Archive of Our Own

“But once in a while the odd thing happens,
Once in a while the dream comes true,
And the whole pattern of life is altered,
Once in a while the moon turns blue.” – W.H. Auden

Abbot’s interest in her, such as it is, is purely professional.

He never even uses her first name – always “Dr. Mohan,” so consistently that she wonders if Slo-Mo has reached even his ears (a thought that makes her burn with shame). When he calls for her it’s to tag her in for a trauma, a procedure, an interesting case; he makes small talk, sure, but it’s never anything truly personal. When he texts her after their shifts, it’s always with a paper to review, a relevant case report, sometimes even a photograph of a diagram he’s sketched out to illustrate a teaching point from earlier. Medicine is built upon a strict hierarchy, and he clearly knows where the lines are drawn; he’s never crossed one, never even come close.

She wishes he would.  

Samira has, in the past year, discovered an unexpected talent: concealing how hopelessly, desperately, ridiculously in love she is with Jack Abbot.  

The denial had been a natural initial reaction. The butterflies in her stomach at the sight of him were just nerves at the start of a new shift, the goosebumps if his arm brushed hers at handoff were simply due to the cold, the way her heart skipped beats at the sight of his smile was a result of excessive consumption of coffee. But nothing ameliorated her symptoms; she started meditating before bed, wearing a fleece to work, switching to decaffeinated blends or teas. But things just snowballed.

It became inescapable the night she’d managed a tricky intubation of a patient with severe airway swelling from angioedema. She’d tubed the patient nearly blind, a Hail Mary before resorting to cric, guided only by instinct, and sagged with relief at the immediate color change and improving oxygenation. She straightened up to find Abbot leaning almost casually against the wall, two feet from her. He hadn’t even bothered to announce himself or glove up, just watched her work, but had positioned himself well within reach if she’d needed him. As their eyes met, he winked at her – and she felt as if she could fly.

There was no hiding from it after that. One little wink, and her world imploded.

It would’ve been easier to get over the whole thing if her attraction to him was purely physical. But his mind is incredible. He’s one of the most creative, innovative, sharp people she’s ever met – some kind of ex-military boy scout MacGyver – and, if that weren’t enough, he is unfailingly kind. Maybe she could’ve resisted the way his crooked grin transforms his face, or the ripple of muscle with every movement that even boxy scrub tops can’t disguise; but she’s helpless against the whole of him.

Samira is nothing if not a realist. She can accept, without rancor, that her feelings are hers alone, that they are not reciprocated and never will be. He’s her attending, he’s eleven years older than her – and, most importantly, she is nowhere near the caliber of woman that he deserves.  

So she shouldn’t feel anything when he comes in one day, Al-Hashimi beside him, her hand resting on his back. She shouldn’t, and yet her mouth has suddenly run dry; he looks open, at ease, head thrown back as he laughs. There’s something unfurling in the pit of her stomach, the jealousy white-hot and razor-sharp. She wants to slap the offending hand away, guard him from any other woman who may want to touch him, and shit where did that come from –  

“Holy fuck,” Trinity says, staring in the same direction. “That’s why he stopped wearing his ring? Fuck.”

It takes Samira more effort than she’d like to keep her voice steady. “You sound disappointed, Trin.”

“Well, yeah! I had money on this. Fucking shit.”

“Oh my god, are they together?” Victoria bursts around the nursing station and skids to an abrupt halt, eyes darting between Samira and the attendings across the ER.  “But I thought –”

The ambulance bay doors burst open, paramedics already doing CPR, blood spattering the floor. He strides over to the gurney, gloving up, scanning the room. She’s already standing before it comes. “Dr. Mohan, with me.”

They looked good together, her brain supplies traitorously, as she lies restless in bed, sleep evading her. It’s true. They make perfect sense as a couple: both attendings, practiced and competent; both with experience in war-torn countries and the kind of unspeakable atrocities they witnessed there; both with a knack for getting under Robby’s skin. It makes Samira realize they are on an equal footing, one that she will never share.

Ever since Pittfest she’s been unable to shake it off; the heady rush of his focus centered fully on her, the wide-eyed mock solemnity as he’d said it was too risky for me to do myself that made heat flare through her core. The feel of his breath, stirring the hair on her neck, as he watched her thread that pigtail in. The way she’d just known she was safe beside him, even when he was physically body-blocking Walsh from approaching their patient with paddles, just to give Samira a moment to shine. It felt like being embattled and having the cavalry storm in, the way he always seemed to hold her anxieties at bay and let her test the boundaries of what she could really do.

She knows it’s probably the adrenaline, painting those memories in technicolor. A trauma bond. It can’t be real, there’s no actual foundation there between them – but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s still spinning in his orbit, trapped in an unabating gravitational pull, anchored by that unwavering eye contact of his.

Try as she might, she’s unable to extricate herself from him. Nor is she sure she wants to.

“You have to stop moping,” Trinity sighs, pressing a plastic cup filled with wine into Samira’s hands. They’re crammed into Trinity’s living room, sitting on the floor around her coffee table. Whitaker is somewhere in the kitchen, bringing back a few more bottles of beer. Trinity had invited them all over after that shift, calling it the Pitt Support Group; Mel had happily said that she’d never had so many friends before, and now they have a standing girls’ night (with Whitaker, because he lives here, and no one has the heart to send him away) every other week. Samira supposes she should probably socialize more with her own classmates, but somehow she just doesn’t feel the same connection to them that she does to this little motley crew. Even if they are unashamedly nosy.

“I’m not moping!”

“You just haven’t been yourself,” Cassie puts in; Mel, beside her, nods vigorously. Cassie isn’t drinking, but Trinity – despite insisting she doesn’t care and that they’re all a burden upon her – has bought four types of sparkling ciders just for her. She’s swirling her cup pensively. “You’re quieter, and you don’t come hang out with us as much as you used to, and I think it started –”

“I thought it was for you,” Victoria says. “The ring, I mean, him taking it off. I really thought it was for you.” Victoria looks devastated; maybe it’s the alcohol, but there are actual tears shining in her eyes, and Samira can’t find it in herself to feel cornered or annoyed. She’s too tired to pretend. Maybe it’s the wine.

“I had hoped it might be, too,” she confesses, her voice small. “I guess I just misread things.”

“Not a chance,” Trinity snaps. “That fucker has been mooning after you for months, even though you’re completely out of his league. No way you misread things. Men are a fucking waste of time.”

Whitaker chooses this moment to reenter the room, and Victoria giggles at the resigned expression on his face.

“I know what’ll fix this shit for you,” Trinity says, sitting up. “Give me your phone – no, unlock it, god, Mohan, help me help you –”

Samira walks home that night a little tipsy, a little wistful, and with a new Hinge profile burning a hole in her pocket.

“Dr. Mohan, I hear you’re consulting cardiology for bed eight?” Abbot materializes at her shoulder, eyebrows raised.

She fights to keep her features neutral, trying to calm the frantic pumping of her heart (he’s here, he’s here, he’s here with me). “Yeah, I was about to call. EKG shows a third-degree block, he’s bradycardic and his pressures are soft, he needs a transvenous pacer and ICU admission until –”

“Tell them we’ll let them know when he’s ready for the unit,” Abbot says, a glint in his eye. He grins at her confusion, all teeth. She thinks of sharks and open water, and maybe she doesn’t need the sea to be drowning.

Ten minutes later she finds herself right back where all her problems began – gowned up, Abbot to her right and leaning over her shoulder to watch her hands. He's murmuring against the shell of her ear, and she hopes he can’t see the goosebumps erupting where his breath tickles her skin.

“Seldinger technique, just like your standard central line,” he nods, watching.  “I have your generator here when you’re ready, Dr. Mohan.”

His voice is pitched low, the way it always is when they’re performing a procedure on an awake patient, and she wonders what it would take for him to call her Samira. She’s positive he can see her pulse jumping at her throat from his vantage point, but her hands remain steady. “Advancing pacing wire, looking for capture.”

For a time there is quiet; the monitor beeps gently in the background and she can hear him breathing, slow and even. No arrhythmias on the monitor; she’s careful, feeding the pacing wire further, until – “Excellent, pacing at 60 beats per minute. Strong work, Dr. Mohan.”

His eyes crinkle at her and she laughs, forgetting the tension between them, giddy with the thrill. “That was amazing,” she laughs, admiring their perfect capture. “Glad you found me before I paged cardiology down here.”

Without warning Abbot stretches across the bed from behind her, securing the tubing, for a moment nearly flush against her. Even through the plastic gowns she can feel the heat of him, his chin brushing the top of her head. She holds her breath, praying he can’t feel her heart hammering at the sudden nearness of him.

“You don’t need them,” he murmurs, stepping back. His hand is warm against hers as he slips her the suture. “You have me.”

She averts her gaze, flushing, hoping he can’t see how badly she wishes that were true.

Browbeaten by her friends, Samira starts going on dates. The problem, because of course she can’t just get out of her own way, is that she finds herself constantly comparing them to him.

One is tall, head and shoulders above her, and all she can think is that Abbot wouldn’t need to crouch so comically to kiss her. Another is an investment banker, all smooth skin and crisply tailored lines, and she wonders instead how the callouses she’s noticed on Abbot’s hands would feel against the curve of her waist. One brings her a bouquet, crimson and showy, and she knows that Abbot would’ve never picked out something as cliche as red roses for her.

She always splits the bill, always drives herself to the restaurant, and never accepts an invitation for a second date.

The problem – well, one of many – is that nothing about Abbot has changed. More specifically, nothing about his behavior. With her.

Samira considers trying to swap some of her upcoming shifts with him, maybe switch to working with Shen – just temporarily, just until she can meet his eyes without wishing she was anywhere else – but every time he finds her on his service Abbot visibly perks up, and she’s too selfish to deny herself the little spark of joy that brings her.

She’s not deluded enough to think that he may have some degree of affection for her, not in the way she feels for him. It’s a teaching hospital, and a teaching relationship. She knows she’s lucky to have him in her corner; every time he calls for her to handle a new case, a trauma, learn a new procedure, she feels grateful that she’s his first choice.

There’s an easy rhythm to working with him. Sometimes in the chaos of the ED it’s easy to trip over people, tubing, machines (she remembers Whitaker nearly concussing himself when he tried to step between a patient’s chest tube canister and the dialysis machine). Robby tends to helicopter, and more than once she’s bumped into him at the bedside; he tries to be supportive, but doesn’t seem to understand when she needs space and when she needs help. And his constant reminders to move faster, the disappointed look in his eyes when he asks her how many she’s carrying (never mind if they are the more complex cases, who need more attention), often leave her feeling small. Useless.

Abbot never does that to her. He has this wide-eyed, locked-in stare whenever he’s looking at her – like she’s laid completely bare to him – and she has never once doubted that he listens. When they are at a bedside together they’re perfectly in sync; even if he’s watching over her shoulder, he anticipates her movements beautifully, never once jostles her, does nothing but make her feel supported. Seen.

She’s spent years feeling envious of Frank for being Robby’s chosen protégé; when he fell out of favor, she’d thought Robby would turn maybe to her or Cassie, as the next-most senior residents working with him, but instead he’d taken Whitaker, an intern, under his wing. There’d been murmurs about that, but she hadn’t let it bother her, because by then she was discovering what a whitewater thrill it was to have Jack Abbot walk into the room and immediately look for her.

But she isn’t as controlled as Abbot. She’s watched him compartmentalize time and time again, come away from running an hours-long code red-eyed and tense, only to package it away as the next trauma rolls in. Samira’s never had that ability, has never managed to live her life in neat little boxes that she can exchange out depending on the situation at hand. Once he’d disappeared up to the roof after a grueling shift, the sound of a mother’s screams still reverberating in the air after Samira had had to tell her they couldn’t save her little boy, and she’d had to grip the arms of her chair to prevent herself from following him, wrapping her arms around him. She longs for the privilege to be able to follow him up, soothe him in those private moments of pain, but she knows better. She waits for Robby, who always seems to know which nights are the bad ones, always knows where to go.

She wishes it was her, comforting Abbot, taking comfort from him. But it isn’t her place; never will be.

There are nights when she locks herself in the supply room, pretends she needs to grab water from the breakroom, just to have thirty seconds without his gaze scorching her skin. She wanders the unit with her hands in her pockets, so he won’t notice how they tremble when he approaches her. At times she’s terrified that if he gives her that sincere, x-ray stare once more time, she might just throw caution to the wind and find out how his lips taste against hers.

It’s embarrassing. Deeply, painfully embarrassing, that she has allowed the best professional relationship of her life to be so polluted by these irrepressible emotions. She remembers the whispers over the past few years, as Heather and Robby danced around each other and did their best to keep things secret (in the Pitt, nothing stays secret for long), remembers the accusations of favoritism and worse that had been hurled at Heather behind her back. Heather herself had handled it with remarkable grace; chin up, back straight, never letting on that it bothered her.

Samira doesn’t have that kind of emotional fortitude.

She’s spent so long trying to carve out a place for herself here. And now that Abbot is freely giving her that mentorship that she has craved for so long, she doesn’t have it in her to refuse.  

And if the way his eyes twinkle at her makes her thighs quake, he never has to know.

“It has been made clear that this is not optional,” Robby says sternly, wrapping up handoff. “It is a PTMC-sponsored holiday party, to ‘boost staff morale.’ It is not the end of the world.”

“What if we have plans?” Shen asks, punctuating his question with a rattling sip of his somehow already-empty iced coffee.

“I make your calendar, and I have Nate’s number,” Robby says, mildly. “Don’t make me use it.”  

Shen recedes, a little sulkily.

“Is there a guest policy? For those of us who are off-site?” Those careful enunciations; Samira would’ve recognized them anywhere. She feels her heart sink a little as she glances over at Al-Hashimi; it’s been months, and she had thought maybe, just maybe, Abbot and she weren’t still –

“What’s she doing here?” Trinity hisses. “I thought she’s back at the VA?”

“Probably here for a staff meeting,” Mel interjects. “I was just at the VA last month, and Dr. Al-Hashimi was working with IT on integrating a new generative AI program that can –”

“No plus-ones, PTMC only, only non-alcoholic beverages will be served, drink limit of two per person,” Robby rattles off. He raises his hands at the ensuing groans. “I know, I know. The budget is not in my hands, my friends. I’m just the messenger for the powers that be.” His tone makes it clear what he thinks of that.  

“Maybe that gorgeous radiologist will be there,” Victoria sighs, dreamily.

Cassie shakes her head, saying something about Victoria being far too young for to be pursuing an attending, but Samira isn’t listening. She can’t tell if she’s hoping or dreading seeing Abbot there. At least here, surrounded by fluorescent lights and the chimes of telemetry monitors, there is some semblance of separation between them, a gossamer layer of professional conduct and workplace ethics dampening her desire to reach out and touch the delicate skin at his throat. She’s not so sure she likes the idea of that boundary being dismantled, even if it’s only for an evening.

“I don’t know if I can go,” Samira starts, and is promptly overruled (Victoria somehow has everyone’s schedules memorized, and immediately reveals that Samira isn’t working that night).

“Think we can go in scrubs?” Whitaker pipes up.

“Not a chance, Huckleberry.” Trinity crumples a paper cup of coffee, tosses it in the trash. “You’re not in Kansas anymore. Tell me you own a damn blazer.”

Whitaker stares at them helplessly as she walks away. “Now I’m Dorothy?”

Samira pats his shoulder. She’s fully aware of what this little analogy would make her. If I only had a brain.  

It turns out to be a semiformal event, as announced in the emails they receive later that week; PTMC has reserved a local bar just around the corner from the hospital for the evening. Samira owns plenty of dresses, vestiges of desperate shopping trips years ago, when she’d been trying to bond with a mother who couldn’t bear to look at her and see her late husband’s face. She hasn’t had an occasion to wear most of them, and now she digs them out of the back of her closet, tracing a hand over the cascade of fabrics.

He probably won’t even be there, she tells herself. The dress she slips into is navy chiffon, hits her mid-thigh; she adds tights beneath as a concession to the December chill. Without the time or inclination to get a trim, her hair has grown out, and after a moment of staring at her flatiron she gives up and hooks a claw clip into it, a few stray curls framing her face. It’s been a while, but her hands still remember how to wing her liner, brush on an even coat of mascara, pat on a layer of rosy lipstick.  

Maybe she will meet someone else tonight. Maybe her friends are right, and she just needs someone to take her mind off dark curls flecked with gray, and the exquisite things that a smile does to Jack Abbot’s face.

She scoffs at herself. Maybe she’ll sprout wings and fly to the moon.  

She takes an Uber to the hospital – she lives well within walking distance, but the streets are probably icy and she’s out of practice walking in heels. The bar is already crowded by the time she walks in, the air filled with chatter overlying someone’s Top 2000s playlist. She catches sight of Robby, looking like he would like to be swallowed up by the ground, trapped in conversation with Gloria and the cardiology division chief.  Shen and Parker are laughing at something Dr. Mehta is saying, both waving at her as she weaves past them through the crowd.

She spots her friends, clustered together in a corner, and Samira forces herself not to scan the throng for him as she approaches them.

“Abbot isn’t here,” Trinity says to her accusingly, the minute she draws near. “For fuck's sake, I saw you looking. You’ve never even gone on a fucking second date with any of those guys I found for you, have you?”

“Hey, now,” Cassie intervenes, before Samira can respond. “Maybe they just weren’t the right fit.”

Samira nods, grateful, but Trinity’s attention is already lost. Garcia has marched out of the crowd and straight past them, without a backwards glance, heading for the bar. There’s an angry twist to Trinity’s mouth, and she glares at them, daring them to comment. No one does.

“We’re going to get drunk,” Trinity declares, mulish. Samira’s about to point out that the bar is only serving mocktails tonight (according to Robby, admin did not want to risk any liability regarding alcohol-fueled accidents or inappropriate behavior), when Trinity produces two flasks from her bag, handing them around.  

The tequila hits her like a brick wall – belatedly, she realizes she should’ve eaten something before coming here – and the evening blurs into a buzzing haze as they settle together in a booth. Mel chatters about her phone call with Langdon, and how he’s doing in rehab (surprisingly well, from the sound of it), Trinity glowers into the crowd, and Victoria brainstorms with an amused Cassie ways she can try to sneak down to radiology next week.

Whitaker joins them eventually, having overslept and forgotten about tonight despite living with Trinity, but he’s remembered her instructions and brought two more flasks, and a deck of cards, with him. She’s feeling pleasantly buzzed and rather drowsy, and eventually Samira makes her excuses as they start setting up the third game of Slapjack.

Tipsier than she’d realized, it takes her a few minutes to slip her heels back on and navigate the crowd. She’s rifling through her purse, looking for her coat tag, when her she catches sight of something familiar in her peripheral vision Her heart throbs painfully in her chest, even before her eyes catch up; she already knows what she’s about to see.

He’s here, leaning against the wall with his legs crossed at the ankles, head tilted lazily towards Robby and Shen beside him. He’s here – and he’s staring directly straight at her. She’s immobilized, feet suddenly glued to the ground, unable to tear her eyes away from him and painfully aware of the blood rushing to her cheeks, staining her skin. Abbot looks practically edible, in a black button-down shirt with a few too many buttons undone, sleeves pushed carelessly to his elbows, head tipped back to reveal the strong lines of his throat – and she wants so badly to chase the planes of his chest with her lips, slide her hands against bare skin, or maybe up into his those tousled curls. When her gaze darts back to his she understands the depth of her mistake; her roving eyes haven’t escaped him, and something in his face has darkened, his jaw clenched (how that makes her shudder). His eyes are gleaming as he watches her.

It dawns on her that he knows.

Someone steps in between them, breaking her line of sight, and the release is like a taut rope being cut. Her face burns with mortification. All this time she’s prided herself on her professionalism, on her caution, on keeping these inappropriate feelings for her attending stoppered up for so long – and in just a few seconds she’s slipped up, toppled her own carefully constructed house of cards. There’s no misinterpreting that look on his face. He sees right through her, maybe he always has, and she is dizzy with the shame of it.  

She skips the coat check, she’ll come back for it tomorrow, she just needs to get out – she squeezes through the crowd, bursts out onto the street. The world outside is a stark contrast to the raucous party behind her; apart from some distant sirens the night is silent, roads deserted, the hour clearly later than she’d realized. Streetlights slice through the dark in long, yellowed beams, beneath heavy clouds. There’s a storm brewing above, and the wind is already picking up, the chill biting at her exposed skin. She wraps her arms around herself, ducks her chin to her chest, pushes through the frigid air. She can walk home; she’s not far, and the sidewalks are thankfully liberally salted. She can’t risk waiting for a ride here, when at any moment, he could –

“Dr. Mohan!”

Fuck.

She pretends she hasn’t heard, stilettos beating a rapid staccato against the concrete (god, she misses her sneakers). There’s a light snow falling, and in any other moment she would’ve paused to admire the beauty of it, but she can hear his lilting gait behind her, crunching on the salt, far too close.

“Dr. Mohan –” Abbot’s hand is a brand on her elbow, and she loses her balance as his fingers close around her arm. He steadies her with another hand against her back, tugs her perilously close to him. In these shoes she’s barely an inch shorter than him, and the proximity steals the very air from her lungs.

Even if he hadn’t been touching her, she’d be rooted to the spot. She’s suddenly exactly where she’s dreamed of being, all these months; in his arms, but with not the faintest idea what to do next.

“You’re freezing.” His voice is raspy, and she shivers, both with the grate of it and the cold. Suddenly she’s enveloped in blissful warmth, and it takes her a moment to register that he’s draping his jacket over her, the leather still radiating his body heat.

“You’ll be cold,” she whispers, even as her fingers clutch the jacket closer.

Abbot’s eyes are dark, focused, pupils blown. “Not a chance.” He reaches up and unclips her hair; the curls tumble free, round her shoulders. Watching her face, he slides a hand into her hair, almost reverently, gently. Unconsciously, her eyes flutter closed, head leaning into his splayed fingers.

He chuckles, a rumble that makes heat pool in her abdomen. Everything feels this moment feels distorted, unreal, as if she isn’t in her own body but watching the scene unfold before her through a thick fog. Tequila, she groans internally, berating herself for accepting Trinity’s flask and thereby robbing herself of any remaining presence of mind. She can’t find the right words – can’t find any words – she’s off kilter, unbalanced, tethered to existence by nothing but him and the hand caressing her neck.

She’s been physically close to Abbot before; sometimes the job demands it, shoulders brushing during a procedure, fingers touching as they exchange tools, but always with plausible deniability. There is none here. He’s incandescent like this, in the half-light, eyes brighter than stars. There’s a scent clinging to his skin; she doesn’t remember him wearing a cologne at work, but this close it’s unmistakable, seductive and complex, cardamom and lavender and something woodsy. Wind rushes against them and she unconsciously steps closer to him, her hair swirling into his face.

“You have no idea, do you,” he says quietly, tipping her face up to his. “You have no idea, the effect you have.”

Her ears are ringing, pulse thundering in her ears, and her brain feels like it’s struggling through molasses to parse his words. It’s impossible to concentrate when the pad of his thumb is lightly stroking her cheekbone, when she can feel his other hand flexed against her waist. He’s holding her like she’s made of glass, and she’s aching to shatter against him. She opens her mouth, still can’t find the right words, and closes it again, tongue slipping out to moisten her lips.

Abbot shakes his head, and there it is, that fucking smile, that almost-shy curve of his lips that she’s been craving. “Unbelievable,” he murmurs, tugging at a ringlet, watching it spiral around his finger. He’s impossibly close, mere centimeters from her, studying her.

She’s ablaze at the hunger in his gaze, not sure what to do with her hands, scared to touch him but aching to. Her hands descend onto his chest, lightly, and he seems to find what he’s waiting for as her eyes flicker to his mouth. The amusement in his smile shifts into something tender as he ducks his head, and then his lips are on hers and her brain short-circuits entirely. His lips are on hers and its chaste, soft, a barely-there pressure, and she’s three steps behind, still processing that this is happening, he’s here and real and kissing her. For a heartbeat she’s treading water, frozen with shock, and then just as he stiffens and starts to pull back, her instincts snap to life.

Samira melts into him, chasing his mouth with hers, and this time he kisses her in earnest, crushing her against him, that patented Jack Abbot intensity on full display. He wraps his hand into her hair and leverages it – just the right degree of pressure against her scalp – to tip her head back, tongue teasing its way into her mouth. When she gasps he grins against her, teeth clacking together.

He tastes like whiskey and secrets and sin –

“Jack –” she stutters on the rest of the words as his tongue finds the pulse point below her jawline, and he makes a pleased sound at hearing his name, tightens his corded arms around her. As his lips trail down her neck she forgets the thought that had startled her, her world narrowing down to in the warmth of his mouth, the scrape of stubble on her skin, the solid perfection of him slotted against her. He comes back to kiss her again and oh, he’s even better at this than she’d imagined, firm but so gentle, tongue like silk, teeth nipping at her lower lip, sending electricity sparking over her skin.

And then reality crashes in, more forcefully this time, and she shoves hard against his chest, wrenches herself out of his encircling arms. Tears are pricking at her eyes. She’d almost let herself forget that he’s spoken for, that he isn’t free, she has no right to touch him – and he has no right to tempt her like this.

Her voice sounds foreign to her, tinny and unfamiliar. “We can’t do this. We can’t. You know – you know this is wrong.”

Abbot staggers back, as if she’d struck him. His face is open, raw, and she feels tears spill down her cheeks as he stares at her. In the glow of the streetlights he’s arrestingly beautiful, a faint dusting of snowflakes crowning his hair, curls rumpled from her fingers, cheeks flushed with cold. But his eyes are wide, shock and hurt plainly written across his face, and her throat burns with shame and with want.

Every fiber in her body urges her to just take one step forward, dissolve into him, reality be damned. But she’s won’t – she’s better than this, she won’t do this to someone else, she won’t cause this sort of pain. She’s spent years trying to be someone her father would be proud of, and even if she considers compromising her own morals, she can’t let her beloved Appa down like this.

It takes effort, and more than a few tries, but she tears her eyes away from Abbot’s. Her legs are unsteady, but she finds her feet and forces them to move, fleeing before her resolve gives way and she winds herself around him, damning them both.  

There’s an intake of breath behind her. She’s not sure if she imagines his voice, husky, breathless.

“Samira.”

Sobs wrack her frame and she fumbles with the keys, stumbles through her door. Her head is spinning; for a moment she wonders if any of it really happened, if maybe she’s just hallucinating from the tequila and the cold – but his leather is heavy against her shoulders, the scent of his skin permeating the collar.

Her chest is tight, breath coming in hiccupping gasps. She’s shivering uncontrollably, even though she hadn’t turned off the heat in her apartment before leaving. Stripping off her clothes, she steps into the shower, trying to scrub away the phantom press of his hands; she can still feel them blazing through the thin layers of fabric that had separated him from bare skin. Eventually she comes away, skin rubbed raw, reddened by the scalding spray –still tattooed by his fingerprints.

That Hollywood snowfall has metastasized into a roaring storm, wind howling against the panes of her window, and she watches it rage through the glass. She’s curled up on the squished armchair she’s dragged with her from apartment to apartment since her undergraduate years, wrapped in a blanket dragged off her bed. Her fingers trace a swelling over her lower lip where his teeth had been, still tender, a reminder that this wasn’t just a dream.

The guilt is relentless, consuming. The memories invade her every thought, more real than the sensation of her fingernails cutting into her palms: the surprising softness of lips parting hers, the slide of his tongue against her own, the way he cupped her head in one strong hand and drew her into him with the other. It had been absurdly easy, losing herself in the vortex that is Jack Abbot.

It’s become her new mantra: he is not free, he is already committed to someone else, he is not yours to desire. She massages her temples, trying to beat the words into her brain.

She isn’t sure how she can ever show her face at work again after this. Her reputation will be in smithereens by this time tomorrow; Slo-Mo was nothing at all compared to this catastrophe. Her mentors, her teachers, her friends – what will they think of her now?

Suddenly she is furious with him, for not only recognizing her interest, but having the temerity to act upon it, when she herself never would have. The humiliation of it roils under her breast, agonizing. Is he laughing at her, now that he’s realized how weak she is? What a fool she is? Had he toyed with her for his own amusement, or as an experiment, to see how far he could push her? How far she was willing to let herself fall for him? Was this all just to bolster his own ego, see just how many women he could ensnare?

Self-loathing consumes her just as quickly as her anger had. As much as she wishes she could say otherwise, she knows him well enough to know that despite his penchant for irreverence, he is undoubtedly, unquestionably a good man. The type of man to fudge the dates on an ultrasound to give a pregnant teenager a choice, to donate blood while working an MCI without any thought for the toll it may take on his own body, to willingly take a bullet if it means he can save the life of another. He would never. And she knows it. It’s why she loves him so.

The thought brings with it another rush of tears. She retrieves a bottle of wine Trinity had left in her fridge, ensconces herself back in the chair and gulps down a few sips, straight from the bottle. She wishes she had something stronger, anything to numb this frenetic, thumping panic consuming her.

She’s tarnished, forever. The other woman. She feels her own self-respect slipping through her fingers, lost to the ether, blown away by the roaring maelstrom outside.

She had tasted whiskey in his mouth, oaky and smooth – clearly Trinity hadn’t been the only one sneaking contraband into that party, maybe he hadn’t been quite in his right mind either. Maybe they had both felt a flash of attraction, and their ensuing actions were simply the result of alcohol-lowered inhibitions and adrenaline.

She’s heard stories, they all have, of his late wife; the woman he’d married young, at eighteen when joining up to the army, and lost to a car accident while he was deployed overseas only a few short years later. He’s worn his wedding ring since, from the sound of it has barely even looked at another woman since. It would make absolute sense for him to be off-kilter. Maybe this whole fucked-up situation has just been the perfect storm, alcohol and a physical desire and an underlying pain coagulating into this.

It’s the best explanation Samira can find, because as much as she would love to absolve herself and lay all the blame squarely at his feet, she knows him – and Jack Abbot is many things, but she knows he is not capable of such bald-faced deception, of such naked cruelty. He would never take advantage of her emotions just for a moment’s indulgence or amusement.

She’s sickened by her own weakness. If she hadn’t stopped and ogled him so blatantly (she remembers with shame how she’d lingered there, practically undressing him with her eyes), if she hadn’t let him hold her and caress her hair and lean in closer and closer, if she had just taken three steps back and bid him goodnight, neither of them would be in this mess now. He is in his first relationship in nearly two decades, has finally found a way to reenter the world of the living – and she’s the reason this relationship is already living on borrowed time.

It isn’t purely her fault – Samira is not so foolish as to blame only herself, it takes two to tango, as they say – but she knows enough about Abbot to know that despite his hard-as-nails exterior, he is deeply vulnerable and deeply wounded, physically and emotionally. If she probes at his scars enough, she knows she will find unhealed tissue beneath.

The evidence is everywhere. Abbot comes in at all hours, on shift or not, because he doesn’t sleep; he’s constantly listening to police scanners, because he can’t tolerate his own thoughts in the silence; spends his free time searching for new disasters to wade into, because he needs the adrenaline and the ability to jump in and take control. He is constantly searching for new ways to drown out the noise in his own head. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to recognize; Samira knows the signs, and he exhibits them all. She’d asked him once, when he came in with a bullet graze from a SWAT mission, why he does it. My therapist says I need a hobby, he’d returned, glib, and she walked away with a sinking feeling. He’s spiraling, slowly self-destructing, and Samira prefers it when he works two weeks in a row, because at least then she knows he isn’t out there being shot at, or worse.

She’s seen the way his face tightens on the nights he eventually flees to the roof, has watched Robby walk him down in the mornings, their faces set, shoulders tense. She isn’t blind to the traumas he carries, and she reminds herself of this now – whatever she is dealing with in life, the hand he’s been dealt is far worse.

She knows he’s walking a tightrope, and she refuses to be the reason he topples into the abyss.

For his own good – and hers – she’ll stay far, far away.

Paralyzed by the fear of walking into the ER and discovering that she is a pariah, Samira calls in and takes three days of sick leave; she’s used so little during her residency that no one bats an eye at her request. By the third day, her phone is constantly buzzing with texts from her friends, and she realizes that no one has an inkling of what she’s done. Trinity thinks she has alcohol poisoning from the holiday party and mocks her for being a lightweight, Mel frets about the severity of this year’s flu season and offers to pick up medication, and Victoria Doordashes a ridiculous quantity of soup to her apartment with a cheery Get Well Soon! card. Word of her indiscretion (infidelity, not indiscretion, she thinks with a flare of shame) has not spread. It seems Abbot has had mercy on her, and held his tongue.

She has dreamed so many times, in so many ways, of being at his mercy. But never like this.

When she returns to day shift it’s with trepidation, and she is moved nearly to tears by the welcome she receives, as if she’d been gone for three months and not three days. She doesn’t deserve such solicitousness. If they knew what she’d done, they would be as disgusted with her as she is.

She tries to dodge Robby, and succeeds for half her shift, but he corners her while she’s scanning the board for her next patient.

“Recuperated, Dr. Mohan?” He’s smiling at her, the expression uncomplicated, and a knot somewhere deep behind her sternum relaxes. Robby doesn’t know. Abbot didn’t tell him.  

“Much, thank you,” she says. Forces a smile in return. Her voice is still throaty – from three days of staying curled up in bed, adrift on a sea of her own tears – but all it does is add veracity to her lies. In just a few days she’s gone from a woman of integrity to a caricature of her own values, stacking one falsehood upon another. She wonders how she’d ever thought, even for a moment, that someone like Abbot would take an interest in someone like her.

She isn’t hiding. She isn’t. She’s a grown woman, she doesn’t run from her problems, and she isn’t hiding.

She’s just restoring her circadian rhythms.

Samira stops picking up doubles, tells Dana she needs the time for research (“Good for you, kid, you need to get out of this place more”).  She stops signing up for night shifts that need coverage, unless Abbot is not listed as the attending on call. She stops staying late to finish charting in the ER, instead breaking her own cardinal rule and taking work home with her.

But the jacket, well, the jacket poses a problem. She’s so stupid – she has an endless list of her own foolish decisions, at this point – but fleeing from Abbot while still wearing this is up there. She’s not sure how to return it to him, not without having to actually face him, which she absolutely cannot do.

But return it she must. It’s clearly well-loved, the leather worn soft but still in excellent condition. It’s heavy in her hands, and she tries not to think about the selflessness with which he’d draped it over her shoulders, leaving him to weather the elements in just a thin shirt. Her thoughts wander to how good he probably looks wearing this; it had been comically overlarge for her, the sleeves falling past her fingers, the shoulders and body of it far too roomy, but she has a feeling Abbot fills it out perfectly.

These days, she’s constantly ashamed of herself.

She considers leaving it in the breakroom with a note, but she’s terrified someone (Trinity) will recognize her handwriting and ask questions. Nor does she want to risk it being stolen or lost, when she’s already made off with it without his consent. She could ask Shen or Parker to give it to him – she knows night shift hang out with each other regularly, keeps hearing from Parker about their “journal clubs” and “case conferences” that are thinly-veiled excuses for PTMC-reimbursed brunch or drinks – but they’ll both have entirely too many questions about how she came to have this in the first place, and she’s not sure she can convincingly lie to them when just the thought of Jack Abbot is enough to reduce her to bewildered tears.

She’s not sure what it says about her life – and her state of mind – that eventually breaking into Abbot’s locker seems to be the sanest move. She enlists Shen for help – between him and Parker, Shen asks fewer questions (mainly because he just can’t be bothered to care), and Robby is absolutely not an option.

“His locker combination?” Shen squints at her, puzzled. “You know he opens that thing like once a month, right?”

“I just want to return something of his that I found,” she says, which isn’t a lie. Mostly. “I just forgot to bring it with me today, this way I can drop it off tomorrow morning.”

She’s found Shen early enough into his shift that he’s barely made a dent in his enormous iced coffee, which is clearly working in her favor. He shrugs, produces a scrap of paper from his pocket, and scribbles down the code.

“Don’t ask me how I know this,” he says, handing it to her. “Guess he’ll have a surprise waiting for him when he gets back.”

She just can’t help herself. “Gets back?”

He looks surprised. “You didn’t know? Dude’s actually taken a vacation. Started the same time that I heard you were out.” Something seems to click, and she winces as he tilts his head at her. “Mohan, is something –”

“Shen! Hey!” It’s Dana, waving her arms from down the hall, and Samira has never felt so grateful for her. “Incoming!”

“Duty calls,” he says cheerfully, ambling off towards Dana and the paramedics bustling near the ambulance bay, and Samira breathes a sigh of relief.

The next morning she creeps in early, the jacket stowed in a tote, having stayed up half the previous night timing her moment. She isn’t working this shift, Shen and Robby are in the middle of handoff with both the day and night teams, and the locker rooms are deserted. She looks both ways, feeling absurdly as though she’s in the world’s most depressing heist film, and then slips into the men’s locker room.

Immediately she’s aware she’s intruding; many of the lockers are decorated with photographs, magnets, stickers (one has Remy from Ratatouille on it, and she grins, remembering Whitaker’s save last year with the rat). She finds Abbot’s without difficulty. Just like the one next to it (which is clearly Robby’s), his is papered with pictures, and after another quick glance around, she allows herself a moment to peek. Some are from his military days, a much-younger Abbot grinning at the camera in the middle of a group of young men, all of them boasting fatigues and sunburns and squinting in the blazing sun. There’s one of him and Robby, both flipping off the camera, an identical picture on the neighboring locker.   

An overhead page comes on, calling a code blue in the ICU, and she kicks herself for wasting time.

The combination works perfectly; the lock clicks open. Shen was right, the locker is nearly unused, apart from a half-emptied pack of Celsius drinks, a pile of granola bars, and a few sets of rolled-up scrubs. She positions the jacket, carefully folded, atop it all, and slips out still unseen.

It fractures her, a little, returning the last little piece of him that she’d had to herself.

Abbot is haunting her.

Sometimes Samira hears the ghost of his laugh, whips around to find an empty room. Once she did a double take in the ED, thinking she’d spotted him during day shift, only to find an empty workstation when she looks back. She stops making masala chai at home, after bursting into tears one night when the scent of cardamom reminded her of the sliver of bare skin exposed by a partially unbuttoned shirt. Ordinarily she would have thrown herself into work as a distraction, but he, too, is such a workaholic that half the shifts she would have picked up already have his name on them. So she buries herself in research instead, throwing herself headlong into new projects that eat away at the empty hours in each day.

But while in her waking hours she can dispel him with the blink of an eye, he keeps finding her in her sleep.

She’s had a glimpse of what being with him could be like, and it has fueled vivid dreams in ways she’s helpless to suppress. On the nights that sleep does find her it is short-lived and restless. Sometimes she dreams of his head between her legs, that teasing tongue put to good to use; other times it’s of the hardness she’d felt against her thigh, the stretch of him, the pain bleeding into ecstasy. But the worst dreams, the ones that hurt the most, are mundane; holding hands in the rain, coffee dates, curling up with her head on his shoulder after a long shift. The simple pleasure of being able to share time and space with him, unrushed and unhurried and unashamed. A luxury that she will never know, but the longing for it is eating her alive.  

It was a naïve hope, thinking she could avoid Abbot forever.

She’s on her phone as she heads for the exit, trying to decline drinks tonight. She hasn’t gone out with her friends even once in the weeks since the Incident, terrified that they’ll take one look at her and smell her deception, pry her secret from her and abandon her in disgust. She’s starting to run out of excuses, especially as they’ve noticed that she’s working less. Trinity is typing, the little ellipsis dancing on the screen, and Samira doesn’t realize she’s on a collision course until it’s nearly too late.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” she gasps, lunging back just before she crashes into someone walking in. She looks up and her heart stutters in her chest.

It’s Abbot, in a black t-shirt and jeans, with a bag slung over one shoulder. It’s Abbot, and he looks – he looks exhausted. There are bags under his eyes, a heaviness to his shoulders, and his mouth is tight at the corners as he looks at her.      

For a moment they’re locked in time, unmoving, and then he shifts his weight almost imperceptibly towards her, as if approaching a skittish animal.

Abbot sighs, runs a hand wearily down the side of his face. He isn’t making eye contact, focusing somewhere just behind her, and she feels as if he’d kicked her. “Dr. Mohan, I –” He breaks off as a group of respiratory therapists walk by, arguing about where to grab coffee. He waits till they’re out of earshot. “We need to talk. Just two minutes, that’s all.”  

Her heart sinks. That’s all. She already knows what he’s going to say. He’ll be a gentleman, of course, will let her down easy. It was a mistake, they were both a little drunk, it will never happen again.

She’s not sure she can bear to hear it.

“I can’t,” she says, backing away, eyes on the ground. “I’m sorry.” She’s been on the receiving end of his lightning-fast reflexes before, and this time she nearly sprints for the exit, not daring to look back.

He doesn’t follow her, and she pretends she isn’t disappointed.

Her only solace is a burst of productivity. She works – mainly days, sometimes doubles (but only after carefully crosschecking the attending schedules, pretending her heart doesn’t still shamelessly skip a beat when she sees his name on her screen). She submits two papers for publication, and is working on revisions for a third. She deletes Hinge off her phone. She tells her friends she just needs a few weeks to catch up on research before she has the free time to socialize – they scold her, but let it go, and she’s relieved. She just needs a little more time to perfect her façade, but she can feel herself achieving a sort of tenuous equilibrium.

This time, Abbot is clearly avoiding her, as much as she has been dodging him. When they overlap at signout he never looks in her direction, keeps his body angled towards Robby, doesn’t linger the way he used to. He no longer has that drawn, faded look to him, and she feels a pang of bitterness that he’s clearly moving on, while she remains trapped in the trenches. Her pulse still pounds when he’s near, lungs constricting with desire, fingers tingling with the urge to slip into his curls and tug his face down to hers. She doesn’t know how to let this go and dive back into her old life, not now that she has tasted his skin, the velvet heat of his mouth.

Sometimes she opens up their old messages, scrolling through his consistently professional texts to her, wondering how she’d managed to torpedo her life so completely.  

She really, really misses him. The ER isn’t the same without him beside her, steady and comforting, that razor-sharp wit always at the ready. She misses his unorthodox approach, the creativity, the way no two shifts were ever the same if Abbot was involved. Robby is a good teacher, but he’s traditional, especially with trainees, and it makes her feel the difference all the more.  

Sometimes she thinks about reaching out and apologizing to him, maybe leaving a note in his locker or sending a text, begging him to forgive and forget and go back to how they used to be. She regrets her escape when he’d tried to approach her, wishes she’d let him slap a band-aid over her gaping wounds, and just returned to some semblance of normalcy.

In her weaker moments she contemplates calling him from a hospital line, so he won’t see her number on the screen. She just wants to hear him breathe, hear his voice. But then she remembers the wounded look in his eyes from that night, the way he looked worn to the bone when they ran into each other a few weeks ago, and the impulse to reach out to him fades, replaced by a bone-deep grief she is not sure she will ever shake.

She misses her father, so much some days that she can scarcely move.

He had been a good man, kind, patient, endlessly supportive. He’d believed firmly that life always works itself out, that if things aren’t working out then they just need more time to settle into place. He’d believed that good things come to good people.

He died when she was eleven.

Her life was never the same, after. Her mother was lost in grief, and Samira was raised by aunts and grandparents, family who stepped in as support. Now that she’s older, she understands; she finds so many of her father’s features in her face, her jawline, the angle of her eyes, the dimples. As a child she felt it as rejection, the way her mother couldn’t seem to ever meet her eyes, but they’re both in a better place now.

There are days when it’s a salve to the wound, her ability to look into a mirror and find her father still present with her. But those are outnumbered by the days it hurts to look too closely, because he should be here. He would have been, if he’d had a different team of doctors, if he’d been to a different ER, if someone had just listened and not dismissed symptoms of a heart attack in a young South Asian man as heartburn and histrionics. They never even checked an EKG, and now her father is gone.

She needs his wisdom now, more than ever. She longs for that unconditional support of a loving parent; knowing that she will never be turned away, no matter what mistakes she’s made, no matter how far she strays. She misses being able to go home. Her mother isn’t even in the States anymore, traveling around Europe with a new boyfriend; everyone in Samira’s life has replaced her and moved on.

Every time, she’s left holding the pieces, slicing her hands open as she tries to fit the jagged edges together. By now she should have learned that they will never fit neatly again.

Just when Samira manages to convince herself that the rest of the Pitt remains thankfully ignorant of it all, Parker corners her in the locker room. “What’s going on with you and Abbot?”

Samira would have given anything to have a better poker face, tries to cobble one together. “I’m not sure what –”

Parker sits on one of the benches, and stares at her pointedly until Samira does the same. “Samira, I’m not an idiot. I saw him follow you out of that party, and then the next day you’re sick,” she emphasizes the word, raising her eyebrows, “And Abbot took a vacation. He never takes vacations. You know he was right back here after Pittfest, when even Robby took a few days off? And then he came back looking like absolute shit.”

Samira’s skin prickles with anxiety. They’re dancing around it, the Incident, and she knows she isn’t going to make it through this conversation without destroying Parker’s opinion of her.

Her thoughts must show on her face, because Parker moves closer. “Hey, hey. Relax. I’m just worried about both of you. He’s been moping around ever since you stopped working nights with him – you know, he didn’t even snap out of it for that propeller injury last week? He’s just…so quiet. All the time. It’s like he’s suddenly become Eeyore.” Parker sighs. “Look, you probably know this, but Abbot’s basically been out of the game since his wife died, what, almost twenty years ago? Just go easy on him, I promise you he’s trying, he’s just a fucking idiot sometimes.”

Samira flushes, embarrassment clawing its way up her spine. “That’s not it,” she says quietly. God, how she wishes it was. “That’s not it at all.”

“Then what is?”

Samira stiffens at the probing, and Parker sighs. “I’m not trying to intrude, I just – he’s so miserable, Samira, and from what I can see, you don’t look like you’re doing any better. I just want to help. He deserves to be happy. You both do, after everything.”  

“I think you have the wrong idea,” Samira says slowly, fighting the stinging behind her eyes.

Parker scoffs. “Please. You two are shit at keeping secrets. Even Shen asked him the other day if he’d fucked something up with you, and you know Shen’s always a bit late to the party.” Her face softens. “You’re the best thing to happen to Abbot in a long time. And he knows it.”

None of this makes any sense. Samira’s palms are clammy and she buries them in her pockets, digging her nails into her thighs to ground herself. Apart from Robby, Abbot is closest to Shen and Parker – it doesn’t make any sense that they wouldn’t know about him and Al-Hashimi, that they would be asking him about her, unless…

The flood of hope would have brought her to her knees, if she wasn’t already sitting down. What if she’s had it wrong from the start – what if that night hadn’t been a lapse of judgment after all, but a moment of unguarded honesty from a man who has never once lied to her? What if she’s committed them both to months of torment for nothing? What if –

The need to know overpowers her sense of caution, and Samira caves.  “Parker, are you – are you saying Abbot is single?”

They both stare at each other, Parker’s eyebrows nearly flying off her forehead. “Single,” she repeats, baffled. “What do you mean, single? Hasn’t he been dating you since last summer?”  

A shaky laugh escapes Samira’s lips. This can’t be happening. “We’re not – we’ve never been together,” she says, watching the disbelief grow in Parker’s eyes. She loses the fight, can’t keep the tremor from her voice. “I didn’t know he felt like that. About me. I thought he was seeing someone else here.”

Parker smacks her hand into her forehead. “Fuck, Samira, you’re as bad as he is.”  She stands up, shaking her head. “You and Abbot are a pair of clowns.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

Parker pats her shoulder, expression torn between pity and amusement. “Seriously, you guys are hopeless.” She heads to the door and then pauses, glancing back. “Samira, just for the record? There isn’t anyone else. Pretty sure it’s only ever been you.”

The door swings softly shut behind her.

The falling snow has dampened the usual roar of the city, and the twilight is paired with an unearthly quiet as Samira shoulders open the door to the rooftop. There’s a small overhang near the railing and she sits beneath it, watching her breath form clouds before her.   

At first, she dismisses the entire conversation out of hand. If Parker thinks they’ve been together for the better part of a year, then she hardly knows any better than Samira herself does. Maybe Parker had picked up on the attraction between them, but while they may both have felt a spark, it was only Samira who caught feelings. Up until he kissed her, Abbot has always maintained a careful space between them. Hardly a reciprocation.

The problem is that she can’t actually write Parker off that easily. If anyone would know about Abbot’s relationship status, it would be Robby and the night shift crew; and Abbot himself is so guarded that she can’t imagine any of his friends would approach her like this unless they were certain. She thinks back to Shen, casually handing her the code to Abbot’s locker with minimal questioning; she’s pretty sure he wouldn’t have done the same if, say, Victoria had asked.

It’s only ever been you.

And if Abbot’s friends are so openly supportive of this, of her…then she must be wrong about him and Al-Hashimi. The idea that he would commit to – or they would encourage – such disloyalty is outlandish. She’s been agonizing over it for months, how someone so steadfastly honest and earnest as Jack Abbot could have touched her like that while being with another woman – and she has a sinking feeling that the answer has been staring her in the face all this time.

He wouldn’t. He hadn’t.  

Once that first domino falls, the rest topple without any real resistance. If Samira had been wrong about Abbot being in a relationship, that meant that he had been expressing genuine interest in her when he followed her outside the holiday party – fuck. She’d rejected the man of her dreams, put him through months of hell, instead of just having the courage and the decency to ask him one simple question before assuming the worst of him.

Her face is freezing, and it takes her a moment to realize that she’s crying.

The look on his face when she’d walked into him swims into her mind’s eye, and Samira squeezes her eyes shut, as if that will erase the memory. She’s a monster. She’s known all along that she doesn’t and would never deserve him, but this – this is beyond the pale. Despite knowing that the motivations she’d ascribed to him were wildly out of character for him, she’d been so caught up in her own pain that she hadn’t even given Abbot the benefit of the doubt before jumping to the ugliest possible conclusion. It turns her stomach to think of how after everything, he had still been the bigger person, had been the one to approach her, and even then she’d rebuffed him.

God, how he must hate her.

She hugs her knees to her chest, staring out at the city lights illuminating the clouds above, the flurry of snow cascading down.

The doubts are still there. Maybe she’s wrong about being wrong, maybe his friends are just looking to get him to reenter his own life, maybe –

No. She won’t fall down this same spiral again. Samira catches a few snowflakes in her hands, watches them melt into miniscule puddles.  

The thought flares to life like a candle in darkness. What if he still cares for you? But she knows it’s impossible, not with how she’s treated him, like he was disposable, like he meant nothing to her, even if nothing is furthest from the truth. The bile rises in her mouth. She’s corrosive, and she knows he will never forgive her. No one ever could.

She leans back against the concrete, wishing the inky sky would open up and swallow her whole.

The text from Parker comes later that night, as Samira steps out of the shower, toweling her hair dry.

It’s a street address, complete with an entrance code and apartment number, and Samira drops heavily onto her bed as understanding dawns.

The phone buzzes again, and she glances down. Just a few more words.

Don’t fuck this up.

Samira Mohan is many things, but she isn’t a coward.

She waits until Friday night; they’re both off that night, as well as the following day (she’s pretty sure she’s going to need to spend the next twenty-four hours in the fetal position, after this), and then types his address into Maps.

The building is luxurious but not ostentatious, clean lines of glass and metal gleaming against the snowy streets. That nagging thought returns, as she crosses the street, that this might be an unforgivable intrusion on her part. Maybe she should’ve waited for him at the hospital (she’d considered it, but didn’t want to do this publicly, where their colleagues could watch or hear), or texted him to meet her somewhere neutral (what if he’d blocked her number?). Now she’s here, at his home, his safe haven, and is forced to admit that this may be yet another colossal miscalculation.

But she owes him an apology, an explanation, at the very least. Without their colleagues listening in, or an audience around the corner. If he asks her to leave she will; she won’t make a scene, won’t abuse his kindness any longer. She worries her lip with her teeth, punching in the entry code to the main doors.  

The elevator ride to the twelfth floor is nerve-wracking; the chimes as she passes each floor feel like an ominous countdown. His hallway is silent, the dense, thick carpet absorbing the sound of her footsteps. This building, too, is yet another reminder of how worlds apart they are; with her resident salary she lives in a clean but no-frills building, a far cry from this. There are windows bookending the hallway, and she realizes that this is the top floor. It probably helps him sleep at night, knowing there is no one above him. She wonders, with a pang, how much of his hard-won peace of mind she has stolen from him.

Samira knocks on his door with her heart in her mouth, stomach a tight bundle of nerves. Please, please, please…

Seconds stretch into minutes, and there is no response. She musters up the tatters of her courage and tries once more, this time three sharp raps with her knuckles, and waits.

In the silence it occurs to her that she should have brought something, shouldn’t have just waltzed up here empty-handed – but just as she’s about to admit defeat, the door swings open.

She really, really should’ve texted him before coming.

Samira’s not sure what she had expected – she’d braced herself for his rage, for his pain, for an indifferent dismissal – but nothing could have prepared her for the sight of a bleary-eyed Jack Abbot, hair mussed from sleep, gaping at her. He’s shirtless, navy flannel pajama pants slung low on his hips, and she’s pretty sure she’s about to spontaneously combust.

From their last rendezvous her hands still remember the hard planes of muscle flexing beneath them, but this is just unfair. He’s ridiculously built; not for show, there’s no six-pack here, but clearly for functional strength. He’s got an arm up against the doorframe that is doing delicious things for his shoulder and bicep, and –

“Mohan, are you okay? How did you – what are you doing here?” Abbot breaks the silence first, and Samira realizes that while she’s been studying him, he’s been doing the same to her; except he’s scrutinizing her for signs of harm. His eyes are worried, scanning her, and a sudden rush of relief cuts her off at the knees.

He doesn’t hate me.

“I think we need to talk,” she says, trying to keep the quiver from her voice. “If it’s okay.”

“Right,” Abbot mutters. She’s not used to seeing him look so uncertain. “You should come inside. If you want.”  

He’s barefoot, so she kicks off her boots at the entrance, regretting her yellow Hufflepuff socks. A quick glance around shows a space that’s warm, lived-in but not cluttered – the living room and kitchen with cream colored walls, blackout curtains against what look like floor-to-ceiling windows, a TV mounted above a dark fireplace. But then the door clicks shut behind her, and Samira reflexively swallows as she turns to face him.

“One second,” Abbot says, not waiting for a response; he disappears down the hall for a moment, comes back pulling on a black t-shirt. She lets him take her jacket, hang it to dry. Her hands are clammy, a nervous sweat breaking out over her skin, and she tries to rehearse what to say next as he motions her over to the couch.  

“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,” she says quietly, settling with her legs crossed beneath her. “I – I really need to say this to you.” Her hands are trembling, and she tugs the sleeves of her sweater down over her fingers. She’d actually practiced her little speech before coming over; the words shouldn’t be this elusive.

She can’t bring herself to make eye contact, and instead focuses on the hollow at the base of his throat, watching the tendons shift beneath his skin. “I, um, I’m here because I owe you an apology. My behavior for the last few months has been childish and inexcusable, and I really am so, so sorry for having caused you any stress or any pain. It was unkind and unprofessional, and I wish I could undo it. You don’t have to forgive me, or say anything, but I just – I needed you to know.” The words come out stilted, too formal. Her ears are ringing in the silence that follows, until –

“Unprofessional,” Abbot echoes. His face is impassive, voice steady, but she can see the tension in his shoulders, the tight catch of his jaw.

“Yes, I was. I’m so sorry.” She closes her eyes, shoulders on. “And when you – when we were – that night, the holiday party, I told you that what we were doing was wrong.” She hears him shift, keeps her eyes squeezed shut. “It was because I thought you were in a relationship at the time, and I was just – I know I wasn’t thinking straight, and I should have just asked you instead of assuming that you would –”

The words falter in her throat as Abbot leans in towards her, brow furrowed. His voice is so, so soft. “What made you think I was seeing someone?”

She immediately feels stupid, knowing how scant her evidence was. Well, her and half of day shift. “You stopped wearing your ring,” she says.

Abbot nods. “Yes, I had noticed.”

Samira gives him a sharp look; this is decidedly not the time for his very on-brand blend of sarcasm and wide-eyed faux innocence. “You stopped wearing your ring, and then you came in one day with Al-Hashimi, and she was touching you, and –”

“And from that, you assumed that I in a relationship with her, and that despite that I would come on to you?” He’s keeping his voice light, but she knows him well enough to detect a ripple of pain underneath.

She hears the unspoken question, and feels her heart break a little more. Is this how little you really think of me?

“I didn’t know what to think,” she says, pleading with him to understand. There’s visible hurt on Abbot’s face that he’s trying and failing to hide, and Samira is unable to ignore the juxtapositions here. She’s fully dressed in jeans and a threadbare sweater, hair pulled back into a bun, at least partially prepared for this conversation; and she has burst unannounced into his home, while he is vulnerable, barefoot in his pajamas and raw from sleep. She doesn’t want her words to be salt poured over his wounds. She wishes now more than ever that she had reached out to him before coming here, allowed him to brace himself before she walked in and began picking the scabs off a half-healed injury.

Samira steels herself. He deserves the complete truth from her, and she’s been hedging. No longer. “I’ve been…I’ve had feelings for you for a long time.” Her face warms, and she fixes her stare on the fabric at his shoulder. “I knew there wasn’t really a chance for me, with you. I knew that you deserved and would find someone who is a better fit for you, and I – I was okay with that. I could live with that, you know? I think it just made sense to me, an attending who works at a different hospital, who has so much in common with you.” She leaves more than I do unsaid. “And then that night, we were both drinking, and I thought maybe it was just a mistake, and you weren’t – you didn’t know what you were doing, it wasn’t intentional. It’s not that I thought you were trying to – to take advantage, I know you, I know you wouldn’t. I thought it was just a mistake. A moment of weakness, and I didn’t want to make things any harder for you, not when you’ve already –”

Abbot drops his head into his hands, and she breaks off mid-sentence. The terror of being this exposed is overwhelming, and Samira counts to four as she breathes in, holds it, and breathes back out, trying to calm herself, trying to stay still enough to allow him some space.

When he lifts his head his eyes are red-rimmed, and she holds her breath. This is it. He’s going to ask her to leave. He’s going to tell her this is unforgivable. Don’t cry, don’t cry. You’ve cried enough.  

“I should have said this a long time ago,” Abbot says, very quietly and very evenly, “And I want you to let me say it now.” He waits until she nods. “Dr. Mohan, I am aware that I am in a position of power over you. I want to be very clear that you do not have to worry about any sort of retaliation, not from me or from any of my friends or colleagues at work, if this…if this is not what you really want. If you are feeling pressured in any way.”

He rubs a hand over his face, and it strikes her how fatigued he looks. Brittle at the edges. “You are an exceptional, gifted physician, and this conversation between us will have no bearing on your future career. Any recommendation or electives you need will not be affected, nor will I ever mention this to anyone at the Pitt. As your attending I am, and will remain, capable of continued professionalism where you are concerned. My personal feelings for you will not get in the way of that.”

 And suddenly it all makes sense. The way he’d kept his texts to her always centered around work, the way he’d only call her by her title and never her first name, the way he had been so openly cognizant of where the boundaries of professional interactions between attendings and residents lay (especially after Robby and Heather) – it had all been to avoid pressuring her. To avoid any inadvertent leveraging of his position as her attending, even if he’d been feeling exactly as she did.

This sweet, sweet man.

He’s motionless beside her, and Samira realizes that he’s given her the perfect opening for a clean getaway and is waiting for her to take it. The tension is starting to ebb, leaving her skin buzzing from the residual adrenaline – and for what she hopes might follow.

His jaw clenches as she gets to her feet, but she only takes two steps to stand before him. “What if I don’t want professionalism from you?”

The cracked-open vulnerability in his eyes nearly brings her to her knees. “What?” he croaks, and she cannot fathom it, that he genuinely thinks she would ever walk away from him.

Nudging his legs apart, Samira steps between them, cradling his face in her hands. Abbot looks gobsmacked, and she strokes his cheekbone with the pad of her thumb, as he had once done for her. “I don’t want you to be professional with me,” she says. Bending down, she presses a soft kiss to his forehead, then to each of his eyelids as his eyes flutter closed. Her voice comes out breathy. “I want you.” She punctuates the words with barely-there kisses to his cheek, his jaw, the space between his brows.

His breathing is ragged, and Samira slips into his lap, sitting astride his thighs. She brushes her thumb against his lower lip and then leans in –

And blinks in shock when he catches her by the upper arms, grip firm but not painful, suspending her above him.

Abbot’s voice is cracked, jagged. “Samira” – and god, the way he forms her name in his mouth, like a prayer, something precious – “Wait, hold on. Wait.”

“Samira,” he starts again, and she thinks she will never tire of the sweet heat of him saying her name, “Are you sure about this? I should never have touched you that night, I’m too old for you, I’m shot to hell, I don’t even have all my limbs – you can have your pick of them. You deserve a younger man – a whole man – not someone like me.”  

“Don’t say that,” she says, more sharply than she’d intended. There’s something in his eyes that unsettles her – he looks painfully vulnerable. Spooked. Like he’s about to topple her out of his lap and make a break for the door. She brushes her thumb against the crease between his eyebrows, smoothes it out. “It’s been you for months, maybe longer. I don’t want anyone else, Jack. I want you. As you are.”

He opens his mouth, looking unconvinced, and she lays a finger across his lips.

“You know me,” she says quietly. “You know I don’t do anything without thinking it through. ‘Slo-Mo’ to the end.”

His lips curl. “Don’t call yourself that,” he says roughly, but his hands settle against her knees, and she takes it as a win. “I’ve been telling Robby for years you’re the smartest one there. You take your time because you take complex cases and you get them right.”

Samira thinks if she loves him any more, her heart might burst from the pressure. It’s unfurling within her like a flower in the peak of spring, and she wants so badly to confess everything – how much she loves with him, how she’d never even dreamed she’d get to be here with him, like this. How grateful she is to know him, in any capacity.

Deciding to show him instead, she bends over him, easing him against the couch, rests her fingers gently against the slope of his shoulders. Those laser-focused hazel eyes are going to be the death of her. She’s only just brushed his lips with hers – fuck, they’re as soft as she remembers – when he rears back again.

Jack’s pupils are so blown, his eyes are nearly black. “Samira, I – I’m not going to be able to be casual about this, so I just need to know –”

“Yes, good, me neither,” she says distractedly, wriggling a little to get closer, and oh. He’s rock hard against her, he’s actually blushing, and she’s never thought of herself as a lucky woman, but somehow the stars have aligned tonight. “Jack,” she sighs, still trapped in place, “Are you going to let me kiss you now, or –”

This time he doesn’t hesitate, and Samira sinks into him as his hands slide up to grasp her hips, pulling her flush against him.

The world screeches to a halt. If there were stars colliding out there somewhere, oceans rising up, the earth quaking, Samira wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t care, because Jack is kissing her. He’s kissing her like he no longer needs air to breathe, like he’s been dying in a desert and only she can slake his thirst, like he was imprisoned and his shackles are loosened.

This is Jack Abbot playing for keeps.

She feels his hands against her scalp, and then the tension there releases as he unclips her hair and shakes it free, burying his hands in it. Her brain is ablaze, body riding entirely on instinct. She grinds her hips into him and is rewarded by a throaty groan – and then the room spins and she’s flat on her back, the couch soft behind her. Jack balances himself above her, both of them panting.

“Careful, now,” he says, but he’s grinning, that dangerous crooked grin that only intensifies the tingling between her thighs. “Are you sure you –”

“Shut up already,” Samira says, trying and failing to pull him down towards her. She’s never in her life been so frustrated with a man for trying to respect her. “I’m sure, I’m very sure, come on –” The inches of space between them feel like an insurmountable chasm, and her desperation must show in her face because Jack’s mouth is immediately back on hers, hot and demanding. She gasps when his hand squeezes her ass, and then yelps as she’s hoisted up into the air.

Every two minutes, something new about Jack Abbot takes her breath away. He’s carrying her with one arm, not even breaking the kiss, striding towards the bedroom as she winds her legs around his waist.

“Holy fuck,” Samira manages as he deposits her onto the bed, sheets still rumpled from where he’d been sleeping before she started pounding on his door. He practically preens, making her laugh.

“Knew I’d impress you eventually,” Jack says, reaching up and stripping his shirt off. She props herself up on her elbows to admire the view; he really has incredible definition, and there’s a sinuous flex of muscle to him as he moves that makes heat pulse at her core.

He hasn’t noticed her stare; he’s standing at the edge of the bed gazing downward, hesitating. It takes a moment for her to understand through the fog of her arousal.

“Hey,” she says, scooting to the edge of the bed. “You should take it off.”

Jack drops down on the bed beside her, making her laugh as the dip of the mattress tips her into him. “Are you sure? I know it’s – I can keep it on, I don’t mind.”

Every time she has been near him, Jack has done nothing but bolster her confidence, and Samira is dipping into that reservoir tonight. She wraps a hand around the back of his neck, pulls him into a leisurely kiss. “I want you to be comfortable,” she says, unwilling to pull back all the way; her lips brush his as she speaks. “I want to have your full attention tonight.”

He makes a choked sound, and then in one fluid movement he’s popped the prosthetic off and is crowding her up the bed, pressing her down into the soft sheets.  

He trails featherlight kisses down her neck, and within seconds has found a spot just above her pulse point that is so overwhelmingly sensitive Samira can’t think straight; it takes her a few minutes to realize that the wanton moans filling the room are hers. Her nails dig into his back and he hisses, fingers skimming her breast, and even through her bra and sweater she jumps at the contact.

She tugs at her sweater, trying to maneuver her arms around him to remove it, and is immediately reminded of just how efficient Jack is once he’s made up his mind about something. He divests her of it in seconds, and she feels her cheeks heat as she remembers the plain gray bra she’d worn today, not daring to dream that he would be the one undressing her later. But it doesn’t seem to matter.

“Fuck, baby,” Jack groans, and she’s never been a fan of pet names, but coming from him it’s impossibly tender. “You are so beautiful. I’m the luckiest fucker in the world.”

For a moment she tries to even the scales, starts mouthing her way down his neck, but he hauls her back to him for another kiss. “Let me take care of you,” he murmurs, voice like honey in her ear, and she shivers. Desperate for his skin on hers, she unbuttons her jeans but is trapped by his weight, has to nip at his earlobe to get his attention so that he’ll help her tug them off. There’s a heavenly contrast to rough denim being replaced by his wandering hands, and Samira lets him push her back against the pillows, body thrumming with an anxious excitement, as he presses delicate kisses down her sternum. He makes quick one-handed work of her bra, and then she’s left only in her panties, skin pebbling in the cool air.

He’s hovering above her again, the position doing exquisite things for his deltoids, and there’s such reverence in Jack’s eyes that she can’t help but smile, press a small kiss to the corner of his mouth. But he doesn’t move, seems frozen, just drinking her in, and after what feels like an eternity (probably seconds), the need building in her core becomes impossible to ignore.  

“Jack?”

“Yeah, sweetheart.”

“Touch me.”

As always, he doesn’t need to be told twice. He’s gentle at first, almost frustratingly so, and she actually whines when he uses the barest hint of fingertips to tease a nipple. The filthy grin he gives her when he discovers how sensitive her breasts are makes her blush all the way to her chest.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” he says, and then he ducks down, his hair tickling her skin, wrapping his lips around a nipple. He uses a hand to torment the other, and her head falls back with a cry, her clit practically pulsating with need. When he grinds his hips against her, she nearly screams.

“Please,” she bites out, nearly inarticulate with want, but he smirks at her and then moves his mouth to the other breast, renewing his ministrations. “Jack, I – I want –”

“I know,” he says, amused. Damn him. “I have you, baby. I know.”

He draws it out, laving kisses and teasing bites on her nipples until they’re peaked and swollen, and she’s nearly vibrating out of her own skin with desire. And then he finally, finally starts mouthing his way down her abdomen, his hands scorching as he hooks his fingers into her panties and slides them off, running his hands down her legs and back up again.

The rush of air against her core is maddening, but then he settles between her legs and blows a puff of cool air against her and she cries out, twining her fingers into his hair.

“Jack, please, please, I can’t –”

“Oh, I think you’ll find you can,” he says, and of course he’s going to be a tease about this. She should have known.

His tongue is a delicate flicker of movement against her swollen clit, and her vision whites out, a strangled groan escaping her. He keeps his lips held against her and she feels the vibration as he laughs, and then he wraps his hands around her thighs, holding her in place, and starts laving his tongue over her in earnest.

The moan he forces from her is so loud it startles her, and Samira grabs a pillow, trying to muffle her cries, because it’s impossible to keep quiet while he’s working her clit like this. He snatches it from her hands moments later.

“I want to hear you,” Jack growls, and then her back practically arches off the bed as he wraps his lips around her clit and sucks, the pressure maddening. Her thighs are trembling against him, her fingers wound into his hair to ground her – in the brief flashes when rational thought returns to her, she worries that she may be hurting him, pulling too hard, but then he begins to use the flat of his tongue against her and she instinctively yanks and he moans.

It usually takes longer than this, but then again, Samira can’t remember being this keyed up in her life. The telltale signs are building; a tightening deep in her core, uncontrollable shaking of her thighs, and then he reaches up over her belly, each hand tweaking a nipple. Her hands fly from his hair to his wrists, trying to pull them away – it’s too much, it’s unendurable, she’s going to die – but he’s an unstoppable force, an immovable object, and when the orgasm overtakes her it is with the fury of an avalanche.

He doesn’t give her much of a respite. As soon as she stops trembling his mouth returns to her clit; the kisses are light, not too overstimulating, but she’s so sensitive that even the gentlest pleasure feels like pain. She keens and he pauses, glancing up.

“You okay, sweetheart?” he asks, and bizarrely she’s reminded of the little check-ins he likes to do after traumatic codes, difficult cases, the same earnest, caring look in his eye. She pats his hair fondly, a little delirious from the fading euphoria.

“Yeah,” she pants, breathless from the orgasm, “Just sensitive.”

“Tell me if you need me to stop,” Jack says seriously, and waits for her to nod before he grins at her again, that devilish, promising grin, and ducks back between her legs.

This time, he gives her only seconds to adjust to his tongue – and then he slides a finger into her, and her hips buck.

It’s good, but it’s not nearly enough. “No, Jack, I want you, not –”

He has the audacity to shush her.  “Patience is a virtue,” he says sagely, and Samira slaps his shoulder lightly, which only makes him laugh. He holds her gaze as he slips in a second finger, swearing as he does it, and then he crooks them just right within her and she falls back against the bed, back arched, a soundless cry escaping her.

“Fuck, you feel incredible,” he murmurs. He starts rocking his fingers into her, stretching her open, massaging her inner walls, his tongue returning to her sensitive bud, and before long she’s writhing, desperate, just on the edge. His hand doesn’t miss a beat as he crawls up against her, mouthing at her nipple – she feels him grin when she shrieks, teeth scraping her – and then he returns to claim her mouth.

She can barely kiss him back, he keeps wringing one moan after another from her with those ridiculous fingers, and then his lips fasten over that electric spot on her neck, his fingers keeping a steady, unbearable rhythm, thumb grazing her clit on each stroke, and she muffles her scream against his shoulder as another orgasm overpowers her.

“God,” she finally manages, limp against him. He’s sitting half upright, lazily propped up against his padded headboard, her head resting on his stomach.

“Jack is fine,” he says mildly, and his laugh as she rolls her eyes is warm, rich, like chocolate melting on her tongue.

She’s sweaty, and her hair is probably frizzy and unmanageable, fanned out behind her, but he’s gazing at her like he’s seeing in color for the first time in his life. Samira isn’t sure how she got this lucky – what good things she must have done, in this or some past life – to deserve him. All she’s done is cause him so much pain, and yet she’s sure that if she asked for the stars, he would find some way to pluck them from the skies for her.

Jack’s fingers are stroking her hair, and she pushes herself up higher, resting her cheek against his shoulder. He’s watching her through lidded eyes, and she sits up she realizes he’s still hard, the length of him straining against his pajamas. Her mouth runs dry.

“Jack,” she says huskily, voice strained from overuse; he hears it too, gives her a self-satisfied smirk. His neighbors must hate her.

“Yeah, baby?” He sounds as wrecked as her, and she leans in for another kiss, open-mouthed and sloppy, tasting herself on his mouth.

“Do you have any condoms?”

He shakes his head ruefully. “It’s been years for me, Samira. I’m all out of stock.” He quirks an eyebrow. “Maybe if you’d given me a head’s up…”

The sight of him like this, splayed out, dimples on display, is doing unspeakable things to her, and she’s aching to actually feel him. “I have an IUD,” she offers, “And I got tested when employee health offered those free screenings in the summer, haven’t been with anyone since – since before then. I’m clean.”

“I did too,” he says cautiously. “But are you sure? We don’t have to do this tonight. Trust me, I’m more than happy to just focus on you.”

“I want to,” she says, stroking him lightly, two-fingered, through the flannel. He sucks in a breath, flexing against her, and she grins; she’s got a pretty good idea of his dimensions, maybe a little above average in length, but girthy. She slips a hand under the waistband and grasps him, teasing the tip with her fingers, and she leans forward to kiss along his jawline. The way he shudders against her makes her clit throb in anticipation.

“Fucking hell,” he groans, and in seconds he’s stretched nude beneath her, his dick flushed and hard and springing to attention.

She straddles him carefully, using a hand to position him at her entrance; it’s been years since she’s done this, and she winces as she struggles to accommodate his girth, sinking down slowly over him. He groans as she takes him in, muttering a steady string of expletives as she eases down his length. Her answering whimper comes out a little more distressed than she’d have liked, and he’s suddenly sitting up, eyes serious.

“Doing okay?” he asks, concerned, and she nods, bracing her hands against his chest, rocking her hips to take in the last few inches of him.

“Yeah, just need a minute,” she says, breathless, the stretch bordering on painful. One of his hands is rubbing soothing circles on her lower back, the other resting on her thigh, and suddenly she’s flush against him, the stretch and the impossible, perfect sensation of fulness sucking the very air from her lungs. His hips stutter against hers before he stills himself, the strain of holding back evident across his face. “Fuck, Jack.”

“That’s the idea,” he promises, and Samira laughs, despite herself.

That sharp burn is settling into a promising, delicious ache. She rolls her hips against him, hissing as the motion brings with it barely-there stimulation to her clit, and then settles into a slow, sinuous rhythm, bright shocks of pleasure snapping along her nerves. He keeps up a steady stream of praise, and she can feel herself blushing.

“That’s it, fuck, gorgeous, just like that,” he groans, head thrown back as she adds a slow vertical glide to each roll, not quite a bounce but enough to feel him twitching against her walls as she moves along his length.

“Fuck, Samira.” His hands are tight against her hips, and there’s sweat beading along his brow. “Baby, can I –”

“Yes,” she gasps, and can’t fight the desperate moan that escape her when he torques his hips to match her rhythm, slamming up to meet her with each thrust. His hands already have her mapped out, and one finger settles against her clit, moving in tandem with her, as another starts teasing her breast. It’s too much and too little all at once, she’s never gone this many times before, but that familiar clench is there, low in her belly –

Her legs are quivering too much to keep any sort of rhythm, and when she starts to falter he wraps an arm around her waist and flips her over, not bothering to pull out.

“My turn,” Jack whispers, catching her earlobe between his teeth – she’s unprepared for the jolt that sends through her, clenches her walls around him, and he makes a small, wrecked sound against the slope of her shoulder. His pace is tortuous, unhurried, and the crescendo within her idles to a plateau as she mewls with frustration. She might be losing her mind.

The broad expanse of his chest and shoulders is tantalizingly near, and she twists up against him, biting at the freckled skin and then soothing it with slow, open-mouthed kisses. He makes a choked sound, and she does it again, feeling him tremble before he abandons any pretense at restraint. Jack’s hips snap against hers, the pace suddenly punishing, and she hooks her legs around his waist, canting her pelvis up to meet his, overwhelmed at the depth the new position gives her. She can feel her walls fluttering around him, she’s close, so close – and then he slips a hand to where they’re joined, toying with her clit, tearing a scream from her throat. He fucks her through her third orgasm without slowing, and she’s wildly overstimulated, nearly sobbing by the time he loses his rhythm, exploding within her in spurts of liquid heat.

The afterglow is a perfect, technicolor, fucked-out haze, and Samira floats in it, weightless, only half-aware of the bed dipping as he rises, cleans her up with a warm washcloth. With a rustle of sheets he slips back in behind her, pulling her back against his bare chest, and she is lulled to sleep by the steady sound of his breathing, her fatigued muscles soothed by the heat of him pressed against her.

Samira wakes languidly, brief snapshots of awareness coming into focus – a strong heartbeat pulsing beneath her cheek, lips brushing her forehead, a heavy arm slung across her waist – only to be washed away by an inky wave of sleep.

By the time she rouses more fully, she has lost all sense of time. The room is still dark, blackout curtains in full effect, but the air is permeated by the aroma of fresh coffee. There’s a muscled thigh beneath her head, and Jack’s hand is resting against her head, very gently massaging her scalp. She raises her head, squinting at him – he’s sitting upright, offensively looking fresh as a daisy, a laptop balanced on his other knee.

“Coffee?” she rasps, and he ducks down to kiss her.

“Yes, good morning to you too,” Jack teases, but he snags the mug from his nightstand and passes it to her. She doesn’t drink her coffee black, but she has to admit that it’s still good, smooth and complex. “How do you feel?”

She scoots upright, wrapping herself in the bedsheet. The small movement sends a twinge through her. “Sore,” she admits, pinkening at the admission.  

“Good,” he grins, tossing the laptop onto the armchair by the window and wrapping her in his arms. He smells fresh, all spearmint and coffee, and for a moment she feels absolutely rank in comparison – but then he kisses her and she melts against him, all thoughts of a hot shower forgotten. He’s still nude, and she rakes her nails through the hair on his chest, delighting in the way he shivers.

“Unless you’re ready for a second round,” he says, voice a little strangled, “You should really stop that.”

She stretches languorously along the length of him, smirking at him as she feels the evidence of his interest jutting against her thigh. Jack groans and collapses onto his back, forearm over his eyes.

“You little tease,” he says fondly, and she laughs, admiring the flex of his arm, kissing his bicep.

Snagging his abandoned shirt from the floor, she slips into the ensuite bath; he’s already kept a toothbrush out for her, and the sharp minty toothpaste makes her feel more alert. The master bath is capacious and surprisingly beautiful, white marble and dark teal tiling, and there’s an equally spacious custom-built shower: a bench all along its length, grab bars scattered along the walls, and dual removable shower heads mounted at either end.

They’re going to have to come back to this later, after the ache between her legs subsides.

“Feel free to use the shower,” he calls through the door, as if reading her mind. “There’s clean towels under the sink, on the left.”

It turns out he has spectacular water pressure, and she emerges fifteen minutes later in a cloud of steam, his shirt falling nearly to mid-thigh, and he rakes his eyes appreciatively over her as he passes her a steaming mug of coffee. Hers is doctored with milk and sugar, and she raises her eyebrows as she sips.

“How did you know how –”

“I pay attention,” he says mildly, intertwining his fingers with hers. “Samira, what you were saying yesterday, about Baran.”

Embarrassment pricks her skin. She leans over to place her mug onto the nightstand, using the motion to avoid having to look at him. “I know, I know, I should’ve just asked – but I wasn’t the only one who thought you were together! You just looked so comfortable together, and it makes so much more sense, she’s beautiful and so competent and –”

“She is,” Jack agrees. “She is someone who I think you’re very lucky to be able to work with. She’s empathetic, experienced, and very good at what she does. Been through some tough shit.” His hand is very warm against hers. “Hey, look at me. It’s not a competition, Samira. Never has been, not since the day I met you.” He brushes his lips against her knuckles. His voice is steady, and he’s fixed her with that look, the one that makes her feel like he’s prying open her ribs, one by one, to gaze upon her heart. “You made me feel like I could live again. Be half of a whole again. You made me want those things, Samira. To be a better man, for you, so I could deserve you. You are too smart, too fucking beautiful, too kind for me. It’s never been the other way around.”

It doesn’t seem real, to have him staring her in the eyes, both her hands clasped firmly in his, saying these things to her. She digs her teeth into the inside of her lip, but the burst of pain doesn’t jolt her from a dream. Real. This is real.

She thinks she might cry. Even worse, Jack notices.

“No, no, don’t,” he murmurs, kissing her knuckles, but her lip quivers anyway. He huffs, and then wriggles his fingers into her sides without any warning, making her shriek and then collapse into panicked giggles as he pins her to the mattress.

“Stop it!” she demands, squealing when his tickling fingers attack her hips. She bucks against him but it’s useless, he has her arms trapped above her head and his free hand is spidering over her, making her scream with helpless laughter. “Jack! Stop it, you asshole, no no don’t not there –”

He stills his fingers against her navel, grinning at her as she gasps for air. “Better,” he decides, and she swats his chest tiredly.

“You’re ridiculous.”

Somehow this seems to please him. He occupies himself with depositing a ring of kisses around her neck, and in a ridiculously short amount of time she’s squirming against him, brain starting to turn hazy with need. Instinctively she parts her legs – and immediately winces.

“Wait,” she breathes against his lips, pulling back. “I think I need a little break, Jack, or I won’t be able to walk at all, and I have a full shift tomorrow.”

“Walk? You don’t need to walk anywhere,” he says, catching her hand and peppering it with little kisses. “I can carry you.” His stubble scrapes against the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist, and she flushes as that tingling intensifies between her legs.

“Who talks like that,” she grumbles, trying to hide what his sweetness is doing to her, but he just laughs into her hair.

She nestles closer, propping her chin against his chest, eyes fluttering closed as he slips his hand under the shirt and starts tracing abstract patterns on her back, very lightly kneading the muscles there. He’s so blissfully warm, her own personal furnace, and she hooks a leg over his and lets herself sink down against him.

She’s spent the last few years driving herself at a breakneck pace, has taken only the required days off and thrown herself into work every minute of every day; there’s something brand new and delicious about just savoring the feel of Jack’s body against hers, tangling herself into his limbs and dissolving into him.

No matter what she does, it just doesn’t seem real. How could it be possible, that he reciprocates her feelings, that the strategically placed love bites on her skin are from his mouth, that the skin warm beneath her cheek is his? That he wants her, truly, every bit as much as she does him? She can scarcely believe that last night wasn’t just a vivid dream, that it had truly been him coaxing one climax after another from her, holding her in his arms like the world’s most precious cargo – and yet here he is, splayed beneath her, loose-limbed and relaxed. She rises and falls with his chest as he breathes, and she reaches up to lay a hand over his heart. Every time her eyes fall closed she pictures him smiling at her again, that easy, carefree smile that makes her toes curl.

He’s practically running in her veins, stamped over every inch of her.

“Where’d you go, sweetheart?” His voice is still a little gravelly, and she can feel the vibrations of it through his skin when she’s pressed up against him like this. She curls in a little closer. Sweetheart.

“Wondering if I’m in a coma,” she mumbles, emboldened by the fact that her face is hidden from his.

The hand on her back pauses, and a whine escapes her before she can stop it. She blushes, but he just shakes his head fondly as he resumes his massage. She hasn’t realized how tense she’s become; even his gently prodding fingers elicit hisses of pain, and even with her face buried in his stomach she can see him frown. He shifts against her, and then both his hands are on her back and shoulders, carefully working out the knots. She coasts on the relief for a while – until his hands drift much, much lower, cupping her ass.

“I’m a little offended you can’t tell the difference between me and a hallucination,” he says, manhandling her onto her back. “Guess you need a refresher.”

He swallows her laugh as he catches her lips with his, parting her legs with his thigh. She arches against him as he laves his tongue against her neck, whimpering as his hands skim her breasts, so sensitive from his earlier attentions that her mind is nearly whited out from arousal.

Belatedly she realizes that she’s babbling, incoherent, fisting the sheets helplessly. “Oh, I – Jack, oh, I –” She can feel him grin, teeth catching lightly against her skin as his mouth follows his hands, and she’s forcibly reminded that he’s an incorrigible tease, who evidently relishes tormenting her like this. Every time a thought crystallizes in her mind, he finds a new way to chase it away, some new ultra-sensitive inch of skin that he can work over until her mind is nothing but tangled neurons struggling to spark a synapse.

She’s practically chanting his name, writhing against him, desperate for more contact that he’s just as determined to withhold. His shoulders are shaking with amusement at the intensity of her need, and she does her best to glare at him; the effect is ruined when he starts circling her swollen clit with a finger, tracing her folds, everywhere but where she wants him to be.

“Jack,” she begs, bucking her hips to try and grind against him, but he lays a palm flat on her belly and forces her back down.

“Yes, that’s me,” he says, and she can hear the barely-contained amusement in his voice.

Perhaps it’s time she fought fire with fire. She slips a hand between them and wraps her hand around his shaft; suddenly he’s very still, his breath a hiss in her ear. “Jack,” she whispers again, caressing him delicately, teasing the tip with her fingertips on each upstroke. This time when she surges up against him he gives way, unresisting as she pushes him onto his back and crawls over him. He’s deliciously responsive, groaning as she kisses down his neck, making her shiver with a hand running down her spine as she mouths her way down his body.

He’s ferociously hard as she takes his dick in her hand, and now it’s Samira’s turn to grin at him, suddenly understanding why he loves to rile her so much. “Any blood left in that brain of yours?” she teases, watching the tips of his ears turn red.

She strokes the velvet length of him first, delighting in the way he twitches in her hands. She does it again, delicately, ghosting her breath over him.

“Sweetheart, what the fuck,” he grates out, and then curses again as she starts dotting the tip with light, dry kisses.

His winds his hands into her hair, one of them resting, without any pressure, against the back of her neck. She flicks her tongue against him, once, twice, and then takes him fully into her mouth, careful to keep her teeth away from him as he bucks against her.

“Shit, sorry,” he gasps, “fuck, baby, that’s perfect, you’re perfect –” His words are lost in a moan as she bobs her head, slowly. She hasn’t done this in a long, long time, but the principles certainly haven’t changed, and she starts experimenting, swirling her tongue around the tip before sinking as much of him in as she can manage, lapping at him, using her lips to tease him before chasing them with her tongue.  

Jack is gorgeous like this, eyes screwed shut, the muscles straining beneath his skin, hands caressing her still ever so gently. He’s surprisingly vocal, and the timbre of his voice makes her shiver.

She’s admired his self-control for a long time, and now Samira does her best to wrest it from him. She never settles into a rhythm, sometimes waiting until she can feel his length flexing desperately in her mouth before switching things up, alternating long licks against the length with wet kisses against the tip. He’s trembling beneath her, tensed, and she decides to push her luck, working the shaft with one hand and focusing her mouth on the tip. When she hollows her cheeks around him he yells, and suddenly he’s dislodged her and flipped her over, lining himself up at her entrance.

“Little minx,” he growls, sweeping her legs over his shoulders. “Think you can stretch?”

“Let’s find out,” she breathes, sounding as wrecked as he does. He folds her in two as he enters her, more than she’d thought possible, but the sensation of fulness is so much more pronounced in this position that she feels suddenly overwhelmed at the closeness of him, the trust he’s giving her, the scent of his skin, the careful way he holds her in his arms. His eyes are shining at her, and she cranes up to kiss him, trying to say it without words, because it’s too soon, she can’t go there yet.

But she knows it.

I love you.  

They agree to keep the relationship quiet for now, given both its novelty, and the fact that he is still technically her attending for another few months. She’s pretty sure part of his desire for privacy comes from Jack having watched Robby and Heather struggle through a messy dating life and messier breakup, and not wanting to take any changes. For the most part she thinks she’s done fairly well at staying professional at work, although Jack did have to go in with an enormous band-aid on his neck after their first night together; she’d gotten more carried away than she’d realized in the heat of the moment, and had left him looking as though he’d lost a fight with a mountain lion. He’d given Robby a blasé excuse about cutting himself while shaving during signout, but the unprompted high-five Samira had gotten from Parker later told her that he hadn’t been particularly convincing.

She understands his reasons for not wanting to make a public announcement just yet, but staying private also means that she’s severely deprived of time with him. Jack has been covering extra nights while Shen is out of town for a destination wedding in Cabo; Samira had offered to take a few doubles, spend some time with him at work, but he had immediately vetoed the idea. “I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to keep my hands off you even if we’re in public, Dr. Mohan,” he’d breathed before ducking between her legs, her retort lost in her mewls. An unfortunate side effect of this was that she’d spent the next two days blushing scarlet if anyone referred to her as “Dr. Mohan” at work.

It also means that when she does see him, his mere existence is enough to take her breath away; and when he smiles at her, she thinks her own heart might stop beating. There’s a novelty to him that never seems to get old; his name on her phone screen still makes her stomach twist and heart pound.

She loves his smile. At work she’s seen it in bits and pieces, sprinkled throughout the shift, but suddenly it’s all she sees. Sometimes he beams at her, the smile so wide it splits his face in two; when he’s laughing with her, sprawled out and at ease, the lines of his throat and shoulders so beautiful that she’s tempted to buy him a year’s supply of turtlenecks just so she can stop trying to restrain herself.  Sometimes he gives her that crooked, suggestive grin that had been one of the first things about him that had ensnared her; when he’s teasing her, when he’s showing her some creative way to save a crashing patient, when they’re in bed and he’s torturing her with his tongue against her clit until she’s begging for him to fuck her. But her favorite, and the one that he seems to reserve just for her, is small and almost shy, a sweet asymmetric quirk of his lips that’s crowned with dimples. That’s the one that makes her heart swell and her chest ache, the one she sees when they collapse into bed after a long shift, when she catches him watching her pin her hair up in the mornings, when she blinks awake to find him caressing her face.

One week of being with Jack Abbot, and she’s ready to start composing sonnets to his smile. She’s not sure how she’s going to survive this.

 Sometimes he just looks at her, something soft in his eyes, and she finds herself aching to confess that she’s in love with him. The words have all but taken up permanent residence on the tip of her tongue; she’s terrified that one day he’ll lean in to kiss her and taste them. He had said that this isn’t casual, but can’t be casual and madly, helplessly in love with you are two very, very different things.

So she bites her tongue, holds her breath. Doesn’t say it.

It happens on a Thursday.

She’s late for a shift, after making the colossal mistake of letting Jack coax her into staying in bed an extra five minutes – five turned into forty-five, she’s useless at keeping track of anything when he’s buried to the hilt inside her, his name on her lips – and then she’d scrambled into the shower, couldn’t find her keys, and is now going to be late to work for the first time in, possibly, her entire career.

Jack is laughing at her, entertained by her frenzy, and she tries to sidestep him at the door when he reaches for her.

“Jack, I really have to go!”

He pouts. It’s adorable, and unfair. “I think I deserve a goodbye kiss,” he cajoles, and she sighs.

“Jack, I’m going to be back in twelve hours, you’ll survive,” she says, breathless, crouching down to tie her shoelaces.

He looks dejected.  

“Okay, okay,” she caves, tiptoeing to kiss him. His arms wrap around her, warm and sure, and she struggles to extricate herself as he starts kissing her neck.

“No, no, we already did that – Jack I am so late, I have to go –” She wriggles free, snags her phone from the counter, hoists her bag onto her shoulder. He’s leaning against the wall, eyes dancing as he watching her, and she deliberately does not let her gaze linger over the crime against humanity that is a bare-chested Jack Abbot. She bolts for the door before his stare drags her back in. “Okay, love you, bye!”

The door slams shut behind her, and she freezes as she realizes what she’s just said.

Fuck.

She can’t think straight for most of her shift. She’s on autopilot, sailing through traumas and lac repairs and even delivering a baby, the whole time wondering how she’s going to explain herself when she gets home.

Home.

There’s no use lying to herself – in just a few weeks, home has become wherever Jack might be found. She practically lives in his apartment; he’d cleared space for her in his closet, even learned what tampon brand she uses and stocked some in his bathroom cabinet for her. But it’s not just about the physical space. There’s something about him that just radiates safety; every time he drapes himself over her – in the kitchen making coffee, in bed at night, by those gorgeous windows of his as they watch the snow whirl by – she feels as though she’s wrapped in a security blanket, like she used to have as a child. Like nothing can hurt her.

She’s terrified that Jack is going to think she’s unhinged. That she’s overly attached, that she has a cluster B personality disorder, that she’s too clingy. Terrified that he will realize he’s made a mistake, being with her. She’s been blissfully, gloriously, inconceivably happy these last few weeks, and she can feel it slipping through her fingers now, no matter how desperately she wants to hold on. She should have known it was too good to be true.

Trinity’s penchant for jokes that are slightly too on-the-nose had once resulted in a comment about Samira’s “daddy issues,” and even though she’d forced a laugh, the words had stung. She’s not blind, she knows that she might have some unhealthy attachment issues after losing her father so unexpectedly and so young, knows that she can be avoidant in her relationships. But it rears its head now, that fear of abandonment, and Samira scrubs her hands raw as she washes them after placing a central line, wondering how on earth she’s going to face him. What she can possibly say to make this better, to keep him from walking away from her.

The answer is simple. Nothing. The damage is done.

They say it’s better to have loved and lost, but Samira isn’t so sure that’s true. She’s tasted enough loss, and it’s like ashes in her mouth. She would have preferred to never know how incandescently happy she could be, than to lose it all because she couldn’t process emotions like a normal, healthy, undamaged person.

She nearly weeps into a burn injury, and pretends it’s due to menstrual cramps when Cassie pulls her aside to ask if anything is wrong; it makes her feel worse, somehow, that this earns her a hug and a bar of KitKat slipped into her hand after she’s done dressing the injury. She doesn’t deserve the kindness of her friends, and she certainly doesn’t deserve him.

The chocolate does help a little. She really has wonderful friends.

Samira ends up staying late, helps Whitaker with an ugly trauma – unrestrained passenger in a high-speed crash, who’d had both legs propped up on the dashboard – and it’s late, too late, before she wraps up her charting, steps out, and almost trips over her own feet in shock.

There in the parking lot, leaning against his truck, is Jack. She feels her heart drop, thinks it lands somewhere near her toes. He’s popped the collar of his jacket against the cold, and he looks like he’s been out here for a while, nose and cheeks flushed with the chill. He smiles as he sees her, and she feels the tension in her shoulders start to ebb.

“Jack, what are you doing here?”

Ever the gentleman, he opens the passenger side door for her. “It’s almost twenty below tonight, thought you might like a lift home. You’ll get frostbite walking back.”

Home. Incredible, how one little word buoys her with so much hope.

He climbs in the other side, hands her a thermos; steam unfurls into the car as she unscrews the lid, sips at the coffee. He shakes his head when she offers it to him.

The streets are empty, tires crunching over salted streets as he drives, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on her knee, palm radiating warmth through her scrubs. The caffeine and sugar are a panacea, and she tilts her head back, eyes slitted, surreptitiously watching him. He’s always so careful; looks both ways, stops for pedestrians, brakes at a yellow light instead of racing through.

And he’s only ever shown that same care for her. He’s never made her feel anything but protected, free – ever since the first day she’d met him. She wonders how long he waited out there for her; didn’t text, didn’t call, didn’t come in to hurry her. Just waited, without ire.

She follows him back home in a daze, doesn’t protest when he waves her toward the shower. The scalding water helps her feel more alert, more herself, and she wanders back into the bedroom wearing pajama shorts and a Metallica shirt she’s pilfered from his closet.

Jack is waiting for her on the couch. He’s kept the lights low, curtains open, ambient light from the city sprawling out below filtering in. He turns as she pads in, wordlessly stretches out an arm along the back of the couch; she accepts the invitation, curls herself against him.

“So,” Jack says, and for all his wide-eyed solemnity there’s a playful gleam in his eye, “About what you said earlier.”

Her face floods with heat. Somehow here, held in the crook of his arm with those hazel eyes warm on hers, her earlier fears seem paltry and ridiculous. She’s been all in from the beginning, there’s no use trying to pretend otherwise.

“I meant it,” she says, doing her best to hold his kilowatt stare. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to being the center of his laser-focused attention. “It’s been true for – for a long time, Jack. I know it’s a lot, and we only just started –”

She yelps as he lifts her to straddle him, steadies herself with her forearms resting on those broad, capable shoulders. “Jack!”

Laughing, he hushes her. “I just wanted to see you properly,” he shrugs, leaning into her hand as she lays a palm against his cheek. He pulls her down for a kiss, slipping a hand beneath her shirt and tracing the line of her spine, making her shiver, but she’s too distracted to kiss him back.

Her mind is spinning out, reeling with shock. She confessed that she loves him and he hasn’t run for the hills, hasn’t told her to slow down, hasn’t asked her to back off. Hasn’t pulled away in disgust. Instead he’s manhandled her into his lap and is kissing her softly, tenderly. Like he has all the time in the world.

His lips pause against hers, and then he smiles, and it’s like the sun breaking through the clouds. “By the way,” he says, voice low, husky, “You should probably know that I’ve been in love with you for the better part of the last two years, Samira.”

If he had told her he was a little green man from Mars, she could not have been more shocked. It must show on her face, because he chuckles, kissing each knuckle of her hand in turn.

“Really?” she asks, and then blushes again when he chuckles. “Hey!”

“Baby, I meant it - you have no idea, the effect you have,” Jack says. “I’m just the lucky guy who gets to have you.”

Samira rolls her eyes, tired of blushing. She’s never in her life been on the receiving end of this much neverending praise, and wishes she knew where to put it. “There was hardly a line,” she protests, and Jack shakes his head.

“Samira, I’ve overheard at least two surgery residents trying to flirt with you in the last three months alone, and that’s only on the handful of night shifts I’ve had with you,” he says, shaking his head. “You just don’t notice. Too much going on in that beautiful brain of yours.”

“You love me,” she repeats, still dumbstruck.

“I love you,” he says comfortably. “Of course I love you. What exactly did you think was happening here?”

“I thought you might get tired of me,” she confesses, quiet. Honesty is not all it’s cracked up to be. “I haven’t had a lot of luck with people staying in my life, and I was worried that if I was moving too fast for you, you might not want –”

Jack’s gaze is so impossibly tender. “Samira, nothing in the world that you could say or do would ever make me not love you. You aren’t moving too fast, baby, I’m way ahead of you. I want as much of you as you’re willing to give me.”

She sniffles a little, voice just a whisper. “Promise?”

His kiss is answer enough, slow and sweet, but he pulls back, cups her face in his hands. “I promise.”

Samira yawns against his lips and Jack chuckles. “Come on, sleepyhead.”

The sheets are cool against her skin as they curl up together, Jack spooning her from behind, his lips pressing dizzying kisses into the sensitive skin of her neck. Within seconds the wet heat of his lips and scrape of stubble have dispelled any remaining fog of sleep, and she’s writhing against him, feeling his hard length against her ass. She’s realizing that this position is entirely unfavorable for her; he has unfettered access to her, the hand beneath her neck twisted round to tease her nipples, his thigh wedged between hers forcing her legs apart. She’s soaked with arousal, moaning helplessly in his arms, and he swears as his fingers dip between her spread legs to find the evidence.

She tries to twist away as runs a finger through her folds, his fingers relentless against her breasts, and he nips at her shoulder, holds her in place. “Where do you think you’re going?” he chides, and Samira cries out as he starts rubbing tight circles against her clit, grasping his forearms for leverage. This time there’s nothing gentle about Jack’s lips on her throat; she’s going to have hickeys in the morning, but can’t bring herself to care. He waits until she’s gasping his name, twitching in his arms, before releasing her and stripping her shorts off her, burying his face between her legs.

She comes with a wail, his name on her lips.

He allows her not a second of recovery, pushes into her while she’s still coming down from her high, and the rush of being filled makes her keen, hands scrabbling uselessly against his chest. His hips move in an easy sway against her, his thumb caressing her clit, and she’s so breathless she can scarcely moan.  

“Come on, baby,” he groans, “You can do it, come for me again.” His pace is steady, coaxing a crest out of that wave of pleasure, and she’s hurtling towards another orgasm, nails digging crescents into his back, her walls pulsating around him. She nearly blacks out with the force of it, and he follows her with a groan, collapsing against her.

It takes a few minutes for her to find her voice. “That was incredible,” she croaks, and he kisses her cheek, teasing a nipple with a single finger until she squirms away.

“Everything about you is,” he says, his smile slow, satisfied.  

They clean each other up in the shower, trading soft kisses amidst the steam and hot spray. When they return to bed she rests her head on his shoulder, drapes an arm around his chest. His breathing starts to even out quickly; she supposes it’s an ex-military trait, the ability to sleep anytime, anywhere, and then snap to total wakefulness just as readily.

“I love you,” she whispers, into the darkness. His arm tightens around her waist, and she leans up to kiss his jawline, his neck. “Jack, I love you more than I know how to tell you. I’m really glad I found you.”

“I know,” he says, voice gravelly. His kiss is languid with sleep, and she wraps a leg around his, molds herself to him, rests a hand in his curls and listens to his breathing as he surrenders to sleep.

It’s overwhelming, almost frightening, to have placed her heart so wholly in someone else’s hands. But there is nowhere else she would rather be than in his arms, and there are no surer hands than Jack Abbot’s.