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It’s late September, which can only mean one thing; Samira’s parents are visiting, and like always, she’s absolutely dreading it.
“I think it’s sweet that they’re so invested in your wellbeing,” Jack hums through his surgical mask one day. Samira’s nose twitches in irritation and her gloved hand stops in its tracks where it is—wrist-deep in a patient’s insides—and she has to actively will herself not to react more animatedly.
“Okay, but you don’t know them the way I know them.” she retorts in a huff. “Not even counting the both of them together, if we just focus on my amma, she’s just… god, so overbearing. And I can tell she’s just going to keep asking and asking why I haven’t found a husband yet, worrying that I’m ‘still alone’…”
Her hands are free now, so she makes air quotations around still alone with bloodied fingers and a roll of her eyes. The sight makes Jack smile. He’d always found it unusually endearing just how expressive just her eyes were when the rest of her face was concealed by a surgical blue.
“Hey, they just love you,” he shrugs. “Could be worse. They want you happy and taken care of, right?”
“I don’t need to be taken care of! I can take care of myself,” Samira counters almost instantly, like she was preparing for that exact comeback. Like she’d rehearsed this same conversation hundreds of times with everyone worth a damn in her life, but they still never quite got it.
Jack can tell he’d accidentally touched on a bit of a sore spot, so he opts not to bring it up again until they’re cleaning up after sending the patient on to general surgery. “What if you enlisted someone to act as your partner? Just to stop ‘em from worrying so much,” he idly suggests, his gaze lowered to focus on peeling the surgical gloves off his large hands to sanitise them.
Samira blinks. “What, like pretending to date someone? I don’t know how convinced they’d be. Besides, who would even want to play that part just to have to deal with my crazy family? I’d have to pay someone to even consider it.”
“I’ll do it.”
“What? No, I don’t— I can’t let you do that, Jack. You’re my attending, it would be weird to pay you to—”
“Don’t need to pay me. I just wanna help, if I’m honest.” he confesses. “It’s clearly bothering you, and I don’t want that to throw you off at all when you’re trying to bring your A-game here. So, if it helps…”
Samira is gaping back at him now. Just the thought of pretending to be in a relationship to sate her parents is absolutely mortifying. But… if he’s right here, and he’s offering… it shouldn’t be so hard, right? It only has to last as long as her parents are in town, anyway.
“… Okay. Deal. But you have to let me make it up to you somehow,” she says.
“Deal,” Jack agrees. And just like that, their little arrangement for the sake of making her parents worry about her a little less is born.
That Friday Samira’s parents arrive in Pittsburgh, and she and Jack had made the executive decision to take off the night before and that day. They spent the day getting their story straight, making sure they could both rattle off their imaginary history without letting it slip for even a moment that they were faking it. It’s the most time she thinks she’s ever spent not working, and certainly the longest amount of time she’d ever spent with only Jack—but they find themselves incredibly pleased with the results.
They’d met three years ago: bumped into each other at Randyland on Arch Street, and Samira had dropped her groceries. Jack was in the middle of picking them up for her as an apology, when none other than Randy himself stepped in to comment that they seemed a good match. The rest was history. On their first date, they’d realised Samira would be working at the same emergency department as Jack and made every excuse to get on shift together. On their first anniversary, they moved in together. Every anniversary after that they’d head on a pilgrimage back to Randyland to pay Randy their thanks for acting cupid in their stead.
It was a completely watertight origin story; to really hammer things home, when Samira had left the room to use the bathroom at dinner, Jack had hushedly confessed to her amma and appa that he planned on proposing this weekend, while they were still in town to witness it. What’d they think?
They were delighted, of course—immediately took to calling him marumagan. Gave him their blessing to call them mamiyar and mamanar, but with the strict condition that it waited until after the proposal (it had to be a surprise, obviously!). They confided in Jack as if he was their own son, like he truly was as devoted to Samira as he acted. He just played the role so damn well, he was almost starting to believe it himself… he’d never really had the time for dating when he was so focused on his work, but getting to play the part of a doting partner like this made him realise that maybe it wouldn’t be all so bad. Not if it was with her, anyway.
That night they’d all been watching TV together after dinner. To really make it believable Samira was snuggled into Jack’s side, one strong arm nestled around her shoulders to keep her pulled into his chest. Before this all started, they made sure to explicitly agree that any physicality would only ever be for the sake of the act. Neither of them would think anything of it. Easy, right?
Except Samira’s parents headed to bed half an hour ago now, and here she is: still dozing off with her cheek pressed against Jack’s shoulder.
“I think they might be getting a little too invested, Samira.” Jack murmurs. So am I. “They’re gonna be pretty upset when they find out we were doing all this and only pretending.”
Samira frowns. “Do we ever have to tell them? They like it this way. They like you. We’re both, like… fine with acting as long as it’s just in front of them, right? I can just tell them we called it off or something when I do eventually find someone real.”
Someone real. That bites a little. Her head has turned and she’s shooting him a slightly irritated look—as if to ask if he has a problem with this whole mess, and he stares back down his nose at her for a second to try and figure out what to say. Who’s to say we won’t slip up somewhere and make it obvious we’re faking it, he wants to ask her, but that’s not what ends up coming out. What comes out is completely uncharacteristic, not like Jack at all: selfish.
“How do you expect to find someone real when you spend most of your time working, then the time you spend not doing that is spent pretending to be dating your attending?” he counters. “You’ll burn yourself out before you even find the time, Mira. And that would be the complete opposite of why I agreed to do this to begin with.” That nickname—Mira—is one he’d decided to use for the act, again. Only in front of her parents, but the acting has become such a constant that it may as well be inextricable from their daily lives.
Samira is staring wide-eyed in disbelief at him now, so he takes the chance to continue. “Samira, there’s a difference between telling them just enough to make them believe I’m your partner and… this. You understand that, right? We’re living a lie. And that lie keeps getting bigger and bigger and worse and worse and it’s only going to end in your parents’ feelings getting hurt somehow. You know— I actually told them over dinner that I was planning on proposing to you soon? They’re going to wonder why they never get any engagement photos. Why a wedding invitation never lands at their doorstep. All because I wanted to ham it up a little so they’d believe you more.”
“I didn’t expect it to go this far,” she pleads. “You just… you were being so helpful and professional. You never seemed like you were having a problem with it, otherwise I would have absolutely cut things off—”
Jack sighs and tips his head back against the plush of her couch. “I didn’t. Not at first. But honestly, Samira…” he’d caught himself now, “I feel fucking terrible lying to your parents’ faces like this. They started calling me marumagan after I told them the proposal thing. That’s when I realised this has absolutely gone too far.” He tips his head down, meeting her concerned, doe-eyed gaze again. “And to be honest, I’m starting to get confused myself. You talk to me, and I can’t tell what’s real and what’s an act anymore.”
Samira watches him for another moment, her brows knitted together in frustration. She hadn’t once stopped to consider that perhaps all these mixed signals were confusing him. Things felt so natural for her, she didn’t think that it might not be the same for him; but she’s never been tactful with her emotions and personal relationships, taking a sledgehammer to everything good in her life for her own protection.
“Let me get this straight.” she starts. “Are you really the most worried about my parents’ feelings getting hurt when this is all over, or you actually more worried about me hurting yours?”
Jack opens his mouth, but she keeps talking. “You knew exactly what you signed up for and what we were planning to do with this, Jack. You knew you’d have to look my amma and appa in the face and lie to them for my sake. We practised, we rehearsed our story. Nobody told you to go the extra mile and pretend you planned on proposing, that was all you. If they get even more invested than we expected? That’s you.”
Samira may swing the sledgehammer hard, but Jack is weathered enough not to let it break him; her words hit his chest and dissolve away instead of permeating. It does take him a minute to think of a response, though. “Listen, Samira,” he sighs, shifting and moving his arm away from her. “I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn. But I just… I care about you, okay? I just can’t shake the feeling that you’re going to get so caught in this lie eventually that it’ll be more stressful for you than just telling the truth. And… yes, okay. It probably will hurt my feelings quite a bit when this is over. But that’s only a natural reaction to spending so long acting out a committed relationship with you that my mind is starting to want to believe it’s reality.”
“… Want to?”
“Yes. Want to. It’s… nice. I’d never given much thought to dating, never thought it was for me. I was quite happy settling with that fact, at least until your little proposal came along. I guess I never realised just how nice it could be, with you. So maybe there is a part of me that wishes we weren’t just pretending, although it would be one hell of a fucked up way for a relationship to come to be.”
“Sorry, I—” Samira speaks up but is cutting herself off almost as soon as she starts so she can bury her face into her hands, rubbing at her eyes with the heels of her palms. In her desperate attempt to avoid some awkwardness from her parents, she’d completely reinvented the concept with Jack. Now she has to sit there, a cold wrapping around her where his arm had just been, replaying all of their faux ‘intimate’ moments in her mind to try and figure out what exactly he saw that she’d been missing.
“So you’re saying that… you want this to be. Real?” she probes, her voice uncharacteristically quiet when she lifts her head just enough for him to see her eyes above her hands.
He nods slowly. “I’m having fun being your man, Mira. Even if it is just pretend. How about we start again? Do it all from the beginning,” he suggests. Samira’s eyes dart across to the direction of her guest room where her parents are staying—and he reaches for one of her arms, immediately telling what she’s thinking. “Don’t worry about your parents. We’ll keep up the act until they’re gone, then figure it out from there. How we’ll tell them. In a way that avoids hurting them. Okay?”
Samira lets out a shaky sigh, then reluctantly relaxes her weight into his side again. “… Okay.”
Even when he’d just been playing a part, Jack was a natural at disarming her: if her parents were watching, he could effortlessly convince her to let go of all her built up stress and rely on him—and this moment was no different. His arm finds its place around her again, and for the first time she thinks that under no false pretenses, this just feels right. That maybe his soothing, mellow nature is exactly what somebody as hotheaded and abrasive as her might need, since he wouldn’t care that she’s tactless and snaps sometimes when she doesn’t mean to.
“Let’s go to Randyland for our first real date. Once they’re gone.” she quietly suggests.
Jack chuckles. “That sounds absolutely perfect. It’s a date.”