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On the second anniversary of his first day of residency, Robby’s shift is the kind that makes him question his profession entirely. Three lost patients, two from the same MVC. An emergency intubation. A patient’s father that read him the riot act. No less than four separate scrub changes.
He is exhausted. But tomorrow, at least, is the start of three days off.
The steps to his building — a half-dozen cement stairs with thick, sloped walls on either side — spill directly onto the street. A buzzing, flickery light above the door that throws a pinkish-orange, funnel-shaped bright spot on an otherwise dark side street.
As Robby comes down the alleyway and turns onto the steps, he stumbles back off the first step immediately. A man is collapsed against the wall, eyes closed and shoulders slumped over. His sweatshirt oversized and gray, one leg splayed long over, the other tucked into his chest. Eyes closed.
“Jesus fucking—” Robby crouches, slaps the extended leg just above the knee. “Jack.”
It takes two more nudges before Jack blinks blearily up at him. His smile is watery, but genuine. “Doctor Robinavitch. Good evening.”
“Have you been drinking?”
Jack stretches, sits upright. Still smiling. “A little.”
“You’re asleep on my stoop.”
“I’m tired. Long shift. Nightmares,” Jack says, shrugging. “The usual.”
“Okay.” Robby sits down beside him, shoulders bumping. “What are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for you.”
“And to what do I owe this… dubious honor?” Robby asks, knocking his knee against Jack’s. He ignores the way his pulse throbs against his throat, his hands sweat.
“Dubious? What, because I’m a little tipsy?” Jack chuckles, retrieves a small bottle of whiskey from where it’s trapped between his hip and the cement wall. “It’s not like I won’t share.”
Robby takes it, lifts it to his mouth. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“Is seeing you not enough of a reason to be here?”
“You should be careful. Because if it was…” Robby lifts one brow, looking sidelong at him as he hands the bottle back. “…a guy could get the wrong idea.”
“My God, Robby, I didn’t know you had any idea how to flirt,” Jack says, grin widening as he leans into Robby’s shoulder.
Robby snorts. “Well, now you know.”
The way he’d initially flirted with Robby had made unbearable heat flush through him; in the first days of residency, Robby had — incorrectly — assumed that they had some kind of innate chemistry between them.
But then — Jack in context. Grinning and touching and teasing his way through the ER. They’ve worked together for two years and in that time, Jack has been a flirt with everyone: patients, doctors, nurses, specialists. Robby had been vaguely disappointed, then relieved; they were colleagues, after all. It was cleaner, safer this way. Knowing that it was just Jack’s personality, not some kind of irresistible pull between them.
But two years in, the truth has revealed itself to be somewhere closer to the middle. Jack is an incurable flirt, but the way he does it with Robby is… different. In some intangible way that Robby remains unconvinced isn’t entirely in his imagination. But still, there were moments between them—
Like this. Jack, sprawled on his front steps for God knew how long, waiting for him to return home. Even more damning: Jack, remembering the anniversary of his first day at the Pitt.
“Well, I like it,” Jack says warmly, soft and low. His eyes are glowing when Robby turns to look at him.
“You…” Robby smiles, but it’s forced and he shakes his head a little, looking away. “You are the worst kind of flirt.”
Jack drinks from the bottle, smirking around the mouth. “What kind is that?” he asks, swiping at his mouth and handing the whiskey back.
“The kind that never means it.”
A stray look of confusion flickers through Jack’s expression and his mouth twitches to the side, the way it sometimes does when he’s focused or when he’s displeased. But he doesn’t look away from Robby, stays level and steady. Soft, even.
“Do you want me to mean it?”
Robby rolls his eyes and takes a long drink of whiskey as he formulates his answer. As he lowers the bottle to rest between his knees, his thoughts start to bleed into one another. Flirtation, a shared bed, heat in Robby’s chest, eye contact across the emergency department. There is something about the two of them. There has to be, it cannot be entirely in his head.
It settles low in his gut, the knowing and the surrender to it. “No. I’m just saying— a guy could get the wrong idea.”
The look that passes over Jack’s face twists its way to Robby’s heart and pummels it. Jack blinks, jerks back slightly, then comes in close enough that Robby can feels his breath. The two of them stay close, staring at one another for a long moment.
“Right,” Jack says quietly. He takes the bottle back, drinks slowly. The thoughtful look in his eyes clouds them, makes them distant. “Robby… are you saying…”
Robby shakes his head, looking down at his hands. “I’m not saying anything.”
“Okay,” Jack says hesitantly.
“You remembered my fucking anniversary.”
Jack spreads his hands. “It was on the break room calendar.”
Robby’s chest deflates, slowly, steadily. He closes his eyes and exhales sharply, then starts to laugh. Beside him, Jack startles — then slowly starts to join in. Their shoulders bump together and when they fall quiet again, the contact between them doesn’t fade. They stay touching, close on Robby’s front stairs.
It has already given him the wrong idea. That’s the truth of it, that he’s already too deep to be saved. And worse, he likes it. Likes the attention, likes that Jack is just a little different with him than anyone else, likes that Jack has slept beside him. Even if they don’t touch, even if they never touch — he likes it.
And he likes Jack. The charm of his grin, the glow of his eyes, the wrinkle of his nose when he’s laughing. They are close, they are friends, they are something else entirely. Where there should be professional courtesy, there are private jokes. Where there should be sympathetic looks, there is a shared blanket. Growing familiar with the slant of the light in Jack’s room. The smell of his detergent.
“It’s not the wrong idea,” Jack says quietly, the smile not quite out of his voice.
Robby’s gaze snaps to him. The way he is looking at Robby — tender, fond. Reminiscent of how he looks when he’s teasing. Some hard edge, a blade drawn in defense, slices through Robby’s chest.
“It’s not the right idea, either,” Robby says sharply. “We work together.”
Jack blinks at him, a tense reconfiguration carving into his features. There is something that Robby can’t read in his face; but it disappears before Robby can commit it to memory for later deciphering. Whatever it is, it smooths into Jack’s normal placidity, his teasing calm.
“We sleep together, too.” Jack shrugs, looks over at him. “So I’m just saying… we could add sleeping together.”
Robby laughs, snatches back the bottle to take a long swig. “Stop flirting with me, Jack.”
“But it’s fun!” Jack whines, leaning fully into Robby and grinning up at him from his shoulder. “And you’re fun. I don’t… I don’t see what the harm is.”
The harm. What is the harm?
It is entirely too much and devastatingly too little. It is that Robby will grow attached, it is that Robby is already attached, it is that Jack is having fun but Robby is helpless to wanting more of it.
One of the things that all doctors learn — that Robby had learned, a hundred times over now — was that the textbook idea of a person was only that: an idea. When you opened up someone’s ribs, when you got inside their softest parts, the reality was something else entirely.
And this: the laughter, the closeness. It looked like one thing, but who knew what it truly was? Who Jack truly was? Perhaps it is only the idea of Jack that he likes so much. Perhaps he’s wrong, and if he got close enough to Jack, it would all bleed between his fingers. The idea he has of what being close to Jack would mean is only theoretical: they have shared a bed a handful of times, only after extremely long, grueling shifts. Otherwise, they have spent hardly any time together outside the hospital.
They hardly know each other. It only feels like they do because they are so close to death every day, looking at each other across the thin crack of it and thinking that the other looks like life. To touch a pulse is not to touch the beating heart in another person. It is the suggestion of something, the idea of it. But it’s not the real thing. A flirtation, not a seduction. The space from there to here.
Jack looks up at him thoughtfully, a few breaths past casual, then sighs as he straightens. “I can go. I just thought—”
“Don’t leave,” Robby says, too fast, with his brow furrowing.
Jack makes a small noise, but doesn’t make any move to depart. They stay on the stairs, quiet, for a long moment.
“I won’t flirt with you if you don’t want me to.”
Robby, pulse hard, picks the blade back up. “Like you could stop.”
Jack lifts his brow, runs a hand over his mouth. Another flicker of something in his face, then: “I would.”
It doesn’t hurt yet, though Robby knows — somewhere in the depths of him — that it will. That Jack is not here forever, that Jack does not and will not belong to him. But the desire to keep him close is too strong. Friendship, more. Flirtation and touch and closeness that feels like something else.
The two of them, for as long as they can stand it. It doesn’t hurt now, which is as good a thing as Robby’s ever had. And if Jack is nowhere to be found at the end of it — well, Robby has been alone before.
“You’re staying.” He reaches for the bottle, a transparent attempt to diffuse the tension. “We’re drinking together.”
“We’re celebrating,” Jack corrects him. “Two years in hell.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Robby says, tipping the bottom of the bottle in Jack’s direction. “Hell is other people.”
Jack lifts his eyebrows, grins. “You’re insulting me?”
“I’m flirting with you.” Robby dips his chin, smirks.
“No, you’re not. You don’t mean it.” Jack is smiling, but there’s something sharp as a blade in it.
But Robby laughs anyway. Keeps laughing as they’re stumbling up the stairs and holding each other upright. And as they’re sprawling into his bed, Jack looks over at him. His curls loose and limp, his mouth pulled toward a smile. He reaches a hand out and flicks a stray piece of Robby’s hair out of his face. And the only thought in Robby’s head — it’s the wrong idea, but he cannot let it go.