Chapter Text
“Why are you so far away?” she said
“Why won’t you ever know that I'm in love with you
That I'm in love with you?”
–
Samira may be speedrunning the whole trying-to-get-a-life thing that Cassie had suggested to her.
But she’s been feeling desperate, grasping, wanting to sink her hands into everything, try everything.
She’s taken pottery classes and come home to her apartment — spare furnishings and bare walls and just-the-essentials cabinets — bearing wobbly bowls and knobby cups with cracked glaze that have now become her favorite to drink her masala chai out of.
She’s been going to Pilates with Mel once a week, and going on her own once or twice more per week on top of that. (Her abs feel amazing, she’s finding it easier and easier to heft inert bodies from stretcher board to gurney, and the back pain that typically plagued her deep into a double shift has minimized, no longer needing 800 mgs of ibuprofen to suppress it enough to make it through the rest of the night.)
She’s gone to the Carnegie Museum a handful of weekends in a row with Trinity and Dennis; sometimes they split up once they’re through the entrance of the Beaux Arts building, and sometimes they stay together and let their whims carry them through the halls, listening to the quiet, sure cadence of Dennis as he shares context about certain artists and periods he’s gleaned from the art history classes he used to take.
She’s heeded Victoria’s requests to invite her to anything, anything at all, just so she could get out from under her mom’s roof more often. The two of them have taken cooking classes, gone hiking and stand-up paddleboarding on Lake Arthur, gone thrifting so Victoria could school Samira on what was cool and what kind of knick-knacks and homeware and decor would help her apartment feel a little less sad and a little more like a home.
She’s gone on a handful of Tinder dates with guys she thought were cute enough, and pretended to be interested enough throughout dinner or drinks or pickleball dates for them to believe she wanted to hook up — which she did, to be fair, but not for the reasons they thought — and she’s ridden them on her couch with her fingers on her clit and their hands on her hips but not holding her tight enough, and she’s sent them home as soon as she got what she wanted and was satisfied enough.
And then she’s sat alone in her apartment and wondered why it still felt like something was missing. Why it still didn’t feel like enough.
In other words, she’s been saying yes, and yes, and yes to everything that comes her way.
Samira’s always been a bit of an overachiever, after all.
So that’s why she is on her way to Presque Isle Beach running exceptionally late to meet the whole crew there: after her Saturday morning Pilates class had ended, the nice girl whose mat or reformer she often ended up next to had asked Samira if she wanted to get a coffee — which turned into grabbing a bite to eat, which turned into browsing a used bookstore and the two of them exchanging numbers and promising to make regular plans to hang out after class.
So that’s why she had missed the high noon call time, missed the chance to carpool with Trinity and Dennis, missed the window when that bakery she liked on the way up to the lake would still have fresh-baked almond croissants in stock.
She’s in traffic crawling along I-79 and it’s nice enough for no AC and the windows down. She elbows her way out of her sports bra while trying not to flash the people in cars stalled around her. She reaches into her tote bag in the passenger seat, fishes around until she feels the synthetic nylon slipperiness of her bikini top and pulls it out. She wrangles and untangles underneath her T-shirt until she’s managed the tangerine-colored triangles over her breasts, and at the next stop of the stop-and-go traffic fixes the straps over her shoulders and ties the back.
No chance she’ll be able to wiggle her way into her bikini bottoms while she’s still on the road, so she’ll just have to wait ‘til she arrives at the beach to handle that.
At least the day looks absolutely beautiful, not a cloud in sight, perfect for a day out on the sand sipping canned cocktails and sweating her mascara off and hoping maybe, just maybe, Dr. Abbot will look at her in that way that she thinks about sometimes late at night.
With those whiskey-colored eyes, hint of jade green, the way they always find hers across every room, around the bend of everyone’s shoulders, from behind every workstation.
She feels a drip of sweat inch down her clavicle, flips her shirt all the way off so she can get a head start on her tan and vitamin D absorption.
She’s not — it’s not a crush. That would be juvenile, and she is thirty fucking years old. She just likes how he looks at her, how he seems to really see her, how he listens to her better than anyone else does. She likes the assuring warmth of his steady hands beside hers, whether they’re both fitted in sterile gloves and acting in eerily-perfect sync over a procedure or sat at a desk with stale break room coffee underlining details and dosages in obscure case studies and annotating each other’s printed copies, she borrowing his pen because she likes the way the ink flows and he borrowing her best blue highlighter because he refuses to get his own.
(And, well, if she thinks about it—)
Maybe she likes how his hair looks when he’s eight hours into shift and he’s been running his hands through it, leaving tracks of his fingers through the curls, graying with evidence of their formerly bright auburn hue.
Maybe she likes studying, in a purely academic way, the contours of his strong body when his back is facing her: sturdy shoulders, rigid spine, wide torso, thick forearms, muscled thighs.
Maybe she likes the way his ear seems to be able to pick her voice out among the bustle, the way he always seems so primed and ready to respond to whatever she has to say, the way his voice turns low when he’s saying her name and commending her work.
(And maybe, just once, she’d imagined it was his thick fingers instead of her own pinching her clit while she was grinding down on Josh or Austin or Danny — she’s not sure which, they all kind of blended together — and she’d come harder than she had in a while, and then she’d sent whatever-his-name-was home and then made herself come again and again, swearing and sweating between her sheets, and then blocked the guy’s number and sat and thought about it for a long, long time. But that was just the once.)
(She doesn’t think about it.)
So no, not a crush.
Though she can’t be held responsible, she tells herself, if the daze of the sun and a couple of hard ciders and the way she knows his eyes will sweep over her makes her act up, just a little bit. If seeing him outside of the hospital environment — a sterile place where he somehow still manages to make her feel a little fizzy under her skin when she looks up from a chart to see him already gazing at her, a feeling she refuses to investigate further — makes her do things she wouldn’t normally have the confidence to do.
At least, that’s what she’s telling herself as she parks by Beach 10 at Presque Isle and catches sight of the group from afar. As she shuts her car door and walks up and spots a familiar head of gray curls, the few threads of red shining in the sunlight, sees that he’s perched in a lounge chair chatting with Heather. As she walks up and, before really thinking too hard about it, plops her bag down on the sand to the left of his chair, fans out her towel there.
That’s what she’s telling herself as she makes eye contact with Trinity a few feet away to her left. They share a friendly smile before Trinity lets out a whistle upon taking in the sight of Samira in her bikini top and a long white skirt with a slit that runs all the way up her right thigh.
And that’s what she’s telling herself as she takes a step so her body is parallel to Abbot’s in his chair, takes in a short breath, reaches under her skirt, and drops her panties to the ground.
Suddenly there’s a choking sound coming from her right side and Samira bites the smile away from overtaking her lips. She looks left to Trinity again, and at Parker, who’s just joined Trinity on her oversized towel with a drink in a tumbler, who’s eyeing Samira’s lacy pink panties and shaking her head with a smirk.
“You feel that, Abbot? Feels like it just got hotter out here,” Ellis calls over to him. Samira hears him grunt in response and she lets herself grin now as she hinges at the hip to bend down and rummage through her tote bag for the bikini bottom.
Maybe she takes her time, ‘cause maybe she knows her ass is parked right by his face, and her pilates instructor Rachel had put her glutes through the wringer today with extra raises and leg circles.
She knows she looks good ‘cause she feels good.
She flips through crumpled receipts and her pencil bag and a half-eaten protein bar and tangled earphones before she finally grasps the thin strings. She straightens and steps into the bottoms, takes a second to adjust them under her skirt, and finally, when she thinks she’s decent, tucks her thumbs into the waistband of the skirt and in one quick swoop flicks her skirt down to her towel.
There’s total silence coming from the side Abbot’s on and more whistles from the side Trinity and Parker are. Samira turns to face the pair of women, her back to Abbot now.
“Am I all good and centered? Nothing’s uneven?” Samira asks. Trinity just grins in response, her eyes flitting past Samira’s hip to catch Abbot’s reaction, which is evidently amusing to her judging by the glint in her eye. Samira feels a zing of satisfaction at the idea.
“Yeah, girl, you’re good. You look fucking banging,” Trinity says.
“That’s your color, Mohan,” Parker adds, tilting her drink up to her in a cheers motion.
“Thanks,” Samira grins, strolling away past Abbot’s chair in search of a drink as she hears Trinity and Parker cackling.
Shen seems to be the unofficial drinks person, posted up by the drinks cooler and sitting in one of those chairs with a pullover shade canopy. He’s got dark sunglasses on, sipping on some unidentifiable concoction through a stainless steel straw — brought from home, it seems like — and when Samira approaches, he greets her with, “Welcome to my bar cart, Mohan. What can I get ya?”
She asks what’s on the menu and he runs through a surprisingly extensive list. She requests a jalapeño margarita and he gets to work, pulling jalapeño slices out of a container, rimming a tumbler with salt from a metal tin, and measuring out shots with a compelling precision. He hands her the drink and she thanks him, and then he sits back in his chair and pops the shade back over his head, eyes falling closed, straw brought back up to his lips.
Sipping the tangy, lightly spicy drink, she moves on to where a group of the others is playing spikeball, everyone exchanging somewhat-friendly competitive barbs across the net. She smiles at everyone in greeting: Victoria is teamed up with Mateo, Donnie is partnered with Dana and, for some reason, Princess with Langdon, the two of them being the primary source of prickly banter.
“If you give me an illegal serve like that one more time, you’re gonna find my earring in your hamburger,” Princess quips at Langdon.
“Hey, I’m not the reason we’re down by five. If you stopped aiming for the ground and started aiming for the net — oh, Samira, please sub in for me next round?” Langdon says when he catches her eye across the net.
“Oh, no,” she responds, “I need to get sunscreen on. You have fun, though!”
She circles back in the direction of Robby and Collins where they are prepping to grill, setting out containers of freshly pickled veggies and cold macaroni salad, bags of buns and potato chips, large aluminum trays full of beef and veggie burgers, big portobello mushrooms, marinated chicken skewered with bell peppers and onions, halved zucchinis. Her mouth waters.
“You guys really pulled out all the stops, this looks amazing,” she says.
“It’s not every day I get to make sure you residents are eating something more nutritious than Twix bars and cold pizza,” Robby says. “Glad you could make it.”
“You’re here just in time, Samira. Some of us were getting worried you wouldn’t show,” Heather says, giving her a subtle smirk.
“Oh, stop,” Samira replies. “Any sight of Mel or Dennis? I wanna say hi.”
“Mel’s been in the water for the past… hour, I think, at this point?”
“And last I heard, Dennis was combing the sand for rocks and shells,” Heather adds.
“Oh, okay. Cool.” Samira stalks back off towards her towel and sits cross-legged. Abbot still hasn’t said anything to her, which is kind of funny at this point.
(And maybe a little endearing?)
“Dr. Abbot,” she says to him pointedly. He — finally — turns his head to look at her, just barely. His eyes meet hers, but it’s different from his usual brand of intense eye contact: it’s like he won’t look anywhere other than her eyes. Like he can’t, or —
“Mohan.” Her eye catches on the feathering of his jaw muscle and she feels the dimple of her smile creasing her cheek.
“Good to see you here,” she says sweetly, reaching into her bag for her tube of sunscreen.
“Is it now,” he says in a low voice.
She hears hushed voices coming from Trinity and Parker’s direction and turns to see them getting up slowly and carefully, as if they’re trying to slip away while escaping her notice.
“Wait, Trin, sunscreen me?” Samira requests, but the two of them are suddenly already ten feet away.
“Sorry, Lake Erie calls!” Trinity responds, hopping quickly away through the hot sand and not looking back. “Get someone else to do it!”
Samira chuckles at her timing, but who is she to argue with fate — or, more aptly, with the meddling of her coworkers who she knows have a running bet which she refuses to discover the parlays of?
“Looks like you’re up, Abbot,” she says, turning to look at him. His eyes blink rapidly, and his head gives a little shake like he’s only just realized she’s there beside him again.
“I’m — up?”
She says nothing in response, just grabs his hand from where it’s gripping the arm of his chair and plops the tube of sunscreen into it.
“Oh… Thanks,” he says, uncapping it and squeezing a modest amount into his hand before rubbing it into his own arms.
He’s hopeless. She’s gonna have to take this into her own hands.
“I’m so glad you’re avoiding getting more freckles on your arms, but I did mean for you to help me with my sunscreen,” Samira tells him, reveling in the way his throat jumps with a swallow and his mouth works over something like he’s chewing on the thought.
“Oh, I don’t think — are you sure, you don’t wanna get, uh, Heather to do it, or—”
She turns to look over by the grill and then swivels back to look at him.
“No, she’s literally handling raw meat right now, so I think I’m good on that. Everyone else is playing spikeball or in the water, and I give it about twenty-two hours before bartender extraordinaire Shen realizes he’s got phytophotodermatitis from the limes he’s been handling, so I’d rather not have his hands on me,” she explains breezily.
“So…” he gulps again, lips slightly downturned in disbelief. “My hands on you, is the move here,” he half-asks, half-tells her. There’s a flash in his eyes that looks like a challenge.
(Or maybe that’s just the light glinting off the lake, making her see things that aren’t there. Or…? Things that are.)
Samira decides to ignore it, just smiles before planting her knees in front of his chair and turning to face away from him.
“Yep,” she says, popping the p-sound. She gathers her mess of curls into one hand over her shoulder and waits.
A long moment passes before she feels a single finger drag slowly in a U along her cervical spine. She feels the blunt tip of a neatly-trimmed fingernail and she thinks it’s his sharp breath, not hers, that punctuates the movement, but she’s not too sure.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “There was — you missed a curl.” His voice is barely audible, a low-toned rasp, as he tucks the errant strand of hair into the pile held in her hand, their fingers brushing for the briefest second.
Another long moment passes and then he adjusts behind her so his knees bracket her body. She feels a low fire start flickering in her abdomen and he’s hardly touched her.
She hears him uncap the lid again and dispense the sunscreen, hears a thick, wet sound as he rubs his hands together.
And then she finally fucking feels sweet relief as both of his hands come to the center of her back, rubbing in ungodly slow circles. He starts pressing his thumbs on either side close to her spine, alternating with pressure from the heels of his palms, and she melts a little, sighing, forgetting where they are and who’s around them and what their very professional relationship is meant to look like.
She lets her head relax and starts deepening her breaths, feeling each breath spread all the way down her limbs and through to her phalanges as he presses deeper and deeper into the knots at the base of her neck. She feels something loosening as he works over her, and she’s so relaxed she almost feels like she could cry or fall asleep or both.
She doesn’t realize she has done so until she hears his voice like a caress in her ear, Samira, Samira, Samira, don’t fall asleep, and she jolts awake.
“Sorry. Did I—?”
“A little, but it’s okay.”
“You’re really good at that,” she says over her shoulder; doesn’t think she can look him in the eye right now when he’s just made her feel so calm, so loose, so safe that she dozed off under his hands.
“Massage therapy is highly beneficial for releasing muscle tension, promoting circulation, and reducing stress, particularly for those in professions where they’re on their feet all day,” he manages to say evenly, as if Samira doesn’t know.
“Thanks,” she says, her voice small.
“Did you — do you want me to get your shoulders?”
“Oh. Yes, please. Um, let me—” she pauses and now she’s suddenly nervous, knows they’re toeing a dangerous line, doesn’t know if this would constitute stepping over it.
But he would understand, right, that it truly is about sun safety, that there truly is no one else available to help her with this?
Right.
So she reaches for the straps on her shoulders and slides them down.
So he has better access. So she doesn’t get sunburnt around the strap lines.
He lets out a little “oh,” and another long moment coasts by. She’s about to wonder if he just isn’t going to do it, but then she feels his warm palm close on the curve of her shoulder. He’s still thorough, but quicker than before, not lingering to press his palms deeply into her muscles this time —
He’s just being professional, amicable. Platonic.
(...Right?)
As soon as his hands leave her skin she quickly pulls herself away and onto her towel, uttering another quiet “thanks.”
As she perches on her towel trying to spot her coworkers — friends, she corrects herself — out on the lake, she feels a familiar confusion settle over her. Her mind seems fuzzy, blurry; she thinks there’s something encroaching on the edge of her consciousness but she can’t grasp it.
She gets like this sometimes. Most usually after she works a double, after sixteen hours of bleary-eyed charting and running traumas and downing the coffees and energy bars that are placed on her desk by a kind hand that she knows well.
The same hand that was just rubbing sunscreen on her back, a hand whose gentle care just relaxed her so much she fell asleep under it.
But despite his kindness, his assistance, he still hasn’t said much to her aside from civilities. That fire in her abdomen is doused with a cold splash of uncertainty.
It’s not long after that when Trinity, Parker, and Mel return from the lake, all of them beaming, all of their exposed skin glistening with beading droplets of water.
“That was a quick dip,” Samira throws Trinity’s way. “Hi, Mel.” Mel waves hey as she reaches into her backpack for her prescription sunglasses, wipes them on a clean T-shirt, and slides them onto the bridge of her nose.
“Was getting hot, just wanted to cool down before I flipped to tan my other side,” Trinity replies, laying back out on her towel face-up.
“Et tu, Parker?” Samira jokes. Parker only shrugs coyly in response.
At that moment, Victoria comes bounding over from the concluded spikeball tournament, Princess following close behind leisurely.
“Now that Samira’s finally here, can we take our pictures please?” Victoria directs the question towards Trinity like she’s the keeper of permissions. Trinity just gestures out with both her hands in the air, like beats me, why don’t you ask her?
“Aw, you guys waited for me?”
“Duh,” Victoria answers. Trinity and Parker catch up with Princess on the results of the tournament — “I carried Langdon and I to victory, obviously,” to which Parker responds with “Of course,” and Trinity with “Typical man riding on the coattails of a stronger woman” — as Victoria pulls her phone from her pink Baggu bag, checks and responds to a few notifications.
Victoria then looks around for a second, and her eye eventually lands on Abbot. “Uh — Dr. Abbot?”
He turns his head to face Victoria from where he’d been looking in the direction of Robby and Heather, contemplative. He pouts his lips the slightest bit, patient, eyebrows raised, waiting for her to go on.
(Samira realizes she can read his every expression and know exactly what he’s thinking, the same way she’s fairly certain he’s able to read hers.)
“Do you think you could—?” Victoria continues, unsure. She just holds her phone out expectantly, like she’s waiting for him to get it.
He chuckles, not unkindly. “Sure, kid. I’ve got teenage nieces, I know a thing or two about good angles.”
He extends his hand and Victoria grins, placing her phone in his hand, no longer unsure.
(If sweet Victoria can act normally about being in a bikini in front of her sometimes-but-rarely attending, surely Samira could too, right?)
Victoria quickly leaps away, gazelle-like, to grab Heather and Dana from where they’re chatting by the picnic table. When she returns, she directs everyone over to the spot she has deemed worthy, the sun hitting their cheekbones from high above, just behind them.
Samira feels a little fond twist in her heart as Victoria pulls her in close, between herself and Trinity, and Samira can’t help the smile that alights on her face as her arms come up around the waists of her chattering girlfriends. Samira looks to both sides of her, taking in the bright, smiling faces of Dana and Princess and Heather, Parker and Mel, Victoria and Trinity on her other side.
Her eyes fall back towards Abbot, and now she takes in his own smiling face as he holds Victoria’s phone capably, if a little dorkily, in both of his hands, capturing the moment Victoria will probably post on her Instagram story with a caption squeezed down into tiny font in the corner of the frame that reads “ladies of the pitt take presque isle ☀️”.
Abbot suddenly stands from his lounge chair and walks a few steps, gesturing with one hand for the girls to spin towards him, adjusting so the sun now hits them head-on.
“The light’s a bit better like this,” he explains. “Not as backlit.”
Trinity lets out a laugh Samira’s not sure she meant to.
“But—” he says.
Then he abruptly drops to one knee, his left one hitting the ground as his prosthetic leg grounds him, and everyone lets out little surprised noises. But he’s unfazed, still holding the phone out, looking through the camera preview.
“There, that’s the better angle. Smile, ladies.”
“Your old knees okay, boss?” Parker jabs.
“Shut up, Ellis, and just let me take the damn photo,” he sing-songs back.
“Count me out of cleaning the sand out of your prosthetic later, then,” she quips, still grinning widely.
“I’ve seen the state of your locker, I’d never ask ya to anyway,” Abbot answers.
“Okay, children, let’s break it up,” Dana teases as Abbot snaps one last pic and returns to a standing position easily.
He hands the phone back to its owner, adding, “Hope there’s a few you can use in there.”
Dana and Heather peel away back towards Robby and Shen, and Abbot follows, grabbing the empty seltzer can from the cupholder in his chair.
Victoria swipes into the camera roll as the rest of them crowd around the screen to find what looks like at least sixty new photos from multiple angles. Candids of them looking at each other and beaming, raising their sunglassed and squinting eyes towards the sun. Tangling their arms around each other, smiling for the camera, mouths half-open in jokes to each other and to the photographer.
“I think we can find a few, thank you!” Victoria calls out to his retreating back and he waves a hand in acknowledgement.
Samira’s starting to head back to her towel when Trinity stops her with an “Ah-ah-ah! Where are you going?”
“To lay out, finally?”
“No, wait,” Trinity whines, nudging Victoria with an elbow. “Let’s take you some new Tinder pics.”
“I don’t need any new Tinder pics. You already know how that’s going,” Samira replies, even though it’s only half-true. They know, broadly, how it’s going (poorly). They don’t know, exactly, why (but then again, neither does Samira, not really, not consciously, not wanting to say it out loud, not wanting to even think about it in specific terms).
“Okay, fine then, thirst traps? They’re always good to have,” Victoria tries.
“And who would I be trapping?” Samira implores.
“That’s between you and God and whoever should be so lucky,” Trinity says. Mel draws Princess away to rally a volleyball back and forth, so it’s now just the four of them: Samira, an unwilling photographic subject and Victoria, Trinity, and Parker as eager creative directors.
“C’mon, it’s fun if nothing else,” Victoria says. “Or... It could be for your Instagram?”
“You guys have seen my Instagram,” Samira replies.
It’s nearly blank: just a profile picture Victoria took of her the last time they went thrifting, a picture from her birthday dinner with the girls, and a group photo from the last Pitt staff party, both captionless, both ‘liked’ lists excessively combed through every time a new notification came in to see if there’d be one user there — sans profile pic, sans bio, just the simple username jpabbot in bold —
“Yeah, and it needs a major work-up. Hence, bikini pics,” Trinity answers.
“I have to agree with her there, sorry,” Victoria adds. “Stand right… there. Hands on your hips? Yeah.”
“Chin up.”
It’s at that moment that Abbot returns to where they are, stops just shy of Victoria’s shoulder. From where he stands, he could plausibly be watching the rally between Princess and Mel.
Or, he could be watching her.
(Does she secretly wish he’s watching her?)
“Whatever you’re thinking of, whatever you’re channeling right now, that’s perfect,” Trinity says.
“Yeah, your expression is giving, like, supermodel, Bella Hadid, for sure,” Victoria says.
Samira didn’t realize she was thinking of anything in particular.
“Turn around?”
“Really?” Samira asks.
“Trust me, just do it,” Victoria insists, so Samira takes a breath and does it.
“Now hold your hair up with both hands, and then look back towards us over your shoulder, just a bit.” Samira’s really doing it, gathering her curls and turning her head. She thinks she can see Abbot out of the corner of his eye taking a long, slow swig from his can of seltzer. She lets her weight settle heavily into one of her popped hips, extends her other leg out straight.
“Like this?”
“Oh my god, yes, there we go!”
“If you don’t post these, I’m actually gonna whack you,” Trinity says.
A spluttered coughing fit sounds over her shoulder and Samira turns to see Parker thumping Abbot in the center of his back. He catches his breath after a few seconds.
“Sorry, just — post — ignore me —”
“Yeah, in the mail,” Parker jokes dryly. “No, hotshot. On Instagram.”
“I’m no goddamn idiot, Ellis,” he returns.
Samira starts to tune them out once she hears Parker say “But, you kind of are, at least when it comes to…”
At first, she was humoring Victoria, who has seemed to really enjoy guiding her. But after a couple of standing poses, she finds she’s also starting to enjoy it a little. The way she, Trinity, and Parker keep hyping her up — with the occasional extra remark from Princess or Mel between volleys — is reinstating the confidence she breezed onto the beach with.
Before she knows it she’s taking the reins and doing whatever feels good and natural, moving her body into new shapes, feeling hot from the sun and the attention refracting onto her.
“Okay, amazing, let’s do some on your towel,” Victoria directs. She and Trinity kneel on Trinity’s blanket to her left. Abbot and Parker have ceased their sibling-like bickering and Parker joins the girls while Abbot parks back in his chair to her right, facing the water.
“Ooh, hold on,” Trinity interjects, a bright idea blooming on her face. “Prop up on your one hand, like that, and turn your hips towards us,” she guides. Samira listens, extending her feet out towards the edge of her towel and facing the camera. “And then just drape your other hand over your hips like that. Perfect.”
“Oh, you are good, Trin,” Parker grins. Samira can’t see Parker’s eyes behind her sunglasses but from the angle of her tilted head she guesses Parker’s looking at Abbot, assessing his suspicious silence.
No choking this time, which could be taken either way.
She lets her head angle relaxedly towards the towel and stares down the camera with a bit of a smirk. Adjusts her legs. Reaches a hand down to pretend she’s fixing the placement of her bikini bottom.
“Is that good?”
“Yes, Samira, so hot,” Trinity says. Victoria lowers her phone and the three of them peruse over their work in the camera roll for a moment before Trinity gasps and snatches Victoria’s phone from her hand.
“Just look at these,” she says, passing the phone to Samira. She takes it, a bit bewildered at what could have possibly made her react that way —
(Oh. That’ll do it.)
In most of the pictures Victoria’s just taken of this pose, she’s kept the background clear.
But in a few, she’d angled just enough to capture Abbot in the corner of the frame.
He’s there, behind her, cemented in photographic memory. His head is turned, just slightly, to look at her. His eyeline looks like it’s drawn towards the space her neck curves into her shoulder and the lone curl that’s draped there. He has a sweet look in his eye, almost adoring, his sunglasses tucked into his shirt so she can see the twinkle in his eye.
The twinkle in his eye as he is looking at her.
As he is seeing her, the way he so often does.
Samira hands the phone back without commentary and leaves them to giggle over the rest of the photos.
And then she finally turns to look back at him. Abbot’s eyes lock with hers instantly, and this time she knows it’s no trick of the light: the glimmer in his eyes is tacitly asking her questions she wants so badly to answer.
Thirst traps, indeed.
But also —
Samira lets a smile stretch slowly across her face, a smile that only grows wider when Abbot returns with one of his own. Her eye flits to the deep crinkles forming by his eyes and she feels a stutter in her chest. She doesn’t see those crinkles often, and she realizes, just now, that she loves every time it happens, that she savors it.
Yeah. She does. She savors every time he can’t help but let the pleasure or satisfaction he feels show on his face, a face that has lived through so much and yet still bears evidence of the joy he has experienced. A face that’s like proof, a reminder against cynicism. Sometimes, on a bad day, she’ll see that face across the Pitt and it’s like peering through a darkened glass and finding a shape she can live through.
And the way Abbot’s looking at her right now, in this moment, like his worldview has sharpened to a crystalline point with her at the center, makes her consider something she’s never really stopped to properly entertain: the idea that the two of them understand each other so often — all the time, even — with a clarity she might call alarming if she didn’t want to call it kismet.
(And maybe, she’s starting to feel like she does want to call it kismet.)
He rolls his lips a little, seems to steel himself, before pointing casually at Samira’s now-empty tumbler.
“Get you a top-up?”
“Sure,” she says, grabbing the cup and moving to stand. “I’ll come with.”
They walk companionably, parallel, shoulders close enough to brush, but they don’t.
“Are you staying the night?” Abbot asks easily. His brother-in-law has inherited a family home that’s close by, and he’s kept it for lake vacations and weekend getaways and sentimental reasons. When the group was making the day’s plans, Abbot had offered anyone who wanted to stay in the area overnight an invitation to the home.
“I think I will, if that’s still okay. If you have room, I mean. Who’s all going?”
“Heather and Robby have tomorrow off. So them and the new kids. I think Santos jumped at the chance to get a glimpse of my personal life so she could report back to the rest of the gossipers, even though it’s not my house. So her and that blond kid, I always forget his name. And Shamsi’s kid.” He pauses, stops short of Shen and his drinks station. “And you.”
Samira smiles softly, feels the crease of her dimple on her cheek again. “And me.”
He nods contentedly before Shen waves him down for his attention.
“Dude, thank fuck, please watch over my domain, I have to piss so bad,” Shen says to Abbot, earning a stunned chuckle from Samira.
“You couldn’t leave it alone for two minutes?” She asks.
“No, bro, the gulls,” Shen insists.
“I don’t think the gulls are after your Jose Cuervo, Shen,” Samira says.
“That’s what you think,” he says, getting up from his shaded chair. “Until your red solo cup gets snatched from your hand one second, and in the next, another of those fuckers drops a lime wedge right in your eye. Your eye.” He points at the both of them as he heads away towards the bathrooms. “Watch my shit.”
“That’s too specific, it had to have really happened to him, right?” Samira asks Abbot as he takes her tumbler from her hand. He just chuckles in response, shaking his head a little.
“Same drink?” He asks, already pulling the container of jalapeño slices from Shen’s stores.
“How did you know what I—?” She says, nodding anyway.
“I pay attention,” he grins, the ‘to you’ at the end of the sentence implicit. Then, off her unconvinced expression, “I saw you nibbling on your jalapeño slices.”
“Hm,” she hums thoughtfully, taking the prepared drink he offers her now. She goes to take a sip but he holds up a finger for her to pause, grabs himself a fresh beer from a cooler, holds the bottle up against the concrete table and bumps his right fist down onto it, popping the bottle cap off in one swift motion. He extends the neck of the bottle towards her cup.
“Cheers,” he says, clinking, his eyes never leaving hers. The sunlight glints, catching the olive shade in his hazel eyes. She smiles at him over the rim of her cup.
Samira likes this moment. The two of them, smiling at each other like this.
Wants more, maybe.
(No, not maybe — not anymore.)
–
Samira and Mel are chatting with Parker about Pilates, trying to convince the latter to give the class they take a try, but Parker is in a twice-weekly commitment with her weight training routine and doesn’t seem to care to be swayed regarding the benefits of the corkscrew move.
“Old man was with me last time I PR’ed on bench press, actually,” Parker says, flagging down Abbot nearby.
“I’d barely count that as a PR, my hands were floating under your bar the whole way up,” Abbot objects.
“I got it up, though, didn’t I?”
He shrugs, presses his lips together.
“Come on, it was impressive, you can admit it,” Parker nudges him.
“Sure. Yes, 175 is impressive for your size,” he concurs.
“Not as impressive as 275,” she says pointedly, “But yeah.”
At that, he rolls his head like he’s dodging her esteem. Samira raises an eyebrow in his direction, and the movement engages his attention like a magnet, the way he snaps to watch the expression come over her face.
“So. Pilates,” he says. Not a question, nor a point. Barely an acknowledgement. Barely an anything, even. Samira pretends not to notice Mel and Parker slinking away, soft feet slipping through the sand.
“Pilates,” she responds. Can’t help but let loose the dumb smile he keeps drawing out of her. “Is there a question there, or?”
“Eh, not really. Just like hearing you talk about… stuff.”
She chuckles. “Stuff? Like…”
“You know. Stuff, things. Topics of various natures, et cetera,” he says dryly, but there’s a fondness in his eye, a hint of affection, an almost-smile she doesn’t want to let slip out of her grasp.
“You’re really good at this,” she says, sarcastic. But she knows her grin is giving her away.
“Thanks, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. Is it going as well as I hoped?”
“It’s kind of working for me, to be honest.” She looks away as she says it. Not out of shyness, just to give herself plausible deniability, an out she doesn’t need, protection against a truth she feels is slowly growing, extending between them like an outstretched hand. “Don’t know what that says about me.”
“Nothing good, probably.”
“I dunno about that. Time will tell, I guess.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Yeah, she likes this moment, too.
(Wants more, definitely.)
–
Heather and Samira are talking about their grandmas’ recipes for potato salad, swapping tips and top-secret seasoning blends as Robby tends to the lit charcoal briquettes of the grill, when Heather raises a hand to her mouth, shuts her eyes abruptly.
“I’m so sorry—” she starts.
“Don’t be, do you need anything? Water?” Samira asks.
“No, what she needs is to stop talking about dill pickles and mustard,” Robby warns. “Both of those have been setting her off lately,” he adds to explain.
Now in the seventeenth week of her pregnancy — a fact Heather had kept totally hidden from her coworkers until last Tuesday, which is part of the reason this trip was planned, as a celebration of the milestone for her, as a celebration for her in general — her morning sickness has become all-the-time sickness, set off by certain foods and smells, by body parts bent in certain totally-wrong angles that roll in on gurneys. Samira has happily stepped up as both a confidante of any and all details Heather wants to share, and as Heather’s choice to hand off to when a particularly grotesque case threatens to send her careening towards the single-occupant bathroom.
“Please shut up,” Heather tells him, sticking a hand out towards his chest as if to physically stop him from continuing. “You did this to me. You were saying, Samira?”
“I can talk about something else,” Samira tries.
“Oh, god,” Heather lets out, before she’s rushing away towards the bathrooms. Robby sheathes his tongs onto a handle on the grill, implores Abbot — who’s nearby with Shen ranking, from worst to not-so-bad, bodily fluids to accidentally have sprayed on you — to watch over the meat he’d just thrown over the fire. Abbot strolls over easily as Robby follows Heather, still continuing his conversation with Shen.
“I’m tellin’ you, pus is the worst. There was this time, two-thousand- fuckin’-eight — god, that year fucked me every chance it got — supplies were already low, and then a delivery got intercepted, so we had nothing. This guy’s brought to us with not one, not two, but three abscesses on his arms. Rationing lidocaine, only had sprayable lido. Tried to be slow with the incision ‘cause I knew it’d hurt like a bitch. Wasn’t slow enough,” Abbot says.
“Ah, fuck,” Shen shakes his head, still sipping casually through his straw like they’re discussing the play-by-play of a basketball game and not the nitty-gritty of field medicine.
“Guy fucking freaked, which was a rational reaction. Oh, and we were out of face shields. You fill in the blanks,” he finishes, clicking Robby’s tongs once before flipping the portobello mushrooms.
“Doctors are insane,” Samira adds, to which Shen raises his cup and says, “True that.”
“The things we can talk about like they’re nothing, while you’re handling food,” Samira says. “This is why I can’t date normal people.”
Shen raises an eyebrow. “Dating civilian stories? Do tell, Mohan,” he says.
She peeks over at Abbot, whose eye is steadfastly lowered over the food, focusing hard on scraping caked-on buildup off the grates.
“Nah, nothing good enough to share.”
“Boring,” Shen objects. She swears he takes a look at Abbot, too, before he narrows his eyes, flashes a peace sign at them, and walks off towards the rest of the group who are all rallying the volleyball in a big circle now.
Samira almost scoffs. It’s starting to feel like nearly everyone here so far has made a conscious effort at some point during the day to leave her and Abbot alone together, like —
Ah.
Okay.
(Well, then, doesn’t that mean she should take advantage?)
His head still down, she says to him, “You’re empty again, Abbot,” and he looks up, hums in question when he sees her attention aimed at him. She moves to pull a fresh beer from the cooler and then brings it over to him.
He hasn’t looked away from her eyes the whole time.
“I can’t do your party trick, though,” she says as she hands the bottle over.
He still doesn’t look away from her eyes as he takes the bottle from her hand, bumps it against a notch in the grill, pops the cap off. Doesn’t look away from her as he takes a sip, the length of the bottle making up the entirety of the space between them.
(She didn’t realize they were so close.)
She lets herself break the eye contact first, her gaze falling to the line of his throat where it disappears under his (blue, floral, buttoned short-sleeve, cute) shirt.
“You’re red,” she blurts out.
“I’m— what?”
Samira doesn’t know what’s come over her when her hands go to his collar and pull it away from his skin so she can see the sunburn emerging in a stark line.
“Oh, my god,” she says, laughing incredulously. “Have you put on any sunscreen at all?”
“Yes.” He gulps. “You saw me.”
“You’re not about to tell me you’ve only done your arms.”
“You’re right, I’m not,” he says, and turns back to the grill, saying nothing more.
“Abbot!” She says, exasperated.
“Mohan,” he grins back.
(Oh, he’s loving this, isn’t he.)
(And — yes — isn’t she, too?)
“Helpless,” she calls him, before striding quickly away to grab her sunscreen from her bag.
She returns and looks at him expectantly.
“Well? Come on. I am not letting you get a farmer’s tan.” She reaches a hand to pull him towards her by the sleeve of his shirt. When he does nothing besides look at her with an indiscernible expression on his face, she pulls again. “Come on. Your turn.”
He works something in his mouth again, his lips rolling, creases by his mouth deepening.
“What do you want from me here, Samira?” He asks.
“I want you to not get sunburnt,” she responds. The fact that the only way to help him avoid that outcome is to get his shirt off and rub sunscreen all over his body is no small thing, she knows.
If they were toeing the line before, this would definitely be crossing over it. He knows.
He knows, and he wants her to say it.
“Jack,” she says, quietly. She says it both as supplication and as an answer to his question —
What does she want? Samira’s telling him now.
(Samira’s not hiding from this anymore. Samira wants — god, she wants — Jack.)
His attention is on her like a magnifying glass; she feels like he can see every bit of her, read every thought as if it’s broadcast across her forehead in a font legible only to him.
“Okay,” he says, nodding once, a brief gesture of acknowledgement that somehow both breaks the tension and makes it swell like waves on the shore.
His eyes still on hers, his fingers find the buttons of his shirt, move down as he undoes them one by one.
They break eye contact so he can fold his shirt neatly atop a picnic bench and so she can move behind him, sunscreen at the ready, suddenly faced with the wide expanse of his back.
Samira wonders if this is how he felt when she had kneeled in front of him just over an hour ago — a little hazy, hot under her skin. Itching with the need to touch him but hesitant about the after. Hesitant, because she knows that once she touches him like this, it will loose a thirst she knows will be quenchable by one thing only, a thing she’s not sure she’s allowed to want from her senior attending.
But Jack turns his head to smile, a little bashfully, at her over his shoulder, and she realizes —
He’s allowing her.
She smiles back. Feels reckless, unmoored in a way that feels less like danger now and more like liberation.
She warms the sunscreen in her hands before smoothing them over the beautifully strong, weathered body that stands in front of her, across the hardened muscle of shoulders and back. She takes care when she gets close to the scars she spots around his ribcage, maps out every freckle she sees. She feels a little short of breath, tells herself the cheers coming from the group several yards away are related to their volleyball rally and not to the two of them, but she’s honestly not so sure it’s totally unrelated to what her hands are occupied with right now.
She moves both her hands up the thick column of his neck, pressing deeply the same way he did on her, quietly savoring his pleasured little hum of relief, tucking the sound away in her head so she can replay it later.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” She asks.
The “Yeah” he utters is dark, roughened with desire. It stokes that fire in her belly that was lit earlier, that she recognizes now is like a pilot light, always on and quickly ignited when she’s around him.
She dispenses herself some more sunscreen and then passes it over to him so she can continue her attention on his back. “Get your chest,” she instructs him, and doesn’t miss the amused huff he lets out. He makes no move indicating that he’s gonna follow her instructions.
She keeps rubbing his lower back, feeling bold enough to slip the very tips of her fingers just below the waistband of his swim shorts — it’s to avoid a sharp tanline, swear — which makes him jump and twitch away from her.
“Buy me dinner first, why don’t you, Mohan, Jesus,” he says, his hands going to the place where she’d touched him, as if he’d felt it like a burn.
“As if you’d ever let me pay on a date,” she replies without thinking.
He turns slowly so he can face her, observe her full reaction as he raises an eyebrow, his mouth sliding into a smirk. “You’re right, I wouldn’t.”
“Prove it?”
“Name a time and place, Mohan, and I’m there.”
“I don’t know any good restaurants around here,” she says, her voice low, a near whisper.
“Good thing I do,” he says, smiling fondly, which completely quashes the nerves she’s been trying to push away. “You like Italian?”
Samira nods, feeling something blooming in her chest as he keeps looking at her in that way that makes her think he —
(No, who is she kidding. She knows. Has known.)
“Good,” he says, handing the sunscreen back to her. “Get my chest?”
“I thought you had two good hands?” She teases.
“Yours are better,” he responds instantly. Samira rolls her eyes, but knows the affection she feels radiates off her anyway.
And so here she is, rubbing her calloused hands over the plane of his chest, down the softly-defined ridges of his abdomen, her fingers smoothing over the thatch of graying hair below his belly button. Feeling skin she’s seen only slivers of, by accident, like when he had to hit the scrub exchange and shamelessly peeled off his scrub top in a way that nearly took his white undershirt off with it right as she just so happened to be walking past. Or that time Dana roped them all into playing pickleball at the new courts by her house, and Samira got to see just how competitive Abbot could get, just how high he was willing and able to jump trying to lobby a ball back to his opponents, just how far his performance polo would ride up to expose the lighter skin of his belly.
She can tell, in her periphery, that he’s had his eyes on her face the whole time — can tell because she feels that familiar warm feeling that his notice always induces in her. She’s sufficiently gotten sunscreen everywhere already, but she runs her hands back upwards, fingers spreading across his pectorals, continuing their path upward until coming finally to rest on either side of his neck.
Her thumbs are tucked just under his chin, and her eyes are suddenly drawn to his lips, and she’s still short of breath, her heart beating faster now, and it would take just the tiniest prod of her thumbs to angle his head towards hers —
“Samira.”
Her eyes snap up to meet his. Pupils dark, the hazel-green irises a mere sliver.
“Will you put me out of my goddamn misery,” he urges, his voice a rasping whisper.
“I don’t know, Dr. Abbot,” she whispers back, leaning in anyways, pressing closer and closer, beaming, “Will I?”
The groan he lets out is quickly muffled as she pulls him in by the back of his neck and finally (god, finally) meets his lips with her own. His hot hands come around her waist, encircle her body so she’s pressed fully up against him; they smooth slowly up her back, one coming to rest in her curls, palm her head. She feels electric from the way he’s licking into her mouth, filthy.
(She loves it.)
He has no shirt collar for her to grasp onto so she has to settle for tangling her fingers in his curls in order to pull him — forcefully — even closer, angle his head so he can tongue even deeper into her mouth. The fire inside her roars, flames crackling up through her chest and licks of heat lashing down through her core. He’s so thorough with his attention, reading her every breath and the little sounds she dares let out and responding to each with exactly what she wants from him —
(How does he know—)
Dragging his teeth over her top lip and rubbing his chin against hers which makes his stubble scratch her skin in the most delicious way and sucking her bottom lip hard enough to bruise and squeezing his hands around her hips, and so how can she do anything but rock her pelvis into his —
“Christ, Samira,” he bites out, his hands around her keeping her from grinding up closer against him.
“Sorry, I—” she pulls her head back, wiping her lip with a finger.
“Don’t— please don’t apologize, that’s not— that’s not what I meant,” he says kindly. He does that thing with his mouth again, rolling his lips together. “I’m—”
He takes a long moment. She waits.
“You affect me,” he finally admits.
“Feeling’s mutual,” she returns straightforwardly, blinking up at him.
“But god, you really do, I don’t think you have any idea, Samira,” he says, brushing a loose curl away from her forehead.
“No, I do. I pay attention,” she grins, echoing his words from earlier. “Plus, I’m not the only one,” she adds, loving the crinkle that appears between his brows when she says it.
“Pretty sure everyone’s been conspiring to leave us alone all day, and if you were to look behind me, they would probably act as if they haven’t been peeking over at us every other minute,” she continues.
“Well, we certainly gave them a show,” he jokes. Tilts his head a little, smiles brightly down at her. She could get used to this — the view of him close-up, their noses just barely touching, what feels like mere atoms between them, hands roaming all over each other’s bare skin.
“I’m very fond of you, you know,” Jack says.
She can’t help but beam again at that.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Okay, good. Because that’s kind of what I’ve been trying to tell you for the past few years, in my own way—”
“Stop talking,” she whispers against his lips. Kisses him again, because she can.
“You just— you make me— Samira, let me,” he tries getting out the words in between her kisses, and she is loving shutting him up with her lips on his, before she decides, fine, she’ll let him —
“You make me go a little stupid, if you haven’t noticed,” he finishes.
“Yeah, I know, Jack,” she answers, tugging one of his earlobes playfully. “Hard not to notice. I just — I think I was denying myself that… I don’t know, acknowledgement? Of what was between us. I’ve known it was there, but kept convincing myself it was all in my head.”
“All in your head? Samira,” he urges, his hand cupping her chin so he can hold her face pinned with the particular brand of eye contact she knows he saves just for her. “You have to know the way I look at you, the way I think about you all the damn time, wasn’t — isn’t — just in your head.”
“Well, yeah, now I know that,” she teases, rolling her eyes a little.
“Good. So. Will you let me do this? Properly?”
“Do what?”
“Don’t make me say it,” Jack entreats her, his eyes searching hers.
(This reversal of their earlier conversation, Samira thinks, is just what she wants. She knows, and she wants him to—)
“Say it, Jack.”
His head tilts up to the bright sky for a second. He pinches the ticklish spot on her waist. She bites back the giggle she’d normally let out in response.
“God, you — Will you — You’ll let me take you out? Make you mine?”
“Yeah. Yes, I will,” she grins.
(After all, hasn’t she been saying yes to everything that comes her way? Hasn’t she been waiting for this question to be asked of her, no matter how much she’d managed to convince herself she hasn’t been waiting?)
“Good,” he responds, his nose nudging hers before he presses his lips in one more time.
Jack kisses her languidly, like he has all the time in the world. Samira lets him because she likes how he makes her feel like time around them slows down, stretches like taffy. Everything else oozes by in slow motion while they move in sync, together, sparks flying when they touch.
By the time Robby and Heather get back, all the skewers and half the hot dogs are burnt to a crisp.
Jack’s not even sorry, and Samira only feels a teensy bit guilty about it.
But then, soon after, everything else is ready, and everyone crowds around the picnic tables, chatting and laughing and squinting into the sun and commending the food, and poking the two of them and giving them eyes and waggled eyebrows, and Samira doesn’t feel so bad about it anymore —
She just feels loved.
And, okay —
She loves.
(And this is what she gets, isn’t it, for saying yes.)
(Yes.)
