorer. The fact that the person in question is one of his residents is incidental. There are probably an odd dozen of other people who’ve done exactly this before, googling her name over dinner, because they saw one of her little videos online.

Her follower count on TikTok is large enough that, for one fleeting moment, he thinks he’s found the wrong Victoria Javadi. The first and most recent video he sees is about Jesse. Javadi is sitting in what looks like the ambulance bay and explaining to the camera that he’s been transferred to an ICE detention center in Clearfield. There are thousands — thousands, he cannot believe it — thousands of comments attached to the video. At first glance, he almost gets it: for better or worse, this is the kind of story that probably does make the rounds on social media, if only because incidents like these are happening more and more often and because Jesse, through no fault of his own, is the kind of person people would sooner sympathize with than the patient he got arrested for protecting.

By the time Robby thanks the waitress for his food and takes two two forkfuls of home fries, he realizes that Javadi is popular. Objectively, properly popular. Her last string of videos have amassed a lot of views, yes, but she has 1.2 million followers and most of her videos seem to cap out at about forty thousand views at least. He tries and fails to imagine a stadium full of forty-thousand people. 

He scrolls through them for a little while, toggling here and there between bites. Someone, he thinks, needs to talk to her about protecting her information online. It’s far too easy to know where she works, not only because of the distinct quality of her name but the visible signage in some of her videos, the entire commute she records in one video capturing her getting ready ahead of her shift. (Do people really watch this sort of thing? he thinks. A perfect stranger doing skincare and making coffee before clocking into work? Apparently, they do. They really, really do.)

He scrolls past one video and onto the next until he finds one where Javadi is sitting in a car. He has seen her walk to work, has heard her complain about public transit, so this car must be, he thinks, one of her parents'. This must be after work, too. The bags under her eyes are more pronounced than usual and the lights in the car are on, casting a wash of bright light against her cheekbones, to make up for darkness that peeks in through the windows. He thinks, but could be wrong, that that's the hospital parking lot he sees in the background. 

“Okay,” she says, “let’s talk about loneliness in medicine.”

She talks about the difficulty of making friends as a student who skipped a few grades as a kid and accelerated through college. She talks about making a small handful of friends in undergrad and losing them during medical school. She talks about trying and failing to make friends at an undisclosed trauma one center medical center in one of the biggest cities in the United States.

“Sometimes, I feel like it’s so easy to confuse being busy with not being lonely,” she says. “And I really, really love what I do and I know I’m so lucky to be doing it, but when I look at some of the people around me, I feel like I’m not the only one. It can be a really, really lonely life and I'm - I heard somebody say this once and I really try to remember it, but the work won't love you back.”

Robby listens until the end, then locks his phone, and places it facedown beside his plate. He works at his food without need of distraction, only half-listening to the radio station that’s playing softly through the speakers above, and feels a vague, but unshakable sense that somehow he’s overstepped, gotten a glimpse into something that wasn’t meant for him to see — despite the fact, of course, that Victoria’s account is public, that the video apparently garnered 65.5k views, that the comments were filled with strangers — other students, residents, even doctors of many years — echoing her sentiments.

He takes a long sip of coffee, better than what he’d had at noon but nothing to write home about, and looks out across the empty booths and through the diner windows at the traffic moving along the highway — wave after wave of headlights as cars and fourteen-wheelers weave in and out of view, the road briefly illuminated by the splitting light of each solitary vehicle before the darkness closes back up around it.

Robby bums a cigarette off the waitress, tips generously enough that she offers to give him two, and smokes for the first time since the pandemic briefly reignited the old habit. Like riding a bike or learning how to float, you never really forget it. He’s standing by his bike in the parking lot, swatting away a mosquito from his neck, listening to the cicadas, and trying to take internal stock of how much stamina he has left and however far that stamina will allow him to travel.

Then his phone vibrates in the pocket of his jacket.

Somehow, instinctively, he knows it's Jack. He knows it with a certainty he has no good reason for having, like some animals can tell a shift in the air, like knowing someone has entered a room before turning around to look at them. When he looks at his phone, he’s proven right with a simple enough message: You alive out there?

Robby looks at it for a few seconds, takes one last drag from the cigarette and crushes it out in the ashtray beside one of the diner doors. This is ridiculous, he thinks. He’s being ridiculous. He can’t just spend the rest of this trip pretending he’s not avoiding talking to Jack. It’ll mean he spends more time thinking about not thinking about him than he’ll spend thinking about literally anything else. Every notification on his phone, every vibration it makes in the pocket of his jacket while he’s riding, he’ll be anticipating it, waiting for Jack to call him again, wondering if he’ll do the right thing and answer the call or do the comfortable thing and decline it.

When he calls him, Jack picks up on the third ring.

In way of a greeting, Robby says, “To answer your question: I’m alive and well.”

“So it seems,” Jack answers. His tone is hard to read, the words too brief for Robby to make heads or tales of his mood by voice alone.

“How was the end of the shift?” Robby asks, lamely, testing the waters.

“Fine,” Jack answers, quickly, uninterested. “Where are you?”

Robby braces. “Indiana.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m in Indiana.”

“I heard you,” he hisses. “I mean what are you doing in Indiana?”

“Right now?” Robby asks.

“No, around this time tomorrow.”

Oh, Robby thinks. Jack’s being bitchy about it. That answers it: he’s pissed. “Well, right now, I’m talking to you,” he says, unable to help himself. Might as well give as good as he gets, in any case. 

“Robby, I swear to Christ — you told me you weren’t going to leave last night.”

“You wanted me to avoid drunk drivers and not ride exhausted and I did that. I got tired, so I stopped. I was supposed to make it to Toledo.”

“Where’d you stop?”

“North Jackson.”

“Where the fuck is that?”

“Thirty minutes from Akron, give or take.”

The other side of the line goes quiet again. Maybe he’s trying to estimate the difference or, equally possible, taking a long, steadying breath. “So, you got on your bike at 10pm after a fifteen-hour shift and rode, what, ninety miles in one go?”

“Eighty,” he says. And then, to make it better: “Maybe seventy-five.”

“Oh, well, that’s fine then,” Jack replies, coolly.

“Yeah?”

“Hell no. You’re a nut job. We used to institutionalize guys like you.”

Despite himself, Robby smiles. “Fuck you, man.”

Jack laughs, but it sounds a little breathy, almost incredulous. “Fuck me? You get on a bike in the middle of the night after the day you had and you ride eighty miles after you told me you wouldn’t and it’s fuck me?”

Robby’s smile, though smaller now, lingers. He has the good sense not to say anything.

“You tell me something,” Jack continues. “Did your phone stop working in North Jackson? You couldn’t have at least texted me to tell me you'd left? We said we’d talk first thing in the morning; I go over to your place right after my shift and you're not there. That's not cool, man. After the kind of shift you had, after you told Whitaker he could have your fucking place, apparently, if you disappear, and then you’re gone, your bike’s gone, you're nowhere to be found. And then to make matters worse, I call you and you don’t pick up, you don’t call me back — what am I supposed to think?”

Robby swallows around a pang of regret that feels as tangible as a knot lodged in his throat. How to explain that he didn’t mean to scare him, only that he did not know how to face him? How to say that he needed every one of the hours he’d put between seeing Jack’s missed calls this morning and now to work out his thoughts, only to feel more lost than he began?

Instead, he says what is simple, because it is true: “I know, Jack. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” he asks.

"Of course I am."

"I just -" Jack replies, so fast he almost cuts Robby off and then stops. He takes a long, deep breath. Robby listens to him inhale, exhale, take a moment to collect his thoughts. "I'm just - I'm happy you're alive, man. You freaked me out." 

"I know. I hear you," Robby answers. He means it. "It won't happen again." 

"You bet your ass it wont," Jack tells him. Then, sighing again, he measures his words. "Y'know, you’re giving me some really mixed signals here, man. You’re not the first guy to put a move on me, you’re not going to be the last, but you’re probably the only one who fled the state immediately after.”

Robby blinks, processes what he’s heard. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah, really. You really think most people who shoot their shot with me go running for the hills after?”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” Robby replies. “I mean, guys."

"Yeah," Jack answers, placidly. "There have been guys. Not for a while now, but in the past."

"I didn’t know.”

Jack hums over the phone. “How could you? It’s not exactly like it really mattered before, when I was married, and I haven’t really — well, you know, I haven’t put myself back out there since.”

Robby nods, out of habit. He does know. For the bulk of the time they’ve known each other, Jack had indeed been married — they'd gotten closer to one another, in fact, towards the end of it. He’d seen Jack through the years when his wife got sick, the months following her funeral, the two years of steady recovery since.

Robby looks out above him, where the sky holds more stars than he ever sees in Pittsburgh. “I guess I thought somehow I would’ve known. Seems a big thing to miss about you.”

“It’s only as big as you make it,” Jack answers.

“No, I know,” Robby says. “It’s just — It feels strange to think there can still be things I don’t know about you.”

There’s a beat of silence between them, neither of them rushing to fill in the quiet or knowing how Over the noise of cars zooming by, Robby can’t pick much of anything else from the phone at all — doesn’t know whether Jack is at home or not, in his kitchen, or in his bed. Doesn’t know why he wants to know in the first place, only that he wants to. 

“You took me by surprise there, you know,” Jack says, eventually. There’s a different quality in his voice now: careful and quiet, almost tender, like tip-toeing closer to something that might take off running.

Robby presses his phone a little closer to his ear.

“Jack, would you believe me if I told you I was as surprised as you were?”

“Have you never —” Jack begins, then stops, and starts again. “Are you into guys? The way you’re into women?”

Robby takes a moment to consider his answer. His knee-jerk response to this question is no, but then he realizes a more honest response would be not until now. But perhaps it would be truer, though impossibly harder, to say: It’s you, just you. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before you.

“I don’t know,” Robby says instead, because this is also the truth, in a way. “All I know is I was I was running on fumes, and I’d just had this insane fucking shouting match with Al-Hashimi, and you pulled me aside literally right after and — and you know how you get to a point of exhaustion that your brain just shuts off? Like you’re on autopilot?”

“You start trying to kiss people when you’re on autopilot?” 

Robby, despite himself, exhales a laugh. “Apparently.”

Jack laughs too. “Brother, if that’s not an HR problem waiting to happen, I don’t know what is.”

“Well, if I go down, you’re going down with me.”

“How’s that?”

“My neck?” Robby supplies. “What was that about?”

“Oh,” Jack answers, and then there’s nothing for a moment but the sound of cars on the highway. “Yeah, no, that was — force of habit, I guess. I used to do that all the time when —”

He stops. Robby waits, patient for whatever follows, except Jack clears his throat, doesn’t supply the rest.

Rather than finishing that thought, Jack says: “Let’s just chalk the whole thing up to adrenaline and call it even. Either way, it’s probably for the best Nazely came in when she did. I’d say we dodged a bullet, but I still haven’t actually figured out if anyone saw anything.”

Something in Robby’s chest turns over, slow and uncomfortable. He has no right to be bothered by this. Hell, he spent the bulk of the day trying to convince himself of much the same idea — nothing technically happened. Nazely saw nothing, or not enough, at least, that either of them couldn’t shrug off if they had to. Jack is giving them both an out and Robby ought to be grateful for it, but instead he finds himself twisted up, out of sorts, biting on the soft wall of his cheek.

“Jack, that isn’t what I was trying to say earlier.”

“No, I got it. Extreme fatigue and emotionally honest conversations make you sexually indiscriminate."

“I’m being serious. Cut it out. It wasn’t —I wouldn’t call it dodging a bullet.”

“No? You know that room’s all windows, right?”

“I’m familiar with what the ORs look like in my own department, yeah.”

“It’s a lot of windows,” Jack tells him, anyway. “I’m just saying that of all the places that could’ve happened, we chose the one place where anyone could’ve just walked past and seen us.”

“Well, they wouldn’t have seen much,” Robby responds. Then, what he says next is meant to be a joke — meant to be a way to side-step the stupidity of feeling bruised by all this, but it comes out all wrong. “Besides, if people are talking about what you got up to yesterday, believe me, it doesn’t involve me.”

The silence on the other end of the phone goes on a beat longer than Robby expects.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack asks.

“You and Mohan?”

“You saw that?" 

"I wasn't the only one."

"Jesus," Jack replies. "Robby, that wasn’t anything like what happened with us.”

Robby tries to swallow down the first thing that comes to mind, but it comes right back up again, unbidden. “You’re right. You had more clothes on when you were with me.”

He regrets it as soon as he says it and regrets it all the more when Jack, perhaps a little stunned, takes a moment to respond. If the adage is true that all jokes have a kernel of truth to them, Robby knows he’s got the balance all wrong; this was too sharp, too cutting in its tone, or perhaps the problem is that it’s all truth, an ugly truth, a thing he could not say lightly.

“I gotta tell you, man, I really don’t appreciate that,” Jack tells him.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Robby says. “Seriously. I was trying to make a joke, and it was shitty.”

“Yeah, it was,” Jack replies. “What happened with Mohan was — It was nothing. I didn’t know she’d been using the room, she didn’t know I was in there. She helped me with my back because I needed the help. But it wasn’t — it’s not comparable.”

Robby takes a deep breath, and then another, and the night air is cold enough now that it almost feels metallic in his lungs, on his tongue. “What does that mean?” he asks, unsure if he entirely wants to know.

He can hear Jack take a slow inhale. “It means I’m not sitting here thinking about what could’ve happened with Mohan if we hadn’t been at work.”

Robby swallows hard. The flash of immediate disbelief he feels quickly settles into something like thirst, a kind of needing more. Like before, when they’d last seen one another, Robby is confronted by the depth and breadth of the things he wants from Jack, how quickly one desire can unearth another.

He wants Jack’s voice in his ear without the noise of passing cars around him. He wants to see him, wishes he could, feeling suddenly cheated by how much is lost when he only has his voice to go on. Most of all, he wants to know the full shape of whatever thought Jack’s been carrying around that has Robby somewhere inside it.

“And what if we hadn’t been at work?” 

Jack takes a second to respond. “You want the truth? I don’t know. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe without that whole fucking day behind us, I don’t do to you what I used to do to my wife, you don’t reach for me, and I don’t —” he stops, then sighs. “It was a weird moment, Mike. You were running on fumes and I just really didn’t want you to leave. All day I hoped you’d tell me you wouldn’t. Neither of us were thinking straight.”

“But that isn’t how it works,” Robby tells him. “You know it isn’t. If it had been Samira in that room with me, or Dana, you think the same thing happens?” He inhales, feeling the enormity of the truth in his words as he says them. “It was you, Jack. For me, it was the fact that it was you.”

Jack huffs out a short, humorless laugh. “We're not doing this."  

“Doing what?"

“I’m not doing this with you while you’re in God-Knows-Where, Indiana.”

“What difference does it make where I am?”

“It makes all the difference,” Jack answers. “Look, if you want to tell me that what happened on Saturday was a mistake, I get it. It’s all water under the bridge. People do crazier shit than that when they’re in the headspace you’re in.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Robby asks, with a flash of defensiveness.

“I'll say it again: you’re on a trip you started by telling Whitaker he could have your place if you never came back,” Jack answers, sharp “You’ve got some shit to figure out and I’ll give you all the time and space in the world to do it. But if you’re going to tell me that you meant what you did, that you really want something with me or - or, I don't know, you want to try and see if we . . . I don't know. Mike, if it’s you, that means something to me. That changes things.”

“I don’t know what I want yet,” Robby tells him, honestly. “All this time, I didn’t even know this — you — I didn’t know you were even an option until yesterday. I’m not asking you to commit to anything, I’m not even asking that this conversation we’re having go anywhere at all. I just — I’m just asking —”

“I know what you’re asking,” Jack interrupts.

“Then answer me,” Robby tells him. Even to his own ears, the words sound a little pleading. With his free hand, the one that isn’t holding the phone, he soothes his fingers against his brow, eyes closed, feeling vaguely caught out by wanting the answer badly enough that Jack might hear it in his voice.

Jack is quiet for a while again. When he speaks next, some of the edge has gone out from his voice. “When you come back,” he says finally. “When you get all this road-tripping out of your system and after you’ve seen that goddamn cliff you need to see so badly — you come home in one piece and if you still want to ask me that question, you can ask me.”

They don’t talk again for a few days, not in any substantive way. They send one another messages here and there as Robby makes his way across the Great Plains, small proofs of life exchanged between long stretches of silence, but these are few and fleeting. They’re mostly done to keep Jack from worrying, which Robby suspects he’s committed himself to doing regardless, but he figures either way that sending him a photo of a sunrise in Madison, Wisconsin can’t do any harm.

Neither of them mentions the conversation they had in Indiana. They don't go back to that unanswered question, they don't poke and prod for anything in the way of answers. There's a charge to their messages now, a difference that's hard to explain except that Robby knows it, feels it, senses that something has changed. The closest thing, the only thing, that Jack does to broach the subject comes in a one-word question: Noelle?. And that -- well, there's not a lot to say in way of an answer, except it's over, except laugh a little a bit over the fact that she didn't even bother to stop doing the dishes when it happened. 

The first time Robby got on a bike, it was the silence he liked the most, the single-mindedness of thought. He liked the way it took up the full breadth of his focus, how the world and all its demands could whittle down to nothing except what was tangible to the touch and what was physically around him.

He usually likes the quiet. He usually likes this thoughtlessness that isn’t thoughtless, just a different kind of thinking than he’s otherwise used to. What becomes quickly apparent over these last stretches of travel, however, is that all this serenity and singleness-of-purpose can get very, very boring when there’s nothing to look at and, across the Northern Great Plains, there are long, long, long stretches of nothing.

Naturally, the mind wanders. Naturally, Robby thinks absently of Jack, of Al-Hashimi, of Dana. He thinks, strangely, even of the baby. He thinks, that is, about what the usual next steps for a case like hers usually are, and what that’ll likely mean for her, and what kind of life might be waiting just ahead of her.

In the long stretch of monotonous hours, because he is thinking of Baby Jane Doe, he is also thinking about his mother — not that what she did was exactly comparable. He was ten years old, he had his grandmother. By all accounts, there are worse hands he could've dealt.

He wonders if running away from a child you think is better off without you is the sort of thing that feels sickeningly, unbearably easy, the way so many terrible things turn out to be. It’s something you learn in medicine, after all. People come into the ED with a broken arm, a fractured skull, the limp body of someone they love, and say some version of the same thing: I didn’t know it could happen that easily. It always looks so much harder on TV.

Or maybe the hardest thing in the world anyone can do is to run away from something good, a person that was primed to love you, and make the daily commitment to never go back to them.

Somewhere along the road, with nothing ahead of him but the same vanishing point where gravel meets the line of the horizon and nothing to see on either side of him but flat land and trees, Robby thinks that perhaps this is the thing he’s always gotten wrong about running away: whether it’s easy or the hardest thing in the world, it isn’t a single choice, but a series of choices. One day after another, one year onto the next, choosing again and again to keep running. It must be exhausting, he thinks, and he's tired. He's tired. 

Robby knows he’s going to have to find a mechanic about forty-five minutes after he crosses into Canada.

The Bonneville itself feels sound beneath him, the engine thrumming steadily along the way it’s wont to do, but the headlight weakens whenever the engine drops toward idle, which happens with increasingly frequency now that he isn't just driving down on interstate highway for two, three hours at once. The next time he stops for gas, the engine starts up when he needs it to, but only with with dragging reluctance and after two unproductive attempts.

“Of course,” Robby says, to nothing and nobody. Of course.

The bike was fine when Toledo became North Jackson, when Noelle became an ex in Ohio, when Jack became — well, whatever the hell Jack is to him now. It carried him faithfully this far and now, with Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump finally within reach, its apparently decided to make its own contribution to the general and overall collapse of Robby’s trip. Because of course it would.

The woman behind the convenience store counter gives him the name of a few different shops up the road, but, when he calls each of them, he learns only one can handle the bike. The ride to Lamoureux & Sons is a slow and careful one and the bike runs well enough that he begins, maybe naively, to hope the whole thing might’ve just been a false alarm. The truth, of course, is not so kind. Bill, one of the titular sons of Lamoureux & Sons, Robby assumes, has a look at the bike and tells him to get comfortable.

“It’s the charging system,” the mechanic explains. “The engine itself is fine, but the problem’s the battery. Common enough problem with those bikes, I'm sure you know, but a headache all the same. I can get it fixed for you, but it’ll be a couple of hours. I’ve got two cars ahead of you.”

Of course, of course, of course.

Sitting in an upholstered chair in an office that smells like oil and old paper isn’t how he imagined his first afternoon in Canada, but the truth is Robby has nowhere to be and no way to get there even if he wanted to. He’s sitting there for twenty minutes, reading but not reading emails again, when an old man comes in from the back with a paper cup in his hand, takes a drink of water, and slips behind the register. 

“What year’s that Triumph?” he asks Robby.

Robby tells him, watches the old man nod to himself, apparently satisfied, and then sit down behind the register.

If only to be politely conversational, Robby asks: “Did you ever ride?”

Tom makes a face. “No, I never liked motorcycles. I don’t trust anything where your body’s the bumper.”

“Ah. Well, you’re probably better off for it.”

“I know I am,” the man answers. “Lost one of my boys in an accident in 2006.”

Robby frowns. “I’m sorry.”

Tom nods, not particularly put out or heartbroken — the gesture just looks placid, well-practiced, probably because it is. “Yeah, Peter probably would’ve loved that Triumph of yours; he had a thing for the older ones. Loved them since he was a kid, actually, which shoulda been my first sign but, well — have you got any kids?"

He blinks, surprised by the question. "Not that I know of." 

"Well, then you'll have take my word for it. Some boys, they set their mind on something and they’re gonna get it, no matter what you tell ‘em.”

Robby nods, not quite knowing what more to say than that.

“Y’know, I probably should’ve known better than to try to talk him out of it,” the old man continues, unprompted, “His mother and I used to warn him all the time. Told him it was dangerous, talked about the statistics, all that, but — well, I’m sure you know this, that's the appeal.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Robby says.

“Sure you do,” Tom replies, easy. “I’m not saying you buy a bike ‘cause you wanna kill yourself. I’m just convinced that half the polish guys like you put into those things is because you know you’re gonna crash it one day.”

That gets a surprised laugh out of Robby. “Nobody buys a bike hoping to crash it.”

“Oh, no, nobody plans on it. But it’s like anything else, you know? People, jobs, vices — half the time, the worst thing about something is just on the other side of whatever made you love it in the first place.”

Robby’s expression must betray him, because Tom laughs.

“You don’t believe me,” he says, reading him correctly. “Look, take my wife, God rest her soul. That woman never met a light bill she couldn’t make higher. She used to leave every light on in the house, every damn one — kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, everything. She’d fall asleep with her bedside lamp shining right in our faces, it used to drive me crazy. We had the same arguments over the electric bill for ten, fifteen years.”

“Fifteen?” Robby asks, trying to do the math on that.

“Well, we were married for forty-two,” Tom explains. “It just took me fifteen to figure out that the same things about her that made it so she was always leaving the lights on were the same things that made me love her. Her head was always elsewhere – the kids, the dinner, her parents. Even after the kids were grown, there were grandkids, there was always me. She took good care of me. And she — she liked to write, she liked her stories.” He taps two fingers against his temple and Robby notices then that he’s still wearing his ring. “She had a whole word going on up here. She had so much on her mind that flipping a light switch every now and then couldn’t fit into it.”

There’s so much fondness in his voice that Robby realizes he’s smiling, unsure when a conversation he began through polite obligation gave way to something more pleasant. “What about the electric bill?”

Tom laughs. “Oh, I always made it work. It wasn’t ever really about the money, anyway — just a convenient way to tell myself I had something to complain about.” He shrugs. “If the price of loving the mother of your children is a pretty electric bill, well. There are worse problems to have.”

“We should all be so lucky,” Robby answers.

“Exactly that,” the man replies. He sits back in his chair, shifts into a comfortable position, then fishes his glasses from his pocket and looks over the printed invoice with Robby’s information on it. “Anyway, Michael, I figure that’s probably a little like what it is you’re doing.”

Robby’s brows raise. He thinks, immediately, of work and then remembers there's no way Lamoureux or his son could possibly know about that. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you ride that bike. You wear your helmet, you probably watch your speed — most of the time, anyway, if you’ve got a lick of sense in you. I can tell you do. But you know every time you get on that thing there’s only so much doing everything right can protect you from.” He crosses his arms. “What do you get out of it?”

Robby thinks for a moment before he responds. “I like the open road. I like the travel. I like that I can’t use a phone when I’m on one.” Then, after a moment and with a little more honesty, he adds: “There’s a quiet it gives me. When I’m on it, the only thing I’m thinking about is what’s out ahead of me.”

Tom nods. “There you have it. That’s the deal then. You know what it gives you. You know what it costs you. You make peace with the fact that they come as a pair — either the whole thing’s worth it or you leave the bike in the garage.”

Just then, Bill comes in through the garage door and squeezes his way past his father to get something from behind him. “Dad, what is this, a college lecture? Stop harassing the customers.”

“I’m imparting wisdom! Besides, Mr. Robinavitch here wasn't making a run for it, he liked my stories." 

Bill looks to Robby, a shared glance as if to say: Isn't he crazy? Then, gesturing towards Robby, he says: “That's only because you’ve got a captive audience.”

“What better kind could you ask for?” his father asks. 

Robby laughs. The laughter comes easy, easier than most things have in several days, and some part of him is surprised to find that when it passes, the lightness it brings stays.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is beautiful, but a lot smaller than he figured it'd be based on all the pictures. The land falls away beneath an enormous expanse of blue and cloudless sky, grass moving in the wind, and the breeze gives respite from the brightness of the sun. It's a cool 70 degrees, a welcome break from the humid and sticky heat of July in Puttsburgh. He walks some of the trails, goes through the museum, stands where he’s meant to stand and looks out.

After several days and two thousand miles, here is he.

He feels more or less the same. That's is the strange thing about these kinds of trips, Robby thinks: the small twinge of underwhelm nobody really talks about. You put enough time and energy into getting somewhere and when you get there, no matter how beautiful the sky, how ancient the cliffs, how perfect the weather, you’re still the same person who came all this way out to see it.

He sends only one photo to Jack. Not the best one, because he’ll show him the best one in person, he decides. Robby buys a postcard from the museum gift shop and, mostly for the novelty of it, finds a post office, pays for postage, and sends the card from Canada rather than carrying it home himself.

They text only briefly — partly because Jack is on a long string on consecutive shifts by the time Robby reaches Alberta, as part of some favor for Al-Hashimi Robby dutifully does not ask him about. But when Robby asks him when Jack has off next, the answer comes back quickly and, by the time Robby sits down for lunch that day, he plots his return trip around it. The days line up easily. They line up so easily, in fact, that it feels almost serendipitous. He does not believe in fate, does not believe in the the mystic machinations of the universe, does not even know what to say when people ask if he believes in God. But if he did.  

For the first time since Pittsburgh disappeared behind him, the destination he puts into his phone is home.

By the time Robby gets back to Pittsburgh the following Thursday, night has already settled over the city. He is exhausted, having covered a longer stretch of distance today than he’d done any single day past — he feels a stiffness through his shoulders, a twinge in his lower back. What little he could do to salvage his hair, hopelessly flattened from his helmet, he tries to do. God only knows to what success, if any.

He probably should’ve gone home first, he thinks. He could’ve showered, changed, slept, made sure he actually looked presentable. Instead, he rode past his own street without so much as slowing down. But now what felt like excitement turns into real, genuine nervousness and he thinks, with genuine discomfort, that the least he could've done was made sure his hair looked - well, decent at least, if nothing else. But he's here no, and when he knocks on Jack’s door, he can feel the thrum of his pulse while he does it, and by then it's too late to turn back. 

Jack had no idea he was coming. That becomes obvious when the door opens and he's standing there in a black t-shirt and sweatpants, his hair wet from what was likely a recent shower, his eyes wide and bright with surprise. He ushers Robby into his place, gives him the space he needs to drop his backpack onto the floor, and then, for just a second, they can only seem to look at each other.

“I have a question,” Robby tells him, at last. 

He watches the surprise in Jack’s face, that little hint of awe, shift into a smile that reaches his eyes — and that smile, that smile, is so fond a thing that something in Robby’s chest gives way before Jack ever takes a step closer to him. "What could possibly be so important that you drove all the way from Alberta, Canada, straight to my door to ask it?" 

Jack places a hand on Robb's arm, palm over the sleeve of his jacket, and it's the first thing that happens between them that makes Robby think: This is happening. This is real. 

"What would you have done the day I left you," he asks, "if we hadn't been at work?" 

Jack smiles at him. “I think I have an answer."

This time, Jack is the one framing Robby’s face in his hands, the one closing the space between them to kiss him. This time, nobody and nothing stops them.It is nothing like Robby imagined, although he must have imagined it a hundred different ways on the long ride home. Jack’s hands are warm against his face, his mouth soft and warm against Robby’s own, and Robby lets himself stand there, still, for one stunned second before he kisses him back. It's kiss, like any kiss. No different, he thinks, because he's a man. Unlike anything else he's ever had because it's Jack. 

The relief of it is almost physical, something like light bursting open in his chest. All those miles, all that empty country, all the careful thinking he had done about leaving and coming back and what either one might mean, and in the end Jack is real and solid beneath his hands, kissing him in the doorway to his apartment like this was something he had been waiting for, too — because, somehow, some way, impossibly, he was.

Robby hums into the second kiss, the third. When Jack pulls back, just for a second, speak — even as his hands find purchase on Robby’s jacket, beginning to shove it off his shoulders, Robby closes the space between them again, swallowing the words before Jack can finish them, and nodding into the next kiss.

“Is this oka—” and nothing else.

There's no time for talking, Robby thinks, but does not say. There's too much to do, so much to make up for, so much time already wasted when they've could've already been doing this together years ago.

For the first time in a long time, Robby cannot think of anything waiting farther ahead of him. There’s quiet here, of a different kind, but not unlike the kind he finds on his motorcycle, on the road, in the face of small cliff where buffalo were once hunted in Alberta, every part of them honored, appreciated, adored. There's a kind of complete and total submission to the present of this moment — Jack’s hands, his mouth, the way he laughs and smiles into each kiss before mouthing kisses down Robby’s chin, finding his neck, his neck again, biting him softly there, soothing it with a kiss - and nothing to think about or care about besides. The world is out there with it's problems and its little glories, yes. It will still be there, waiting, when they're done. But for now, for now -- for now and the first time in a long time, the best thing out ahead of Robby is already here in front of him.