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Chapter Text

Mel and Langdon were unique among residents in that they possessed legitimate reasons to be kept on the day shift: caring responsibilities. Santos made a couple deliberately controversial remarks and Javadi said that her body clock being stubbornly diurnal should be an equally valid reason, but otherwise nobody seemed to mind, which relieved Mel. She’d had to have her caring responsibilities accommodated in med school, and those accommodations simply let her exist on seven hours of sleep instead of five, but she was used to having at least a few peers who saw them as unfair advantages. Always being on day shift because of outside commitments felt like an important piece of common ground between her and Langdon and then, after six months of working alongside him, it was pulled out from beneath her feet. Apparently because Langdon was not raising his kids solo he had told Dana he could cover night shifts in a pinch, and he told Mel that such pinches usually emerged once a year for about three weeks.

She thought she did a good enough job hiding how much she missed him and his jokes and high energy and encouragement, how much she struggled to orient herself in the absence of the first safe harbor she'd found in the pitt, and how much she was hurt by his casual greetings when he came in as she was leaving, like he’d hardly noticed her absence. But she didn’t hide her excitement when the three weeks (and two days) had lapsed and their schedules aligned once again. She would have told anyone who asked that the reason she was so chipper was because she was excited for Langdon to be back, except that Whitaker did ask in an aside during their morning rounds, and she did tell him, and he looked a level of uncomfortable usually only Santos could provoke, or the nurses when they ganged up on him. So she determined to play it cool for the rest of the day, and held to it until finishing up with the first patient she worked on with Langdon – so an hour and ten minutes. He listed out a battery of tests for her to order and she nodded and then when they would normally part she bounced on her heels and stayed put.

Langdon did a double take and asked her, “Anything else?”

“Um, I missed you,” she said.

He smiled and returned to updating the patient's electronic file. “Well, I imagine everyone did, it’s just that nobody else is honest about their feelings. It wasn’t the same without me, right?”

She shook her head, smiling as she almost always did when he smiled first. In turn, his smile widened further.

“I missed you too,” he said, and even though it was probably normal for people to reciprocate that sentiment, it still took her by surprise.

“Oh,” she said.

“You get me, Mel,” he said. “Night shift people don’t get me. They’re vampires, we’re children of the sun.”

She laughed, although she didn’t know how to accept the compliment without disrespecting the night shift people, and so just said that she would go run and get those tests and he was already being pulled toward another trauma bay, anyway.

They sat beside each other at lunch but didn’t really talk, because half the staff was there too and Mel found it almost impossible to follow group conversations, even though she liked being included, and Langdon was surreptitiously texting his wife (saved in his contacts as Abby with an angel emoji, she noticed for the first time, and flushed, like she’d read his diary) about where he’d left the book he’d read to his eldest the night before, because nobody could find it. Apparently Langdon had no idea, but Mel stopped letting her eye be drawn to his phone screen and focused on her sandwich, brought from home.

The shift passed quicker than any in recent memory, and when people started drifting toward their lockers, tagged out by their replacements, Langdon made eye contact with her and jerked his head, indicating for her to come over.

“You see Ellis come in soaked?” he asked once she had skipped to his side. “She bikes to work.”

“Oh, no,” Mel said, hurrying to keep pace with his long strides as he made his way to his locker. “Is she okay? Does she have a cold?”

“No idea,” Langdon said indifferently, which left her unsure as to what they were talking about. “You get the bus, right?”

“Yes,” she said, glad for a straightforward question and what seemed to her like a change of subject.

“I hate public transport here,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, it’s a little unreliable, but it’s nice to have some time to myself. That's pretty rare.”

“That’s probably why I hate it,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m just hoping one of the other passengers will have a medical emergency so I have something to do. Joking.”

When he made a particularly dark joke he generally didn’t leave a breath between it and a confirmation that it was in fact a joke. At least, he did that when he was talking to Mel. She appreciated it.

“Anyway, that’s not my point,” he said.

“Oh,” Mel said, putting it together. “No, I have an umbrella, it’s all good. And I always get into my pajamas as soon as I get home so it doesn’t really matter when it rains.”

He had that half smile he often wore, like he was making himself focus on the matter at hand but she had said something with the power to distract him. “You’re Hazelwood like me, right?”

“Not quite,” she said. “Greenfield, but right by Hazelwood.”

“Cool, so you’re closer to the hospital than me,” he said. “Basically on my way.”

She paused, looking at him. Sometimes he forgot to say the most important part, barreling ahead to additional commentary.

“Right,” he said, apparently knowing what her look meant. “Would you like a ride? I’ll do my best to recreate the ambiance of a Pittsburgh bus in my car, if it would make you more comfortable.”

She bit her tongue against saying ‘oh’ for what would have been the fourth time in this single exchange. For some reason she wanted to say no, even though she wasn’t on a direct bus line and getting to and from the hospital was more awkward than she let on, and if her place wasn’t out of the way for Langdon a ride would be a big help. But it just didn’t feel to her as casual as it seemed to be to Langdon, which made her want to make sure she’d thought it through. Langdon was fiddling with his locker, waiting for her, and she had to remind herself that fidgeting was his base state, not pronounced impatience. Then she said, “Yes, please, thank you.”

He smiled and she felt warm the way some but not all of his smiles made her, and she hadn’t yet worked out what distinguished the warming smiles from the normal smiles. “Great,” he said. “Five dollars I’m ready to go sooner than you.”

She straightened up. “That’s not fair, we’re already at your locker!”

“Time is money, Mel,” he said, and instead of protesting further she speed-walked to her own locker.

They forfeit the bet after failing to agree what constituted ‘ready to go’ but Langdon did deem her a worthy competitor. He also opened the passenger side car door for her as he said it, which distracted her a little. In the words of Perlah, Langdon had charm but no manners.

“...it must be because we’re used to rushing,” he was saying as she climbed in. “Not to make assumptions – but some days the difference between father of the year and child neglect is how fast you can tie your shoes and make a sandwich, you know. Put your address in the GPS, thanks. And you must be under pressure with your sister and this job, time wise.”

He said it so casually, like it didn’t mean anything, so she didn’t feel the usual flare of defensiveness when people acted like she must find it overly demanding, even draining, to look after her sister. Langdon had chosen to have two kids and embraced the challenge of it – she thought she knew him well enough by now to know that the challenge probably made it even more worthwhile for him – so she could admit that she was usually kept pretty busy without him reacting like she was living some tragedy.

“Yes,” she said, after finding her address and clicking start. Twenty minutes, the GPS estimated. It took her fifty on the bus, door to door. “Sometimes, on the days when my schedule is actually open, I’ll show up to things like fifteen minutes early because I’m just not used to it.”

“Exactly,” he said, laughing, pulling the car out of the hospital lot. “I had the same thing, when Abby took the kids to visit her sister and left me alone in the house for a week. I realized I had absolutely no idea how long it took me to get ready in the morning if I had nothing else going on.”

Mel hummed out a laugh and looked around the car. She only realized that she was looking for signs of his family when she didn’t find any. It must be this was his car for work and Abby kept the car they used for bringing the kids places. Langdon was messy, she knew this about him, but the car had no mess.

“It’s very… neat and tidy,” she said.

“It is my car, I promise,” he said dryly. “I just literally only use it for getting to and from the hospital so there’s never been a chance to make a mess.”

“Right,” she said.

“It's the sole piece of evidence that I’m capable of neatness,” he said. “That’s why you’re the first colleague I’ve given a ride to. The hospital’s always trying to encourage green transport, car pooling and the likes, you know, but I don’t trust any of those slobs to respect my space.”

She smiled. Langdon often made comments like that that made her giddy, created a playful us vs. them – she and him vs. the slobs, she and him vs. the night shift people. She wasn’t used to feeling on the inside of things.

“Well, I promise I will,” she said, and he glanced over at her.

“I was mostly joking,” he said. “I’m not precious about this thing, don’t feel...”

“Don’t feel what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking awkward for some reason. “I just want you to be comfortable, you know.”

She nodded and looked out the window. Already they were on a different route than the bus took, and the street was totally unfamiliar. She’d been in Pittsburgh for nearly a year, coming into Oakland almost every day, and still she hardly knew it at all.

“What would you be doing on the bus?” he asked.

“Reading or listening to music,” she said. “If there’s not stuff to catch up with.”

“Stuff?”

“Life admin.”

“Right,” he said. “You know, you might be one of the very few in the ED who actually read. Some people say they read, like Robby says he reads, but he’s been stuck on the same non fiction book for like three years. I have a theory, you want to know my theory?”

“Okay,” she said, smiling. Sometimes Langdon was really chatty, and sometimes he was quiet. When he was quiet she thought that was her preference, and when he was chatty she thought that that was.

“Reading is the least likely hobby for emergency doctors and nurses because once we’re out of work we either want to turn our brains entirely off, which is why so much of the lunch conversation is about reality TV, or we want to stave off the adrenaline crash, which is why there are so many charity run fundraisers. Reading doesn’t give us either. It’s intellectually demanding but not exciting. You continue to be one of a kind, Mel.”

“Reading can be exciting,” she said, frowning. She was reading a pretty exciting high fantasy novel at the moment. The main character had just summoned a demon. That had to count as exciting.

“Right,” he said, his lip curling a little. “Not quite on the level of sky-diving, though.”

“I guess not,” she said. “But who would want to sky dive?”

“What music do you listen to?” he asked, and it was always impossible to tell when Langdon was deliberately changing the subject and when he was just distracted by his own thoughts.

“Rap, mostly,” she said. “And EDM.”

He made a noise of disgust. “You’re so much cooler than me,” he said. “Start talking about music to me so I can steal your opinions and impress people.”

She knew he was joking but she still wondered who it was he wanted to impress; she doubted it was any of their coworkers. Moreso than anyone else, she was aware of the fact that Langdon had a life outside of the hospital. She couldn’t imagine a single fact of Robby’s life, or Collins’s, she had on multiple occasions forgotten that Dana had kids, and the interns and med students generally didn’t have anything going on outside of their education. Langdon had to have friends, hobbies, commitments, adventures. It wasn’t just his wedding ring or the bracelet from his kid; she just couldn’t imagine Langdon alone, and she couldn’t imagine him doing nothing. Proof of concept: they hit a red light and his fingers started dancing along the wheel, his head craning to look at she didn’t know what. He would never lie on a bed with the curtains pulled for forty minutes, staring at the ceiling - a favorite pastime of many of their colleagues.

“I do like to talk about it,” she said hesitantly, trying to gauge his actual interest level. She could talk about 90s rap for the length of a coast to coast road trip.

“Awesome,” he said. “I don’t care enough about music so I never figured out the bluetooth in this thing. If you can set it up you can play me some of your stuff.”

“Hm,” she said, confused. They would probably be at her place in five minutes. When did he want her to figure it out, or play it? How would she figure it out?

She saw him glance at her and he must have realized her dilemma. “I mean,” he said, “If you’d like to keep car pooling.”

“I don’t have a car,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “I think car pooling implies people taking turns, but it would just have to be you all the time.”

“I’m okay with that,” he said. “Come on, you know what a control freak I am.”

She smiled. “Am I really on your way? It’s not a huge—”

“No,” he said. “And it means I won’t have to get stuck in traffic alone, which is an immediate improvement to my quality of life. I like spending time with you, Mel. And we established that we missed each other.”

“Okay,” she said, flushed. “Please, thank you.”

He shrugged one-shouldered and changed the subject to pharmaceutical sales reps, which occupied them until he turned onto her street. She lived on a first floor apartment of a red brick building she thought looked very quaint and pretty, but she had no idea what Langdon would make of it.

"Nice house," he said, almost to himself. "Nice street. Very Mel."

"Thanks," she said. "I like it. Well, it has garden access, and the next door neighbor's got this cat, and--"

“You’re on tomorrow, right?” he asked.

She cut herself off and nodded and didn’t return the question. She knew his schedule.

“Then let's pick this story up in the morning. I'll see you then." He peered out his window up at the sky. "Look, it's stopped raining. You're safe."

"Yeah," she said, not sure exactly how she was feeling, but safe wasn't the worst word for it. "Okay, I'll see you in the morning."

Chapter Text

Frank Langdon made a brilliant friend, which hadn’t surprised Mel for a second. Not that she’d seen much evidence, but he was an all-in kind of person who did nothing half way. He was a brilliant friend the way he was a brilliant doctor, father, driver, runner, and community garden patch maintainer. He’d been Mel’s brilliant friend since her third visit to the rehab center, which finally convinced him she wasn’t doing it as a courtesy. From then on he made a point to know what was going on in her life, remember her family members’ names, and show her every picture of his kids ever taken. The car pooling, to her, seemed a natural extension of their friendship. Once she was convinced it wasn’t an inconvenience for him, she didn’t think much of it at all.

But evidently it struck their colleagues as a big deal. It took them a while to pick up on the pattern of her and Langdon arriving and leaving together, and she made an offhand comment about the arrangement to McKay when McKay talked about how rough her commute was, and then, eventually, everybody knew, and everybody had something to say.

It made Mel more uncomfortable than it should have. They weren’t saying anything wrong – Dana winked at her and called her a good influence, Collins said she must have the patience of a saint, Santos said she’d have to reconsider her tire slashing fantasy, and Robby just gave her a sort of look which she connected back to him asking her to keep an eye on Langdon when he first returned to the pitt. They weren’t really making fun of her or criticizing the choice – but they all obviously thought it meant something, and she couldn’t work out what. And suddenly the little habits she and Langdon had built up over the months felt spotlit, every offhand snippet of praise he offered her, every extraneous detail she shared with him about a patient or a case, just because she wanted to hear what he thought.

At least it wasn’t that people thought there was something going on between them. She doubted he could have been so close with Collins or Mohan without it spurring rumors or even his wife’s unease. There were no rumors about her and Langdon – just some jokes, the way people made jokes about Whitaker and Myrna. It reminded her of how in high school boys were never nervous to ask her to a dance, because they assumed she understood they only meant as a friend. Langdon could get away with things with her that might have raised eyebrows with someone else.

But still, she had never done well with attention or speculation, even if it wasn’t mean-spirited. What made it all the more unnerving was that Langdon seemed entirely oblivious to the attention. She swung between believing he was actually somehow missing it to believing that he was choosing to ignore it, but either way it left her unsatisfied. She wanted to be able to talk about it, to make sure he was okay with it, with being seen as... she wasn’t even sure what.

Maybe that was what sustained other people’s interest, the fact that it wasn’t especially obvious what she and Langdon were. Best friends felt premature – was there such a thing as work best friends? But if best friends felt too big, work best friends felt too small, too limited. She had heard the nurses apply the concept of work husband and work wife to Robby and Collins, but she didn’t want to touch that. McKay had referred to Langdon as Mel’s mentor, which she understood a little bit but which also hurt her pride. He wasn’t all that many years ahead of her – he had a lot to teach her, certainly, but it wasn’t like she was his student. She liked to think they were closer to peers than that.

The car pooling, she thought, represented this blurring of boundaries: not quite work but not quite personal life, either. If somebody asked her if she ever saw Langdon outside of the hospital, what should she say? Technically yes, but it was still hospital adjacent.

She was overthinking it, and one night she couldn’t sleep at all because right at the end of the shift Javadi had screwed up a simple stitch, turned to Mel and said, “don’t tell Dr. Langdon.” Javadi had no poker face to speak of and it was obvious she immediately regretted it, but it still threw Mel off. The following morning she climbed into Langdon’s car on a mission to finally debrief with him, handing him a coffee and making a soft noise in greeting. That was a new little tradition which made her feel more comfortable with him driving her to and from work. She started brewing an extra cup of coffee in the morning, bringing it out to him in a keep cup which he washed in the break room at some point during the day and handed back to her on the way home. He was the only coffee drinker in his house, so it simplified his morning to not have to make it at all. His wife had turned to green tea a couple years back: the green tea drinker and the benzos addict, Langdon had said. A match made in heaven.

Langdon took a long swig from the cup before placing it in the holder and pulling away from her apartment. “It’s going to be a bad day,” he said. “I can feel it. Some mix up in the lab so we have to redo a bunch of tests, lots of aggro patients.”

The car rides had taught her that Langdon was superstitious. Every morning he said something like that, to reverse-jinx the universe into giving them a manageable shift.

Mel didn’t have a superstitious bone in her body, and found this an easy way to rile him up. “Nope,” she said. “I think it’s going to be really easy. Quiet even. I’ll probably get to help Mohan with that research project of hers.”

“Screw you, King,” he said. “If the nurses knew you talked like this they’d throw you to the wolves.”

She laughed a little. The idea of teasing people – at least people other than her sister – often felt dangerous, but she was finding ways to do it with Langdon without going too far.

“What if Robby knew about your superstitions?” she asked. Robby shared her tendency toward skepticism. They had bonded over it, in fact.

Langdon shook his head. “I’m instituting a new policy. Car pool confidentiality. As sacred and unbreakable as the doctor patient kind.”

It was a joke, but she found it a little reassuring, what with how under the microscope she’d been feeling in her friendship with Langdon. The car journeys were just the two of them, unobserved. For a moment she remembered her and Becca as kids under the blankets with a torch on. They had called it their secret society.

“Deal,” she said, and he threw a smile her way. One of the ones that made her warm.

He focused back on the road and she looked at her hands on her lap, twisting her fingers. She wasn’t sure exactly how to bring it up.

“No music?” he asked, and she glanced at him. His tone was light, but there was some wariness on his face, like he could already tell something was up.

She took out her phone and connected to the car bluetooth, playing some Mase. Feel good in the morning, chill in the evening; that was for her rather than for Langdon. Sometimes she thought she could put on a track of someone shredding paper for twenty minutes and he wouldn’t notice. He really didn’t care about music.

“Do you ever think about what people think of you?” she asked, starting out more generally.

His fingers flexed on the wheel. “Depends who’s people,” he said.

“Say, just, our coworkers.”

“Depends which coworkers,” he said, and she could hear him smile.

“If you found out there was some rumor about you, would you care?” She was going about it so wrong. She didn’t know why she was being so indirect.

“What, like that I stole drugs?” he asked.

She pursed her lips. From day one of his return he’d committed to being very open and casual about his addiction, and it awed her a little. Maybe he really just didn’t care what people thought.

“I’m just wondering,” she said, “because I do care. What people think of me. More than I should, I think, sometimes. And I can get neurotic when I feel like there’s a part of my life people are paying a lot of attention to. It reminds me of—” It reminded her of her sister, of all the gawking that had gone on in their home town, but she didn’t want to go there.

“Ah,” Langdon said. “Okay.”

“Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” he said. “The fact that people find our friendship charming and adorable.”

“Do they?” she asked. “Is that what it is?”

“No,” he said. “They find it confusing. In answer to your question about whether I care, I mostly don’t, but it does kind of annoy me that people can’t see how much you and I have in common. I’d think it was obvious. I clocked it your first day.”

“Oh,” she said, processing that.

“And also they find us charming and adorable,” he said.

“I think I just don’t like it when I don’t know what people are thinking of me,” she said. “I’m sure it’s not mean, I just don’t know what it is.”

“You do know what they think of you, though, right?” he said. “Determined, gifted, straight up, caring. It’s what they think of us you’re trying to make sense of.”

“Yes,” she said.

He shifted in his seat, the first indication he found this tricky too. “Is there something in particular you’re concerned about?”

She flushed, understanding immediately what he meant. If she was worried people thought they were having an affair. “No,” she said. “No, that’s not—people know that doesn’t make sense.”

He relaxed. “Good,” he said. “I mean it’s good that you know that.”

That she knew it didn’t make sense or that she knew people knew that? She desperately hoped he meant the latter, that he hadn’t ever thought that she might think—she shook her head.

“I think that’s why, though,” she said. “I mean, if it’s not that, people don’t know what to make of it.”

“We could say that you’re my long lost sister,” he said. “That’s an explanation.”

She laughed.

“Or that Robby’s paying you extra to keep an eye on me,” he said. “I could probably get that rumor going, people would buy it.”

“Am I over reacting?” she asked. He wasn’t taking this seriously.

“No,” he said, a little rushed. “Sorry, I’m being flippant. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know what to make of it? Us?”

“Yes,” she said. “We’re friends.”

“Good friends, close friends,” he clarified.

“Yes,” she said, a little grateful. It was a worthwhile distinction. She was friends with Mohan, with McKay, and it wasn’t at all the same as her friendship with Langdon.

“Okay then,” he said, like that settled it. “If Dana and Collins get to go around all buddy buddy, I don’t see why we can’t.”

“Or Santos and Garcia,” Mel said.

“Yes—well. That’s a little different, I think.”

She cleared her throat, feeling awkward. Bad example.

“Anyway,” he said. “The gawkers are impeding on our sacred car time. We can’t let them win, let’s talk about something different. My kid bit a dog yesterday.”

Her eyes widened. “Like, aggressively?”

“As opposed to?”

“Affectionately,” Mel said. “Exploratorily.”

“Well, that’s a very nice way of looking at it,” he said.

“Was it your dog?”

“God no,” he said. “Now that would be a problem. Our neighbor’s. I said that I didn’t think it was too big a deal because this particular dog kind of sucks, but Abby says that’s beside the point.”

“Maybe your kid’s just a good judge of character,” Mel said.

“Man, you’re awesome at this,” he said. “Affectionate, exploratory, a good judge of character. My kid rules.”

She smiled. “Once during my internship when I was sleep deprived and trying to study I bit into my physiology text book. I’ve sold a lot of my books but I kept that one because it still has teeth marks and I don’t know how to explain that.”

“And on a scale from aggressive to affectionate, what was that?” he asked, sounding amused.

“I think I was trying to absorb the knowledge more directly,” she said. “I thought it would work as a mnemonic.”

“The secret to Dr. Mel King’s success, everybody,” he said.

“No, not everybody,” she said. “New confidentiality clause, remember?”

“I remember,” he said. “You’re right, it won’t leave the car."

Chapter Text

They’d been carpooling for eight months and this was the first time he was driving her home after a really bad day, which meant she hadn’t had a really bad day in eight months at least, which was something positive to latch onto.

Three patients had died and she’d been working on two of the cases. The third she hadn’t even talked to, but she’d run into their room when they coded and had been the one doing compressions when Robby called it. She was just a little in shock. She hadn’t done anything wrong, which she would have known even if Dana, Langdon, Robby, and Collins hadn’t all pointed it out to her. Deaths were randomly distributed, and in truly random distributions, you got clusters. Today was a cluster.

Langdon had been looking her way since the first death, and cleared out a break room for her after the second, stood guard at the door so she could gather herself without interruption. When a problematic recurring patient showed up he’d maneuvered his way into being the lead doctor on the case and called for Whitaker’s support, sparing Mel. But he hadn’t really said much to her, and that continued in the car on the way home, outside of a gentle check in after she closed her door. She wasn’t sure how much it had to do with her state, if he thought she needed space. He’d been quiet on the way into work too. Sometimes he just had quiet days.

Usually, she didn’t mind. She could find it calming, and him being quiet didn’t mean he needed quiet from others, and if she caught him at the right time he’d let her ramble uninterrupted about her sister or her work at the VA or the online seminar on patient safety she’d attended the night before. He never looked like he was paying attention, but he seemed to remember everything she said, liable to bring it up weeks later.

On the car ride home, though, she found she missed the more outgoing version of Langdon, who bragged and got competitive and loved gossip and made wacky jokes. She needed distraction. He could always make her laugh, always give her something to think about, always make her feel better about herself. The silence in the car just seemed to amplify her thoughts, remembering every word the dead patients had said to her, every hint they’d given her about what their life had been like before they wound up in the pitt. She remembered the daughter of the second patient, who’d gotten on the first flight available in the early hours of the morning to get there in time, but had missed her mom by twenty minutes. She felt as though she was still in that moment; she didn’t know how to get out of it.

She didn’t realize she was crying until she heard Langdon’s vaguely panicked voice. “Oh, hey, hey, Mel,” he said. “Oh, shit, don’t cry—it’s okay.”

Being told to stop crying and that things were okay was not exactly textbook bedside manner, and she could imagine Dana rolling her eyes, but she could also hear the genuine concern in his voice, and that was what counted. He could have been reciting the warning signs of early onset Alzheimer’s and it would have still worked. She took in a breath.

“I know,” she said. “Sorry. I’m okay. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “Just wait, just give me a minute.”

She didn’t know what that meant and was clenching her eyes closed counting down from fifty in her head, trying to get herself back in check, so she didn’t follow up. When she opened her eyes again they were on a street she didn’t recognize and he was slowing down, pulling up in front of a roadside diner.

“What are we doing?” she asked.

“Indulging ourselves in Americana,” he said. “The food here is more comforting than anything I can say, I promise.”

She was immediately seduced by the idea, but shook her head. “No, my sister’s waiting.”

“Do you want her to see you like this?” he asked, and it prompted her to pull down the visor to look at her reflection. She was so pale and crying always made her blotchy all over. She almost felt embarrassed looking like this in front of Langdon, but then she remembered how pasty his skin had been in rehab. Seeing him there had really humanized him for her. Up until she saw him she hadn’t really believed what she’d been told, about him using. It had seemed too disconnected from the man she’d met on her first day.

“No,” she said. Her being upset panicked Becca.

“This’d be an extra twenty minutes,” he said. “Can she spare you an extra twenty minutes?”

Mel swallowed. “Yes,” she said.

“Okay,” Langdon said. “So, Mel, want to go get milkshakes?”

She smiled, which he took as an answer, throwing open the door and practically jumping out of it. Gone was quiet Langdon. She wondered if he’d somehow sensed this was the version of him she needed.

He rounded the car and opened the door for her, something he always did in the morning too, and she thought it might seem ungrateful to draw attention to it but she always wondered where it came from. She wouldn’t necessarily describe anything else about his conduct as chivalrous.

“Twenty minutes,” she repeated.

“Uhuh,” he said. “You could set your timer, we’re out of here as soon as it hits the mark.”

“You think that’s long enough for me to feel better?”

“I’m willing to put money on it,” he said as they walked in. Americana was the right word for it; it looked like it had been set up with a 50s theme ten years ago, so all the shiny vinyl and soft colors were worn and stained. It was quiet and warm and she wondered if this was one of Langdon’s favorite places. It had some kind of charm. She felt like he was sharing a secret with her.

“By the way,” he said, as he guided her to the farthest booth, “I said milkshakes because Abby’s started on dinner and she’ll kill me if I come home having already eaten. So I’m getting a milkshake, which I think I can argue just counts as a beverage. But if you want a burger or whatever please feel free.”

“No,” she said. “Milkshake sounds nice. It sounds perfect.” She didn’t know why; as soon as he’d said it she could picture it, and it had felt like a total escape from the day.

“Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry?” he asked. “They only do the classics here.”

“Chocolate, please,” she said, and then regretted the please. Why was he acting like he was going to do the ordering?

“Hell yeah,” he said, and began walking to the counter. She made a noise of protest and he turned to her immediately, like he was worried she was going to start crying again.

“I can order myself,” she said.

“An hour ago you were doing a cervical biopsy,” he said. “I wouldn’t think this was beyond you. But I’m paying, so this makes it simpler.”

“Wait, we never agreed you’d pay,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But if anyone ever questions what a stand up guy I am I can tell them one time I got Mel King a milkshake.”

She began to respond and he sighed and stepped closer. “Okay, honestly?”

She nodded for him to continue.

“It’s still very obvious you were crying basically seconds ago, and I thought you might appreciate getting to stay in the booth.”

“Oh,” she said. She hadn’t thought of that, of having the waitress behind the counter look at her, wonder about her. “Oh. Yes, I do. Thank you.”

He nodded at her and then turned to go up to the counter. She flushed, embarrassed for making a big deal of it, and began to fidget with the salt and pepper shakers. In Langdon’s absence the spell of the diner started to fade and she began to fall back in to the memories of the day. Luckily he returned soon enough, sliding in across from her and giving her a long look.

“It fucks me up too, you know,” he said, his voice low.

“When your patients die?” she clarified.

“No,” he said. “Well, yes, but I meant when your patients die. It doesn’t seem right.”

She cocked her head at him, not getting his meaning.

He sighed. “I mean, you should be different. Patients who get you as their doctor should live. Maybe it’s because you’re so full of life, I don’t know—I don’t want to make it sound like I think you don’t belong in the ER, you know how much I respect you as a doctor, but you’re kind of out of place in tragedy.”

It left her a little dumbfounded. Strangely she had had a similar thought about him. When he was around she always held on to some hope, no matter the odds, that everything would work out. It seemed inexplicable and unfair when it didn’t. “I don’t know what to say to that,” she said.

“I wouldn’t either,” he said, the corner of his mouth ticking up. “Let me say this instead. It’s okay that you’re not used to it. It's probably a good thing.”

She nodded. “I know,” she said. “I hate the idea of becoming desensitized… but there’s some middle ground, isn’t there, where you can care without getting overwhelmed? A balance?”

“I’ve heard tell of it,” he said.

“You don’t think it’s possible?”

“No, I do,” he said. He often immediately rowed back on his more cynical comments, like he felt guilty for making them. “But it mightn’t be, you know, some huge breakthrough the way I think a lot of us hope for. Balance might just be knowing where to get milkshakes after a bad day.”

She smiled, slowly, processing the theory. “Do you come here often?” she asked, and only realized that was the bad flirting line when he let out a shocked burst of laughter.

“Sorry,” she said, flushing. “I meant it literally.”

“Yeah, no, I got it. I used to come here more. I found it like my second week in Pittsburgh, and I haven’t really branched out much.”

“How’d you end up in Pittsburgh?” Mel asked, not wanting them to fall silent again, like in the car. She was curious about it too. It had taken her a few months to catch on that he wasn’t from here. He just seemed so much like he belonged. She thought she might not get an answer, because the waitress dropped off the milkshakes then and Langdon didn’t stay on one topic for long.

But after the waitress left he said, “Abby’s from here, did you not know that?”

She shook her head. He always seemed surprised when there was something she didn’t know about his family.

“Well, when she first got pregnant we moved back to be closer to her parents.”

“That's nice,” Mel said, and mentally made the connection in her head, that both of them had come here because it was what was best for their family. “Do you like it?”

He shrugged. He had a kind of awkward shrug, one shoulder going higher than the other, and even though she thought it probably had a sad explanation to do with his back pain, she liked how it looked. “I honestly think I’d be happy anywhere so long as I got to practice emergency medicine. I’m not that…”

He seemed to struggle for the word, so she filled in the blanks. “In touch with your environment?” she offered.

He smiled, narrowed his eyes at her. “Ouch,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, alarmed. “I don’t mean it as a bad thing. You just seem kind of…” and then she struggled for the word. What was a nice way of saying it? Disconnected? Oblivious? But she honestly didn’t think it was a flaw, she found it funny. People would make comments about how bad the traffic had been that morning and he’d stare at them blankly. He wore the same kinds of clothes regardless of the seasons, and got iced coffee in January too.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “I am kind of. You’re the opposite, right? Environment’s important to you.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding.

“So what do you think of Pittsburgh?”

“I like it,” she said, but he sensed her hesitation.

“But?”

“Well, I just don’t know it as well as I’d want to, this far into living here,” she said. “I mean my street is lovely, and I like the hospital, you know, for a hospital, and I found a nice old supermarket near me, but I just still feel so new. I don’t really feel at home yet.”

It felt like a huge confession, but Langdon took it in stride. “I get it,” he said. “It’s not your city yet. I think before I found this place it was still just Abby’s city. She’s a health freak, you know, so this was the first thing that felt like my Pittsburgh.”

“Yes,” Mel said, pleased. “I haven’t found my Pittsburgh yet. Like, there’s a park near me and a library but neither of them are that nice. I want to find my park, one with nice water features, and my library, with comfortable reading nooks and well-informed librarians, and my bakery...”

He’d been smiling the whole time she’d been talking, and she faded off awkwardly, not sure where she was going with it. “Well,” he said. “As a first step toward your Pittsburgh, I’m willing to share this diner with you. It can be your milkshake spot too.”

She laughed a little, but she was touched. “Thank you,” she said.

“There’s another hot spot I could introduce you to,” he said.

“Hm?” She was a little wary of the term hot spot.

“My dining room,” he said. “Abby keeps telling me to invite you over for dinner.”

Mel paused. That was certainly effective distraction from her God awful day. “Oh,” she said.

“That makes it sound like I don’t want it,” he said, frowning. “I do, sorry, I just keep forgetting to ask. I mean I see you so much anyway, you know.”

“Yes,” Mel said. It had never felt like an absence, not seeing Langdon outside of work. She already saw him more than essentially anyone other than her sister. And even that was close enough.

“I figure, though, it’d be nice for you to meet my family, so you know I’m not making them up,” he said. “And it would be cool if your sister came, too. I’d like to meet her.”

“Oh.” Mel smiled. Often she had to invite Becca along to social gatherings herself. She much preferred when the other person took the initiative. “That would be nice.”

“So you’re in?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sorry. No, I am. I mean, I’m not not in. I just—this is kind of out of nowhere feeling.”

He smiled. “Yeah, sorry,” he said.

“Are you making it up to take my mind off today?” she asked.

He laughed. “No,” he said. “I think I could come up with something more creative if that was the aim. No, honestly, Abby’s just curious about you. It’s a married people thing. You can only be friends with one for so long before it becomes weird that you’ve never met their spouse.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“For what?” he asked, clearly holding back a smile.

She shook her head. “Okay,” she said. “Yes, thank you, I would like to come over for dinner.”

“Awesome,” he said, but she wondered if maybe he didn’t actually seem that enthused. Maybe he preferred keeping a clear divide between his family and his work, but she didn’t know how to ask that without being pushy. She was probably just over thinking it. Probably once she got used to the idea it wouldn’t seem like a big deal at all.

She opened her mouth to try to say something casual, but instead yelped a little at a blaring alarm from his hoodie pocket.

“Sorry,” he said, pulling his phone out and silencing it.

“What was that?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“You could say that,” he said, and glanced up at her. “Our twenty minutes are up.”

Disappointment battled with her amusement that he’d actually set a timer. She didn’t know when he’d done it. “Oh,” she said. “Well, it was a really nice milkshake.”

“You feeling better?” he asked.

She nodded. She was, at least in that moment. She just hoped it would last the rest of the evening. Tomorrow she was back into the breach, and the next shift always washed away the last one. “Told you,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, standing up, kind of sad she didn’t get to take the diner up on its offer of being open all night. She didn’t feel confident that she’d be able to keep it together once Langdon wasn’t there to help. “Let’s go."

Chapter Text

“Change of plans,” Langdon said right by her ear, sliding in behind her in the swarming ED. She yelped a little, clenching her hands, then turned around to look up at him.

“How so?”

“Robby needs a ride,” he said. “Jake’s mom’s car broke down so he’s given her his for the day. He asked me to drop him home after the shift.”

“Oh,” she said.

He tilted his head at her. “You okay with that?” he said. “I know you’re a little intimidated by him.”

“Actually I’ve really improved in that regard,” she said. They had an inside joke now, about rodeos, for some reason.

“Good,” he said, smiling. “I’m sorry it’s short notice, I’ve just been his back up ride in the past, so.”

It struck her that he seemed a little uncomfortable. “Are you okay with it?” she asked. “I could take the bus if—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You being there will be what makes it bearable. Robby can get real unprofessional once we’re outside these walls, but I’m hoping you’ll be the buffer.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay. How do I do that?”

“Just be yourself,” Langdon said, smiling. “You naturally keep people in check.”

She squinted. Sometimes Langdon’s compliments targeted traits she had never thought about before, in herself or in anyone else, and it took her a little while to figure out their value.

Langdon’s attention caught on something behind her, another case, and he began to stride away, but not without pointing to her and saying, “You just have to take my side in any disagreement.”

She nodded, smiling. She liked feeling like they were a team.

All three of them walked down to the parking lot together, and without really thinking much Mel opened the door to the backseat, Robby going to the passenger side.

“What’s going on here?” Langdon demanded, instantly rounding the car again from the driver’s door to look at them accusingly. “Absolutely not.”

“Sorry, am I supposed to ask permission?” Robby asked, slowly.

“There’s a very strict hierarchy in my car, much like in the pitt,” Langdon said. “But in my car Dr King outranks Dr Robinovitch.”

He made a twirling gesture with his index finger and Robby rolled his eyes, gesturing dramatically at the front seat to Mel.

“Oh,” she said, and laughed a little. She thought about arguing – really she had taken the back seat because Robby had longer legs than her and the car wasn’t very spacious – but then she remembered that she was supposed to be on Langdon’s side, and so assumed her typical place in the front. She strapped in and took out her phone to connect to the bluetooth. With Robby in the back, it didn’t feel too different from any other evening.

“More green lights or red lights?” she asked Langdon.

“Red,” he said, which was a useful proxy for whether he had had a bad day or not.

“Green tomorrow, then,” she said, and he smiled for a moment.

She started playing some mellow Earl Sweatshirt and Robby said, “Since when do you listen to this kind of music?” which confused her until she realized it was directed at Langdon.

“It’s Mel’s music,” Langdon said, hissing through his teeth a little as he twisted back to reverse out of the parking space. “She’s educating me.”

“He makes a terrible student, doesn’t he?”

That was directed at her, and she felt conflicted. She was supposed to be taking Langdon’s side, but she doubted he could tell her a single thing about the song that was playing, or even whether he had heard it before (he had, multiple times). “Well,” she said. “I don’t know if I make the best teacher. I could be making more of an effort.”

“Quiz me on the relationship between rap and Atlanta strip clubs,” Langdon said, glancing back at Robby. “Or the most influential radio shows of the early aughts.”

Mel blinked, taken aback. Even if he didn’t pay attention to the music, maybe he paid attention to what she said about it. She kind of wished he hadn’t let Robby know she’d talked about strip clubs, though.

“So, when are you going to get your car back, Dr. Robby?” she asked, and Langdon snorted.

“I would also very much like to know,” he said.

“Not feeling especially welcome right now,” Robby said.

“Oh, no, sorry,” Mel said, shaking her head. “Sorry, I was just trying to make conversation.”

“I’m not,” Langdon said.

“Uhuh,” Dr Robby said. “Should be sorted by tomorrow. Apologies my gallant deed to help a kid get to school on time is inconveniencing you.”

“I think it counts as my gallant deed,” Langdon said. “I’m the one covering for you. Make sure Jake knows that.”

“Absolutely,” Robby said, unconvincingly. For a moment Mel wished she was sitting in the back. She knew that Langdon and Robby had some kind of bond, that Robby had chosen Langdon as the resident he’d take under his wing, but she didn’t really get to see them talk like this, as in not about work, often. It was nice.

Then Robby leaned forward. “Where are we going?” he asked, as they took a familiar turn. The street where sometimes that lady was walking her big dog, Mel knew it as.

“Mel’s,” Langdon said.

“I thought she was on your way,” Robby said, and Mel’s eyes shot up, looking to Langdon, whose jaw flexed a little.

“She is,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” Robby said, and he sounded like was holding back laughter. Langdon glanced at Mel and she looked straight ahead. She knew that Langdon wouldn’t actually drive down her street if he was going straight from the hospital to his home, but she always assumed it was a very minor diversion, maybe adding two or three minutes to his commute – something that her making his coffee compensated for adequately. She had been to his home now, for that dinner, and he’d picked her and Becca up and driven them, but she didn’t know Pittsburgh well enough to know what the shortest path between it and the hospital would be. She couldn’t be that much out of his way, but for the first time she wanted a specific value.

“Um, where do you live, Dr. Robby?” she asked.

“Langdon hasn’t mentioned?” he said. “We’re practically neighbors.”

“I would put the number at 500, in terms of people who live closer to me than you do,” Langdon said. “But we are in the same general vicinity.”

“The same catchment area,” Robby said.

“Well, it’s a very nice neighborhood,” she said.

“It is,” Robby said. “Do you know Pittsburgh well, Mel?”

“Not really.”

“Ah.”

“She’s getting there, though,” Langdon said.

“Speaking of our neighborhood,” Robby said, “How’s Abby?”

Mel didn’t understand the connection but tensed a little anyway.

“Good,” Langdon said, then cleared his throat. “Real good, man.”

As far as Mel knew this was the first thing he had said about his wife in weeks. Mel had only picked up on it recently. The dinner had been a few months ago, and really nice. He had funny kids and Abby was exactly what she would expect: incredibly beautiful, incredibly put together, and also very warm and kind. Langdon had gotten on with Becca and Abby had seemed to like Mel (had called her adorable), which was really all she had wanted from the night. Anyway, Langdon and Abby had seemed happy. They made each other laugh, he thanked her for the dinner, she thanked Mel for looking out for him at work. And Mel had already known that Abby had been very supportive during Langdon’s recovery, which had perhaps naively led her to conclude that their relationship was bulletproof. The casual way Abby just seemed to appear in his conversation, so interwoven with everything he had to share, had faded recently, even though he still brought up their kids. Mel had no idea what to make of it, and having only realized in the past couple of days, had not decided yet whether or how to broach it.

“Good,” Robby said. “I saw her at the market last weekend.”

“Oh,” Langdon said. “She didn’t mention.”

“Well, she didn’t stop to talk long,” Robby said, and Mel placed his tone. He was fishing for information, the way he did with patients too scared or ashamed to share their full story.

“You know Abby,” Langdon said. His tone Mel still hadn’t placed. She was pretty sure she hadn’t heard it before. “Always busy.”

“You both are,” Robby said.

“Uhuh.” It functioned as a conversation ender. In the following pause, Mel belatedly realized that this was probably when Langdon wanted her to step up as a buffer. This must have been what he didn’t want Robby to get unprofessional about.

“I finally got that book from my library,” she said to Langdon, and she could tell her instincts were right when he responded with enthusiasm. Usually when she talked about books he seemed to merely tolerate it.

“Oh yeah?” he asked. “Must have been like six months, right?”

“Months aren’t really an accurate measure of time,” she said. “It was twenty eight weeks.”

“You started it?”

“Yes,” she said, and grimaced. “And actually, I don’t know if I’m going to like it.”

“After all that,” Langdon said, laughing, and glanced back at Robby. “Mel refuses to buy books. Our girl is strictly library only. But this one nearly made her break her rule.”

“It’s the final installment in this sci-fi series,” she said, to Robby. Sometimes she repeated details to Langdon when she was pretty sure he hadn’t been paying attention the first time, but it usually annoyed him and she was usually wrong about it. She wanted to make it clear that this information was for Robby’s sake alone. “And it was very highly anticipated because it’s been six years since the last book, so there have been major back orders.”

“Why don’t you like it?” Langdon asked.

“Too many characters,” she said. “I looked at the table of contents and none of my favorites get a POV chapter until over two hundred pages in.”

“When do you get a chance to read?” Robby asked, disbelievingly. “Articles, let alone books longer than two hundred pages.”

“I’m pretty sure Mel doesn’t need sleep,” Langdon said. “She’s more evolved than us.”

Sometimes when Langdon talked about Mel to other people there was a note of pride in his voice, like she reflected well on him. She didn’t really understand it.

“Um, well, it’s actually just something my sister and I love to do,” she said. “Read together, our own books, and then tell each other about them.”

“Like a book club,” Robby said.

“Yes,” Mel said slowly, even though not quite. “Except we’re reading different books.”

“Maybe you need a book club, Robby,” Langdon said. “Finally get you over the hump. Get you to finish that book you’ve been working on since pre-pandemic.”

Mel hadn’t been working in healthcare during the pandemic, and she noted that Langdon was the only one at the pitt who ever invoked it casually, as a measure of time rather than a tragedy. He didn’t really believe in things being taboo.

“How are you in a position to make fun of me for that?” Robby said. “You barely read hospital memos.”

“Bullshit,” Langdon said. “I go through so many books. I probably read more books than Mel.” Mel’s eyebrows raised, immediately willing to protest, their alliance against Robby be damned, and then Langdon said, “Just last night I finished one about a very brave little frog who had to overcome his trust issues to cross a stream and reunite with his family.”

“Oh,” Mel said, laughing. “You mean children’s books.”

Langdon looked at her with that pleased smile he had for whenever she really laughed. There had been points in her life when she’d been self conscious about her laugh, hiccupy and loud, but not around Langdon. “Books is books,” he said. “Though I had the same problem with that one as you have with yours. Way too many characters.”

She laughed again. It pleased her disproportionately, that they could get on like this around Robby. She had wondered a few times why their jokes and shorthand seemed to fade away when they were in group settings. She had been worrying since Langdon told her Robby would be joining them that it would prove excruciatingly awkward, that she wouldn’t know what to say, or that Langdon wouldn’t sound like Langdon all of a sudden, or that Robby would find them weird. But this seemed to be going well, and she glanced back to see if Robby was laughing too. He wasn’t, he was just kind of looking at Langdon. She couldn’t read his expression. She wondered if they’d been unsuccessful in distracting him from the topic of Abby, if he was still thinking about it. She wondered what he knew that she didn’t. Her laugh faded out a little.

Chapter Text

They’d been commuting together for over a year the first time Mel got into the car mad at Langdon at the end of the day. He’d upset her on the very first case she’d had that morning and her annoyance hadn’t softened any over the hours, even with the usual chaos and heap of distractions. She’d been rehearsing in her head how to address it in every quiet moment, so she hadn’t raised it with him yet and she wasn’t sure if he’d picked up on her mood at all. She’d been avoiding him, but the pitt was always so busy you could get away with avoiding someone for at least two shifts before they actually noticed. This was even true with Langdon, despite the fact that on normal days they tended to gravitate toward each other, ended up working a disproportionate number of cases together.

She could tell just by the way he shut his door and strapped in that he had no idea where her head was at. He glanced at her only briefly, beginning to pull out of his spot, and said, “More green or red lights?”

“Red,” she said, as a useful precursor to what was to come, but he didn’t react. She felt a little taken aback. Maybe only she read into that game, maybe he never did.

It was one of his chatty days too, so he was even less likely to pick up on how she was feeling. “You know I’ve got seven different kids parties to go to in four days?” he asked. “Abby and I were trying to come up with a game to play to make it bearable. Like a drinking game without the drink. We got drunk, once, at a kid’s party, a bunch of the parents did, and it did not go well. I was saying I’d do a British accent at the one where we don’t know the people so well and we’d act like we didn’t know what people were talking about when they questioned it, you know. Then we were debating which of us can do a better accent, want to hear mine?”

He’d been bringing up Abby again over the past week or two. For example, they’d had a barbecue last weekend, even though Abby normally didn’t want the equipment taken out of storage until June. It seemed like a good sign, although Mel wondered if there was a new kind of tentativeness in his voice when he mentioned her, a carefulness in how he said her name. Whatever. She wasn’t thinking about the state of his marriage right now.

“I’m kind of really mad at you,” she said.

“What?” he asked, almost distractedly, then looked at her fully for the first time since he’d gotten in the car. “Wait, what? For real?”

“Yes,” she said.

“God,” he said. “What did I do, Mel? I’m already sorry for it.”

She shook her head. “No, don’t just apologize,” she said. “I want you to really understand.”

He paused for a moment. “Should I pull over?” he asked. “I mean are we having a real conversation here?”

She hadn’t thought about that. It had made sense to her to wait until the car ride to have this conversation, to give herself time to prepare and to make sure they wouldn’t be interrupted. It hadn’t occurred to her to consider his ability to engage while also driving. “It’s okay, whatever works for you,” she said. “I mean if you’d prefer we can. Sorry, I didn’t think of that.”

He laughed a little and slowed the car down, looking out for a place to park.

“What?” she asked, defensively.

“I just think that’s the nicest anyone who’s actively mad at me has ever been to me,” he said.

She pursed her lips. She didn’t want to be nice right now – but she still stayed silent until he’d found an appropriate spot. “It’s about my case this morning,” she said, once he’d pulled in. “My case that became your case.”

“Yeah,” he said, turning to her with wide, concerned eyes. “How are you doing after that? You all good?”

She blew air into her cheeks and then exhaled slowly.

A man had come in with numbness in his left leg, and they’d gotten a warning from the nurse working chairs that he’d been pretty disruptive. He’d seemed fine in the first check up, but when Mel returned with some test results and double checked with him that he didn’t use any drugs, he called her a fucking arrogant bitch, at a very high volume, and lunged at her like he was going to grab her or hit her. She’d retreated and luckily he was too weak and tied up in tubes to get very far. Princess, who was working the case with her, called security while Mel stood shell shocked in the corner, staring at the patient who was staring right back. Security had shown up with Langdon, because he always liked to know what was going on. Langdon had gotten the quick run down from Princess and then guided Mel out of the room toward a stairwell. Her favorite stairwell, and she wasn’t sure if it was a coincidence or not.

“Take some time,” he’d said, and she’d nodded, very grateful. She did need time, to stop feeling so shaken, to stop feeling in danger. She’d heard far worse stories about patients, and she’d seen worse too, but this was the worst kind of aggression that had ever been directed at her. So she did need time, but fifteen minutes tops. When she came out again and found Princess to say she was ready to take the next steps, she’d said, “Don’t worry honey, Langdon’s handling it. You can work another case.”

“Since when?” Mel asked.

“Since he looked at the case file and made the diagnosis.”

“Does he know about the exposure to lead?”

“Yep,” Princess said, which meant Langdon had worked it out himself, because Mel hadn’t noted it down yet. She’d felt good about working that out.

She knew, obviously, that Langdon had meant well, and she could tell from looking at him in the car that he had no doubts at all about what he’d done. So she’d really have to spell it out for him. “I’m good,” she said. “Except I don’t like other doctors taking my cases.”

He frowned, then widened his eyes. “Oh,” he said. “Shit. Mel, I just assumed…”

“But don’t assume,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. She didn’t want him apologizing yet, she didn’t feel like she’d explained herself yet. “I worked out the lead exposure too, you know,” she said, which wasn’t one of the lines she had rehearsed in her head.

“I’m sure you did,” he said. “You don’t miss things.”

“You can’t just… you know. Make unilateral decisions about what’s good for me,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking properly, I was really mad.”

She frowned, some concern edging in. She hadn’t thought that he might have been going through something. She’d no idea what kind of day he’d had. “You were?” she asked. “About what, had something happened?”

He gave her a disbelieving look he usually reserved for their most irresponsible patients. “Someone tried to assault you,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Well, still. I still don’t appreciate you taking a case because you think I can’t handle it.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t think you couldn’t handle it,” he said. “I just thought it’d upset you.”

“I’m grown, I work in an emergency department, things are going to upset me,” she said.

“Yeah, but we try to mitigate that,” he said, and squinted at her. “I’d thought you’d picked up on this, but maybe not, so I’d better come clean. You know I try to orchestrate it so you don’t have to deal with the really drunk patients? Because it seems like they make you uncomfortable.”

She flushed. She had suspected that, but it was the first time having it confirmed. “Yes, I know that, it’s different.”

“It is?” he asked. “How?”

It sounded like a genuine question. “Because this was my case already,” she said. “And because it was a cool case. And I’d figured out the thing with the lead.”

“Right,” he said. “No, you’re right. I am really sorry.”

“And maybe I am mad about you making it so I don’t have to work with highly intoxicated people,” she said. She knew she used to appreciate it, but in light of this morning maybe it was part of the same problem. “I don’t want you thinking you have to look after me. I’m not an intern, I’m not one of your kids.”

“I definitely don’t think of you like that,” he said. “My kids eat crayons. So do interns.”

It was funny, but that annoyed her further. It was a more extreme manifestation of the same discomfort she’d felt when McKay had called Langdon her mentor, she realized. She hated the suggestion of a power imbalance, but of course, undeniably, there was one. That was what had frustrated her the most about this morning: she had to just accept it, because Langdon outranked her. For as angry as she was, he was fully within his rights to pull her off any case at any moment. She hadn’t thought about it before, about what it meant to be so close with someone who had that kind of power. It felt suddenly risky. She’d seen him pull rank before, with students and interns and even with junior residents, but not with her. That was just because they were usually so on the same page, especially when it came to medicine. What if a case came up where they strongly disagreed about the appropriate course of action, would he just remind her of his greater experience and dismiss her? It wouldn’t be wrong of him to do that. And if it was Collins doing it, or Robby doing it, she wouldn’t mind, not really. But it just felt so gross, thinking about it with Langdon. She wanted him to respect her and trust her and learn from her. She wanted, so desperately, for them to be equals.

So she said it. “I want us to be equals.”

“So do I,” he said. “I think most people would argue you’re a level or two above me.”

She felt a moment of warmth, the way she usually did at his compliments, then screwed up her mouth and shook her head. “Even that,” she said. “The way you’re always saying things like that can make it seem like you think I need a cheerleader.”

“No, God, I—how long have you been feeling this way? Jesus.”

He looked so deeply alarmed that she felt some errant sympathy and tried to rein herself in. “Since this morning,” she said. “And it might just be because I’m already mad at you.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding unsure.

“Do you see me like… I don’t know. Like a project? Do you think our relationship is one where you’ve taken me under your wing?”

“No,” he said, slowly. He glanced out his window and looked back at her. “Mel, I want to respect where you’re coming from. But can I make a counterpoint?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Well, for as many times as I’ve redirected drunks away from you, you’ve made sure I wasn’t involved in transferring a patient from a gurney to the bed. And you shut people down when they talk shit about addicts, and you never lose your patience with me, and one time you knocked over my coffee and pretended it was an accident but I know you did it on purpose because you thought I was over-caffeinated. In my head, if there’s any imbalance between us in terms of who’s helping who, it’s very much in my favor.”

“Oh,” she said. She hadn’t thought about that at all, but he was right. It wasn’t like she never did anything for him, it’s not like she didn’t feel protective of him. God, had she made up the whole issue? No, she hadn’t – he outranked her, and he was her friend, and they’d never talked about what that meant. “That’s true. But, well… I still think…” She was too thrown off to articulate it straight away. With restraint she knew to be remarkable by his standards, he let her gather her thoughts.

“But you’re still my superior,” she said.

He grimaced.

“I know it’s a gross word,” she said. “But it’s true. And even if you don’t feel the power, or you haven’t internalized it, it’s very much real.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure, you’re right—but it’s not like I’m your boss. I mean, I can’t fire you, or discipline you really. And if I ever do anything that crosses any line, there are like five different people at least in that hospital who you could tell who would put me in my place.”

“Thank you,” she said, slowly. “I know that, and to be clear, I don’t think you’d try to take advantage of me. That’s not why I’m bringing this up.”

“Okay,” he said, looking a little relieved. “Good.”

“But I mean, even fair and proportionate use of your power. What if I mess up a case and you have to take me off it? Or we disagree about what treatment to pursue and you overrule me? You wouldn’t be wrong to do either of those things, but it would feel...”

“Weird,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “But it’s not like I want preferential treatment. If I should be taken off a case it would also feel weird for you to not do that.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess there’s a reason it’s never happened so far. You’re exceptional at your job, and you and I approach medicine the same way, and you’re good at explaining yourself to me when you’re doing something that didn’t occur to me, and you’re not stubborn, you’re willing to trust other doctors’ judgments. But, no, you’re right, the day could easily come.”

“Right,” she said. “So what do we do?”

“I’ve no idea,” he said. “I mean, I don’t want to stop being close over it.”

“No,” she said, a little horrified.

“So, is it a cop out if I say we should just handle it when it actually comes up?”

She chewed on her lip. “Maybe not,” she said, and frowned. What did she actually want, right now? What did she want from him? “I’m sorry if I freaked out—”

“You’re not wrong about this morning,” he said. “You’re not at all. I should have talked to you about it, obviously. I just… I don’t think it’s indicative of a broader problem with our friendship. At least I really hope it isn’t.”

“Okay,” she said, feeling pretty reassured by him, although she wanted time to think it all through, make sure it added up the way he was right then making it sound like it did. “Apology accepted. Um. We can start driving again now.”

“Just a second,” he said. “Mel… Just, you know you could’ve told me about this sooner. Like, as soon as it happened.”

“I wanted to get it straight in my head,” she said. “What I wanted to say. Things don’t always come out right when I don’t process them first.”

“Right,” he said. “And if it’s for your own sake that’s cool, but you really don’t have to be gentle with me, you know?”

“Not really,” she said, unsure what he meant.

“Like if you were getting things straight because you were worried about saying the wrong thing and upsetting me. Was that it?”

“In part,” she said. It wasn’t the only concern, but it was very important to her to treat people with respect, and to make sure the issues she raised with them were fair and measured. She didn’t like to act on impulse.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” he said, and sighed. “Like, you know how Dana and Collins are always shit talking me?”

“Yes,” she said. “And Garcia.”

“Right, but Garcia would shit talk a wall. With Dana and Collins I’m special.”

“Okay,” Mel said, smiling a little despite herself.

“But Dana and Collins are good, kind people, right?”

“Yes, absolutely,” she said.

“So they wouldn’t shit talk me if I couldn’t handle it,” he said. “I mean if it got to me at all. They’d never deliberately try to upset a colleague.”

“Yes, that makes sense,” Mel said, slowly.

“See, I’m thick skinned,” he said. “Abnormally so. My mom got divorced three times by the time I was sixteen, God bless her, I’ve got two young kids who have just figured out what tantrums are, Abby knows better than anyone how to mess with my head—” Mel’s eyebrows shot up but he just laughed a little as he said it, like he found his wife messing with his head endearing, which he probably did. “And I work in an ER, obviously.”

“Okay,” Mel said. “Sorry, what’s your point, specifically?”

“My point is if I fuck up and you want to tell me about it, don’t waste time worrying you’ll say the wrong thing to me, or hurt my feelings. I swear I can handle it. I doubt there’ll ever be a twenty four hour period where the worst thing someone says to me is something you said to me.”

She bit her lip. “I still want to treat you with respect,” she said.

“Trust me, I can handle a little disrespect,” he said, and did that uneven shrug she always liked. “Sometimes I get a kick out of it.”

She had certainly seen evidence of that; it had just always seemed so separate from their dynamic. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take this on board.”

Chapter Text

Mel had a tendency to blame herself, or to at least explore the possibility that she was the responsible party for any given difficulty, so when she began to suspect Langdon was avoiding her she assumed she’d done something wrong. He’d been quiet on the way in that morning, and on both car rides the day before, and they hadn’t seen much of each other during either shift, and by the time it stopped feeling accidental she couldn’t pinpoint what their last substantial interaction had been, and couldn’t distinguish the last few days adequately in her head. Her frazzled state and his disappearance weren't coincidental; a lot of her shortcuts to coping with various stressors hinged on having him around. The first free ten minutes she got she made a list in her medical notepad of things she could remember saying to and about him in the last 72 hours. She assumed it must have been something she said rather than something she did because when she got in trouble it was usually for clumsy remarks.

She clapped her hands with satisfaction when she arrived at a plausible theory: she had idly remarked to Robby that Langdon didn’t seem to be getting much sleep lately, and it only occurred to her then that it was the exact kind of sentiment Langdon would resent being shared with Robby, who he was still trying to impress and reassure. If Robby had relayed it back to Langdon, Langdon could be mad at her for it, although that still left her confused as to why he hadn’t confronted her yet. Langdon wasn’t the simmering type. Also – well, without being insensitive, it didn’t seem like such a huge deal, and Langdon was usually pretty forgiving, at least with her.

Between patients, she caught him speed-walking (which for him was normal walking) out of the pitt to an empty overflow wing, and she tried to follow. He walked so much faster than her that by the time she turned the corner to find him he was already sitting on a chair in the hallway, bent over with his head in his right hand, his left hand, she noted, bare of his wedding ring. He was twisting it between his fingers, a nervous tick she’d never seen before. Suddenly she felt like she’d interrupted, invaded his privacy. Clearly he wanted to be alone – was it back pain, maybe, with the way he was hunched? Was there some difficult patient he’d worked she didn’t know about? She could check in with Robby—but then that’s exactly what Langdon wouldn’t want her to do. She backed away quietly, flushed. She thought that if he’d seen her like that he wouldn’t leave her be, he’d come up to her and put himself right in the middle of her troubles, and a part of her wanted to be able to do that for him, to just walk up and make it better, but she wouldn’t even know where to start. Maybe, if it felt right, she could try to broach it in the car.

She didn’t have to. When he climbed in, she asked, “More red lights or green lights?”

He said, “Green,” which surprised her, and then: “Sorry I’ve been off.”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s okay. It seems like something’s really bothering you, so you know. If you need space.”

He laughed a little. “I never need space,” he said. “I hate space. There are just some things it’s hard to speak about.”

And suddenly she felt so naive. She was sure anybody else in the pitt would have had it as one of their first suspicions: his addiction. Had he relapsed, or come close to relapsing?

“I find most things hard to speak about,” she said. “So no judgment here.”

He nodded. He hadn’t even turned the engine on, which she wondered about but didn’t draw attention to. “But you still do,” he said. “Speak about things, the important things. You’re brave like that.”

Then he stopped talking again, and after an extended silence she couldn’t help herself. “It’s not—” she stopped and started. “It’s not something I’ve done, is it?”

He looked at her straight on for the first time in what must have been a while, because it was the first time she noticed how worn he looked. Exhausted, and a different kind of exhaustion than what was common enough among emergency room doctors. But despite that, he smiled. “No,” he said. “You don’t fuck me up this bad, Mel.”

She nodded. “Do you want me to keep guessing?”

He shook his head. “God, it’s ridiculous. Okay. Abby wants a divorce.”

Mel tried to school her expression, iron down the utter shock she was feeling, and said, “That’s not ridiculous.”

He shook his head. “I meant being scared of saying it aloud was,” he said. “No, her wanting that is not... it’s not ridiculous.”

“It’s...” she said, and she meant to end the sentence somehow, but he took it as a prompt.

“A long time coming,” he said. “Probably.”

That shocked her all over again. For a moment she felt foolish – Langdon was her best friend, and he was getting divorced, and to him it wasn’t out of the blue, but she had had no idea it was even within the realm of possibility. Then that feeling turned to annoyance at him, for keeping it from her when she was such an open book, and then she buried that annoyance because obviously he needed her support. God, she’d never been called on for support on something like this. People in her age bracket tended to go through break ups, and a divorce just seemed so much more serious. Would Langdon have to get a lawyer? She had always wanted to cultivate more intergenerational friendships; maybe if she had she’d have experience with divorced people. She shook her head a little, to get herself to focus.

“Do you think she could change her mind?” she asked. “Will you try to get her to change her mind?”

His lip quirked a little. “That’s not really something you do, with Abby.” It sounded the same as every other offhand comment he’d made about his wife, casually affectionate, matter of factly intimate.

“I thought...” she faded off. “The way you’ve been speaking about her recently, it seemed like you were doing well.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know. She denies this, so maybe it was just on a subconscious level, but I think she came to the decision a while ago and wanted us to end on a high note. You know, some good final memories before we parted ways.”

“I’m sorry,” Mel said. And, hesitatingly, hating to have to resort to it: “I don’t really know what to say.”

“I know,” he said. “Is this coming out of nowhere for you?”

“A little,” she said. There’d been the while where he stopped talking about Abby, but even then divorce hadn’t crossed her mind as a possibility. And nothing he’d ever said suggested dissatisfaction on his side, so she couldn’t imagine he was okay with this decision; but then, how he was talking about it now didn’t seem like heartbreak. Maybe he was in shock. She wondered when, exactly, Abby had told him this.

“That’s on me,” Langdon said. “I haven’t been able to talk about it with anyone, the problems we’ve been having. It reminds me of the pills. It just becomes too big to put into words, I don’t know. She’s been a part of my life for so long. I still haven’t wrapped my head around it.”

Mel nodded, trying to be a worthy confidante, trying to think of what she could say to help. “Are you... I mean, did it blindside you?”

“No,” he said. “Not that... it’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” she said.

“Abby’s always been pretty enigmatic,” he said. “She has this whole world in her head, you know. She was a bit of a loner growing up, and she’s still just so independent. It’s what I thought would make us work, why I didn’t feel so selfish proposing to her while I was in medical school, because even though she loved me she didn’t really need me. It’s always been that way. I could work late, I could miss things, she didn’t really mind. But I guess, I don’t know, the balance between me and solitude just kept slipping. And not in my favor. When we started arguing, when we started falling out of sync, it was more important to me to find a resolution than it was to her. She doesn’t need to win the way I do, you know. She’s better at letting things go. And another thing I loved about her – love, maybe – is that she’s so unpredictable. I never learned to read her fully, so she never took me by surprise, because I knew I didn’t know what to expect. I don’t think there was ever a point in our relationship where her leaving me would have seemed, you know. Unbelievable.”

It was an inappropriate response, but Mel was filled with a sense of awe over Abby. She’d been a little intimidated when they met, by her looks and how graceful she was, how pretty her laugh was, how smooth and competent she seemed, but this made her sound like a character in a book, like a femme fatale. Mysterious, independent, unpredictable – worth marrying even though he didn’t know how long he’d have her for. Something turned in Mel’s chest, some kind of pain that wasn’t sympathy for a friend.

“That’s a lot to lose,” she said, her voice coming out a little strangled.

“Yeah,” he said. “At the same time, you know, I’ve always been the needy one, and not just with her. I hate being alone, but she’s always needed time alone, so I’ve already built my life around her absence, in a way. Hobbies she doesn’t share, friends she doesn’t share, work, obviously. I’ve one friend who’s already been through a divorce and, man, he was left with just... nothing. That’s not what it’ll be like for me. It’s sort of weird how… how fine I think I’ll be. In a sense.”

“What about the kids?” Mel asked. She was changing the topic too quickly, she was messing this up. “I mean, have you talked about that?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but we haven’t agreed anything. At least it’s all amicable. I mean, with my history, if she wanted full custody she could get it. But she doesn’t.”

“That’s good,” Mel said. “And have you told them?” Asking questions was easier than offering opinions, or trying to say something she thought would help. She had no idea how. She realized that up until this point she had generally stopped herself from thinking too hard about his marriage, about what it must mean to him. Everything she knew about it he’d just offered, unprompted.

He shook his head. “That’s what I’m going home to do now,” he said. “I’ll sleep in the spare room tonight and then she’s taking the kids to her parents in the morning. The mom and kids usually get the house, but she doesn’t seem to want it. I think she wants more of a fresh start. I don’t know that I’ll like so much living there on my own, though. We might just sell it and both find new places. But then, the kids are already going through this huge change, I don’t know if losing the house would be good for them.”

This sparked Mel’s second inappropriate response: what if Langdon moved to a new part of Pittsburgh and it no longer made sense for them to car pool? She knew they had been friends before the arrangement, but at this point it felt so integral to what they were that losing it would feel like losing him, or at least this version of him, which she was pretty attached to. She had to push that out of her head.

“What can I... Is there something I can do to help? I’d really like to help.”

“God, I don’t know,” he said. “Just make me feel normal, please.”

She smiled. That reminded her of her approach when she visited him in rehab. “Maybe, um,” she said. “It would be normal to leave the parking lot.”

His eyes flicked outside like he’d forgotten they were still there and he said, “God, yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to make you late getting home.”

She shook her head. “This is a good enough reason for lateness,” she said. “And I get if you don’t want to drive.”

“No, I don’t mind driving,” he said. “I like driving, I like driving with you. I just don’t want to go home.”

“Oh,” she said, and felt some sad sense of defeat when he nevertheless started up the engine. “It would be nice to just keep driving, wouldn’t it?” She wondered how long it took to drive from Pittsburgh to the sea. She wondered if they could get there by midnight.

“Yeah,” he said, pulling out of their space. “That’s one thing I want to do, a real road trip. Abby and I—” he cut himself off.

“It’s okay,” Mel said. “To still talk about her. Like you said, she’s been a huge part of your life.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well we drove to Pittsburgh when we moved. It took us two days, but we were taking it slow. It was awesome. I was so happy. But I’d love to do a real gnarly one, fully cross country, like Seattle to Miami.”

She thought he was maybe forcing himself to talk, a little, to talk about something other than the end of his marriage. Considering how shamefully uncomfortable she’d found the topic, she didn’t mind. The road trip was obviously just a fantasy, anyway, because she could think of at least two good reasons it wouldn’t make sense: his kids and his back. “I’ve never really liked cars until now,” she said. “I mean until we started car pooling.”

He smiled a little, and it looked real, and she felt some warmth in her that had been absent since she first started worrying about him. “Why didn’t you like them?”

“Lots of different little reasons,” she said. “Becca doesn’t like them. That’s the biggest, I suppose. And when we moved away from home, to a big city for the first time, the public transport seemed like one of the most obvious sort of symbols of the difference. Back home you were so dependent on your car, and it would just... they made me a little claustrophobic. And I’m not a good driver.”

He did a double take. “Come on,” he said. “Really?”

“Really,” she said.

“That’s shocking to me,” he said. “That’s, like, unbelievable.”

“Why?” she asked, laughing a little.

“Because you’re good at everything you give your attention,” he said. “You must not want to be good. I mean if you don’t like cars, maybe there’s some motivational block.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. You have to tune things out, you know. I’m not good at that.”

“Have to tune things out in the ER too,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “And I struggled with that. But it’s worth it.”

He made a noise of agreement, then said, “Damn. Mel King is a bad driver. God, if there’s ever been a time I’ve wanted to break our car pool confidentiality.”

“Really?” she asked. “I’ve told you way more embarrassing things than that.”

“I wouldn’t be trying to embarrass you,” he said. “I just think people should know you’re human after all.”

“People do know,” she said, flushed. Her colleagues saw her do awkward and embarrassing things every day.

“Then again,” he said, ignoring her protest. “You’ve already succeeded in making me feel normal, somehow, which I didn’t think was an actually reasonable request. So back to being a little bit more than human.”

Chapter Text

Langdon’s first bad day after the divorce wasn’t even really to do with the divorce, as far as Mel could tell. He’d been handling it all quite well. He’d gotten a little antsier, maybe a little less patient, but not in a way that hugely concerned anyone, and it was already returning to his pre-divorce norm. There was no relapse, no breakdown, no surge in apathy or volatility. He didn’t really talk about it beyond the practicalities, and a couple of jokes when news first broke to stop people from walking on eggshells around him, but Mel felt she could piece him together well enough anyway. He’d ended up staying in the same house, for the sake of his kids, and Mel knew it was hard for him being there alone. It wasn’t a massive house but it was pretty big for just one person. It was also obviously hard seeing his kids less, just a couple nights a week. She had no way of gauging how much he missed Abby; he still saw her and talked with her relatively frequently on account of their children, and he still casually mentioned her, more or less as he had when they were married, and Mel didn’t know if that was good or bad.

There were ways he was turning what he was going through into a positive, which seemed very Langdon to her, never one to accept defeat. Rather than resign himself to ‘divorced guy dinners’, he’d taken a cooking course in the city and kept teaching himself once it finished. He was getting pretty good. She knew because he’d bring food he made in sometimes for lunch, and he’d share it with her – and only her, which he was shameless about and which made her a little self-conscious, but in a nice way, which was not a mix she’d really known of before becoming friends with Langdon. He said cooking was like medicine, which he said about everything he really liked, and it was becoming a little bit of an obsession, which she knew was what he needed. He had also started gardening, but just easy veg and herbs he could use in the kitchen. He compared gardening to medicine, too.

So in that way the bad day was because of the divorce, because the divorce had led to the gardening, and the gardening was how he tweaked his back again. He told her in the car the next day, on the way to the hospital, and if he hadn’t she wasn’t sure if she’d have known. It made her a little uncomfortable seeing what a good job he did covering it. Because she knew what she was looking for, she noticed all the extra tasks he gave to med students or interns, to save himself from having to stretch or reach or crouch. He finally followed Robby’s advice of sitting by the bedside rather than standing, and started sitting when he was filling out charts, too. Otherwise it was all pretty much the same – so much so that toward the end of the shift she was hopeful the pain had begun to fade back to his base level.

That dream was shattered pretty much instantly in the car. The car had changed more since the divorce than Langdon had, because he had to use it for his kids when he had them and it had finally accumulated the mess Mel had anticipated on her first journey. It made Mel like the car even more, made it seem more true to Langdon, although Langdon complained about it being too small for the kids, on account of all their stuff and sometimes having to drive their friends, too. Despite those complaints he didn’t seem interested in replacing it, which made Mel wonder how good he was with change. Maybe he hadn’t stuck it out in that house purely for the sake of his children; maybe he couldn’t deal with losing his family and moving to a strange apartment all in one fell swoop. She knew there was research about the importance of familiar environments in preventing relapses, but she also knew Langdon resented his behavior being interpreted through the lens of addiction, so she kept that to herself.

That day, when he got into the car, he grimaced reaching for his seat belt.

“I can get it,” she said, without thinking. It was pent up from hours of watching and not saying anything, because she knew he wouldn’t want her to. He sighed and then nodded.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said, although she only realized then what she had offered to do. She kept her body as far from his as possible as she reached across to get the belt, and he took it from her once she had pulled it to the center of his chest, the rest of the process easier. She watched as he did it. She kept finding herself looking at his left hand, still not used to it without the ring. She’d never really paid attention to someone’s hands before.

He glanced at her and said, “I could have.”

“I know,” she said. “What about driving, is that position uncomfortable?”

“Not so much,” he said, and turned the key.

“So it’s... it’s still bad, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “A pitt shift isn’t really a great recovery plan when you pull something.”

“What is?” she asked.

“Well, you know my preferred means of coping,” he said. “Otherwise just wait until my days off and see what I can do then to ease it.”

“But you have your kids on your days off,” she said, softly.

“Yep,” he said. “Toddlers also aren’t great for back pain.” He looked at her. “I don’t like to be—one of the reasons I don’t like talking about it is there’s nothing to say. I don’t know how to spin it into something funny or interesting, there’s no silver lining, and people feel awkward because there’s nothing they can say either.”

“I don’t want to say anything,” Mel said. “I want to do something. Is there anything I can do?”

“Maybe,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.

“What?” she asked, after giving him some time.

“It wouldn’t work in the car,” he said. “But a massage, maybe.”

“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “I thought you didn’t like my massages.” She had given him one once and then the next time she offered he’d refused, which she had found insulting. She had thought her technique was solid. Physical therapy was a big part of the VA’s work, and even though it hadn’t been what she was there for, it had been interesting to learn about.

“No, I do, it’s just...” he made a face, and she couldn’t tell if it was to do with his back or some other kind of discomfort.

“What?” She felt like she was missing something, like this was a bigger deal to him than it was to her.

He laughed a little. “You know, I can tell you now.”

“Of course you can,” she said, surprised, even though she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Remember when you gave me that massage in the break room? Like a year back?”

“Yes,” she said, briefly. She didn’t like how clearly she remembered it.

“Well, Abby knew my back had been killing me when I woke up that morning so when I got home she asked about it, and your massage had really helped, but I just—I didn’t tell her about it. I realized she might... It’s different for people who aren’t doctors, you know?”

“Yes,” Mel said, glad he was looking at the road and couldn’t see her flush furiously. He was right, it was different for doctors. Both of them handled human bodies all day. She had been digging her fingers into his spine, over his scrubs, in a room that smelt like burnt coffee, and Whitaker had wandered in halfway through and started talking to Langdon about skin grafts. Langdon had kept cursing between medical insights. She understood that wasn’t what most people thought of when they heard massage, but she felt deeply uncomfortable that Langdon hadn’t been able to explain that to his wife. She tried to remember if she and Abby had already met at that point. She didn’t know why Langdon would have been concerned if Abby had met her, had seen her with him already.

She wondered if anything else had ever happened between them that he’d felt he couldn’t tell his wife, and then instantly remembered an obvious candidate. A random, sleep deprived conversation inspired by a patient with a triple barrel name, where he said that if they were married he’d go by Frank King because of how classically masculine it was. She hadn’t blinked, hadn’t found the comment strange at all, and said Melissa Langdon sounded very elegant, which she would love to seem, and he’d argued against it because she wasn’t Melissa, she was Mel, and Mel Langdon sounded like something from Star Trek, so they’d be the Kings.

For the first time it occurred to her that was an inappropriate exchange to have with a married man, even though she knew neither of them had meant anything by it or thought about it twice, and toward the tail end of a long shift conversations tended to get increasingly surreal. Then again, it had just been the two of them when they had it, and she suddenly suspected it wouldn’t have happened if there had been anyone around to hear.

“Yeah, so,” Langdon continued. “The next time you offered I said no because it’s not good form to do stuff you don’t tell your wife about, and I couldn’t tell you why, either, because it’d have felt disrespectful to her to talk about it behind her back. It’s just...” He broke off and laughed again. “It’s all this stuff I don’t have to account for any longer. All this math I don’t have to do.”

She couldn’t tell if he thought that was a good thing or a bad thing. “What does that feel like?” she asked, and then cringed a little, because she’d sounded like Kiara.

“Freeing, but in a scary way,” he said. “Like driving without a seatbelt. I’ve been getting that feeling a lot. She uh... I sort of think she kept me in check. Kept me civilized.”

Mel swallowed. Her throat felt dry for some reason. She said, “A massage would work in the car. You’d just have to pull over.”

He didn’t look at her or say anything, and she’d been distracted by helping him to strap in so she hadn’t put on any music, and the silence beat against her ears. Then the car slowed, and he pulled in by a small, locked up park.

She took a breath. “Maybe if you open your door and sit with your legs out and your back to me,” she said.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, and followed her instructions. She undid her own seat belt, pulling her legs up onto the seat and turning toward him. She could feel her heart beat in her fingers and she thought to herself, you’re only doing this because he’s single, if he was married you wouldn’t be doing this, and it terrified her. She had never seen his marriage as something that influenced their friendship at all – that created boundaries between them that wouldn’t otherwise be there.

“All good?” he asked, and she wished desperately to know what he was thinking. She wanted confirmation that he wasn’t thinking any of the things she was thinking, that this was casual, unremarkable, to him.

“Uhuh,” she said, and put her hands on his back. She tried to just use her finger tips, but she could still feel him, and he was warm, and he was hanging his head forward and she liked his neck, she didn’t know if she’d ever seen it from this angle before, maybe when she was walking behind him and he was hunched over a patient – but it wasn’t like she was really paying attention to it then, and she looked up at the gray car ceiling. She dug deep by his shoulder blade and he made a noise, and she wished again that music was playing. This was ridiculous, she was so impressionable, she wished he’d never told her that he’d lied to his wife about something they did, it was putting ideas in her head, and he shouldn’t have, he shouldn’t have turned their friendship into a secret.

“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, fuck.”

“Good or bad?” she asked, snapped out of it a little. She was doing this to help her friend, her best friend.

“Good,” he said, so she dug a little deeper into the same spot. He let out this kind of laughing hiss of air, controlled pain, but she didn’t check in again. He was her best friend and she knew how to read him. His t-shirt was very soft, and thin. The car was warm, which didn’t make sense, because Langdon’s door was open. Maybe she was just warm. He was warm too.

“Okay,” he said, his voice tight. “That’s good, that’s enough, thanks Mel.”

She was about to protest she’d barely done anything and then she realized she had no concept of how much time had passed at all. She was closer to him than she had been when she started, leaning in, and that was strange too. It was strange that it would happen without her noticing, without her giving her body permission. She pulled away, sat back in her seat.

“Did that help?” she asked. Her voice was a little different just as his had been, but she had no excuse for it.

“Yes,” he said, and rolled his shoulders back before sitting back straight in the driver’s seat. She had liked seeing his shoulders move under the light cotton fabric. She watched again as he twisted to close the door. He looked at her only briefly before starting up the engine. “Thank you,” he said.

She forced down whatever was going on with her, focusing on the fact that he was her friend and she wanted to help him. “I’m glad,” she said. “That it helped. I’ll do it whenever you want.”

“Jesus,” he said, softly.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

She swallowed, racking her brain for anything else she could do for him, preferably something that wouldn’t make her feel so weird. “You’re off Saturday and Sunday, right?” she asked.

“Yep. You’re Friday Saturday?”

“Yes. I could come help on Saturday,” she said. “With your kids. If it would be useful to you to have an extra set of hands.”

“What about Becca?”

It was too short notice to launch a change of plans on Becca. “Just during the day, when she’s at her center,” Mel said.

“Don’t you do your errands then?”

“I’ll get them done on Friday,” she said, and then flushed. She was talking like he’d already agreed. “Just, only if you want.”

“I want,” he said. “I’m bringing them to the aquarium.”

“Oh, awesome,” she said, genuinely enthusiastic.

“That mean you’ve been before or you haven’t?” he asked.

“Haven’t,” she said. “But I want to. And it’d be good to scope it out before going with Becca.”

“Good,” he said. “That’ll make me feel less like I’m in your debt. I’m practically doing you a favor.”

She smiled. “I don’t think we keep score,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Of who owes who,” she said. “I think it just ends up evening out.”

Chapter Text

Langdon was punctual in a way that didn’t seem entirely in keeping with his character but which came as a relief to Mel. She could always rely on him to be at her door thirty minutes before their shift was scheduled to start, with a minute in either direction for wiggle room. This morning he pulled up twenty seven minutes before, which wouldn’t make them late but was still unusual. Also, he’d come from the wrong direction, not the direction of his home. When she got into the car she barely had to offer him the coffee. He just reached for it himself and took a very long swig.

“Oh,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said, placing it in the cup holder. “Hi.”

The apology was atypical too. She was the one who apologized for no reason, not him. “Hi,” she said. She fiddled with her phone, setting up the music, and he didn’t say anything. She asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he said, pulling away from the curb. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Okay,” she said. “Were you staying somewhere else?”

“What?”

“You didn’t come from the direction of your home.”

“I had errands,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” she said.

“Today’s going to be another awful day, I can feel it,” he said, and she relaxed a little at finally having something familiar. “My guess is that there’s some reason another ER has to close down, like flooding or something, and we have to take all their overflow.”

“No,” she said. “A wealthy old widow with a DNR is going to take a shine to me. It’ll be life changing.”

Langdon let out a shocked laugh. “That’s dark, Mel,” he said, but it sounded approving. She smiled. She had really made the joke because she knew he’d enjoy it more than it being her kind of humor.

“In reality I do think Dana’s going to be on the warpath today,” he said. “So, heads up.”

“Why?” Mel asked, frowning.

“Her daughter got suspended from school. Night shift texted me.”

“What’s that got to do with the night shift?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, smiling. “They’re just gossips.”

“Or they know you’re the most liable to make her really mad,” Mel said. “I’ll try my best to protect you.”

He laughed again. “She has said I remind her of a teen girl on more than one occasion,” he said. Mel smiled, and he glanced at her, and then he glanced at her again.

“What?” she asked, instantly on edge.

“Shit,” he said. “Okay, I’m about to make things weird. I lied.”

“About having errands?” she asked. “I know.”

“Course you do,” he said. “Also indirectly, by not answering when you asked if I’d slept somewhere else.”

She began to feel nervous, almost panicked. It wasn’t hard to get her there recently, not for Langdon anyway. Her problem was she couldn’t tell if the shift she was feeling was in her own attitude and outlook or if it was in reality itself, in their friendship. They had met up outside of work twice since the aquarium, which was new – he’d come over after work once for a movie night which was mostly a success except he turned out to be one of those people who liked to talk during movies, which Becca didn’t appreciate. He’d learned quickly to keep his thoughts to himself until the mandated discussion during credits, although his leg had been knocking against Mel’s all through the hundred minute run time, restless, so she spent the whole movie thinking about putting her hand on his knee and stilling him, which of course she didn’t actually do.

Only a week or so later she’d taken him to her library on the morning of a day off to pick out books for his kids, trying to bring him from the dark side of always ordering them online. That had also been a partial success; he’d seemed to enjoy it but at the end she’d suggested he could bring his kids to the library because libraries often have activities for families and he said but they must be for nice, quiet, well-behaved families. He said he was scared to bring his kids somewhere like the library, because they were like him, they liked to make messes, they had no reverence for anything. She hadn’t been able to follow up to clarify how serious he was because it had left her tongue-tied, which brought her back to her confusion. Had something changed in their friendship, or just in her? And now, was it strange that he’d lied to her, directly or indirectly, or that she found she didn’t want to know what about?

“You don’t think indirect lies count as lies,” she said.

“Yeah but you do,” he said. “And I try to live up to your standards. I slept with someone last night.”

“Those aren’t my standards,” she said, and she wasn’t even meaning to make a joke, she was just really taken by surprise, and he laughed again. Her heart was pounding very hard all of a sudden.

“Who?” she asked, thinking about all the pretty women who worked in the hospital. She’d heard a number of jokes about him rebounding, about people wanting to be his rebound, in the month or so after news of his divorce broke. It hadn’t really occurred to her to take them seriously.

“Nobody you know,” he said. “Nobody I know, really. I went out to a bar with a friend last night, and it just kind of happened.”

She swallowed, her mouth dry. She forced herself to sit still. “Okay,” she said, in the absence of anything else. What he’d said hadn’t really landed for her yet, it was more like it was skidding over a protective layer of ice.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

That alarmed her. “For what?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think coming straight from that to you feels disrespectful.”

“No,” she said, a little too forcefully. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Probably,” he agreed.

Silence seeped in. It was ridiculous to think that was disrespectful, except maybe part of what she was feeling was hurt.

“I mean, it’s ridiculous to try to keep it secret, too,” she said. “We’re friends. We can talk about things like this.”

Except they never had. Mel hadn’t dated since arriving in Pittsburgh. One time a patient had flirted with her pretty heavily and Langdon was basically the only one on the shift who hadn’t acknowledged it. Langdon had been married with kids, so he was most likely sexually active—except she’d never thought about it. And talking about him and his wife's sex life was maybe more private than talking about a random hook up. Like, Mel had met Abby. Abby wouldn’t have wanted Langdon talking about that part of their marriage with his coworkers, and he never had. But friends told friends about things like this.

“Right,” Langdon said. “I mean, it’s not exactly a rich conversation topic. I don’t have much to say about it.”

But suddenly Mel had a lot of questions. “Do you think you’ll see her again?” she asked. Even though it was a relatively tame start, she felt untethered. She remembered what Langdon had said about feeling like he was driving without a seatbelt since his divorce. She’d thought about it a few times, wondering if it was weird that she felt that way too. Some restraint she hadn’t even known about was gone.

“No,” Langdon said, and glanced at her. “Do you think that’s bad?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, just, some people don’t really approve of... random hook ups.” He sort of cringed when he said the phrase. She wondered if it seemed juvenile to him, after a decade of marriage.

“Sexual puritans,” she said. “I’m not that. I think it’s totally fine, especially after so long in a monogamous relationship. It makes sense.”

“Right,” Langdon said. When he spoke again he seemed more relaxed, and she felt pleased with herself, like she’d proven herself a worthy conversationalist on the topic. Although it insulted her that he had seemed initially uncomfortable speaking about sex with her. “Yeah, I mean that was kind of the idea. I’ve really forgotten about that whole world. Flirting in bars, finding someone you fit with. I was just ripping the band aid off. It was the first person since Abby—obviously.”

His words made her feel very warm. She wanted to know which bar it was, if it was one she’d been to. She’d been to three in Pittsburgh, all near the hospital, all for after work drinks associated with some colleague’s birthday. Friends talked about sex, but she realized the questions she wanted to ask were probably out of line. She was just suddenly so curious. She wanted to know who approached who, and how long they’d spent together in the bar before leaving, and how he’d known that the woman was into him, and how he’d known that he was into her. She wanted to know what he’d said to her when he’d woken up that morning, if she’d been on the same page about it being a one time thing or if he’d had to let her down gently. Had they kissed goodbye? Had he showered at her place? He must have, he didn’t look like someone who’d been out at a bar the night before. But those must have been the same clothes, and it was a t-shirt she recognized and a pair of jeans she recognized. It destabilized her to think he wouldn’t have separate clothes for something like this. She slipped her hands under her thighs, pressing down on them.

“Did you enjoy it?” she asked, and grimaced. She didn’t mean if he’d enjoyed the sex, but everything else, having a one night stand. “I mean, doing this kind of thing. Do you think you’d do it again?”

“No,” he said, and she put the intense relief she felt at that response in a box. It was getting to be a pretty full box. She’d began to worry she might have a little crush on him the night she got home from giving him that massage, and it had been basically all she could think about when they went to the aquarium, which was disruptive and annoying, so she had effectively compartmentalized it.

Langdon was still talking. “I hadn’t liked that stuff even before Abby, back in college. I’ve always been the relationship type. And it’s even more the case now, I think. I mean it just felt so... I don’t know. I was bad at it. I mean not the—fuck.”

“Not the sex?” she asked.

“God, Mel,” he said, sounding half amused and half alarmed. “Yeah, no, not that part. All the stuff around it. I mean this morning I wanted to get breakfast with her or something. Not that I really wanted it, but I just felt like I should, like that’s what you do. But she just made coffee for the both of us and was on her way.”

“Oh,” Mel said, and glanced at the coffee she’d made him in the cupholder. She felt hurt again.

“It wasn’t as good as yours,” he said, hurriedly, and she felt embarrassed that he felt the need to say that and also that it worked, that it lessened some of the tension in her chest. “And I needed two cups this morning, I really didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Right,” she said.

“I mean I didn’t sleep well,” he said. “Her mattress was really soft.”

“I hate that,” she said.

“Same.” He cleared his throat. “What about you, would you ever find someone just for one night?”

She looked at him, alarmed. “What?”

He smiled. “See how it feels?” he asked. “But we’re friends, we can talk about things like this.”

He was repeating her words back at her. She pulled a face and he laughed.

“No,” she said. “I’ve never slept with someone I haven’t known for at least a month.”

“And have they all been boyfriends?” he asked. “Or would you have casual sex?”

Driving without a seatbelt. Frank Langdon was asking her if she had casual sex. “They’ve all been people I thought might become boyfriends,” she said.

“That’s smart,” he said. “It’s always seemed so risky to me when people fully commit to someone without even knowing if the sex is good.”

“Sex isn’t important to everyone,” she said. It was a little easier talking about it in the abstract, not to do with their specific histories. It wasn’t even uncharted territory then, considering how often the sex lives of patients came up at work.

“Right,” he said. “Most people, though.”

She nodded, conceding the point. “We should change the subject,” she said.

“Sure,” he said, glancing at her and frowning. “Sorry, was that uncomfortable for you?”

“No,” she said, even though it was a little, but it was also thrilling, and it would have been frustrating to avoid it. “I just mean because we’ll be at the hospital soon. I can’t transition straight from that conversation to work. I think I need a buffer.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, I’m sure they’ll be taking bets on what Dana’s daughter got suspended for, if you want to start brainstorming now.”

Chapter Text

Last year on Mel’s birthday Frank and Collins had decorated the front of her locker with a neon-pink birthday girl sash, which she hadn’t really minded except it had drawn enough attention that even people she barely knew had started wishing her happy birthday, which was a little stressful. About halfway through the shift Frank had picked up on this and said she could take it down if she wanted and it wouldn’t hurt his feelings, but that had stressed her out more because she didn’t know what decision to make. She had really liked the sash.

This year he had learned from his mistake, and when she opened the door to his car in the morning there was a cupcake on her seat as well as a green polka dot balloon tied to a white ribbon tied to a small plastic weight, which was beside the cupcake. Evidently they would celebrate before they got to the hospital.

“Oh,” she said, laughing a little.

“Happy birthday, Melissa King,” he said, and then picked up the cupcake and the balloon weight so she could sit down. She was still holding his coffee so she couldn’t take the presents back, and instead he just placed them down on her lap, which made her flush, even though there was no direct contact. He took the coffee and cheersed it at her.

“How you feeling?” he asked.

“Good,” she said. “Fine. Normal.”

He grinned. It wasn’t just with her, she’d seen it with their coworkers too. He took birthdays very seriously. “You know what I think today is going to be?” he asked.

“A terrible day,” she said, nodding.

“No,” he said. “The opposite. Quiet, peaceful, easy, full of grateful patients.”

She laughed again. “That’s sweet,” she said. “Thank you. And thank you for these.”

“Are you going to try it?” he asked, about the cupcake.

“Did you make it?” she asked, curiously.

“Oh,” he said. “God, I wish I could say yes, but no. Cooking doesn’t translate to baking, I don’t think. I did pick it out, though. Yellow’s your favorite color, right?”

“Right,” she said, smiling. The icing was yellow, and her particular favorite shade of yellow: bright sunshine rather than pale banana, which she secretly disliked, even though she felt bad for disliking a color. It was a very cute cupcake.

“So?” he said. “Are you going to try it?”

“I can,” she said. “But would it be okay if I kept it for later? I don’t really have the stomach for sweet stuff this early in the day.”

That wasn’t entirely true. It was kind of true, but really she just wanted to look at the cupcake some more. She wanted to have it in her locker during the day. Where would the balloon go? It would stay in the car. Maybe she’d come out to look at it on her break. Suddenly a word came to mind that she hadn’t thought before, not with regards to Frank. Boyfriendy. A cupcake and a balloon, picking her up on the morning of her birthday, it was boyfriendy. She inhaled a little sharply.

Frank groaned but nodded. “Fine,” he said. “But I really want to know if it’s nice. I want to be there when you try it.”

She frowned. They usually ate together during their shifts, so that wouldn’t be weird, but it felt weird that he’d asked. “Why?”

“Because I’ll be able to tell if you like it or not,” he said. “If I just get a second hand account you could lie to me.”

“But I wouldn’t,” she said. “Why would I? You didn’t even make it.”

He made a gun with his hand and pointed it to his chest, pulled the trigger.

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t—”

“Next year I’ll make you something,” he said. “I’ll figure out baking.”

“Well, you know, the way it differs from cooking is that it’s far more precise,” she said, to cover how flustered she was by him making that promise so casually. “So it’s probably even more like medicine. But, um, I really don’t mind that you didn’t make this. I mean it’s still very nice and thoughtful of you. Thank you, Frank.”

He smiled at her. “I like that you’ve started calling me that,” he said. “How did it happen?”

“I don’t know,” she said. It just had. She would have thought that if she ever made the transition from Langdon to Frank it would have been a conscious decision. She didn’t like how many decisions her subconscious seemed to be making for her recently.

“So what do you and Becca have planned for this evening?” he asked, either satisfied or bored by her response. He’d invited her and Becca over to his that night, for a birthday dinner, but she’d said no instinctively. She and Becca had pretty set birthday traditions and she didn’t think Becca would like them being disrupted, which is what she’d told Frank, but she also thought that she herself would find it too much. Going to his house that was just his house, not his and Abby’s house.

“Oh, well, I don’t entirely know yet, because Becca gets to choose a lot of it. And on her birthday I get to choose. But it’ll be take out and a movie and a board game. My guess for the movie is a musical, she’s gotten into musicals, but I can’t get more specific than that. I hope it’s a comedy, though. I like comedic musicals, I can’t take dramatic musicals seriously, which makes me feel bad, because so much work goes into musicals. I mean, I say the board game is her choice, and it is, but it’s not a surprise, we always play Life. And for food...”

She faded off when she realized Langdon wasn’t listening, wincing a little. “Well, anyway, it’ll be nice,” she said, almost to herself, and then he took a hard right, taking them off their usual route into a residential cul de sac she’d never noticed before. He was driving very slowly.

“Oh,” she said. “Um, what are we doing?”

“Pulling over,” he said. He had that look on his face from when things got serious with a patient, like a switch had flipped. “There’s something wrong with the car. Look at the smoke.”

She didn’t know how she missed it, curling out the left corner of the car hood. “Oh, shoot,” she said, as he stopped the car.

“My sentiments exactly.” He opened his door and stepped onto the quiet road. She got out too, stepping onto the pavement they’d half pulled up on. She squinted and looked around. It was still early enough there was very little activity. The houses were uniformly white with big windows and brightly painted doors; the door paint color was where residents were allowed to express their originality. There were no fences between her and the front yards, which were green and well maintained and extra charming on the hot sunny morning. Summer had arrived just in time for her birthday. She turned her squint to Langdon.

“How bad is it?”

He shrugged at her, his phone held between his shoulder and his ear. He hadn’t even opened the hood; apparently car maintenance was not one of his skill sets. He must have been calling for roadside assistance. She checked her watch. She was a pretty optimistic person, but she didn’t see how they’d get out of this without being at least a little late for work.

“I’m going to call Dana,” she said.

“Thank God,” he said, presumably on hold. “She’ll be way nicer to you about it. Remind her it’s your birthday.”

She frowned as she pulled her phone out, trying to figure out how she could work that into conversation. She sat down on the curb, criss-crossing her legs and breathing steadily while she waited for Dana to pick up.

“Uhuh?”

“Um, hi, Dana, it’s Dr. Mel King.”

“I know, sweetie, I just got caller ID on this thing. Fancy, huh?”

“Ha. Well, you know that Dr Langdon and I car pool?”

“I do,” Dana said, and Mel could imagine from the distraction in her voice that she had about five other demands on her attention in that moment.

“Well, uh, his car broke down.”

“The car broke down,” Frank said, his voice raised, across the car. Obviously he was still on hold. “Don’t put this on me.”

“I mean the car broke down,” Mel said obligingly.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“We don’t know,” Mel said.

“Uhuh,” Dana said. “You got through to roadside yet?”

“Frank’s on the phone,” she said, and then grimaced. She preferred to still call him Langdon when she was talking to their coworkers.

“Right,” Dana said. “So, you’re playing hooky on your birthday, is that it?”

Mel’s eyes widened. “No,” she said. “Oh, no. I mean I promise we won’t be that late. We’ll get an uber if we have to. Of course if we could be there we would.”

“Sure,” Dana said. “I bet Langdon messed with his own engine. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“I don’t think Langdon knows enough about cars to do that,” Mel said.

“Oh, come on,” Frank said.

“I’m defending you!” she said to him, holding the phone away from herself for a moment. When she brought it back, Dana was laughing.

“I’m just screwing with you, kid,” she said. “I’ll bully one of the night shift stragglers into staying until you get here.”

She said it like it was reassuring, but that made it worse. “Oh, thank you,” Mel said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

She finished up with Dana a little anxious, but couldn’t turn to Frank for distraction or reassurance because he was still on the phone. She disconnected her phone from the car bluetooth and quietly played some Wu Tang Clan from its tinny speakers to brighten the mood. She leaned back on the palms of her hands and looked at the blue sky, regulating her breathing.

One song later Frank sat beside her, his long legs splayed out in front of him. He had taken the balloon from the car, and the white ribbon was wrapped between his fingers. She watched as he extracted them, placing the small weight on the slim stretch of pavement between their hips so the balloon floated a couple feet above their heads. “Roadside assistance will be here within the hour,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. That was better than she’d have hoped for. Things could work quick in cities.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded, looking up at the sky.

“Look, there’s nothing we can do now,” he said. “And there was nothing we could’ve done to stop this from happening. Well, at least that’s true for you, maybe I’ve been a negligent car owner, I don’t know. You know that sometimes people are just late to their shift, and you know that nobody’s gotten in trouble for it, and nobody’s died either.”

She nodded, and kept nodding until she convinced herself she was okay. She sat up straight. “You’re right,” she said.

He smiled at her, knocked his knee into hers. “Once in a blue moon.”

She watched the balloon against the blue sky and felt him rearrange himself, and then he knocked into her again, intentionally. They were sitting very close. She looked at him and smiled when she saw he was proffering a bag of dollar store candy.

“They were in my car door, I don’t remember when from,” he said. She did – Halloween, at the pitt. The nurses had put them out and they weren’t supposed to be for the doctors. She let it slide, because he’d probably taken it for his kids and then forgotten. She had just told him she didn’t like sweet stuff in the morning but hoped he wouldn’t call her out on the discrepancy; she could use it now, in her hour of need.

“Thank you,” she said, opening the bag. She thought about knocking back into him, as part of her thanks, but chickened out. Those nudges were the first deliberate casual contact she could remember having with him, apart from what was par for the course when they were working on a patient together and one awkward hug back when he was in rehab which she could hardly remember, except for how skinny he’d felt. She wasn’t usually the biggest fan of physical contact and didn’t know how to seek it out, but Frank had always been so casual and comfortable with it – elbowing Collins for no reason during rounds, squeezing Jesse’s shoulder after a difficult case, messing up Whitaker’s hair. She was beginning to resent how he never applied it to her.

“Anything for the birthday girl,” he said, but he was distracted, reading a text. He snorted. “I guess Robby just got the news. He’s said he’s going to ban carpooling to work. No reason for one car breaking down to mean I’m down two doctors.”

The last sentence was obviously a direct quote and Mel bit her lip. “Oh, no,” she said.

“He’s not serious,” Langdon said, glancing at her.

“I know,” she said. “But he has a point. We’re not diversifying the risk with this approach.”

“Things go wrong with buses in this city far more often than a car,” he said. “So we’re minimizing risk by taking you out of public transport.”

She nodded. That was a good point. She was surprised when he didn’t say anything further. It obviously wasn’t one of his quiet days, and usually that meant filling every silence he encountered. She looked sideways at him and was taken aback to find him smiling. He had his eyes closed and his face to the sun. He looked incredibly beautiful. He wasn’t the kind of person it was easy to forget was good looking, not even for ten minutes, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him look as lovely as this. The lighting in the pitt was pretty unflattering, even for people like him and Collins and Mohan.

She was awestruck, and with painful clarity she realized she had made two fatal errors in her assessment of her newfound feelings for him: firstly, that they could neatly be kept separate from their friendship; and secondly, that they didn’t amount to more than a harmless, silly crush. She should have been scared of how much they seemed to amount to, in that moment, but she was too caught up in him. She wanted to leave him like that, to not disturb him so she could keep watching, but her curiosity got the better of her.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked, her voice quiet, like she was in the library.

“This feels like home,” he said, and then half opened his eyes to look at her. She tried to keep her expression neutral. He closed his eyes again before elaborating. “I grew up in the suburbs, and in the summers there was never anything to do. We did our best to make our own fun but a lot of the time we’d just end up on the curb, fucking around, pretending we knew how to skate. I smoked my first joint on a curb like this. And thus began my descent.”

She laughed. “I didn’t know you were a nostalgic type of person,” she said. Frank didn’t linger on anything. Everything was about what was happening in that moment and what he could make happen next.

“Not usually,” he said. “It just kind of feels like I’ve taken you back home with me.”

Boyfriendy, she thought again. She was glad she was sitting down. She felt jittery.

“Sitting on the curb side with Mel King on a hot summer day, eating candy. Who’d have thought.”

“I’d like to see where you grew up,” she said, emboldened by how out there he was being.

“I’d say the same to you, but small town America freaks me out.”

“Me too,” she said, smiling. A woman approached then, the first pedestrian since they’d pulled up, walking in a large arc around them with her dog. Langdon dropped his head back to look at her.

“Our car broke down,” he said, and Mel flushed at the our. She didn’t know if she was losing it or if every second thing Frank said was really so charged.

The woman nodded, and Frank pointed at the balloon. “It’s her birthday,” he said, but the woman just kept walking.

“Rude,” Frank said. “I’m going to get someone to say happy birthday to you by the time roadside assistance arrives.”

Mel shook her head. “I hope nobody else passes by,” she said. It felt dream like, and it felt like the kind of moment that could stretch out into forever. Other people just got in the way.

“Yeah,” he said, and when she looked at him, he was looking back, his gaze steady and fixed. “You’re right, it should just be us.”

Boyfriendy, she thought, about that look.

“Mel, I've wanted—”

Too boyfriendy; she could hardly breathe. She stood up. “I hope there’s nothing really wrong with your car,” she said, wrapping her arms around her middle. Our car, he had said. “I wouldn’t want you to have to replace it. I like it.”

She looked down at him when he didn’t respond straight away. He was leaning back on the palms of his hands, looking up at her with an expression she’d never seen before, not on anyone, except maybe in old religious paintings. He didn’t say anything, just kept looking, so she tried again. “I wonder what kind of people live here,” she said. “It doesn’t feel real.”

He rubbed a hand down the side of his face, sat up straight, and sighed. “Sure, I can play that game,” he said. “Okay, yellow door right across from us. Serial killer, obviously.”

Chapter Text

A lightning strike victim came into the pitt at 2pm, which is what let Mel know the weather had changed. Frank raised his eyebrows at her across the gurney but she ignored him. She’d never worked a lightning case before and, with requisite self-admonishments for insensitivity, it was pretty exciting. At 5pm they got two traumas from a car crash caused by poor visibility in heavy rain. She wouldn’t have even known about them except Frank called her over from the other side of the pitt to assist. Usually a case brief wouldn’t include “in heavy rain.” That was medically irrelevant, but Frank made sure to mention it.

She’d been taking the bus to and from work for the last week, and he’d really been pretty easy-going about it, but clearly that was about to change. She wasn’t surprised to find him leaning against her locker at the end of the shift.

“It’s shit weather,” he said. “Come on, Mel.”

She opened her mouth, but he beat her to the punch.

“I know you have an umbrella and you’ll be getting into your pajamas once you’re home anyway,” he said, his lip twitching with a small smile. “But I hate getting stuck in traffic alone and you’re basically on my way.”

She’d lived long enough in Pittsburgh by then to know that that, at least, was not true. Frank added somewhere around fifteen to twenty minutes to his commute by dropping her home and picking her up. In his defense, he’d suggested the carpool before he’d realized this, which was very like him, and then once he figured it out he wouldn’t renege on a commitment, which was also very like him.

Anyway, a part of her felt relief at his cajoling, like he was snapping her out of a spiral she had no power to extract herself from alone. She had thought she was taking space to help herself think things through, but it had ultimately devolved into an excuse to not think about it, to avoid it entirely. It wasn’t all on her: it had never felt like there was any space for reflection. The past week had been especially stressful, which she didn’t think was a coincidence. In any given environment she put in place a network of rules and rituals to keep her grounded and centered, and she only realized then how many of the ones she had created to help her navigate the pitt hinged on having Langdon beside her.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He ushered her to the car like he was scared she’d change her mind, giving Javadi a death look when she tried to ask Mel a question, so Mel called over her shoulder that Javadi could text her instead. They strapped in, no music, no guess about the traffic lights, and before they’d even pulled out of the parking spot, Frank said, “So, are you ready to talk about it?”

She looked at him, disbelieving. He asked that like she was the one who’d approached him.

“Right,” he said. “Well, personally, at this stage, I’d think we’d better talk about it, ready or not. It’s like I said to you, way back when, I’ve a thick skin. I don’t mind a little disrespect.”

A week ago they’d brought a man back from near certain death while his kids waited outside. She and Frank had spoken to each other in low quick voices, saying what should be said even though it didn’t really feel like they needed to, it felt like they were already in each other’s heads, always knowing each other’s next move and how to follow it. It felt choreographed, like every moment of practicing medicine together had been rehearsal for this one case, and it paid off. Once stabilized, the nurses wheeled the patient out to the OR and his children followed the gurney, leaving her and Frank alone in the trauma room, panting. They pulled off their gloves and their gowns and looked at each other and laughed. She had held up her hand for a high five and he’d high fived, but instead of it being brief he’d curled his fingers between hers and squeezed and she for a moment thought, yay, he’s finally making casual physical contact with me, and then he was using his grip to pull her closer as he stepped closer too, and then he’d kissed her.

If she had ever thought about it, which she had very carefully not, it was exactly what she would have expected from a first kiss with Langdon. He didn’t believe in tentative exploration of new possibilities, he just threw himself in the deep end. This time he took her with him, his mouth pressing hard against hers, open and warm and searching. Instantly she went from having no idea what it was like to be kissed by him to knowing fully and intimately.

She’d kissed back after only a moment, like even if she thought she was shocked she wasn’t really, her subconscious making decisions for her again. Kissing, more than sex, was something she tended to overthink, the mechanics of it less straightforward – where she put her tongue in relation to their tongue, how much pressure to apply without applying too much pressure, how long to hold certain positions. She didn’t with this kiss. It wasn’t that she was more confident, more sure of herself, it was just that she wanted it too much to care about doing it right. Maybe it was the worst kiss Frank had ever had, she wouldn’t know, she was just kissing back hard and desperate. Her hand had curled into his hair, pulling him down toward her so she didn’t have to stay on her tip toes, and it seemed kind of ludicrous that they’d been friends for so long without her touching his hair before. He’d made a noise that didn’t sound like this was the worst kiss he’d ever had.

Then his warm, splayed hand had been on her back, directly on her back, under her scrubs and her tank top, or at least half under the tank top, half tangled up with it, and she’d made some room between their mouths to release a startled breath that sounded like an oh! It hadn’t been a bad oh! But Frank had pulled away then, slightly, his forehead still against hers, his hand dragging away from her back, straightening her scrubs, landing on her waist. Still she’d been in a sort of daze. It was only broken when she tracked his eyes drifting to their right, and realized he was checking to see if anybody was outside, if anybody had seen. He didn’t react so she assumed they were safe, but the mere possibility had her stepping back from him fully.

“Um,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said, not sounding or looking it at all. He was smiling slightly, in fact.

She had tried to come up with something to say and landed on the most pressing question. “Why did you do that?” she asked.

“Uh—to celebrate?” he offered, not sounding too sure of himself. She had wrapped her arms around herself, and he’d said, “I just don’t really understand the scope of the question.”

That sounded like something she would say, which discombobulated her further. She didn’t say anything coherent then, just made some noises and hurried out. She was slightly more put together at the end of the shift, when she approached him to let him know that she would be getting the bus home. He had looked crestfallen.

“I’m really sorry if that was the wrong move,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

It didn’t help her to hear he wasn’t thinking. She was thinking so much, all the time. “I’m not saying it was wrong,” she said. “I just need to process it.”

“And I can’t help with that?”

“No, definitely not,” she said, a little harsh. It was just that she couldn’t think straight around him. Maybe that’s what he’d meant about not thinking, in which case it would be good for him, too, to have some space. She remembered what he’d told her the day she learned he was getting a divorce: I never need space, I hate space. She swallowed. “And also please don’t pick me up in the morning.”

Even if he hated space he was good at giving her some, at least for the first week.

“I don’t know how thick my skin is,” she said, frowning. She’d never really taken the time to assess that part of her character.

“I don’t anticipate saying anything that would be a blow to your ego,” he said.

If he had any idea in his head of what he was going to say, he was way ahead of her. “So, what do you want to say?”

“Firstly, I really am sorry,” he said.

Already her ego felt in jeopardy. She made a face without meaning to.

“Only because it obviously threw you for a loop,” he said. “I didn’t exactly give you much heads up.”

“No,” she agreed.

“We should have talked, I had meant to talk, to buy you lunch and talk,” he said. “But then I just wanted to kiss you so I did. I’m not really good at careful, or slow, or patient, even though I know that’s what you deserve. I’ve always just sort of rushed into things head first. Which is probably why I’m divorced at far below the median age.”

She laughed a little and he smiled, obviously pleased. “But even if I’m doing it in backwards order,” he said, “I would like to have that talk now. Although previously I had thought it would be unfair to do it in the car, because you can’t, you know, run away. But if you want me to leave you at a bus stop at any point just holler.”

She nodded. She would protest the idea of her running away except for the fact that that was exactly what she had done after their kiss.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me set out my side.”

“Please,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you,” he said, matter of factly. “But if that’s too much straight off the bat, fine. Let’s just say I have feelings for you. You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met and you make me like myself. I hate not being with you, I hate not looking at you.”

Her hands flew to her cheeks and she focused on her breathing. Then she sat on her hands and closed her eyes. She didn’t know what to do to shrink his words into a manageable size.

“So what am I in for here?” he asked, lightly in a way she didn’t believe. “A we’re better as friends speech? It’s not the right time? You need more time?”

“I have feelings for you too,” she said. Her eyes were still closed. Her words felt too big, too. She hadn’t ever thought it would be a good idea to share them with him, but then she didn’t have much experience keeping secrets, either. “A lot of feelings. You’re—I think of you like an anchor. My anchor. In a good way.”

“Oh,” he said. “God, that’s the best news I’ve gotten in years. Fantastic.” He said it like it solved all their problems, as opposed to being the root cause.

She made a dubious noise, opening her eyes just to squint at him.

“Please don’t worry. Let’s just bask in the glow of requited feelings for the rest of this car ride,” he said. “Possibly the rest of time. I mean, God, Mel, we want each other. You know how lucky we are?”

She smiled, giddy for only a moment, and then shook her head. “I still don’t know what we’re doing,” she said.

“Neither do I,” he said, but he seemed pleased by it. “Want to pull over somewhere and make out for a while?”

She flushed, twisting her hands together. “Yes,” she said, because it was a direct question and she was too caught off guard to prevaricate. “But that wouldn’t solve anything, so we shouldn’t.”

“We can’t just enjoy it for now?” he asked plaintively.

“I can’t enjoy it without knowing what it is,” she said. This was the source of her panic.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “Let’s diagnose this. Shall I ask you a series of questions?”

She nodded. That sounded good.

“Okay. First question. Do you want to act on the feelings you have for me?” he asked.

“Act on them how?”

He looked caught out and she shook her head. “I don’t mean it as a trick question. That’s what’s been bothering me. I know I want something, desperately, and I know that something has a lot to do with you, but I can’t get more specific than that. I can’t work out what I can fairly ask from you.”

“I don’t care about fair,” he said. “Ask me to take a vow of poverty, or shave my head, I’ll really consider it.”

“I’m serious,” she said. This is what she’d needed, something to react to, some framework to act within. After feeling tongue tied for a week, suddenly she had a lot to say. “So far we’ve fit so well together – I mean as colleagues and friends. But what I’m wondering is, if we wanted to go on a date, what night in the next month would suit? And if we could find one night, how long would we have to wait until the next one?”

He quieted, and despite herself she felt disappointed. She’d wanted him to have some magical solution.

This is what had blocked her mind up for the last week. She found it nearly impossible to let herself seriously entertain the idea that he might have feelings for her, real feelings, relationship feelings, and without accepting that premise she couldn’t think through the implications of the kiss. Now her brain was flooded with them. He was free most evenings, her almost none. She had afternoons on her days off when Becca was at the center, but if Frank was off those days too, he had his kids. Maybe some time Abby would have the kids out of town, or there’d be a party he’d drop them off at. Maybe sometimes Mel could splurge on some overnight respite care for Becca. But that did not add up to a relationship. Maybe months down the line, in a year or so, and if he still wanted to be with her, maybe by then it would be okay to have him over at hers for the night regularly. Maybe even sooner than that he’d be okay with them holding hands in front of his kids—but then, what level of responsibility would she have towards his kids? Would he want her to be, functionally, a stepmom? She couldn’t really imagine that, not in the foreseeable future. But she didn’t know if it was silly, wishful thinking, to ask him to put in so much work for something so far down the line.

“I just feel foolish,” she said. “I mean, it’s such a huge thing to ask for, us being together, and I don’t even know how it would work, or how I would want it to work. I feel so inexperienced next to you, and like I’m just this kind of love struck, I don’t know what, following you around.”

“I very much think it’s me who does the following,” he said. “And, look, it’s not like I think I come across great in this scenario.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, frowning.

“I’m a recently divorced addict with kids catching feelings for a younger coworker,” he said. “It’s hard not to feel sleazy.”

“Not that much younger at all,” she said, a little alarmed that he saw that as part of their dynamic.

“No,” he conceded. “I added that for dramatic effect.”

“You’re not that recently divorced either,” she said. “And you know I don’t think any less of you for your addiction. Really the only relevant consideration for me is that you have two young children.”

“Right,” he said. “Only that. Just that.”

“Well, McKay’s ex’s girlfriend doesn’t seem to mind,” Mel said, and laughed a little to make it clear she was joking. Frank laughed too.

“Yeah, let’s just model our relationship on theirs,” he said.

“Becca’s part of this too,” Mel said. “I know you get on with her, but she doesn’t like change. I mean you being my friend from work is one thing.”

“I thought she really wanted you to get a boyfriend,” he said.

“No, she’s worried about it,” Mel said, even as she flushed at hearing him say that word, saying it in relation to the two of them. “She just brings it up a lot.”

“Right,” he said. “Okay. We’re both so busy. We have huge responsibilities already outside of work, and for most people this job is enough of a hindrance to relationships. Even if we found an evening for a date, when would we ever not have to go home afterwards? I mean separately. When would we ever get to spend the night together, a full night?”

“I don’t know,” she said, forcing herself to be practical, not frantic over the idea of a night with him. The way he was talking it was like these barriers hadn’t really occurred to him before, which surprised her, because he’d said he’d been wanting to talk about this for a while. She’d have thought he’d have thought it through.

“Neither do I. And how do you feel about walking through the pitt holding hands?”

“Gross,” she said, without meaning to. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said, smiling. “I feel the same. I don’t think we’d get in a lot of quality romantic time at the hospital.”

“I don’t know what the solution is,” she said.

“What if you moved in with me?” he said. “You and Becca, I mean. I’ve got this too big house.”

Her eyes went round and he laughed.

“No, I know,” he said. “See, I don’t know what I’m doing. Let’s just get married, first, and take it from there.”

“Oh my God,” she said, putting a hand to her cheek.

“I’m joking.”

“I know. That doesn’t help.” But she liked that he could joke, even then. She always liked that he could joke.

“The solution is probably what I started out with,” he said. “About being patient and careful and thoughtful. We shouldn’t rush it, we shouldn’t force it. I’m not going to lose interest in you, or stop wanting you, just because we can’t get dinner together on a regular schedule. Let’s just take our time.”

“Not too patient,” she said. “We should be opportunistic too. I mean if there’s an evening where we can spend an extra forty five minutes together, I want to do that.” She blushed as she said it, but Frank didn’t blink.

“Whatever way you’ll fit into my life I’ll take,” he said.

She inhaled a little. He’d made some pretty grand statements at the very outset of their conversation, but this one felt so real, so practical, so immediate. She found herself repeating it, softly. “Whatever way you’ll fit into my life I’ll take.”

“God,” he said, and reached over, his hand on her hands. She turned her palms upward, and he traced his fingers over hers. “Seriously, I would really like to pull over and make out.”

Chapter Text

Frank had always had two modes of being: dog with a bone and kid chasing a butterfly. Mel was pretty relieved to learn that when it came to their nascent, amorphous relationship, he was the former. He didn’t get discouraged or impatient or distracted, even though finding time for each other, outside of the car rides, had proven as hard as they feared. Mel did get discouraged and impatient (never distracted; it was really all she thought about) but she was putting on a brave face about it. And some days his hand on hers on the way into the hospital, and the slow kiss when he dropped her off in the evenings, really was enough.

Other days it very much was not, so when the stars finally aligned and she and Frank finally had a real date scheduled she found it hard to contain her excitement. She had to do just that for an entire shift, because they would be going straight from the hospital to the restaurant and nobody else knew about their new status. It just felt silly, premature, to talk about it before they’d done anything more than make out a handful of times. She had smiled through forty minutes of a child shrieking crying while resisting her examination, which had earned her a few bemused looks. McKay asked her about it and she said, “You know, I just love children.”

She thought Frank flew more under the radar, but she knew him well enough that she could tell he was excited too. His jokes got goofier, he made more of an effort with the medical students (until they annoyed him again), and he drank two fewer cups of coffee than his average intake.

If it was up to Mel they’d have had three dates by now, it’s just that those dates would have been throwing paper airplanes down the hallway in the empty wing on the eighth floor, eating protein bars while stuck in especially bad traffic, and spending an hour down in records trying to dig up some old documentation for a dementia patient. Frank was adamant that those didn’t count, though. People are going to ask about our first date, he said, for years to come. Trust me. I have to prove myself worthy.

He was constantly saying stuff like that. He was not doing a good job at all of managing expectations. Mel had always assumed she would take quite a measured approach to any relationship, romance balanced against practicality and realism, but it was hard not to get carried away by the way Frank spoke about them. He seemed so sure already that they would work out, that they would make each other happy, that they would last. And she knew that was, in a sense, a flaw of his, and that he could be wrong, but she had trusted him for far too long to stop now.

So this wasn’t just about having a first date, it was about having a first date that was a worthy starting point for their future together, and Frank promised that a particular Mediterranean restaurant would deliver. She didn’t know much about food, but she was excited by the venue choice because it was right near her favorite park and she thought it would be nice to go for a walk with him there after. She didn’t know if that was a coincidence or not and couldn’t ask, because even if it was she knew he’d try to take credit.

They wouldn’t get the whole night together. The center was bringing Becca and some other attendees on a day trip, which would mean Becca would be home later than usual, and paying home help to stay for four hours once Becca was back was within Mel’s budget and would bring them up to midnight. Embarrassingly that made her think of Cinderella, but she kept it to herself. Maybe she’d say it to Becca, maybe.

But still: the restaurant was booked for half past seven and they would leave the hospital at 7pm, which meant they would have five hours together, just the two of them, which was entirely unprecedented. The closer it got to the end of shift the harder it got to keep herself in check. Sometimes they’d catch each other’s eyes and just smile at each other. When they got changed out of their scrubs at the end of the day she worried that people would notice they were wearing nicer clothes than usual, even if it was still nothing fancy, but Frank’s assertion that their coworkers were too self absorbed to pay attention to stuff like that panned out (although Mel didn't like to attribute it to self-absorption -- people were just tired after a long shift). Once they were sitting in his car she felt like they’d just pulled off a heist or a bank robbery. He must have been thinking along the same lines because he said, “Feels like we’re in the getaway car.”

“Then go,” she said. It wouldn’t feel real until they were on the road. “Quick.”

He smiled and obliged, pulling out of the parking space.

“Robby’s going to punish me tomorrow,” he said. “I was cherry picking pretty egregiously today.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“Avoiding patients that could end up, like, throwing up on me or otherwise making me smell bad,” he said.

“That’s very thoughtful,” she said, smiling. It hadn’t occurred to her to take extra precautions, but she’d gotten lucky. Nothing especially off putting had happened that shift.

“That’s the kind of romance you can get used to, darling,” he said, and she flushed. He only seemed to ever use pet names ironically, but they still got to her. She probably couldn’t handle him saying them sincerely.

“Do we just talk normally?” she asked.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, I guess I want this to feel… date-y,” she said. “But I don’t know how to talk like it’s a date, rather than just us hanging out like usual.”

“Ah,” he said. “I guess just do what feels natural. You look really hot, which I wouldn’t have been able to say before. I think how we talk tonight is going to be a little different than how it was when we were just friends, without us trying.”

She nodded, flushed. “You look nice too,” she said.

His lip quirked up. “I didn’t say nice, I said hot.”

“Yes, well,” she said. “Your sweater is a nice color.”

He laughed. “I’m trying to think if there’s any first date conversation topic you and I haven’t already covered,” he said.

“Oh!” she said. “I could look them up. There are always lists for things like that.”

“Go for it,” he said, and hummed a little under his breath while she waited for the search results, which made her smile.

“Oh wow,” she said. “This is a list of 100. That’d take us the whole night.”

“I bet we’ve already talked about more than eighty of them.”

She raised her eyebrows. Frank obviously didn’t know the kind of websites that made blog posts like this. She didn’t think there would be close to that level of overlap. “How much?” she asked.

“Over eighty.”

“No, if that’s what I’d meant I would have said how many,” she said. “I mean how much would you bet.”

“Oh,” he said, glancing at her with a raised eyebrow. “Interesting. Okay, if I win I get to buy dinner.”

“That seems a little backwards,” she said. Both in that his prize would be spending money, and in that he claimed to be a male feminist. She did however like that he seemed to intuitively know she would only let him do that if he won a bet; he hadn’t brought up his desire to pay before. “In two senses.”

“Ha,” he said. “Well, yeah. I’ve no excuse, I just want to. What do you want if you win?”

“It’s hard to think of anything I want that I don’t have right now,” she said, candidly.

He reached his free hand over to her. As was custom, she held it with both of hers. “What about my old student ID?”

She gasped. “Seriously?” she asked, squeezing his hand without meaning to. She’d glimpsed it once, because it was still in his wallet – unsurprising, considering his wallet was ancient, falling apart, and as thick as a novel – but he’d immediately hidden it from her and then held the wallet out of her reach when she’d tried to grab it. Which had made it very alluring to her. He must look awful in the photo.

“Ten minutes supervised access,” he revised.

“You’re on,” she said, and opened the website. She had faith in her ability to eventually parlay that supervised access into total ownership.

Frank surrendered after the eleventh conversational prompt (who has influenced you the most in your life, and who do you aspire to be like) not because he was convinced he was wrong, he insisted, but because he didn’t want to hear any more of them. “Who talks like this?” he asked, pulling his hand away from hers as though in protest, although it was also so he could put his turn signal on. “People are supposed to say this to people they just met? This is supposed to help break the ice?”

Mel scrunched up her mouth, laughing a little. “I would like to know what you would do if you had the power to stop time,” she said.

“I refuse to tell you on principle,” he said. “Ask me if I had pets growing up, God.”

“I already know about your childhood pets,” she said.

“See,” he said. “If the list had just had normal questions I’d have been in the clear.”

She laughed, and her amusement faded into a more general pleased feeling. “You’re right,” she said. “This feels natural, like our regular conversations, but it feels like a date, too.”

He glanced at her. “I am going to be a stickler,” he said. “The date doesn’t start until we’re at the restaurant.”

“Okay,” she said, not really minding. In her head the date might as well have started when he’d picked her up that morning. In fact, the fizzly feeling all through her body had been with her at varying levels of intensity since he’d said that he might be in love with her. That hadn’t come up since, that specific word, and she thought maybe it was really on her to bring it up again. It hadn’t yet felt necessary to her to articulate it, and she’d take all the time she could get to prepare.

She realized they’d went quiet and rolled her head against the headrest to look at him. He looked more relaxed than usual, some tension she was too used to to normally notice absent. She placed the tips of her index and middle finger on the hinge of his jaw, wanting to know what it felt like when it was like this. He didn’t react, just let her inspect him. She let her fingers drag down his neck then pulled her hand back to her lap. That word might become urgently relevant pretty soon.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, and felt a little self-conscious doing so. It was something she remembered picking up on from films and television as a teenager, that people in relationships could ask each other that whenever they wanted. It seemed like one of the highest forms of intimacy.

He turned to her, looking skeptical. “You really want to know?”

She nodded.

“I was thinking that Abby’s going to have a field day when she hears about this.”

“Oh,” Mel said, uncomfortable, not sure what to make of that. She didn’t know what it meant, and it upset her a little that while she’d been obsessing over him he’d been thinking about his ex wife.

“I should have made something up, shouldn’t I?” he asked.

“No,” she said, frowning. “Um, why would Abby care?”

“Because she always said I had a thing for you.”

“What?” she asked, a little horrified.

He glanced at her. “No, you didn’t cause problems in my marriage. Seriously, you didn’t. She was half just fucking with me and anyway, she wasn’t the jealous type.”

“Okay,” Mel said, a little reassured but still confused. “But she’d met me.”

“Yes, that was part of it.”

“But, I mean…” Mel trailed off.

Frank glanced at her, frowning. “Yes?”

“Just, she must have known there was nothing to worry about.”

“Because?” he prompted, sounding almost annoyed.

“Well,” Mel said. “I’m not really the mistress type.”

“She didn’t think I was cheating, she just thought I had a crush,” he said. “Don’t need to be the mistress type for that.”

She swallowed. She was still getting used to considering herself the crush type. “Did you have a crush?” she asked, not sure what she wanted to hear. She didn’t like to think that they’d ever done anything wrong in their friendship, back when he was married, but it was also hard to remember what it was like to spend time with him and not be infatuated.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “At least I didn’t think of it like that. But I was more attached to you than was fully explicable. These car rides, especially the ones going home, they really helped me come down from the shift, you know? Which isn’t always the easiest.”

“Yes,” Mel said.

“Abby was able to guess the days I worked where you were off,” he said. “Because I’d come home more agitated. More like my old self, she said.”

She looked at him, and side-stepped the heart of what he’d just said. She hadn’t entirely wrapped her head around the things he said about her, about his feelings for her. They were slowly sinking in, but had not yet quite hit home. “It’s funny to think you have an old self I don’t know,” she said.

“I guess that’s why you want that student ID so badly,” he said.

She smiled. Probably it was. “When I go back to my home town people always talk about how little I’ve changed,” she said. “They say it like it’s a good thing.”

“Same,” he said. “Well, they don’t say it like it’s a good thing to me. They call it arrested development.”

“But I like to think I’ve grown a lot,” she said, and then laughed belatedly at his comment.

“I’d have to assume you have,” he said. “You’re not the kind to stagnate.”

She nodded. She didn’t know why she was thinking about it, and then she did. “I wouldn’t have been able to go on a date with you before, I think,” she said. “My old self.”

“Really,” he said, sounding a little taken aback. She liked how well he understood her, but whenever she got to say something that surprised him it really pleased her, too. “Why would you say that?”

“It’d be too unfamiliar, unpredictable,” she said. “I’d have been scared of the ways it could go wrong.”

He was quiet for a while, and she was surprised by how serious he sounded when he did respond. “I’m going to try really hard to stop the ways it could go wrong from happening,” he said. “You know that, right?”

“Yes,” she said, and then, “Me too.”

“Good,” he said, and she looked out the window, smiling. They were nearing her park, which meant they must have been nearing their restaurant. She squeezed her hands together, and saw him glance at them, once and then twice.

“What are you thinking now?” she asked.

“You’re always asking that at the worst times,” he said.

“Well, I guess you only go silent when it’s something you’re embarrassed to say to me. What are you thinking?”

“I’m weighing my chances of getting to do something more than kiss you tonight,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, sitting up straight.

“I’m thinking slim to none, unfortunately,” he said. “We don’t have anywhere to go.”

“Well, you know,” she said, pursing her lips. She liked that he sounded pretty confident that she’d want to do something more than kiss him too, that it was only pragmatic concerns that stood in their way. Sex on the first date wasn’t so risky when it followed weeks of thwarted make out sessions, and anyway, secretly, Mel really did think of this as their fourth date.

“What?” he asked, glancing at her with that smile that made her warm all over. She still hadn’t figured it out.

She raised her eyebrows, cocked her head. “There’s always the car.”