Chapter Text
By the time she parks her car, takes the shuttle from the overflow garage, gets inside, and makes it up to the administrative offices, all eighteen of PTMC’s on-call rooms have been claimed for the storm. Samira was a late addition to the staffing roster, likely added an hour or two after someone reminded Robby that as much as it’s illegal for the hospital to ask him to work while he’s on FMLA, it’s just as illegal to volunteer for work while on FMLA.
Regardless, Samira is pretty certain that Heather would have killed him for leaving her alone with their newborn son for two days.
There are a few people she could text and beg for access to their offices, or might have been able to, hours ago. But now those people are likely at home, their elective surgeries cancelled for the next few days as Pennsylvania sinks into a State of Emergency, and Pittsburgh into a blizzard warning. There’s no way for her to ask for a key, or for an air mattress.
She’ll be bunking with the interns in the library, it’s looking like.
And it’s fine. It’ll be fine. The hospital always gets their allotment of FEMA cots and wool blankets, and she has her airpods and white noise app. She’s slept in considerably worse conditions just to get through medical school and residency.
With a sort of dedication she usually spares for complicated procedures best left for the operating room, she steadfastly ignores that she last stepped foot in the emergency department no more than four hours ago. The hands on the clock are rounding eleven as she thumbs in the code on her locker, shoving inside her backpack and an extra pair of scrubs. She’ll just get back to work, and then at some point, she’ll drop from exhaustion.
“For what it’s worth, I did tell them I’d be okay on my own,” Jack says, appearing with a conciliatory cup of coffee.
Samira shrugs. “Someone needs to relieve you in the morning.”
The last time they were forecasted for weather this bad, between the time the snow started and the snow finally stopped, only two hundred and forty seven patients presented themselves to the emergency department. At one point, they’d broken it down by hour—over the course of almost fifty hours of blizzard conditions, they’d treated an average of six patients per hour.
But still, you have to sleep eventually.
“Yeah, but I don’t need anyone to relieve me now,” he replies. Their fingers brush as he hands her the mug. It’s fresh, and smells like the coffee grounds he saves for particularly rough or boring shifts, from the bag he has squirreled away in his locker.
Taking a sip—oat milk, brown sugar, a whack of cinnamon from the expired spice jar in one of the cabinets—she smiles. “It’s not my bedtime yet.”
She saw him at handover, of course.
Took the unbuttoned henley he put on under his scrubs instead of his standard bleached Hanes undershirt as the weather advisory that it was. Was also possibly mildly distracted at how his forearms looked when he pushed up the sleeves.
“We’ve got Chairs mostly cleared out,” he says, crossing his arms and making the sleeves situation worse. Tendons flexing, silver arm hairs glint in harsh fluorescent light. “Waiting on some lab work to come back on the stragglers. Waiting on a few of our frequent flyers to make it in, but hopefully they’ve found beds at the local warming centers. All elective surgeries have been cancelled for the next two days, so we should be able to clear out most of our boarders to Med-Surg. We’re still gonna have to draw numbers for open ICU beds.”
For the most part, the Pitt will remain empty.
There will be the people who trickle in—homeless folks looking for a place to get warm, nervous parents with baby’s first fever, early cases of frostbite and wind burn. And then there will also be the injuries and illnesses caused by the storm itself, casualties of a lack of patience or forethought—MVAs, snow blower accidents, cardiac events incited via rigorous shoveling, slip and falls over black ice.
“Any word on if they’ve done maintenance to the backup generators since last winter?” Or the summer. Or the last severe thunderstorm.
It’s always last on admin’s list, right up until it happens again.
“Oh, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.” Jack smiles wryly. “Where are you planning to camp out?”
It’ll really depend on how many of their beds stay open. She’ll get interrupted every ten minutes, but at least she’ll be somewhere familiar.
“Not sure,” Samira says with a shrug. “Got here too late to snag an on-call room. Could always try bribing facilities to let me into someone’s office.”
Almost every OB attending has a couch in their office. Maybe she can find someone who’s also been held, and see if they’re willing to switch off.
What Samira doesn’t expect is for Jack to reach into one of the pockets of his cargo pants—she should not find them as attractive as she does, she thinks it must be some form of operant conditioning—and extract a plain white keycard, holding it out to her. “I was the first one held. I’m not gonna need it until the morning.”
She blinks, hard.
“Are you suggesting we hot bunk?”
Jack’s face splits into a wide grin. “How do you know what hot bunking is?”
“Watched a lot of MASH reruns with my Appa, growing up.”
She shifts her weight between her legs; their shoulders brush, mostly by accident. He’s warm, and he smells good, and her thoughts are deeply inappropriate for someone who started as a teacher and mentor and has settled into being a very good friend.
There’s no reason why she can’t be normal about the fact that, on a technicality, she will be sharing a bed with Jack Abbot.
“Then I guess I am,” he replies, even and unbothered, like it never even crossed his mind to think about how the smell of her curl cream will be on the pillowcase. “Come find me when you get sleepy.”
Cocking an eyebrow at her, he slides the keycard back into his pants, and wanders off in the direction of a ringing phone.
It starts as a slow night, and stays a slow night.
The wind picks up, and visibility diminishes to almost nothing. Plows stop at midnight for anything less serious than a Code 4 trauma, and won’t restart again until 0500. Some of the ambulance squads have snow tires and chains, but not all.
They deliver a baby with frank breech presentation—a failed home birth, a midwife who thankfully knew her fucking shit and could tell she was touching a butt cheek, not a head—as one day crawls into another, just barely getting the expectant mother inside and onto a bed before digging deep into their obstetrical educations to remember the steps of the Mauriceau-Smellie-Veit maneuver.
“I am conceding defeat,” she grumbles, trying to use a sani wipe to scrub amniotic fluid out of her hair. He tries, desperately, to stop the visage of her grinning at a squalling newborn lacquered in vernix and viscera, from plastering itself to the walls of his memory. It’s too soft, too delicate, too close to resembling something he wants in a grotesquely primal way. “Wake me up if you need the bed before seven.”
He won’t.
But he imagines what that would be like, the electronic click of the lock opening up into a dark on-call room, Samira snoring softly (he knows she snores, she denies it, but she’s fallen asleep on his couch more than enough times for it to be more than circumstantial), body loose and unencumbered. Would she roll to face the wall, for him to spoon up behind her? Or would she open her arms for him to fit between? Would she throw a pillow down to the foot of the bed, like when he used to share with his sisters on vacation?
“Nah, I’ll be alright,” he says, because his thoughts about her are verging far too close to domesticity.
Samira rolls her eyes. “Jack, there’s no one here. We’re both being held until 7 AM, the day after tomorrow. Just wake me up if you need to take a nap.”
“Okay. I will,” he says, because she wants to hear it. “But I won’t.”
Because he’s afraid that if he falls asleep beside her, his brain is going to find new, irrevocable ways to betray him. Such as dreaming of Samira, eyes tired but bright, hair frizzing out from a ponytail, holding onto a swaddled neonate with the grip of a prizefighter. Samira, smiling at him, holding out a hand to join her on the bed.
There are some things he wanted in life that he tidied away a long time ago.
He doesn’t allow himself to imagine the baby, lets the image pop like a bubble, pushing the thought far, far away.
“If we get something really cool and you don’t page me, I will be offended,” she says, taking her hair down from her tortoiseshell claw clip. Combing through them with her fingers, she shakes the strands loose and back into their natural curl pattern. “If I’m gonna be stuck here—not that I don’t find your company delightful as always—I better see someone impaled by an icicle or something equally insane.”
“Understood.” Keeping his eyes locked on hers, he gives her a short nod. “I will personally page you if someone comes in with a penetrating icicle wound.”
He knows she’s not kidding. He’ll do it.
Her lips, pouty and burgundy and shining with petroleum jelly, quirk into a grin.
“Thank you,” she replies, holding out her hand expectantly.
Briefly, Jack tries to remember what he’d dropped in his on-call room at the beginning of the night. He’d packed a duffle bag before leaving home, assuming he’d get the email as soon as he arrived that the hospital would be placing him on the A Team. He hadn’t unpacked, but he’d also brought his own pillow and blanket and left them on top of the bed.
Does he care if Samira uses them?
Should he tell her to move them on the little workstation in the room?
“Consider it a professional courtesy.”
In the end, all he does is confirm the room number for her, drop the white keycard in her hand, and watch her disappear towards the elevator.
She texts him when she wakes up a little after 6 AM, a full thirty minutes before she set her alarm to go off.
You (6:04 AM)
anything on fire down there?
Jack Abbot (6:05 AM)
Wind keeps setting off the motion sensors on the ambulance bay doors
We had to turn them off
You (6:07 AM)
yikes
well, im up
The on-call room, while lacking a proper bathroom, does have a little sink and vanity for her to brush her teeth and throw some water on her face. Samira considers forgoing her contacts and leaving her glasses on, but the last time she did that she had to soak them in barbicide to get the smell of bile off them.
The anti reflective coating hasn’t been the same since.
Jack Abbot (6:11 AM)
No rush
I think the nursing staff is starting a game of slap poker
You (6:12 AM)
wtf is slap poker
Jack Abbot (6:14 AM)
They didn’t want to play with money,
so they’re slapping each other when they lose
And with that revelation, Samira wets her hands to smooth down her flyaways, and tugs on the zip up hoodie she’d shoved into the bottom of her backpack. It’s two sizes too big, and she usually wears it to and from Pilates class, but it’s the warmest sweatshirt she has.
Setting her laptop down on the window ledge, she cues up a morning stretch routine on YouTube, trying to loosen the last vestiges of slumber from her muscle groups. By the end of the seventeen minute video she doesn’t exactly feel energetic after four hours of interrupted sleep in a twin bed with a mattress far much firmer than she prefers, but it’s better than nothing.
She does one last check of the room and her pockets—phone, pen light, trauma shears, stethoscope, peppermint oil, gum—before turning off the lights and closing the door behind her.
The PTMC on-call rooms are all on the administrative floor, a likely concession to the reputation they’ve been given by Grey’s Anatomy and all other medical dramas since time immemorial. She knows they used to have a barracks style room down one of the little service hallways shunting off the Pitt, but that it was converted into a supply room during the last round of renovations to make the emergency department HIPAA compliant.
Now, the on-call rooms function essentially like hotel rooms. Just very sparse, very tiny hotel rooms.
And since the admin team works 9 AM to 5 PM, Samira isn’t entirely certain what would actually stop anyone from using an on-call room the way they’re portrayed on TV. Because sure, you have to check in to a room like you would a hotel, provide your hospital ID so that your shift can be verified, but there’s not actually anything stopping you from bringing in someone with you. It’s not like the security cameras actually work, half the time.
The other half, no one monitors them unless there’s an incident that necessitates a review.
That is to say, what her and Jack are doing is technically breaking half the rules they have to sign and acknowledge in order to get a key to an on-call room at all.
By the time the elevator reaches the ED, Samira is marginally more awake.
“More coffee? I’m going to think you like me or something.”
Jack is waiting for her at the Hub, reading an old copy of Journal of Emergency Medicine with his feet up on the counter. In front of him are two mugs of coffee, still hot, wisps of silver steam curling up from worn ceramic.
His lips threaten a smile.
“Couple of cases of frostbite and hypothermia, one case of carbon monoxide poisoning we’re monitoring, and one case of man versus snow blower.”
He pats the empty office chair next to him; Samira walks around the counter and drops into it, gathering the navy mug— LEVEL ONE DRAMA CENTER —into her hands, taking a long sip. It’s not what she would describe as good coffee, but it’s made to her preferences.
“Isn’t it still snowing?”
“He said he wanted to get a head start.” Balancing the open journal on his thighs, Jack reaches for his own mug— WORKING THE POLE , a picture of a nurse in a retro white uniform hanging a bag of fluids—and takes a large gulp. Samira’s wondered more than once if Jack has ever actually been diagnosed with ADHD, or if he just takes the fact that caffeine calms him down as just a fun little quirk about himself.
“Is the cafeteria open?” she asks. He looks at her askance, amused. “Right. I should have packed more snacks.”
She didn’t exactly have a lot of time between getting the call from staffing and throwing all her shit into her car, frantically trying to beat the first squall line of snow to the hospital. All she remembered to grab were a couple of chocolate peanut butter granola bars and a bag of goldfish crackers.
Jack licks the pad of his thumb and turns the page. It really shouldn’t turn her on as much as it does.
“I ordered pizza for everyone before the worst of it hit. There should still be a couple of boxes in the break room.”
“Breakfast of champions.” She knows without asking that he ordered a veggie supreme, hold the olives. Her pizza order is one of the few constants in her life. “I’m a little disappointed I didn’t wake up to you crawling in bed with me. That room gets cold.”
The overly starched sheets and thin down-alternative comforter did little to stave off the chill; facilities must be reducing power to non-essential parts of the hospital on orders from city officials.
In the end, she did what she told herself she wouldn’t do, which was unfold the warm wool blanket that Jack brought from home and tuck it around her body in a last ditch effort to insulate herself from the chill. It smelled like the laundry detergent he uses at home, something fresh and summery. She’d questioned it once, and he’d shrugged and said that after fifteen years in the military and eight years wearing hospital scrubs, maybe he just wanted his civvies to smell like something besides color-safe bleach and sanitizer liquid.
“And I’m authorized to warm you up?” he asked, cringing as Kim slapped one of the interns so hard that it left a handprint on his cheek.
“Definitely.”
He looks at her again, one his quick sidelong glances that trace up and down her body. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
“You should, we’re here for another night.”
She wonders, not for the first time, what that would be like. Wonders if Jack is a tactile sleeper, if he’d reach for her unconsciously and refuse to let her go. Or if he’d be like a number of her past partners, willing to cuddle when they first slip into bed, but then need to roll over and apart, at least a foot of space between them.
Clearing his throat, Jack’s eyes flicker back to her again, lingering a little bit longer on her face. “What if I need you to warm me up?”
Now isn’t that a thought?
Her mind invents a hundred sudden scenarios—Jack, coming back inside with snowflakes in his curls after triaging a GSW in a car out in the driveway; Jack, scrubs soaked and lacquered to his pale skin after running two blocks to get an ambulance that couldn’t make any further on the ice, a patient running out of time; Jack, stepping under the frigid decon shower after treating a patient coming in after an industrial accident, prolonged dermal contact with chemical contaminants.
“Then page me,” she murmurs, holding his gaze. “We can’t lose another attending with two already on parental leave.”
She’s flirting. She knows she’s flirting.
There’s this whole routine, six years into their friendship, one that started when she was an MS3 over her head in the Covid-19 pandemic. One that they started after Adamson died and Robby went near catatonic and suddenly Abbot was on days and the only senior attending around to even attempt to mentor her. It had started as case reports and end of shift debriefs up on the roof, six feet apart, sharing takeout. It had started as a way to see another human being without PPE and vent hoods and masks. It had started as a way to avoid going home to empty apartments and a world that was rapidly going madder and madder with every passing day.
They’d both contracted it eventually, neither sick enough to merit hospital care. But Jack was there, even if he was Dr. Abbot to her back then, dropping off a pulse ox, canned oxygen, and a deli container of chicken soup at her door. He texted her twice a day, threatening to drag her ass in if she didn’t reply with her vitals within the hour.
When it was his turn, it was only natural that she do the same.
“I’ll warn you, I’m a cuddler,” he says, flirting back. He reminds her of Hawkeye Pierce like this, hair threaded with silver and still somehow boyish. Passively suicidal, yet somehow the emergency department’s director of morale. “One time I had to share a bed with Robby in the world’s shittiest airport hotel before flying home from a conference, and he did not enjoy waking up to being spooned.”
Jack Abbot is the Pitt’s biggest flirt, and Samira knows better than to take it personally, six years into working here.
“Robby doesn’t know how to appreciate you,” she drolls in reply, plugging her credentials into Epic. Briefly, she hopes that with fewer faculty and staff in the building with the storm, that it might allow her to view a chart without crashing three times at first.
Hope is futile.
Jack laughs, soft and easy. “That’s what I’ve always said.”
“Anything else I need to know?”
They have a census of eleven.
“Nah, you know how to administer rewarming treatment for stage four frostbite and how to handle amputation via snow blower.” He closes the journal with a barely audible thwack , the tips of his fingers tracing absently over the glossy cover. He spins one quarter turn in his chair, his feet falling to the floor, the prosthetic landing harder than the flesh and bone one. Tossing the copy of JEM onto the desktop, he hauls himself to his feet. “But if either of those come in, let me know if you need a hand.”
She won’t.
She might, but she won’t.
His job for the next twelve hours is to finish his charting, eat something for breakfast, and try to sleep. Her job for the next twelve hours is to hope that they don’t have a family of six present with carbon monoxide poisoning because someone thought it was a smart idea to set up a generator inside the house.
“Get some sleep, Jack.”
“I’ll try,” he says, scrubbing his hands over his stubble. She can clock how long it’s been since he shaved by how much it catches in the light, the last of the auburn in his coloring shining like burnished copper.
Robby box dyes his hair, she’s fairly certain, stubbornly holding onto his near-black hair as his knees and back relent to arthritis and the prescription for his reading glasses gets stronger every year.
The morning she found her first gray hair in the mirror, she asked Jack if he’d ever bothered. His hair had been red once, the kind of fiery auburn that women spend hundreds on at the salon. Eh, I’ve been going gray since I was eighteen. Didn’t bother me then, doesn’t bother me now.
Which it shouldn’t. Samira thinks it makes him look rather roguish.
(Ellis had found a JROTC portrait taken his junior year of high school. Found is a strong word; Samira is fairly certain that Parker has a longstanding flirtationship with one of Jack’s nieces, one of his oldest sister’s kids who breeze in and out of his guest room like they own it.
He’s overly fond of them. She knows just from the look on his face when he speaks of them, the children born during his last years of high school and first years of college. Toddlers he helped raise when his mom died and his dad split and he still had three older sisters keeping him on a short leash, marching him towards a future.
More than once, Samira has wondered what that was like.
Amma had stuck around, but sixteen years after Appa’s death, they barely speak. Outside of expectation, Amma has taken little interest in her future.)
“Sweet dreams,” she says, threading the line between sardonic and sincere. He might sleep, he might not. She knows at home he has a line of orange prescription bottles in formation on his nightstand—prazosin, trazodone, melatonin, hydroxyzine—that in theory he could have packed to bring with him here.
But she knows him, knows his hypervigilance. He won’t take a sedative if he’s not sleeping at home.
“Always are, when they’re of you.”
Samira has to do a double take, looking up from his chart notes on their earlier breech delivery. But his face is affectionately blank, eyes widening at her when she glares.
“Knock it off, or I’ll start to think you’re serious.”
“Who said I’m not?” he replies, donning the tight, teasing smirk that always makes her wonder what it would be like to kiss it off his face.
Scowling, she returns to negotiations with Epic.
Jack is awake before the door handle even moves, jolting from his miserable doze to full alertness as soon as he hears the electric thrum of the lock. It doesn’t matter that he knows it’s Samira, his body leaps to full attention.
“Hey, it’s just me,” she whispers, shutting the door gently behind her.
His voice exits his throat as a rasp. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” she says with a sigh, and then groans. “It’s almost three in the afternoon and I’m yawning every other word. I slept like shit last night and if my eye twitches any harder, I’m gonna get a migraine.” She pauses, looking down at the aglets on her hoodie, toying with them. “Is it okay if I take a nap?”
He starts to roll over before she finishes her question.
“I can get up—”
Scoffing, Samira toes off her sneakers. “That’s not what I asked. I was promised spooning.”
Fuck. He did do that.
He very much did do that.
Because here’s how his little routine tends to go: there is a long period of time in which he and Samira are not rostered on the same shift, because the ED budget is ass and oftentimes there’s not enough room in payroll to schedule both a senior and a junior attending. But then he sees her, for the first time in days or weeks, either because they are working together or there’s a party or someone’s cajoled him to going out to whatever bar everyone is meeting occasionally. Then he remembers how much he respects her, how much he fucking likes her, and then they’re meeting for coffee or for breakfast after shift, or she’s coming home to sleep in his guest room because she feels like shit.
And then it’s unbearable, the closeness, and they’re texting each other non-stop in a never ending stream of consciousness. And then he flirts with her, badly. Awkwardly. Usually in the workplace, because she’s done something astonishing that makes him forget you’re not supposed to fucking leer on the clock. It makes him feel like a fucking teenager again, gangly and pimply and with no clue what to do with his hair.
He has no problem flirting when the stakes aren’t there—married women, little old ladies who are nervous about their blood pressure medication, bartenders and paramedics of all genders. After his wife had died, he’d had a two year long grief-fest spent getting into the pants of and between the sheets with anyone and everyone he could. Jack Abbot has no problems with flirting. He is in fact, exceedingly skilled at it.
But with Samira Mohan?
He’s fucking useless. He feels like he’s back at his eighth grade formal, trying to figure out how the fuck to tie a tie.
“I might not let you go,” he mumbles, blinking steadily as she climbs up over the end of the bed, fitting herself between him and the wall.
She’s so thoughtful it makes him want to cry, sometimes.
With a caustic little snort, she folds herself into him, arms crossed under her breasts. The ghost of a habit, he tangles their legs together, and she rocks closer until her head is under his chin.
“You’ve got twenty minutes before I pry you off me,” she sniffs.
“Deal.”
In theory, the sun is going down when Samira hears banging on the disabled doors that open out into the ambulance bay. Frowning, she hits the switch at the Hub that manually activates them.
Santos and Whitaker stomp through, shaking themselves free of rivulets of the snow and ice adhered to their layers of coats and scarves and gloves.
“Whitaker, are you wearing snow shoes?” she asks, turning the switch off again.
It doesn’t matter how short a time the doors are left open; the wind follows them in, gusty and loud, and Samira pulls her hoodie around her tighter and fights off the urge to shiver. It’s dark outside, no discernible difference between day and night to be found, and from the last NWS tweet she saw for their area, sustained winds are up to fifty miles per hour.
Trinity tears a cheerful looking bobble hat off her head. Samira wonders if Whitaker knows how to knit. “Our power’s out,” she grumbles. “Decided to come to work when the thermostat in our apartment hit fifty degrees.”
“Yeah,” Whitaker says, more than a little breathless and he shucks off his external layers. “I brought them from back home. Never thought I’d have a reason to use them, but we’ve got about two feet of powder out there.”
“Did Santos make you tow her in like a sled dog?”
The moment it leaves her lips, Samira can’t decide if the question is a joke or not. Trinity Santos’ relationship with Dennis Whitaker is perplexing to her and everyone else in the Pitt.
“I should have,” she complains.
Whitaker just grins at Santos fondly.
“Who’s on?” he asks, finally down to just his scrubs, slightly askew from the trek into the hospital. He’s wearing an Under Armour thermal turtleneck that she’s fairly certain she’s seen Trinity wear on the odd occasion they’ve had recently to meet up for a run.
“Me and Dr. Abbot. We’ve been switching off. Lena’s been holding down charge. Handful of med students and interns who were too afraid to call out.” It’s a right of passage, really. “And uh… Donnie, Mateo, and Kim. We’ve got an RT and a radiology tech and a handful of CNAs.”
“Okay, well.” Santos huffs, hands on her hips. “The cavalry's here.”
“Mostly because the cavalry didn’t want to lose feeling in their extremities.” The red flush on Whitaker’s nose and cheeks would agree with that statement.
Briefly, Samira wonders if she should run a hypothermia screening on him.
“There’s fresh coffee and some leftover pizza and sandwiches in the breakroom. Go get warm and dry, and then I’ll get you caught up.” More than once this shift she’s ducked into the bathroom to run her hands under the dryer, hesitant to take more blankets out of the warmer knowing that the laundry attendants aren’t in the building. Watching them head towards the lockers, Samira alerts to motion in her peripheral vision. “ You are supposed to still be asleep.”
She’d left him asleep, proud of the fact that he’d snored straight through her easing herself back and off the bed. Her blood pressure had spiked as she fumbled with her shoes and the contents of her pockets, but he hadn’t moved then either.
Jack shrugs, hands clasped behind him.
“I don’t sleep well in new environments.”
She sighs.
“There are far too many of us for this many patients.”
She’d tried spinning some people off to find a place to crawl into to sleep, but no one has actually worked enough today to earn the kind of exhaustion that typically merits an early night. Instead they’re all just slowly succumbing to cabin fever. There’s a dance party going on in South 15.
“Okay, so for once we’ll get to experience adequate staffing ratios.” Bending forward, he leans his forearms on the counter. Voice dropping to a whisper that contains more gravel than is strictly considered decent in the workplace, he says, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
Then, as if he’s fucking with her, his tongue darts out to wet his lower lip.
Samira briefly questions her sanity.
Smiling sweetly, she changes the subject. “Primanti’s by the stadium donated sandwiches and boxes of coffee, the Fire Department delivered them a few hours ago.”
His chin dips towards his chest. “Please tell me—”
“I already wrote your name on a Rueben because I love you,” she replies. It was the first thing she did after the firefighters brought in the boxes and dropped them in the breakroom. “It’s in the fridge.”
Jack looks at her like she hand-painted all the snowflakes currently on the ground in Pittsburgh.
“You are my best and favorite coworker.”
She spent half an hour this afternoon dozing in his arms. She’s pretty sure she knows what brand of deodorant he wears. Knows what the scrape of his stubble feels like against her temple.
Samira Mohan is pathologically risk averse.
But something about this storm—maybe the change in the barometric pressure, or lack of change between day and night, or the windowless room she spent the night in, or the fact that with Robby and Heather on parental leave it’s been the two of them leading the Pitt for the past six weeks, the past twenty-four hours—has her willing to gamble.
“Kiss tax,” she teases, pointing at her forehead as she stands.
Jack seems delighted, leaning towards her further. Grabs the base of her skull, fingers curling around the nape of her neck, applying just enough pressure to move her close enough to brush his lips against her hairline. “You’re bold when HR isn’t here.”
It hits her like a charge from a defibrillator—when was the last time she received physical affection from anyone? She gets hugs from patients, holds their hands when they’re scared and strokes their hair when they’re in pain. But when was the last time she had a relationship that didn’t involve remaining perfectly still, perfectly in place, motionless and touch starved.
Sleeping on Jack’s shoulder was the most physical contact she’s gotten from anyone since her last failed Tinder venture six months ago.
She gives Jack a flagrant up and down with her gaze, watching his cheeks burn pink.
“You’re enjoying yourself,” she replies.
She doesn’t miss the nod he gives her in reply.
It replays in her head over, and over, and over again.