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It’s just shy of four in the morning, and Jack Abbot has just discharged the patient in North Eight—a newly minted pledge from Sig Ep at Pitt who has yet to learn his limits. The kid’s been sleeping it off since just after one-fifteen this morning, after a good half-hour of puking his guts out and moaning about his terrible life choices.
(Also featuring: repeated, slurred promises that he’s never drinking again, which—Jack fully expects to see him back in one of their beds before Homecoming rolls around.)
He steps into the hall, out in the open in case he’s needed for a case consult or an incoming trauma, tablet in hand as he jots down a couple of notes on the patient in East Fifteen who needs repeat labs within the next hour. If he's lucky, the lab will get its life together and actually provide him with the results sometime around shift change.
Not that he’d ever be arrogant or stupid enough to say it out loud—he’s not John Shen, thank you very much—this Wednesday-to-Thursday night shift’s been pretty q-word by and large, and the ED is as settled as it ever is at this time of early-early morning, so he very clearly hears Dr. Mohan’s voice echo from the nearby North Six when she says:
“Thank you, but I have a boyfriend.”
Jack’s first instinct is to snort, but he holds back because A, that would be unbecoming of an attending physician in general, and B, because Lena has just come through this wing of the ED with a basket of supplies tucked under her arm. The low sound of her chuckle says she heard Mohan too, and it would therefore be even worse if he visibly reacted to it.
He’s not an idiot, and the nurses have gotten so much worse at hiding their gossip since around the time Mohan started her tenure as Chief Resident earlier this summer.
Jack’s second instinct after hearing Mohan’s lilt from the treatment room is to roll his eyes, which he does do—because he can also conceal it—while pulling up the chart for the patient she’s supervising that Whitaker kid on.
Eric Edgerton, 35-year-old real estate developer, presenting with a nasty laceration on the right forearm when the window he was attempting to install in the house he’s flipping shattered out of nowhere.
And, as it turns out, he’s one of the far too many patients who mistake a doctor or nurse’s professional courtesy for genuine interest.
Of course he is.
Look, Jack knows he’s a lot smarter than most people.
He’s an attending physician at a Tier I trauma center. He made it through Ranger School on his first attempt. His graduate education was bought and paid for by the good ole USofA. He convinced his high school sweetheart, Eleanor, to not just be okay with him joining the military after graduation, but to also marry him so they could both escape their census-designated, no-name West Virginia hometown just months before the one and only coal mine shut down.
And yes, the bar is so, so low, because it turns out that by just knowing the definition of the word no—which, for the record, he learned when he was, what, a toddler?—is one of the few things that sets him apart from not just people in society, but also specifically, his own goddamn gender.
He’s no longer ashamed to admit that he went through a bit of cliched culture shock when he transitioned out of the military medical setting and into the ironically calmer routines of working at PTMC. He’d spent so many years through his service and three and a half tours (that last one was rather abruptly interrupted), that he was forced to be really intentional about how he interacted with his superiors and his subordinates, regardless of their gender.
It’s not like he doesn’t respect the hell out of women—starting right at home, because there are no woman he respected more than Nora, who absolutely flourished once he was able to get her out of their Uber-conservative hometown and to where he was stationed, which, while still on the conservative side of a purple state, was leagues more liberal than anywhere near where they grew up.
The women he works with at PTMC are all insanely smart and highly qualified and—
All have to deal with unsolicited overtures from their patients.
Which is not to say that he and the other male identifying members of the hospital staff don’t get their fair share—Garcia started calling Langdon ER Ken for a reason, after all, and Jack knows he’s exceedingly popular with a certain subset of the population of women over thirty-five, plus there’s the, well, Myrna of it all.
But with his female colleagues, he just notices it a hell of a lot more.
No, not just because the current case in question is with Dr. Mohan.
And sure, they’ve gotten a lot closer, working side-by-side in trauma rooms and sending case reports from all over the world back and forth between their inboxes, plus drinks in the park with everyone after shift and some casual meals in tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants he thinks she’ll like when their schedules allow—and if it’s less often than he’d like, well, that’s no one’s business other than his.
Mohan was the first resident to volunteer to cover the night shift rotation Langdon missed when he went on his leave of absence after Pittfest (Robby was not happy about it and Jack was very much not stupid enough to ask, though he wasn’t entirely surprised when he finally heard about the rehab stint), and she kind of just never left, even through he fully expected her to rotate fully back onto days as soon as King and Santos gained enough PTMC ED experience to be able to handle the shitshow and a half that is The Pitt After Dark.
Hell, he fully expected Robby to put up a bigger stink about him stealing his star resident, but he never said a word, just kept scheduling her for a week or two of nights every six weeks or so. Jack’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth—raging crush on her or not—he knows better than to try to chase off one of the best doctors this hospital has ever seen.
It’s an honor that she graces the night shift with her presence as often as she allows, even if it is now less since she became Chief and has to be on days to ride herd on all the new interns.
Jack takes a couple steps closer to North Six, crossing the curtained-off window and settling where the wall divides the room from North Seven. It’s not that he thinks he needs to be concerned—Mohan can more than hold her own, and Whitaker is surprisingly scrappy when he’s not getting peed on, which he can only attribute to him living with Santos for the last year—but it won’t hurt to listen in a little, while he still has a few minutes.
“Aw, don’t do that doc, you don’t need to lie to me,” Edgerton responds with a tone Jack can only classify as a whine. “Let me take you out.”
“That’s very kind of you to offer,” Mohan says evenly, ever the diplomat and so, so careful with her words, so she doesn’t give Edgerton the wrong idea, just like she’s been trained. Too bad this guy won’t catch the hint. “But my answer still stands.”
“Because of the boyfriend. Riiiiiight,” Edgerton drawls with a chuckle that makes Jack’s jaw tighten at the smugness—he really dislikes when people choose not to listen to her. “It’s just one dinner. Look, I got a guy who can get us into Dog & Pony on Friday. I know you’ll love it. What do you think?”
Propping a shoulder against the wall, gaze focused on his tablet even as he listens in, Jack’s brows tilt in the direction of his hairline when this guy name-drops the most exclusive restaurant in western Pennsylvania. The kind where it’s impossible for mere mortals to get any kind of reservation, especially not on the weekend, unless you know a guy who knows a guy.
Nice try buddy, but Jack’s pretty sure he’s never met a person less food motivated than Dr. Samira Mohan.
He’s taken to keeping an extra protein bar or two that he knows she’ll eat in one of the pockets of his tac pants, just in case he catches her borderline hypoglycemic, which is often enough to make his eye twitch, and he has to tamp down on the urge to set up a weekly grocery order so he knows she has some food handy at home.
“My answer is still no,” she says, not unkindly, and clearly intending to put this line of conversation to its end. Jack picks up on the slight edge in her tone that tells him she’s very much ready to move on to another, less insistent patient. It’s a tone he only knows because he’s worked with her for so many years, nothing a patient who has known her for all of ten minutes would be able to pick up on, “Dr. Whitaker, who are those stitches coming?”
Whitaker sputters through a response, but it’s drowned out by Edgerton barreling through with, “Look, look Doc, I’ll believe you if you can give me one good real reason why you’re saying no. Enough of the fake boyfriend crap. You don’t need to be like that with me.”
“That’s the truth of it.”
“Oh, come on,” there’s that whine again. “I’m not like one of those creeps who won’t take no for an answer."
Well clearly, he missed a few branches on the way down from the top of the self-awareness tree.
“I just want a little honesty. I can take it, Doc, promise.”
“Oh no Mr. Edgerton,” Whitaker finally manages to say. “Dr. Mohan really does have a boyfriend.”
Huh.
Jack didn’t know Whitaker had it in him.
Sure, he’s just a hair too obvious about it, and in Jack’s experience, that kind of supportive insistence backfires more often than it helps, but it’s nice of the kid to try in a kind of case that isn’t as high stakes as it could be.
A little more than a year ago, Jack had somewhat passively listened in as Robby, Princess and Donnie joked about Whitaker’s first shift, but it wasn’t until the next few days of gossip trickling down to the night shift that he learned exactly what the kid went through that day, before shooting victims started coming in by the truckload.
By that time, Jack was as surprised as anyone that the kid stuck it out, but he’ll be the first to confirm that Whitaker’s really hit his stride since he matched with the ED for his residency. And now, he spends the bulk of his shifts following Mohan around like a baby duckling, much to the amusement of the nursing staff and his roommate.
“Oh, so you’re in on it too,” Edgerton accuses, even as Whitaker cautions him not to move his arm, and—
Though he’s not often ruled by his baser impulses—that got pretty well beaten out of him back in Basic Training—Jack doesn’t think about what he’s about to do, or the future implications of it, when he slides his tungsten wedding band off his left hand and drops it in one of the zippered pockets of his pants for safekeeping. Squaring his shoulders, he tucks the tablet to his side with his elbow and shoulders his way into the room with a breezy, “And how’s it going in here, amigos?”
It’s long-honed instinct that stops him from looking to Mohan first to ensure that the patient on the bed isn’t about to keel over and die in the extremely unlikely event that his best doctor and a promising intern both missed something.
“Just fine,” Mohan says with a placid smile from her perch on the stool next to the computer in the corner, her vantage point perfect for supervising Whitaker without hovering right over his shoulder. Her posture is ballerina perfect, inky black hair tied back in the low ponytail she’s favored since she started growing her hair out too long for the claw clips she used to favor.
Jack can’t help but miss those curls from the crown of her head that would escape the clip when shift would get particularly hectic, but having seen her in action during an MCI a few months ago (twelve-car pileup on the highway to snarl the morning rush hour—she dove right in the moment she stepped into the ED and it was like she’d been at his side all shift long) he was comforted to know that sometimes a few curls will still manage to escape the hair tie’s grip.
He can even spot one of those curls in particular resting at the nape of her neck, right behind ear ear, the tail end of it just barely cupped by the triple-wrapped black elastic. The fluorescent lights above glow in the dip of it as she turns to the patient, “Mr. Edgerton, this is Dr. Abbot, one of our senior physicians on shift. Do you mind if he observes?”
The flick of her gaze, which he didn’t realize he was anticipating until he caught it, from the curtained-over window and back to him says, hey, I knew you were lurking.
Jack glances back with a subtle shrug of his shoulder as he shifts his grip on the tablet and leaves it on the corner of the computer cart by Mohan’s elbow, saying just being nosy.
He doesn’t know what kind of response she has for him, not with the patient on the bed letting out a huff that dollars to donuts reads as annoyed at the interruption, as if Edgerton was only one insistent prod away from getting Mohan to agree to dinner.
“Uh, yeah. Sure, man.”
Mr. Eric Edgerton lounges on the examination bed like he’s on a plush chaise, uninjured arm tucked behind his head and one leg crossed over the other in a way Jack assumes is meant to show off his physical assets, but really just gets in the way of Whitaker doing his job to carefully stitch up the laceration on his extended right arm. Oddly enough, the patient reminds Jack a bit of Langdon, with the extremely square jaw and all that floppy brown hair, but the eyes are brown instead of blue.
He takes a step closer to the foot of the bed, head tilted to take in the job Whitaker is doing—he’s making good progress, but not quite enough headway for Mohan to duck out for no reason, not unless there’s an incoming trauma, which he’s not about to ask the universe for. And if he stands in parade rest as he looms over Whitaker’s back in a way that he’s caught Mohan staring at more than once, then that’s just instinct drilled into him since he was a wet behind the ears brat getting whipped into shape back in Basic.
Like clockwork, he meets her gaze again with the tilt of his head—though not until after her gaze abruptly tears away from his shoulders—and shifts his brow enough to wordlessly ask, so, how bad do you want to fuck with this guy?
The careful way she purses her lips for one distracting moment, which Jack has to tear his focus away from, feels like an admonishment—she takes a lot of pride in those patient satisfaction scores of hers, if only to rub them in Robby’s face when he gets uppity about her patient times, though he’s been after her about it less and less since Pittfest. Mostly because Robby has been so focused on whatever's still messing with his head to deal with Mohan and the other residents that he's run off on that six month sabbatical instead of going to therapy.
Mohan thinks he's actively avoiding her with the leave, letting her take a figurative Mulligan for her final year of Residency so he can start fresh with the next cohort.
It’s a mess, and he’s trying to stay out of it, if only because Mohan asked him to.
So, he’s just as surprised as ever when Mohan says, “Jack, Mr. Edgerton was nice enough to give Dr. Whitaker and me some new restaurant recommendations in the area. There’s one in particular he really likes, but I don’t think it’s going to be open when we’re off shift this morning.”
Whitaker chokes on his own oxygen supply, but the tiny part of Jack’s brain that’s focused on being an educational superior is pleased to see that his hands don’t shake around the pair of forceps attached to the needle driver.
He just—he didn’t think she was going to use his first name, let alone imply all of that to the guy, who is now looking at Jack like he’s just realized he’s stepping into someone else’s territory, a tick in his jaw like Edgerton’s just realized he massively miscalculated.
It’s more than a little insulting to him and Mohan both that all it took was one vaguely implied sentence in Jack’s general direction that gets the guy to clam up, when he really should have taken her first goddamn no thank you at face value.
“Ah,” Jack somehow manages not to sound like he’s unexpectedly been given the honor of being Mohan’s boyfriend for the next five or so minutes, which he has surely not been thinking about for way longer than he’s about to admit to HR. “We should—maybe make note for another night, then.” Then he pushes it, because he just can’t help himself, and that’s apparently the kind of night he’s having. “And just go to our usual after handoff.”
Mohan has also picked up on Edgerton’s mood change, and has seemingly decided to figuratively say fuck this particular patient satisfaction score when she nods with that wide-eyed, innocent gaze she often uses to placate Robby when she knows she’s right, knows he’s wrong, and she’s just waiting on lab confirmation before she rubs it in his face, “Sounds good to me.”
Fuck, she easily could have been an Oscar winner, rather than one of the best doctors he’s had the honor of working with.
Jack has zero reason to be gleeful in any sort of way—they already had plans for dinner-breakfast at Carmelita’s, like they usually do when their shifts line up and she’s not exhausted from her research—when Edgerton slowly lowers the hand behind his head to his lap, his attitude going from overbearing flirting to closed off and an attempt at stoic that leans more toward sullen.
Hey may have little-to-no awareness, but he’s got just enough to take two plus two and come up with a Jack is the boyfriend in question kind of four.
Sure, it’s not actually true, but no one in the room, hell, in the ED, is about to set the guy straight.
Whitaker turns his surprised gaze to Mohan over his shoulder, and she gently nods with her chin at the last bit of the wound on Edgerton’s arm that remains unsutured.
“Mr. Edgerton,” Mohan says, drawing his attention from the general direction of his lap, and Jack notes with—no it’s not glee—when he refuses to meet her eye, but looks at a patch of wall behind her shoulder. “Once Dr. Whitaker is done with your stitches, we’ll go over wound care and then we’ll get you your discharge paperwork. Do you have any questions?”
“Uh, no. All good,” he says, curt.
Jack can’t help but smirk, smothers it with a palm to his mouth, already thinking of how he’s going to make it up to Mohan when Edgerton’s dissatisfied survey lands in the system.
—
Fortunately, Whitaker finishes Edgerton’s stitches before Jack has to come up with a real excuse for why he’s still in the room supervising a basic suture job that's already being supervised by someone who will easily outpace his own career one day.
Once they’re far enough away from the treatment room, Whitaker looks at him and Mohan, “I’m so sorry,” he whispers frantically. “I just—I thought it was Langdon walking by!”
Mohan presses her fingers to her mouth, but Abbot can see the amused curve she’s failed to stifle, knows she’d giggle if it weren’t unbecoming for her to within earshot of a patient. If he let the intrusive thoughts get their way, he’d take her hand, press those fingers to his own mouth, but there’s no way he’s stupid enough to do that in the middle of the goddamn ED.
He’d just really, really like to.
“It’s okay, Dennis,” Mohan says, patting his shoulder with the hand in question. “But you can absolutely let me handle it myself next time.”
Poor kid looks a little sick at the thought of a next time, even if he probably gets hit on more often than Mohan does, and by a significantly more diverse array of patients, though not nearly as often as he ends up covered in a variety of disgusting bodily excretions in a way no one else in the department does, “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Mohan assures. “I appreciate it, but don’t worry about it.”
Whitaker then looks between him and Mohan again, “Wait, is it because of what I said that you two had to,” he trails off like he’s too uncomfortable to finish his sentence out loud.
Jack can’t help but mess with the kid, he just makes it so easy, “Had to what?” He asks innocently.
Mohan favors him with a glare that says stop being so mean to him, but other than that there’s no real heat in the admonishment, and she looks at Whitaker before Jack has the chance to counter with a pointed brow tick, “Why don’t you go wrap up Mr. Edgerton’s chart, and we can debrief some scenarios in a few minutes.”
“Um, sure, thanks Dr. Mohan,” Whitaker stumbles over his words before scuttling toward his favorite charting station, off in a corner where he won’t accidentally run into any unidentified fluids.
Jack ends up facing Mohan, whose head is tilted slightly as they lock eyes, and he’s not sure what’s about to come out of his mouth before he’s cut off by Lena shouting his name from Central, “Abbot!” Moment ruined, as they so often are in the middle of the ED, he cranes his neck to see her, phone pressed to her ear. “Single-car MVC incoming. Man versus telephone pole, two minutes out.”
With a nod, he turns back to Mohan, who has already drifted off to one off the sanitization stations scattered in even intervals down the hall, all business once more, “You want to take the lead, Chief?” He asks while pumping a palmful of sanitizer into his left hand, almost freezes for a moment when he sees the pale strip of skin at the base of his finger.
Not now. They’ve got a patient coming.
Mohan grabs a pair of gloves from a nearby dispenser, first in her size, and then grabs another pair in his, “Hell yeah,” she passes him the gloves, and he refuses to think about the way his skin tingles when their hands brush, because he’s not fucking fourteen years old anymore.
—
Shift ends with a rare, easy handoff.
Including the car crash victim—stable, waiting for an ICU bed—Samira splits her remaining cases between Santos and McKay, while Abbot gives Al-Hashimi and Dana the full rundown. The board isn’t as much of a mess as it could be, but it’s still pretty bad, including a near five-hour wait in Chairs as the morning incidents start rolling in.
The weather widget on her phone’s lock screen tells her it’s shaping up to be a nice morning, one of the few left before the weather turns to shit for the next six months, so when she ducks into the locker room, Samira ditches her scrub top and the t-shirt beneath it in favor of one of the longline sports bars she ordered in bulk off Amazon after Victoria explained to her and Mel that they could totally get away with wearing it on its own. It’s still a little chilly, so Samira grabs the hoodie she wore in the night before from the bottom of her locker and throws it on, zips it halfway up her chest.
Shouldering her bag, she badges out and heads up to the fourth floor of the faculty parking deck to wait for Abbot, the absurd, acid green Ford Bronco he apparently bought to celebrate—read: distract—from his first limb revision surgery some years back, parked two bays away from the handicap spaces, because he’s stubborn as hell about it.
She lets the strap of her bag slide off her shoulder and onto the ground, leans against the car’s rear bumper to take some pressure off her feet after a night of running back and forth through the ED. It was far from one of the worst shifts—she ran a couple codes, one code stroke and was able to team with all the other interns who started residency back in July, which—
Is a shift she really would rather not think about.
Instead, as she digs her fingers into the ponytail at the base of her neck, tugging the elastic from her hair, her mind can’t help but wander back the last few hours, to the case with Whitaker before dawn.
She’s no stranger to pushy patients like him. It’s an experience she’s had since she started her first clinical rotation, and she considers herself lucky she hasn’t ever gotten a frequent flyer with a crush—Myrna doesn’t count, since she hits on everyone equally.
Edgerton was probably one of the easier ones—too attractive for his own good, if she went for that kind of stereotype, and it would have been easy enough to put the situation behind her after she and Whitaker were done treating him, had Dennis not tried to help and accidentally pushed the issue.
And then Abbot stepped in.
She’s still not quite sure what to make of that.
As if summoning him with her thoughts, she hears the stairwell door scrape open and there he is, his camo backpack slung over his shoulder. There’s a slightly uneven shift to his gait that she can’t help but squint at as he approaches, trying to figure out with just her eyes and the way he’s walking which muscles have seized up on him.
“You cut that out,” Abbot chides lightly once he’s a handful of feet away.
She leaves an insolent make me on the tip of her tongue, but she’s pretty sure he picks it up anyway, if the way the tips of his ears flare bright red is anything to go by.
“I didn’t say anything,” she insists, all innocence as she grabs her bag off the ground, only for Abbot to snag it from her hand, tosses it and his go-bag into the back seat, behind the driver’s side before she has a chance to protest.
Carmelita’s diner is a twenty minute walk from the hospital, but a seven minute drive, and is almost equidistant between her fourth-floor walkup and the three-bedroom craftsman Jack moved into two years ago, when he reached the end of his rope with commuting from the suburbs.
Inside, Samira watches Abbot’s chest heave with the force of his sigh as they settle into their usual booth in the back of the diner, Abbot with his back to a wall covered in old newspaper clippings about the restaurant’s opening in the late forties, while she slips into the vinyl seat across from him, putting her back-to-back with a mother catching breakfast with a pair of teenage daughters, almost too distracted to eat with how focused they are on their phones.
Jack shifts, getting as comfortable as he can after so many hours on his feet—he’d long since clocked in by the time she arrived for their 7 p.m. shift at 6:15—and then he leans forward, propping one arm across his body on the table so he can reach down with the other toward the prosthesis attached to what’s left of his right leg.
Through the din of the open kitchen to her left, Samira can’t hear the click when the mechanism releases, but sees the telltale shift of his arm as he rubs at the tired, overused muscles on the end of his residual limb. It’s probably bruised, as it tends to get when he’s been working. If she’s got the math right, it’s four shifts, back-to-back-to-back-to-back, plus his monthly stint with Tactical EMS two days before all that, which means she's going to have to figure out some way to keep him out of the ED until the next time he's scheduled so he can catch a break and heal.
And while Abbot has no issue with doffing the leg in full view of their colleagues, he won’t do it elsewhere in public where he’s at risk of being stared at, or worse—according to him—thanked for his service, so she’s pretty sure he’s just sitting with the silicone sleeve resting on the socket without resetting the suction, probably won’t until they leave.
She orders the lemon poppyseed pancakes with a side of bacon, because Jack used to get real twitchy those first few times they got breakfast together, when all she’d order was eggs and dry toast, because yes, he said he was happy to pay, but she’s not about to go for the priciest thing on the menu. Of course, then she would ended up with part of his three-egg and well done hash browns scraped onto her plate, his hazel gaze intent and insistent until she ate at least half.
“You really didn’t have to do that, you know, with the patient earlier,” she says after Kenny, the art student with the shaved eyebrows that make him look like a Vulcan fills their coffee mugs.
Abbot waves one hand, the other busy with stirring an unhealthy amount of sugar into his coffee, “You know I’ve got your back with that shit. Sorry he was such a shit listener and you had to put up with him asking you the same goddamn question forty different ways.”
“Sometimes I wish I could get away with being less nice.”
Abbot’s brows arch, like he’s not sure that’s physically possible for her to do, which—
Okay, he might not be wrong.
She wraps her hands around her own mug—unaltered, because she needs the caffeine to go right into her veins, do not pass go, do not collect $200—and lets the warmth seep into her fingers, “I know. I just—I didn’t want to overstep, you know, since-”
“Eh,” he dismisses, the lines bracketing his eyes crinkling a bit as he takes a sip. “Nora would have gotten a kick out of it. You know that.”
Samira hadn’t had many chances to meet Abbot’s wife before she passed, but she’ll never forget those days during the height of the pandemic that cannibalized her intern year, where it felt like every shift was a double shift and they could just never get ahead.
Back then, she’d only known Abbot as the intimidating night shift attending who would often flit in and out of her shifts, usually tag-teaming with Robby and the senior residents at the time on some of the diciest cases. Every once in a while, he would hand her—or any med student, intern, and even a handful of the younger residents—his phone and unceremoniously say, “Tell Nora something weird,” before he disappeared to handle another case or to bully Robby into taking five minutes before he collapsed under the weight of Adamson’s death, his new leadership role, and the breakdown of his relationship with Heather.
Waiting on his phone’s screen would be Nora Abbot via FaceTime, a pretty brunette with gray eyes, usually sitting on the couch in their old house with a cup of tea in her free hand.
Nora spent most of her life battling a number of autoimmune issues that placed her in the extremely immunocompromised segment of society, leaving her completely housebound during the worse of the pandemic case surges. With Abbot spending upwards of twenty hours a day at the hospital, Nora’s teenage niece Lola ended up camping out in their guest room to keep her company and to have some comparative peace and quiet to do Zoom school, since her parents' house was crowded by three, highly energetic little brothers who had been bouncing off the walls during quarantine.
The first time Abbot handed her the phone, Samira spent a good thirty seconds stumbling over her words before she managed to put them in the correct order to introduce herself, Samira Mohan, intern, Carnegie Mellon. It’s nice to meet you. And then she’d spent the next five minutes talking Nora through an obscure case report she read early on in med school about a patient who once coughed up a blood clot in the same shape of the secondary bronchi.
(Ironically, it was actually almost easier to take breaks during that awful year, because the hospital was consistently scheduled heavy with doctors and nurses, leaving a comparative abundance of time to panic in the staff bathroom or in the good supply closet or a quiet corner of the stairwell outside the COVID ward.)
Nora had listened in, amused, and with that same intense focus she was slowly learning to get used to from Abbot when he’d guide her through a procedure she’d never done and was probably too early on in her residency to even think about doing. That first time, Samira had to hang up when the senior resident, Dr. Abe Yu, called for her, ordering her to come watch a tricky intubation, leaving Samira with Abbot’s phone and no idea where in the hospital he was to return it.
She’d settled on leaving it in her pocket until Abbot found his way into the treatment room she was taking a patient’s history in, and managed to toss it to him before he had to depart again, almost on a run, to handle the commotion of an incoming MVC, because that was one of the things people liked to forget—it wasn’t just pandemic patients coming through the hospital. It was the usual cases you’d see in the ED on a daily basis and pandemic patients coming through the hospital.
Over the next few months of the pandemic, she would end up with Abbot’s phone to make small talk with Nora a handful of times, but it wasn’t until late fall 2021 that she got the chance to meet her in person, at a socially distanced barbecue at the park across from the hospital—Robby and Dana’s attempt at fostering some semblance of normalcy amidst over a year of constant nightmares.
Samira had crossed paths with both Abbots a couple more times afterward, but it was early on in 2023 when Nora’s fragile health took a turn that she never recovered from, passing away that June. It was awful and tragic in all the usual ways, but also because she got through a global pandemic, only for her body to give out on her anyway.
Knee deep in another year of residency, Samira sent Jack a condolence card and volunteered to cover Ellis’ shift so she could make the funeral with the rest of the night crew, and didn’t see him again until he returned from bereavement leave.
The Jack Abbot across from her now is so wildly different from the angry, grieving who man almost exclusively worked nights for a year, let alone the intense physician she met after starting at PTMC. Sometimes she’ll sit with him, completely unable to wrap her mind around the fact that she gets to have this, gets to work with him side-by-side in the ER, gets to send annotated case reports and hospital gossip and medical memes back and forth with him, that this is real and it’s happening, and it keeps happening.
And okay, so maybe she likes him more than just her preferred colleague and it was nice to spend five minutes in a world where they were making date plans, rather than we need to eat before we pass out so we might as well get food together plans, but—
That’s when Samira sees his bare left hand.
She did notice he’d taken his ring off sometime before nosing in on her case with Whitaker because he was bored or whatever, and the pale strip of skin on his fourth finger stands out under the lights in the diner, just like it did when she noticed it in the treatment room.
“Jack, where’s your ring?”
His gaze darts down to his hand like he also forgot it wasn’t there—god, she can only hope he didn’t lose it somewhere in the hospital—but then he reaches up, hooks a finger on the bead chain that’s tucked under his t-shirt and scrub top that she knows holds his dog tags, and between bites of eggwhite omelette says, “It’s on here.”
“You’re not going to put it back on?”
Jack hasn’t looked away from his hand, this thumb coming up between his middle and ring fingers to rub at the paler skin there, “I don’t know,” he muses, thoughtful. “My therapist keeps telling me that I’ll know when the time is right, that there is no right or wrong time to do it. I always thought there’d have to be some big meaning to it, a point, you know? I mean, not that there wasn’t a point, with you, today.”
Swallowing hard around a bite of pancake so she doesn’t choke, Samira reaches for her coffee cup to wash it down.
Pretending to be her boyfriend can’t possibly be meaningful enough for him to take his wedding ring off.
Not for her.
“I’m not—I mean, you don’t-”
She breaks off, doesn’t know what she’s even trying to say.
“It’s okay. It,” Jack also breaks off, throat working. “It feels like the right time, I think.”
Oh.
Okay so maybe this is about that thing that they’ve never talked about, the thing that’s been brewing since the Pittfest shift, when he cornered her two days later, demanding to know what Dr. Walsh was talking about when she snarked about not wanting Samira to drill into any more patients’ heads unsupervised. His eyes lit up when she explained the procedure and cited the case study, and he kept peppering her with questions all the way up until Robby dragged him away for handoff.
And after that, it kind of just never stopped. Not the case studies or the intense eye contact as they practically read each others’ minds while working on patients in and out of the trauma rooms, the off-shift meals and, apparently, pretending to be each other’s partner.
Okay.
Samira doesn’t know what kind of audacity possess her when she reaches across the table and places her hand atop his, but she almost manages to keep her voice steady when she says, “There’s no need to rush if it’s not. I’m not going anywhere.”
Which is true.
Robby’s all but told her that the Medical Education Fellowship is hers for the taking, and that he’s just waiting for it to be processed on high in HR before he can actually send the offer letter through the portal. Once that happens, she’ll be well on her way to a tenure-tracked junior attending position at PTMC in just a few short years, another checkmark to the plan she placed when she was a grieving thirteen-year-old.
Since he's on the road, the email from him landing in her inbox was the shock of her life, and it was all she could do to reply coherently to Robby that she was looking forward to discussing it with him when he got back, to tamp down on her glee until the end of shift.
The hug Abbot gave her when they found their way to each other, as they tend to do when they're not on the same shift, was more physical contact than she’d had in months, and it was all she could do to not cling to him, to bury her face in the side of her neck.
(And if she did, just a little bit, well, no one was in the stairwell to see, and it wouldn’t surprise her if Jack deliberately tugged them into the one corner on the south side where she was once told is a small security camera blind spot.)
Okay, maybe she should have figure out this was happening back then.
Here and now, in this diner far enough away from the hospital that they know they won’t be seen by their well-meaning, but extremely nosy and gossipy colleagues, Jack turns his hand over under hers, cups his fingers around her hand.
So now they’re holding hands.
Samira—does not know where they’re supposed to go from here.
It’s more than a little absurd, holding hands around dirty plates and half-drunk cups of coffee, and, well, she has never been well-equipped to navigate all this relationship stuff.
She hasn’t been on a date since her senior year of undergrad, and even then, she and her boyfriend at the time just, well, fell into the proximity-based, halfhearted relationship they were in before she left for med school and buried herself in classes, clinicals, her research and residency. Shouldn’t she have been able to navigate past this after, what, elementary school?
Jack’s hand is warm under hers, a little dry thanks to the amount of hand washing they do on a daily basis, and she can’t help but laugh, a little wry, “All this because Mr. Edgerton couldn’t-”
He cuts her off with a squeeze to her fingers, “Not because of Edgerton, Samira.”
Her cheeks suddenly go hot, and she can’t help but break away from his gaze, sending her own back down to her plate.
“Hey, hey,” Jack shakes their joined hands. “Don’t do that. You don’t have to hide from me.”
It’s his earnestness that makes her look back up at him, and she sees the nervousness reflected back in his eyes—this is as big a step for him as it is for her. She can’t help but smile, squeeze his hand where it’s still wrapped around hers.
He smiles back, a little wry, like he’s also thinking about the logistical implications of a potential something between them working around their all-consuming work lives.
“I’m just not sure what we’re supposed to do from here,” she makes herself admit, a little helpless.
Before Jack can respond, Kenny shows back up with the cheque, and Jack works his wallet out of one of the back pockets of his tac pants with his free hand so he doesn’t have to let go of hers, tosses his AmEx Black card on the little metal tray before Kenny has a chance to set it on the table between them.
As always, he doesn’t even bother with the pretense of letting her go for her wallet.
Once, it would have bothered her—okay, yes, it still does a little, she’s supported herself on her own for so long and hates feeling like she’s taking advantage—but he’s never once let any resident pay for a meal or a drink or snacks at the PTMC department softball games, it’s just that he pays for her most often.
He’s forced to let go of her hand when he has to reset his leg into the prosthesis, and when they’re outside the diner, halfway down the block from his car, they run into that point they’ve been reaching more and more often lately: the time when they’re supposed to go their separate ways, that they’ve taken to making excuses to stave off for just another few minutes, even though they both need to get home and sleep, or try to.
It may be different now, but the last few months of Samira’s residency still loom in front of her.
But then, Jack says, “It’s nice out,” he slips his hand into hers again, and her fingers twitch before she lets him lace his together with hers. “You want to walk off breakfast?”
“Are you up for that?” She glances down at his right leg.
He may not roll his eyes, but she knows he almost wants to, “‘Course.”
They're across the street from the riverwalk, so Jack tugs her along until they’re trailing along the mixed-used path, and walking on his left side, Samira can feel the tension he’s carrying himself with, how his posture has gotten more deliberate. She knows that the recommendation for experienced prosthetic users is twelve to sixteen hours a day, and Jack’s already past the upper end of that limit.
She nudges his shoulder with hers, “Stop guarding your limp.”
Jack grunts, and his gait shifts just slightly, revealing just a little bit of his limp, but not all of it. The lines bracketing his eyes tighten when they have to sidestep the walking path to avoid a trio of cyclists coming toward them, and while Samira doesn’t ask another time how much longer he’s up for being on his feet, she does steer him toward a bench that looks out at the river, “My left SI’s about to stage a mutiny, let’s sit for a few minutes.”
There’s a skeptical arch to his brow as he looks down at her, but he doesn’t call her on the bluff that really isn’t—her left sacroiliac joint has been barking at her for the last few hours of their shift like it always does since she had the audacity to turn thirty. Plus, he can’t exactly hold back his own groan as he lowers himself onto the bench next to her.
He tugs her in closer by their joined hands, so the entire line of her side presses up against his, and it’s exhaustion that leads her to drop her head to his shoulder. They sit in silence for a few minutes before Jack quietly asks, “Any thoughts on where you want to go from here?”
“Hmm?”
Jack lifts their hands, runs his thumb back and forth over her knuckles, “You know what I mean.”
She huffs a sigh, says what she said back in the diner, “I don’t know.”
“While I’m more than happy to hold your hand and be your friend, I think we both deserve more than that.”
“Yeah,” she admits, quiet, as she stares out at the way the sun glints off the water, and she reaches with her free hand to tuck her fingers into his elbow. “We do. I just—what would it look like?”
“Whatever you want, but-” he says, shifting around to look her straight on, and she sits up to meet his gaze with the same intensity, because she likes plans and it sure sounds like he’s got one. “I figure first, I kiss you, then two: we go back to mine so I can give my leg a break and we get some sleep, and then—see how we feel this afternoon.”
The look on his face says exactly what he’s thinking about re: those potential afternoon plans.
“Then this weekend,” he goes on. “I’ll take you out to dinner at Dog & Pony, and after, we talk about if we think there’s any chance we can hide this from the hospital until your fellowship when the optics get less dicey.”
“I think we make too much eye contact in the trauma bays as it is,” she snorts.
Jack chuckles low in his chest, and then he drops her hand to slide his into the fall of her hair and goes right into fulfilling step one of his plan. He tilts her head, just slightly, and presses his lips to her neck, and she shudders when the tip of his tongue flicks gently over her carotid for one dizzying moment. By the time he’s trailed his lips to her jaw, Samira’s hand has landed on his arm, fingers flexing as Jack kisses one corner of her mouth, and then the other before pressing his lips fully to hers.
A moan catches in her throat as his tongue slides down the side of hers, and she slides her fingers into the curls at the nape of his neck that she’s been itching to touch for, what, as long as she can remember? Forever maybe?
Eventually, the buzz of a bike chain filters through the way her brain is shorting out other than to chant it’s happening, it’s happening, it’s happening, and Samira vaguely remembers that they’re in public.
Jack seems to not have such qualms and keeps pressing kiss after kiss against her mouth.
Finally, Samira pulls away to breathe, her forehead touching his, but when Jack makes to dive in again, she says, “Wait, wait hold on,” she pats her hand on his chest, momentarily distracted by the firm muscle under his scrub top. “You can get us a table at Dog & Pony? Their wait list is like six months long.”
It’s like a dam has broken and now that he can, Jack dives back in, pecks her on the mouth once, quick, “I also happen to know a guy—old army buddy works in restaurant supply distribution. He’s been getting after me for months to stop ordering on DoorDash and get out of the goddamn house. He can get us in pretty much anywhere.”
Samira can’t help but laugh, “Surprised you didn’t mention that to Mr. Edgerton, rub it in his face a little.”
“Thought about it,” he says, dragging his thumb down her jaw. “But I didn’t want to completely tank your patient satisfaction score.”
She groans, drops her head back to his shoulder, “I don’t even want to think about that.”
His hand slides back up into her hair, thumb pressing into the base of her skull which makes her groan, “Now I know you’re tired.”
“Ugh,” she grunts as Jack covers the back of her neck with his whole hand and squeezes until some of the tension releases. “So,” Samira draw out. “Step two?”
She can feel his chuckle vibrate through the hand still pressed to his chest, “Thought you might be a fan of that one.”
“Only if we can sneak in a shower. I feel so gross from shift.”
Samira doesn’t have to lift her head to pick up on the interest he takes in that, “Well, as it happens, I have a really nice shower.”
“You know, I kind of figured.”
Separating reluctantly as Jack laughs, a sound she wants to hear all the time, Samira pushes off the bench first, holds out a hand to him, “Come on. Let’s get you home.”