Archive of Our Own

Mel glowers the banana. In five bites, it will be gone. She’ll barely even have to chew. The slimy inside part will only graze her tongue – and afterward, she’ll be full of energy and potassium, just like she’s supposed to be. Bananas are nature’s original energy bars.

“I can do this,” she says and screws up her eyes for the first bite.

“Are you psyching yourself up to eat a banana?”

“If I have to talk about it, I’ll never do it,” she says, not opening her eyes. She doesn’t need to; she knows Langdon’s voice.

Digging her fingernails into her palm, she forces down the first bite. Chew, chew, swallow. Twenty percent done. She can do this. Four more bites. It will be over in less than two minutes.

She only gags a little, on bite number three. She doesn’t think it’s visible from the outside, which is good, since Langdon shows zero sign of retreating.

“Did you run out of protein bars?” he asks when she’s finally done. Without being asked, he hands her a big glass of water, which is surprisingly thoughtful.

“No,” she says. “Well, yes. I mean, I ran out and didn’t buy any more. I’m saving money.”

“Tell me about it,” Langdon says, making a sympathetic face.

Mel almost does, but she remembers most people don’t mean that expression literally, so the words have to stay inside her head. Theoretically, she’s saving for a two bedroom apartment, but that’s probably out of reach. So actually, she’s saving for a nicer sofa bed, preferably from a real store and not Facebook Marketplace.

There’s a beat of awkward silence, like maybe Langdon was expecting her to tell him about it, which is a dilemma. Should she ask? Because so often, she thinks people are starting a conversation, and then she realizes she’s talking to the air. It’s not her favorite life experience.

Dana saves her by bursting into the kitchen.

“Construction scaffolding collapse, four casualties, two minutes out. Tea time’s over!”

The next day, Langdon offers her an apple and an orange. A mandarin, to be precise. One of the special easy-to-peel ones that come in cute little net bags marketed to children.

Mel had gone into the kitchen to face down her banana in private. An ambulance – well, several ambulances – are five minutes out. Apparently a local fraternity made a staggering array of unwise choices tonight, so if she wants to eat anything she’d better take care of it now.

“There’s a lot of fruit in the world,” Langdon says. “You don’t have to eat the mushy kind.”

He holds out the mandarin, and she shakes her head. “Thank you. I mean, that’s very kind, but…”

She trails off, not sure if she wants to expose the depth of her negative feelings about citrus fruits.

“But what?” He looks genuinely curious, and he’s standing in a way that blocks the ugly fluorescent light from shining directly on her, which is probably an accident, but it’s still nice.

She takes a breath. “The quantity and location of the seeds is uncertain.” She waves her hands. “And sometimes they’re too dry and the membrane part gets all stuck in your throat.”

She’s flushing now, braced for him to laugh, but instead he says, “Membrane, huh? When you put it that way…” He tosses it into the trash. “Apple?”

Mel has complex feelings about apples. The micronutrient profile isn’t ideal, and the texture is a question mark – sometimes they’re pleasingly crisp, and sometimes weirdly mealy. At least with a banana, she always knows what she’s getting into, texture-wise.

But Langdon looks so hopeful, so she’s eating this apple, texture be damned.

She can’t hold back a little noise of pleasure when she bites in. It’s perfectly crisp and sweet-tart, obviously one of the expensive Honeycrisp ones she won’t let herself buy at $2.99 a pound.

Langdon’s watching her with a little smile on his face, so of course she smiles back…and that’s when Santos bursts in, followed by Princess.

“Eugh,” Santos says, her gaze bouncing back and forth between the two of them. “Do I even want to know what’s going on here?”

“I do!” Princess chirps.

“I think I hear the first ambulance,” Mel says hastily, ducking out the kitchen door. Her face feels hot and probably she should be embarrassed, but she can practically feel Langdon smiling at her back, and somehow that makes it okay.

In the morning, she finds a half dozen shiny red Honeycrisp apples in her locker.

“Can I ask you something?” Mel asks.

Langdon looks up sharply. Only his bright blue eyes are visible above his surgical mask. Not that Mel ever notices them, or thinks about them.

He looks tense, and she realizes belatedly that people have been asking him a lot of intrusive questions about his addiction.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” she asks quickly, wanting to dispel his discomfort as quickly as possible.

The sharp eyes between his eyebrows vanish. “That’s easy,” he says. “You started it.”

“I did?” She’s pretty sure Langdon had started it on their first shift together, when he’d given her a break to pet the dog, and invited her to de-gravel the road rash wound. You’re gonna love this, he’d said, and he’d been right. That’s what they’re doing together now – except this time, their patient is unconscious, and they’re each working on one leg.

Langdon looks up at her again over their patient’s torso. It’s very hairy and somewhat plump, so not the best for having a moment – which is good, of course, because Mel doesn’t want to have moments with her friends. Especially not her married friends.

“You really helped me on my first day back,” he says slowly and clearly, like she’s a little kid who might not understand.

“That’s nothing.” Mel shrugs, not even bothering to look up. “You’re a good doctor. You should know that.”

The steady ping-ping-ping of gravel hitting the bowl stops. Suddenly he’s standing behind her, tugging her wrist away from the patient.

“Look at me for a sec, Mel,” he says, and she does, even though eye contact is kind of hard for her sometimes. “It was a lot, okay? Everybody was so disappointed in me, and they had a right to be, so I guess I’m not surprised they weren’t – I don’t know –” He waves a hand.

“Encouraging?” Mel asks.

“Yeah. That,” he says. “So don’t say it was nothing, okay?”

He’s still looking at her pretty intensely, and she gets the feeling he’s waiting for an actual response.

“Okay,” she agrees. “I won’t say it was nothing.”

He smiles, or at least she thinks he does. It’s hard to tell under the mask, but his eyes crinkle up at the corners. They go back to working on their patient after that, but Mel’s chest feels light. She’d done it right. She’d made a friend.

On Saturday morning, she bumps into Langdon on her way into work. Actually, bump is much too mild a term – it’s a very sharp collision.

“Whoa.” He steadies her with a hand on her shoulder, which she normally doesn’t like, but his grip is pleasantly firm and not at all sweaty. “You okay?”

He bends down to look into her eyes, so he’s definitely going to notice the deep blue-black circles underneath them. Sure enough, he scrunches up his face. “Seriously, Mel, are you okay?”

She feels heat rising to her face. “Yeah,” she says, “Totally.”

“You look like a Victorian orphan,” he says.

Generally, Mel likes people who don’t dissemble. But on this particular occasion…

“You’re not going to give up, are you?” she asks.

His hand is still on her shoulder, holding her in place. “Not a chance.”

She sighs. “If you must know, I watched The Exorcist last night. It was not my finest choice.”

He drops his hand and laughs. “Why would you do that?”

“Friday is supposed to be movie night with Becca, but she went out with Adam…” She realizes she’s clenching her jaw and tries to make herself stop. Becca’s allowed to have a life outside of her; the therapist she’d obtained from the Pitt’s employee assistance program had affirmed this many times.

“Let me guess, you wanted the opposite of anything she’d want to watch,” Langdon says. “Been there, done that.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. The first time Abby’s parents took the kids for the night, we went out to see a horror movie –”

“And you got so scared you couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night?” Mel asks, because that’s totally what happened to her.

“Not exactly. The first victim died, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how that was somebody’s little girl, and then I couldn’t stop crying, and we had to leave. Date night ruined.” He pauses. “If you tell anyone, I’ll have to kill you.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” she says. “I take secrets very seriously.”

Langdon laughs, which she doesn’t totally understand because she really does take secrets seriously, but it’s nice to stroll into the ER together with him laughing at her side.

Well, it’s nice until Dana sees them and gives her a look. And then Princess tugs her aside and whispers, “Get it, girl!”

Mel’s whole face is on fire. “Oh, I, uh, didn’t get…I mean, I wouldn’t…he’s married,” she finally stutters out.

Princess raises her eyebrows and points down the corridor. “Wedding ring’s gone. He’s fair game.” She looks him up and down appraisingly. “I’d hit that. Wouldn’t you?”

“We’re friends,” Mel says firmly, but her stomach’s churning. She’d thought they were friends, maybe even really good friends. But good friends tell you when they’re getting divorced, right?

Mel volunteers for chairs today, which earns odd looks from basically everyone because nobody loves triage. It’s boring and high stress all at once: ninety percent are trivial complaints – ankle sprains and respiratory infections – but the other ten percent are actually serious issues masquerading as trivial complaints, and people die if you can’t figure out which is which. Also everyone is mad at you all the time because there’s no way to be fast enough.

Mel spends a lot of the morning saying things like “you have chlamydia” and “you appear to have a seasonal respiratory virus,” which is usually followed by “no really, ma’am, antibiotics can’t treat a virus.” Which is then followed by some variant of you mean I just spent $380 for some asshole to tell me I have the crud?”

To which Mel variously replies, yes, I am not an asshole, and would you prefer lung cancer? I could refer you for chemo, if you want your hair to fall out. The last one earns her a talking-to from Dr. Al-Hashimi, who now works almost exclusively in triage for reasons no one understands.

In between each patient, Mel challenges herself to her new therapist’s favorite thought exercise, which is not officially called “secrets have nothing to do with you,” but it’s kind of the gist. In other words, she thinks of reasons Langdon didn’t tell her about the divorce that do not involve her being a bad friend – or worse, not a friend at all.

Langdon is not getting divorced. He lost and/or forgot his wedding ring.
Langdon is not actually her friend, just a very nice coworker.
She’s a terrible friend because Langdon thinks she’ll judge him for getting divorced.

Sixty-six percent of the reasons are all about her, so she’s definitely failing at the game.

“My chest feels weird,” Mel’s patient says, dragging her thoughts away from Langdon.

“Weird how?” Dr. Toomarian prompts.

“Like there’s this flip-flop sometimes…” Her voice trails off, often a sign the patient is withholding information.

“How many caffeinated beverages have you had today?” Dr. Toomarian asks.

Good question, Mel thinks. Most interns would have asked “have you had a lot of caffeine,” which is a dangerously subjective question – especially where college students are concerned.

“Um, four? Or maybe six? Midterms are coming up.” The patient’s pink fingernails flicker in the light as she waves her hands.

“I hear a slight arrhythmia,” Toomarian says, pulling her stethoscope back from her patient’s chest.

Mel agrees; she heard it too. But it doesn’t sound like the whole story.

“What made you decide to come to the ER specifically?” she asks, thinking back to the way their patient’s voice had trailed off.

The woman looks down at her hands. “It’s kind of embarrassing…”

“It’s alright,” Mel says. “Tell us everything, and we’ll decide what’s important or not.”

“I just have this feeling of, uh, doom?” she says, the frosted blond tips of her hair swaying. “I mean, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I looked it up on the internet and it said I should come in.”

“Like, world end-y doom?” Mel asks. Dr. Toomarian shoots her a weird glance, but Mel ignores it. It’s a valid question.

“Yeah.” Their patient nods. “Exactly like that.”

“Your heart has a slight arrhythmia, which can happen when you’re under stress or you’ve had a lot of caffeine,” Mel says. “But just to be safe, we’re going to check your potassium level and get an EKG.”

“We don’t want a psych consult?” Toomarian asks in the corridor, while Mel is trying – and failing – to come up with non-self-centered reasons Langdon didn’t tell her about the divorce.

“We might,” Mel says, “But a sense of impending doom is an overlooked symptom of cardiovascular problems among women. We always investigate physical causes before psychiatric ones.”

“Potassium of 1.8?” Toomarian stares at the lab results, her jaw literally hanging open. “I can’t believe she’s conscious, much less walking and talking.”

Langdon peers over her shoulder at the computer screen. “Hey, Mel, good catch.”

He squeezes her shoulder, but she dances out of his grip.

“Sorry,” he says, looking like a kicked puppy. “I know you don’t like –”

“It’s okay,” Mel says hastily. Dr. Toomarian looks just a little too interested for Mel’s comfort – and so do half the people gathered around the nurses station. “Gotta start a potassium drip,” she mutters. “ Um, bye.”

Diagnostically speaking, it’s a great day. She catches a spleen lac in an eight-year-old who “felt weird” after a bike crash, and a STEMI in a 27-year-old whose chief complaint was “I think I did too many drugs.” Al-Hashimi makes a point of praising her during hand-offs, which is nice.

Now all she has to do is get out before Langdon sees her, which is easier said than done since he’s doing his annoying hot guy lean against her locker.

“Did I do something wrong? Cause I kinda got the feeling you were avoiding me today.” He looks down at his shoes. “But it’s possible I’m a little oversensitive about whether people want me here…”

“I want you here,” Mel says quickly, because it’s true.

“So you weren’t avoiding me?” Langdon asks, looking skeptical.

“Not in here,” Mel mutters. The locker room is the worst possible place for a private conversation, especially at the shift change.

“Right,” Langdon mutters darkly, but he falls into step beside her as they walk toward the door. It’s almost automatic, at this point – Mel realizes they’ve been doing it since almost the day he got back.

Princess winks at her in the ambulance bay, so naturally, she turns bright red.

“What was that?” Langdon asks, because of course he couldn’t overlook something so embarrassing.

“Um, Princess wants to have sex with you,” she says hastily, which makes her turn even brighter red. And oh god, was that supposed to be a secret? Princess hadn’t said it was a secret, and she doesn’t think Princess would really tell her a secret, but what if it was one of those things she’s just supposed to know?

“Princess wants to – That’s absolutely terrifying.” Langdon runs a hand through his ridiculously floppy hair, forcing Mel to notice how beautiful it is. “And you were talking about that because…”

“She noticed you weren’t wearing your wedding ring.” Mel swallows. “I noticed too.”

“Yeah. Abby moved out,” he says quietly, and Mel instantly feels guilty for making him talk about it before he’s ready.

“I’m sorry,” Mel says, because she is – even if she looks at Langdon more often than she should, and not in entirely platonic ways.

He nods. “Doesn’t really explain why you were avoiding me though.”

Now it’s Mel’s turn to look at her shoes. “I just thought if you were getting a divorce, you would tell me,” she says slowly. “You know, because we’re friends. Right?”

She hates the way her voice goes up at the end, making it sound like even more of a question.

“Of course we are.” His hand lands on her shoulder, and he starts to squeeze, then jerks back. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t like –”

“I do like,” Mel says hastily. “Just maybe not in public.”

For the first time today, he gives her a half-smile, and she realized how much she missed it. Avoiding him had made the whole day feel wrong, even if she had done good work.

“Look, it happened a couple weeks ago. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want it to be real. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Mel says. “You shouldn’t have to tell people things until you’re ready.”

Most secrets don’t have anything to do with you, Mel thinks. She adds it to the very long list of things Dana is right about.

“Well, I’m glad you’re not avoiding me,” Langdon says. He sounds cheerful, but his eyes don’t look happy. “Because I was going to ask if you would maybe…come over for dinner? And watch a movie? Becca’s welcome, of course. It’s just, being on my own isn’t totally great for me right now, so if you don’t mind…”

“Of course I don’t mind,” Mel says. Normally, she’d worry about sounding too eager, but Langdon seems to need eagerness right now. “And Becca has a date. Again. So I’m on my own tonight too.”

She doesn’t mean to sound bitter, but Langdon puts a gentle hand on her back, so she probably does. It stays there as they walk toward across the parking lot, radiating warmth down her spine. She wouldn’t have thought she’d like it, but she does.

Maybe a little too much.

Langdon’s apartment definitely belongs to a single man: everything is navy blue, the walls are bare, and there’s a lot of random clothing scattered around the living room.

“What do you want for dinner?” Langdon – Frank – is banging cupboards open and closed, peering into the fridge. “I have, uh, chicken, pork chops, assorted shapes of mac and cheese, breakfast cereal, and one of everything in the freezer section of Trader Joe’s.”

“One of everything? Seriously?” Mel narrowly refrains from asking what that did to his budget spreadsheet.

“Almost everything, yeah.”

He’s slouching against the cabinets now, hands buried deep in his pockets, but Mel’s starting to get the idea that he doesn’t like to be still. Now he’s launching himself back into the living room, gathering up the clothes strewn over the sofa. She suppresses the urge to ask if these are clean clothes – in which case they really ought to be folded – or dirty ones, in which case they should never come in contact with the sofa in the first place.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he says, jerking Mel’s attention away from the great laundry question. “What do you want for dinner?”

Mel blinks. She has actively fantasized about this moment for many years, and now it’s here: someone wants to know what she, Melissa King, wants to eat. And she has absolutely no idea.

“Oh, uh, I usually just eat whatever Becca wants,” she says. It’s easier not to make two meals, and Becca has much stricter preferences than she does.

“Yeah, but Becca’s not here.” Frank tilts his head toward her. “So what do you want to eat? I’m actually a pretty decent cook, so as long as it’s not, like, sushi I can figure it out.”

Mel shrugs. “Whatever’s easiest for you. Just not pizza. Or spaghetti. Or chicken nuggets or mac and cheese.”

“That’s not an answer,” Frank says. His voice is weirdly gentle, and he looks at her expectantly. For some reason, it makes a lump in Mel’s throat. She doesn’t answer, and he says, “How long has it been since you thought about what you like?”

“Well, there’s a grocery budget, and Becca…” Mel says lamely, pushing back a wave of embarrassment. She’s twenty-seven and a doctor and she should probably know more than her favorite brand of protein bars.

Frank’s eyes look wildly excited in spite of the dark circles beneath them. “We can solve this. I’m gonna make one of everything, and you can decide what you like best.”

Without waiting for an answer, he bounds into the kitchen and starts preheating the oven and the air fryer. Mel chases after him, alarmed.

"That's not necessary. Or responsible! We don’t open that many packages of food at once.”

“Yeah? Says who?” Frank’s grin is the widest she’s seen in maybe ever. Definitely since he came back from rehab.

Mel realizes that she’d actually grabbed his wrist to stop him from opening a package of tteok bok ki – whatever that is – and she flushes and drops her hand. She’d never touched him before. He looks down at where her hand had been, his expression unreadable.

Then he lays both hands on her shoulders and pushes her away from the kitchen. “I’m going to make dinner, and you’re going to take a nap.”

Mel plants her feet. “No, I’m going to help with dinner.” Obviously. If someone insists on making an extravagant feast, she’s at least going to assist.

He shakes his head. “Come on. First rule of emergency medicine.”

“All patients are sick until proven otherwise,” she says automatically, even though this hardly seems like a teaching moment.

“Not that one,” he says, exasperated. “The other one. Abbot's number one rule?”

“If someone offers you a chance to sleep, you take it, no questions asked?” Mel intends to protest that it’s not relevant when they’re not in the ER, but he holds up a hand.

“That’s it. So let me tell you how it’s going to be: you’re going to lay down on my couch for an hour, and when you wake up, there will be a buffet of the finest frozen food Trader Joe’s has to offer.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “I have a lot of experience making unwilling people go to bed, so I’m just warning you, if you try to fight me, you’ll lose.”

With that, he nudges her toward the couch, and Mel decides to follow. Maybe, just for tonight, she can pick the easy option.

Mel awakens to an array of conflicting smells – tomato sauce, she thinks, but maybe also soy sauce? And something citrus?

She blinks her eyes open, fumbling on the coffee table for her glasses. Frank puts them into her hand, and he comes into focus above her: hands sunk deep in his pockets, shoulders scrunched, looking a little apologetic.

Why would he look like that? she wonders, and then she sees the table behind him.

“That is a lot of food,” she says slowly, trying to process.

“I go over the top sometimes,” he says. “But I figured neither one of us really got lunch today, so…”

“We should eat seven dinners?” Mel asks, sitting up.

He shakes his head, still looking sheepish. “No, I figured you should eat one dinner you like,” he says firmly. “I wanted you to have choices.”

He puts a gentle hand on her back – the same way he had in the parking lot – and steers her toward the overloaded dining table.

“You don’t like your food to touch, right?” he says.

“Oh no, it’s okay,” she says automatically, even though it’s actually not. People tend to mock her food preferences, and besides, it’s rude to be picky in someone else’s home.

Frank narrows his eyes. “Why do I get the feeling you’re lying?”

“Because I’m lying,” she concedes. “I don’t think I’m very good at it.”

“Well, no lying here, okay?” he says. He picks up a plate, and it takes Mel a minute to realize he’s actually serving her, filling up the plate with tiny little scoops of everything, using pita chips to make a dam between sauces. “Don’t eat anything you don’t like. Promise?”

He makes her look him in the eye before he hands the plate. She nods seriously and scoots aside some of the serving dishes to make room for them both to sit.

“We score each dish on a scale of one to ten,” he says. “By the end of the night, we’ll know what you, Melissa King, like to eat.”

She glances at his plate. It’s arranged just like hers, so they can go in the same order, but he didn’t make the pita chip dams, so the sauces are commingling dangerously. This seems like an impediment to objective scoring, but she decides not to say anything since they’re at home and they’re not doing real science.

Frank points to the top left corner of their plates. “Orange chicken. Go.”

Mel recklessly shoves a whole chicken nugget in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “Seven.”

“Reasoning?”

She takes another bite, thinking it over. “Pleasantly crispy, but unnecessarily sweet.”

Frank nods, like he’s taking mental notes in his head. The salsa verde burrito gets a surprise eight; it’s soft, but in a cozy, homey way. Scallion pancakes get an eight for the flaky texture alone, and it’s a shame she can’t score them higher, but it’s very unlikely they contain any valuable micronutrients. The tteok bok ki, on the other hand, earn a miserable two.

“Texture?” Frank asks, although Mel’s not sure how he knew.

“They’re kind of…glutinous,” she says, shoving aside the last of the soft rice cakes on her plate. “No offense to the people of Korea, but I don’t think it’s for me.”

“So we’re looking for something savory with a crispy element, and at least some nutritional value,” Frank says. He skips down a couple rows. “Try this one,” he says, pointing at what looks like a piece of pork chop submerged in a promising golden brown sauce. “And here, maybe put some fried onions on top.”

He offers her a plastic container of the crispy fried onions they sell at Thanksgiving, the kind that go on top of a green bean casserole. It seems reckless to buy them outside the holidays, much less throw them on random foods, but Frank is watching her expectantly, so she complies.

She doesn’t notice the mushrooms until it’s too late. They’re submerged in the sauce like treacherous little icebergs, but she’s going to eat them. For science, she tells herself. And for Frank, although she’s not going to examine that particular reason too closely.

She shoves the fork in her mouth, steeling herself for slime, but these are like no mushrooms she’s ever tasted before – they’re plump and firm, full of buttery goodness.

“Twelve out of ten,” she says quickly. “No offense to the other food, but I think I’d rather have a whole one of these.”

She reaches for the plate of sliced pork chop in the middle of the table. It’s seared golden on the top and bottom, just a tiny bit pink in the center, and the sauce is sprinkled with parsley.

“This wasn’t from a Trader Joe’s box, was it?”

Frank scrubs a hand through his hair, a thing he seems to do when he’s nervous, or maybe embarrassed. “No. I thought you should have something homemade.”

It’s kind of hard to swallow around the sudden lump in her throat, but Mel manages to do it somehow. No way is she letting any of this pork chop go to waste.

“Nobody’s cooked for me since my mom died,” she says. She’d rather not talk about it – she hates being the pitiable orphan – but if someone helps you, it’s important that they know. Frank is helping her a lot, even though he’s struggling right now. He deserves to know exactly how much this pork chop with mushroom sauce means.

There’s a beat of silence, which probably means that she’s killed the atmosphere. Confessions about dead parents tend to do that, which is unfortunate, because she’s not great at getting conversations back on track.

Then Frank squeezes her hand. It feels really nice, even though there’s sticky orange chicken sauce in his hand. “I’m glad I got to be the first. Any time, okay?”

He drops her hand, but he’s still looking for her like it’s a real question and he expects a response.

“Okay,” she says slowly, and he beams. Maybe she’d put the conversation back on track after all. She probably ought to leave things light and fun, but she’d be a bad friend if she didn’t at least ask if he needs to talk. “Do you want to talk about what happened? With Abby, I mean?”

Frank slumps back in his chair.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Mel adds quickly, but he shakes his head.

“No, I probably need to talk about it.” Frank sighs. “It was okay till I went back to work. And then it was twelve-hour shifts, and then going to meetings afterward…She said being married to an ER doctor in recovery is like being a single mom. And if she’s going to be a single mom, she’d prefer not to be married.”

“Well, shit,” Mel says. She’s not prone to profanity, but Dana says sometimes there really is no other word. Yet another thing she’s right about.

Frank snorts. “Yeah, I thought that too. But the weird thing is, it’s kind of a relief to admit it’s over. Even if it makes me feel like a fuck-up.”

“You’re not a fuck-up,” Mel says quickly, but Frank just shakes his head.

“On the marriage front, I think I am.”

“But you’re a really good doctor,” she says, thinking of the closed neck reduction and how good he’d been with Becca. “And you’re a really good friend.”

“Hey, look at me for a sec,” he says, and Mel flushes. She hasn’t been doing a great job with eye contact, but Frank doesn’t look annoyed. He actually looks happy.

“Thanks for coming over tonight. I really mean that.”

“Anytime,” she says. “I mean that extremely literally.”

Because she has no life outside of Becca. Maybe this is how she starts getting one.

After that, food-and-movie night becomes a regular thing on the weeks when Frank doesn’t have his kids. It’s about eight weeks in – not that Mel is counting – when the “How to Train Your Dragon” incident occurs.

Frank tosses her the remote and says, “Your turn to pick.”

“No, I picked last week.”

Frank shrugs. “So owe me one.”

“I already owe you three.”

“Are you seriously counting?”

Mel doesn’t answer. Of course she’s counting. Fairness and reciprocity matter in relationships, and this one is important to her.

He takes her by the shoulders. He’s not that much taller than her, but it’s still a nice moment; she always feels protected when he does it.

“Hey, you had a bad day. Pick the movie. And you don’t owe me anything, okay?”

He always looks into her eyes at times like these. Even though she’s not great at eye contact, she likes the way he does it. He only ever demands it at important moments, and she can accept that as part of his personal communication strategy.

“Okay,” she says, nodding seriously. It was a bad day. The depositions for the measles case just won’t end, and she’d been the lead on a tragic peds case that she hasn’t been able to put out of her mind. So far, her heart hasn’t grown the hard carapace required of emergency physicians.

She lets the cursor hover over “How to Train Your Dragon.” A dragon that looks like a snaggle-toothed cartoon cat feels right for today, but Frank probably watches lots of kids movies, so he probably needs a break, so maybe could look for something –

The remote vanishes from her hand with a sharp tug. Frank presses play.

“Love this guy,” he says, looking genuinely happy. “Looks just like a cat.”

“You like cats?” Mel asks, trying not to sound overly excited.

“Hell of a lot less trouble than dogs,” he says. “Who knows? If I’d gotten the kids a kitten instead of a puppy, maybe I’d still be married.”

Mel frowns at that. She’s aware that the impulsive puppy acquisition had been a point of tension in the marriage, but as a cause of divorce, it seems overblown.

“Joking,” Frank says, shoving her shoulder playfully. “I can do that now. It’s a good sign.”

“That is a good sign,” she agrees, even though she’d prefer that he refrain from roughhousing. He’s looking at her with a smile she doesn’t quite understand, but it doesn’t seem derisive, so she sinks back into the couch cushions with her dinner plate balanced in her lap. He’d made the pork with the mushroom sauce again, and this time, he’d added crisp-tender green beans on the side.

Your favorite, he’d said, presenting the plate with a melodramatic flourish. To banish a bad day. His face had flushed in a way that made her worry he had a fever, but she’s been sneaking little glances at him all night, and he seems fine.

Except for the fact that he seems to be watching her more than he’s watching the movie. But probably just because her reactions are over the top. The dragon is cute, yes, but it’s more about how he’s different, and the protagonist is different too, but they’ve built a real partnership, and – well, okay, maybe she identifies with it a little too much, even though she’s not nearly as fierce as Toothless.

Which is why it’s so devastating when the little dragon is caught and hurt and pinned down by the cruel leaders of a society that refuses to understand him.

Mel doesn’t realize she’s crying until Frank stops the movie. He wraps his arm around her shoulders slowly and carefully, so she can speak up or move away – but she doesn’t want to do those things, so eventually, he lets the whole weight of his arm fall against her.

“Hey, tell me what’s going on.” His voice is soft and gentle, and his face probably is too, but Mel is so not making eye contact right now.

She’s being stupid, obviously. It’s a kid’s movie, the kind she’s seen before. Obviously, a happy ending is coming – but that little dragon was cute and sweet and innocent, and now he won’t be again. Kind of like the siblings in the peds case she’d worked today. Kind of like her after her dad died, and her family fell to pieces, and she never really found a place to belong after that. Sometimes she thinks she has, but she always turns out to be wrong, and that just makes everything worse.

Dimly she thinks she should get up and find her jacket, then head home and never speak to Frank again, or at least not for several months, until the embarrassment fades.

Except that Frank doesn’t look annoyed or mad or weirded out, or any of the other things she imagines most people would feel if someone started crying in the middle of a relaxing dinner at the end of a long shift.

He looks…patient, she thinks. Weirdly untroubled by her emotional outburst.

“Sorry,” she says reflexively. It seems like a good thing to say, just to touch all available bases.

“For having feelings?” he asks. “I’m pretty sure it’s healthy.”

She gestures toward her half-eaten dinner plate and the frozen video on the screen. “You did all this, and then I –”

She gets stuck for words again.

Frank shrugs, or at least, Mel thinks he tries. His range of motion is limited with his arm still draped over her shoulders.

“You think this is bad?” he asks. “You should’ve seen me in rehab.”

Mel almost agrees. She should have seen Frank in rehab; she’d wanted to, but it seemed too forward after only knowing him for a day. Fortunately, she realizes that’s not what he means before any unfortunate words leave her mouth.

“Really?” she says instead.

Frank meets her eyes with a grin. “Total mess. Way worse than this. Kicked a hole or two in the wall.” He squeezes her shoulder. “It’s good that you can cry. Do you wanna tell me what it’s about?”

Mel glances back at the video, which is frozen with Toothless pinned to the ground. She takes a shaky breath. She’d fantasized about this moment – someone asking what’s wrong, and genuinely wanting to know the answer – but it’s scarier than she thought it would be.

“It’s just sad, when you think you have a place to belong, and it turns out you don’t,” she says finally.

Frank nods seriously, looking straight into her eyes. It’s strange to think that someone like him, beautiful and popular and talented, would know what she’s talking about, but it seems like he does.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” he says, and Mel decides that she will.

She tells him about the boy who’d asked her to the junior high dance as a joke, and the girls who’d pretended to be her friend so they could copy her homework, and even the aunt who’d said we’ll be family after her mom died, but that only meant sporadic checks and perfunctory phone calls on holidays.

It doesn’t make sense that she’d be crying about this now. It’s an ongoing frustration, one she’s mostly used to, and none of it is the reason for her extremely bad day. But if Frank is startled by her outburst, he doesn’t show it. He just keeps nodding along and telling her how good it is that she can talk about things that bother her.

“Only to you,” Mel says, and he actually does look startled by that, like he’d imagined she’d cultivated a rich and robust friend network while working 80 hours a week and caring for Becca.

“Thanks,” he says quietly, which makes no sense. Mel doesn’t have a script in her head for what to say after you interrupt movie night with a random breakdown, but she’s pretty sure thank you is probably at the top of the list.

“I think that’s my line,” she says, but Frank shakes his head.

“No, really, I mean it. When you go to rehab, people kind of stop talking to you about anything that matters. And it makes sense, because I let a lot of people down. But it feels really good to know one person trusts me.”

“I do trust you,” Mel says quickly. “And you’ve never let me down.”

He smiles at that – a huge, radiant smile that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle up in a really adorable way. His arm is still wrapped around her shoulders, and he tugs her toward him in a kind of hug that leaves her head resting against his chest. Probably there’s a time limit for this, but Mel’s not sure what it is, and she just…stays there. He reaches around her for the remote, and okay, maybe they’re actually going to finish the movie like this? Which is fine by her, because he’s warm and his heart is a steady drumbeat under her ear, and she feels a good ninety-eight percent less alone than she has since the day of her mother’s diagnosis. Also, she may have fantasized about this a time or two, even though it’s not best practice to imagine this sort of scenario with your friends.

Then he says, “hey, wait a second,” and pulls away.

She figures she knows what he’ll say next. Probably something about how friends don’t do this, or maybe just that it’s late and he needs to go to bed, which would be an easy way to let her down gently.

Instead he takes off his sweatshirt and tugs her back down to his chest. Now her face is resting against his soft, dry t-shirt instead of the wet patch she’d made with her tears. It’s so kind she almost starts crying again, but she holds it in because that would defeat the purpose of his very thoughtful gesture.

The last thing she thinks before she falls asleep is how warm his skin feels through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.

Mel awakens to the frantic beeping of…a kitchen timer?

The world around her is blurry, but quite obviously not her apartment. Because it’s Frank’s apartment. Because she’d spent the night.

And, okay, that was very very unplanned, but she’s on the sofa, covered by a child-size Disney princess blanket and Frank’s hoodie. Clearly she hasn’t done anything terribly untoward. Except leave Becca alone for the night with no prior communication.

Fuck. She lunges for her phone, whose blurry outline she can see on the coffee table. Twelve unread messages.

Frank stumbles into the kitchen just as she finally finds his glasses. The beeping stops. Thank god. She looks up, and his face is red.

“Sorry, sorry,” he mutters. “I’m, uh, not good at mornings. You know how they say to put the alarm clock across the room? I kind of have to take that advice to the extreme.”

Mel nods distractedly. She’s still scrolling through Becca’s messages, which are way less alarming than she’d anticipated. Mostly the blow by blow of her night time routine: don’t worry, I have brushed my teeth. Followed by now I’m checking the door is locked and the stove is off. The last message is the one that jolts Mel off the couch: Did you have sex with Frank? Was it fun?

Fuck, fuck, fuck. There’s no way she has time to go home and change, so she’s going to arrive at the Pitt at the same time as Frank, and she’ll be wearing yesterday’s clothes, and everyone is going to think they had sex. Which of course she will deny, but no one will believe her, and since she’s a terrible liar, she’ll probably give away that she does think about him as more than a friend, and then he will know and their friendship will be destroyed.

“Do you want some extra scrubs?” Frank says.

He digs around in a laundry basket on the floor and comes out with a handful of clothes. She’s kind of preoccupied with her panic attack, so she doesn’t take them right away, and Frank flushes red again.

“They’re clean, I swear. I just didn’t get them put away. Or folded.”

“No, no that’s totally fine,” Mel says, regaining her senses at last. She doesn’t understand Frank’s refusal to keep things in logical places, but it’s mostly stopped bothering her. “Do you see my jacket?”

He winces. “We forgot to put it in the washer last night.”

“Right.” Mel says. “I actually forgot someone peed on me yesterday.”

Frank shrugs. “It was early in the shift. Here, take my hoodie.”

He offers her the one she’d slept under last night, and Mel takes it, trying not to look too eager. It says Fort Pitt Museum on the front, so it could totally belong to her, even if it is a little too big.

After she changes, they eat bowls of cereal together over the kitchen sink. She thinks Frank is standing closer to her than usual, close enough that she can actually feel his body heat. But that’s probably just her imagination.

Mel figures she’s got a max of two hours in the hoodie before the tag starts to drive her crazy. Then she’ll have to decide between two of her least favorite sensations: being cold enough to get goosebumps, or feeling a tag scraping against the back of her neck.

At approximately eleven o’clock, she realizes nothing is bothering her.

At approximately twelve o’clock, she scores her first bathroom break. She pulls off the hoodie in the stall, thinking she should check the brand of this miraculous garment with the non-annoying tag. That’s when she discovers that the tag is gone. Not just cut out, which leaves an even more annoying strip behind, but properly removed so that even the stitches are gone.

Had Frank taken out the tag just for her last night? Before he’d laid it over her chest?

And does it mean something if a man does that kind of thing for you?

Who can she even ask? Dana might know, but Princess seems more…active with men, which means she probably knows more. But Princess is also a gossip, and –

She needs to stop this. There’s a simpler explanation: Frank also hates tags in his clothes, and he’d removed it himself a long time ago. It probably has nothing to do with her at all.

“Are you hiding in the bathroom?” Santos’ voice cuts into her thoughts. “Because an impalement is coming in, and friends don’t let friends miss the good trauma.”

“We’re friends?” Mel asks, beaming as she comes out of the bathroom stall.

“Don’t get excited. It’s a figure of speech,” Santos says.

Mel shakes her head. “No take-backs.”

Four o’clock is usually a quiet time for day shift; the rush hour car accidents haven’t started yet, and some of the less determined people in chairs have gone to pick up their kids from school. It’s a good time to finish charting, so Mel parks herself in front of a computer.

Mostly, she tries not to participate in the gossip that swirls around the Pitt, but it’s hard not to listen. Especially when the subject is Frank.

“Hot, recently divorced. Who do you think he’s banging?” Princess asks wistfully.

“Twenty bucks says it’s one of the morgue techs. Those girls are freaky,” Santos says.

“You’d know,” Princess says.

“Hell yeah I do,” Santos says. “But I’m not the subject of today’s conversation.”

Perlah shakes her head. “It’s always a peds nurse. Blonde, twenty-two, just finished nursing school.”

Princess nods. “Probably one from every shift. That’s what I’d do, if I looked like that.”

“Oh no, he’s not like that,” Mel interjects before she really thinks about it.

Suddenly every eye is on her, and her skin feels hot. She probably looks like a boiled lobster. Is it wrong to wish for a sudden multi vehicle accident or a good stabbing?

“I’m sure he has a heart of gold,” Santos says acidly.

Princess leans forward in her chair. “Tell us more.”

“I just don’t think he’s obsessed with appearance, that’s all,” Mel says lamely. “His wife was pretty normal, honestly.”

“You met the wife?” Princess practically squeals.

“I’ve just seen pictures.” Mel can feel her face growing hotter, and she’s hunching down in her chair. Any minute now, Frank’s going to walk by and think she’s gossipping about him.

“When? Where?” Santos says sharply.

Suddenly Jesse starts coughing theatrically. They all look up, and then Frank actually is coming around the corner, walking straight toward them. The silence that falls over the work station makes it alarmingly obvious that they’ve been talking about him. The worst part is the hurt look in his eyes.

Hand-off time rolls around, and for the first time in weeks, Frank’s not standing next to her, ready to walk out the door with her. He’s on the opposite side of the circle, refusing to make eye contact.

Clearly, he knows she was talking about him, and he’s drawn the worst possible conclusion. Which stings, but also, he’d been so kind to her last night, so he’s probably feeling vulnerable and betrayed. She forces herself to take a long, steadying breath. All she has to do is tell him the truth: Santos and the nurses think he’s a man whore, and she was defending him.

Yes, that will make him feel so much better.

Santos pinches her, and Mel looks up to everyone staring at her.

“Dr. King is going to recap the perforating trauma for the night shift team,” Al-Hashimi says sharply, and Mel has a bad feeling it’s not the first time she was asked.

She tries not to look at Frank while she narrates the case, or while she listens to the rest of the sign-outs, but it’s hard not to glance out the corner of her eye. He’s the first one out the door, and she doesn’t get to follow because Santos drags her into an empty exam room.

“You. Me. Beer. Stat,” she says. “As in, right now.”

“No thank you.” Mel’s already edging toward the door. “I haven’t been home in two days.”

It’s the wrong thing to say.

“Tell me you did not spend the night with him.” Santos looks extremely intense.

“I fell asleep on the couch, if you must know,” Mel says with as much decorum as she can muster. “It wasn’t – I mean, we didn’t…”

“Oh, we are absolutely going for a beer right now,” Santos says, and Mel finds herself agreeing. Not because she wants to, and not because she’s afraid of Santos, although she is a little bit. Mostly because Santos is her friend, even if she’s weird about it, and it’s hard to say no to someone who’s worried about her – even if that someone is wrong.

“Did he tell you he was diverting drugs?” Santos says the second their beers arrive.

Mel looks down at the scratched bar top. She hadn’t known – but then, she hadn’t asked.

Santos, at least, doesn’t comment on Mel’s obvious discomfort. “Look, I’m not supposed to talk about it. Or know about it. But I thought you should know.”

“Thanks. I think.” She swallows a sip of her beer, even though she doesn’t really feel like drinking.

Santos is staring at her in an intense way that seems to suggest she wants more of a reaction, or at least more of a conversation. Or maybe Mel’s misreading. Maybe she’s just giving Mel time to gather her thoughts.

“Diverting drugs is bad. Really bad,” Mel says slowly. “But he’s being tested now. Twice a week. I don’t see how he could be doing it anymore.”

She slides off her stool, ready to go even though she’s barely had a drink of her beer and it bothers her to waste something she’s paid for. Santos stops her by grabbing her shoulder.

“Hold up. You’re not getting off that easy.”

Santos gestures at the stool, and Mel sits with a sigh. She could walk out, but then Santos will just keep hounding her, quite possibly for the rest of her days.

“You realize that whole passion for medical education was a front, right? He wanted to work with junior residents like us because he thought we wouldn’t notice, or we’d be too scared to report it if we did.”

That feels like a kick to the stomach, although Mel tries not to show it. It’s stupid to even care. She’d just thought that she and Frank had clicked from that very first day. It had felt like a miracle, and she’d wanted to keep it – not find out a year later that he’d had an ulterior motive all along.

“Look, you’re not a junior resident anymore, but I thought you should know,” Santos says. “People who abuse their power don’t change. I don’t want him to take advantage of you.”

“Thanks.” Mel’s voice sounds hollow, even in her own ears. “I think I need to be alone now.”

Santos waves her hands. “You do you. Just promise me you’ll think about it.”

Mel nods to show she understands that Santos is looking out for her. The worst part is, she will think about this. Probably a lot more than she wants to.

The honorable thing would be to send Frank some sort of message. In fact, she’s pulled out her phone and opened the message screen several times, but honestly, this sort of situation is well beyond her current interpersonal skills.

Hi! You shouldn’t have assumed I was gossipping about you, and by the way, were you using me to divert drugs? PS Don’t talk to me for 72 hours. My brain requires extended processing time for these unusual circumstances.

That is not an acceptable text message.

So she does the next best thing: she volunteers to take nights while Ellis is out of town for a wedding. Frank has his kids this week, so he’s bargained away all his night shifts, which basically guarantees she won’t see him for a week.

This is a surprisingly horrible thought, but sacrifices must be made in the name of sanity and clear-headed thinking.

Now she can lose herself in all the last-minute preparations required to make sure Becca is safe and well cared for during a week of unexpected night shifts. Had her therapist asked her if caring for Becca might be a way of escaping her own problems? Yes, yes she had. It’s possible Mel had gotten angry and ended the session early.

It’s possible that she’s not the poster child for emotional functionality that she pretends to be, and that makes it a little harder to judge Frank for whatever he’d done – or failed to do – in the throes of his addiction.

But she’s not thinking of him right now.

A week later, Mel’s thoughts are more tangled than ever.

Which is why she’s so thrown when she bumps into Frank at the start of her last night shift. Literally bumps. Just like the time she’d run into him in the parking lot, when he’d steadied her with a hand on her shoulder and invited her to watch a movie. That’s why it hurts so much when he steps back immediately.

“I didn’t know you were working tonight,” she says.

A muscle clenches in his jaw. “Happy to see me, huh?”

“It’s not that,” Mel says hastily. Her heart had actually fluttered at the sight of him, even though she would’ve preferred otherwise. “I thought you had your kids this week.”

“The jeopardy call roster doesn’t care about child custody arrangements,” he says tiredly. “As you know.”

Frank has more jeopardy call than anyone else, thanks to his extended leave of absence. That means when someone else calls out sick, he gets called in – even if it requires a last-minute scramble for nocturnal child care.

He steps around her to reach the lockers, and Mel realizes belatedly that she should’ve stepped out of his way. He takes his usual locker, the one right next to hers. They’ve been doing it that way for ages.

“You know, you could’ve said something instead of not talking to me for a week,” he says.

The muscle’s twitching in his jaw again, and Mel steels herself for the locker to slam, but he makes a point of closing it softly. He knows she hates sudden loud noises.

“You could have too,” Mel points out.

Frank sighs. “Would you have answered?”

Mel doesn’t have anything to say to that.

Medically, it’s a great shift. She takes the lead on a resuscitative thoracotomy – opening the chest wall to stop a cardiac bleed – and the patient survives. Later, she’d caught a heart attack presenting as severe epigastric pain. Abbot had high fived her twice, and Santos sent her a congratulatory text message, even though all this happened at 3:00 AM, and no one outside the nightshift should know.

But Frank doesn’t come by to squeeze her shoulder like he usually does, or to check if she needs to do a breathing exercise to banish the last adrenaline after a tricky procedure. Instead, she feels him watching her from across the room, his eyes lingering on the hoodie she’s worn every night since she borrowed it from him.

Then, to make the wretchedness complete, her car refuses to start when it’s time to go home. Jumping it fails, which is how she knows it’s the alternator she’s been trying to avoid replacing for several months now.

Now it’s 8:00 AM, solidly into rush hour, and it’s raining hard. An Uber back to her place will cost $70. She’s standing in the ambulance bay, dithering over the money, when Frank appears at her elbow.

“What are you still doing here?” she asks, momentarily forgetting how awkward things have gotten between them.

“Drug test.” He looks away from her, which is uncharacteristic of him.

All she manages to say is, “Oh.”

He starts walking toward the parking lot, but he only makes it five steps before he turns around to face her. “Do you need a ride home?”

Mel looks down at her phone. Your offer has expired, the screen says. It helpfully informs her the price is now $80.

“Yes,” She swallows. “Do you want to share my umbrella?”

“Yeah, that would be good.” He sounds stiff, but there’s no denying that his improvised umbrella – which is actually a clipboard from the nurse’s station – sucks.

Just a week ago, sharing a slightly too small umbrella with Frank would’ve been high on Mel’s list of romantic fantasies. Now their awkwardness is compromising the very purpose of the umbrella, because every time their arms brush together, they spring to the side, exposing half their bodies to the rain. It’s a short walk to the parking garage, but they’re both wet by the time they reach Frank’s car.

“Don’t look in the backseat, okay?” Frank says with a little wince. “Actually, don’t look in the front seat till I tell you.”

“I will avert my gaze,” Mel says solemnly, and she makes a show of looking at the gray wall of the parking garage.

She sees Frank smile as she turns around, and the tension between them breaks. For a second anyway, until they get in the car.

“I don’t know where you live,” he says. He’s not asking for the address so much as pointing out that she’s never invited him over – and probably wondering if they were less close than he’d imagined.

I didn’t want you to know I sleep on a pullout couch in the living room. Instinct suggests the words are right, but the urge to mask is too strong. She can’t actually say them out loud. Her therapist says she’ll keep feeling lonely until she learns to share what’s really happening in her life, but today’s not the day.

Which is why the car ride is so desperately awkward.

Frank pulls into the parking lot of her run-down little building. Her hand freezes on the door handle. She needs to say more than thanks for the ride.

“Okay, I’ll start,” Frank says. The muscle in his jaw twitches again. “It really hurt my feelings that you were talking about me last week. I mean, I know the others do, but I didn’t think you’d join in.”

“Well, maybe you should’ve asked me about it before you assumed the worst,” Mel says, surprised by the anger in her own voice. It’s not that she never feels angry; she just doesn’t usually let it out. “I was defending you.”

Now there’s an annoying lump in her throat, and she hates the way her voice wobbles at the end.

“Shit. I should’ve realized.” He looks up at the ceiling, letting out his breath in a long rush. “What you said before, about finding a place you think you belong, and then realize that you don’t…That’s how I’ve felt about the Pitt since I came back. When I thought you were gossipping….” Frank’s voice trails off, but he holds her gaze. “I didn’t handle it well. I’m sorry."

That’s it – no excuses or defensiveness. Just an apology. It’s a reminder that at least one of them goes to therapy and takes all the advice they’re given.

“Thank you,” she says, maintaining eye contact even though it’s hard for her.

Frank leans back in the driver’s seat, and his shoulders slump. Mel can’t tell if he’s relieved or sad.

“Can I ask what they were saying?”

“Oh, it wasn’t about drugs,” she says, flapping her hands.

Frank laughs. “Honestly, that’s kind of a relief.”

There’s a beat of silence, and Mel realizes she can’t get out of explaining what they were talking about.

“They were guessing how many women an attractive, recently divorced doctor would be sleeping with.” Mel flushes when she has to say the word attractive, even though she’s not directly saying that she thinks he’s hot. “And I said you weren’t like that.”

She pauses. A horrible thought occurs to her.

“I mean, unless you are like that, and you just didn’t tell me. Which you wouldn’t have to, because it’s not my business. It’s your business. Oh god.”

Her face is on fire now. Not figure-of-speech fire. Like actual fire. Like if she stuck her head out the window, the rain would turn into steam.

Frank laughs, but it’s not a happy laugh. She thinks there’s a bitter edge to it.

“You’re right. I’m not like that,” he says slowly. “I’m not saying I never have been. But right now, I’m not sleeping with anyone.”

He’s doing the meaningful eye contact thing again, and Mel’s stomach flips. Why does he want to make sure she knows that?

“Thank you for telling me,” she says.

Frank squeezes her hand. There’s a beat of silence where they both watch the windshield wipers swipe back and forth.

Then he says, “Was that really all? I feel like that’s not all.”

It would be easy to claim she kept her distance because she felt so hurt by Frank’s assumption, but it wouldn’t be true. He’s been honest with her, and she owes the same to him.

“You were diverting drugs from the hospital,” she says.

“Yeah.” He drops her hand.

“Did you like working with junior residents because that made it easier to steal drugs? I mean, is that why you were working with me?”

She hates herself for it, but her voice is distorted by tears at the end. She can’t be calm about this. She just can’t be.

Frank looks up at the ceiling. For the first time in as long as she can remember, he won’t meet her gaze. She thinks she might actually throw up.

“That was my MO,” he says hollowly. His hands clench into fists, and Mel thinks he might bolt from the car. Instead he wrenches his gaze toward her. “I don’t remember thinking that you looked easy to manipulate, but I can’t guarantee I didn’t. And if you’re asking if I stole drugs on your watch, the ugly truth is that I can’t remember.”

He looks up at the ceiling again, like he can’t stand to see whatever expression might be on her face.

“Thank you for telling me,” she forces herself to say.

“Mel, if you want to get out of this car and never talk to me again, I don’t blame you. But before you do, I want you to know that I kept working with you because you make me a better doctor. Even on that first day, you made me a better doctor.”

Santos would absolutely tell her to get out of the car, but Santos also has a witheringly dark outlook on human nature that Mel doesn’t share.

“I did?” she asks, unable to keep the pride out of her voice.

“That autistic guy. I mean, the man with autism. I couldn’t get anywhere with him, and you solved his whole problem in, like, five minutes. Then you explained it to me, and you didn’t even try to make me feel bad about it.” He looks at her again, and now his eyes are dancing with the old familiar excitement. “Look, I know I fucked up, but all I’ve ever wanted to be was a really good doctor. You brought me closer to that.”

Mel takes her time to consider, and Frank doesn’t push her to say anything. She’s trusting, maybe to a fault, but she’s not completely naive. He could be trying to manipulate her now – to keep her friendship, to stop her from reporting him, or just to survive an uncomfortable moment. But if that were true, he wouldn’t have been so good with Becca.

Something inside her chest unclenches.

“Do you want to come upstairs?” she asks. “We could watch a movie.”

Frank huffs out a relieved sigh, but he ducks his head so Mel can’t see his expression.

“I’d really like that, but I think I need to go to a meeting now.”

Mel nods. “Yeah. Okay. Of course.”

He tenses again, knuckles going white around the steering wheel. “Can I ask a favor?”

“Anything.”

He looks at her gratefully. “It, uh, helps sometimes if somebody’s waiting for me to get to say I got there. Can you stay up till I message you?”

“Yeah, that’s easy.”

Mel’s not usually the one who initiates contact, but on impulse she squeezes his hand. Frank breathes in sharply, and she’s not totally certain what it means, but he doesn’t move his hand away, so she doesn’t either.

“We okay?” he asks. It sounds like there’s a lump in his throat.

“Yeah,” Mel says, and now there’s a lump in her throat. “Movie on Friday?”

Frank smiles – the good one that makes his dimples and laugh lines stand out. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

On Wednesday, she and Santos are sitting at the work station together.

“Quit with the humming,” Santos says sharply.

“What humming?” Mel asks. “Was I humming?”

“Incessantly. And if you don’t stop, I’ll kill you. I don’t even have a clever, witty way to say it. Just know that I mean it. Humming leads to death.”

“Huh.” Mel taps her fingers on the desktop, which is probably also annoying. “You know, this isn’t the only time this week someone told me I was humming.”

Santos shoots her a baleful look.

“You’re angry because you’re behind on your charts again, aren’t you?” Mel says. She is, at last, getting better at her therapist’s game of other people’s behavior has nothing to do with you.

“You don’t have to be so fucking happy about it.”

“I’m not. I mean, that’s not why I was humming.”

“I don’t want to know.” Santos sinks back down into her workstation, her fingers clicking rapidly over the keys. She freezes when she sees Frank turn the corner. “Oh god, does it have something to do with –”

Mel looks down hastily. She has a bad feeling she’s blushing. For Santos, witnessing embarrassment is much like a shark scenting chum floating in the water. It never ends well for the prey.

Sure enough, she’s yanking Mel into an empty exam room.

“This is exactly why you’re so far behind on charting,” Mel protests, not that it does much good.

“Seriously?” Santos’s eyes widen dramatically. “After everything we talked about?”

Mel shrugs. “He’s not using me,” she says flatly. “He hasn’t asked me for drugs, money, forged time sheets or clean urine. And I don’t think he can get around the drug tests.”

Mel had actually considered these possibilities carefully. She and her therapist had brainstormed a list of relapse behaviors and determined what would constitute a red flag. Metaphorically speaking, Frank’s flags are green.

“So, what, he said sorry and now everything’s fine?”

“As far as I’m concerned, yes. You get to make your own decision though.”

Honestly, it’s a little reductive. It’s not just that Frank had said sorry; it’s also the rehab and the meetings and the honest way he’d apologized to her. But that level of detail is a bit much for a recalcitrant coworker in the middle of a shift.

Santos has gone still, although Mel can feel the way she’s practically vibrating with fury. It feels like a lot, considering that – as far as she knows – Frank had only yelled at her once, a very long time ago.

Unless…

“Are you the one who caught him?” Mel asks. She can’t think how else Santos would know about the drug diversion; surely the attendings wouldn’t gossip with a resident about that.

“Does he know?” Santos says sharply.

“I don’t think so.” At least, he hadn’t said anything to her about it. “I won’t tell him,” she adds, because Santos is her friend too.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Her voice sounds hollow, and Mel feels a flicker of gratitude she recognizes that. Maybe she’s not as bad at reading people as she thought she was. Maybe she’d just gotten so tangled up in caring for her mom and her sister that she hadn’t allowed herself to experience varied relationships and the emotional skills that come with them.

That, or the therapy is actually working.

“You did a really good, brave thing by reporting him,” Mel says. “He could’ve died, and patients would’ve died. And I know you put your career on the line to protect them.”

“Whatever. Don’t get all mushy on me,” Santos says breezily, but Mel doesn’t miss the way her spine relaxes – or the faint flicker of relief on her face when she turns away.

She really is getting better at reading emotions. Her therapist will be so proud. She’s formulating what to say next when Santos flounces out the door.

Apparently she’s not any better at figuring out when conversations are about to end.

When Mel arrives at Frank’s on Friday night, he hasn’t shaved, his hair’s a mess, and he’s juggling an armful of laundry.

“Is everything okay?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

“I, uh –” Frank swallows. “It’s kind of a disaster in here. I don’t know if you want to come in.”

“Of course I want to come in,” Mel says, all smiles. “I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

Since the night they’d held hands in Frank’s car, which was technically five days ago, not that she’s been counting.

“Okay, well, um…” Frank stands back from the door and gestures theatrically toward the living room. “Come on in.”

Mel blinks. It does look like a bomb went off. The furniture is just a vague shape under piles of clothes and papers and Chinese takeout cartons.

“I didn’t forget that you were coming. I just got that night shift while the kids were here, and then I got called in on my day off, and there’s, um, therapy, and meetings…” His voice trails off. “This is what happens.”

Mel shrugs. “We can fix this. We’ll pick up the trash first, and then you’ll get the clothes and I’ll do the toys. The important thing is, don’t stop and stay focused on one category at a time.”

Frank shoots her a surprised look. “Has this happened to you?”

“Lots of times.” Mel would wave her hands, but they’re currently occupied dragging the big trash can out of the kitchen. “Intern year was not my finest year for housekeeping.”

Frank’s on his knees in front of the coffee table, gathering takeout cartons. “You seem like one of those people who always has their shit together.”

Mel shakes her head. A messy living area is overstimulating but sometimes unavoidable. “I don’t think that’s possible during residency. For anyone.”

“You’re saying this is not because I’m a recovering addict who just finalized his divorce?”

“It might have something to do with it,” Mel allows. “But I think it’s mostly a byproduct of an eighty-hour work week. Anyway, if your apartment got messy because you went to therapy and meetings, I think you prioritized correctly.”

“Thank you.”

It takes Mel a minute to realize what’s happening, but suddenly Frank’s arms are around her, pulling her tight. It’s awkward and kind of alarming because she’s holding dirty chopsticks and a fragile-looking container of soy sauce, but then she relaxes into it anyway, and it feels really nice. Like a little cave protecting her from the world.

Frank lets go just as suddenly as he’d grabbed her, pulling back with a string of muttered apologies. “Sorry. I know you don’t like unexpected physical contact.”

“I don’t mind when it’s you.” Mel blurts the words out without thinking, and she’s glad Frank’s looking away because she can tell she’s blushing from the heat on her face.

After that, it seems like he’s always touching her in casual little ways – knees bumping while they kneel together to clean the coffee table, fingers brushing when he helps her move the trash can back to the kitchen, an appreciative squeeze when she hands him a daddy-and-me drawing she found underneath the sofa.

Less than an hour later, the room’s in much better shape, but Frank still looks embarrassed.

“This isn’t what I pictured for tonight,” he confesses. He’s looking at his shoes, which makes Mel realize how often he usually looks at her.

“What did you picture?” she asks.

He winces. “Food, for one. I think I’m down to frozen fish sticks and questionable fried rice.”

“That’s fine. I’ll order us pizza.” Mel’s phone is already in her hand. “What toppings do you like?”

Frank stops her with a hand on her arm. “You always have pizza with Becca. This is supposed to be your night for something different.”

Mel shakes her head. “I’m not here because of the food, Frank. I’m here because of you.”

It’s her second almost-declaration of feelings tonight, and this time, she doesn’t even blush. He should know how much she likes seeing him. Because she’s looking at him, she sees him swallow hard. Twice.

“You know you’re the only person who says things like that, right?”

Mel makes a noncommittal noise. She certainly does not know that, and she suspects Frank of exaggerating to make her feel good.

“Yeah, right,” she mutters.

“No, really,” Frank says slowly. “My parents love me, but right now, it’s like they’re just looking for warning signs and I’m trying to prove that I’m okay. And the kids don’t mean to make me feel guilty, but it’s hard not to when I work so late. So I let them stay up late when they’re here, so then Abby gets mad…”

“Right, but what about your friends?” Mel asks. Frank had obviously been one of the popular kids; she thinks it’s hard not to be, when you’re that good-looking and charming and talented.

But Frank shakes his head. “You mean the people I made awkward conversation with at kids’ birthday parties? They weren’t exactly beating down the door after I came back from rehab.” He takes her by the shoulders and looks her in the eye. “It’s just you, okay? You should know that.”

“It’s just you for me too,” she says quietly. She’d thought she’d feel embarrassed to admit that, but it’s nice, actually. She wants him to know.

His hands are a warm weight on her shoulders. “Then it’s even more important that you have nice things when you’re here.” He smiles wryly. “Like, way better than Pizza Hut.”

Mel would shrug, but she doesn’t want him to think she wants him to let go. “I do have something way better than Pizza Hut. I have you.”

Frank’s hands tighten around her shoulders. There’s a long pause, but not a bad one – a cozy one. Then his voice goes very soft.

“I’m going to do something, okay? And if you don’t like it, or you want me to stop, I want you to tell me.”

He leans in, and she sees his eyes flicker shut, so she closes hers too. His lips brush against hers, just for a second. Her hands come up to his waist automatically, and then she puts them down again because honestly, she’s not sure what to do. It’s not that she’s never been kissed. She’s twenty-seven. It had happened – but mostly at college parties she’d forced herself to attend, and occasionally in med school, with guys in her study group when she was trying way too hard to pretend to be normal. But she’s never been kissed like this, by a man she really likes, one who’s carefully watching her every move.

He opens his eyes and looks at her questioningly. “Okay?” he asks.

He doesn’t look weirded out by her flustered reaction.

“Very,” she says. Of course, her face betrays her by going hot, and she sucks in a breath. “You should know – I mean, you can probably tell – that I’m not…” she looks down at the floor. “Experienced. With, um, any of this.”

“That’s okay,” Frank says. His voice is soft like a worn-in sweater. “We’ll go slow.”

He leans toward her again, and this time, she tilts her face up to meet him. His lips are still gentle against hers, but this time, he lingers. His fingers trail over her jaw, and she flinches back, even though she doesn’t mean to.

She’s ready for the whole night to fall apart, but Frank doesn’t look annoyed or disappointed. He steps back just enough to give her space.

“You can tell me, Mel.”

She breathes in slowly like her therapist taught her, giving herself to gather her thoughts. “It’s new,” she says finally, and Frank nods encouragingly. “And when you touched my, um,...”

Her fingers flutter toward her jaw.

“Too light, too hard, or the wrong place?” Frank asks.

Okay, clearly he’s thought this through. It makes it easier.

“Too light,” she says. Without realizing it, she’s closed the distance between them, and she can feel the warmth of his body next to hers.

“Can we try again?” he asks. “Or do you want some time?”

“Again,” Mel says. It’s way too fast, but she forgets to be embarrassed.

Frank’s lips are against hers again, harder this time, and his fingers are firm against her jaw. Their mouths open, and she likes the heat of it, the warmth spreading from him into her. His arm is tight around her waist, pressing her close, and she arches up into him –

And then suddenly it’s too much, she has to pull away again.

“Sorry, sorry.” She’’s hiding her face, looking down at the floor. “I like it. I just, it’s a lot and it’s new, and –”

“There’s nothing to apologize for.” Frank’s voice is firm. “I told you, we’ll take it as slow as you want. Come on, let’s sit down and watch a movie.”

He’s turning toward the couch when she sees it – the tag peeking out the back of his sweatshirt. Clothing tags don’t bother him; he’d cut the tag out of his museum hoodie specifically for her..

“Hey, Frank,” she says, but then her voice gets stuck. Her fingers trail over the empty spot in the neckline of her borrowed hoodie, feeling the place where the tag ought to be. “Did you cut the tag out of this hoodie for me?”

Even with the evidence in front of her, it feels audacious to assume. She braces for him to say that he hadn’t – that the tag ripped out ages ago, or he’d done it for his daughter or even some other girlfriend.

But he just beams. “Took you awhile to notice.”

She settles onto the couch next to him.

“No, I noticed right away,” she says quickly. She decides not to mention exactly how many hours she’d spent thinking about it. “Was it a message?”

Frank gives her a look – the same kind of look he’d give her if she asked if the sky is blue, or if normal oxygen saturation definitively rules out respiratory failure.

“This question has an obvious answer,” she says.

Frank gives her the look again.

“And the answer is yes.”

Frank nods.

“So the apples, and the food trials, and blocking fluorescent lights…”

Frank nods reassuringly. Mel feels like she can’t breathe. Months she’d imagined and waited and longed and she could’ve had this all along?

“But you didn’t say anything.”

“I thought I did,” Frank says, but then he shakes his head. “That’s a copout. I started doing it because it was so easy to make you happy, and I needed to feel like I could make someone happy. And then I realized that if you like seeing someone happy – like it’s the best part of your day – that might mean something. I thought you’d get the message.”

Mel shakes her head. “You remember my aunt, the one I told you about?”

“The one who sucks?”

Mel swallows back her reflexive urge to defend one of her few living relations. Her aunt does suck.

“She used to hate it when I got upset about tags, or weird textures in food, or the lights. She’d always say, your sister has a condition. You’re just looking for attention.. So I tried really hard not to show it when those things bother me.” She takes a long breath. “So it didn’t occur to me that you would notice.”

Or care, she almost adds, but that sounds too sad and self-indulgent.

“I take it back,” Frank says. “Your aunt doesn’t suck. That’s too polite. She’s an asshole, and I hate her.”

“You’ve never even met her,” Mel answers reflexively.

“Do I need to?” Frank raises his eyebrows almost to his hairline. He looks ridiculous, and Mel laughs in spite of herself.

“So you don’t think I…stole it all from Becca?” She didn’t think she’d done it for attention – at least not consciously – but she can’t rule it out.

“No. Absolutely not,” Frank answers gratifyingly quickly. “You’re just wired a little differently from other people, that’s all.”

They’d been sitting apart on the couch – she’d needed the space – but now his hand drops to her knee. His thumb draws warm, firm circles against the side of her leg, and Mel considers that he might have spent a lot of time thinking about exactly how she’d like to be touched.

“I want to try it again,” she says. Somehow she can’t quite make herself say the word kissing, but that might actually be more embarrassing, because now she’s blushing hard.

Frank looks at her questioningly, but his lips curl up as understanding dawns. “You want me to kiss you again?”

She pulls herself up straight and looks him in the eye. “Yes, Frank, I’d like you to kiss me.”

She’s smiling. Probably in a ridiculous way. She can’t help herself. She’d done it; she’d asked a man – a very, very attractive man – for what she wants, and he’s going to give it to her.

This time, it’s less new and she’s not afraid. When her body arches toward him, she leans into it, and she does a thing she’s fantasized about for a very long time: she pulls him down on top of her. At first, he’s too careful, trying to prop himself up on his elbows and keep his weight off her. She keeps pulling him down harder, and finally he gets the picture. His whole body lines up with hers, the weight of it pushing her down into the cushions. It’s as good as she’d always imagined, better than she’d imagined. She keeps making ridiculous noises in the back of her throat – or at least, she thinks they’re ridiculous – but they just make him kiss her harder, which makes her arch up into his touch, which makes him kiss her harder again. It’s a whole big cycle, and they’re both breathing hard when he finally pulls back.

“Mel, you don’t have to do anything you want to do,” he says. He’s too far away from her, and he’s looking into her eyes the way he always does when he’s totally sincere. He licks his lips. “But do you want to spend the night?”

“I do,” she says, and her voice comes out all strange and breathy. “But I told Becca I'd come home tonight, so…”

Frank nods. He smooths down her shirt, pushing it back into place where it had ridden up. She shivers when his warm fingers graze her skin.

The night doesn’t have to end. Yes, her apartment is terrible and embarrassing, but with the appropriate disclaimers…

“You should know my apartment is awful. I mean, I clean the bathroom, but it’s not in good shape. And it’s a one bedroom, and I gave the bedroom to Becca, so I sleep on a sofa bed in the living room.” Her eyes are squeezed shut. She can’t actually look at Frank while she confesses all of his. “But if you wanted, you could spend the night.”

When she finally manages to look at Frank, he’s grinning.

“Mel, you are not the only person to live in a shitty apartment in residency. Of course I want to come.”

There is a man in her apartment. An actual man in her apartment. Not just any man. Frank. There is a Frank in her apartment.

In her bed. In her terrible, thin-mattress sofa bed because even though she’d saved the money for a better one, she had not saved the time to shop. Well, she had the time to shop, but not the time to shop correctly, with careful tests and price-to-value comparisons. So she hadn’t shopped at all, and now Frank is forced to endure the rickety old Facebook Marketplace sofa bed. Clearly, she had not planned ahead.

And, oh god, had he seen the credit card bill on the table? The actual paper credit card bill she’d gotten because she’d accidentally marked her credit card statement as spam, so now they communicate with her on paper, so there are incriminating letters lying around for Frank to see. Her mom would be so disappointed. No credit card debt, finance 101. But fourth year of med school had been dicey, financially speaking, and when her laptop broke, she hadn’t found an alternative method of payment. And then she’d needed to move halfway across the country for residency, and things stacked up. And now Frank might know she’s less responsible than she portrays herself.

Just like Frank now knows that her kitchen faucet drips incessantly. Well, had dripped incessantly. Apparently it was a quick fix. It only took Frank five minutes. Which means it’s something she really should’ve known, but she’d stupidly endured it for the entire duration of her lease.

“Mel?” Frank’s voice drifts out of the dark. “Where did you go?”

“Um, anxiety spiral,” she says.

Frank shifts further away, which isn’t great, because they’re already too far apart. She’d made things awkward.

“You know I’m just happy to be here with you, right?” he says from the edge of the mattress. “Just so we’re really clear, when I said don’t do anything you don’t want to do, I meant sex. I don’t need, or expect –”

“Oh, it’s not that,” she says quickly. “That’s the one thing I’m not worried about.”

Once she’d overcome the initial anxiety, her body seemed to know what to do. Even now, it’s generating many ideas entirely on its own, all of which are foiled by Frank’s retreat to the opposite side of the bed.

Frank’s hand lands on her arm, warm and heavy. “Then what exactly…?”

Mel swallows. “Um, did you see my credit card statement? Or the broken shower tiles?”

“Um, no? I didn’t read your mail or inspect your shower?” He sounds genuinely baffled.

Mel’s familiar with this exact tone of voice. It means she’s added a non-sequitur to the conversation, although she’s not sure exactly what it was. She hadn’t even confessed to her ill-advised attempt to glue the tile back in place with toothpaste.

The silence stretches out, and then Frank says, “Mel, did you think I’d judge you for having credit card debt?”

“Well, it’s not very good, is it?” Her voice is thick. Her mom had limited opportunities to give her advice before the illness took over, but Mel had done her best to live up to what little she’d received. Sometimes she’d failed.

Suddenly Frank is leaning over her. “Credit card debt sounds pretty okay to me. I mean, I’m a drug addict.”

“That’s not how I think of you,” Mel says quickly. “I think of you as Frank.”

She’s not usually the one who initiates contact, but she reaches up to push his floppy hair out of his face. He surprises her by leaning into the touch, pressing his cheek into her palm, and she actually stops breathing for a second. She’d imagined so many things between them, but she’d never thought she’d see him like this, with his face cradled in her hand.

“Is it so hard to believe I think of you as Mel? Not Mel with the credit card bill and the kinda run-down apartment?”

“Yes.” Mel nods seriously, even though he might not be able to see it in the dark.

Her hand is still resting against his face, and she trails her fingernails experimentally across his jaw and down his neck. His eyes flicker shut, and he rewards her with a little gasp, and okay, maybe she’s not going to be terrible at this sex thing after all.

Then he catches her wrist and pulls it away from him. That wasn’t the reaction she hoped for, but his grip is firm, and honestly, it’s a pretty big turn-on.

“Mel, we’re talking about this,” he says firmly. “Why is that hard to believe?”

He tucks her hand against her chest, but his hand stays on top of it, big and steady and warm. She opens and closes her mouth a couple times without saying anything. Organizing her emotions into speech is hard sometimes, and people get impatient, but Frank seems okay with waiting.

“When we were younger, Becca needed a lot of help, so I tried to not need help. To make things easier on my parents, I guess.” She’s not totally sure she’s making sense, but Frank nods encouragingly, so she pushes on. “And then, you know, they died. So it was just me and Becca, and money was really tight. I was going to drop out of college and work full time, but Becca kept telling me I had to go to med school. And I did, obviously. But it was really hard. If I didn’t work enough hours, we’d get evicted, but if I got a C in a class, I might not get into med school.”

Just thinking about that time in her life makes her chest hurt. Maybe Frank knows that because he squeezes her hand.

“So you got in the habit of acting perfect all the time because you had to be perfect all the time?”

“Yeah, I think that might be it,” Mel says. Her therapist will be so pleased.

Frank smiles at her – not the megawatt grin that crumples up his eyes, but a soft one-sided smile. “Mel, do you realize you made it? You’re a doctor. You’re, like, seventy-five percent done with residency.”

“Seventy-two,” Mel corrects, because she has three months left in third year. “Although I do appreciate the effort at quantifiable data.”

She sees Frank smile in the dark, and that’s the exact moment she stops feeling scared. And when she stops being scared, she gets to feel a whole lot of other things:

His hand, still on top of hers. His thumb, pressing into the hollow of her palm.

His knee, resting against her thigh.

Her tongue, darting out to lick her lips.

“Frank, please,” she says, and it doesn’t seem like enough, but maybe it is – or maybe he can see how hard she’s breathing – because suddenly he’s on top of her, letting her feel the whole weight of his body, just like she’d wanted.

She feels her legs opening around him, welcoming him. It’s scary in a good way, like a roller coaster, fun because she knows deep down she’s safe and secure.

She’s lived so much of her life in hiding, but maybe it’s good to be seen.

She opens to him, again and again.