Archive of Our Own

This was Samira’s MO. Empty head, devil’s playground. This was why she was always insisting on pulling doubles, working working working, so she didn’t have to be in the exact position as she was now—getting an idea, realizing it’s actually not that great, letting it consume her anyway.

3AM, her next shift scheduled to begin in four hours (who’s counting?) and Samira was in bed, submitting an interest form with the fertility clinic at PTMC. Dr. Nadia Alvarez specifically, her chestnut hair shiny over one shoulder in her website mugshot. She looked like the type of sharp but comforting presence you would want for digging into your ovaries to fist the eggs out of it. Or so Samira hoped.

She wondered what people thought when they saw her thumbnail in the employee directory.

***

Samira couldn’t really make up her mind over how she felt about the fertility department when she finished her intake with Dr. Alvarez’s office. They did her transvaginal ultrasound, put her through the blood panel. The entire time, the department was something completely thematically detached from the services it actually offered, in the sense that the walls were painted an untainted pastel pink and green, with framed pictures of happy parents and airbrushed baby bumps and jolly toddlers on just about every inch of the wall.

No one was asking her, but it seemed kind of insensitive. Parents struggling with fertility, in the lowest moments of their lives, faced with an idyllic universe that may forever be out of their reach. Samira was personally indifferent to it all, or maybe just a pessimist. In their defense, a car dealership doesn’t paper its walls with shots of crime scene car crashes, pictures of vehicles getting bumper tested.

It probably wasn’t intended, and she was probably just reading too much into it, but the whole thing had a post-feminist haze to it; like how decades ago freezing your eggs was a last resort for lonely, unloveable women, who walked into the procedure with everyone raising knowing eyebrows at them: we can tell that you were naturally unchosen to receive the gift of motherhood, yet here you are, defying the wishes of God. Now, it was way more normal, to the point that it seemed almost painfully positive; it’s your body, come freeze your eggs, motherhood is an inevitable coda of womanhood, and it’s better delayed than rejected. It reminded her of uncanny valley med spas, come get yall’s injections! If you can pay, you get to stay. With the right resources, you can resist and outdo the tide of biology fighting against you.

The resources were the whole reason Samira was doing this song and dance anyway. Her hospital insurance, generously gracious about business done in house. She’d been thinking about insurance a lot, after Orlando Diaz—not that she hadn’t spent a large portion of her life not thinking about it; it was just that ever since that case, and then her own ticking mortality, a monthly reminder of a barren womb, as her amma would call it, Samira had been thinking a lot about actually using the resources she had at hand. People killed for this—or got killed, more like.

Samira was hoping that her tests would come out conclusive of her beliefs that her body was not capable of child bearing. She’d certainly never made great attempts at caring for it, aside from that time after appa’s death when she, self admittedly, had developed a mild case of orthorexia. Granola mother, immeasurable grief, the stars aligning. She thought she was mostly recovered now, fifteen years later, aside from a constant voice in her head that told her that it was better for her to go hungry than fill her stomach with something that was needlessly calorie dense.

She didn’t go into that much of an extended history with Dr. Alvarez. Who fucking cared, you’d be harder pressed to find a millenial woman without body image issues, than one with them. Her meetings with her reproductive endocrinologist were not therapy sessions—Samira was saving that gimmick for her future generation, for them to deal with the inevitable issues she’d induce in them with her foray into motherhood.

Dr. Alvarez had no time, or tolerance, for Samira’s bullshit—in the kindest way possible. Some of her greatest hits:

“Do you smoke or vape?” Smoking, yes, but Samira lied. She wanted to get a A+ at egg freezing.

“What is your alcohol intake like?” A beer once a blue moon with coworkers, bumming out in Rooney park right outside the hospital. More often, six dollar Trader Joe’s wine, drunk straight out of the bottle, on nights when sleep eluded her completely and she began thinking about her life too deeply. Samira lied again and omitted the last bit.

“Have you experienced any weight fluctuations or have had periods in your life when you struggled with regular menstruation?” Now that was just fucking mean spirited. Of course. Samira was often so stressed that her hair fell out, she alternated months on which she’d get her period, and sometimes she didn’t have any appetite for weeks, after which it would rear back so voraciously that she’d empty her fridge in a single night. It was all part and parcel of life, normal.

And just when she thought she was done with the difficult questions, that’s when Nadia pulled out the boxing gloves.

“Do you have a family or personal history of blood clots, strokes, heart conditions?”

Well.

“As you know, during the stimulation phase you will need to inject yourself with a cocktail of hormones that will inevitably have a varied effect on your body and lifestyle. Do you have family or personal history of depression, anxiety, suicide ideation?”

Samira bit down the urge to say something glib. It really didn’t fucking matter. She hadn’t killed herself yet, and it wasn’t on the near horizon, not unless she had a really bad day, in which case the answer was subject to change. She just wanted the damn procedure for some peace of mind. Samira pursed her lips in a gesture that she hoped seemed innocent, and shook her head as she told her, no, not really.

“Not to mention, this is a huge undertaking for your body. We hope our clients have a good mental constitution and a greater motivation for getting the procedure. Do you think it would help you if we discussed some of that right now?”

To this, Samira outright said no. It was one of those questions that made her wish her mother was with her at the doctor’s appointment so that she could answer on her behalf. It was a matter of lighting a match with her amma—one little spark was enough to launch her into a diatribe about why it was so important for Samira to start thinking about her future. Blegh.

“What is your primary support system like? Who is going to drive you home and stay with you for the 24 hours after the retrieval?”

Okay, unnecessary jab. Mckay was probably going to drive her back home, maybe. Big maybe. Depends on when the procedure ended up being scheduled and if Cassie was off during that time, and could find somewhere to put Harrison. Samira was going to cross that bridge when she came to it. She didn’t allude to her hesitation with Nadia—Samira could probably get on Tinder and ask someone to do it for her, worst case scenario.

At some point Samira managed to beg off, with the threat of her shift beginning and her needing to report back on the first floor. In the elevator, she rested her head against the cool metal, her entire body feeling feverish.

She hoped that once this trial was done, she didn’t have to think about any of those things for a long, long time.

Unlikely, but a fool could hope.

***

2 Months Later

“James Doherty. Sixty year old male, three day history of coughing. Got called in when his wife found him tripodding. No known cardiac history but sats are dropping every time he moves,” two sweaty EMTs rattled off as they pushed the patient from the ambulance bay into the ED. Jack intercepted them, expecting the incoming case from the notification from Lena earlier.

“Mohan, with me,” he called off in the general direction of Samira. She badged out of the portal, where she had been doing her end of shift charting. She fitted her stethoscope back on her neck and followed, hot on Jack’s heels.

Samira was already nudging the ear of her stethoscope against the man’s lungs by the time he got parked at the Trauma room. “Bilateral lung sounds not looking great. Sats are still dipping at 82%.” She pressed her knuckle against the man’s sternum and he barely responded. “Patient is lethargic and not sensitive to pain.”

Jack nodded at her assessment, then said, “He’s going into respiratory distress. We might need to intubate.”

Intubation was not the preferred course of action, more a last resort, but given the patient was having severe intercostal retractions, they were forced to. Both Jack and Samira donned on their surgical masks and eye protection, the air in the room hurried and urgent.

“Bag him at 100% oxygen,” Samira told Nazely. “I’m going to hold a two-hand seal around the mask,” she demonstrated the placement of hands to her meanwhile Jack ordered the paralytics.

“Going in,” he said after the nurse administered them, and he passed the GlideScope blade down the patient’s throat. A few seconds later, “Nearing the epiglottis.”

When he said that, Samira felt resistance at her hands, and then convulsions that almost bucked her off. “He’s gagging,” she yelled out, just as the laryngoscopy video feed caught a glimpse of his vocal chords. “Laryngospasm.”

“How?” Jack asked incredulously, given that the sedatives should’ve avoided the exact same scenario. The choking and coughing got worse until the pump over his mouth gapped and the patient diffused a plume of lower-respiratory secretions right in Jack and Samira’s faces. The aerosol dusted their skin like a slasher movie, a girl getting murdered in the shower; Samira quickly managed to close the gap and make the mask flush again when Jack was finished with the procedure. They moved in tandem, and he gave her a short nod before Samira began inflating the cuff.

“Yellow on the colorimeter,” she declared, her neck strained to the side to look at the monitor. “Equal breath sounds. Let’s get him on the ventilator, tidal volume 420.”

Nazely and the nurse took over, while Samira and Jack side-barred to discuss tests. She ended up ordering an ABG, chest X-Ray, troponins, blood cultures, CBC, and a quick RPP swab. The case ultimately ended up saddled to her, which was fine because she would've rather waited for the results on the patient anyway, even though the day shift’s clock-in was imminent in about thirty minutes.

There was also something else.

About an hour later, after she had finished her charts that were pending before Doherty’s, Samira got into the elevator and pressed the button for the 27th floor.

Today was the day that she was picking up her gonadotropin injections from Dr. Alvarez’s office. It had taken eight weeks of constant tests and visits and consultations, plus one last ultrasound of her ovaries and blood test right before she had started her shift that day, but she was finally approved and ready for the stimulation stage, timed to start at day two of her cycle.

Samira walked back into the ER with the cooler box containing her injections. She stashed it in the bigger resident locker rooms with the showers and larger storage solutions, expecting to leave soon now. She went back to the floor and picked up a tablet, hustling over to Trauma 1 and logging in to check if Doherty’s test results were in or not.

“What,” she muttered to herself, right outside the door to the room, thumbing through the pages. The microbiology lab report was flagged as URGENT, two red exclamation marks right before the notification.

“Hi,” a plainly dressed employee interrupted Samira right before she could click on the test. Samira looked at her, failing to hide her not now, lady expression. The woman continued, “I’m Diane, from the public health and epidemiology department,” She dipped her gaze to confirm Samira’s identity from her badge on her chest pocket, “I was notified of a high-consequence airborne pathogen report in this room.”

Psychosomatically, Samira felt an itch inside her throat upon registering Diane’s words. A short reel played in her head: James in respiratory distress and asphyxiating rapidly, no time for her and Jack to put on their PPE or turn on the PAPR, and the feeling of fluids spattered on their faces, hitting the miniscule gap between her mask and protective glasses.

Fuck.

***

“God, this fucking sucks,” Samira proclaimed, leaning on the hallway wall right outside Trauma room. She found herself stating that depressingly often at work.

Jack was leaning on the wall opposite to her, his lips pursed to one side and his hands behind his back, his body forming a slanted beam. The situation was made eerier by his stillness and the fact that he was letting something actually hold his weight.

“Never a dull day on the job, huh?” he ventured, making circles on the floor with his shoe while they waited. Everyone else around the ED was looking at them in between moments of their bustling, but no one dared getting close to them.

Samira gave him a curl of her lip, rejecting his attempt at lukewarm optimism.

It only seemed to encourage him. “It’s not so bad. We’re both vaccinated, and we’ll still be getting pai—”

“No, it’s not about that,” Samira shook her head. “Having to quarantine is so 2021. What am I even supposed to do the whole week?”

He smiled faintly. “Have you heard of this thing called not looking a gift horse in the mouth?”

“I’m serious.”

“Come on. I can name at least five people off the top of my head who would kill to be in our position.”

“Yeah?” Samira raised a challenging brow. “Name two.”

Jack shrugged. “Okay, well—Joy, for one. I’m sure Javadi wouldn’t—”

“Two people who aren’t med students forced to work here.”

He got a contemplative look on his face. He was silent for long, long minutes, each second punctuating Samira’s point.

Finally, he sighed in resignation.

“Jesus, I work with a bunch of medicine nerds.”

That at least shook loose a laugh out of Samira. “Yeah,” she nodded, then remembered who she was talking to. “Actually, I don’t want to hear you saying this. You’re probably going to be the one crawling out of your skin the whole week. Do you realize this means that you can’t live your double life as Jack Ryan anymore?”

Reluctantly, he grinned. “I thought about that.”

Samira was still a little spooked by him casually getting shot at during his TEMS shift a few months ago. She found it difficult to accept that he casually risked his life 3-4 times a week, feeling rage over the fact that he had endeared himself to her, made her care for his friendship—now more than ever, given that they’d started getting to know each other more after she had dressed his wound—only to flounce it and everything in his life so carelessly.

“Think of all the poor washing machines that will go unsaved, maybe even refrigerators—or, God forbid, Walmart flat screens. Who’s going to save them if you’re at home, Dr. Abbot?”

“All right, all right,” Jack raised his palms, “I was just trying to make you feel better.”

Samira hummed in response. At least now they both equally feel bad.

They both waited for Diane to return and give them her final instructions. She was inside the Trauma room getting Nazely and the nurse’s account of the events for the file, already having done the same to Jack and Samira about ten minutes ago.

“You know,” Jack started again after a moment. “I do have a herb garden project that I’ve been meaning to get to.”

Samira looked up from her shoes to Jack. “Okay, that’s maybe two days worth of work. What are you gonna do with the rest?”

“Watch them grow, probably.”

“Wow,” she chuckled. “Riveting.”

“What can I say? I work hard, and I play harder.”

Samira cringed, then felt her cheeks heat in quick succession. They were friends. She had no business imagining situations that might constitute play for him. She tried to focus on the intensity of the first part of her reaction, hoping to come off unfazed. “Eugh. Please don’t ever say that around me again.”

Jack laughed self-effacingly. “It’s true.”

He fell quiet for a bit, and as Samira snuck glances at him at frequent increments through the curtain of her lashes, she got a feeling that he was thinking of something that she couldn’t recognize, given that he had a faraway look in his eyes while he stared directly at the fluorescents overhead. A man looking into the sun, hoping to overcome the mental turmoil through the sensation of his eyes stinging.

Apropos of nothing, he said, “What were your arrangements like during COVID?”

That was a loaded question if Samira had ever heard one. She answered it only at face value, unwilling to remember that time any more than she strictly had to.

“I—uh, I was living in a shittier apartment, with a roommate who moved back home and left me to cover the rent for the vacant room. We all obviously had to come to work. I was luckier than most because I was living alone, I knew so many people who were terrified of infecting their families.”

She remembered her daily phone calls with her amma, trying to get the severity of the situation across from hundreds of miles away, pleading with her to take the proper precautions and not trust Whatsapp forwards. Mailing her PPE and N95 masks, instructing her over FaceTime on how to put the N95 on properly. And she didn’t even want to think of the piling of dead bodies in the spillover rooms, the loss of Adamson, the reuse of their damp PPE in between patients after the shortages.

Tough times, but Samira didn’t need to preach to the choir by telling Jack.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, lost in memory. “Yeah.”

They stood there in silence for the rest of their wait. Samira didn’t return the favor of asking him to rehash his experiences. She didn’t want to know.

After another five minutes, Diane reemerged from the room. Nazely and the nurse passed them a wince, their paths diverging from Diane as they fled defeatedly to the direction of the employee lockers, and Diane came over to Jack and Samira.

“So,” she started, taking a deep breath, now protected by a N95. “I just finished giving this spiel to them, and now it’s your turn,” She must have been trying to smile uncomfortably under her mask, but it just came off as a grimace through the visible portion of her face. “As I said before, Occupational Health requires employees to be put on leave for 5-7 days in the event of suspected exposure. Don’t worry, with this atypical strain of Adenovirus, we usually get our staff back in action around day five. You know the drill, you will need to log results from your daily rapid antigen tests in MyChart where a nurse will monitor them. The hospital will send the kits to your home. Are you both okay with the addresses we have for each of you on file?”

None of that was new information, and even though the patient hadn’t been admitted for COVID, the muscle memory was still there.

Jack looked at Samira. Samira looked at Jack. Diane alternated looking at Jack and Samira.

After a stretch of awkward silence in between the trio where Jack and Samira just shot each other telepathic looks (Did I already say this sucks—Yes, you did—Well, to reiterate, this sucks—Yes, it does,) Samira finally opened her mouth to speak for herself.

“Yeah, that should be—“

Jack knifed the side of his palm on Samira’s forearm. She stopped and stared at him.

“Diane, can I have a second with Dr. Mohan to discuss something?”

Diane and Samira looked at him like the virus had already begun spreading to his brain. Still, the former cleared her throat and gracefully said, “Sure.”

With the same palm—now clasped around her forearm—Jack pulled Samira a few feet away from Diane, who pretended to be super interested in the wallpaper all of a sudden, alternating that with staring at her phone. After he was sure that Samira was following him, he quickly and professionally dropped her arm out of disinterest. Samira tried not to take it personally.

They huddled together at the opposite end of the long-ish hallway. Samira looked at him askance, curious as to what was so important that it couldn’t wait a few minutes.

“Hey, so—uh, crazy idea,” he began, his voice barely above a whisper, his head tilted towards her. “Do you just wanna’ do this quarantine thing together? I have a guest room, and I assume you live in an apartment? You could limit exposure that way.”

Samira felt her eyes go wide. Never in a million years had she expected those words out of him.

Her immediate, instinctive answer was a no. A fuck no, even. Not out of discomfort, but it was just not a good idea. Samira was not meant for cohabitation, plus combined with the fact that sometimes, just sometimes, she had uncouth thoughts about him, her attending, it would not work. She recalled Santos making an offhanded, teasing comment to him about his naked sunset yoga, and the thought of that—no, no.

“You’re right,” Samira said, nodding. “That is a crazy idea.”

He huffed a frustrated breath. “I’m serious. Just so we can keep an eye on each other and make sure neither of us start talking to the walls.”

“How do you know I don’t already do that?”

He looked at the ceiling once, then back to her. “Then I’ll join you, I like making new friends.”

Her heart fluttered, a useless organ. “Jack, it’s nice, really, that you care—but I’ll be fine! and I’m sure you’ll be fine too. You don’t have to do this.”

He blinked at her, taking that in. Gift horse, mouth, Samira looking in; they all belonged in the same sentence, an apt picture.

Then, “What’s in your fridge?”

If she was in a cartoon, there’d be a piece of holey cheese with flies flying overhead if someone were to open her fridge. He didn’t have to know that though.

“Pardon me?” Samira reared back, somewhat overcompensating out of defensiveness. “What’s in your fridge?”

He smirked at her. “Groceries. A concerning amount of frozen Costco bulk meat.”

She huffed. “Way to sweeten the deal.”

“Point is, there’s more than enough food for the both of us. Honestly, for two more people after that.”

“Doomsday prepper,” Samira muttered under her breath, not trying particularly hard to be secretive with her judgment.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“Consider it. It’ll be fun. I think. I hope,” he said in conclusion, done with his piece.

They both stood there at an impasse, taking turns staring at each other, then at the walls.

The idea of him not pursuing it any further was kind of disappointing, strangely. She thought about herself alone in her apartment—the last time that had happened, she’d decided to take the leap on freezing her eggs. She wondered if a week of solitude would lead to immaculate conception, or something equally as concerning.

“Your idea makes no sense,” she protested in the silence, even though he wasn’t trying anymore. “What about my clothes and stuff?”

Jack shrugged. “We can make a stop on the way.”

“What about limiting exposure?”

“You are limiting exposure. Think about it this way, right now it’ll just be once, quickly—pack and then disinfect right after. You’re still saving your neighbors for the majority of the duration.”

She closed her eyes, shook her head in a small wave, shocked that she was actually considering it. “This is inane.”

“No, it makes sense. Think about it, everyone could use some company. We could finally work on the pigtail catheter white paper.”

Her ears stood up. Okay, now he was actually sweetening the deal. She wondered what else she could get him to add to the pot if only she kept refusing.

“Fine,” she said finally, dragging her feet but able to admit to herself that she felt almost…anticipatory, at the prospect of not being alone. Jack and her got along great—during car rides, hurried sustenance-shoving breaks, discussions of novel journal articles—except the times he would turn on his practiced charm and knock Samira off-kilter, because she would start wondering if that was just his default or something she brought out in him. Some boxes were better left unopened.

“Great,” he said, grinning. It had quite an effect.

When they both returned from their discussion, Diane raised her eyebrows at them. She waved her hands in the professional equivalent of spit it out.

“We have decided to quarantine together in order to not threaten the safety of Dr. Mohan’s elderly neighbors and her roommate. Can we use my address for the kits?”

Samira gaped internally at him for embellishing the truth. Her neighbours were an asshole family of four, where the kids cried all night, and she hadn’t had a roommate in about three years, ever since she’d moved. But she supposed this did make it a little more believable than we are colleagues and friends of the opposite gender who are going to be in close proximity for a while, but everything is very above water HR-wise, don’t worry.

Diane gave them a doubtful look, waiting for Samira to refute his claim like she was being held hostage. When she didn’t, Diane nodded, and with another sure, it was done.

***

Samira asked Jack to pop the trunk of his car with a tap on the hatch. He obliged, clicking the button on the car keys, and raised an eyebrow when Samira hefted her cooler into the cavern.

He was too stubborn to ask her what it was outright. She was too stubborn to supply an answer to his nonverbal demand.

He didn’t break until they were a good ten minutes into the drive.

“What’s in the cooler?”

Samira had only told Cassie yet, who had been supportive of the decision. Without being requested, Cassie had asked to let her know in advance so that she could time her day off right, in order to drive Samira home after the retrieval. She’d also said that while she wouldn’t give up Harrison under any circumstance, she was glad that Samira was keeping her options open. Samira was so unexpectedly overcome by the kindness that she’d ended up having to wipe off a few unwanted tears in the women’s room after the conversation. Normal stuff.

“I’m taking up drinking on the job.”

“Don’t let Baran find out,” Jack replied, eyes on the road.

“I won’t,” Samira said, her apartment complex coming into view. She put on her mask, pulled out the wrapped PPE she’d borrowed from the hospital. Jack let her evasion go.

“I’ll be quick,” she said once he parked in the guest spot. She stepped out and ripped open the package, and started putting the protection on.

Jack killed the ignition, and then he was getting out too, doubling over to her side.

“What are you doing?” she asked, a little panicked that he’d try to help her pack. Her apartment was a mess, and she was pretty sure she’d left her underwear drawer upturned on her bed last evening in an attempt to find suitable clothes for her shift.

“Relax,” he said, standing a few steps behind her. “You’ll need a hand with the PPE.”

Both their voices were kind of funny sounding from behind their masks. Samira breathed a sigh of relief, but then tensed back up again when she felt his quick, deft touch fasten the ties and neck velcro along the back. He’d helped her do it dozens of times at work, but it felt a little more fraught now that there was nobody dying two feet away from them.

Samira might’ve been holding her breath the entire time. Who knows.

“Okay, you’re good.” He gave her a tap on her shoulder, and then she was off; she only risked a glance back at him once she’d keyed into the main door, through the glass.

He was looking at the door, even though she was sure he couldn’t see much behind it.

Samira ran up the stairs inhumanly fast.

***

“So,” Jack said when they were on the way to his house, Samira’s duffel rattling in his trunk too. “What’s in the cooler?”

It all felt dangerously, frighteningly domestic to Samira; her stuff in the back, a common destination, a shared car ride, easy conversation.

She groaned in response. “I’m assembling my own go-bag.”

Jack looked like he was trying to muffle a smile. “I’ve had one for a decade now and haven’t needed a cooler yet. What gives?”

“Blood bags. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” he said, nodding along.

***

It wasn’t a very well thought out plan, Samira realized, when she jerked open Jack’s fridge door.

Salt on wound, his fridge was full of actual food and ingredients and tupperwares, as promised. It looked like the food groups pyramid had thrown up in there. She wondered if that was how well-adjusted people lived, but then she remembered his interpretation of the concept of a hobby and vindictively rejected her own hypothesis.

“You’re letting the cold air out,” he said, happily in the peanut gallery while she strategized over the most inconspicuous way to cram her hormonal charcuterie board in his fridge.

Samira rolled her eyes and shut the door.

“Are you ready to tell me yet?” he kept needling her, elbows resting on the kitchen island and his chin propped over his hands.

Why the fuck did I say yes to quaranting together, especially in the middle of my medical crisis? she lamented. Biggest fucking idiot who’d ever lived.

Samira breathed in, then she breathed out, repeating that a few times. She thought of the pastel pink and green walls of the fertility clinic. This was totally not something to feel cagey about, she told herself.

“I’m holding onto the medical supplies for a friend who is freezing her eggs.”

Well.

Progress. Better than cold beers and blood bags.

“A friend,” he stretched the word out, “right.”

She considered the fact that by the time she would leave his house the supplies would be halfway looted, with a special emphasis on the fact that she’d be injecting herself in his house. Ugh.

Pastel pink walls. Framed stock photos of baby bumps and tiny fists. It was totally, totally, so totally okay.

“A friend…who is me,” she finally admitted.

Samira braced herself for some kind of reaction. When she scanned his face, it was open and blank, the perfected look of serenity but not indifference. She felt raw, and also kind of like a barbed wire, where anything he would say or do would affect her negatively, and make her lash out. She didn’t regret disclosing the news to him, but she just wished that it would be like yelling something into the expanse of a canyon, the confession already swallowed by a vacuum with no consequence.

Jack nodded without missing a beat. Then he came over and shouldered her away from his fridge, opening the door and staring at the contents for a minute.

Samira looked at him, waiting, wanting to say something along the lines of aren’t you letting the cold air out too now, but she ended up staying quiet.

Just as she was beginning to think he was grabbing himself a snack, Jack started moving things methodically from the bottom-most shelf, up to the top and the middle ones.

She wondered if the leaning was fucking up his aged back (realistically, the balance of his prosthetic.) The shelf was already relatively sparse as compared to the higher ones.

“Here,” he breathed out when he straightened, the slab all empty now. How did he keep the shelves so clean? Samira’s were all water stained and crusted with stubborn spills of dairy.

She stared at the empty space, then at his profile. Empty space, profile.

“Thanks,” she mumbled after a minute, her voice feeling grating and thick in her throat, the cool air of the fridge mostly escaped by then.

***

They were friends, but neither of them had seen the insides of each other’s living quarters before.

After the perishables were stashed, Jack gave Samira the tour: he lived in a brick townhouse in Squirrel Hill that had a swing on the porch, four spacious rooms evenly distributed over both floors of the home. Wooden floors, completely open living room and dining area, the kitchen and rooms siloed in the corners. Sparsely furnished, but attempts at the endeavor apparent through a Persian rug in the living room, a six top dining table in front of the kitchen. Wedding and family pictures lining the stairway, some more on the bookshelf in the living room. Samira didn’t look into them, afraid that she’d violate his privacy, or worse, psych herself out if she spotted Robby or his late wife, two ghosts.

“This explains the readers,” she commented, chin pointed towards his huge, huge TV, held up on a console table right in front of a plush couch.

Jack flushed. “I’ve always been near-sighted.”

“Lot of reading in the dark as a kid?”

He shook his head. “Genetic. I didn’t like reading, I just wanted to sleep in the backyard and never go back in.”

Samira smiled at the image. Unruly red haired kid, freckled by the sun, complaining about bedtime. She pointed to the couch for permission because they were both still in their scrubs, and when he nodded she just about jumped onto one end, sinking in as soon as her body made contact. Oh, so good. Fucking divine. The kind of couch that could inspire one to write an ode to it.

She could not help but groan.

“You need a minute alone with that?” Jack asked from the sidelines. When Samira looked over at him, he was flushed pink at his ears, revealed by the light pouring in through the windows.

She shushed him, rolling her neck along the back of the seat, her spine perfectly supported by the cushions. She patted the seat beside her in a blissful haze, inviting him on his own couch. He obliged, and aha, even he let out a grunt as soon as he was in its arms. The noise reverberated through her body, and it was nice, like sitting in a massage chair for a second.

“I can’t tell if this is just a really good couch or if I’m just tired,” Samira thought out loud, her voice coming out slightly slurred.

“Both,” Jack was starfished on the seater a few inches from her in the exact same configuration as her. Their elbows brushed every time someone rustled. “This is my pride and joy. A couch like this needs a big TV, Samira.”

She nodded in agreement, her cheeks rubbing against the pleasantly soft fabric of the cushion. She understood now. “I don’t understand how you get any work done. You couldn’t pay me to get up right now.”

He laughed, a chiming sound. Samira was being serious, but sure. Her cheeks felt warm, whole body really. She tilted her neck to watch him do it, his profile shaking from the amusement. God.

His laugh petered out eventually and then he was looking at her too, their eyes joined for a few seconds, and she realized she must’ve been smiling, because he started smiling too.

Jack was the first to clear his throat and look away. He patted her shoulder, half jostling her and half using her for support as he hiked himself back to his legs. “C’mon, shower and food. You can take the guest room downstairs or up—“

“Downstairs is good,” she interrupted, still not getting up. Two more minutes.

“Downstairs it is. I’m in the room next to that, and the bathroom is in the middle. Get up.”

Samira cursed him out in her head for the cruelty he was inflicting, and then ruefully peeled herself off her seat. “Fine, fine, Jesus.”

“Any requests for dinner?”

“You mean breakfast?” She flashed her phone screen at him—9AM.

“Semantics.”

“You don’t have to cook for me,” she winced, not wanting to be burdensome.

“Okay, then tell me what I should cook for myself, and make exactly enough leftovers to serve one more person.”

“Eggs?” she asked, thinking of something easy.

“Eggs,” Jack exclaimed, already walking away from her. She watched him pick up her duffel from where she’d just dropped it unceremoniously somewhere near his front door, and he parked it in the guest room that was supposed to be hers. Slapping the door after he was done, he said, “Let’s get moving.”

Samira got moving.

The guest room was made up, and she could bet that he got cleaning services at some level of frequency for his house. She picked out some clothes from her duffel that he’d placed on the bed, resisting the urge to get in while still wearing her gross scrubs, and went into the bathroom.

It was stocked to the gills, curl products on the sink, accessible shower with a bench pushed all the way back to the butt end of the tub, a men’s razor and shaving cream, a singular black toothbrush in the holder with the bristles imprisoned behind a tiny plastic case. She brushed her own teeth with hers, and when she was done, after a moment of hesitation, she put in her blue toothbrush next to the existing inhabitant. She didn’t dwell on the terrifying feeling of domesticity she’d felt in his car intensifying upon seeing the two toothbrushes lolling together in the cup.

After she emerged from the shower, smelling like the same hints of chemically-engineered, generic body wash scent that she’d caught a few times on Jack, she made her way to the kitchen.

The man in question was placing toast into the toaster and cracking egg after egg in a pan on the stove. She watched him move like a creep, lulled by the steadfast motions of his body, as exact in his home as they were in an emergency. He had headphones on, letting her have her privacy with the peep-show, and his hair looked damp, his clothes looked lived in. Samira could feel her eyelids shuttering.

“How do you like your eggs?” Jack asked, back still turned to her, the muscles rippling as he scrambled them hard and fast on the pan.

Samira jumped, not having expected to be caught. “I—uh, just about burnt.”

He turned to face her, taking the headphones off. “Really?”

“Yes. Why? Don’t tell me you take them runny.”

He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, busted. “I’m normal, so yes.”

“Wow,” She moved to come closer, all the way to the opposite side of the kitchen island. She wanted to call runny eggs disgusting, but she tried graciousness for the sake of her host. “To each their own, I guess.”

He grinned at her forced attempt at ambivalence. Ever the problem solver, he took out his eggs on his plate early and left the other half cooking for Samira. She took out the popped bread from the toaster, buttered it and put it on his plate, then popped some for herself.

When they ate, standing at the kitchen island instead of sitting at the dining table, his food must’ve been lukewarm while they waited for her serving—but he didn’t complain.

***

Samira had never been able to sleep well in foreign beds—hotel rooms for conferences, friends’ homes during sleepovers, sharing a bed with her cousins at their houses—she would toss and turn, trying to find a comfortable spot on a mattress that didn’t have a dip in the shape of her form.

Samira slept just fine in the bed of Jack’s guest room.

She woke up a few hours later in the afternoon, feeling sufficiently rested. Being on the night shift schedule was so strange, made her feel unproductive because even after a good REM cycle, you awoke to the majority of the day at your hands. She laid in bed just scrolling for a while, the news and then social media, and when the tendrils of disgust at her inactivity began creeping in, only then did she go out into the living room. She sat at the dining table with her Word doc open, consisting of the section headings for the pigtail catheter paper, the concepts of an abstract, a few unfinished paragraphs in the methods section.

The problem was, every time she’d tried to work on the paper—and trust, she’d tried and tried—she would think of her heart and soul that she’d poured into her racial disparity study, only for it to be shut down as fast as someone swats a gnat dead. It was a strange kind of paralysis, an ouroboros; to make progress you have to make progress.

The cursor kept blinking at her, and she bokeh-ed it out by unfocusing her gaze and running through the instructions of how she was supposed to take her hormone shots that night. First would be the easy part, she’d charge in the smaller dose on one of the Gonal-F pens, pinch a pocket of fat on her stomach, and shove the needle in. Then, she’d have to dissolve the Menopur in saline, inject the long and delicate 27 gauge needle in another pocket of pinched stomach fat. That’d be really good for my body image, she thought, to spend the next ten days pinching and prodding at the flab around my stomach. At least she had teenage experience with that.

She thought of herself as a child, the memories faded and mythologized but present nonetheless, of getting flu shots and vaccines. Her appa was the one who’d take her, and he’d ask her to crush his hands when she felt the jab of the needle. He’d tell her a joke in Tamil, something that would take her a microsecond longer to comprehend, the exact distraction the provider would need to get the injection in. She was mildly scared of needles on herself, always had been—it wasn’t so much a vasovagal reaction as just an irrational fear, or perhaps a surviving vestige of loss at the fact that there was no one’s hand to crush anymore, no one to tell her a joke.

Shaking her head, Samira switched out her windows and for the thousandth time, she reread statistics and stories from couples with their experiences; then the exact biological mechanism of the hormones down to their chemical structures and synthesis and how the practices differed in European countries; Reddit anecdotes from uterus-bearing patients and their side-effects with the hormones. Every URL she clicked on was already purple, no matter how far she ventured into the bowels of her search.

That was how Jack found her two hours later, thankfully with her screen facing the opposite way from his line of sight, his hair dented and horned at one side, no doubt from sleeping with it damp. The silver strands glinted in the diminishing sunlight, and the image struck something in Samira, made her throat tighten. He was an attractive man, even when he was rumpled. Maybe ever more so in the undone state.

And she was living in his house for a week. What was life?

“Sleep well?” he asked.

“Slept great.”

“Nice. Whatcha’ doing?” he asked, pulling a chair beside her.

She swiped back to the doc guiltily, almost like he’d caught her watching porn or something. He didn’t question it.

“Paper. We need to make progress on this, Jack. We need to get something meaningful down this week,” she told him while showing him her screen, hoping that her preachy tone would unlock something in her own brain.

“I agree,” he said, then left to get his own laptop. When he came back, they started talking about the sources they were thinking to cite, then pulled up the paper from Japan where the procedure had been described the first time, quoting sections to each other like Bible-thumping fanatics. They started reading the cited works of that paper, then the cited works from those, all the way down until the conversation devolved to the papers they were sending each other on their three year old email thread. Three years old, Jesus—that’s the age of a small child.

They managed to add about five words to the document.

At some point the alarm on Samira’s phone rang, drawing their attention away, where they were both reading from Jack’s screen with the sides of their faces basically pasted together, and their chairs pushed up so close that she might as well have been sitting on his lap. She jerked away to turn the ugly sound off, 7.45PM, alarm titled with ‘Day 1 gonalf menopur’.

She was supposed to take her shots at 8PM exactly every day, and in a burst of organizational motivation she’d set up daily alarms for herself with the dose of the day detailed so as to not make any mistakes halfway through the course, when she was to swap the Gonal-F with Cetrotide.

Obviously, Jack saw it.

And awkward silence descended, or maybe it wasn’t awkward and just felt so in Samira’s head. She shifted a few times on her chair.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Jack said, refocusing on his screen. Samira could tell that he was just about vibrating out of his skin to offer her help, take control of the situation and make her his patient. She much preferred his half-hearted facade of being chill than an overzealous attempt that would’ve made her feel defensive.

“I’ve got it,” she mumbled as she got up and headed to the fridge.

***

God, the Menopur hurt like a motherfucker. The pen had been fine, if not a little daunting—but it was the full fucking injection that was a lot daunting, made her hands shake around her pinching claw and her injecting grip. When it went in, it had stung so badly—more knives and blades than the pins and needles she had read about—that Samira had immediately slapped the emptied syringe on the sterile cloth set on the counter and doubled over in pain. She slapped her now free hands around the door a few times, hoping the drumming would distract her, but it didn’t.

Nine more days of this, she realized miserably, when the pain had dissipated marginally.

“Samira?”

Fuck. The sound seemed close, almost inches away from her.

“Yes?” she asked back, wincing.

“All good?”

“Yes,” Instead of an answer, it seemed like she was questioning it.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Can you say something other than yes so I know you’re still standing?”

If only he saw. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, tapping her feet and clenching her eyes shut to focus away from the pain. She was pretty sure she’d injected herself correctly, but it hurt a lot.

“Yes,” Samira said distractedly, but then realized what he’d asked. “I’m good.”

“Alright,” he said, quieter than before. She couldn’t hear footsteps padding away, or he was just really stealthy. She quickly tidied up and deposited the used needles in her sharps box, and then used an alcohol wipe she’d brought from her apartment to disinfect his counters.

When she opened the door, Jack was leaning on the door to what she assumed was his own bedroom. She was going to punch him if he asked her if she was okay again. His gaze ricocheted over her form from top of her head to the bottom of her socked feet, taking stock that each body part was there, and only when he was satisfied he looked at her face.

Samira’s hands hung limply at the sides, full with the medicine bag, twinges of pain thumping at her abdominal area; Jack had his arms crossed over his chest. They both just stared at each for a while.

“Back to work, Dr. Mohan,” he said later, giving her a break. “We’ve made no progress on writing.”

Samira had forgotten about that in the span of twenty-some minutes. She ended up chuckling, grateful for no further prodding, and after swinging the stuff into her room she joined him again at the dining table.

The cycle repeated itself. They were both equally bad at keeping each other accountable—as soon as Jack was ready to add something to the doc, Samira would interrupt with something she thought he’d find interesting, and vice versa, all the way down.

“Fuck,” she let out defeatedly. “This is never getting written, is it?”

He hummed. “Maybe we should take a break.”

She stared at him in disbelief. No wonder he wasn’t a fireman—he’d see a burning building and think to fight fire with fire.

“Then what have we been doing till now?”

“C’mon, we have all night. I slept super well, and I work better in the late hours.”

She needed him to stop saying stuff like that. He had no clue the kind of effect it had on her.

Groaning, she said, “What do you suggest?”

He grinned devilishly, scurrying away to open the console table under the TV. His wide back blocked her view of the contents inside, and when he came back to the table, he dumped a deck of cards on the counter.

“Rummy?” he asked, settling back down next to her.

A lightbulb in the attic of her mind lit up.

“I have a better idea,” she said, lightly slapping Jack, palm open against his cheek.

His eyes widened slightly, and then realization struck. He put his hand on top of hers before she could snatch it away, and as he brought it down, he grunted in unsportsmanship.

“Don’t say Sla—“

“We should play Slap Jack.”

***

Jack knew a few card shuffling tricks, so fucking what. Unrelatedly, Samira was on the verge of taking herself to a corner and hyperventilating out of how heated she felt as she watched him maneuver the cards around, weaving two halves of the deck together like two phonebooks paged alternatingly. Then he overhandedly reshuffled them, and repeated the same thing again.

Her amma was the only other person she knew who could do crazy stuff to a deck like that—she’d tried to teach Samira at multiple points in her life, and Samira had even succeeded at it once, but it was a stroke of beginner's luck.

When he unshuffled them a fourth time, that’s when Samira reached the end of her stick.

“Is that strictly necessary?” she asked.

He still proceeded with cutting the deck in half and placing his thumbs at the corners. “Yes.”

Samira bumped her finger at the whizz of the cards riffling together, and it caused his pressure to go out of whack, ending up with the cards jumping high up, straight out from his hands, hitting his chin as they landed on the table.

He looked at her in confusion.

She burst out laughing, wheezing until her ribs tightened and the slight ache around her stomach reappeared.

“Your face,” she said when she’d regained her breath. “Should’ve taken a picture.”

Jack was smiling too, looking a little stunned.

“Now I’ll have to start all over again.”

Groaning, she slapped her head on the table in resignation and just let him do his routine.

“Okay, ready,” he said after what seemed like ages, and then he began doling the cards out one by one, face down. After he was done, he said, “Dealer goes first.”

Disagree, but she let him have it.

And then she smoked him.

Every time a Jack revealed itself, she slapped the table at the speed of light, his rougher palm landing on the back of hers a picosecond too late. She’d smirk and hold the namesake up to him, his own brethren forsaking him. In no time at all, she ended up with four Jacks in her hand, and him with none—well, maybe himself, but that didn’t count.

“Again,” he said intensely at the end of the round. Samira was much too happy to oblige. She dealt this time.

“The problem is,” she singsonged at him, gloating, “you’re not going at it hard enough. I slap your palm with no hesitation, with full feeling. I give you permission to return the courtesy.”

“Thanks,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I know how to play.”

“But do you know how to win?”

“Deal the fucking cards. Jesus.”

The new round went on for longer, both of them getting too trigger happy at certain points and slapping at the wrong card. Even though he’d denied it, Samira’s assessment was true, and he was holding back before. Now each time his palm landed on her it was with breathtaking force, a direct equivalent of her own.

He won that time.

“Tie breaker,” Samira called out as soon as the round was over. She wanted to say that his win didn’t count, he had taken her advice and flustered her.

“Did you forget how to win?” he taunted, lower lip pushed up, a sore winner.

“Fuck off.” It should’ve made her hate him, his over competitiveness, but the effect was endearing. Stop beating, she ordered her heart, stop it. It didn’t.

With sore palms and sore hands, they began again.

Like madmen, they played cards until Samira felt her focus slipping and her back yearn for a flat surface. They had gotten tired of Slap Jack because they kept getting tied and neither of them could resist the call for yelling out again, over and over until they took mercy upon the same hands that they very direly needed for work.

Real Jack had taken his prosthetic off under the table at some point when they started playing Rummy. He told her somewhere around round three that he used to play cards all the time when he was stationed in Afghanistan, with locals who would beat him at it so badly that it’d be hard to keep his chin up after—but he didn’t mind, and he also got better at it eventually. Samira told him that her amma and her sisters, whenever they went back to India, would spend the entire span between the time they’d feed their families lunch and the time where they’d have to get up to make dinner playing every card game under the sun; they’d get done cooking and do it all over again, every day.

Rummy was more involved, and also more Samira’s ballgame.

That is, until she could actually concentrate on her cards. Yawning, she flipped her phone screen over, and it was 3AM. The passage of time felt unaccountable to her then, because she wouldn’t have been able to pin point where it went, made worse by the fact that usually all her days were so interminable.

***

Naked sunrise yoga was a myth, Samira discovered the next morning, it was neither at sunrise nor naked. Or maybe he was honoring his guest and doing it fully clothed in his garden. Schrödinger’s yoga, impossible for Samira to know if in an unobserved state that was his true form or not.

He must’ve seen her watching him through the sliding doors to the backyard.

“Come, join!” he called to her.

She opened the door, waved to him. The morning air felt good on her face, his medium sized yard a balmy reprieve to the eyes from all the green space.

“I don’t want to intrude,” she said, meaning no, thank you. Before he could respond, she closed the door back up and ran his Keurig with a cup and toasted up some bread while she was waiting, trying to be useful.

He hadn’t emerged by the time she was done. Pouring him a cup with a splash of milk and sugar, just how he took it, she moved to bring it out to him. Jack had moved on to doing pushups, which was endlessly intriguing to watch, a feat of strength with the interruption in balance that a residual leg must’ve induced. He was really ripping them out, one after the other, and when she came to stand next to him, he fell chest first on the mat with a huff. Breathing heavily, eyes squinted with the assault from his sweat, he looked up at her.

“Coffee,” she said, but it didn’t come out all together, voice too thick.

“Thank you,” he said while still pushing air in his lungs. “You didn’t have to.”

“I made just enough leftovers for exactly one other person.”

He grinned at her reappraisal of his own words. Pushing himself up until he was sitting, he took it from her.

“There’s toast in the kitchen,” she pulled out the ace up her sleeve. “We should attempt to eat something green today, maybe.”

He winced. If anyone knew Jack, they’d know that he hated avocados and asparagus, was ambivalent about lettuce and spinach, and tolerated broccoli.

“Cilantro for garnish?” he asked.

“Soap gene,” she said.

“Yours is more childish than mine.”

“Keep lying to yourself.” Samira pushed him by his sweaty shoulder as she walked away.

***

The antigen tests arrived some time around 9AM. They both took it huddled over the kitchen sink, and shared miserable glances over their red bars over the positive sign. The purge, table for two.

The exhaustion hadn’t set in yet, so in anticipation they got the physical work out of the way that day. He worked her hard, to the bone, with how much she dug up. Digging was fucking hard. Her muscles were honed for endurance, not blunt force. She still did it without complaint, outpacing Jack, because for some reason everything was an unspoken competition for her.

Lunch break came and they ate another quick meal, passing a can of full sugar soda between each other. He made iced tea, saying that he’d always wanted to do that, come out from his yard sweating and covered with dirt to pour himself ice cold sweet tea, like how they did in commercials.

Later, they laid down the tarp over the ground, then nailed the four wooden plans he had in his garage to form a square, pen-like structure. He kept his wife’s stuff in boxes stacked high in the corners, labels like Lucy donate, Lucy misc, Lucy study scrawled on front faces with block letters.

“If I don’t get a fellowship, I could probably be a contractor,” Samira commented, the hammer still clutched in her hands. Their construction was pitiful.

“Why not do both? You can have it all.”

“Of course you’d say that.”

He grinned at her, knowing that it wasn’t a compliment, and patted her shoulder once. There was dirt under his nails just like hers, accumulated after the first round of scrubbing before lunch.

They chugged on. Next came the fertilizer bags, heavy as shit, pun not intended, lifted from both sides by each person as they awkwardly crab-walked it to the backyard.

Samira must’ve missed the first time it rang, and she only caught the alarm for her shots around 8PM.

***

“Fuck,” Samira mumbled to herself, “fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Anticipating the pain didn’t make it any better. She took the shots on the other side of her stomach, the right side, because the left was bruised from the previous ones. The Menopur injection still hurt like hell, the reaction of the hormone spreading subcutaneously more than the actual needle jab, the sting of which was completely unnoticeable in comparison.

She hopped around a few times, then pinched her biceps, then her knees. Nothing helped, but what could she do?

Jack was leaning against his door in the same spot as yesterday.

“I could help,” he finally gave in, and she was almost proud of him for holding out for a full 32 hours. “I don’t know if you know this, but I work at the ED. As a doctor.”

“Really? I would’ve never thought.”

“I know what you mean, I’ve been told I could model.”

Samira shook her head and turned the knob on her door. “Must’ve been blind,” she told him, disappearing in her room.

“Consider it,” he yelled out, to be heard from behind the door.

She would not.

***

Samira was considering it.

It went against every instinct she had. The idea of letting him see her in a vulnerable state was repulsive. But then she thought about how badly her hands were shaking today, and she was afraid that she’d accidentally drop the syringe somehow or inject herself incorrectly, making the whole ordeal costlier, and not to mention, dragging it out when it was dialed in a tee, with little to no room for error.

That night, they were so exhausted from the manual toil that they did not even bother with the farce of pretending to work on their paper. Instead, they sat on their designated chairs around the dining table playing cards. Samira kept winning, it was going great for her.

Jack slammed his losing hand on the table after his second consecutive, and fourth total, loss.

“As much as I am enjoying losing to you repeatedly,” he began, “can we try doing something more collaborative?”

The collaborative activity they were supposed to do was writing the damn paper, but Samira suspected that that endeavor was on the back burner until serious inspiration struck. She had a vague sort of confidence that they would get to it at some point, maybe during their time together, or maybe after that. Aren’t writers' retreats supposed to be famously solitary?

“Now that I think about it, I can’t really think of any games to be played between two people that are supposed to be collaborative,” Samira said, wracking her brain.

Jack raised a brow at her, the counterargument apparent. Yes, of course, but that particular option was not really viable for two people who were supposed to be friends, impulsive thoughts notwithstanding. She swatted his arm.

“Jigsaw?” he offered.

“Do you actually have one?”

“Yes. Birthday gift for my 43rd birthday by my sister. I never got to it, in hindsight.”

“Imagine if your therapist knew that you have had that the entire time, and you still chose to get into SWAT when he asked you to find a hobby.”

“Don’t tell him. I’d be fired as a client,” he grinned, his neck going a little pink. “You really hate the SWAT thing, huh?”

Yeah. One could say that. “Me? No, I love it when someone I care about actively seeks getting shot for fun,” Samira said, keeping her tone light to disguise the pang she felt in the chest at the thought. “How’s the wound doing, by the way?”

Jack turned his back to her, thumbing the neck hole of his shirt. He pulled it up awkwardly until the bottom hem had pooled around his shoulders, and his bare back came into view for her.

“I can’t see that far back in the mirror, but it doesn’t hurt anymore, so I assume it’s fine. I sleep on my stomach or my side anyway. Can you even tell it’s there now?”

Samira barely heard a word. Or, she did, but they all arranged herself in her mind slowly, like they were passing through something viscous first.

Nothing you haven’t seen before, she reprimanded herself. Told herself to get a grip.

“It’s scabbed over,” she said after clearing her throat once, twice. “No redness or inflammation. No hematoma. Healing as well as it could.”

He quickly dipped his shirt back down and turned back to her. “Oh, good. I was wondering.”

She hummed, not wanting to speak and dismantle the image from a few seconds ago before she could commit it to memory. Why was she saving it? Not important.

“And about the SWAT thing. It’s not permanent. I know it’s sustainable long term. It’s just something to do… while I figure things out.”

“Okay,” she said, lukewarm on the answer. It was his life. She just thought it was selfish to risk it, given how much loss they saw on a daily basis. When she thought too long about the matter, she would start feeling a sticky kind of helplessness, which she did not welcome. “The jigsaw?”

***

They stayed up too late doing the one thousand piece jigsaw in the image of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. They were aligned on their strategy—seperate the edges first and piece them together, but the hard part came after that.

Every piece of the speckled background looked the same. They got into heated debates, undoing each other’s attempt at piecing the glitter together because they were sure the other was incorrect.

Their mild frustration was somewhat eased by the show playing on the TV. Jack wanted to show her MASH, and Samira wanted to rewatch New Girl, because Santos and Javadi at work had spent an entire day categorizing their patients and coworkers in New Girl terms, and now it was on her mind.

They went with her pick.

By the time there were only a handful of pieces left, the sun was beginning to rise, and they’d sped through the entirety of the first season of their show.

“I kind of don’t want it to end,” Samira said, staring at the smattering of the wonky pieces—the flower-bed—gathered on the side of the bigger picture painting. Samira avoided looking at the completed portion, feeling like she was intruding on an intimate moment between a couple wrapped in the blanket of patterns. The completionist in her screamed at the urge to not finish.

Jack put down the piece he was toying with back down on the table.

“Me neither. I just didn’t want to say it.”

Samira looked at him, his hands, his fingers spinning his piece in a circle. When she raised her eyes back up to his face, he was looking at her, trying to fit her together. Samira imagined an image of Jack printed on a puzzle and jumbled, at her mercy, her solving it and keeping it framed on her mantle.

“Another day, then,” she said, shrugging, even though she didn’t feel like shrugging.

“Another day,” Jack reiterated.

Despite their natures, they left the jigsaw incomplete— finishing it only in their minds, satisfied with the assurance that if they wanted to, they could.

***

Positive antigen test again, another piece of evidence in their camera roll.

When Samira woke up from the sleep that she’d missed out on that night, Jack was already up and listening to the radio dispatcher on his couch, TV turned to a sportsball channel and the bustle of it on a low volume. She had a gripping fear that he might’ve finished the puzzle without her, but she checked, and he hadn’t.

He turned off the dispatcher when Samira caught him. She didn’t prod, for her own sanity.

“Feeling the symptoms today too?” she asked, making herself comfortable next to him. An itch in her throat, slight heaviness in her head.

“Yeah. It’s manageable.”

“Same,” she said, nodding. “So, what’s on the agenda today?”

“Planting. You’re still game?”

“Let’s do it,” Samira smiled.

Basil, tarragon, sage, mint, and—gag—cilantro. They sowed the seeds, blessed the soil. There was no technique to their practice, just poking shallow dents in the fertilizer and burying the evidence of tampering. Hands and knees covered in dirt, his laundry machine getting primed for overtime.

“Are these herbs actually compatible with the Pittsburgh climate?” Samira asked him when they were done, enjoying the sunset, sitting on his lawn-set, repeating their routine from yesterday of sharing a soda. Diabetes—her mind yelled; Jack—her body argued back.

“I—heh,” He scratched his neck and chuckled, “I don’t fully know. I blacked out at the seed section at Home Depot, and the next thing I knew…”

“Good job,” Samira smirked at him. “Don’t get too attached, in case they don’t grow.”

Jack looked at her, eyes tripping over her profile. She supposed it was a cynical thing to say. It wasn’t like she was trying to trample his hopes.

After a second of their eyes connecting, Jack looked back away at the horizon above his fence.

“They’ll grow.”

Maybe they would.

***

“Did you consider it?” Jack asked when her alarm rang that day.

Despite her best wishes, she had. She’d settled on the conclusion that she would let him help only if he offered again, given that her stomach was now tender and sore on both sides, and pinching it felt loathsome.

It was easier to write it off if she fooled herself into thinking that it was a favor she was doing him, making him feel useful.

“Yes,” she mumbled. Then, a little louder, “Do you actually want to do it? I’m afraid I’ll be a nightmare. The Menopur hurts like shit.”

“I actually want to do it,” he nodded, a sure look on his face. “Anything—I mean, yeah, I’ll do it. I want to help.”

Samira patted her knees a few times. Her palms were sweating.

“Fine.”

***

“Okay,” Jack said, the Gonal-F pen held in his hand like a villain holding a knife in a shlocky horror movie. “You ready?”

“Just get on with it,” Samira said, staring a hole into the ceiling.

She was sitting on the bathroom counter, and Jack finished swiping the bottom of her stomach from where it was uncovered, waistband of her sweatpants dipped indecently low, her shirt rucked up to her ribs. She was sure he didn’t care, and he hadn’t even blinked an eye, exposure to much more explicit parts of the human body probably raising his thresholds for stimuli sky-high. The wet disinfection from the alcohol pad felt extra cold when it was coming from him, or perhaps her skin was overly heated.

He pinched the skin, and Samira closed her eyes. Opened them back again, to look at the top of his head as he bent beside her. It was compulsive, how much she liked his hair. Coarse, a thick tapestry of curls knit together in the back, like an artist that had spent days detailing the strands to weave together and still stand out with the contrast of the white.

“What’s your favorite color?” Jack asked, derailing her thought process. It was for the better—she was starting to think of ocean waves while looking down at his hair.

“Oh my God, I’m not a kid,” she protested. The perimeter of the pen touched her, and when he made the jab it felt strangely unexpected. She yelled out, “Turquoise!”

“That’s a good one,” he said, not breaking his concentration. The bottom corner of his teeth was tucked into his teeth, like Samira was a precious celebrity patient who could make him lose his license. He put the pen down on the sterile cloth and ripped open another alcohol pad. “I’m partial to black.”

Samira hissed when she felt the sting over the puncture.

“One more to go.” Jack began preparing the Menopur, dissolving it in saline with the 18 gauge and then swapping out the syringe with the 27. Neither of them in an ER and in their day to day did these kinds of things. It was fascinating to see that he had still remembered, just like she had. “You’re doing great.”

Heat, heat, heat, so much heat, rushing through her veins and spreading down her limbs, dusting her neck and cheeks. Her heart sped up, and when he started tapping the syringe to let out the air bubbles, it started beating straight out of her chest, for different reasons.

“Relax, you’re white as a ghost,” He patted her shoulder, a heavy and comforting weight in his grip. “I can do this with my eyes closed.”

“Just—Just what someone wants to hear when you’re sticking something sharp in them.”

“I’m joking. I’ll keep at least one eye open,” he demonstrated with a wink. Thinking that he’d had her distracted, he lightly pinched a different spot of her stomach pudge, and before she knew what she was doing, Samira was shoving him away from her; two palms open on his chest, a big push.

He stumbled back a few steps, only because she’d caught him unawares, the syringe still held steady in one hand.

“Wh—“

Samira hopped off the counter, and ran out into the hall. “Get away from me, Jack, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. It hurts too much.”

“Samira!” Jack came hunkering after her, “c’mon, you know you can’t stop the course right in the middle. It’ll do more harm than good.”

“You don’t know how bad it feels! Nothing can be worse than that.” She ended up pasting her back against the wall to her borrowed bedroom, ready to escape.

Jack raised an eyebrow and pulled up his right pant leg, uncovering the ankle of his prosthetic. He started walking closer.

“Mine probably hurts worse,” she defended herself weakly.

“I don’t doubt that, I saw how bruised up the area was. I’m sorry.” He stopped when he was standing toe to toe with her. “But we have to do this. There’s a reason why you’re letting me help.”

Samira blindly outstretched her arm and started patting around for the door knob. “I don’t—I don’t want to anymore. I don’t even want kids right now. Or in the near future. My uterus will become unhabitable before I am finally ready. God, Jack, I’m against surrogacy—I would never do that—and my eggs will rot in the PTMC freezer forever, and I’ll be stuck paying for the storage fees till I die, probably of a MI because of my family history, but at least the storage fees will be cheaper—“

Jack clasped his free hand over the one that was fumbling with the door. He brought it back in between them, kept holding it, steady pressure.

“Breathe with me,” he said, disgustingly calm about the situation, his chest rising and falling. His volume seemed so much lower in comparison. The easy inflow and outflow of his breath taunted her. “You’re panicking, and that’s okay—you don’t have to go through with the retrieval at the end—but I’ll be remiss if I let you miss a dose in case you do decide to do it. You decided on this for a reason. Just focus on that.”

He placed her hand on his shoulder, and with his freed, he began pulling her shirt that had fallen back down, up.

“What are you doing?” she wheezed, a little dazed, the panic still not fully dissipated. Their thighs brushed once, and it felt like an odd thing to notice, but she did.

“Shh,” he muttered, and kept on until her top was satisfactorily crumpled under her bra.

“Don’t—don’t shush me,” Samira sputtered, “this isn’t the 80s’, you wish, geriatric grandpa.”

He chuckled darkly, and then he was pinching her stomach, just enough gap between their bodies for him to move his hand around.

“Keep going, I can take it,” he said, and she tightened her claws over his shoulders at the words. “Call me every name in the book, if it helps you.”

Samira felt it then, the twinned nip from the puncture of the needle and the galloping of her heartbeat, their perfect synchronization, added with the immediate agony of the hormone spreading through her insides. “Fuck you,” she seethed, “fuck you, fuck you,” He kept emptying the barrel into her, “I hope you die. I hope we both die,” She dug her nonexistent nails into his shoulder, hard, as the pain bloomed and took over her whole body. “You're an ancient bag of bones—”

Her eyes were clenched together so tight that she didn’t even notice that he was done until he was putting her shirt back down.

“Seriously?” he said, “bag of bones?”

Samira opened her eyes. The asshole was grinning at her. She unhanded him, and thumped her skull against the wall a few times, trying to knock her brain back into place.

“C’mon, I need to swab you,” he nudged her back to the bathroom, and on shaky legs Samira followed.

Back in there, he tore open another alcohol pad and disinfected the injection site. Samira let him do it, pain and shame warring each other, exacerbated by her embarrassment at her coarse language.

“Jack, listen,” she began, “I—I need to say thank you, and I—uh, I’m so—“

“Don’t mention it.” He patted her stomach once, and moved her out of his way in a sure move. “Same time tomorrow?” he asked, smiling at her and he gathered everything for the sharps box.

Samira stared at him, trying to understand what made someone such a glutton for punishment.

But the unfortunate fact of the matter was, that today she would’ve probably bailed halfway from the injection if she were doing it alone, derailing the process by horrific measures. As much as she respected Dr. Alvarez, she did not want to spend even a second more than necessary in her office or fighting with her receptionist to get some time on the books. Jack had helped her, and at the risk of sounding overly effusive, he had somewhat saved the train from going off the tracks.

Gulping around her dried up mouth, Samira confirmed, “Same time tomorrow.”

***

Jack didn’t let Samira make things awkward after the jab. She still felt a little touchy from having accepted his help, felt selfish and ungrateful, but she thankfully took the opportunity to just keep the ball rolling.

When she reemerged from disinfecting his bathroom and the walls outside, he was in the kitchen bobbing two tea bags in two mugs.

“Chamomile,” he told her, divining again when she had come out from her corner and was watching him from the sidelines.

“Thanks,” she said as she came to stand by him, clutching her mug in her hands. The pain from the hormone wasn’t that of menstrual aches, but the thought was appreciated nonetheless.

“I have a fire pit, you know,” he said, leaning his hip on the kitchen counter as he took a sip too.

“I know. I saw. We were sitting right by that this evening.”

“And?”

The paper. She debated between warm company and staring miserably at a blank screen, berating herself to write something and not doing it anyway. Up until a few days ago the answer to the dilemma would’ve been crystal clear to her, but now the consideration was muddled.

She made her decision reluctantly.

“I’ll bite,” she said, face half covered by the rim of her mug. “Let’s do it.”

He grinned. She memorized it, added it to a mental collection. “That’s what I like to hear.”

His idea of a firepit was just an upturned, thin iron dome-like thing balanced on four iron legs.

While Samira settled on the lawn chair, he brought out a bunch of coal briquettes from his garage in a dusty container, and dumped them noisily in the pit. Pulled out a lighter from his pocket, burnt a small plank of wood and dumped it in with the coal.

“Why do you own a novelty lighter?” she asked, peeking that it was one of those more expensive, silver ones with the lid you had to flick open to light.

“Smoker,” he admitted bashfully. “In a past life. Before I met my wife.”

“And in your current life?”

“Nicotine gum. Shit drills a hole through my gums though.”

“Really? I tried it, I think, once. I didn’t feel anything.”

Jack chuckled. “It was supposed to be a stepping stone to quitting completely. I’ve been climbing with no success for years now.”

It was hard to imagine Jack trying something and failing at it. “It took me the longest time to convince Dana to let me bum a cigarette from her. She just kept saying, not on my hands, kid.”

Jack looked at her, and she had a feeling that he was making the same assessment that Dana had, deciding if he thought she was a kid or not.

“What did her in?”

“After the fireworks, on the fourth of all days. She must’ve overheard me talking to my mom, and before Benji picked her up she just put her half used pack of Newports in my hands. Told me I looked like I could use it more, and that she’d promised her daughter she was quitting anyway.”

“That’s Dana. Fairy God Mother that comes bearing Newports.”

Samira laughed at the image. It wasn’t too far from the truth.

The fire had caught by now, a pleasant accompaniment to the chill in September air. The embers glowed neon red, and Samira felt her eyes scorch just by looking at it from a distance. She considered that she was growing older, and at some point she’d try to recall her life, and all she’d remember was the graveyard of her own failures. Maybe that’s what people like her deserved, but she had the strongest urge to escape her destiny, remember smaller moments that punctuated the bad. She wanted to remember playing cards with Jack, doing a puzzle with him, eating with him. She wanted him to be a good memory, period.

Warmed to bone by the flames nearby, Samira peppered Jack with questions that she’d always had, but had never found the time to ask. What was something he’d changed his mind about in recent memory? What was something as a kid that he’d believed, and now he wanted to be true, as an adult? Was there anything in his life that he’d wanted desperately, and then later been grateful when he didn’t get it? If he could go back in time, to whatever point that he’d wanted, and change things, would he take the opportunity?

Jack answered honestly. She would give him that, because she could not give him the grace of being completely honest when he asked the question back. It was not that she was lying, but all her answers were surface level, because she did not want to think too deeply about her childhood, her future, or her present. All she wanted was to experience the moment.

Jack let it go. He always did, when it came to her.

***

Time took on a hazy quality.

They slept when they were tired, woke up when they were rested. Ate when they were hungry, didn’t follow the convention of acceptable meals dictated by the time of day; rice for breakfast, eggs for dinner. Showered in the middle of the night before going to bed, or late in the afternoon; Samira saw him go from their currently shared bathroom to his bedroom in just a towel, freshly showered after their impromptu bonfire, body balanced on crutches and smelling like the same stuff she was smelling of these days, steam rising off his skin—it struck her dumb and restless for a long time, making her rustle and tangle her sheets around her legs in bed.

Samira was taking the disruption to routine better than he was, only marginally. But what else was there to do? Their third test, on the fourth day of quarantine, was still positive; the frustrating part was that if only they were not infectious, they could’ve been working just fine. Samira got worse headaches just staring at the fluorescents of the ED after a shift than she did from the virus.

She usually checked the weather forecast for the day before she left the house, deciding on if she was going to tow her jacket with her or not. That week, she hadn’t been minding it though, because there was no reason to do so. When she woke up that fourth day—the sound of thunder booming in her ears, the covers feeling oppressive because his central AC didn’t seem to be blowing—she realized that it was 4PM in the afternoon, and the sky outside was cobalt-gray through the windows. The power had gone off.

The house wasn’t dark per se, still sufficiently lit from the backyard glass door and the huge windows everywhere. Jack had undone the shutters from ones that usually stayed covered and was gathering torches, bottled waters, canned peaches, and a first aid kit on the kitchen island, presumably for easy access.

“God, this is like your dream come true,” Samira commented, rubbing crusts from her eyes.

“You’ll regret saying that when you’ll end up needing my provisions.”

“I’m good,” she said, rejecting his offer for now. “I’m okay with not surviving the apocalypse. I’ll turn into a zombie and terrorize you.”

That made Jack smile.

“I’ll be okay with it if it’s you, I guess.”

That made Samira smile.

She realized that they were just standing there smiling like lunatics, so she shook it away. His flirtation was rubbing off on her. What a shame.

There was no coffee without the machine, so she just made them two more teas steeped from hot water from the stove. They ate a bunch of cookies that his neighbor had baked him and he’d forgotten about.

“Oh, shit,” Samira said, “the hormones. Fuck. Your fridge.”

“Already taken care of.” Jack tilted his chin to the cooler on the counter. “Filled it up with all the ice that was in the freezer, so I think we will be good for a while. The county website said the outage shouldn’t be for too long.”

Samira felt a frog in her throat.

“What about your bulk Costco meat?”

“I’ll thank them for their sacrifice if they end up spoiling,” He bobbed his head solemnly. “And I might’ve overstated my abundance. There’s really not that much in there.”

“Huh,” she said, considering that. “You’re a bit of a liar, aren’t you? I didn’t know this about you. What else do you lie about?”

Jack flushed, red creeping up over his throat, and got a long look on his face. He thought about it, which was good, because Samira wanted an honest answer.

“I embellish more than I lie. Sometimes. Maybe a little omission here and there. But I try not to do it anymore, I used to be pathological as a teenager.”

This was what therapy did for people, she supposed. Made them capable of wearing their faults strapped loud and visible to their chests. Or it was just something he was telling Samira, which was a scarier prospect to consider. Maybe he was lying about lying. Who could know?

Whatever it was, Samira was in no position to act superior. She’d never been honest a day in her life, least of all to herself.

***

They passed the time. Jack taught Samira how to juggle with oranges from his fruit basket, and she told him that she always knew he was a clown who’d escaped from the circus. She didn’t pick it up immediately, but after a few hours of dedicated practice, she could throw two objects in the air simultaneously and reliably catch them at once. The oranges fell on the floor more times than she bothered counting, more pulp than segments by the end, but they both each took one, peeled and ate it.

The power came back around 7PM, and so did the dread. Another day, another round of injections. They stuffed the hormones back in the fridge, and Jack had egg on his face with how severely he had overprepared.

Better to be safe than sorry, he simply shrugged.

Later, “I told you that I can be a nightmare,” Samira said conversationally, watching the minutes slip away before her alarm was supposed to ring.

“I wouldn’t say nightmare,” Jack hedged, “I don’t even think your resistance would categorize you as a difficult patient, not yet at least.”

“You flatter me.”

He smiled. “I’m serious. I get it, you don’t like people taking care of you. Not everyone can be as emotionally available as I am.”

Samira rolled her eyes. “Right, you’re great at asking for help, which is why you were hiding in an exam room alone to dress a bullet wound you had no way of reaching.”

“But I let you, didn’t I?”

She cleared her throat. “Yeah,” she said, scratching circles on this table with her nail, “yeah, you did.”

***

It never got easier. If anything, the pen Gonal-F pen started to hurt too, with the tender state of her stomach.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Jack kept repeating to Samira, like it was hurting him all the same. He took her left hand with him and pulsed with his grip, and when she felt the jab, she let herself crush his hand.

A little out of breath from the sting, Samira then watched him prepare the Menopur with saline. He looked…cute, there was no other word for it, like a teenager swirling a test tube with focus in chemistry class. It didn’t make her situation any better, not really, but it eased some ache in her whose existence was a mystery to her, before him. Beautiful profile, beautiful man. She had the irrational urge to steal him for herself.

While he swabbed her skin in preparation of the big event, Samira considered that she had been right, being in such close quarters with him was wrecking her nerves. They were a little over halfway with their stay together—she’d come there carrying a small flame for her attending/friend, and she’d leave there with a forest fire on her hands. She wondered if it was just the proximity, but it wasn’t—it was his hands, his hands on her; it was his beautiful hair and his beautiful smile, his lies and his truths.

Samira was so, so fucked.

Right then was not a great time to have an epiphany. Jack was tapping out air bubbles from the syringe, ready to go.

“I can’t have you running off today,” he said, his hand closing around her knee briefly, her legs hanging off the edge of the counter from where she was sitting on it.

“What?” Samira stretched it out, “Me? I would never.”

Jack raised his eyebrows and nodded, “I’m going to think about ‘bag of bones’ every time my joints click. Thanks for that.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad it had the desired effect.”

He shook his head. “Let’s try something different this time. You are a flight risk.”

Samira scoffed, and he took that as acceptance. He pushed at her shin until she was forced to scoot back slightly, still limited by the sink, and he stood closer until his stomach was pressed to her knees. “Both hands on my shoulders, and no swatting business. Only if it’s strictly necessary.”

He was completely caging her in, she realized; overwhelming her senses. She followed the directions, because—she wasn’t too sure why, because. It wasn’t enough. He held her left hand on his own shoulder, dug it in hard, like he was the Jack they were both slapping.

“I’m going to duck now. It’ll be bad, but it’ll also be over. There is that.”

Samira nodded. He ducked, as promised, and her hunched posture was enough pinching to form a roll substantial enough for him to inject in. She felt the needle poised over her skin.

“Going in now,” he announced, and she realized he was tweaking his strategy from yesterday, when he’d try to catch her unawares. She appreciated the advanced notice, but the reaction still came. Her shins began to writhe in protest.

“Wait,” she asked, taking a few composing breaths. “Just wait.”

“Okay,” Jack relented and straightened, but held the needle at the same tipping point. “It’s on your count, Samira. You know that.”

“Jack, I—“ She looked away, her weakness shameful and repulsing. “It’s just… going to hurt so badly. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

“Let’s talk about it then,” he said, and he must’ve not realized it, but his left hand was softly patting hers. Samira felt it all. “Tell me why you’re doing this.”

She took a deep breath, almost the first half of a sigh. Held it in until it started to hurt, only let it go afterwards.

“I—I don’t know if I’ll ever want kids,” she prefaced, babbling nervously in an effort to create delay, “I don’t think I could ever overcome my selfishness enough to be a mother. My amma, she, uh—sometimes the food situation was bad, rice with this, uh—ground spice, it's called podi, and still she’d only eat after my appa and I had had our fill. I don’t know if I can ever do that for someone,” Samira gulped, blinked a few times. “I wanted to have this option so that if I ever…fixed myself, I wouldn’t be shit out of luck. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder—that maybe I just can’t be. Maybe I can’t be saved, and I can’t pass…whatever’s wrong with me to a child that would grow up and wish that it’d never have been born.”

“Samira, hey,” Jack moved his face until he found her gaze. She didn’t know what was wrong with him. It should be a psychiatric disorder to demand that much eye contact at all times. “I get it,” he said, and she had no doubt that he did. “I’ve been there. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, and even if there is, I don’t think it’s beyond saving. Whatever you choose, it’ll be on your terms, and you don’t—you don’t need to have a kid if you don’t want to. It’s not something to decide on in a snap. I would know—“ He chuckled, but it had no humor in it. “I never had them. After I came back, you know, after my last tour, I—I used to have these episodes of rage and isolation. I was such an asshole to my family, and to my wife. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for that. I couldn’t bear it, if someday I reverted to that in front of my kid.”

A curl of hair had deviated from the flock and fallen on his forehead from when he’d ducked and come back up. Samira had the unstifflable urge to push it back, and she supposed she didn’t stop herself, because she was doing it in a flash with her free hand. His hair was softer than she’d thought, a pleasure to sink her hands into. She rubbed a lock between her fingers, trying to ingrain the feel within her fingerprint.

“People can change—when I look at you, I believe that. For the better, I mean,” she said, wishing he’d ask her to let go of him.

He didn’t.

A corner of his mouth curved up, ever so slightly, in the cruelest way. “I try. I know you do too. Whatever you choose in the end will be right for you. But you know I can’t let you go without today’s dose.”

Samira bit her lip. He followed her there, and it was trite, but he did, if only for a second. She realized he’d been holding the injection at approximately the same place the entire time. She wondered how his hand wasn’t cramping.

“I know,” she said, trying to get herself psyched up. “I know. Just do it.”

His throat bobbed. He seemed to be considering something, thinking. Was he going to give up at the home stretch?

With his voice rough, he said, “If you want, I—uh, I could distract you.” He emphasized his offer with a tease of the sharp point of the needle at her stomach.

“How?”

He pushed the needle in. Her eyes shuttered closed and there was the harrowing pain as usual, and Samira was thinking that he must not know the dictionary definition of a distraction, or he must be really bad at them, because all she could think about was a hundred blades scratching up her insides, and her blood feeling like—

Jack propelled his body forward, took his hand off hers from his shoulders. It came up at the side of her face, warm and demanding, angling it for a second before it was his mouth over hers, hot and insistent, just like his hands. She didn’t see it coming, but she had known from his exhale hitting her chin that he must’ve been shifting closer. After a moment of shock they moved, in tandem and complimentary. The taste of out of season oranges, hints of citrus on his lips.

She kissed him back. Of course she did, it didn’t even occur to her for a second to not. What she did think of was that maybe she was dreaming, and the only thing disputing that claim was the pain, she would hope that the best dream she could dream wouldn’t have any of that. When he had emptied the dose, he carefully pulled the needle out and placed it somewhere, and it was hotter still that he could do it all, or maybe he was just not as affected as her.

The thought finally forced her eyes open.

He was so red.

His breathing was heavy when they parted, him sensing her momentary hesitation.

She felt buried under a metric tonne of debris with his eyes on her. “Did that just—“ Samira muttered, and he was still so close that it seemed to reach him quicker.

“Yes,” he affirmed.

“And we—“

“Yes.”

“The injection is—“

“Yes.”

“Why? Why did you do—“

“Ye—“

“Don’t say yes. Say something else.”

Jack pushed his teeth down on his bottom lip. “Because I’ve wanted to do that for years. I asked you to stay with me so that I could somehow get myself to work up the courage.”

Samira smiled. It was kind of manic, because she could feel her dimples creasing. “You’re telling me you had ulterior motives the entire time?”

He blushed harder, if that was even possible. Samira felt a little warm herself, like liquid held loosely.

“Not exactly for this. But for your company. To be near you,” He toyed with the hem of her rucked up shirt distractedly. “Is that bad?”

Samira, in that moment, found Jack to be profoundly dumb. With a hand fisted in his shirt, she pulled him back to her, and told him one single word, the complete opposite of her actions.

No, she said. Thank fucking God, she thought.

**********************************