Work Text:
Samira calls Jack on the nights she can’t sleep. He’s awake— he’s always awake. Answering on the second ring, hey there, Dr. Mohan a rumble of gravel, so warm that she can feel his smile leaking through the phone. She jokes once that she’s convinced he’s superhuman, running on air and audacity while the rest of the mere mortals take a handful of hours to rest and recharge. He laughs but doesn’t correct her, the jagged edges of a chuckle settling warm and soft between her ribs.
Later, of course, she chips away at the truth. The police scanner that keeps watch with him like a grey-muzzled canine and the silver wedding band he hasn’t taken off in the five years since its twin was buried in a plot back in West Virginia. The way he flinches at the first pop of a firecracker on the roof on the Fourth of July.
The calls very quickly, and without her even quite accepting it, become something of a ritual. A way to sharpen the soft edges of the adrenaline high that lingers after the worst of her shifts, the ones where nothing she does is enough and she knows the patient is gone before she even learns their name. These are the ones she takes care to remember the most, should haves and if onlys running through her mind, even though it’s the exact thing she tells the med students not to do.
Samira likes to think she’s good at giving advice. But taking it? Not so much. Appa used to call her his strong-hearted girl. The last time he said it was under hospital fluorescents, his face gray, hands that had built swing sets and planted gardens trembling as she clasped them to her heart.
So maybe she’s not good at taking advice. At separating herself from the version of Samira Mohan that walks through the doors of PTMC each morning (she enters through chairs, always. It grounds her, reminds her what she’s doing it for). But it doesn’t get easier, the weight of the silence that falls over a trauma room after they call it. Three months ago, there was Daniel La Posa, age 54, herniation after a bad fall. Last week, Maya Nayak, 15, sepsis from an untreated bowel perforation. And today, Carmen Martinez, age 37, smoke inhalation. A house fire and a third floor bedroom and rescue efforts that were simply too little, too late.
Samira can’t shake it as she tucks up on her sofa, a container of leftover Chinese from her barren fridge balanced atop a stack of journal printouts on the coffee table. Jack’s now-familiar scrawl is a constant throughout the pages; normally, she’d flick through them until something caught her eye, a stack of lime green post-its and a pen (a Zebra Surari, her favorite med school indulgence) already on standby.
But Carmen’s next-of-kin was her eighteen year old daughter. Sofia, an only child whose father died when she was eleven. Who told Samira she’s been thinking of going the pre-med route, her voice a hoarse warble in the too-quiet family room that still echoes in her head, all these hours later.
It was like peering through a cracked window, fissures of a life that’s so close to her own she had to excuse herself to go stifle a sob in the bathroom. She texted her mother after Robby insists she takes a few minutes in the staff lounge, a simple I hope you’re having a good day that gets a heart react and a series of seemingly random emojis that Samira didn’t have the brain power to decode. She made a mental note to call on her next day off, maybe schedule a long weekend in the spring to visit.
If she were a good daughter, she’d call her now, Samira thinks. She squints at the oven clock; 9:45pm, but her mother is a night owl. Appa used to complain about with a smile on his face, a kiss pressed to both of their foreheads before he slipped off to bed.
Surely it can’t have been that long since they’ve spoken. A week, maybe two?
However, it’s not an option right now. Because her energy is still too unwieldy, and her mother’s gentle, probing questions will feel like strong-armed attacks. And God forbid she try to set her up with the son of a friend of a friend again and Samira has to explain again that her schedule is too complicated to accommodate a relationship, and—
She sighs. The word relaxing and her mother don’t belong in the same sentence. An ugly thought, one she regrets it immediately. The elusive, nebulous concept of being a good daughter seems to slip further and further away each time she tries to reach for it.
Her phone sits beside her, face down, like it’s judging her inability to manage the come-down without using Jack as a crutch. And that’s what it is— using. A one-way street. He never calls her when he’s had a bad shift (and she knows he has them, even if he won’t admit it. But she hasn’t quite worked up the courage to find him on the roof, yet).
Easier to just give in now, before the skitter of phantom fingers start creeping across her limbs, a precursor to the deep well of anxiety that almost drowns her from the inside out on the hardest days. A patchy sort of logic, but there’s some truth to it. Because that’s the thing about Samira: she’s good at keeping her emotions under lock and key, until she’s not. And then it’s a torrential downpour, a seismic wave of tragedy that none of her usual coping mechanisms can hold back. Not a weighted blanket, or a hot bath, or one of the dog-eared thrillers she picked up at a library sale last winter.
Until, that is, the first phone call.
It was an accident, sort of. They used to email occasionally, journal articles swapped with little extraneous chatter through their PTMC accounts. She did the same with Dr. Shen, only his responses usually came with texting shorthand and thumbs up emojis. And then she was drafting an article—just a teaser, really, of her research into racial disparity in emergency medicine diagnostics—and he offered up his phone number at shift change, in case she wanted on-demand feedback.
On-demand feedback. He ducked his chin when he said it, holding her gaze until she nodded, realizing he was serious. It shouldn’t have meant much of anything—a throwaway comment, really—but Samira’s heart thudded a little unevenly, and she nearly dropped her phone in her haste to hand it over to him. He typed, she noticed, like an old man, punching each letter with a thick finger.
She did not file that particular sight away for later examination. How the veins on his forearms stood out against the freckled tan of his skin. How she could trace their path up his arm, disappearing under the sleeve of his (distractingly tight) t-shirt.
“Your caps lock isn’t on,” he’d said, a crease between his brow. Her eyes snapped back to his face, praying he hadn’t noticed her wandering attention. “What’s up with that?”
She bit back a laugh. “It’s something we did in college. We thought we were cool.”
He handed the phone to her, a small, bemused smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. Jack Abbot (work) in the contact name, like she was in any danger of forgetting him. “Oh, I think you’ve got plenty of star power on your own, Dr. Mohan.”
He’s always doing that. Little compliments wrapped in a soft sort of humor that feels too earnest, sometimes, under the harsh ED lights. It makes her head feel too heavy for her shoulders, and she doesn’t know quite where to look. Certainly not at him; no, that only makes it worse. But she’s a little bit braver for it, a little more sure of herself and the decisions she makes each day.
He was called away by Ellis after that, and Samira went home, and absolutely did not wake up from a dream at four in the morning that rattled her so badly she forced her tired limbs out of bed for a cold shower. And she didn’t think about the way dream-Jack groaned out her name, the way his hand fisted in her hair and tugged, his teeth grazing her earlobe as she writhed under his touch. The thick press of his fingers between her thighs, coaxing her open, mindless words of praise dripping from his lips.
She waited an appropriate amount of time to reach out. Until the dream was flushed out of her system, which turned out to be two days and several revised pages of her article later. She curled up on her townhouse’s tiny excuse for a balcony and texted him, a bottle of beer sweating in her hand on an unseasonably warm October night.
Jack called her immediately. “Hey there, Dr. Mohan,” he said, without a hint of awkwardness. Like they did it all the time. Like she hadn’t needed to wait until darkness blanketed the city and she was pleasantly buzzed before asking him to look over a fucking journal article.
“Hi, Dr. Abbot,” she said, and it was a triumph that her voice didn’t shake, a careful compartmentalization of thoughts that had started emerging with a concerning frequency.
Like what it would be like to walk together to the parking garage after a shift. To call him Jack out loud like she’d already started doing in her head (she’s not sure when this happened, either. Like so many things with Jack, it just is). To get into the same car and drive to the same place, and she wouldn’t have to fish around in her bag for her key because his would already be in hand, and they’d take their shoes off by the door and bicker about whose turn it was to decide on dinner and—
“I think you can call me Jack in the comfort of your own home,” he teased, plucking the thought from her head.
Samira slammed shut the front door of the metaphorical house in her mind and added a padlock for good measure.
Yes, it felt a little like flirting. Grown up flirting, different from the pigtail pulling that seemed to continue even in college, the Snapchat messages and u up texts from guys in her contacts that had no last names. But that was just Jack— he flirted, he complimented, and he was, occasionally, her attending.
Samira knows she woefully underdeveloped in the flirting department. That the quick, witty banter that comes naturally to so many of her coworkers is a lost art, as far as she’s concerned. Even the gentle softness she’s observed between Langdon and Mel (not that she’d ever ask any questions there; he’s only just stopped wearing his wedding ring) is like a locked box she doesn’t have a key to. Just a few steps behind everyone else, vacillating between trying to keep up and convincing herself that her inexperience doesn’t matter.
(Inexperienced, maybe, but not totally lost. Samira has tried the apps, gone on dates that ended up back in bachelor apartments, waking up in beds that, inexplicably, don’t have a top sheet. She knows enough to bring herself to a tidy orgasm once or twice a week, keeps a rotation of faceless fantasies that gradually develop hazel eyes that crinkle at the corners and curly, silver hair—)
They talked about the article for at least half an hour. Jack was enthusiastic but pragmatic, suggestions wedged between bits of praise she’d have once bent over backwards to hear from Robby. He gave it away easily and without lessening its value, a combination that brought a heat to her cheeks that the cold condensation on her beer bottle couldn’t soothe. Because she could tell that he paid attention. He hadn’t given her work a cursory once-over, a favor to the fourth-year resident that had as good a shot at the PTMC fellowship as anyone. No, he took it seriously. Took her seriously, even as the conversation slowly shifted from case studies they’d read recently to the pair of bonded kittens she’d adopted that summer, and their new habit of dragging the water dish across the floor while she was at work. She told him their names—Apollo and Juno—and how nice it felt when they came running to the door when she got home in the evenings.
It was nearly one in the morning when she yawned for the fourth time in two minutes and Jack, firm but gentle, insisted she go to bed. She didn’t dream that night— didn’t think of anything at all, really.
Now, Samira stabs her chopsticks into a container of lo mein, sighing again. There’s a movie playing on the television—something vaguely Christmassy with a cast of former Disney Channel child actors—but she can’t focus in on the dialogue enough to make sense of it. She stares blankly at the screen as a vaguely attractive white man races to the blonde lead’s front door, a bouquet of white roses scattering petals across her front porch. She has no idea if they’re married or broken up—or maybe just dating? Maybe she’s a little bit in love with him but is too scared to admit it, or he’s her boss and it would be highly inappropriate for them to—
She picks up the phone. Two rings, and then, “Hey there, Dr. Mohan.”
Almost unconsciously, Samira sags with relief at the sound of his voice. She turns off the television just as the woman opens the door, a blindingly white smile on her glossy lips. “Hi, Dr. Abbot. I’m sorry for calling… Again.”
‘Thought I told you it was Jack,” he says, and she hears the slight clink of a glass. She pictures him at the kitchen sink, scrubbing dishes in that careful, efficient way he works over a patient. She’s suddenly desperate to know all of the small details of his life. Does he keep a sponge by the sink? What color are his dish towels? Does he dream about her too? “And not to apologize for calling, oh, I don’t know, half a dozen times. Did you eat?”
Always the same questions, predictable and simple and nice.
“Leftover Chinese,” she says proudly, rattling a carton of egg rolls, though he probably can’t hear it. “From that place I told you about, on my way home? The Dragonfly?”
“I remember. What about water?”
Samira’s eyes flick guiltily to the Owala peeking out of her work bag, still half-full from the staff lounge that morning, and then to the glass of red wine tucked between her knees. “I do have a drink in front of me,” she allows, scrunching her nose as Jack laughs.
“You deserve it, honey. Let me guess: red, cheapest thing you could find at Target?”
Honey is new, but it slots into the pattern of their conversations effortlessly. She’s always cringed a little at pet names, but something about the way Jack says it feels natural. An extension of her own name, Samira and Dr. Mohan and honey interchangeable monikers, facets of herself that reflect the same face she sees in the mirror, spoken in his voice.
“Correct on both counts, Dr. Abbot.”
“Never failed a test, Mohan.”
“I find that hard to believe. Never once, in your whole life?” Samira tilts her head back, letting her eyes drift shut for just a moment.
It’s amazing, how quickly her nervous system regulates itself at the sound of Jack’s voice. And, of course, she knows that’s not really true; it’s a myth, something people tell themselves on the comedown of trauma. A way of fixing whatever’s been broken.
And Samira knows all about fixing. Knows about breaking, too.
Jack huffs out a laugh, and she can imagine this too. Maybe he’s sitting on his couch now, like her, or in one of those old man recliners they keep in the attending lounge, all cracked leather and worn cushions. She nearly asks him, but stops herself at the last minutes. It’s something she struggles with, this line in the sand they’ve drawn, how much is too much a dance she can’t quite memorize the steps to.
“I failed a spelling test in first grade,” he admits. “Spaniel. S-P-A-N-I-A-L. Swore off veterinary medicine right then and there.”
“My best friend growing up had a cocker spaniel,” she says, the memory coming into focus slowly, like it’s being drudged up through mud. “I think his name was— Cobie? Colby? Something like that.”
She leaves out the part about how that friendship faded when she and Ayesha started undergrad on opposite sides of the country. When Samira’s twice-weekly calls became monthly emails and then tapered off into nothing at all. Ayesha got married last month, and Samira saw it on Facebook. Eleven years of friendship reduced to a tagged post from a friend-of-a-friend. She drafted six comments and deleted them before settling for simply liking the post.
“Didn’t take you for a dog kind of girl.”
Samira scoffs. “I’m not. They’re cute, but way too messy. Before the cats, the only experience I had with pets was a fish that I kept alive for a respectable amount of time when I was seven. I gave it a very nice burial in our vegetable garden.”
“How did I know that was what you were gonna say?”
“Which part? The fish or the vegetable garden?”
“Both. The garden, though. It suits you.” His voice takes on that soft, feather-edged tone she’s trained herself not to read too much into (or, at least, she’s very good at lying to herself, because each sweetheart and honey makes her heart rate tachy.) “I can see you with a watering can and a tomato plant, easy. It’s a nice picture.”
“There were two tomato plants.” She corrects him softly, and this memory is clearer, not so much tugging at her consciousness as inserting itself with a near-imperceptible force, a shiver of water rippling across a still pond. “Appa planted them the year I was born. My mother still keeps up with it. The garden, I mean. You should see the sunflowers she grows in the summer— they’re easily twelve feet tall.”
“Oh, yeah? You’ll have to show me a photo sometime.”
She likes the way he says it. Imagines that he’s standing right in front of her, a rumble of syllables hitting low in his throat, and his eyes. Flecks of green that shine more brightly outside of the ED’s harsh fluorescent lighting, shifting beams of amber that cut through his irises like falling stars. She pushes the glass of wine away, glaring at it like it’s the reason her head goes fuzzy when Jack rasps out a laugh.
“What?”
“I can hear you thinking,” he says a little ruefully. “Those wheels are turning, Dr. Mohan. What’s on your mind?”
You, you, you, she wants to say.
“Just a little tired, I think,” she lies instead.
And maybe he can sense that, too. But he doesn’t push, always content to let her sort through her overactive mind like she’s cataloging a library. It’s comforting instead of suffocating, the type of companionable quiet she craves after a shift that lingers like an open wound, a reminder that she’ll get up in the morning and do it all again— they both will.
Because emergency medicine is like that. And you learn quickly how to arm yourself against it, to fortify your lungs and heart and accept that the job can swallow you whole, if you let it. Sometimes, Samira worries it already has. That she lives inside the stories her patients tell her, spinning out on memories and fragments of moments she’ll never experience. And God, isn’t it close enough that they meansomethingto someone?
Even if it’s not her life. Not her laughter, her love, her honey-sweetened nostalgia and you-had-to-be-theres and remember-whens. For a few minutes, a few hours, she gets to share in them. Until discharge, when they collect their belongings and step back into their lives, and Samira’s left standing by an empty bed, surrounded by ghosts.
So yes, maybe she craves some sort of companionship. But it’s something she’s only recently realized that she might want. Because the absence, the lack, isn’t really an absence at all; her townhouse rental is sparse but tastefully decorated with art on the walls from Etsy and a handful of throw pillows on the velvet green sofa she found for a steal on Facebook Marketplace after she moved to Pittsburgh. She socializes just enough at work that she doesn’t come off as unfriendly and participates a few times a week in the group chat Trinity started (aptly named the girls and whitaker ig). Everything about her life is neat and tidy, just enough to keep her head above water until she finishes her residency.
Not an absence, then, but space. Space for something to grow, something that she’s not quite brave enough to reach for yet.
“You still with me?” Jack asks, a knowing lilt to his voice.
Yes, she thinks. But give me just a little more time. I’m almost there.
Jack’s always been perceptive. Wordlessly dropping a mug of coffee with three sugars and a splash of milk in front of her at the intake board while she’s mid-yawn, putting air in her back left tire with a portable pump when he sees it looking a little flat and not-so-subtly threatening to come by and change it himself. A pair of gloves in her locked when she skids into the ED late, breathless and already bemoaning walking to her car at shift change, an extra protein bar slipped into her hand like a secret, an iced matcha from her favorite coffee shop when she works a double.
The sort of attention that she might bristle at from someone else. Think it patronizing, or overbearing. With Jack, though? It’s honest.
“I don’t even think he knows my name,” Victoria had complained earlier that week. She’d just come off a rotation on the night shift and was relieved it was over, practically skipping into work with a large coffee and sunglasses on her head. “No, I’m being serious! The entire time I worked with him I was hey, you.”
Samira had been half-listening, catching up on her charting during an unusual afternoon lull. “Really? I’ve always thought Dr. Abbot was good with that sort of thing. He’s the only one who pronounced my last name right the first year I was here.”
Victoria and Trinity looked at each other, then at her. There was something distinctly smug in Trinity’s smirk as she patted Samira’s shoulder. “Huh. Funny. Maybe just think about it for a little bit longer, Mohan,” she’d said, and it was only a touch condescending.
“You know you’re allowed to call me too, right?” Samira says quickly, too loud for the steady quiet that’s settled between them. Apollo and Juno, their small, tabby bodies twisted together in an armchair, blink at her sleepily. “I mean, I don’t want you to think that I see you as a therapist, or something. We’re friends.” Her voice lifts on the last word, making it sound like a question.
“Jesus, if you start thinking of me as a therapist, we’ve got bigger problems,” Jack replies, a grin she swears she can hear softening his words. “But yeah, I know. It’s hard to teach an old dogs new tricks.”
“You’re not old,” Samira interjects, indignant on his behalf. “Older, maybe. Bur not old.”
“Sweetheart, I remember when the Berlin Wall fell.”
His laugh reminds her of her childhood home. The good parts, the ones she wants to remember. Plucking tomatoes from the vine and biting into them, letting the juice run down her fingers. Sunflowers reaching towards the sky. The bedroom door clicking shut, her mother and father a heartbeat away down the hall. Warm, soft, hers.
“Thank you,” she says, then clears her throat. She feels bad for jumping around subjects, but it’s how her mind is working tonight, fitful stops and starts that Jack gamely follows. She thinks of Carmen and her daughter, of her father and the fact that she’s lived without him longer than with him. “For always picking up.”
Jack clears his throat. For a moment, where Samira wonders if she’s overstepped their delicate boundaries. And then: “I’m here as long as you want me to be.”
Later, after they’ve exhausted the details of her shift and the lo mein carton is empty, she falls asleep with her phone still balanced by her ear on the back of the sofa. There’s an intake of breath, a quiet, “Goodnight, Samira,” and a click.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
It dawns on Samira, sometime in mid-January, that she might be addicted to the sound of Jack Abbot’s voice. He seeks her out at shift change most days, and she’s so used to his habit of always being around that she forgets to think anything of it. Until Dana sidles up to her and murmurs, “When are you gonna put the poor boy out of his misery?” like Samira’s the one in control.
(Is she? Has that been the problem all along? That Jack’s been so obvious, so sure, but she’s taken her time on the ascent. A careful jog instead of a sprint.)
The calls get longer and more frequent, stretching out across the hours as she siphons off some of Jack’s innate steadiness, using it to ground herself in the midst of chaos. He still answers the phone the same way, still asks her if she’s eaten and how much water she’s had, but they fall into conversation effortlessly, picking up right where they left off in the few moments they’re able to steal at shift change.
In late winter she gets volunteered for a rotation on the night shift and learns very quickly she doesn’t mind being awake while the rest of the world sleeps. The atmosphere is different; Ellis and Shen don’t seem to mind if she spends extra time with her patients, and sometimes it’s quiet enough that she’s able to make some headway on her research.
Her mother worries about her sleep, about if she’s getting enough sunlight and (even if she won’t say it directly) human interaction. But then Samira mentions Jack and Amma goes quiet before letting out a small, noncommittal hum and saying, “Well, I’m certainly glad someone’s looking out for you.”
Samira rolls her eyes even as her phone lights up with a message from Jack. It’s a photo of a package of plush mice, the words Tell Juno and Apollo I’m sorry for stealing their mom in the following text. What she wants to say is, Don’t be sorry. Working with you is my favorite part of the day.
They’ll love you forever, she replies instead, humming as Amma launches into a story about her cousin’s engagement (he’s a banker and has three sisters, and would Samira like her to ask if he has any single friends?). She almost asks Jack if he’d like to come over and present his offerings himself. She’s not even sure if Apollo and Juno have ever met a man—she’s certainly not bringing any home—but if anyone could win them over, it’d be Jack. And they’re friends, aren’t they? Friends see each other outside of work.
But then her mother is asking when she’s coming home to visit, and the delicate touch her response requires is not unlike the precision she needs to execute a lateral canthotomy.
“I’m a senior resident, Amma. Once I finish my residency, I’ll have some more time. No, I know, but maybe next summer…”
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Samira arrives at her next shift to find a large, hot maple latte and a crinkling bag of toy mice waiting for her at the charge desk. Dana, in the middle of hand-off with Lena, fights to hold back a smile. “Whatever you two get up to in your private time is none of my business,” she says, gesturing to the mice. “But I think I saw Mr. Meow Mix heading for the roof.”
“Thanks, I think.” Ignoring Lena’s waggling brows, Samira picks up the coffee and makes a beeline for the stairwell before she can second-guess herself.
“While you’re at it, remind him I’m not his UPS guy!” Dana calls after her.
The rule-follower in Samira, the one who never snuck out of the house in high school and had her first sip of alcohol at twenty one, cringes a little as she pushes through the double doors marked ROOF ACCESS - NO ENTRY. She knows for a fact McKay and Langdon sneak up here to smoke, and Trinity swears she overheard that some of the nurses have a case of wine stashed somewhere for post-shift debriefs. And then there’s Jack.
Jack, who glances over his shoulder at the low creak of the door and looks unsurprised to see her there, hovering in the doorway. “Dana rat me out?”
He clambers back over the railing, though she senses it’s more for her benefit than his own. He seems comfortable up here, loose in a way he isn’t during their shifts together. Still strong, still capable, but there’s a gentleness to the slope of his shoulders, the way he holds himself.
His cheeks are pink from the cold, twin to the vibrant sunset splashed across the sky. The wind tugs strands of her curls free from her claw clip, whipping around her face as Jack leans against the railing, his arms crossed. Eyebrow cocked, mouth set in a half-grin. He’s waiting for her to talk, but Samira didn’t come up here with a plan.
She saw the coffee and the mice and something in her chest broke open, and her only thought was that she just needed to see him. Proof of this person who cares for her in a half-dozen maddeningly thoughtful ways every day. Who answers her calls regardless of the hour, who treats her not like she’s made of glass or an impenetrable steel but something softer, an innate warmth woven into the way he says her name. Dr. Mohan or Samira, it’s the same, reverent vowels and holy consonants that all add up to a truth she’s helpless to avoid.
For all of her careful planning, her insistence that the rest of her life can wait (until the end of residency, until she completes her fellowship, until she’s secured an attending position). She sees them for what they are now: excuses, walls built up to protect her from the hurt that’s flown through her bloodstream since she was thirteen years old. Channeling her capacity for love into empathy for her patients, not realizing it’s possible—it’s vital—to have both.
And against the odds, Jack’s managed to blow past every obstacle. To become someone she wants to be soft with.
“I… I wanted to see you,” she says. Close to the full truth, but it’s too heavy for the hour, for the heartache that’s waiting for them on the ED floor. She tries again: “Were you going for subtle? Because I’m pretty sure half the ED’s claimed a corner up here.” Teasing this time, pushing past the lump in her throat.
That half-smile still lingers on Jack’s face, lightening the shadows in his eyes. “Not you though, right? First time caller?”
“How could you tell?” She picks her way across the roof, side-stepping a chipped coffee mug filled with cigarette ash.
Jack waits until she’s right next to him to speak, adjusting slightly to shield her from the worst of the wind. She tilts her head to meet his gaze, squinting against the last rays of sunlight. Wondering if he can see it in her eyes that she’s still holding back. “Your face gave it away. I promise I won’t jump before a shift; that’d just be mean.”
She shouldn’t laugh at that, but she does anyway. Gallows humor is part of the job. Bumping her her shoulder against Jack’s, Samira lingers in his space a moment longer than strictly necessary. “I would prefer you didn’t at all, actually.”
There’s a silence that stretches on and on. She considers breaking it, but something in Jack’s eyes stops her. It’s a tactic she’s used countless times on a patient when she can tell they’re working up to a confession. Admitting to smoking a joint before they came in, the fall down the stairs that wasn’t actually a fall down the stairs. Their arms brush, her windbreaker meeting the bare skin of his arm.
“Not planning on it, sweetheart,” he says finally. His voice is rougher. “Hell, five years ago? Two? I might’ve had a different answer. But not now.”
He doesn’t need to spell it out. A part of her doesn’t want him to. She knows bits and pieces of his story, picked up in off-hand remarks and through the ever-churning rumor mill, a few details gleaned from their own quiet conversations in the early hours of the morning. Enough to know that the grief that sometimes squeezes her so tightly that she can’t breathe visits him, too.
She hesitates, then, “What changed?” Pressing him, like a thumb held to the purple-blue of a bruise, letting the discomfort swell into a sharp pain that tugs at her ribcage.
“Oh, I can think of a few things.” Jack’s hand stops fiddling with the stethoscope already slung around his neck and brings it up to her cheek.
He moves slowly, giving her time to change the tenor of the conversation, to angle her body away from his, so close now that she can count the exact number of freckles dusted across his nose. Sixteen. And Samira feels like she could pitch over the edge of the roof, on the precipice of no return. Ready, for maybe the first time in her life, to jump. Finally, he pushes a loose curl behind her ear. It’s a lesson in futility; when the next gust of wind tears across the roof she feels another strand escape her clip. Neither of them try to fix it.
Because there’s a moment before a kiss when it feels like the entire earth could fall away, and you wouldn’t even notice. Samira hasn’t had many of them—too busy, too tired, too everything—but she remembers all the steps. How Jack’s calloused palm curves across her cheekbone, how warm his skin is against her wind-chapped face. Her own hand finds his arm, fingertips seeking shelter beneath the sleeve of his scrub top. She parts her lips to say something, but she’s not sure what. His name, a simple please?
But before she can make up her mind there’s a loud bang, the roof access door flying open and ricocheting off the wall, shattering the moment.
“Uh, Dana sent me to find you,” Whitaker starts, looking somewhere slightly above both of their heads like he’s caught them in the middle of something illicit. A surgical gown hangs halfway from his arms already. “There’s a double trauma about ten minutes out.”
It’s maybe the first time in her professional life that that she wishes it would all stop. The shrieking wails of the ambulance sirens cut off midstream, the traumas hovering by the doors and gloves and gowns tucked neatly in their bins. Another minute, and she might have finally prodded at the truth that’s swollen into something unforgiving between them. It’s still there, in Jack’s stiffened shoulders and her own locked knees. Even Whitaker, still carefully avoiding her gaze as color blooms on the high points of his cheeks, seems to feel it.
Jack moves first, gently untangling her from his side, the way she’s pressed herself further into him almost unconsciously, her shoulder fitting neatly beneath the arm he had braced on the railing. Maybe a little illicit, then. Closer to a mess of HR forms than a friendly bond between an attending and senior resident.
“Got any more information than that, kid?” Jack says gruffly, his hand finding the dip between Samira’s shoulder blades as they cross the roof together.
“Whitaker,” Samira murmurs, realizing that Victoria might have been onto something after all. She presses her lips together in an effort not to smile as he shrugs, clearly not concerned with filing that information away.
Jack knew her name immediately, she recalls. Even corrected Dr. Bellinger, a senior resident when she was an R1, who had an annoying habit of calling her Samila and waving it off with a laugh each time she corrected him.
Whitaker rocks on his heels. “Collision between an electric scooter and a pedestrian. Guy on the scooter hit a street lamp and the pedestrian hit the pavement. Possible skull fracture, maybe some internal damage. We don’t know if the scooter driver was impaired.”
“Scooterist,” Samira corrects, stooping over to pick up the coffee mug. She wrinkles her nose at the waft of stale cigarette smoke that comes with it. “It sounds made-up, but it’s a real word.”
Jack pulls the mug from her hand before she can blink. “I’ll tell Langdon to clean up after himself next time,” he says, and she’s not imagining it, the way his thumb lingers on the inside of her wrist. “Whitaker, round up the med students and meet us at Trauma One.”
She’ll apologize to Whitaker later, if he’ll ever look her in the her eye again. Continue this conversation with Jack. Stand on her toes and finish what they’ve started up here, against the Pittsburgh skyline.
All of it, later.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
The ER gives them all a warped sense of time, days sliding by as they live and die by the weekly schedules, trading darkness for daylight at shift change and soaking up days off like they’re the rare bursts of sunshine punching through the bleakness of the end of winter in Pittsburgh. Samira doesn’t have a chance to talk to Jack— not about the almost-something on the roof, at least.
They talk about plenty of other things. Like the fact that Juno has adopted one of the mice from the pack Jack bought and carries it from room to room like a security blanket (she sends photos, and Jack is quick to point out that one of doors on her kitchen cabinets is hanging off it’s hinges. He’ll stop by and fix it soon, he says). Or Robby’s quiet trip to Portland when he takes a rare long weekend to “catch up on some things (she’s not supposed to know about this one, but Jack’s exasperated stubborn idiots when she reads off the schedule tips her off). It only takes a little bit of cajoling for the whole story to spill out.
Mostly, though, they talk about her research. She has a complete draft in-hand by early March and spends hours agonizing over the abstract, struggling to condense what has been years’ worth of time and energy. Jack is on FaceTime when she presses send on her first submission, unfazed by the tears that gum up her throat as she wonders aloud whether this might change the outcome for another young girl’s father. If a practitioner might stop in their tracks and remember her carefully compiled statistics and researched pedagogy and order another test, or simply listen to a patient who insists that something’s wrong.
Jack is quiet for a long moment, face unreadable through the pixelated screen. “You know, I don’t know how much I believe in God, or Heaven, or any of that shit. But I sure as hell believe in you, Samira.”
It might just be the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever said to her.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Samira has a good shift, by all accounts. Only one major trauma that was a little touch and go for a while—a forearm degloving on a construction site—but they were able to stabilize and send him up to the OR with high expectations of recovery. The handful of others that rolled in—a three-car MVC, two unrelated GSWs—were brutal but ultimately manageable. The kind of day that even allowed Samira ten minutes to take a lunch (a slightly wilted, very processed salad, but it still counted).
Traffic is minimal, and there’s a new episode of her favorite medical podcast to keep her company as rain beats down on the windshield. And the forecast for Saturday, her day off, is perfect— high of mid-60s and sunny. A Pittsburgh false spring, but she’ll take it.
She must have been feeling too optimistic, her steps a little too buoyant even as the rain soaked through her jacket. The universe has to balance the scales, somehow. Take something else from her (even though she’d argue in front of a judge and jury that surely she’s given enough— isn’t her whole life about giving?) She’s usually so good about holding her breath, diving in with her eyes wide open, doing what needs to be done with an analog precision that earns her the highest patient satisfaction scores at PTMC.
It’s her own fault, really, for not seeing the other shoe waiting to drop.
The crunch of glass reaches Samira’s ears first. Hesitating on the doorstep, searching blindly through her bag for the loose key she swears she’s going to put on a ring soon. Her eyes track upwards, over the small window beside her front door and its empty planter box (she swears she’s going to do something about this, too— maybe in the spring).
And that’s when she sees it: the round globe covering her porch light, shattered into jagged pieces, most of which are being ground to glittering dust under her feet.
She runs through the possibilities like she’s making a differential diagnosis: a stray ball from one of the neighborhood kids; a strong gust of wind; a shitty landlord special that finally gave out. And then she sees a handful of deep gouge marks at the edge of the doorframe, like someone tried to pry it open. A screwdriver, maybe. Or a crowbar.
Samira feels like she’s floating outside of her body as she catalogs the damage. Untethered from reality, mind as blank as it during her R2 year, when she looked up from a gaping chest cavity and saw two med students watching, waiting for her to tell them what to do. At least she recovered quickly, then. Sent one off for Robby and had the other glove up.
Now, though, Samira simply stares at the ugly gashes. They can’t be sutured or glued. She can’t pull up a chair and take a history of this door, with its peeling paint and tarnished hardware. She’s a doctor without a patient, without a fucking clue.
And the thing is, she’s handled so much worse on her own. Standing by her father’s bedside as the machine flatlined, then again at his graveside. Four years of undergrad and four more of med school, a near-complete residency under her belt. COVID. One of the worst mass-casualty incidents in Pittsburgh’s history. Maybe she’s not always been good at coping, but she’s certainly good enough that a steely, deep breath should center her again.
But it doesn’t.
Later, she won’t remember digging her phone out of her bag. Making the decision to call the last number in her phone’s log— the only number, but she won’t let herself think about how pitiful that is right now. And fuck, she was supposed to call her mom this week. Her hands are shaking so badly she nearly hangs up twice, waiting for those two familiar rings.
“Hey there, Dr. Mohan,” Jack says, so warmly that a few rogue tears prick at the corners of her eyes, mixing with the rain dripping from her lashes. She doesn’t bother wiping them away. “You’re early. Robby cut you loose or something?”
“Jack, I—”
She can’t get the words out. Reaches for them and finding nothing. Fucking useless.
What is she supposed to say? Something bad but also not terrible happened, and you’re the only person I could call. Sometimes I can’t catch my breath from how enormous life is and how small I am, but you make it all feel a little more balanced. I can’t be brave, or strong, or good right now, but you can. You always are.
She’s never put much stock in setting down roots, sure that her path diverges from Pittsburgh sooner than later, but this old, halfway-lived in house is hers. And now it’s been violated. Tainted.
Jack curses under his breath, a string of words she’s suddenly too exhausted to unravel. “Samira, I need you to breathe,” there’s an air of forced calm in his voice, fingertips pressed to a bleeding wound. An ignition turns over and purrs to life, tires squeal on pavement. “Are you at the hospital or home? Either way, I’m coming, Samira. Tell me what happened. Can you do that, honey?”
“Home. I think someone tried to break in,” she says, sucking in a deep lungful of cool, wet air. It rushes to her head, clearing a little bit of the haze from her thoughts. “I just got here. The outside light is shattered, and the door looks like someone tried to force it open. I— I don’t know what to do.”
“You did the right thing, calling me,” he says soothingly. “Give me ten minutes, sweetheart. I’m almost to you. You’re outside, right? Just wait right there for me.”
The math isn’t hard to do. He lives a solid fifteen minutes away in the not-quite-suburbs, a nice neighborhood and a house that he once quietly admitted is full of old ghosts. And that’s without traffic and the added hazard of water on the roads. Horrible images of him running a stop sign or a red light and the crunch of metal on metal flood her mind, but Jack keeps up a steady stream of nonsensical chatter as the minutes tick by.
“Oh my god, the cats,” she chokes out, interrupting a bit of gossip Jack heard about Trinity arriving to work in Parker’s jeep last week. “What if—?”
“Don’t go there, Samira,” he warns gently. She swears she can hear the accelerator kick up another notch. “If they’re anything like their mom, they’re smart. Probably high-tailed it under the bed as soon as they heard something.”
And then his familiar truck whips into the parking lot and Jack is in front of her before she can blink, a hand reaching up to briefly cup her cheek as he looks her over. Hazel eyes scan her from head to toe, a thumb presses against the inside of her wrist to check her pulse. A physician’s touch, Sergeant Jack Abbot with his ramrod straight posture and discerning eyes that could cut through flesh and bone as easily as the blade of a scalpel.
“You’re here,” she breathes. The fingers on her wrist spasm. Even without touching him, Samira can tell a little bit of tension leaves his shoulders.
Jack opens his mouth, then closes it again. Finally: “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, Samira, but I’m always gonna answer when you call.”
She could cry some more. Or kiss him. Ask him how long he’s been waiting, ever so patient, for her to realize this fact that he makes sound so small, so ordinary. A precious, careful kind of care she doesn’t know how to handle, stumbling around on the uncertain legs of a gangly calf.
“I have. I’m starting to.”
Jack nods, just a shallow dip of his head, but not before she catches the warmth pooling in his gaze. The kind that seems to find her in every crowded room, every in-between moment and unwritten space.
“Stay right here,” he instructs, voice a little more gruff than it was before. “Let me check things out, and then we’re calling the police.”
Samira waits while Jack takes a lap around the building, checking each of the ground-level windows and the back door. It’s not long at all before he’s joining her back on the tiny slab of concrete that passes for a porch, t-shirt plastered to his skin and water dripping from his salt and pepper curls. And when he finally, finally pulls her to his chest she takes her first deep, stuttering breath in what feels like hours. She’s burning in all of the places he’s touching her, smoothing her hair, cupping the back of her neck, tracing the shell of her ear.
“Everything’s locked up tight. They must’ve gotten spoiled before getting inside. You’re okay, honey,” Jack murmurs, tightening his hold on her, like he’s trying to convince both of them it’s true. Like he spent the short drive over playing out worst-case scenarios, and can’t quite convince himself that she’s standing in front of him, unharmed.
“No police,” Samira whispers, lips brushing his throat. An accident, she thinks. He tenses like he’s going to argue with her. “Just— just stay. Please, Jack.”
The first time she’s ever said his name aloud, and she can’t even see the look on Jack’s face as the word lands. But if there’s a moment for it, it’s now, standing in the pouring rain with his arms wound tightly around her waist, adrenaline sharpening her mind so she can recognize how much it matters, that he dropped everything and rushed to her side when she needed him. That no part of her doubted he would. That he’s the only person she wants by her side— here, in this moment, and all the ones that come after.
“I’m changing the locks tomorrow. And buying you a security system.” Jack’s tone brokers no argument. Not that Samira’s in any headspace to offer one; it feels nice, allowing him to take care of this.
“I’ll pay for it,” she counters. Dredges up enough energy to skim her nose across his throat, nearly smiling in spite of everything as he swallows hard. “It’s my stupid house.”
Jack lets out a huff and shakes his head. She feels it against her shoulder, his chin jutting into the curve of her neck. “Can’t let you do that, Samira. I get a hell of a discount at Home Depot.”
He matches her tone, leaning into the teasing that’s become as crucial to the fabric of their relationship as the seamless way they work together in a trauma room. Always seeming to know exactly what she needs before she can ask for it, passing over a ten blade or loosening some of the tension pulling at her chest with a joke and half-grin.
Deftly, he extracts himself from her just enough to tug the house key from her closed fist. She doesn’t remember grabbing it, but her palm stings where the teeth dug into the callous-bitten skin. Jack shoulders the door open, and Apollo and Juno crowd around them as Jack ushers Samira inside, one hand still firmly holding her waist.
“There you are,” Samira coos, bending over and scratching both cats behind the ears. Relief pools in her stomach, making her feel lightheaded. “I brought my— a friend.”
“A friend, huh?” Jack crouches beside her, grunting a little. He holds out a flattened palm, letting Apollo and Juno sniff at him. “Nice to meet you,” he says to each cat in turn, a deadpan expression on his face.
He’s doing it to try and draw a smile from her. A quick glance out of the corner of his eye, checking to see if he’s got her attention like a little boy on the playground. It’s so endearing her chest tightens again, this time with pleasure instead of pain.
“Is it a senior discount?” Samira asks innocently. Jack’s brow furrows. “At Home Depot, I mean. I just assumed.”
He grins, a raspy chuckle escaping him. “Cute.”
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Jack fits into her home (because that’s what it is, she realizes— a home. Roots she can’t ignore, nurtured with every late-night phone call, each post-shift beer in the park) easily, in a way that should maybe unnerve her. But it’s like he’s supposed to be here, standing broad-shouldered and dripping rainwater against the flat beige paint and the slightly-crooked art she’d hung with push pins a week after moving in. Generic, plain prints that she had every intention of donating once she moved back to New Jersey. Like her, they’re stubborn. Still sticking around, all these months and years later.
“Nice place.” He takes off his shoes by the door before she can ask, dropping his black backpack in the same spot.
He’s never been inside before. Once, when her trusty Prius was in the shop, he’d given her a ride home, but she was too nervous to invite him in, fidgeting with her hands and looking anywhere but his eyes as he wished her a good night in that low, gravely voice that’s become, almost without her noticing, a lifeline.
Now, Samira watches him take in the small, sparse living room, a strange sort of anxiety twisting her stomach. His eyes linger on the lone photograph framed in silver on her coffee table. Appa and Amma on their wedding day, exactly two years before she was born. It’s a copy of the original, the one her mother keeps in a leather-bound photo album and, Samira’s fairly certain, hasn’t touched in years.
Sometimes, she thinks this is where the friction started. She wanted to remember Appa with each beat of her heart, carry his voice through her veins. Pour over the photographs until she’d memorized each wrinkle on his smiling face, each crease carved into his palm. Amma couldn’t. So she let his photographs—let their life—collect dust on a shelf.
Samira clears her throat. “My parents,” she says unnecessarily. “I haven’t gotten around to putting anything else out.”
Jack is kind enough to let her get away with the lie.
“You favor him,” he says quietly. “You were a teenager, right? When he died.”
“Sixteen years ago. I was thirteen,” she says.
It’s comforting to hear it put in plain terms. Yes, her father died. Yes, it was awful. She got so sick of people dancing around it after the fact, phrases like he’s no longer with us and he’s in a better place now setting her teeth on edge. Her father died because of doctor’s oversight and it nearly fucking killed her. Jack, who has seen more tragedy than anyone she’s ever known, meets her gaze unflinchingly.
He nods once. Doesn’t offer any platitudes. Just keeps seeing her with raw, unfiltered honesty. The kind that lets her be the worst versions of herself, waspish after a hard shift, breaking down over the phone.
“You’d have liked him,” she adds. It’d be too much for someone else, a level of intimacy that feels unprompted. Unearned. With Jack, though, it’s simply the truth.
Her father’s youngest sister, Disha, spent most of Samira’s childhood flitting in and out of relationships. Free-spirited, Appa called her. Not unlike you, my Mira. Often, she’d call Appa for advice, voice hoarse with tears, fresh off another breakup. He used words like kind, dependable, generous, steady. A good man.
Jack picks up the frame, studying it. “Yeah? I think so, too.”
A good manwho’s spent months—years—learning her from the inside out. She studies him, tracing a line from the slope of his nose to the bulk of his bicep, the veins in his forearms and the freckles on his hands. His hands. Samira’s breath catches. His left ring finger is bare. A sliver of skin paler at the knuckle.
“Do you—” Her voice is reedy, an octave too high and harsh. She tries again. “Do you want something to drink?”
It feels simplest to start there. A glass of water in her kitchen, and then all the rest.
Even though it was her idea, Jack is the one to tug her forward, crossing the threshold into the galley kitchen and gently pushing her into one of the rickety IKEA chairs she hauled with her from her New Jersey apartment. She’s looking at him through eyes that still aren’t quite her own, quietly directing him towards the cabinet where she keeps her dishes. He swipes two glasses and fills them from the Brita, sitting one in front of her with a pointed look. Samira obeys, mind still buzzing, and drinks until the glass is empty. Jack pushes the second one across the table wordlessly.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t handle that well.”
It’s the first string of truly coherent sentences she’s threaded together since he arrived. Now that the adrenaline has burned off, shame burrows in her stomach, pressing down on her windpipe. Rainwater drips to the floor.
“You asked for help, Samira. Nothing wrong with that.”
Jack reaches across the table slowly, like he’s approaching a wounded animal. His hand covers hers, freckled and tan. She knows from experience where, exactly, that tan ends. A bullet graze, an empty exam room. An eloped patient, a broken healthcare system. I’ll pay for it, said so easily, without hesitation. She’d been blind to it still. Him. But July Fourth is a lifetime ago, and between it stands a dozen more moments just like that one, where she’d needed someone to see her and Jack had been there, already looking, gaze steady.
“Thank you,” she says, hoping it conveys even a fraction of what she needs it to. He squeezes her hand once, twice.
“Of course.” Sandpaper again. Jack clears his throat and stands, a screech of plastic on linoleum that makes her flinch involuntarily. “Come on, honey. You need a hot shower and dry clothes.”
Nothing wrong with that. Some of the tension in her shoulders eases. Again she follows his lead, through the living room and up the narrow stairs, avoiding tripping over Apollo and Juno as they fly past them, blurs of orange and black against the carpet. The second floor is really just her bedroom, with a bathroom no larger than one of the ED’s supply closets sectioned off opposite the stairs. It’s as sparse as the rest of the townhouse, but at least she has a bed frame (only for the last year— Cassie was getting rid of one, and it seemed convenient enough to be worth the headache of navigating it up the stairs).
“You can—”
“I’ll just—”
Jack looks a little flustered, back pressed to the wall at the top of the stairs. Samira tries again. “You can come in. I mean—it’s a mess, so maybe try to ignore that, but the bed’s clear,” she pauses, a touch of mortification bleeding through the numbness still clinging to her thoughts. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots a pale blue bra hanging out of the dresser. “No that I’m asking you to bed, if you want to sit—”
Jack laughs, a low, pleasant sound that rumbles through her own chest. It settles something in her. Shakes the last of the cobwebs from her head. “Tempting, but I’ll wait for you downstairs,” he says, and she swears his eyes flick towards the dresser. “These two can keep me company.”
Her traitorous cats are circling Jack, and he leans down to scoop up Apollo, settling him against his chest as he heads for the stairs. Samira swears something inside her explodes. Incinerates. Turns to molten lava as Jack’s heavy tread grows fainter, replaced by the clink of glassware and running water. Doing the dishes, she assumes, thinking guiltily of the soggy bowl of cereal she’d left in the sink that morning.
But it’s nice, having someone else here as she digs through the pile of laundry she’s been meaning to fold for a week, searching for a t-shirt that isn’t ripped or covered in old stains. She settles on an old, faded tee from her med school days, the university’s logo printed in peeling letters on the front, and a pair of flannel shorts that pass the could I wear these in front of Robby and not want to disappear off the face of the planet test. A plain pair of black underwear, and—
Samira hesitates in front of the dresser, stealing a glance look towards the stairs. Then, before she loses her nerve, she snatches up the blue bra. It’s nothing special, but it’s the prettiest one she owns. A safety measure, she tells herself as she scrubs the last of the day from her skin. A precaution, just in case… But she doesn’t—can’t—finish the thought.
Jack is sitting on the sofa, thumbing through a medical journal with Apollo and Juno curled against his side. He’s changed clothes, too; a navy t-shirt replacing the black and jeans swapped for a pair of dark grey sweatpants. A flush that has nothing to do with the brutally hot shower she just took slowly spreads across her cheeks.
“You’ve already read that one,” she says, leaning over the back of the sofa, her hair falling forward and brushing Jack’s cheek. “Left it in my locker last week.”
“I know,” he murmurs. Tilts his head back just far enough so that their eyes meet. “Not with your notes, though. Brilliant work as always, Dr. Mohan.”
Samira blushes further at the praise, clearing her throat and putting some distance between them before she does something stupid, like press her lips to one of the freckles high on his cheekbone. She perches on the edge of the coffee table and stretches out her legs, feeling the weight of a twelve hour shift and everything that came after settling heavily on her.
“You don’t have to stay and babysit me all night,” she says, even though the thought of trying to sleep here, alone, already seems impossible. “It’s your day off. I’m sure this isn’t how you expected to spend it.”
Jack carefully marks his place and sets the journal aside. Leans forward, elbows braced on his knees, studying her like he’s got all the time in the world. And he just might, because she feels frozen beneath his gaze, barely breathing as he shakes his head. Exhales slowly. “My plans for tonight were nonexistent, Samira. I can go, if—”
“No, I— I want you to stay,” she blurts out, Jack’s eyebrows raising in surprise. “You can take the bed. I’ll sleep out here. I just— I don’t want to be alone just yet.”
It feels a little bit like stripping herself bare. She’s never been good at vulnerability, admitting need too close to admitting fault. Because her mother needs her (or used to), and so do her patients (only temporarily), and it’s taken seventeen years for Samira to realize that she didn’t just trade a father’s love for a lifetime of grief in that hospital room. That at thirteen she’d started shutting doors that had barely begun to open, nearly two decades’ worth of friendship and community and love boarded up with the same smooth wood and nails that built her father’s coffin.
Jack is quiet, studying her, reading every bit of emotion that flits across her face like she’s a book he’s memorized every page of. A hand hovers just short of her knee, letting her decide whether or not she wants to close the gap. Always giving her a choice. Samira shifts, and Jack’s fingertips brush her kneecap. Warm, calloused, an electric current coursing through her bloodstream.
“Of course I’ll stay,” he says lowly, with all the certainty of a foregone conclusion. His gaze flicks down to her bare legs, just long enough for a delightful red flush to start creeping up his neck. “But you just went through a traumatic event, and you’re coming off a twelve hour shift. You’re sleeping in your own bed. Doctor’s orders.”
“It’ll kill your back.”
“Not something a Naproxen and a heating pad can’t fix.”
“The cats will be on top of you all night,” she tries again.
“The more the merrier,” Jack counters, deadpan, and then winces when he realizes how it sounds.
Samira bites back a smile, her protests dying on her lips. “You’re impossible.”
“I’ve got a stubborn streak, honey. Same as you.” She catches a hint of Virginian drawl in Jack’s voice, a smooth glide over the word honey that’s sticky-sweet on the back of her tongue. He stands, stretching his arms above his head, his t-shirt riding up and exposing a sliver of skin that Samira has a hard time dragging her eyes away from. “Now, where do you keep the extra sheets?”
Samira’s house is pitifully ill-equipped for guests.
Her mother visits a handful of times a year, usually opting to stay in a hotel because of how unpredictable Samira’s hours can be. They haven’t lived in the same house since she turned eighteen, and she’s not quite sure they’d know how to orbit each other. Sometimes, she wonders if any of her mother’s habits from her childhood have held over; if she still prefers her first cup of coffee black, or she still insist on getting dressed before coming downstairs, even on the weekends.
She digs up a clean (and only a little dusty) set of sheets printed with rows of faded Christmas trees and pulls a sage green throw blanket from the end of her bed. The lumpy pillow is also hers, and Jack laughs off her really, I keep meaning to replace them with a I saw combat, Samira, this is nothing.
She flutters around uselessly while Jack carefully tucks the sheet beneath the sofa cushions, pulling the edges taut and smoothing it against the arms. His pillow is cradled against her chest until she realizes how strange that must look, and she nearly trips over the corner of the coffee table in her haste to throw it at the sofa.
Eventually, they end up right back where they started. Jack on the sofa, and Samira on the coffee table table. They’ve both leaned in closer, knees interlocked like puzzle pieces. There’s a heat in Samira’s belly, and color in her cheeks. She can’t remember the last time she felt like this— wanting someone so badly she ached. She could list a hundred reasons why it’s a bad idea. The power structure, their age difference, the fact that the next year of her life is a gigantic question mark.
Funnily enough, she doesn’t seem to care all that much anymore. Selfishness looks like the pink of Jack’s mouth, widened hazel eyes and dark, dilated pupils. It feels like fingers pressing against her thighs, palms flat on her knees, steadying them both as Samira finally finds the words that have evaded her for so long. Her lips part, a confession dancing on the tip of her tongue, and then—
Her stomach grumbles. Loudly.
She turns her head at the last minute, groaning into Jack’s shoulder as a chuckle reverberates through his body, curling around her neck. Even through her embarrassment, she finds a quiet thrill in it. Being this close without sterile gloves or scrubs between them, touching him just because she wants to. She presses a small, secretive kiss to the underside of his jaw.
“You keep that up, and I’m not gonna be able to be a gentleman about this,” Jack mutters, flustered, even as his grip on her legs tightens. It’s her turn to laugh, drawing back to take in the flush that spreads all the way to the tips of his ears. “I’m buying us dinner.”
“I can’t let you—”
“I’ve seen the inside of your fridge, Mohan. You’ve got two shriveled up limes and a handful of condiments to your name,” he says. Adds, in a half-hearted grumble, “Should’ve just let me put my card on your phone last year.”
Samira’s teeth sink into her bottom lip. Another piece of July 4th that sticks with her, one of the only bright spots in a day that was bookended by misery. Jack, leaning over her shoulder, punching Orlando Diaz’s address into the Uber app. He’d smelled like sweat and antiseptic and gunpowder, an arm bracketed beside her on the desk, biceps corded in muscle beneath the sleeves of his t-shirt. She’d been exhausted. Fighting with her mother, warding off a panic attack that would pull her out of commission later in the afternoon. But Jack had been there, steady, solid. Bumping her shoulder with his own before he’d gone off to find Robby, eyes snapping up to her face when she’d half turned, letting her fingers trail along his arm.
He’d tried to convince her to let him use her phone. Said come on, Mohan, I like to be useful in that way that sounded only halfway like a joke. She’d been tempted to let him. Could see that he really meant it, that he’d be thrilled to find a charge on his bank statement for her favorite brand of crunchy peanut butter or a variety pack of protein bars.
“It seems like I’m always on the losing side of an argument with you,” Samira says lightly, even as a real flicker of uncertainty creeps back into her mind. “I don’t want you to think I’m…”
“Using me?” Jack supplies, brow quirked as she nods, cringing a little. “Samira, you’re maybe the most capable person I’ve ever met. I know you don’t need someone to coddle you. But,” he pauses, seemingly searching for the right words. “If you’ll let me, I’d like to help carry the load sometimes.”
She wants to accept it at face value. Pull her bleeding heart from her chest and let Jack hold it for a while. Trusting that he’ll keep it safe. That he’ll give it back if she asks him to (and a little afraid that day won’t come. That she’ll let him have it forever).
So she asks him a question. “What are you getting out of this?” Her voice is smaller than she’d like it to be. A self-conscious, strained laugh follows. “I’m kind of a mess, Jack.”
Jack looks at her. Really looks at her, like he can see through every lie she’s ever told herself. The pieces of her that have been twisted into knots, some old and frayed, others still pulled taut. Put there by PittFest, by every patient she’s lost before and after that day. His gaze is a still lake. A sunflower swaying in the breeze. The ripe skin of a tomato pierced by her fingertips.
“I wasn’t looking for anything,” Jack says. Slowly, emphasis on each word. “I’ve spent years in the dark. Sometimes believing the medicine is the only thing keeping me going, sometimes thinking that it’s gonna kill me someday. I was doing okay, before I met you. Getting by. And then you walked through those doors on your first day and it was like—” he chokes out a laugh, eyes glassy. “It was like I finally fuckin’ woke up. To sunshine. To you. I never expected you, Samira.”
Me either, she thinks. Not any of it. Not Jack snapping on a pair of gloves and calling out Mohan, you’re with me over his shoulder without breaking stride. Holding the door to trauma one open with his forearm, letting her duck beneath him. It was early in her intern year, but Slo-Mo was already a thorn buried in her side. Never on the night shift, though. Jack made her feel capable. Trusted her in a way that, in turn, helped Samira trust herself. It was easy to write off her infatuation, to privately insist she’d never noticed the slight reddish cast to his hair, or the way he tilted his head ever so slightly to the left as he worked through a difficult differential.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Her father’s death, her mother remarrying, a temporary stint in Pittsburgh that’s starting to shimmer like it just might be the rest of her life.
“I’m not any good at this,” she warns. A half-smile teases the edge of her lips. Jack’s gaze flits to her mouth. “This… needing people thing. You’ll have to help me out.”
“Of course,” Jack says. Pushing a strand of damp hair behind her ear, pressing his thumb to her cheekbone.
“I’m probably going to mess up,” she breathes. Scooting forward, knees bumping against the inside of his thighs. “Bottle up my feelings. Not tell you when I’m hurting. It might be complicated.”
“I like complicated.” He tracks her every movement. Widens his stance to give her more space. Rubs circles on the small of her back.
“Good,” Samira says. “Because I think you’re my favorite person in the world.”
And that’s all the warning she gives Jack before she throws her arms around his neck and kisses him hard. A little too enthusiastically, maybe. Their teeth clack together, she nearly loses her balance and slides off the coffee table. It’s messy and too short, because Samira had been holding her breath before she leaned in, her lungs screaming by the time she draws back, panting a little.
It’s also the best kiss of her life.
Until the next one, which Jack initiates by pulling her bodily into his lap, fingers running up and down her spine like he’s trying to memorize its exact curvature. With each swipe of his tongue she sinks a little deeper, sliding her fingers through his hair just because she can. Because Jack Abbot is kissing her, and she’s not afraid of what comes next.
They’ll break apart, breathless and laughing. Jack will order food—too much of it—and they’ll eat side-by-side on her sofa. She’ll lead him upstairs. He’ll lean his prosthetic against the foot of her bed. She’ll take off her shirt, and his eyes will drag over her slowly, so slowly, heat and hunger in them as they catch on the pale blue bra. She’ll fall apart gasping his name, and he’ll groan hers into her throat.
And then he’ll spend the night. Not on the couch, but in her bed. They’ll go out for breakfast, and then back to work. It will be the same life Samira’s already known, but bigger. Brighter.
She interlocks her fingers with Jack’s, pressing them right over his heart. Feels it beat steadily against her skin. She's more than unafraid; she can’t wait to see what comes next.