what’s another few hours?

All it takes is an incidental conversation with Shen after handoff one night, the certainty and laughter in his voice when he tells her Jack would love to have her, and wouldn’t it be nice to get away from management for a change?

She agrees.

The first night she picks up, Shen rolls in just as an alarm sounds on his phone, an old Marc Rebillet track: “night time bitch, it’s night time bitch, it’s night time bitch! we doin’ night time shit!” and busts a singular move in the hallway right before he goes into the locker room, exclaiming “hey I’m not late?” with no expression on his face. Samira lets herself laugh out loud as soon as he’s out of sight, thinking, what a welcome.

She isn’t the best at sleeping during the day, but eventually falls into a groove, fueled by exercising in the morning so her body is as exhausted as her brain is, followed by literally collapsing like a dead body into sleep for at least 6 or 7 hours.

Robby takes some leave anyway. She figures it was a good idea to switch.

She finds herself blooming under Jack’s guidance, his encouragement, his dry sense of humor.

“What do you think?” he’s always asking her.

She runs it down for him - the top two options, a series of other considerations.

“I trust you,” he says. She believes him. He just needs her to think out loud first.

In the most complex traumas he is a smooth operator, calm under pressure. Airway, uncontrolled hemmorhage, breathing, circulation, disability, exposure, full set of vitals, labs, surgical consult. TXA, fluids, blood. He runs a code like he’s conducting a string quartet, directing even the newest nurses with a calm confidence; stepping in when needed, sometimes before they even realize it.

Once he starts an IV three other people struck out on while they wait for the ultrasound machine to be free.

The newest nurse has the temerity to ask if he’s supposed to do that. He just laughs.

“Once a medic, always a medic,” he replies, grinning.

He flirts with everyone. At first Samira just figures she’s part of everyone, too, but the evidence to the contrary starts piling up.

He leaves her fancy chai in her locker one morning. No occaision. “It just made me think of you.” He knows her lunch orders by heart, but she sees him asking the other residents what they want. He passes behind her and puts his hand on the small of her back, slides a rolling chair gently into her vicinity when she doesn’t realize how long she’s been standing on her achy feet.

He offers her a ride when the weather’s bad; some nonsense about how he doesn’t trust her car in the snow. She can’t afford a special set of winter tires, it’s too low to the ground, the front wheel drive. It would be safer to use his truck. No, it isn’t out of his way.

Santos sees them headed to the parking garage together, texts Samira a photo of a dad hat for sale on Etsy with “Down Bad” embroidered across it followed by five laughing emojis. Samira sends back a bunch of laughing emojis too because she doesn’t know what else to say, isn’t willing to argue about it on account of how much she wishes it was true.

“Here you go,” he says, pulling up in front of her building. “I should get your number, in case this doesn’t let up and you need a ride in tomorrow night.”

“Sure,” she says. Smooth as fuck.

The next time she's leaving for work, there’s a foot of fresh snow on the ground and he's there to pick her up, truck warm, chai in the cupholder for her, and she can’t ignore the goddamn butterflies.

“You’re the only one working tonight with a front wheel drive car,” he says, apropros of nothing. Shen drives a Rav 4, Parker has an old beat up Yukon, and Mel uses public transit or walks, most days - she might get an Uber. “I have to look out for my people,” he adds.

He never says anything overtly inappropriate, after that, instead finding a million other things to talk about now that he has her number. But she finds herself grinning at the notifications from him like a kid with a crush anyway.

They’re stabilizing a bad MVC case one night and she’s helping him reduce a femur. He pushes propofol and fent, makes some little joke that gets the nurses laughing, just another example of the kind of hilarious shit he usually says when the patient is sedated and there are no onlookers. Counts it down. “On one, Samira,” he says, “three - two - one.” Sets the guy’s leg with a pop. The whole time he’s making direct eye contact with her and smiling like he’s buying her a drink at a bar. She actually gets a little shaky, the adrenaline, the flirtation. She feels like a kid whose crush is finally going to ask her out.

Get ahold of yourself, Mohan, she thinks. Jesus. He flirts with everyone. It’s not just you. But she wants it to be just her.

Later on he passes through the breakroom while she’s in there. He’s halfway through eating a KitKat and he drops another one on the table for her, wordlessly, his palm resting on her shoulder for a moment before he leaves.

He doesn’t trust himself to stay in the room, because he might start talking.

That’s the trouble. There’s never a lack of talking.

He feels safer doing it over the phone; can’t trust himself in person, not with their coworkers watching, not while he’s a foot away from her, close enough to touch.

They have a growing thread, for weeks, then months: journal articles and weather predictions and inside jokes and case by case debriefs and news stuff. Links to their favorite songs on Youtube, run splits, recipes, medical memes. Videos of his dumbass polydactyl orange cat who’s missing a back leg climbing all the furniture and curtains like a little monkey with claws. She tells him stories about her family. They swap gossip about their coworkers, sometimes. They even share the barest suggestions of their nightmares when they’re waking up, to leave a message to reconnect with reality, even though one knows the other isn’t going to answer anytime soon.

He has voice notes from her, and to her, saved on his phone.

He doesn’t want to admit to himself how close they are.

The voice notes are about so many things: the two of them debating the latest revisions to the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines. Her mom’s perfect chana dal recipe. A quote for brake pad replacement for Samira’s car, from his mechanic (Samira didn’t realize he’d already quietly put several hundred dollars toward it for her). Jack, long-winded, telling her he gets a great deal because he’s friends with that guy & she should take advantage of it. Tidbits about her interesting cases from day shift. Crazy stuff she hears Santos saying. She vents about Robby; he replies telling her to keep her chin up and trade some of her days for nights, which she finds herself doing more and more often, lately.

Just before the Fourth of July he disappears into the woods, far from fireworks and people, and before he gets in the car to leave Pittsburgh, she records herself reading something she loves - “Bars Poetica” by Bob Hicok, poetry about existential joy instead of existential despair. Lets her voice soften during the line about sex.

“Call if you need anything,” she says at the end, knowing he won’t. She just wants him to understand he is on her mind.

He listens to it drunk at the edge of the lake that night. Saved it like a special treat for the end of the day. He almost drives back into town just to get signal to call her, then decides against it, figures he’ll show his whole hand on the phone, it’s too much of a risk.

Meanwhile, she’s busy, helping Walsh amputate firework accident fingers, staying up for almost 24 hours with only a two hour nap, wondering distantly in the rare slow moments of her workday if he’s having any nightmares.

Most importantly the voice notes from her contain her laughter. Sometimes he listens to them while he’s still in bed, operating in slow motion before he gets up for work. He would not admit this to anyone, not at gunpoint, that he’s saved so much of it, listened to certain ones over and over again. The same way he keeps his wife’s letters and cards safe, in a box on a high shelf in his closet.

When Samira finalizes her research article for publication, she asks him to give her feedback and he takes them out for dinner. She wears the nicest clothes he’s ever seen her wear; a burgundy dress, soft knit material, black boots. He’s tongue tied, awkward for the first half of the meal when it’s usually so easy for them to talk. He feels like a teenager again.

Toward the end he sneaks out to the waiter to pay (so she can’t even offer) and stands by the bar, looking across the room at her as she looks at something on her phone, a little smile on her face.

Fuck, he thinks. I’m not going to get out of this in one piece, am I.

“Did you lose your ring?” Parker asks him at work later that week.

“No.”

He looks for Samira. She focuses on her computer screen diligently, knowing that meeting his gaze right now would be the equivalent of holding up a blinking neon sign. Her heart speeds up a little.

Parker watches the two of them like a tennis match, back and forth.

“Oh, you left it at home?” Parker inquires.

“I did.”

“You good, boss?”

“I’m just fine,” Jack says, hint of a smile.

He goes to therapy and lies about how they are just coworkers who became good friends. His therapist is gentle about it; suggests he say something to her.

“You are allowed to be hopeful,” he tells Jack.

“I would rather be okay, thanks.”

“I wonder if you can just let yourself be curious about another chance at a love connection, after spending so many years grieving,” he says. “Just…talk to her. Be curious, without expectation.”

“I talk to her all the time,” Jack replies, defensive. “Almost every day. What do you mean.” It’s a cop out. He can’t begin to tell himself or his therapist the truth: that actually he has to keep his distance, carefully, because she might be everything. And he wants everything.

“I’m asking, have you actually told her how you feel?”

“Absolutely not. I think it would make her uncomfortable, and we could get in trouble.”

“Who told you that?” his therapist asks, levelling a glance at him, and he realizes that’s actually just his own anxiety talking.

“I took off my ring for her,” Jack says, and holds up his bare hand. “She can see that I’m not wearing my ring.”

“It’s very meaningful for you to do that,” his therapist says, thoughtful, “but to someone who isn’t you or me, how would they really know what that means? How would she know how important that is? You need to tell her.”

The following week they’re at work and he’s trying to get her to take a break and lie down in the call room. Her habits about this are terrible; she’s used to working through the whole thing on day shifts where there isn’t time for such luxuries.

He passes her the keycard to the call room and she looks down at his hand as she takes it, blurts out “where’s your ring?”

“Right here,” he says, and lifts his chain. “I’m not mourning anymore,” he says, “but I won’t forget. Go sleep. Come back in an hour.”

She lies awake in the call room for most of that, fruitlessly trying to sleep, eyes closed but mind going and going. Not mourning, just remembering? She’s had fantasies about grabbing that chain and pulling on it to kiss him.

The call rooms all have terrible memory foam mattresses. She sinks into it uncomfortably as she rolls onto her side, bends one knee and adjusts, tries to actually get comfortable enough to rest. Reaches an arm out on the cold expanse of the rest of the mattress, feeling alone.

Jack doesn’t see his family much, but when they do visit they treat him well. His sister and his niece come into town and his sister fills up his fridge with homemade food. They stay up late with him around a firepit in the backyard talking, toasting marshmallows. His niece is curious, eventually convinces him to show her a picture of Samira; he has one from the PTMC website, and another from a going away party they threw on shift for one of the nurses.

“Oh my god, Jack,” his niece says, in the cadence of a teenager in a cartoon. “She’s like…she’s like a movie star AND a doctor. She’s so beautiful.”

“No comment.”

“You’re already in love with her, right?”

“Kelly, stop it,” Jack’s sister interjects, disapprovingly. “Be polite.”

“I can’t - she works for me,” Jack says, like that makes a difference. “It’s frowned upon.”

“Who cares,” Kelly laughs. “Look at her. You should take her out.”

It’s three days later and they’re at work, both eating breakfast burritos courtesy of Jack’s sister; Jack had asked her to make some of them vegetarian. Potatoes and cheese and egg and green chile. Samira keeps almost burning her mouth, taking a tiny bite and setting the thing back down.

“This is so good but it’s like lava inside. You going to give me the recipe?”

“I don’t know the recipe. Green chile. My sister made it for you. Mine has sausage.”

His sister knows about me? Samira thinks, picks the burrito up and takes another tiny bite, exhales steam a little comically. She should just let it sit and cool down but she’s starving.

“Oh, she was visiting?”

“Just for a few days. My niece is looking at universities up here.”

When he looks over at her, she’s already staring at him.

“Well, tell her I say thank you.”

Samira picks a kid out of chairs one night and bumps him to the top of the queue, because he just looks absolutely terrible from the doorway. Next to room. His physical exam is garbage.

When his scans come back, she finds a bunch of internal injuries, the kind that can’t be explained by any accident or fall plausible for the patient’s age and developmental stage. He goes up for surgery, a unit of blood already infusing, ketamine on board, an OR nurse pushing phenyl in the elevator just until anesthesia can get their hands on him. It’s all hands on deck for violent child abuse; the police are called to meet the parents, and an investigator is headed over from Children’s Services, too.

The father threatens Samira, calls her a stupid bitch, raises his hand as if he’s going to swing. She manages to maneuver to safety, thankful she never let him get between her and the only way out of the room. Just as she’s clearing the doorway and peeling off around the corner to get behind the desk, he storms in past her, shouting, in a terrifying, guttural version of his voice she’s never heard.

“That’s enough!” he says, one hand up in the air; the drill sergeant’s knife hand.

The father backpedals, startled - suddenly uninterested in trying to bully anyone, faced with Jack Abbot’s rage, five foot nine of solid muscle, bone and carbon fiber, a scowl on his face. He’s flushed, red, conscious of the fighting stance he’s in, the distance from his hand to the back pocket where his knife is, the distance from his hand to this fucking asshole who threatened her.

All around them, the room falls silent, save for a crying baby out there in chairs. Lena picks up the phone, pages security, checks on the ETA for the police, staring at the door to the room.

“Sit down,” Jack says to the guy, “and don’t ever come at anyone here. You’re going to jail tonight. Do yourself a favor. Just sit down and shut up. Don’t make it even worse.”

Security materializes at the doorway, watchful.

Jack’s in the hallway now, looking everywhere for her. She’s behind the desk, her hands shaking. Most of their colleagues are watching him now too. He strides toward her, eyes on hers.

“Samira. You okay?” Barely audible, as if they could have any privacy right here at the hub. He grips the edge of the desk, knuckles white, imagines ripping the laminate veneer right off the thing. He wants to put his arms around her.

“I’m okay.” She almost can’t get it out. Tries again. “I’m - I’m okay. He didn’t touch me.” She lowers her voice. “You can’t do that, raise your voice,” she says. “Threaten people,” she adds in a whisper.

“I’ll stop when someone stops me,” he mutters, just loud enough that Samira can hear him.

“I’m okay,” Samira says again, wearily.

“Good,” he tells her, “yeah. Alright. Good.” He’s still flushed, restless, hands clenched uselessly at his sides now. He feels like he’s going to explode. He’s not just upset about her; he’s thinking about that kid, the internal bleeding, the broken pelvis. A wave of rage and nausea passes through him.

He looks at Lena. “They’re on the way, the cops?” he says, just to confirm, and she nods at him, eyes wide. “Don’t let anyone go anywhere. I’m going to get some air.” Lena nods mutely.

Samira feels everyone’s eyes on her. She charts for a while. And then she takes the long, roundabout way to the stairs. Climbs up six flights to the roof.

“Hey.”

He feels her hand, warm on his left shoulder, turns around to face the sound of her voice, blindly, eyes closed. Then eyes open, but focused on the flat roofing beneath his feet. Unable to stop her when she puts her arms around his shoulders, reaching up on her tiptoes, still a little out of breath from the stairs. He’s holding completely still, as if she was a wild animal he was trying not to startle. Finally he relaxes down into it, letting his head rest on her shoulder and his arms go around her waist.

“It’s fucking senseless,” he says, first to himself, then again, louder, to both of them. He can smell her sweat, her skin as he turns his face into her neck and lets his cheek rest there on the slope of her shoulder, breathing out. “A kid. What’s the goddamn point.”

She wants to tell him it IS senseless, and there’s nothing they can do, but he can’t shout at people.

“Jack,” she says, instead, softly. Leaves it at that. Sirens wail on the street down below them. It never fucking stops.

“Yeah,” he replies, hoarse.

“I didn’t want you to be up here alone,” she tells him, as if that’s an adequate explanation for why she’s lovingly holding her boss, also now her closest friend, at four in the morning in the cold, on the roof.

I’m going insane, she thinks. I’m finally losing my mind, but there’s no one up here to see it. She thinks back to this morning - earlier tonight - she’s disoriented! - how she woke up and immediately thought of him, answered his messages before even getting out of bed. She’s spiraling out of control. The ache for it burns like a hot stone in her belly; they are pressed against each other, but she can’t get close enough. She turns toward him, presses her mouth against his, gentle, barely moving. A long moment passes. He feels her palm on the back of his neck, so warm.

When he pulls back, instead of reciprocating, her eyes are still closed.

“Not because you feel sorry for me,” he says, and his hands are on her shoulders, so she steps back like he’s pushing her away, instinctively interpreting it as a type of rejection. But he follows her to stay close, thumbs on her biceps now, holding her arms. The wind picks up for a moment and her hair whips around wildly while she stares at him, the hurt clear on her face.

“I don’t,” she tells him.

“Everyone does,” he counters. They might be too polite to say it, but he’s certain.

“Not me,” she insists, her voice harder, and they’re not moving. She reaches for his face and kisses him again, for real this time, not chaste, her mouth open and slick. He kisses back; how could he not. Unmistakable, his tongue in her mouth. Kisses her cheek, her forehead, the smooth black softness of her hair, her mouth again, her throat, leaning down at an awkward angle, rapidly losing control of himself.

“Oh, God,” he says into her neck. “Fuck - I shouldn’t, I’m sorry - I -” but he can’t say anything more because she kisses him again.

“Why,” she whispers. “I want to.” So he keeps kissing her until he hears the sirens have stopped at their ambulance bay, directly below.

“We have to go back,” he says, sighing, their foreheads together. She lets her fingers drift over his cheeks, feeling stubble. “Wait a few minutes then come back down,” he tells her.

She nods. Imagines the wind just taking her off the roof and into the sky, light as air with her feelings, heart racing.

“I can do that.”

He kisses her forehead, his hand warm on her cheek, and then he’s gone.

She spends the rest of the shift white knuckling it to get to the end, pretending everything is normal, and when she gets to her car, she scans the garage expectantly. She realizes, sadly, that he already left - normally he waits for her and they talk before they go home.

She opens the converstion they’ve been having for months on her phone, and messages him: I missed you on the way out, let me know when you make it home.

He doesn’t respond.

The sun rises and she runs five miles around her neighborhood, comes home and showers, crawls into bed. He still hasn’t responded, but she sees he read the message. Her heart sinks.

I shouldn’t have kissed him, she thinks.

There was a line and she crossed it.

She thought he would follow her to the other side, but she was wrong.

Maybe all he wants to do is flirt, talk - a distraction, companionship, but not much more. Not really what she wanted. She’s in tears for a while, until her head aches. Eventually she falls asleep.

Once he’s downstairs again, the spell on the roof is broken and he switches himself off a little. He decides for a while he should pretend nothing happened. Give her the opportunity to retain a little of her dignity.

Maybe she just did that from the adrenaline. Maybe because he had been ready to hit that guy himself, a fireable offense.

He sees her message from the parking garage once he gets home and feels gut punched, sad. She was looking for him. She always does, at the end of their shifts. She looks for him all day, across every room. He thinks about all the times they made a seamless team, eyes locked in the middle of running a case. How he sometimes felt like her hands were a second set of his own. Her mind sharp and fast, a bird of prey hurtling down toward its target, and all he could do was watch her and nod yes when she looked at him for his attending doctor approval.

He types out three different answers.

Deletes them all, sends nothing.

He wants to tell her they shouldn’t do that again (the kissing, the touching, his face in her neck, his hands all over her) - the problem is that ALL he wants is to do that. Again (and again and again and again).

It’s the right time for a sleeping pill and a drink and a dark room. For making an attempt to resign himself to it.

When he gets to work early the next time, she’s there, parked right next to his spot, even more early than he is, in her street clothes, leaning against her trunk.

“You’re avoiding me,” she says, abrupt, dispensing with a greeting, as he gets out of his truck.

He comes to stand next to her, close, arms crossed. “I didn’t want you to think you had to do anything,” he replies, careful. Heart pounding.

“Bold to think you could get to me to do something I don’t already want to do,” she snaps, then regrets it, her face softening. “Was it a mistake, on the roof? If it was, it was my mistake.”

“No. It was - it was wonderful.”

“Then why are you avoiding me?” she insists, and he can see it, the hurt on her face, in her eyes. He sighs, puts his arm around her shoulder. She leans into him immediately. Heat seeking.

“Because I’m old, and crazy, and my body is broken, and my brain is broken, and we have fun at work, but you know, I’m not fun all the time. It’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s fucking terrible. Sometimes I don’t even want to take care of me anymore. And you’re young. And brilliant. Beautiful. You deserve something…easier than this,” Jack tells her, gesturing vaguely at himself, his leg, his truck. “Your whole life, your whole career ahead of you.” He feels sick.

“That’s not true,” she says. She doesn’t know where to start. “I - I like you.” She’s going to start crying before work even begins; what the fuck. “You’re not going to do it wrong.” She breathes out then, a big sigh, heavy, fast, trying to get herself under control.

“Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says. Reaching for her. “I’m just, I’m trying to do the right thing here.” She shakes her head, steps away from him, waves him off and starts wiping her eyes.

“I don’t want to do the right thing,” she tells him, “I’ve been careful my whole life.” She looks up at him. I’ve been so careful, she thinks, and all I’ve ever gotten in return is lonely.

“Just don’t want to hurt you, Samira.”

“But what if that’s not what happens,” she says, turning to go. “You don’t want to find out? To know?” She is going to be late and she needs another five minutes to crash out in the bathroom; they can revisit this later.

So then he’s standing there alone, and other people on night shift are showing up for work, parking. He goes back into his truck to sit down for a minute, plays it out in his mind.

Imagines the worst things happen.

All the flavors of the worst, in this case. They sleep together and she rejects him, and then he still has to work with her and get the knife twisted every time she’s on the schedule. Not a good outcome, but it wouldn’t be his worst trauma.

They sleep together and the reality of his life horrifies her, so she pushes him away, and he loses her as a friend, as a lover, but he still has to supervise her. Or maybe they sleep together and she likes that enough, but freaks out when she realizes he might actually be in love with her, and then it all goes to hell. Well. That would hurt. But at least that way he would have tried.

Or they don’t sleep together, and instead they suffer and yearn through another year of this, until she finishes her residency. And then maybe she doesn’t want to stay on at PTMC as an attending, shoulder to shoulder with someone who made her cry in the parking garage, with someone she knows carried a torch and never gave it a shot.

He considers if they would get in trouble with management, but he remembers Robby and Heather.

The problem is he can’t imagine meeting anyone else like her.

He never has.

Not that he meets many people at all, these days.

It’s almost 7. He has to go to work. He grips the steering wheel and lets his forehead rest against it for second. Says out loud to himself: Goddamnit. Fuck.

And then he’s out of the truck and headed for the stairs. In the elevator he opens his messages again, looks at that last one from her. He composes a reply: meet me in the garage in the morning before you leave.

Samira washes her face in ice cold water in the women’s locker room, regretting her vulnerability, missing his arm around her shoulder and feeling young. Stupid, pitiable. The cliche of a younger woman who’s into her boss. At least he isn’t married.

Her stomach flips when she sees his message. Meet me in the garage? Either he’s going to kiss her again or put an end to all of it, she isn’t sure.

It’s time to work now: no more of this. She vows to lean into the chaos today, get her mind off all this shit.

The ER has a rhythm, which is waves. You see a slew of patients, shoot off a pile of orders to each, hammer out a bunch of tasks, then regroup to drink water and yap, let your nurses tell you if anything is working or not, then re-do it all. It’s like surfing, catching wave after wave.

The trauma bays are the big waves and you can crash on the reef there, trying to stabilize someone who’s trying to die on you, trying to figure out what’s going on with almost no time to make a second guess. The short waves are in the waiting room, among the low acuity cases and you can wipe out in an embarassing way there, too, but it’s usually non-lethal.

Parker, bless her, can tell Samira is having a profoundly bad one, and stands with her at the board, one arm slung close around her shoulder.

“You good?” she says. She has that way of checking on people that never feels invasive, only caring, welcome.

“I don’t know,” Samira says. “Think I’ve had better days.”

“We’re gonna be alright,” Parker tells her, “we’re gonna make it through,” she adds, nodding confidently. “What can I help you with?” Together they divvy up the work. Later she brings Samira a cup of tea and they huddle in the corner of the breakroom, on the sofa talking. Jack walks in and sees them, washes his coffee mug with brisk efficiency; immediately leaves. He can eat that sandwich he brought later. He imagines Samira’s talking about him, which makes him nervous. Or excited. Something.

They are, though. Ellis is trying to convince her of the realness of it.

“Well, he flirts with everyone,” she says. “Not just you. But he always looks for you first. I feel like a goddamn third wheel in the trauma bays with you two.”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“I kissed him last night,” Samira confesses. “On the roof. After that kid - after he went in there with the dad screaming at him.”

“Girl,” Parker says, whispering. “You didn’t! Is that why he ran out of here just now?”

“And he kissed me back.” She’s smiling now, flushed, glad it doesn’t show, and beside her Parker sets down her drink for a second to punch the air triumphantly.

“Oh shit, that IS why he ran out of here just now,” she confirms.

“I think he’s backpedaling. I think I scared him.”

“Impossible. The man has looked death in the face. He’s in love with you. Oh, I’m winning VACATION MONEY!” Parker says, laughing, and puts her arm around Samira’s shoulder, leaning in for a hug.

When the end of their shift arrives, Samira is run off her feet, too tired to think straight. She almost falls asleep in her car waiting for him, but when she hears his truck’s door open and close she wakes up, startled. He knocks on her passenger side window so she lets him in.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” he replies, and he reaches for her hand, bringing it over the console toward him. He holds it in both of his and stares down at the contrast of their skin. Her smooth brown wrist against his pale, freckled one. “Sorry I was a little late. Thanks for waiting.”

“Yeah.” She feels exhausted, and probably looks it, too.

Her hand in his: that’s a good sign.

“I want to…do this,” he says, carefully. When she meets his eyes, her smile grows. “I really want to. It scares me how much I want to. But I’m out of practice. And I don’t want anyone to say anything to you about it, because you work for me. Accuse you of getting special treatment, or something.”

“I don’t care,” she says. “They already tease me all the time, how much you flirt. I’m also out of practice. All I do is study and work and sleep.”

“They do?” He thought he was being subtle.

“Yeah, all the time. Parker’s been telling me to put you out of your misery, and I kept telling her it wasn’t like that.”

“Jesus.”

“You know what I want?”

“Anything,” he says, and he’s looking at her. Really, really looking at her. It’s almost too much. Samira squeezes her eyes shut for a second. She’s exhausted, emotional, her self-control flagging. “Anything.”

“I want to - I want you to take me home, and feed me, get into bed with me, and I want to just sleep. I want to sleep for a while.” She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. “God, I’m so fucking tired.”

“It’s okay. I remember being a resident.”

“And once I’m not so tired anymore, I want to stay in bed with you and come so hard that I can’t move,” she adds. He smiles a real smile, toothy and genuine, that she covers with a kiss, awkwardly leaning over their hands and the console to reach him. They’ve been dancing around this for how long? “We don’t have to be back here for another 36 hours. Let’s make it count.”

“I’ll follow you to yours.”

It doesn’t feel real, letting him in the door to her apartment behind her, both of them dropping their stuff on the bench in the hallway, kicking off their shoes together. Samira is distantly aware she has dishes in the sink, stuff scattered all over her bathroom counter and all over her desk, the bed unmade, but it’s too late to care.

“I’m going to shower. Help yourself to anything,” she says, with a vague wave of her hand in the direction of the kitchen. She shuts herself in the bathroom to strip off her clothes. She’s trying to remember when was the last time the sheets were changed, and if she left any tissues in there among the pillows from crying herself to sleep last night. She washes her hair and shaves her legs, taking her time. She hears the water running in the kitchen.

When she comes out of the bathroom, wearing a tank top and a pair of cotton shorts, she sees that Jack has washed most of her dishes and gotten them glasses of water and there’s a big bag of takeout on her kitchen table.

“How did you know what to-” She starts opening the bag. It smells so good. “I’m starving.” Jack dries his hands on a kitchen towel and sidles up next to her to kiss her cheek.

“Oh, I just asked Ellis what kind of thing you would like,” he says. Samira pauses for a moment and looks at him, eyes narrowed.

“Jack.”

“I told her I want to bring lunch on Thursday night for the residents from somewhere new, other than our usual spots by work,” he explains. “I did actually try to cover our tracks a little, here.”

“Oh no, now you have to bring lunch on Thursday for the residents,” she deadpans.

“Small price to pay.” He smiles. He would have bought lunch every week if he’d known that’s all he needed to do to get here.

They eat Thai food (vegetarian for her, chicken and shrimp for him; coconut rice, green papaya salad, mango juice) then he showers, brushes his teeth with stuff from his work bag. When he comes into her room she’s already in bed, the window blacked out and a lamp on. Her room is the opposite of his - a little messy, kind of cluttered, colorful, very lived in. Her sheets and pillowcases and quilt are different jewel tones. Green, violet, dark blue. There’s art on the wall above her desk, next to a printout of her schedule. Lingerie draped over the back of a chair, a coffee mug full of makeup stuff next to her computer. A colorful oriental rug.

“Come here,” she says. He strips to his boxers, sets his leg on the floor. Lies down next to her under the covers. He’s suddenly still when she turns onto her side and drapes herself over him easily, as if they’ve done this a hundred times: her head on his chest, her leg over one of his thighs, her hand resting on his hip. He can smell her hair, feel how warm her skin is when he runs a hand up and down her back, which makes her groan a little. Not quite a sexual sound, but it hits him like one anyway.

“Yeah?” he says, the smile in his voice.

“Yeah,” she affirms, sighing.

She’s thought about this so many times alone in her bed - not just the sex but also just this. Being with him. She’s imagined it, yearning, to help herself fall asleep after a particularly bad day. So the real deal hits her like a drug. Her eyes are closing and then she’s out. It takes him longer to fall asleep, but her room is cool and dark, just like home. Her breathing is slow, hypnotic, regulating, and he finally drifts off.

She doesn’t know how long it’s been when she wakes, overheated, to find herself curled into a ball on her side and Jack holding her, pressed against her back. She tries to get up and wakes him too, gently moving his arm off her waist.

“Hey,” she whispers, hoarse. “Sorry. Too warm.”

“‘It’s okay,” he says, stretching. He props himself on one elbow, his hand on her thigh, looks down at her sleepy face. “I didn’t dream.” It was a deep sleep. Like she pulled all the restlessness out of his brain and metabolized it for him.

“Oh. Is that good?” she asks, brown furrowed.

“Very,” he says. “And unusual. How you feeling?”

“Better,” she says, reaching for her phone. “It’s almost 3. I could go back to sleep.”

“Go back to sleep then,” he says, kissing her, tangling his fingers in her hair to move it out of the way and get to her neck. She can’t help it, pushing her hips back against him.

“Then stop waking me up,” she says, annoyed even though she’s also turned on. “Later.” He relents.

“I’ll be here,” Jack says. Her eyes close. “Already waited years, what’s another few hours,” he adds, barely audible, just a mumble, talking to himself.

She’s awake still to hear him say that - and for a second she holds her breath, shocked. She tries to think back - years. Since they met? She remembers at first being a little scared of him. His intensity. She tries to remember if he ever really flirted with her, early on, and nothing comes to mind.

She opens her eyes. “Years?” she asks, her voice trending high.

“Did I say that out loud? Pretty much since we met.” he says. “Just…go back to sleep. Tell you later.” She feels his hand, smooth over her hair and down the back of her neck. She’ll probably have to pry it out of him.

Samira falls back asleep hard, landing into unconsciousness like a cliff jumper. She dreams about her dad. She’s a kid again, eating halwa with him after dinner, looking out the window in the dining room of the house she grew up in. There’s a ferocious Cambridge blizzard going, backlit by the yellow streetlights. Christmas, maybe? The dream is so vivid she can feel the prickling dry heat from the radiator in their kitchen, can smell her dad’s aftershave over the rosewater syrup of the dessert.

The nostalgia and homesickness of it is gut wrenching. She wakes up with tears in her eyes and covers her face with her hands immediately, dislocated at the sudden change, hauled sharply into the present moment. Beside her, Jack is sitting up against her headboard, shirtless, tranquil, reading something on his phone.

“What’s wrong,” he says, immediately, voice low, soft. Everything is a little out of focus to her in the dim light. “Hey. Hey, Samira.”

“Dream,” she chokes out. The mental image of her dad’s face is still clear. He was so young.

“Get over here.” He lays down next to her and pulls her into his arms. He thinks about all the times they had a heavy conversation, how he imagined them together doing just this. But instead he had to text some well meaning, tepid bullshit like “I know how you feel” and “things will get better eventually” because of course he couldn’t tell the truth: I love you, you’re not alone, you deserve everything, if I was there I’d put my arms around you & I wouldn’t let go. You can lose your shit with me.

He presses his face into her hair and feels her, a little shaky, exhaling against his chest. He rubs her back and imagines a ball of light surrounding them both, engulfing the whole bed, burning up everything dark. A therapy trick. He wants to call her sweetheart, kiss her, but she’s a little stiff against him, and he wonders if he’s just making things worse by focusing his attention on it.

“Was it about work?” he ventures.

“No,” she replies, not wanting to make things more real than they already feel. He doesn’t ask her to elaborate. Everyone has their own homesickness, their own grief. For a second he tries to remember if she ever told him her dad’s death anniversary - Iif it’s this time of year. Eventually he loosens his grip and looks down at her, searching her face. Kisses her, feels her smile into it.

“You have stuff for coffee?” he asks. It’s about 5:30; he would normally be getting up now anyway.

“Yeah.” Usually she has coffee at home, switches to tea on shift. “You can help yourself.”

Once he’s out of the room she gets up and looks at herself in the mirror, eyes red and puffy. Tries to comb out her hair a little, rinses her face, brushes her teeth. Maybe the exhaustion is getting to her. She tries not to think about the problematic implications of dreaming of her father then waking up crying in her attending’s arms. Her mom would have a field day with this mess.

When she joins him in the kitchen for coffee, it’s still light out. He hands her a mug.

“Rested?” he asks.

She nods. They drink their coffee in silence for a bit and she stares out the kitchen window. When he sets his empty mug on the counter and turns to face her, it feels momentous, all of a sudden.

“I think,” he begins, “before we - you should know I can’t be casual about this.” He looks down. “If that’s what you want, we shouldn’t-”

“What,” Samira says, abruptly, because, why would he think that she wants it to be…casual? For a second they just look at each other. She feels feral about all of it, not casual.

“I think I’m too far gone to just, uh, take it easy,” Jack adds. As if that explains anything.

“Well,” she says, warily. “Good, because I don’t think I can be casual about this either.” She’s distracted momentarily, watching the way his muscles move when he reaches for the edge of the counter behind him and leans back.

“I could only hope.”

Samira thinks, what does “casual” mean? Going on dates with someone else? Sex followed by kicking him out in the middle of the night? She doesn’t care for any of that. He is warm and alive and real in her kitchen, half naked. She’s trapped under his stare. She doesn’t understand what else she could even want, really.

“Casual like seeing other people…I definitely don’t want that,” she says, and reaches for him, kissing him chastely and then letting her head drop onto his shoulder. “You said you waited years?” she asks. “That’s a long time.”

“Samira.”

“Come on, I want to hear the story,” she says, and he ducks his head, turns a little red, which only makes her want it more.

“Maybe for the first six months,” he ventures, “I saw you around. I thought you were gorgeous then told myself to stop thinking about it because you were brand new, you were so young. We were supervising you. Robby started trying to…complain to me. That you did too much investigation, spent too long with your patients, couldn’t turn them over fast enough. I don’t think he realized it, but I found it impressive. The stuff you were catching, that others missed. The relationships you created. So the more he whined about it, the more I kept an eye on you and the more I liked you,” - here Jack paused to laugh for a moment, his eyes flicking up to the ceiling, shaking his head. “Eventually I nagged him a bit, to let you start rotating to nights. When you asked me to I was so happy.”

“Oh,” Samira says, stunned. “Oh.”

“I’m rambling.”

“That’s ok.”

“You gave me your number because of that storm, remember, and I wanted to drive you home. And then I just couldn’t stop talking to you.”

“Wait a second, can we go back - Robby was complaining about me?”

Jack scrubs his hands over his face, sighing. Fuck Robby, he thinks. That stupid Slo Mo nickname. His condescending tone, how he always leaned down toward her to tell her something like he was chastising a kid at school or something. Getting under her skin, undermining her self-confidence. When she was just as bright and capable as he was, if not more so. (Sometimes he wishes he could be her day shift attending for a change. Until he has to talk to management on a day shift.)

“Stay on topic, Mohan,” he says, smiling a little. “Nevermind Robby. I’m trying to explain how I fell in love with you.”

“In…love?” she parrots back, dumbly. Oh, wait. Oh. He’s serious.

“You’re gonna make me say it twice?”

“Yeah, say it again,” she murmurs. She never had anyone initiate with her like this; it’s a rush, if it can be believed. Suddenly his hands are warm on her waist, under her tank top. “Say it again, Jack.” Her voice is barely audible, her mouth an inch from his; hot, terrifying, thrilling, all at once. Her heart races. He kisses her, long and slow, teasing her mouth open and then he pulls back to literally whisper in her ear.

“I fell in love you with.” Voice low, a little rough.

Is this what an out of body experience feels like?

“Yeah,” she whispers back, fighting the urge to let her eyes roll. He’s holding onto her hip like he might leave a mark. She can’t move. “Jack -” but his mouth is on hers again and with one quick step he turns them, so she’s the one backed against the counter now. She reaches back for it with one hand, the other holding his face while they make out like a couple of kids.

“Up,” he says, suddenly, and it takes a second for her to realize what he’s asking her to do. When she figures it out, he spreads her legs apart and hooks his hands behind her knees to pull her toward him, so she’s sitting on the edge of the counter, her inner thighs pressed against his torso. He keeps kissing her, reaching up under her top. Her nipples are so hard they ache and when his fingertips brush over them she gasps, startled. “Ohh,” he says, like he’s discovering something, and then he’s taking her shirt off and they’re skin to skin in her kitchen with the blinds open in the middle of the afternoon and she’s getting so wet she’s soaking through her shorts onto the cool quartz of the countertop. He reaches down to suck her nipples and she lets her head fall back, undone.

“Bed,” she says, unable to form sentences. “Now.” He’s back up to kiss her again, and shakes his head.

“No. I like you right here.” Her shorts are loose, the inseam not very long, and he can touch her without much difficulty, his fingertips warm against her. “Jesus, you’re soaked.” He slides two fingers in and hears her almost cry out right away, feels her nails sinking into his shoulders.

She can feel herself scratching him so she reaches for his hair, gets one hand into it and tries to pull, half-successful, his head tipping back.

“If you don’t fuck me right now-”

“Patience.” He’s not resisting the pulling, she realizes, and calculates that - his eyes closed, mouth open in pleasure, head tipped back.

“Oh my god, fuck, Jack -”

“I bet you can come like this.”

“I don’t want to yet -”

“What are you going to do if I make you,” he murmurs, and then his fingers shift, pressing up against a specific place and she suddenly can’t move, thighs clenched against his sides, almost sliding off the counter if it wasn’t for him holding her. She’s sure her neck is turning red from his stubble. “God, I thought about this,” he adds, leaning back and trying to get a look at her face. He wants to watch it happen.

“Fuck- fuck, I thought about it too,” she gasps. He’s doing something with his thumb now that’s making her incredibly restless, incredibly close, and when she comes she’s shouting for a moment into his shoulder. He can feel her teeth on his trap, lightly, crying out against him and spasming around his fingers.

He kisses her as she shakes through the comedown, trying to catch her breath.

“I don’t usually go that fast - I don’t know what happened.”

“This is what it’s supposed to be,” he says. “Here, hold on.” He’s lifting her gently off the counter, until they’re standing, face to face, against each other. She leans into his chest, sighing, and reaches for him. He’s hard as a rock. She smiles when he inhales sharply at the contact.

“Let’s go to bed.”

Fucking him for the first time is a fever dream; he’s bigger than she expected, stronger than she imagined, tossing her around in between stopping to ask her for things, switchy, and he smells fucking great, and she can’t keep her hands from going all over, pulling his hair, gripping his shoulders or his ass.

She’s been on Depo for three years and it’s finally worth it now, to feel him inside her, to hitch her leg up high over his hip and sink her nails into his skin as he slams into her raw because she wants more, more, more. The chain pulling isn’t just a fantasy - it turns out it works. When she’s riding him, she can tell he’s getting close, reaches down and grabs it and pulls sharply once. His eyes fly open and meet hers - she smiles - this is a perfect position of control.

“Let me have it,” he begs, while she shifts her position a little so she can speed up. “Samira, baby, please -“

“No,” she says, “I want to come again, wait for me,” and then she drops his chain and plants her hands on his chest and angles her hips down against his belly, grinding. “Now,” she says, shoving him into the mattress, and he’s done, cursing as he comes, hands firm on her hips, thrusting up into her. She’s there a moment later and then they’re both collapsed against each other. He reaches up to brush her hair out of her face as she gradually shifts off of him to lay on her side.

“Oh my god,” she says, muted. “I’m going to be sore. Worth it.” She closes her eyes, hears him get up and go into the bathroom for a minute. When he comes back he has a wet cool washcloth and wipes her off, gently, then lays down next to her on his back.

She rolls over and lays her hand on his chest, sighing, and they doze off for a bit without saying anything. She can’t remember the last time she felt this relaxed. Catatonically relaxed.

“Do you want me to go home?” he asks eventually. Hesitant.

“What? No.”

“I just thought, I’ve been here all day.”

“I like it,” she says, moving so she’s against him. “I’m not back on nights for a while, anyway, so I’d miss you. Stay for a bit.”

She would miss him? He finds himself holding his breath for a moment, smiling.

At work a few weeks later, standing in front of the board, she can’t help but have a stupid smile on her face. She’s been trying to keep it neutral at the hospital, but everyone can tell she’s in a good mood.

“Are you…happy to be here? You psycho,” Santos says in passing, rolling her eyes.

Samira just laughs.

She woke up in Jack’s bed earlier this afternoon, well rested, came twice while he went down on her and touched himself and then she washed his hair in the shower, listened to him moan his way through a scalp massage. They almost ran out of time to get out of the house because he got her on all fours and fucked her into his pillows, made her come again so hard she thought she was going to get a hamstring cramp.

It’s hard to imagine something that would put her in a bad mood right now.

He bought them seven dollar coffees on the way to work, dropped her off at her place so she could get her own car to keep up appearances. Now she’s scanning the intake list, bouncing on the balls of her feet, looking for the ticking time bomb patient. Business as usual.

Something catches her eye - a guy from a nearby state correctional facility who was ambushed in the yard and slashed, coming in via ambulance with lacerations to his face and belly. There had been a riot. When he gets to the ambulance bay everyone puts on masks because he reeks of industrial grade pepper spray.

Whitaker dermabonds his face up after cleaning it out and Samira tries to work on the laceration on his belly, ends up doing an ultrasound and calling Walsh for help at the bedside. He goes for an abdominal CT and then they close, Walsh working on the deepest layers.

The mistake they make is letting him put his jumpsuit back on, instead of discharging him in hospital garb. The guards moved automatically to uncuff and dress him, on autopilot, and Samira didn’t think twice about it, until they take his jumpsuit out of its plastic bag and unfurl it in the trauma bay, effectively macing everyone in there.

She had been feeling unwell under her N-95, sore throated, beginnings of a headache and some wheezing, but it quickly gets worse - her throat tight, her tongue feeling too big for her mouth, her heart racing.

Walsh sees her wheezing, hand at her throat, and gets her outside and sat down in a more ventilated area, mask off. Perlah is taking her vitals.

In the trauma bay Walsh is letting the corrections guys have it. “Why the hell would you shake out his clothes in here?”

“Open up, say ahh,” Perlah says, looking for airway swelling, and then her eye are wide and she’s looking around for Jack and calling for an epinephrine kit. “Mohan, are you allergic to capsaicin?”

“No - I - I didn’t think so - I’m Desi, are you kidding? I’ve been eating chili since I was a baby,” Samira insists, but her voice sounds strange, stifled. She’s having trouble breathing and her blood pressure is tanking, 80 over 40, and Perlah is getting ready to inject epinephrine into her thigh, suddenly, and someone else is putting her on the monitor, moving her shirt to attach electrodes.

Her vision swims and then Jack is in the room with them, reaching for gloves, laying the stretcher flat.

“I’m getting access,” Jack says, and she feels strange from the adrenaline, dizzy, when he lifts her arm to straighten it, apply a tourniquet and start a large bore IV. She tries to sit up, confused, and he pushes her down by the shoulder then traps her wrist between his elbow and his body to immobilize her arm. “Samira, it’s ok, just hold still for me,” he repeats. Once a medic, always a medic, she thinks, and he’s so fast. Perlah is drawing up meds. “Bolus a liter of saline, 50 of Benadryl, 20 of dexamethasone, 40 of famotidine,” he adds, then he’s listening to her lungs. “10 liters on the non-rebreather.” He looks at Perlah, then at Samira’s other arm. “You want another line? Or it’s your turn?”

“You spoil us, Abbot,” Perlah says, smiling. “It’s ok, I’ve got it.”

It’s his hands gently moving Samira’s head to apply the oxygen mask and adjust the straps. He leans down toward her, quieter. “You’re okay. Everything’s okay,” he repeats. Something in her face must be communicating panic. He squeezes her hand, reaches over to the monitor to cycle her blood pressure again to make sure it’s improving.

“Allergic to capsaicin,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Jesus, that’s like…half of your kitchen. This one is going to be a real puzzle. I might even have to teach you to cook my white guy food.”

Samira focuses on her breathing and he doesn’t let go of her hand. Above the stretcher, Princess and Perlah make knowing eye contact, eyebrows raised, smiling.

In another week she’ll officially be in her final year, and she doesn’t really want to be chief resident, but it might happen, because Langdon, the one they all thought was destined to it, is now a year behind her.

They talk about it in the car on the way to her place.

“I think you should be prepared for Robby to offer it to you,” Jack says. “What do you want to do next? Attending? Fellowship?”

There’s a fellowship she heard about at Maryland Mercy, the hospital where the helipad opens directly into an OR, where they have an impressive shock trauma service that everyone knows all over North America. “I don’t know yet,” she lies. She had considered some kind of surgical training as well, which is Emery’s influence, but she’s not sure she can handle another few years of being broke. There are some emergency specialization fellowships that looked interesting but they’re all in other cities, and she’s starting to realize, with dread, that she doesn’t want to go anywhere without him.

“I guess I can just stay at PTMC as an attending. You’re here,” she says, and looks over at him, and he frowns for a moment, meeting her gaze.

“I don’t want you to do anything because of me.”

“Well, I don’t know if I want to move to another city right now,” she says. “I like this. I like seeing you all the time. I spent so many years before this putting work before my personal life, you know.”

“I do.”

“It would be easy to get the attending job anyway.”

“Sure. But is that what you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if I came with you?”

“What? You don’t even - I don’t - where? Where would I be going?” She’s flustered. “I don’t have enough saved to move.”

“So what? I do.”

All he does is work and save money, frankly. No kids, not living large, hitting 60 hours every week lately.

“Jack, seriously.”

“I am being serious. Wherever you need to be to do what you want, Samira, we can go,” he says, patiently. Totally calm like this is the most common sense thing in the world and not a proposition to completely upend their lives. “I love our team at work,” he adds, “don’t get me wrong. I’m thankful Robby brought me here, we work with amazing doctors and nurses. But sometimes I wonder if it’s a waste for you to stay here in our shadow. You’re meant for more. I had my day. I can work wherever as long as there’s a trauma center there.”

“Jack.” She’s a little stunned.

“You’re renting. Just don’t renew your lease. And I could rent out my house. We can…there’s so many opportunities. Emery and I were talking about it. Penn, Ryder, VCU, LA County, MMC. We would recommend you, you’d have a good chance.”

“I’ve thought about MMC,” she admits. “You make it sound so easy.”

“It can be easy. I’m great at moving. We’ll go together, I can work as a locum and you can do a fellowship. If you want to come back here later, we can come back.”

“You’d do that for me?” Samira murmurs.

“Well, yeah, I would, because I can,” he says. “I think about it a lot.”

He can’t bring himself to say of course I’ve thought about it, I love you. Of course I want to go where you are, I love you. Of course I want you to do what makes you happy, I love you. He hasn’t met her family yet; they’re hiding it as best they can at work. He’s trying to pace himself, which is getting harder and harder to do, the more he wakes up next to her.

“I’ve never lived with anyone before. Other than roommates and my parents, I mean.”

“Well, I was only married once, but, we’ll figure it out together. I just want you to follow your dreams,” he says. “You have a whole year to think about it.”

One morning she gets coffee with Emery, seeking career advice, and that’s what it starts out as, but soon it’s just Emery breaking down Jack’s psyche for her. They had worked together on deployment, she had been the one who took his leg, and now they were both here, working nights. She truly knows him. She gives him endless shit because she knows him so well, and no one else has the privilege of getting away with that, not even Robby.

“This is the thing…he’s never going to ask you to do anything for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He would never ask you to stay here for him, even if he wanted you to. Let me guess, you’re the one who finally kissed him and that’s what started all this? And after you kissed him he probably backpedaled and panicked, and that confused you?”

“Yeah,” Samira says, stunned. “How did you know.”

Emery laughs for a moment, sighs, takes her hair down, a tumble of thick black waves. “I know because he would never want to put you in a position to make you uncomfortable. Trust me, if there’s anything you want, just tell him. He’s been after you for so long, practically since you were an intern, but he would never say anything. That’s how he is. He likes to decide for other people that he’s going to annoy them and he shuts himself down.”

“I see,” Samira says.

“You’re in charge,” Emery says with a smile. “So was his wife. I also think he didn’t say anything to you because he couldn’t handle the pain, you know, if you didn’t reciprocate it. He’s been through a lot. Sometimes he just opts out, rather than risk it.”

“Makes sense. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think I should do a fellowship?”

“I do think you should, and after you get sick of being down here in the trenches with us, you should teach,” Emery says, confidently. “But it’s not my decision to make. It’s yours.”

“I know.”

“Take me with a grain of salt, okay? My wife is principal violin in the orchestra here and that’s not a very portable job, but I love her more than life, so here I am. Looking back I sometimes wish I’d done a fellowship somewhere cool, or deployed again, or traveled more, like volunteering, that kind of thing. Go for everything you desire, Mohan. Life is short.”

And then she’s looking down at the table, softly smiling like it was all worth it.

Chapter 2: it would be you

Summary:

shots fired!

Notes:

hey folks what should jack's sister's name be? and also what is his cat's name?

Chapter Text

Samira lives in a building with 10 units, a low rise complex built in the late 1970s. It’s affordable. Not in the richest neighborhood, certainly, but it’s clean, pest free, located close to PTMC, and it fits her budget. Her place is newer inside, too, on account of a previous tenant grilling with a propane tank on the balcony and lighting a cigarette, causing a fire and leading to a big renovation inside.

She has a neighbor two doors down who’s dating, or living with, a violent man. A man who comes home drunk, angry, and screams at her. Throws things, threatens her, calls her names. More than once Samira has woken up because of their fighting. She’s sure the woman has been thrown to the floor or into the wall, judging by the noise. Sound travels fast in the wood framed building.

Samira has called the cops on the guy twice in a year, never leaving her name, never identifying herself. The first time, she ended up leaving for work soon after, and wasn’t around to see if they ever showed up or not. The second time she heard the guy threatening to kill her and the cops arrived quickly. Samira watched them march both people out to the parking lot to talk to them separately. Getting their stories. She looked on from her kitchen window, heart in her stomach, anxious.

She knows that in Pennsylvania they can do victimless prosecution, if they want to. But still, for some unknowable reason, the cops let the couple go back inside together that night.

The woman’s face is red and blotchy from crying, and she walks behind the man, her eyes on the ground, resigned. The scariest part, Samira thinks, is that he doesn’t seem high or drunk and isn’t behaving erratically. He is very calm, in control of himself while talking to the cops, steady on his feet.

The next evening it’s quiet and she doesn’t see the man in the hallway, or see his car in the lot. She puts $60 and a pen with the domestic violence info in a plastic grocery bag, along with some pamphlets from work from Kiara, and a couple of snacks to hide it all. Ties it onto the woman’s doorknob.

In the morning she goes down the hall and the bag is gone; there has not been any noise, or screaming. She hopes the woman took it, but there’s no way to know.

For a moment she stands in front of the woman’s door, considering knocking and introducing herself, but in her gut she is afraid. A long minute passes and then she leaves for work, feeling like a coward.

“You have tomorrow off?” Jack asks, not daring to look at her.

He knows her schedule by heart, but it seems less insane to ask her, pretend he doesn’t. As if he doesn’t open up the hospital system’s scheduling app on his phone on a weekly basis just to see how many days he gets to work with her and figure out when they can spend time together.

“I do.”

“Any plans?”

“Work on my draft and sleep. And I should clean my apartment and go buy groceries.”

“Why don’t I bring you something for dinner? Just order your groceries on the delivery thing. Save yourself a trip.”

“I don’t have a subscription to that.”

“Use mine.”

Dana passes them and tips her glasses down for a minute to look at Samira meaningfully, then walks by without saying anything, a little smile on her face.

“I thought we were going to be careful at work,” Samira says, nearly a whisper. “Keep it professional.”

“I’m just facilitating the submission of your article on time to the Journal of Trauma and Injury because I’m a good mentor,” he replies, smiling, “It’s professional. I’ll text you my log in for the delivery. You’re going to send me your draft, right?”

“Yeah,” Samira says, “of course I will.”

She’s wondering what’s wrong with her that his interest in her research actually turns her on, physically turns her on. Is there a name for this?

They’re off in two hours. She has to fight not to smile.

He does text her the delivery info, and she logs in, orders some stuff and picks an evening delivery time, and then halfway finishes cleaning before she decides a nap is in order. She can work on her article tomorrow. A few hours later she hears the neighbors get home, already yelling, and then a door slamming and the guy shouting “you fucking bitch!” at the top of his lungs on his way out.

She feels tense. She can’t fall back asleep, so she texts Jack: I’m up, stop by anytime.

He’s there in 40 minutes with a bottle of white wine and a pizza and his backpack like always. Dark green t-shirt, jeans, neatly clean shaven. In the kitchen he sets down the food and intercepts her before she can grab wine glasses, wrapping his arms around her waist and shoving his face into her neck, breathing her in.

“Oh, I missed this,” he says, muffled. Samira reaches up to put her arms around his neck, fingers of one hand already in his hair.

“Me too,” she replies softly. It’s been almost a week since they had any time to be alone together and she’s been craving it like a junkie.

The pizza is good. Thin crust, prosciutto, ricotta and some interesting pesto-like sauce. And the wine is smooth, cold. She feels relaxed, tipsy when they make it to the couch, talking about her research article with her lying in his lap. He listens to her go on and on about it, running his fingers through her hair, a faint smile on his face. By the time they make it to her bedroom they’re both a little tired and the sex is sweet, slow. She comes underneath him, grinding herself against his pubic bone until it’s too much, but he can’t finish, not even with her on top. She goes down on him, is rewarded with a litany of cursing and begging and praise, and he keeps getting close but not quite over the edge.

“Come here,” he says, finally, gently pulling her up by one arm so they’re laying crushed against each other. He rests his chin on the top of her head and when he talks, she both hears it and feels the vibration in his ribs. “I can’t. SSRI side effects. Jesus, I want to. Won’t be able to, though. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She’s intimately familiar with these side effects; she’s been on Wellbutrin for about a year, but Zoloft before that, and it took forever to get herself off, if at all. “You don’t have to be sorry. How did it happen before?” She remembers the first time he stayed over.

“I skipped it that day,” he said. “For you.” He lets out a choked half laugh. “But the next night I started to get the brain zaps, so.”

“Do you want to get off of them?”

“Maybe one day,” he says. “I don’t know. Just don’t take it to mean that I’m not attracted to you.”

“I know,” she says, and then props herself up to kiss him.

“You don’t have to get off them because of us. I still - the sex is amazing,” she says. She wonders if he ever could stop taking those drugs, actually. The rumors, if they are to be believed, is that his history with PTSD is significant. He’s mentioned the various medications throughout their time as friends - five or six, depending on the day. Zoloft, benzos, propranolol, trazadone, buspirone. Toradol and gabapentin for his leg.

Later he gets up to put on his boxers again. It’s a little cold, so she puts on his shirt, too lazy to get up from bed to go through her dresser and find something. She’s had fantasies of waking up in the morning with him hard against her, seamlessly transitioning them from sleep to sex. “Why don’t you ever sleep naked?” she asks.

“I don’t like to be taken by surprise,” he tells her, vaguely. Before him, she slept on the side of the bed by the door, but now he’s the one that does that, just like he checks that her front door and balcony door and windows are locked, draws her blinds closed before they sleep. Never leaves his stuff in the living room, other than his boots. Likes to keep his bag at the foot of the bed, or by the nightstand, where he can get to it. She wonders if he ever really relaxes.

It doesn’t take long to fall asleep, Samira on her side facing away from the door and Jack curled around her. She’s out cold when the noise starts up down the hall - yelling first, and then a thud, and then a gunshot, followed by two more. Unmistakable. Outrageously loud sounds, shattering the pitch black of her room.

Jack awakes suddenly, activated like a sleeper agent, and before Samira can even figure out what’s going on she feels him grab her upper arm and aggressively shove both of them off the bed onto the floor on her side. She hits her head on the edge of her nightstand and catches her free arm on the edge of the bedframe on the way down, painfully, before she finds herself trapped underneath him.

He manuevers to get to his bag and pulls out a handgun with one hand, pushes her down onto her belly with the other, and kneels against the bed, watching the door of her room, aiming at it.

“Jack, what the fuck,” she says, “ow, what the fuck, what are you - Jesus -”

“Shut up. Quiet.” His free hand is still on her upper back, keeping her down, and it moves to cover her mouth instead. Her arm is throbbing. There’s no noise coming from the neighbor’s, now. They wait, a tense minute, and then Samira hears the woman start crying, quietly at first. Then crying louder. Wailing a little.

She realizes they’ve just listened to a murder. And he’s having a flashback to being in combat. She twists her face away from his palm, shoving his forearm with one of her shoulders until she can talk to him.

“Get off me. Get off. My arm - let me up,” Samira says, pushing him off her, and when she sits up to look at him, his eyes are vacant. His arm resting on her bed, gun pointed at the doorway to the room, away from them. “Jack. Jack!” Nothing. “ABBOT,” she barks, louder. That finally gets through.

He turns to face her, barrel pointed down toward her mattress, at least, and she gently reaches out and puts her hand over his, softly pressing his wrist into her bed until he lets it go. “Hey. We’re okay. We’re safe. Put this down. Put it down. Ceasefire. Jack. It’s me. We’re in my room. There’s no one else in here. We’re safe. I need to call for help. I need to call 911 for my neighbor. Put it away.” They’re both shaking. “Put it down. Just put it down.”

He lets go, and she picks it up gingerly, sets it on her nightstand out of his reach. Picks up her phone to call 911. Her free hand rests on his chest, over his heart, and he holds onto it with both of his, trying to slow down his breathing, pale, sweating, eventually turning to sit with his back against the bed, knee pulled up to his chest on his good side. She looks at his eyes. Watches the expression on his face change, as he realizes what’s going on.

She gives the dispatcher her address. “I think my neighbor shot someone,” she says. “Her boyfriend. I think she was defending herself, I heard them fighting.” It might not make a difference, but Samira’s trying. “No, no, I didn’t see anything. Only heard it. I live down the hall. I’ve just been inside my own apartment, I didn’t go over there.”

When she’s done she drops her phone onto the rug unceremoniously and all but climbs into Jack’s lap to wrap her arms around him, even though her elbow on the side she landed on is killing her. His face is against her collarbone when he really starts to shake, the tremors, and she just holds onto him.

“It’s okay. We’re okay,” she says, over and over, until he’s still. She helps him up to sit on the bed.

“I hurt my arm.” There’s already a bruise on her tricep, the same thickness as the bed frame’s rail. She lifts her arm to try to get a better view, and a look crosses his face like he’s going to break out in tears. He touches the bruise, lightly with one thumb. Inhales sharply. She hears sirens outside.

“I’m sorry,” he says, hoarse. “God, I’m sorry. Your face, you’re bleeding a little.” He reaches for a tissue from her nightstand and holds it against her temple.

“The police are coming. We need to get dressed,” she says. She gives him his shirt back, puts on pajama pants and a tshirt herself, and watches wearily as he clears the chamber and puts the gun away in his bag.

“I thought I was - I thought we were under fire. What kind of people live here? You can’t stay here.” He’s shaking his head and he won’t look at her. “You can’t stay here. If you want to give a statement, fine, but we’re not staying here tonight.”

“It’s just, it’s my neighbor - she has an angry boyfriend - I’ve called the cops twice on them but they wouldn’t arrest him, why the fuck not, I don’t know. Do you always carry a gun?”

“Everywhere the state of Pennsylvania lets me,” he says.

“You couldn’t hear me. You were having a flashback.”

“I thought we were under attack. Woken up by fire.”

There’s the sound of the cops banging on the neighbor’s door. “Police, open up!” Samira’s heart is still racing.

When the cops knock on her door, making their way through all the neighboring apartments one by one, looking for witnesses, she gives a brief statement through an opening of just a few inches, not wanting them to come in and see Jack, or see her forehead, or see her arm. She is scared. She didn’t grow up with any of this, doesn’t know how to unload or load a weapon or safely handle one, doesn’t know how she can explain him throwing her out of bed in a panic, hurting her.

After the police leave her doorway, there’s constant noise; people going up and down the stairs, crime scene techs, detectives, deputies. Jack is restless. Samira thinks about the plastic bag looped over the doorknob.

She says it out loud, just as she starts crying. “I should have knocked on her door. I should have said hello. Introduced myself. Given her my contact information. Maybe she would have come here for help. Maybe I could have helped.” She looks at him. “Did I do the wrong thing, calling 911?”

“No. Would you rather I have gone over there?” he asks, and he looks at her, and then she realizes he means it. He certainly could have. Would have. He has the skills and the ability, but he’s not anyone’s officer, anymore. There’s no telling what he would have found.

“No,” she says. “Definitely not.”

“So it’s good you called,” Jack says. “Samira, it’s not your fault. Come on, we’re getting out of here. Get whatever stuff you need.” He examines where she hit her head, his thumb warm and gentle on her cheekbone. “I’ll dress this for you at my house.”

She packs a bag and they go hand in hand out of her building, down the other stairwell, away from the police, to his truck. He drives them to his house in the middle of the night. They’re in his living room and she’s closing her eyes so he can irrigate the gash on her forehead and close it with steri-strips. She’s wired and exhausted.

“You scared me,” she says, again. Quietly. She feels the paper towel he’s using to soak up the saline rough against her eyelashes, the sting as he dries the cut off and pinches it closed with the strips.

“I’m sorry, baby.” He kisses her cheek on the uninjured side. “I was trying to protect both of us.”

“You always have a gun?”

“Most of the time.”

“I don’t think I like that.”

“Maybe you would like it more if you understood it a little better.”

“You were flashing back to something. You couldn’t hear me. You weren’t…there with me. What if you-”

“I would never hurt you,” he says, evenly, pre-empting her, as if he’s already this conversation before, maybe with himself, maybe in his head. She opens her eyes to find the full weight of his gaze focused on hers. “I would never, ever hurt you. Need you to understand that. It sounded like someone was coming for us and I was asleep. You’re always with me. On my side. Even when I'm having a flashback.”

“What if I’m worried you’d hurt yourself?”

“I wouldn’t need a gun to do that,” he says, which is grim, but it’s the truth. And she can tell from the look on his face he isn’t going to elaborate. He thinks about the roof of the hospital. The old truck he totalled, after his wife passed away. “Wouldn’t do that to you, either,” he adds, softly.

He’s seen enough times at work what happens when a person tries to shoot themselves, and the aim is a little off. Ending up in trauma surgery, neuro ICU, then long term acute care, tracheostomy, long term ventilator dependence, a feeding tube, pressure sores, just an incubating body for your barely working brainstem, no ability to communicate, or move independently, care for yourself. You can’t even ask for your own death, at that point. There are so many fates worse than death. And many better ways to go than shooting yourself.

“I didn’t grow up with any of this,” Samira says, weakly. She knows his wife was in the Army too, back then; it probably was never an issue for them. But she feels out of her depth. “Do you bring a gun to work?”

“Not allowed to carry on their property.”

“Oh.”

“But I do have one in my truck. Fingerprint safe, low profile, under the console on the driver’s side.” She stares at him. “I’m kind of surprised that you didn’t assume this about me. I was a Ranger, Samira. It’s, uh, it’s built in at this point. Has been. For a long time.”

“I understand that,” she tells him, nodding. “But this is new for me.”

“So what’s the story with your neighbor? I don’t want you to go back there if it isn’t safe.”

“She was in an abusive relationship. My neighbors aren’t criminals. I don’t think the guy even lived there. He didn’t stay there all the time. When he did, they would fight, physically, and he’d scream a lot. I called the cops a couple times. I talked to Kiara about it. What I could do without being too involved. They wouldn’t arrest him. A few days ago I left bag of things on her door, some money, food, domestic violence resources. But I was afraid to introduce myself to her.”

“Do you feel guilty?”

“I do.”

“You shouldn’t. It’s not your fault. You did what you could. You know it’s not as easy as just calling the cops or asking the victim to leave. Maybe she asked them not to arrest him, or she refused to cooperate. There’s no way for you to know.”

“I could have talked to her.”

“You’re assuming she would have told you what was going on. You’re a stranger. Think of all the patients you’ve offered help to and they went right back to it, after we sewed them up.”

“I know, I know. She’s probably going to end up in prison over this, if she killed him,” Samira says, shaking her head. “Probably just for defending herself. Jesus.”

Jack leans against the armrest of the couch and gestures toward her until she lies down against him, carefully keeping the pressure off her bruised arm. He lets one hand rest on her sternum, holding her.

“Maybe,” he says, his voice low. “But you, Samira, could not have prevented that.” He kisses the top of her head. “I’ll make you a deal. Why don’t you stay here for a while while you find another place to live. I can teach you basic gun safety. I don’t want you be afraid of it.”

Afraid of me, he thinks.

“You really think I should move?”

“Well, I don’t want you back going there. Who knows what’s going on. It’s just wood and drywall, you could have been shot if he was just standing in the wrong place when this happened.” She’s crazy if she thinks he’s not going to be rabidly protective about this, flashbacks aside. “It’s not really a good area,” Jack adds. “I remember being on a resident’s budget, too, but your life isn’t worth saving a couple hundred bucks a month on rent.”

“That why your house is brick and cement?” Samira asks.

“Well, yeah. In part.” He always thought vinyl siding was ugly, but no one would ever hear him complaining about a having a big basement built like a goddamn bomb shelter, either.

She feels the urge to argue with him, but first takes a moment to think about what he said. It’s true. She could have caught a stray. Or he could have. She can’t imagine him going back to her place and feeling relaxed there after this.

“My rent is only $1050. They didn’t raise it for three years. I can’t imagine how I’m going to find that again.”

“We’ll figure it out. In the meantime, just stay here and save your money.”

“Jack - I don’t want to impose,” she begins. His house is family sized, a brick ranch. Two bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, another bedroom and bathroom in the finished basement, a big eat in kitchen, a dining room, a garage that fits two cars, a deck in the back.“What am I going to do with my stuff?”

“You’re not imposing. I’m offering.” As if on cue, his three legged cat hooks claws into the sofa and drags herself up to where they are, sprawls out on top of Samira’s shins and goes to sleep. “Put your things in my basement. You don’t even have that much stuff,” he says.

It’s true; she had to move for undergrad, again for med school, again for residency, and for years she’s been living very lightly, knowing there’s a good chance the following year would bring yet another move, for fellowship, or for an attending job in another city, who knows.

“We would have to tell HR, though.”

“Not yet.”

“No?”

“Not if it’s just temporary. We should tell them if you want to stay here permanently, though. That’s when Robby and Heather filled out their forms.” He doesn’t add that he’s hoping she will, that he’s actually spent some sleepless mornings after work daydreaming about it.

Samira thinks about what Emery said to her that one day: “you’re in charge.” Her heart pounds. She wonders if he can feel it.

She closes her eyes. Imagines staying here. Coming home to him cooking. Walking around in a towel, naked underneath, until he can’t control himself and his hands are all over her in the kitchen, the living room, the dining room. Sharing coffee before work. Getting to see him more, instead of one night a week together and quickly in passing at shift change. Crawling into bed with him on their days off. Playing with his cat, grilling in his backyard, going running together, maybe meeting his sister one day, maybe even inviting her mom over, if she can ever get over the shock of their age gap and how white he is and the fact that he’s her boss.

“We can give it a try,” she says softly.

She can’t see his big smile, but she feels him kiss the top of her head in acknowledgement. His cat purrs and purrs against her feet, and if she really concentrates she can hear the sound of the wind through the trees in his yard, too.

They fall asleep like that for a while.

In the morning she puts on long sleeves under her scrubs, and applies concealer to her temple, carefully, but when she gets to work Dana pulls her aside and into an empty conference room and asks her what’s going on, because nothing gets past that woman.

“Did Jack have a flashback?”

“He did, but it’s not, it wasn’t - it wasn’t like that. It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“What do you think I’m thinking?”

“That he hit me. He didn’t hit me."

“No,” Dana hisses, “He’s never…well, he punched Robby once because he got startled. But I’ve never seen him hit a woman. What happened?”

“My neighbor got into it with her boyfriend, and the noise woke us up. He thought we were in danger. He just kind of pushed us both off the bed and I bumped into the night table.”

“You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“You have to be ready for that king of thing, with him. How long did he take to come out of it?”

“It wasn’t long,” Samira says, and she knows she’s minimizing. Dana scrutinizes her. “A few minutes?”

“That’s good. Things are better than they used to be. Are you up for this, hon?”

“I am, actually,” Samira tells her, and to her credit, Dana doesn’t argue or second guess, just pats her on the back for a moment.

“If there’s anyone here that I thought could handle him, who could understand,” Dana says, leaning in, conspiratorially, her hand on Samira’s shoulder, “it would be you.”

Her bed, dressers, and desk fit nicely in his basement. She puts her dining table down there but mostly they eat in his kitchen upstairs. Immediately she starts noticing how many little things he does to make her life easier, and compares it to the last time she tried to live with a boyfriend (disastrous), where she felt like she couldn’t fit herself or her belongings into his home, or his life. That guy didn’t want to make room for her, but liked having her around for his entertainment.

This is a little different.

Jack notices what groceries she buys, keeps her coffee and tea and oat milk in stock. Orders more shampoo and conditioner before she runs out. Waters her plants for her, which he hangs up on ceiling hooks above the alcove window in his kitchen, where the best light is. Makes space for her shoes and coats in his hall closet, buys a new, thick rug for the basement so she can do yoga down there when her back bothers her. Moves his weights up into the other bedroom upstairs so she has room for all her things. Clears out space for her car in his garage.

He never puts chili in the food he makes for them, throws out the majority of his hot sauce collection, until she brings him an article about allergy challenges and proposes they do an experiment on her to figure out if she can tolerate dietary chili but not pepper spray.

“Not that I don’t like your cooking,” she says, because she actually does like it a lot, “but I miss my food, too.” He grills for them, makes soup and freezes it, cooks breakfast before work some nights. She tries his marry me chicken, shepherd’s pie, curry. It’s the most meat she’s eaten in a while.

He agrees, but under strict conditions; starts an IV on her and premixes meds before she even takes one bite, makes her lie down between steps on the couch, just in case she has a reaction. She actually can eat it. She only gets a bit of a rash when she tries something fairly concentrated, but no airway symptoms, thank god. He jabs her in the left deltoid with IM Benadryl at the end of the process and kisses her cheek, smiling.

The day after their little test she finds bottles of Claritin and Benadryl on the kitchen counter by his toaster. A week after she moves in he starts putting a silk pillowcase on one of the pillows on his bed for her hair, without even being asked. He sharpens her kitchen knives, fixes the seasoning on her cast iron pan, changes the windshield wipers on her car, brings her a stack of mail from her old place one morning without being asked.

Sometimes she’s so tired she goes into the basement and collapses in her own bed like deadweight, but on the better days, the better nights, she goes to sleep next to him. And if he wakes up at odd hours from nightmares or insomnia, he goes into another room, or into the living room, leaving her undisturbed until just before she has to get up.

He takes her to the range one weekend, and does his own imitation of a concealed carry permit safety class. Lets her pepper a target with his Glock 19, coaches her on timing a trigger pull with her breathing. He makes her clear the chamber and load and unload several times, until she can remember.

“I want you to know how to do this,” he says, but can’t get himself to add ‘if you ever have to take it away from me’ out loud. “You’re actually pretty good at this,” he adds, squinting at the two targets she used, one before he coached her and one after, the clear difference between the two. “Fast learner.”

He has yet to find something she can’t figure out.

“I get the appeal it has for you, I do,” she tells him on the way home. “But I just don’t think I’d want the responsibility, me personally.”

“Well, good, because that is on me,” he tells her, smoothly maneuvering through freeway traffic to get them home.

Now that she thinks about it she’s never seen him get properly drunk, sloppy, uninhibited. She thought it was a mental health thing, or a professionalism thing, the whole time. But it might be more about a desire to maintain his reflex speed, his concentration, the clear awareness of his surroundings. He’s never even told her a story about being that drunk. Not even from when he was young. The responsibility really is always on him.

She has a day shift before Jack’s night shift, and on the home stretch in the afternoon, she palliates an older Pakistani man who’s there with his young daughter. This time it isn’t something she can fix, or prevent, or deal with surgically. It’s just his time.

She calls Jack from the privacy of the handicap bathroom on the far side of the lobby, voice thick with tears, and he talks her into coming home a little earlier. He gets in touch with Robby, to let him know he’s going to be a couple of hours late. He hopes no one makes the connection.

Instead of handing off to each other on rounds like they normally do, he meets her at their front door, takes her bag out of her hands and drops it on the floor so he can put his arms around her.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she says, immediately. She is not in the habit of leaving work early.

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” he tells her. “You’re allowed to be affected by things. All of us are.”

“You’re going to be late, you can’t-”

“They know I’m going to be late. I called Robby. I have an hour and a half.”

“Thank you.” She can’t stop crying, her breathing shaky. He has a sweatshirt on, a dark gray one, and where her face is on his shoulder she can see the damp spot from her tears.

“What was it about him?” Jack asks carefully.

“Almost the same age.” Samira’s relationship with grief is on again, off again. Her life formed around the loss, and most of the time she isn’t thinking about it actively, but when it reappears suddenly, it’s always with the emotional force of a car getting crushed on the train tracks. Full power.

She feels wrung out, sick. “Fuck, I have a headache. I want to lie down.”

In his room she puts back on the same pajamas she took off that morning and lies down on top of his covers with her face in his pillow.

“I gave him a good death,” she says into the pillow. “Ordered a Versed drip. Made du’a with his wife. Stayed in there with her until she was done reciting the Salat Al-Jazanah.” She didn’t have to do that, but she couldn’t make herself walk out, either.

“Samira,” he says, and she turns onto her side to look up at him where he’s seated on the bed next to her. “If he was here, you know that he’d be incredibly proud of you.”

She squeezes her bloodshot eyes shut. “I know.” Thinking about that only makes her want to cry more.

“Just get it out,” Jack says, and he lies down next to her, pulling her closer until her face is pressed into his chest. He kisses the top of her head. “I love you.”

In the position they’re in, with her eyes closed and face turned away from the light, it almost feels just like she’s alone in her old apartment after a day shift in the middle of winter, in the dark of her room, spiraling. Like the last time this happened. Everything, she realizes, including this, is so much easier with him at her side.

The challenge she’s having is shutting the hell up about it, because she feels iridescent with joy and they haven’t fully told anyone else what’s going on.

She tells her mother she is staying with a friend from work after the shooting, looking for another apartment, purposefully vague. She hasn’t made a single appointment to see another apartment yet.

She also tells Mel, who doesn’t much participate in the gossip casino aspect of their workplace.

“Are you happy?” Mel asks her.

“I’m so happy it scares me,” she says. “Feels like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“Maybe there isn’t one,” Mel shrugs. “Maybe this is just our turn to be happy.”

She has also started seeing Frank, slowly, gradually, nothing like moving in together, since his divorce was finalized, and frankly both she and Samira are glowing. The nurses keep commenting on it. They usually just say noncomittal things about going to yoga and sleeping more and taking better care of themselves, evasive, though it’s not really fooling anybody.

“I want to introduce him to my mom, but I can’t. Not yet. Maybe if we go to HR. Or next year when I’m an attending.”

“Did you hear back about chief resident yet?”

“Jack says Robby wants me to do it, but nothing formally, no.”

Samira works a princess shift one day, 8 hours, so she comes home before Jack has gotten it together to leave for the night. She’s in the living room, playing a game with his cat they’ve gotten in the habit of, where she flicks a hair tie across the rug and the cat brings it back over and over like she’s playing fetch. She realizes she feels settled, not particularly interested in looking for another apartment. He hasn’t asked her to pay anything in weeks so she was thinking of making him breakfast before he leaves for work and doing their laundry. She wants him to know she appreciates everything.

“I’d like to put you on my emergency contact list,” he says, apropros of nothing, standing in front of the coffeemaker in his flannel pajama pants and no shirt.

“Sorry, what?” she calls out from the other room. “Wait, who’s on there now?”

“My sister and Walsh,” he says. She walks into the kitchen and the cat follows her clumsily.

“You should show me your healthcare directive first,” Samira says. “I mean, if you want me to, I’d be happy to, but I just want to be sure I know what you want.” She’d thought about it, what she would do if something happened to him. She doesn’t have his sister’s number so she always figured the next best thing would be to ask Walsh.

“Who’s yours?” he asks.

“My mom.”

“You want me to be on there too?” He says it as casually as if he’s asking her if he should pick up a pizza on the way home.

“I think you should meet my mom before doing that,” she says, imagining, intrusively and suddenly, her body on a ventilator in an ICU, and Jack and her mother staring at one another in shock on opposite sides of her hospital bed. “And I should meet your sister, too.”

“I would love to meet your mom,” he says, immediately.

“She’s not going to like how much older you are. And the fact that you’re white.”

“I’ve been known to be pretty charming,” he says, unconcerned, and walks across the kitchen to stand against her, wrapping his arm around her shoulder. She leans into him, sighing.

“I haven’t even looked for another place to live yet,” she admits.

“I love to hear that,” he tells her, takes a sip of coffee. She can hear the satisfaction in his voice. He hopes she never bothers. “No rush.”

“I told her I was staying with a friend from the hospital.”

“Not entirely a lie.” His free hand is warm in the curve of her waist, and she’s getting distracted.

The second time Jack picks up her mail from her old place, there’s a letter from PTMC in there, which Samira opens first, discovering she is chief resident, right before she checks her email. Immediately she tells Mel and then the others know, and everyone is messaging her congratulations.

Santos wants to go out after work next shift to celebrate.

“You want to come with us?” Samira asks him. He’s emptying the dishwasher and putting stuff away, boxing up their leftovers to take to work. “Robby will be there, you can hang out with him.”

“Is that a good idea?” he asks, cautiously. “How am I supposed to not be all over you?” He closes the door to the fridge and his hands are on her as he backs her up against the kitchen counter to kiss her. “Everyone’s gonna know,” he adds, mouth hot against her throat.

“Do we have time for this?” she asks, already starting to take off her shirt, hips pressed against his. “Fuck, I missed this so much.” Their schedules haven’t been lining up recently.

“I don’t even care if we have time,” he replies, kissing her again, reaching for the clasp of her bra while she unties the drawstring on his pants. “We need it.”

Chapter 3: it's different with you (isn't everything)

Summary:

they deserve to enjoy themselves a little!!

Chapter Text

“Sometimes I think she thinks I’m stupid.” Samira is talking about Walsh. They’re in the kitchen together, finishing dinner.

“She doesn’t,” Jack says. “I know for a fact she doesn’t.”

“It’s just…today I got snapped at reporting off to her before they took that guy up to the OR. I don’t even know why. I didn’t do anything differently than last time.” Samira makes a face for a second; Jack recognizes it as the same face she made back in the day when she used to tell him about Robby hassling her to work faster.

“That’s just how she can be. It’s not personal.”

“So it doesn’t have anything to do with me?”

“It doesn’t. But she can’t just turn it off. Don’t take it personally. It would make more sense if you knew all the shit she went through.”

“Why aren’t you like that too, then?” Samira challenges, arching an eyebrow in his direction. “If you mean the shit in the military? You went through some of the same things.”

“Well, I was, kind of, at one point,” Jack tells her. “But then I got my heart broken real good when my wife passed, which was terrible. Forced me to start dealing with some of that. I can’t explain to you what it’s like to be a female surgeon in the military. My job was stressful enough, but she told me stories about moving furniture against the door to her room on deployment like a barricade because the guys she supervised would joke about raping her to make her straight. I never experienced anything like that. She had to be hardened, or she wouldn’t have made it.”

“What the fuck,” Samira says, with gravity, “is even wrong with with people?”

“Right? Like battle isn’t enough, we had that shit too.” Jack shakes his head. “She’s actually softened quite a bit since she came to civilian life. The safe life.”

“Guess I met you at the right time,” Samira says thoughtfully.

“You did. Come here.” He puts down his dish towel to put his arms around her for a moment.

He wonders when this will become unremarkable, how many times he’ll ask her to get close and then touch her, until it doesn’t feel new anymore, doesn’t give him this visceral warm feeling of relief.

“You’re going to make us late,” Samira says, in between kisses.

They’re about to go to the bar and meet up with their coworkers, but he’s peeling the left strap of her yellow dress off in front of the mirror by the door, his hands all over her. She’d put on dangling earrings and makeup and lipstick and heels and when she looks at the two of them together in the mirror, her heavy lidded eyes over his shoulder as he kisses her throat, she gets even more turned on. Can’t remember the last time she properly dressed up like this.

“You want me to stop?” he asks, still for a moment, before returning to her mouth.

“No,” she says, breathless, “but we’ll be late.”

“I can drive faster,” he reasons. “Oh, fuck, no bra,” he adds, delighted, and unzips the back of dress enough to get it off her shoulders, thumbs and squeezes her nipples, pausing to gently suck them, rewarded with her hand in his hair, pulling. He reaches under her skirt to find her already wet, slips his fingers into her panties. She makes an animal sound, turns to the mirror and leans forward to brace her hands on the console table in his entryway. “Not yet. You want it bad, huh?”

“Jack.” It comes out as a whine.

“Ask me, baby.”

“Not asking, telling,” she replies, grinning. She can feel how solid and hard he is rubbing against her ass; no point in waiting.

As usual, she’ll get what she wants. She feels his mouth on the back of her shoulder as he unzips his pants, pushes her skirt up and her panties down to mid thigh. Samira lets herself fall foward a bit, forearms on the console table, and arches her back for him. When she looks up in the mirror, open-mouthed, she sees he’s staring at her face, watching her expression. And when he slides in all of a sudden, she squeezes her eyes shut and moans, pushes herself back against him to the hilt, fast, and hears him inhale suddenly in surprise.

“I was waiting for this,” she tells him. Lets him grip her hips and fuck her hard and fast for a bit until she pushes herself back upright onto her hands, and then he slows down a little, reaches around for her clit and buries his face in the back of her neck.

“Fuck, I’m gonna come if you keep doing that,” she says, agonizingly close, overwhelmed by sensation from both front and back.

“Good,” he says, “I want you to.” He holds her in place as she rides the wave and her legs start shaking, fucks her through it. When she can’t take anymore she turns around and jerks him off a little with her dominant hand, wrapping her other arm around his neck, her dress kind of a wrinkled mess now.

“Do you think you can finish?”

“Not now,” he says, sighing. “Fuck, you smell so good. What is this? Is this new?” He can’t get his face out of her throat. He wants to fuck her and bite her shoulder and breathe her in; close isn’t close enough.

“Some essential oil thing my cousin gave me, I can’t remember what it’s called,” she tells him. “You like it?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “I always like how you smell, but this is good too.”

Samira kisses him again, long and soft and wet, and then she pulls away to check herself in the mirror, disheveled. Tries to fix her hair a little, puts her dress back on, lets him zip it for her, his hands warm on her shoulder blades.

“Looks like I gotta do my lipstick again in the car,” she says, wiping some of it off the edge of his mouth with her thumb. He smiles against her hand. “Everyone is gonna be able to tell, I look like a mess.”

“What if I want them to,” he replies, grinning, and adds, “anyway, you look great. Don’t worry about it.”

When they get to the bar Samira goes in first, and Jack sits in the truck for a bit, trying to make himself relax. Act normal, he thinks. Try not to stare. By the time he’s inside, he finds Robby sitting at the bar. At first he avoids the group of residents in the large booth in the back having a round together; tells himself he can have one whiskey and one beer and that’s it, because later he’ll have to be sober enough to drive.

Robby’s looking at him, curious. “You’re busted,” he says. “I know that look.”

“What? I don’t have a look.”

“You sure do. I was making the same face at a party just like this years ago watching Heather tell everyone she matched into emergency medicine. I think I also made the same face when she graduated med school.” Robby sounds fond, a little wistful.

“They’re too good for us.” Jack is heartfelt.

“Can’t argue with that.”

“She’ll easily have my job in just a few years,” Jack says, lifting his chin for a moment to gesture toward Samira. Santos is whispering something hilarious in her ear; she throws her head back and laughs and laughs, teeth extra white and her lipstick bright. Jack can almost feel her happiness radiating to him all the way across the room.

“She might. But she’ll still need your battlefield guidance sometimes. We all do. Couldn’t replace you.”

“You flatter me,” Jack replies, rolling his eyes.

“You two are a match. Couple of workaholics,” Robby says, shaking his head. “Perfect for each other. Setting a new record for fewest days of leave used in one financial year.”

“She makes me want to go on vacation.”

Robby laughs at that, skeptical. “I’ve never heard you talk about wanting to go on vacation, really. Only ever had to remind you to use your days so they don’t expire. I think the longest you ever took was a few days at the cabin.”

“She makes me want to take her on vacation. A whole week even. Hell, maybe even two.”

“Well, go ahead and put in a request. I’ll do my best to look the other way,” Robby says, grinning.

“I’m going to tell you something in confidence,” Jack says, turning to him.

“Alright,” Robby says, meeting his gaze. “Shoot.”

“She’s staying with me right now. Uh, in my basement.”

“What?”

“There was a shooting at her apartment building, very likely a death. It happened while I was there visiting her. I wasn’t going to let her go back alone.”

“Jesus. Should I even ask you to tell me when or how that happened?”

“Please don’t.”

“Did you draw your weapon?” Did you draw it on her, Robby thinks, but stops himself from saying it.

“Don’t.” Jack repeats. They just stare at each other for a second, Jack willing him to understand. “We have tried our best to be discreet at work. And our schedules are almost completely opposed sometimes…she’s in my house, but I feel like I barely see her other than to hand over. I miss her.”

“I think this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you not to do this,” Robby says carefully. “You know, power differentials, professional boundaries, conflicts of interest, improper conduct leading to discipline, all that stuff. I remember that night you called in that you were running late, and she left early. I’m not stupid, Jack.”

“Nobody said you were,” Jack replies, patiently. “She just had a really bad day, I was the one who told her to come home early.”

“I figured.”

“Robby, I’m just not going to listen to you when it comes to this. You’re not one to talk. We agreed we’d tell HR if she wants to live with me permanently. We’ll do all the paperwork.”

“Has she been looking for a new place?”

“My house is real nice,” Jack says with a shrug, deflecting. He doesn’t want to jinx anything, or share any more details.

He downs the rest of his whiskey and makes his way across the room to her. Pretends like they didn’t drive here together, like he didn’t bend her over a table and fuck her senseless at his front door just an hour and a half ago. Greets her and says, “Congratulations, Dr. Mohan,” carefully puts one hand on her bare upper arm and kisses her cheek, polite. “Can I buy you a drink?”

They go to the bar together, where he concentrates on not touching her, aware of the many eyes on them. He orders a club soda with lime and a gin and tonic for her.

“So what goals do you want to accomplish as chief resident?” he asks.

“I want to learn how to float a pulmonary artery catheter,” she says. “I want to crack a chest at least one more time before I make attending. I want to stop working so much overtime. And I want to revise my article to get it accepted into a second journal. Actually, scratch that. I want to present our work at a conference.”

Jack laughs. “Oh, easy,” he says sarcastically. “You can have dibs on the first chest we open up but don’t tell Santos. And it better not be open because you puncture a ventricle trying to place a PA catheter.”

“I know what v-tach looks like,” she says, amused. “Don’t worry.”

“Smart and beautiful too,” he whispers in her ear, his mouth barely moving, as they walk back to the booth. Just to rile her up. She looks back toward him, almost trips herself on the back of a chair.

“Get ahold of yourself,” she chastises him, but she’s not mad, she’s smiling. Jack asks the group if they’ve eaten and offers to buy a couple of pizzas, to the delight of Santos and Mel, who were pre-gaming before this at Santos’ place. Whitaker pulls a bag of chips out of nowhere and sets it on the table next to his beer, prepared. Shen and Ellis are already sharing a basket of fries but say they’ll have some pizza, too.

Robby just watches them. If he also feels a twist of grief and regret in his stomach then, thinking about Heather on match day, about the fact that she even got pregnant that year, secretly, he doesn’t let on. Just finishes his drink, and decides that after one more he’ll make the rounds, saying goodbye, go home alone.

When they finally head home that night, Samira takes his keys to go out to the truck first and Jack lingers behind for few minutes before he joins her. She is flushed and happy, a sheen of sweat along her collarbone from the heat inside the bar. When he gets in the driver’s side, she reclines the seat back a little and sighs, pleasantly tired, eyes closed. Jack starts the truck and brushes her cheek with the back of his knuckles.

“Hey, sleepyhead. We should invite your mom over to celebrate your promotion,” he ventures. “If you want.” This feels like a strategically good time to ask, the good mood she’s in.

“Yeah, but I’m scared she won’t like you.”

“I don’t care. It won’t change how I feel about any of this. Talk to her and ask when she wants to come. I can book her a flight.”

“You don’t have to do that. Also she’s never going to stop asking about you, once I break the seal,” Samira adds.

“That’s fine by me. Maybe we can get along,” he says, merging onto the highway. Samira lets her head fall to the side, temple against the window, and peers up at the lights flickering by in passing. “It means something to me, to meet her. And I want you to meet my sister and my neice,” he adds. A pause. “I’m so proud of you, baby,” he adds. “Chief Resident. Soon to be attending. Published author. You really had a big year.”

Samira closes her eyes; feels tears. The good kind. The kind that appear when joy might crack your ribs open all of a sudden and remake you. “Thank you,” she whispers, and reaches out toward his shoulder to touch him, wanting to be tethered.

She has a day shift in the morning, so when they get home she dutifully rehydrates and takes her Advil, but in bed with Jack she’s still awake enough to want to talk.

“I told Robby you’re staying here. At the bar,” Jack ventures.

“Oh, shit, why? He’s never going to leave me alone about it. We’ll get in trouble.”

“He’ll leave it alone. And if he doesn’t, tell me and I’ll set him straight.”

“What is it between you two?” she mumbles, rhetorically.

“Bonded by suffering. He’s a goddamn pain in the ass but I love him in a certain way, you know? We’ll always owe each other.”

“I see.” Samira rolls onto her side and tucks herself into Jack’s body, wrapping an arm around his hip and resting her forehead against his sternum. He radiates warmth. She’s getting sleepy, feeling ultra relaxed. “Last week when I left early, that day? You told me you loved me and I didn’t say it back. I was just scared.”

“It’s okay.”

The reason he doesn’t mind is he pays so much attention to her actions. He cares less about hearing her say it; sure, it would be nice, and make him bloom with a wave of happiness from the inside out, but in the meantime, he doesn’t need that. She holds him, kisses him, washes his hair in the shower, wants him, cooks for him, looks after his cat, responds to his journal articles and his stories, talks him out of his nightmares, does manual therapy on his back and his hip, laughs at his jokes, looks at him first across the room at work when they’re in the thick of it, reaches for him in her sleep in the middle of the night.

Isn’t that the same thing, he thinks. Isn’t that really all it is?

“I do love you, though,” she says, into his shirt, shaky. He gets his arm under her and scoops her up into a hug, turning onto his back and bringing her along, until she’s suddenly draped across his torso, yelping with surprise. He kisses her and kisses her, hands in her hair.

Samira picks up a night shift, the first one in a few weeks, and takes a short lunch break with Jack on the roof just to split a chicken parmesan sandwich. She’s tired, couldn’t get any sleep during the day, so she’s drinking diet Coke in the middle of the night.

“I want to go on a trip,” he says. “Can you make a vacation request?”

Neither of them have taken any leave since Christmas.

“What, to overlap with yours? I’m pretty sure we’re not allowed to do that.” She shifts to a cross legged position, across from Jack seated with his back agains the wall, sandwich out on butcher paper between them next to a pile of kettle chips.

“Robby would probably approve it,” Jack tells her.

“Yeah, and then I would have to listen to people gossiping about us going out of town together, that I’m getting special treatment. No thanks.”

“You’re spiraling.”

“I’m not,” she insists. “We have to go to HR before we do that.”

“I just want to take you to a beach for a week or something.”

“A beach?”

“You need a break. We need a break.”

“You don’t even like the beach.” She squints at him a little, skeptical.

“Ok, a forest then. The mountains? I don’t know. I feel like I’ve barely seen you. Imagine we get a whole week without having to go to work.”

Samira puts her hand on his forearm, suddenly, and he freezes for a moment, sandwich in mid air. “I’m right here,” she reminds him.

“Yeah,” he says, shrugging. “But, you know what I mean.”

“Ok. Let’s go to HR,” he says, and she takes a big breath in, then exhales suddenly. “After that, vacation.”

In the end they decide to go to a hot springs in the Alleghenies.

The sun is strong and her skin is darker now, a hint of a bikini-shaped tan line at her hips that Jack wants to sink his teeth into. He had been hiding out under an umbrella, napping and reading, gradually getting a little drunk on Corona and lime. When he woke up and opened his eyes, focused on her, he felt like he was waking up into a dream. Samira’s swimming in circles in the pool for a while, then floating on her back, eyes closed against the sun.

Later they have lazy sex in the hotel room, Samira on her back on the edge of the bed and Jack between her legs, holding one up against his shoulder. He slams into her, methodical and slow, and listens to her moaning. Turns his head to kiss her calf and gently sinks his teeth into it.

“I skipped my meds,” he gasps out, “I think I can come,” and she makes a sound between a moan and a cry, tightening herself on him suddenly, opening her hips as much as she can.

“Not yet,” she says, “not yet, I want to be on top,” and he has to stop so they can switch positions. She wants to climb on top of him and hold him down, grind against him and tell him not to come until she does, but can’t get a good grip on both of his wrists with her smaller hand.

“Put your hands here,” she says, and pushes them behind his lower back, as if he’s handcuffed there.

“I want to touch you,” he insists, but it’s a weak protest. He’s smiling.

“Not until I - oh, hold still,” she says, and then her palms are flat on his chest and she shifts forward until the pressure is just right. She gets loud. The people in the room next door can definitely hear her. “Oh, fuck, oh fuck this is so good, god, I wanted this.” Jack groans and involuntarily his hips jerk up against her. She pushes him down again. “No,” she says, stern, and his breathing is frantic. “Not until I - oh -” she comes hard, frantically grinding her hips down for a good half a minute, legs shaking, until he joins her. She’s the one to pull his hands free, falling down against him so they can roll onto their sides until she eases her hips away.

Jack opens his eyes for a moment but then closes them again. When Samira gets up to go to the bathroom he raises one hand into the air, vaguely reaching for her. “Hey, where you going,” he says.

“Just a minute,” she tells him. She stares at herself in the mirror after peeing, looks at the pale stripe of skin where the strap of her swimsuit crossed her collarbone, her lips pink from the sun and from kissing, her hair all puffy and tangled. She feels lethargic and satisfied, too tired to even try to fix her hair.

She lies down next to Jack and curls herself against him. “Why don’t you go on vacations more? I mean, I’m broke, so that’s why I can’t. But what’s your excuse?”

“Don’t like to be alone with myself. I’d rather be at busy at work,” Jack tells her, his face in her hair. “It’s different with you.” Isn’t everything, he thinks.

She’s radiating heat from being in the sun all day, warm against him. “Good,” she says, pleased.

The next day they hike in the woods, go out for lunch, and come back to the pool for sunset, sitting in the corner with their drinks, facing west, watching the sky turn pink and gold and amber.

And they talk about next year.

“Ok, so the problem is if you go to Shock Trauma you’re just going to be doing mostly trauma.”

“What’s the problem with that? I like that.”

“I think you’ll get bored. But they do have research also. You probably would miss all the weird internal med and hematology and endocrine cases. Sepsis presentations. Neuro.”

“But I love trauma.”

“You like everything, baby, that’s why you like EM. And I don’t think it would suit you because you won’t be able to take time to talk to families. The pace is bonkers. They’re going to want you working in resuscitation on the roof moving patients in and downstairs in like an hour or into the OR, and there’s no time for talking to families up there. I’d like it. Fuck, I’d love it. But I also hate talking to families.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, because I’m terrible at it.”

He has his arm up, his elbow on the edge of the pool, unintentionally flexing a little, and she becomes aware of a younger woman eyeing the two of them from the other end, eyes going back and forth from her to him, the girl’s mouth open a little. Samira raises her chin and smirks for a second, meets the girl’s gaze, boldly, as if to say, I know, right? Just look at him. The girl meets Samira’s eyes then quickly looks away, caught, and Samira feels a rush of arousal, suddenly.

“You’re not terrible at anything,” Samira says to him, faintly, and sighs.

Underwater, she wraps her hand around his thigh for a moment.

“First, you’re very biased,” he says, startled, looking down at her hand on his thigh, “and second, half the time I ask you or Parker to go in there and talk to the families for me, because I suck at it,” he adds, ducking his head like he’s embarrassed. “I can’t be like you and Robby when it comes to that. Where I’m from there’s no families and no time for talking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I learned to practice medicine at war,” he says, and puts his arm around her. “No families. Half the time the patient’s not talking, either. If you keep your hand on my leg much longer we might have to go upstairs right now, but I was originally going to say we can stay here until the sun sets, what do you think?”

Samira laughs and releases his thigh, wraps her arms around his neck and floats gently against him instead.

Above them the sky is jewel-toned and dramatic, and the water is still warm. Samira rests her cheek on his shoulder and closes her eyes, imagines herself walking into a new hospital without him, wearing the characteristic Shock Trauma pink scrubs, on the first day of a fellowship. She’s surprised to find she doesn’t have the burst of anxiety in her belly she was expecting to feel.

Chapter 4: but then it isn't

Summary:

samira's mom makes an appearance and some crazy shit happens at work (trigger warning for gun violence again)

Chapter Text

Jack doesn’t know what he expected Samira’s mother to be like, but it wasn’t exactly this.

She is incredibly beautiful for her age, warm, in a formal way. The same height as Samira, a big smile, thick dark hair peppered with gray and white. He recognizes the way grief has solidified in her because it’s basically like looking in a mirror.

He doesn’t wear his ring anymore but he still feels it a little. Interacting with people as if he is behind a pane of glass all the time.

She arrives at his house with a shopping bag full of groceries and beauty products, wearing a green lehenga and yellow gold jewlery, kohl, lipstick. When he opens the door, they shake hands because he doesn’t have the nerve to try to hug her, just yet, but he does take her bags immediately, trying to be chivalrous.

There’s a moment where they pause, staring at one another in silence, and then Samira appears behind him, brushes past him, to give her a big hug. He notices that she still wears a wedding ring. Jack looks at it quickly and looks away again, up at Samira, who is happy and laughing like a kid, hugging her.

“Amma,” she says, and her voice becomes a girl’s again for a second and that makes Jack’s heart feel like someone’s got a hand around it, squeezing tight.

They eat dinner together, a combination of things Jack grilled and side dishes Samira made, with pickle from the store and raita from scratch. They make small talk. Jack tells some stories from being in the military; the funny ones. The ones that make people laugh, not look at him horrified.

Her mother keeps looking back and forth between the two of them, as if she’s trying to figure something out. When Samira is telling her a story about work Jack leans back into his chair for a moment and holds his beer in his lap and just looks at her, smiling a little, and out of the corner of his eye he can see her mother studying him.

They’re eating dessert when she asks him if he wants kids.

“Uh,” he says, and clears his throat. “We haven’t talked about it yet, actually.” Samira is looking daggers at her mom. Under the table Jack reaches for her and puts his hand on her knee.

“I’ve always prayed for grandchildren,” her mother adds, passive aggressively, and then Samira suddenly is up to her feet, gets busy clearing off the table and bringing dishes into the kitchen to rinse them. Mom looks at Jack and he just smiles, trying to be polite. It’s something he has never allowed himself to want after his wife died, and anyway, Samira has always been very consumed by her work. As much as he’s consumed by his. They never talked about it.

Jack offers to stay home and clean up after the meal while they go for a walk together, and he watches out the living room window as Samira walks away with her down the sidewalk, arm in arm.

“Do you think he’s not a good match?” Samira asks.

“I think you could only be with another doctor. I like him, if he makes you happy.”

“He really does.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when you moved in together? When you got together?”

“It was supposed to be just temporary, the moving in part,” Samira says, shrugging. “I didn’t plan to…I don’t know. I thought you’d be upset with me, because he’s white and he’s older.”

“A long time ago I gave up trying to convince you to follow tradition, honey.”

“I can still tell you’re upset, though. Just tell me what it is.”

“I’m not upset.”

“Amma!”

“The age gap,” she sighs. “I just imagine him getting sick, or something happening to him, and then you’ll be left alone, like I am. I don’t want that for you. It’s hard. It’s very hard.”

They stop under a streetlight, and Samira turns to face her, tries to shove down the urge to cry, suddenly.

“He takes really good care of himself.”

“Sometimes it’s not in our control. You know that.”

“I just want you to be happy for me. If I was with someone younger the same thing could happen, just unexpectedly. You and dad were the same age.”

“I know,” her mother says, and sighs, looks away, because she can’t explain it.

For her there is no happiness without bracing for impact, there is no enjoyment without preparing for the worst.

Samira understands what this is - where it comes from - immigrant mindset, the widow’s grief - but that doesn’t make it any easier to talk about. “I just don’t want you to get hurt like I did,” her mother tells her. “You can choose better for yourself, someone your age.”

“That’s funny,” Samira says, shaking her head. “He said the same thing when we kissed the first time, that he didn’t want to hurt me, that I could probably find someone better, or younger. But I don’t care, and we’re really happy. I love him.”

They get into an argument after that, a real one, and Samira hates herself for snapping, for her sarcasm, but everything that follows. It feels like being a teenager: angry and hurt and scared and cornered and fighting, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Eventually, they both shut down, and change the subject. They do a lap around the neighborhood while her mom catches Samira up on the extended family and the neighbors. Samira feels despondent and realizes this is what was behind her delay in telling her mom about everything, the delay in telling her to visit.

When they come back, Jack is in bed reading, opting to give them privacy, and he hears them making tea and conversing, kind of heated, in Urdu through his bedroom door, cracked open. For a moment he closes his eyes and puts the book down and just listens. Samira sounds like another woman in that language, the tone of her voice different, lower, the cadence faster. He hears them go down the basement stairs, presumably so Samira can get her mom settled. Waits for her to come back up and join him. For a while it’s quiet, then he hears something that sounds like Samira crying in the living room so he gets up to find her.

“What happened?” he’s whispering.

She’s on the couch, her face in her hands, elbows on her knees, hunched forward like someone punched her in the gut. She doesn’t resist when he pulls her to her feet and brings her into his room and closes the door behind them.

“Hey. Talk to me.”

“Nothing, I, I just can’t do it.”

Jack puts his arms around her. “You can’t do what?” he says into her hair. “I don’t think it’s nothing.”

“Spend time with my mom and not get upset and feel like a fucking teenager again. Do you know what she told me?”

“What?”

“That she worries you’re going to die before me,” Samira says, exhaling, ragged and loose, eyes wet, “because you’re so much older, and then I’ll have the same broken heart she has. But worse, because I could prevent it, by choosing someone my own age,” (here she pauses to inhale all of a sudden, which Jack knows means she’s gonna start crying), “and in our case, our family, it wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t something she had control of, it was an anomaly, but she thinks that I could somehow control it by choosing correctly, which is insane, and.” Samira pauses, her breath a shuddering mess, rubs her eyes. “I didn’t choose you so much as this just happened…I stopped being able to imagine myself with anyone else…I wanted to be around you all the time. And then I started living here and I have what I wanted all along, but, also what I wanted was for her to like you and for her to be happy for me, but I’ll never have that-”

“Sweetheart,” Jack says, “hey, slow down,” and he wants to say ten other other things too, but he just leans back and looks at her for a second, her eyes darting around the room like an instruction manual to all of this will appear suddenly, in mid air. “Hey.”

He kisses her and for a long moment, she doesn’t move except to soften against him.

“You know on tv, how people’s families are happy when they fall in love,” she says, and he nods. “I would settle for just a fraction of that but she won’t even fake it for me.”

“She’s afraid,” Jack says, because he knows about that. “She’s happy too, but probably more afraid. And she doesn’t *know* me. Maybe she just needs to see us in action together? She didn’t even know who I was until a few weeks ago. I could be anybody.”

“I’m sorry, this isn’t easy for me,” Samira says, looking down. “I should have told her sooner.”

“I’m not upset with you. Just sayin’ she doesn’t have a lot of information.” She believes him, somehow; when anyone else says things like this to her, she assumes they are lying to be polite. “Let’s try again tomorrow, maybe it was just an awkward night? We can go to the art museum or something. Ask what she wants to do.”

After they go to bed, Jack tries to read but can’t focus. Keeps switching from one thing to another, losing his place. He’s sitting up and Samira is sprawled in his lap, knocked out with the blanket pulled almost over her head. He lets his head fall back against the wall with a thunk and closes his eyes, his hand still on her upper back, and tries to test if his brain is willing to sleep or not. It’s not.

He’s trying to digest all of this: a woman in his house whom he loves, her mother in his basement, all the complicated grief. Long ago he had tried to make peace with the fact that he would be here alone for good, and now Samira is as much a part of his home as he is, as his furniture and his artwork, as his memories of his wife.

He didn’t realize she was that lonely, is the thing. Maybe it was bias: when you’re pushing 50, almost everyone younger seems happier and less anxious than you, like a rule. Maybe she was just good at hiding it, better. Like he used to be. He knew she didn’t have siblings or pets, or anyone except her mom, and a constellation of distant extended family she doesn’t stay in touch that much with, or see in person except on rare occaisions. And he’d watched her become friends with their colleagues at work, which took years, because all she did was work and sleep. But he didn’t realize she also had kind of a black hole of grief buried in there, like he did, just with a different story behind it.

Once at work he had noticed Santos snapping at Princess in Tagalog, found her in the break room to ask what happened, because rule number one is ask for help when you need help and rule number two is listen to the nurses.

Santos hadn’t wanted to tell him, at first, but he pressed.

“Princess was making a comment about you and Samira, that she has daddy issues and that’s why you’re together, and I was just telling her to stop, is all,” Santos had said, unable to look him in the face. “I just said enough. She doesn’t know you two like that. And that’s not what it is, anyway. Besides, Princess’s dad is around, but her boyfriend is twelve years older than her! She must be projecting some bullshit.”

“Ah,” he had responded, as he thought about how to reply, tracking Santos over his shoulder as he reached for the coffee.

“Samira is my friend. I had to say something,” she’d added, before quickly heading back to the floor.

Jack had reassured her he doesn’t let things like that bother him, in the moment. But he still sometimes thinks about it, wonders if that’s why they ended up here after all. If all along she was just looking for something to take the edge off her grief.

He sleeps for almost six hours and gets up mid-morning, makes chai for everyone how Samira taught him, which earns him a real smile from her mom, the surprise on her face. They go to the Carnegie art museum, and he walks through the Scaife Galleries holding Samira’s hand, admiring the way she looks in sandals and a long skirt, pretending they aren’t traumatized for a living, pretending they’re normal people enjoying a day off together. Samira speaks a mix of English and Urdu the whole time, switching back and forth.

Samira drops him off at home so he can nap before work and spends the rest of the day with her mom; he isn’t sure doing what. When it’s 10pm and he’s sitting down to have coffee, finally, he calls her to see how it went, and she sounds better, more relaxed than the day before.

Did she say anything about me? he wants to ask. Tells himself to do it later, after she’s gone home. He wonders what Samira has told her about their relationship, in private, in Urdu when he can’t understand, catching up with her on the phone in the basement.

“You guys getting along okay?”

“Why, you’re gonna be mad at my mom if we’re not?”

He can hear the smile in her voice.

“That a bad thing?”

“You’re always so protective. I’ll be okay, Jack.”

“Of course I am. Obviously I am,” he scoffs. It’s as innate to him as doing pushups or staying up late, needing white noise at night to drown out his thoughts; the people he loves are his to defend. “I’ll see you in the morning. I gotta go. Love you.”

The entrance to the emergency department is well fortified. Flanked by security, the triage desk in its glass cage, the metal detector.

But the hospital has a lot of doors.

The night everything happens, weeks later, some of them are open.

Later Jack will wonder who swiped their card to let the guy in at first, if he just laughed and smiled and said, I’m new, would you be able to let me in? Or, I forgot my ID, would you be able to let me in? And that was that, fate sealed, someone thinking they were doing a favor to another employee.

It’s shift change, 6:50pm, and he’s been at work for 20 minutes already, Samira coming off her day shift, contemplating staying later to help out before heading home. Most of them are around for handover. Dana is home sick. Lena came in early. Langdon, Mel, Santos, Shen, Ellis, Whitaker. Robby and Jack. Samira and Heather.

When the gunman comes around the corridor toward the bullpen he’s shouting something, and Jack turns to look, sudden recognition sweeping across his features, and hits the deck behind the desk, taking Samira down with him almost by the nape of her neck, strong arming her.

Shots fired.

Jack’s brain switches from civilian back to soldier and his knife is out, he’s scrambling on the floor to the edge of the desk, able to tell by the change in the man’s voice that he’s turned with his back toward them, firing at security, into patient’s rooms, screaming something that comes through as static and noise to Jack, meaningless.

Samira is grabbing his arm with a vice grip, trying to pull him back, because she knows what he’s going to do, even though she, too, is in shock. No, he sees her mouth moving to say. No, no, no - Jack - no - and he isn’t thinking at all, when he twists his arm out of her hand, kneels, crouched, for a moment just to gauge the distance.

When you’re new to the armed forces and learning defensive tactics one of the things they teach you is the Tueller Drill. It demonstrates that an average attacker armed with a knife can close a distance of 21 feet in about one and a half seconds. Faster than the average armed person can draw, aim and fire a weapon. Jack is not an average attacker with a knife, and the distance is less than 21 feet.

When he launches himself from a half kneeling position on the floor and extends the knife in front of him, running at this man’s back, he has a brief thought that this might be it for him.

Might be the last thing he does.

He’s at peace with that.

The man is able to turn halfway toward Jack, finger still on the trigger, spraying an arc of ammo across the desk and up into the ceiling as Jack tackles him from behind. He swings big, sinking all five inches of his folding knife into the back of the guy’s neck, above C7, above the edge of his bulletproof vest, into his spinal cord, the tip lodging itself against the curve of a vertebral body with a sudden stop.

He goes down like a house of cards, neurologically unplugged and screaming turned to gurgling, Jack on his back like a monkey, his free arm wrapped around the man’s throat. The rifle lands under him until Jack pulls it away, elbowing it out of his reach.

“Clear,” he shouts, “clear,” and looks up, to survey the damage, the security officers down across the room. “It’s over,” he says, suddenly realizing everyone does not know that it is, can’t understand him. “It’s over. It’s over. It’s over. He’s down.”

He starts to get really, really dizzy. His vision tunnels to static. He blacks out.

In the morning they will count 14 fatalities. Flesh wounds of varying degrees to doctors, nurses.
Patients sent to surgery. One security guard will bleed out via his right femoral artery in the middle of the hallway.

EMS and SWAT respond to PTMC.

Walsh and Garcia run the scene, Walsh saving the life of three staff and one patient who were almost mortally wounded. Luckily, change of shift in the OR means the most help they could have is available.

(Jack will think about that later, that this man chose shift change to hurt as many of them as possible, not realizing that’s also when they would have the most help, the most doctors and nurses and surgeons they ever have in the building at one time.)

Samira, unharmed, will wake Jack from syncope by pounding on his chest, calling his name, panicked, and he will reach up for her without thinking, pulling her on top of him, both of them in shock. He will run his hands over her body and her limbs, expecting bleeding, uncomprehending, unable to calm down, hyperventilating, heart rate in the 190s.

The entire department will end up on diversion for a bit, patients transferred to Presby and to community hospitals, emergency plans activated to accomodate their usual patient load.

Jack will be sedated with Versed IV push there on the floor, given anti-hypertensives. Pain medication when they realize how his leg landed under him when he tackled the guy.

He will not come back into the building for a full week.

They will never be able to ask this man why he did it.

Investigators will pull up treatment notes, billing records, personal information; they will speculate, theorize; hospital bills, psychosis, political motivations, delusions, maybe? But no one will ever really know.

Samira will go back to the building with him, one week later, and have a panic attack in the ambulance bay.

She will leave the property that afternoon without even walking through the door.

The end of her final year of residency is in one month.

But then it isn’t, because they both take a leave of absence.

He always thought he would stay at PTMC for good, no matter how much it hurt, but he didn’t factor love into it, didn’t factor Samira into it, that he wouldn’t be able to ask that of her after what they went through.

“I have to get out of there,” she says, in tears, with him at home, on the couch during her leave. “I feel so guilty but I can’t do it.”

“Don’t feel guilty,” he offers, uselessly, knowing it’s just something to say, because he does too.

“I can’t,” she repeats, “I can’t go back,” over and over.

He doesn’t argue with her.

Jack knows how to deal with something like this, knows what he needs to do. Does it.

But he’s so fucking tired of it. He wants to never have to use these skills again.

He makes phone calls for them. Asks for favors. Accomodation to finish her residency. A fellowship in Baltimore, a critical care attending role for him as part of a transport team in their system. Locum shifts at the Level 1 department at Johns Hopkins.

They have nightmares, they take medication. Samira tries EMDR. Finds her own therapist. He pays for things and thinks about asking her to marry him to get her onto his retiree Tricare, then realizes that would tie their wedding to this fucking shooting, and pushes the idea out of his mind again. She asks him to take her shooting and they go to the range together, where she shreds targets until she stops flinching at the noise, until her breathing is smooth and even.

His sister comes to stay with them for a couple weeks, and she loves Samira immediately. Looks after them both like he’s a kid again. It’s her job to make sure he gets dinner and goes to bed on time and is showering and getting out of the house, that they both are. She has a way of doing it that isn’t overbearing.

He has a flashback at home at one point, not long after the shooting, and comes out of it sitting on the floor next to his coffee table. Both of them there with him, his sister and Samira, and he bursts into tears, exhausted, thankful.

He always thought he would be alone.

He knows what to do. But he always thought he would have to do it alone.

Chapter 5: heroic in its ordinariness

Summary:

all is well, folks.

Chapter Text

two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness,
the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine
–look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

excerpt of XIX
Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems

Samira’s last several shifts are uneventful, but she’s operating in a fog the whole time, anxious until it’s all over. She has a prescription for Ativan and burns through what’s left of it just as her clinical hours are done.

One night she’s getting ready to go in with Jack for a night shift and gets shaky and nauseous and dizzy in the living room just before leaving the house.

“Maybe I’m getting sick,” she says, hesitant. “Maybe I caught something.”

“No, you’re having a flashback. Here, sit down.” He recognizes the look on her face, her eyes vacant, hands shaky.

“I’ll be fine,” she insists, voice hollow, as if saying it out loud will make it so. “I’ll be fine.”

“Samira. Sit down.” She feels his hands on her shoulders. She reluctantly does so on the couch, then, one shoe on her foot and the other in her hand. Jack takes the shoe from her and sets it down, kneels in front of her, taking her hands in his own. “Squeeze,” he says, and she does, as hard as she can, until his fingertips go white from the pressure for a moment. “There you go. Breathe. Do we need to be late tonight? Do we need to call in?”

“No,” she says, feeling guilty, weak. “No, I have to go.”

“We can be late.”

“Jack,” she sighs.

“It’s allowed. What you need is allowed.”

“No, I would rather just go,” she says, and breathes deep, meeting his stare. She thinks about calling out and how everyone will be asking her what happened and is she okay and is everything alright the next time she comes in. It’s pre-emptively exhausting, just to consider that. Easier to push through instead. “Let’s just get this over with.”

That night he finds what feels like a hundred excuses to check on her, and nobody says shit to him about it. Nobody says shit to him about anything, these days. He snaps at Robby sometimes, and Robby just nods, looking at the floor, none of his characteristic pushback left in him.

While he appreciates their gratitude, he also sometimes just wishes things could go back to normal. Misses his back and forth with Walsh, rolling his eyes at Shen’s antics, laughing at Santos piping up with the most out of pocket takes at 3:30 in the morning, joking with him like he’s a member Gen Z, too.

After Samira is done at the bedside, she treats studying like a job and puts in a daily 8am to 6pm shift in the university library, packing herself lunches and bringing a thermos full of tea with her.

Jack works, trying to get back to full time, but he can’t. It’s too much. Eventually he adjusts his hours down a little, waiting to see what’s going to happen with their new jobs. He needs a day off between shifts sometimes instead of rushing through four in a row like he used to, or else his nervous system is shot by the last day.

Samira can tell, now, as soon as he gets home in the morning what kind of night it was. Sometimes he’s dissociated, numb, needs to be told to shower and eat. Moving as if in a fog. On those mornings she stays home until he’s settled, afraid to leave him by himself. There are some mornings, too, when she never makes it to the library, just lingers in bed talking to him about everything and nothing, holding him. Waiting for his brain to come back from wherever it is.

“Will it always be like this?” she asks, one such morning, sprawled on top of him with her head on his chest, a living weighted blanket, half-drowsing.

Stay here with me, she thinks.

“No,” he tells her, “but I don’t know for how long it goes on.” He doesn’t dare admit to her how bad it was the first time, home from deployment, what his wife went through, how long it went on for. He finds her hand with his own and inhales deeply, sighing into her hair.

“Feel like I’m gonna crawl out of my skin,” he says.

“Let’s get out of the house.”

He washes down a handful of pills a shot of whiskey in the kitchen and then they go for a walk together through the neighborhood. He doesn’t even bother wearing sunglasses, figuring he’s fucked for sleep now anyway; it’s already midmorning. When they get back he goes to lay down again and she joins him, sliding her hands under his tshirt, moving to pull it over his head.

“I don’t know if I can,” he begins, medication side effects in mind, but she shakes her head.

“It doesn’t matter. Just to get your mind off it,” she tells him. She’s right. She kisses him, palms warm on his chest. When she’s coming, straddling him, using him, pushing him back against the headboard, she pauses to sink her nails into his shoulders. His anxiety is gone, briefly, replaced by the pure clean feeling of pain. He can’t come, but it’s a form of transmutation anyway. When she kisses him one last time before climbing off it feels like she’s saying amen.

If he has nightmares during the day while she’s out of the house studying, he doesn’t saying anything about that; but she always tries to come home before he leaves for work in the evening.

Always wants to tell him she loves him, to look at his face, before he leaves.

“I’ll see you when you get home,” she always says. Looking at his face, evaluating how bad it is by the bags under his eyes, by how distant they look.

“Of course you’ll see me when I get home,” he tells her, and from anyone else it might even sound condescending. But not from him. He knows why she’s saying it, her prayer out loud, the fear of something happening again.

Pittsburgh, like all US cities, has its share of routine GSWs. Accidents and drive-bys. All week they’ve been looking forward to having an evening where they’re off together, finally, and then a seventeen year old girl gets shot by her boyfriend at 5 in the afternoon on Samira’s day shift. She runs the case and Robby calls him to come pick Samira up, he doesn’t want her going anywhere alone. When she comes down to meet him he parks and gets out of the car, takes her bag off her shoulder and tosses it into the backseat and crushes her against him, hugging her tight until she exhales, heavy, into his shoulder.

“Let’s go home,” he says.

“Yeah.”

He’s warming up leftovers when she comes out of the shower, and is confused for a moment when she turns off the stove, sets the lid back on the pan. She’s wearing a towel, her bare feet soft on the kitchen floor. He’s trying to remember when he last swept, looking down at her feet when she grabs him. He can feel the edge of the counter in his back when she kisses him hard, holding his face.

“Help me stop thinking,” she says, words muffled, half against his mouth, her tone pleading.

“Honey,” he begins, wanting to tell her to take a second. She has that look on her face, on the edge of something, frantic. How she gets sometimes. Her hands move down, tight on his arms, the blunted edge of her nails sinking in a little into his triceps through his shirt.

He leads her to his room and kisses her, works his way down her body when the towel falls onto the floor, lays her out on her back and grabs her by the crease of one hip to bring her to the edge of the bed. Fucks her hard and fast, the air punched out of her lungs in gasps, and when she comes she reaches up for him - into nothing until he leans down and collapses against her. The pressure of his hips is what she wants to grind against. When she finishes, it’s crying out.

He rests his face in her neck and tries to catch his breath.

“Hey,” he says, tentative. “You here with me, baby?”

“Yeah,” she tells him, sighing, and he rolls to one side, taking her with him, limbs strewn across each other.

“I love you,” he says, leaving out how his heart dropped near to his feet when he got that call from Robby asking him to come and get her, assuming something really bad had happened, for a split second.

“Love you too. Oh, no, I scratched you,” she says, suddenly, her fingertips brushing over the red welts on his back.

“‘I like it,” he says. When he goes to work tomorrow and someone says hello, greets him with hug, or a slap on the back, he’ll be jolted momentarily from the sting of it, immediately pulled out of whatever bullshit his brain has latched onto.

“There’s got to be something wrong with us,” Samira observes with a low chuckle, resting against him.

“We went to hell and back. I knew the way but I wasn’t planning on you to join me.”

“No one else I’d rather make the journey with,” she says, a smile in her voice, and sighs.

The moment he chooses to ask her isn’t anything momentous, just another day in their life.

They’re eating dinner on his back deck, listening to crickets and watching the sunset.

“I want to get married,” he says, suddenly. Well, it sounds sudden to her, but he’s been thinking about it. She’s staring at him, but her smile is big. “Should I get down on one knee?” he asks, looking around for somewhere to put down his drink. “I can, it’s just gonna take me a minute, so-”

“You don’t have to! It’s a yes.” She pauses, narrows her eyes. “I’m not going to take your name, though.”

“I’d never ask you to. You’ve always published under Mohan,” he replies, scoffing.

“True,” she says. Takes a deep breath, kisses him, then buries her face in his neck.

“It’s going to be just like how things are now, but you get my Tricare and my pension, all my stuff when I die, plus we get a discount on taxes. Your mom is going to love it,” he adds, raising his eyebrows meaningfully, even though she can’t see his face. (Since the shooting, Samira’s mom has internalized the fact that Jack saved her daughter’s life, and suddenly they get along a lot more easily. Nothing like a close brush with death to put it all into perspective.)

“Hey. What is it?” he asks. He can see the wheels turning in the look on her face.

“I love you so much but there’s still a part of me that feels like something will go wrong.”

“We cheated death,” he reminds her. “Let yourself enjoy it. I love you too.” He leans back into his Adirondack chair for a second. “That night,” he says, “I had a moment where I thought it might have been suicide to run at him - he could have just as easily turned to face me…I thought maybe that WAS it. But I accepted it,” he says, sighing, “to save you and the others. I thought about it later and realized maybe why I was ready to die was, well….then I wouldn’t have to live without you.” But you would have had to go on without me, he thinks.

Samira’s eyes fill with tears and she reaches for him again, wraps her arms around him, leaning forward in her chair, overcome. Only Jack would propose and then immediately talk about suicide, she thinks, and only she’d get it.

“Thank you.” It can never be enough, but she’ll have the rest of her life to say it.

They have their wedding at a rural property just outside the city, and the weather is lucky that day. Samira’s family and their coworkers make up most of the guests, with a handful of Jack’s relatives there too. Samira doesn’t really have a bridal party, a little stressed about being the center of attention, but she lets her mom give input on the outfit and jewelry, lets her cousins take her out one night on the weekend before the wedding for a sort of bachelorette thing. Desi clothes for the ceremony, a slip dress and comfortable sandals for the reception. Open bar, a relatively small guest list, simple decorations.

She will remember her eyes blurring with tears as she came down the aisle to him, the way his smile looked. The way the drinks tasted. Dancing with Jack, and then later, drunk, dancing with Mel and Parker and Trinity. They made some of their vows out loud, in front of the audience, and Jack’s insistence, there was a part only for her, whispered in her ear.

They have their gold rings now, hers with a solitaire diamond. And plain silicone bands for work, though he’s been thinking about getting a tattoo.

Heather and Robby orbit around each other all night just like how Samira and Jack used to - Heather looks beautiful, keeps looking across the floor to find Robby, until he finally seats himself beside her and doesn’t leave her side.

Walsh and her wife are there, Langdon and Mel, Trinity and Garcia, Whitaker and one of the nurses. Javadi brings her boyfriend too, a med student one year below her. Samira watches everyone at dinner and is happy they all found someone, despite all the trauma.

Robby comes up to Jack after the ceremony is done and gives him a hug, claps him on the back, tears in his eyes, shaking his head. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

When they’re packing to move to Baltimore, Jack’s neice comes to visit and to lend a hand. Shows Samira some of his photos and military stuff, pictures of his late wife. He has a couple of medals, old uniforms. There’s a photo there from some barracks in Afghanistan, a much younger Walsh and Jack with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, standing at the edge of a group of guys gathered under a tent. Walsh’s hair much shorter, both of their smiles massive. Jack’s hair is mostly auburn, and his freckles are out of control from the desert sun. Samira stares at the photo for a long moment, realizing she’s never once seen Walsh smile like that in real life.

She’s struck by the breadth of her luck. Jack saved her life, saved everyone in there after that moment, then went on to help Walsh with the others who’d been hit. To be in the worst place, at the worst time. But also the right place at the right time, if this is her entire world, now, living under the umbrella of Jack’s care.

Every other month they have an all hands meeting for EMS that Jack goes to in person. Samira stops by to drop off Salvadoran food for lunch, and he texts her the number of the conference room so she can come upstairs to meet him because they only have half an hour.

As everyone’s filing out she greets him with a grin and a kiss, handing over a huge paper bag.

“I’ll see you tonight?” she says. They have plans to walk down to the harbor for a drink; she’s in the mood to dress up for once, pretend to be a real person and not just a doctor. Jack nods at her, squeezing the curve of her waist with one hand before turning back toward the conference room.

One of the medics makes a comment, then, not to him - but near him - within hearing distance, anyway - that he must be pretty rich if he can get a piece like that. It’s a comment on their age difference, and on the pay difference between the medics and the doctors. The room falls quiet. This kid is barely 19, brand new; has no sense of professionalism; this his first job and he’s still impulsive, rough around the edges.

Jack sets down the food and stands up, his face impassive. “Hallway,” he snaps, staring the guy down. The two of them step out.

“Sir-”

“If I hear you make a comment about a woman like that on the clock again you and I are going to have an HR problem. You can be a piece of shit all you like at home, but you can’t do it here.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Are you?”

“Uh,” the guy says, hesitating at the look on Jack’s face.

“And another thing, that was my /wife/,” Jack adds, leaning in, looking over the guy’s shoulder because he doesn’t trust himself to look at his face, his voice dropping, barely audible. “You ever comment on her again, you’re going to have a medical problem, not an HR problem, because I’m going to put your head through the wall. Now. Are we good?”

“Yeah,” the medic replies, eyes wide before he looks down, embarrassed. “Yeah. Yes sir. Sorry.”

“Let’s get back to lunch,” Jack says, already walking away.

After so many years at the bedside, Jack is still adjusting to his transport job. It feels strange to basically function as a command center, dispensing orders, taking video calls but not getting his hands on patients. Feels strange to be on a radio again, use the military alphabet and say the word “over” what feels like a thousand times a shift. Sometimes he even works from home, which is especially weird, talking his team through medevacs from his home office with his feet up. Baltimore is crazy; it has more gun violence than Pittsburgh, accidents on the water, and more drug overdoses, too.

He likes working with the paramedics. At times he wishes they’d let him ride in the helicopter. Samira jokes he should get a medic’s license in Maryland (he always kept one in Pennsylvania, mostly for purely sentimental reasons) just to get in the air for once, and he laughs. But his coworkers think it’s a great idea.

“We’d love to fly with you, old man,” one of the team lead paramedics tells him, looking at him with the same gleam in his eyes that Jack remembers his new staff had in the military. They look to me to lead us out of darkness, he thinks, and here I am just wishing I could lead myself out of my own darkness first.

His therapist is right, though. This kind of critical care job is much better for his stress than being the emergency room attending or in the field all the time. It’s the most he’s ever been able to sleep at once, the longest he’s gone without a nightmare so bad it wakes him up sweating, heart racing. When he feels the itch to get his hands dirty, he picks up shifts at Johns Hopkins in the trauma bays per diem, but never tries to get a position there.

At some point management approaches him about teaching skill simulations, and he agrees to do it, on the condition that Samira will join him after fellowship, because he doesn’t want to be the only one responsible for the whole thing. Plus he misses working with her, if he’s honest with himself.

“If you’re the one who trained her,” the program director tells him, “as far as I’m concerned she’s already hired. Just tell her to give me a call and we can figure something out.”

Their house in Baltimore is a stone rowhome near the university, with giant windows, a flat roof with a deck, and a walkout basement. Older, but renovated lovingly inside by the previous owner, with central air, two rooms upstairs for sleeping when their schedules don’t match and another big room they use like an office, their desks across from one another and the walls covered in bookshelves. Jack lets her put up some of his service memorabilia and photos.

He’s developing a critical care training curriculum, at times picking up the 11am to 11pm mid shift at Hopkins while she’s finishing fellowship and praying to stay on as an attending because she likes Shock Trauma so much. For his 51st birthday, Samira gets him a service dog, which she has been attending training sessions for under the guise of going to Pilates. A German Shepherd named Zelda, only a year and a half old. They’d been talking about getting a dog and Jack was all for it, but Samira pretended to hesitate so she could buy herself some time to figure this out.

When she brings the dog home Jack gets a little emotional. Samira doesn’t have the heart to admit to him the dog is as much for her as it is for him; she likes having Zelda with her while she’s alone in the house, when he’s at Hopkins or onsite. It feels safer, knowing if someone tries to get in the dog will wake her up. She likes to walk around Roland Lake with both of them at dusk in the summer, sit on the grass on the hill by the playground and play fetch, wind in her face.

There are some days of work where he waits out front for her with the dog, and he gets there early, sits on those metal benches by the main entrance, Zelda in her service animal vest seated at his feet, sitting attentively scanning the street. Listens to music with one headphone, the sounds of the city, the traffic.

Sometimes she says let’s go, and they’re off, but other days she just sits down next him and he puts his arm around her shoulder and she leans in and the dog sits against her shins too, as if they can fix everything with their proximity, somehow. Samira waits for the summer air to warm her up from the chill of the air conditioning inside and she doesn’t say anything. Jack doesn’t ask her anything, either, just waits. Waits for her to be ready.

“I know that I’m doing something good here, but…” she says, and then she sighs, a heavy exhale, and he nods. Because he gets it. It feels like bailing out a boat that will only ever take on more water. Like pushing a boulder up a hill. Robby would say to imagine Sisyphus happy.

The dog jumps up and plants her feet on Samira’s knees for a moment and yelps a little, then jumps back down. Down the street, someone pulls up to a red light with all their windows down and music up, some gospel choir singing Amazing Grace, the driver singing along. Samira closes her eyes. Her feet ache.

In a minute she’ll get up and they can go home. In a minute. In a minute.

She had worried about the cat and the dog getting along, but the cat seems to somehow understand what’s going on. They sniff each other’s noses in the living room when they meet for the first time, and Zelda uses her snout to scoop the cat under her belly, lift her up and set her onto the ottoman so they are at eye level. They stare at each other for a long moment, fascinated. Samira can’t hold back laughter as the cat rests one paw on Zelda’s nose before turning away, as if to say, nice to meet you, I see you are here to help us.

Jack quickly realizes he isn’t the only one being woken from nightmares by Zelda’s paws landing on his sternum. The best nights are summer nights when Samira’s off too, when he comes home from work, showers at top speed, cranks the air conditioning and dives into bed with her, and the cat and dog both come to lay on top of them on the duvet, happy.

“Everyone loves me,” Jack says, sighing, his eyes closing, his head falling onto her shoulder, his arm around her hips, pets gathered at their legs.

“Of course,” Samira confirms, sinking her hand into the thick fur on the back of Zelda’s neck, and then she finally gets the deepest rest she’ll get all week.

She doesn’t want to move again, she realizes. They’re on their own in this city, but can easily get to Jersey or Pennsylvania to see their friends and her family when they have time off, and in the summer, the beach is accessible within a few hours.

For the first time in her life, she realizes she isn’t waiting and holding her breath for what comes next.

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raspberrypuddle on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 12:52PM UTC

This was absolutely beautiful! I especially love the idea of them sharing voice notes. All the ways you show them caring for each other are just perfect!! Definitely one of my favorite fics for them ☺️

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ofspacecrafts on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 01:01PM UTC

This was so good! I love the way you write Abbot. Also Samira getting advice from Walsh is perfect .

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alwaysenduphere on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 01:44PM UTC

i loved this. ❤️

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AnyoftheKates on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 02:02PM UTC

Oh fuck. This was so fucking good. Thank you so much.

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Ilseme on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 03:37PM UTC

Wow. Just. Wow. Wow. This was just, wow I don't think I can even summon words to describe how amazing this was. Im literally speechless. Also giggling and kicking my feet.

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1. mothman_is_with_the_Ms on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 11:16PM UTC
  
  thank you! ❤️
  
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killedcassandra on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 06:21PM UTC

this was so gorgeous, i love them!!! but i must say as a fellow desi woman, the idea of being allergic to capsaicin is horrifying so I will choose to believe it is something else <3

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1. mothman_is_with_the_Ms on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 11:16PM UTC
  
  i needed a Device to get them doing more domestic activities maybe he'll teach her how to cook
  
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2. 1. killedcassandra on Chapter 1 Sat 21 Jun 2025 12:08AM UTC
    
    I may forgive you if we get Chef Jack just sayinggg
    
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chuckles2much on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 10:35PM UTC

Loved this!! The voice notes were 🥹🥹 beautiful fic!

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Emsyanne on Chapter 1 Fri 20 Jun 2025 11:13PM UTC

THE POEM???!!! What did Jack think was going on there 🤣. Loved this!!

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Sionnuala_Ni_Cheallachain on Chapter 1 Sat 21 Jun 2025 01:37AM UTC

Oh I *love* this.

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No_Other_Lover on Chapter 1 Sat 21 Jun 2025 02:55AM UTC

Ooof loved this, slow and steady wins the race indeed, thank you so much!! 💜💜💜💜💜

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Bbnc22 on Chapter 1 Sat 21 Jun 2025 04:37AM UTC

Had to re-read to make sure I got it all and man, you are a phenom moabbot writer!!! This was amazing thank you for sharing

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dazzlingsuns on Chapter 1 Sat 21 Jun 2025 07:10AM UTC

You blew me away with this beauty!!!! Absolutely loved this from start to finish. There’s such a lovely energy to this fic and I’m definitely going to be back to reread!!!

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whatthatmeans on Chapter 1 Sat 21 Jun 2025 11:36AM UTC

This is so perfect. Abbot is down bad but also a dumbass. I love them.

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alibrandi on Chapter 1 Sat 21 Jun 2025 12:54PM UTC

wow you really did something here. loved the Emery mentor moment at the end & Parker and Samira on the couch. Samira needs more boss ladies in her life

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dearsadbeautifulreader on Chapter 1 Sat 21 Jun 2025 04:16PM UTC

hey so this was one of the most beautiful thing I’ve had the pleasure of reading !! you’re amazing and the poem you shared is so !!! idk the way you write these characters just feels so right to me like they’re coming alive off the page <33

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nomelon on Chapter 1 Sun 22 Jun 2025 12:41AM UTC

Gah gorgeous. I love your Jack, his strengths and his fears, how he's just so happy to be in love again and respects her so much that he's ready for whatever life throws at them. And Samira, I feel you on the nap first, sex later.

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BittenRose on Chapter 1 Mon 23 Jun 2025 03:44PM UTC

delicious. so vulnerable and such palpable tension both between the characters and between themselves! i finished and immediately scrolled up to re-read.

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bogbrained on Chapter 1 Mon 23 Jun 2025 07:21PM UTC

incredible.
“i don’t want to yet-“
“what are you going to do if i make you” HELLO
they are switches your honor. and they bite :)
really romantic i love it

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crownsandstars on Chapter 1 Tue 24 Jun 2025 01:37AM UTC

Reeling even after my second read. There’s just so much heart and care, the cadence of your beautiful, deeply felt prose really carries the emotional beat of the entire story. I love your version of Jack and Samira and their love and the incredible detail you go in with scenes in the ER. Thank you thank you for this lovely lovely fic!!! I really hope to read more of them from you :D

Last Edited Tue 24 Jun 2025 01:38AM UTC

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graceless on Chapter 1 Tue 24 Jun 2025 01:51AM UTC

just reread this and i can’t believe i didn’t leave a comment the first time, i think i was too overwhelmed by my love for it?? and perhaps also with the horror of imagining a fellow desi being allergic to capsaicin (to echo another comment) which sounds like a nightmare i wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies so to imagine it for my girl samira is heartbreaking. but luckily i like a dash of angst, especially when it’s in the context of such incredibly beautiful writing that i will 100% be coming back to again and again.

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