Work Text:
In hindsight, Samira wishes she would have gone to another hospital. UPMC Shadyside would have been fine. It was right there, she lived only a few minutes away, and most importantly, she wouldn’t have known any of the damn doctors or nurses treating her.
In hindsight, she wishes she hadn’t even gotten out of bed this morning. She wishes she hadn’t left her apartment. She wishes she’d stayed home, alone with her cat, and fully enjoyed the one day off she’s scheduled to have this week. She has an insane shift schedule coming up and she was looking forward to relaxing for one single day.
That plan did not involve a car accident, a potential wrist fracture, and a mild concussion. Yet here she is.
“What the hell happened to you, kid?”
Samira lifts her head slightly. Dana is standing in front of her with her hands on her hips, a wad of gum in her mouth, and a frown on her face. If she had any hope at all of sneaking in unknown, that was dashed the second she saw Dana at the hub.
She drops her head back against the bed and sighs. “Tell me he’s busy.”
Dana snorts. “He is, and you should thank your lucky fuckin’ stars for it.”
“Who’s on today?” Samira asks. One of the new day shift attendings they’d stolen from she thinks upstate New York is her doctor, and one of the new interns Samira hasn’t had the chance to get to know was helping. Princess got her enough acetaminophen for a small horse for the pain, so really she should have known any chance of this staying a secret was dashed the second she saw Princess’s face. But a girl can dream.
“Collins is around here somewhere. Robby’s dealing with a code. Santos. Some of the newbies.”
“And Jack?”
Dana walks over and smooths Samira’s hair back, an unexpected motherly gesture that makes her throat feel tight. She tries to swallow around it and focus on the pain in her wrist.
“He’s with a patient in South 8. Has no idea.”
“Please keep it that way.”
Dana smirks. “I’ll do my best, kid, but you know him.”
“Tell Princess I’ll give her a hundred dollars if she keeps her mouth shut.”
There’s a knock on the door, and suddenly there’s Collins looking concerned. “What the hell happened? Princess said you broke your wrist?”
Samira groans, and Dana cackles.
“I’ll go do recon,” Dana says, still smirking. “Yell if you need me.”
She disappears back through the sliding door, leaving Samira alone with Collins.
Collins pulls up her chart on the computer and quietly reads through. “How’s the pain?” She asks, looking at Samira’s wrist.
“Manageable. I just want to go home.”
“Now you sound like every other patient we get in here,” Collins smiles. “Do you need anything? Have they done an x-ray yet?”
She shrugs helplessly and then shakes her head. “There was a trauma incoming, I told them I could wait.” She desperately wishes she could remember the attending’s name, but her brain is fuzzy and she’s just so tired.
Collins hums. “They give you anything for the pain?”
“A shitload of acetaminophen. It’s not touching it.”
“I’m sure it’s not. You’ll probably get some pain meds when you leave. Want me to take over, or leave it with Gonzalez?”
Gonzalez. That’s right. Stephanie. She’s nice enough, Samira guesses. Doesn’t really know her. To Collins, she shakes her head. “No. Run interference if Jack tries –”
“He doesn’t know you’re back here?” Collins cuts in, eyes wide.
“And I want to keep it that way.”
Collins snorts and shakes her head. “Good luck with that. I’m leaving before I can be considered an accomplice.”
“You already are!” Samira calls after her, but the door slides shut and leaves her alone.
She really should have gone to UPMC.
It’s another hour before they get back for the x-ray, confirming what Samira already knew was a distal radius fracture. Nondisplaced, won’t require surgery, but does currently hurt like an absolute bitch .
She’s trying not to complain, but she doesn’t want to be there in the first place, and her head is killing her. The acetaminophen isn’t touching the throbbing in her wrist or head and the fluorescent lights overhead aren’t helping either.
The only positive – and she hates thinking of it like that, really – is that Jack hasn’t found her yet. She is pretty sure she owes Princess and Dana a hundred dollars each at this point, but she doesn’t even care. Money well spent.
It isn’t until Robby comes into the room that she remembers she has no luck, actually, and she shouldn’t be so thankful.
“What the hell happened?” he asks, stopping short when he spots her in the bed. “Mohan? Jesus Christ, how long have you been here?”
Samira groans and throws her not broken arm over her eyes. “Too damn long, seriously, I’ll bribe someone for discharge papers at this point.”
“What the hell happened?” he repeats, stepping up to the computer to pull up her chart. “Does –”
“No,” she says, cutting him off before he can even say his name. Because if Robby says his name, it’s only a matter of time before her peace evaporates into thin air.
“Broken wrist?” he murmurs, eyes still on the screen. “Looks like they’re waiting for a CT too.” He pulls out his pen light and checks her eyes. “Pupils dilated, but reactive. How’s your head?”
“Wishing for a swift death,” she deadpans instead.
“Hey,” Robby scolds her. “I’ll go get–”
She puts her hands up in surrender. “Sorry. I’m fine. Seriously. This is extremely overkill.”
“What happened?”
“Car accident. Idiot in front of me stopped short, idiot behind me didn’t stop at all, and now here I am.”
“Whiplash?”
She shrugs. “Not really. A little sore I guess but nothing crazy. The head and wrist are winning out anyways.”
Robby’s phone goes off and he mutters something unintelligible to himself, and then he starts backing up towards the door. “If someone doesn’t come take you to CT in the next half hour, have them come get me. I’ll fast track you."
“Like hell you will!” she yells, but once again, he’s gone.
Samira rubs her temples and groans. She’s never taking a day off ever again.
The problem with Robby being the senior attending on shift and Jack also being there for some reason is… well, there’s a lot of problems with it.
Namely, Jack should have gone home hours ago. His shift ended at seven, and it’s currently almost lunch time. Samira only knows that he’s still there because she keeps getting updates from the various people stopping into her room.
Right now, it’s Dana, and honestly, doesn’t she have a shift to run?
She plops down in the visitor chair and shrugs, tossing an M&M into her mouth when Samira asks exactly that. “I have an attending to check on right now. They’ll be fine without me for a few minutes.”
“Robby came in,” Samira says, rolling her eyes. “Told me he wanted to fast track my CT scan, which I don’t even need. ”
Dana snorts a laugh. “Of course he did. You’re lucky –”
Samira puts her hand up. “I know. Believe me.”
Dana shakes her head, but she smiles. “You kids. I swear.”
“Why is he still here? His shift ended hours ago. Make him go home.” She’s not proud of the way her voice shifts to a whine at the end of her sentence, but she’s in pain and tired. She figures she’s allowed, just this once.
“Yeah, okay. Bad enough I’m in here and haven’t told him. He’s gonna kick my ass enough as it is.”
The problem is that Samira is pretty sure they’ve spoken about him enough today that it was only a matter of time before he came into the room – he’s like goddamn Beetlejuice – but it’s still a shock when all of a sudden, he’s standing in the doorway, looking at her with a combination of fear and rage that would be impressive if it didn’t make her feel so bad.
“What the hell happened?” he asks, storming into the room once his brain catches up to the situation in front of him, probably.
“Dammit,” she groans, throwing her head back and staring up at the ceiling.
“See ya!” Dana says and quickly scurries out of the room before Jack can physically block her from leaving.
Dana has never been happier to be of small stature. Her ability to slip right by Jack Abbot, almost undetected, was impressive, even to her. Of course, that was only because his entire focus — now and for the foreseeable future — was on one Samira Mohan.
It went like this:
Dana didn’t take night shift unless she absolutely had to. A wonky sleep schedule made her crazy, and she was better suited for day shift anyway. She kept things going, kept them all in check, and she isn’t the first to say that the ED would crash and burn if it weren’t for her mere existence, but she’s not going to deny it either.
But, a hero’s job is never done, etc etc, and sometimes duty called.
What she’s saying is — Dana was there the first night shift Samira Mohan ever worked. She was there the first time Jack Abbot lay eyes on her. And she knew, she knew, despite what bullshit Robby spouted on a daily fuckin’ basis, that Jack Abbot and Samira Mohan were something to keep her eye on.
It gave her a stupid little thrill, is all. She didn’t watch much reality TV, but who needed it when you had things like this happening before your very eyes?
That was — Jesus Christ. Has it really been seven years since that happened? She’s getting too old for this, really. One of these days she’s going to quit and mean it, and fuck you Robby for thinking otherwise.
Anyway. Dana was there, is all she’s saying. She saw the spark flicker to life. She’s known Jack Abbot a long time, and she hadn’t seen him light up like that since —
Well. She doesn’t like to think about that, but it’s true all the same.
So then PittFest happened, and Dana may have quite literally had a broken face, a throbbing headache, and a strange combination of apathy and empathy for humankind as a whole that day, she may have been busy with 400 other things at once, but she saw the way Abbot and Mohan worked together. She saw the glimpse of a smile when they pulled something off, saved a life, whatever. Dana had her own shit going on that day in, like, every single aspect, but she still clocked that shit from a mile away.
Then there was the after.
She saw it all. For a lesser bystander — Robby, for example — none of it would have seemed like anything. A lingering hand on the small of her back while he guided her through a door; a smile when she complimented him; a laugh at one of his stupid jokes; coming in earlier or staying later so one could see the other and tell them about something they read in a medical journal, or a patient they had, or the latest take out place they’d tried.
For once, it seemed like Jack Abbot was living. And for once, it seemed like Samira Mohan was too.
And Dana had a front row seat to it all.
“How is she?”
Dana pulls her eyes away from the computer screen, peering up at Idiot Number Two in her life over the rim of her readers. “Okay,” she says and then looks back at the screen. “Abbot’s in there, which I can only assume is your doing.”
“Princess,” Robby defends himself. “But maybe I assisted.”
Dana rolls her eyes. Idiot . She loves the men in her life very much, but she also hates every single one of them. “Leave them alone.”
“Has she had a CT yet?”
“Go ask Gonzalez! She’s her doctor.”
“I’m asking you.”
Dana puts her hands on her hips and glares at him. Robby puts his hands up in mock-surrender.
“Okay, fine. Jack’s in there?”
“He is. Why don’t you go torture them? Or, here’s a novel idea. Do your job?”
Robby gives her a smirk, so she does the adult thing and flips him off. He laughs as he walks away, and Dana rolls her eyes.
“Absolute children, as far as the eye can see,” she mutters to herself, and then she gets back to work.
“Why the hell wouldn’t you have someone come get me?”
Samira shrinks into her bed, just a little bit. She knows in some part of her brain that he’s not mad at her, would never be mad at her but especially not when she’s laying in a hospital bed, but she can’t help her reflexes. “I didn’t want you to freak out, which was obviously a very silly worry for me to have.”
He gives her a flat look. “You’re fucking hurt, and this is tame compared to how I’d like to be acting. Believe me.”
“Sure. Silly me.”
His jaw tenses, and he walks over to the side of the bed. “What happened?” He asks through gritted teeth. “How long have you been here?”
“Longer than I’d ever like to be on my day off,” she mutters. “I got in a car accident. I’m fine. My wrist is broken and I have a mild concussion. But I’m fine.”
Jack reaches out, clearly wanting to inspect her broken wrist, but for a brief second, she thinks maybe he wants to hold her hand. Which is insane, but there it is.
She gives him her wrist, and he very delicately inspects it. She winces, even though she wants to pretend she’s totally fine and nothing hurts and really this is all a big silly misunderstanding. But her wrist does fucking hurts, and Jack’s looking at her like he’d go to war with the idiot who hurt her, or maybe like he’d tear down city walls in her name. Like she’s an altar he wants to kneel before in the name of holy worship.
It’s enough to make her dizzy. It’s enough to make tears spring to her eyes unexpectedly.
“Shit. Does it hurt?” He asks when he sees the tears, his voice low and gravelly.
She shakes her head and lies. “No. I’m fine.”
“Liar. You can tell me.”
“I’m afraid you’ll go kill the man who caused the accident.”
“Seriously maim, maybe. Not kill. I’m not an animal.”
“Ha,” she deadpans. She tries to wipe discreetly at her eyes, and Jack doesn’t say anything about it. “I didn’t want to scare you,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.
Jack is still holding her arm, his fingers brushing against her skin softly, like he wants to heal her from his touch alone. “And you thought me finding out because Robby’s a fucking idiot would be better? After you’ve been here for hours?”
“I was hoping I’d be gone before you found out.”
A sound escapes from the back of his throat, pained, and Samira wants to take it back. She wants to take it all back. She wants to go back two hours before so she can call Jack after it happened.
“I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head but doesn’t say anything. Neither of them says anything at all.
Heather is on her way to check on Samira when Robby intercepts her in a move that she knows, with every single thing in her, is as intentional as all hell.
It’s as bad as his stupid dance when the rats were in the Pitt and he didn’t want her to see. This man, honestly. Not at all subtle in any aspect of his life.
She loves him, and she came to terms with that many moons ago, but honestly.
“I need you to check on this patient with me,” he says, leading her not-so-gracefully down the opposite direction from Samira’s room.
Heather raises an eyebrow. “That patient better not be you in an on-call room,” she mutters under her breath. “That worked exactly one time.”
Robby honest to god smirks. She wants to slap him.
She loves him so much.
“No, actually,” he says, leading her towards the hub. “There’s no patient. Abbot’s in there and I didn’t want to subject you to that.”
Heather sighs. “He found out?”
Robby shrugs, and Heather knows that shrug. Robby had a hand in him finding out, and she should rip him a new one for that, but honestly it’s for the best. The longer Jack went without knowing Samira was there, the more harassment they were all in for.
Robby guides her into the break room and starts to get himself a cup of coffee. He holds up the pot towards Heather, asking without asking if she wants any, and she shakes her head.
They don’t usually get moments like this together these days, not at home and not at work. With a two year old running around dictating their days at home, and an entire emergency department depending on both of them most days, it’s just not in the cards. So Heather takes the quiet moments when she can get them
She watches Robby closely as he fixes himself a cup of coffee. Too much cream, not enough sugar for her liking. Heated up in the microwave even if it’s a fresh pot, because if it’s not scalding his mouth then it’s not hot enough for him. She can’t help but smile, just a little.
She thinks of Samira and Jack. She thinks of the song and dance she’s watched them do for over three years now, the way they’ve lived in each other’s orbit like they couldn’t or wouldn’t be anywhere else. The way they don’t work together much, but when they do, it’s a sight to see.
The way they remind her so much of herself and Robby, so many years ago.
There’s something in her that pulls at the thought – something sharp but distant – because she worries. She can’t help it. She knows where Samira is, she knows the impossible position she put herself in, and Heather worries.
It’s different for them, obviously. Samira is an attending now, and while there might be some HR paperwork to file if they ever finally decided to cross that line, they could. For Heather and Robby, the lines were different, for so many different reasons.
So it’s different, but still. Heather worries.
“What’s up?” Robby asks, his voice taking on that knowing tone, like he’s asking but it’s only a formality because he can see inside of her head so clearly, he doesn’t actually need her to tell him what’s wrong.
The annoying thing is usually that’s one hundred percent true.
She sighs and leans her hip against the counter. “What’s going on with them?” she asks, folding her arms over her chest. “Abbot and Mohan.”
Robby raises an eyebrow and looks at her over the rim of his glasses. “What do you mean?” he asks, but it sounds like what do you know?
Men. So helpless, so clueless.
She rolls her eyes. “I’m just asking if someone should go check on her and break them up, or if we should leave them alone.”
“Break them up?” Robby says around a laugh. “They’re not brawling in there, Heather.”
She rolls her eyes again. “You know what I mean.”
Robby smiles to himself and shakes his head. He drinks his coffee and then dumps out the dregs of it before looping an arm around her shoulder. He kisses the top of her head and steers her towards the door. “They’re fine. Leave it be.”
They step back out into the chaos of the ED and with one last look towards Samira’s room, Heather shakes her head and gets back to work.
Jack has to leave to check on a patient that may or may not be coding, status update completely botched thanks to the timid MS3. Normally he has more patience for that kind of thing.
Normally Samira isn’t laying in a hospital bed though, so.
He doesn’t say anything before he leaves, just looks at her one more time and walks away. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know what she wants from him right now. The dark, traumatized part of his brain has been screaming at him for the past thirty minutes, ever since he found out she was in the hospital to begin with. Between that and his general exhaustion, he doesn’t have it in him to figure out what’s between the lines right now.
His patient isn’t coding – or maybe was, but is fine now, thanks to a slick save by Santos and co. Jack checks in anyways, makes sure everything is fine, and then he officially hands the case off to Santos. She’s a senior resident now, she can handle it.
He needs to get the hell out of this hospital.
He tosses his gloves and his gown, and he makes his way to the hub. He needs to finish up a chart or two and then he’s gone for real. He’s off for the next two days, thank fucking god, so he didn’t mind staying late. Now he just wants to go home.
“You okay?” Robby asks him as he furiously types on the computer.
“Fine,” Jack bites out. “Someone better take Sa– Mohan to get a goddamn CT scan in the next ten minutes, or so help me God.”
“Already on it. Gonzalez took her when you were checking on your patient.”
“Great.”
“Is it?”
Jack slams his hand down onto the counter. Princess is standing a few feet away and she jumps, and then she gets up and goes to be anywhere else. Jack looks at Robby with a fierce eyebrow raised. “Something you want to say, Michael?”
“Don’t Michael me,” Robby snarks, rolling his eyes. “I’m not the one who broke her wrist, Jack.”
Jack grunts but doesn’t say anything.
He fucking knows, okay? He knows he’s having some pretty huge feelings about all of this. He knows he needs to go to his bi-weekly therapy appointment that is coincidentally tomorrow so that he can talk about all of this with someone who isn’t Robby, or Dana, or anyone else in this goddamn hospital.
It’s just –
When your wife dies at the hands of a nasty car accident on 376 when she was just trying to get home, you can’t help but have some pretty massive baggage anytime the words car and accident are uttered, but especially when –
When what? His brain supplies unhelpfully. When what, indeed.
“You’re going home,” Robby says, pulling him from the spiral he’s headed towards. “Like, now, hopefully, but anytime in the next fifteen minutes would be acceptable.”
“When is Mohan getting discharged?” he asks before he can stop himself. Because he’s been thinking about it since he found out she was in there in the first place. She’s not going to have a car, and she’s going to need to get home, and she’ll probably insist on a goddamn Uber, which – over Jack’s dead body.
Robby sighs and rubs his hand over his face. “Soon, hopefully. We just need the CT scan results.”
“Then I guess I’m here until the results come down.”
The two have a staredown. Jack knows he’s being a miserable S.O.B. He knows, okay? But it’s Robby. He can handle it and then some. Jack’s dealt with a lot from him over the years, and would do it all over again in a heartbeat. But isn’t it his turn to be a bastard?
“You’re insufferable,” Robby mutters, and then he walks away.
Jack goes back to hitting the keys of his keyboard like they’ve personally offended him, which is enough to draw Dana’s attention next. She really doesn’t want to do this, would rather just leave him to brood or stew or whatever he feels the need to do right now, but she also loves him dearly. If he’s spiraling out of control, she’s going to step in.
“Honey, you’re scaring the kids,” she jokes softly, stepping over to him. “Want to tell me what’s up?”
“No,” Jack bites out. “I want to get the fuck out of here.”
“Well sure, considering you’re–” she checks her watch, “–roughly five hours over shift. Why don’t you?”
“Because she’s–” he starts, and then he stops himself. He looks up from the computer, his eyes wide and wild. She can almost physically feel the way his heart is slamming against his chest now, as if she were standing there with her hand pressed against him instead of on the other side of the counter.
When Jack Abbot first started working at PTMC, Dana Evans had been a nurse there for roughly twenty years already. He was fresh out of the military, missing part of a limb, and happily married. He was also traumatized to hell and back and internally miserable. She watched him change over the years – thanks to an absolute metric ton of therapy – but it took awhile.
Then he lost Katy, and any progress he was making towards managing his PTSD flew out the window. He’d only been working at the Pitt for a little over a year at that point. When he first showed up, Dana worried about him, but it wasn’t until he lost Katy that she realized what real worry looked like.
Dana used to work night shift a lot in those days. She was witness to more than one Jack Abbot breakdown – in his own way, of course. He wasn’t loud about it, he didn’t kick and scream and yell about it. But it was scary in its own way.
They had a system back in those days. When she recognized the signs – could see the breakdown coming from a mile away – she’d send him out for air. She preferred when he’d go out to the ambulance bay to smoke a cigarette with her, but he preferred the roof. She hated it, but it was better than a breakdown in trauma 2.
“Jack,” she says now, her voice soft. She doesn’t want to spook him. “Do you need some air?”
“I’m fine,” he grumbles, eyes still on his computer. A few more minutes pass, and he slams his hand down on the counter again. This time, even Dana jumps. “Seriously, how fucking long does a CT scan take?”
“Abbot.”
Dana doesn’t know how he does it, but there’s Robby. Like he materialized out of thin air, suddenly right beside them. Jack looks at him and the two have a silent exchange, and then Robby looks at her and they have their own.
I’m worried about him, Dana’s eyes say.
I got him, Robby’s say.
Then, Robby turns to Jack. “Let’s get some air.”
Dana watches as the two of them disappear to the stairwell. She takes a deep breath, knows that Robby has this for right now at least, and she gets back to work.
Robby doesn’t say anything as Jack shoves the door open with more force than he puts into his chest compressions. He doesn’t say anything as Jack stomps over to the railing. He doesn’t say anything as Jack lets out a string of nonsensical curses.
He just lets it go. He follows, makes his own way over to the railing, and leans against it while his friend lets it all out.
When Jack’s done, his body sags against the metal railing, and he’s breathing heavily.
“You going to tell me what the hell is going on now?” Robby asks after a few minutes of silence. “Or are we going to keep doing this song and dance a little longer?”
“We’re not together,” Jack says finally. His voice sounds like it’s being ripped from his throat against his will. “We’ve never – that line hasn’t been crossed. But I hear she’s been in a car accident and it was like someone drove a fucking scalpel through my chest.”
“Mohan?” Robby clarifies uselessly. Of course they’re talking about Mohan. He’s not that dense, no matter what Dana says. “You care about her. We all know that. We’d have to be pretty fucking stupid to not see that.”
Jack shakes his head vehemently. “I heard she was in a car accident and my fucked up brain told me she was dead.”
“Well, yeah,” Robby says, because what else is he going to say? Jack has a fuckload of trauma of all kinds, but a special brand of car accident trauma that would color any sane person’s reaction to hearing that someone they care about was in a car accident, let alone someone like him.
“No, not yeah, ” Jack snaps, turning to look at him. The wild look isn’t in his eyes anymore. Now he just looks sad. “I’m fucked up, man. She doesn’t need that on her plate. I should have just gone home.”
The problem with all of this is that Robby has a hard time following Jack on a good day, but especially right now. It’s like the thread of the conversation has been chopped up into pieces with Jack’s tactical knife and now Robby’s trying to piece it back together.
“I don’t get it,” he says finally, shaking his head. “The two of you don’t make any sense.”
“I know,” Jack says, voice low and gravelly. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“No. I don’t mean you don’t make sense together ,” Robby sighs. Although part of him does in fact think that, he knows if he said that, Heather would possibly push him off the roof herself. “I mean, why this stupid back and forth, push and pull you’ve been doing for over a year?”
Jack looks pained when he looks at Robby again. “Because she wasn’t an attending, and now she is, and I can’t do that to her.”
“Do what?” Robby exclaims. “You’re not tying her up and forcing her to – “ He stops himself, sighing and shaking his head, before continuing. “You’re both adults. Have you tried, oh, I don’t know, talking to her?”
Jack doesn’t say anything. Of course he doesn’t, because Robby already knows the answer. Jack’s made up his mind. He doesn’t care what anyone else has to say, even Samira Mohan herself.
Robby doesn’t say anything for awhile. The two of them stand there, not speaking, until Robby’s phone goes off. He checks it quickly – it’s Dana, letting him know Mohan is back from her CT scan – and shows Jack.
With a nod of his head, he turns on his heel and starts towards the door. Robby takes a deep breath, takes one more look out towards the city, and then follows.
Samira is fine, as she knew she was. She has a mild concussion, a broken wrist, and absolutely nothing earth shattering wrong with her. They put a splint on her wrist, because the swelling hasn’t gone down enough for a real cast; she’ll need to come back in a few days for that. Dana’s working on her discharge papers, and she’s gathering her things up when Jack comes into the room.
He seems both more calm and less than earlier, which feels right, Samira thinks. He also looks absolutely wrecked. Her heart aches when she sees him.
“Dana’s getting my discharge papers,” she says to him. “I have to come back in two days for a cast, but I’m free as a bird.”
She’s standing beside her bed now so she can get her things together. Her purse, her keys, her phone. She needs to text her mom, but that can be done later, when her head isn’t throbbing so much.
Jack walks over to her, standing close enough that she could reach out and stroke his cheek if she reached up with her not-broken arm. There’s a part of her that wants to, but there’s always a part of her that wants to.
Wanting to touch Jack is like breathing for Samira. It’s constant, endless, always there even when she doesn’t even realize it. It’s been like that for years, and she doesn’t see it going away anytime soon.
“I heard you were in a car accident, and time fucking stopped,” he says. His gravelly voice drags over her skin like a physical thing, enough to give her goosebumps. “I couldn’t think about anything else.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “I should have called you. I didn’t want to freak you out, and instead I made things worse.”
“That’s not –” Jack sighs and shakes his head. “That’s not what I’m trying to say. You didn’t – you don’t have to call me. I don’t want you to feel like you have to call me.”
And… oh. Well. Samira wasn’t expecting that. She thought… well. It doesn’t matter what she thought, clearly.
“Right. Okay.” She nods and looks at the ground and then steps back, because she needs to put some physical distance between them before she loses it. “Well, Dana’s going to be back soon with my paperwork so I guess I should–”
Jack groans and takes a step forward. “I don’t know how to do this,” he says, sounding like she punched him. “I have more baggage than an airport terminal. I’m fucked up, Samira. I mean, Jesus Christ. You got in a car accident and I was ready to burn this place to the ground.”
“You’re an emotional guy,” Samira jokes, but she feels the tears burning in her throat.
“Imagine what a sane reaction to that would have been.”
“I’m not interested in sane.”
“What are you interested in?”
They’re so close now. Samira doesn’t know when that happened, doesn’t know when the distance between them evaporated into thin air. She reaches out with her good hand and presses her fingers against his chest, right over his heart. She can feel it pounding.
“If it’s not obvious by now, I’m not sure it ever will be.”
“Humor me,” he says, strained. Pleading with her.
“Do I really have to say it?”
“I wish you would.”
She smiles, even if she feels like she’s being ripped open at the seams. “You. Always you, Jack.”
She wants him to kiss her now, because she’s not sure she can move, but he’s frozen in place. He looks terrified. Like one wrong move and she’ll break — or maybe he will.
“Okay kids,” Dana announces, coming into the room and causing Jack to move at the speed of light to the other side of the room. As far away from Samira as he can get. “There’s a script for pain meds, nothing crazy, but it’ll help you sleep tonight. Come back in two days and we’ll see if you’re ready for a real cast. And you have the next four days off, courtesy of Robby.”
“I don’t—“ Samira starts, but then she sees the way both Jack and Dana are looking at her, so she shuts up. “Fine. Am I free to go?”
“Get the hell outta here,” Dana smiles. She wraps Samira in a hug, the motherly instinct coming out yet again, and then she sends both she and Jack on their way.
“Do you — I mean, you need a ride right?” Jack asks her as they walk out.
“Oh.” She does need a ride, considering the goddamn car accident that brought her here in the first place. She hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Come on,” Jack says. He puts his hand on the small of her back and guides her to the elevator.
“You don’t have to.”
He doesn’t dignify that with a response, and a part of Samira is glad.
They find his Jeep easily enough — Samira has been in it before, this isn’t new — and she climbs into the passenger seat after he opens the door for her.
He gets in on the other side and they sit in silence for a few minutes. Samira stays quiet, because she’s not really sure what else to say at this point.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Jack says finally. He keeps staring straight ahead, flexing his hands on the steering wheel.
“Taking me home, I hope.”
He looks at her, again with the pleading eyes. She knows in that moment — she knew it before obviously, but that moment solidifies it — that he would do absolutely anything for her.
She reaches over and presses her hand — she’s grateful, finally, that it’s her right arm that’s currently in a splint and not the one closest to him — against his cheek. His eyes close and he leans into it, and she wants to kiss him so bad .
“Take me home, Jack,” she says quietly. Jack opens his eyes, locked with hers, and nods.
He’s been to her apartment before.
She doesn’t think that’s weird, although if she thinks about someone like Robby standing in her living room for too long her skin starts to itch, so. But it doesn’t matter. He’s been here before. It’s where —
Well. Anyway. The point is, he’s been here before. They’ve watched baseball games on her TV and had movie nights. They’ve eaten take out in her living room. He’s fallen asleep on her couch. This isn’t new.
(And really, when she thinks of it like that, later, she’ll want to laugh or maybe kick herself. Because really. What were they making such a big deal of all of this for? Haven’t they been saying how they felt for over a year now, without explicitly stating it?)
But for now, she’s nervous.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Jack says finally, breaking the silence around them, repeating the same thing he said in the truck. “You gotta help me out here, Samira.”
Something in her melts.
She reaches out and brushes her hand against his cheek. He closes his eyes and turns into it. She moves her hand until her fingers are in his hair, and she pulls him towards her until he’s a breath away. He’s still hesitating, like he really doesn’t know what to do, and Samira knows with everything in her that she has to make the first move. That Jack isn’t going to even with a gun to his head.
Which is fine. Samira knows that now. She gets it.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” she says quietly. “That okay?”
He lets out a breath like it’s been punched out of him, and Samira smiles. She presses her lips against his, still smiling, and Jack wraps his arm around her waist to hold her close. Her stomach dips, and her splint bumps against him while she tries to get her bearings.
Unfortunately, this grounds them both in a way that has Jack jumping back like he’s been shocked. He’s breathing heavily, like he just ran a marathon, and his eyes are wide.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, stepping forward. This just makes Jack step back. She gets it. She doesn’t move.
“We can’t do this,” he says, strained. “We can’t – we said we weren’t going to do this.”
“That was over a year ago,” Samira reasons. “I wasn’t an attending. I am now. I want this.”
He looks at her in a way that says he does too – that he wants this, and then some. That he wants everything. But he can’t say it.
He can’t ever say it.
Because a year ago, they were here. They were in her apartment, a night spent together eating take out after a rare shift overlap. Jack had covered a day shift for Robby, so he and Samira had worked together for twelve insane hours. It was a crazy shift made better simply by the fact they were working it together.
It was something they did sometimes. Usually she showed up to his place with some new medical journal she’d found, or a study she wanted to go over, or a procedure she needed more information on. It didn’t really matter. They found an excuse whenever they needed to.
They were tired, and so close together, and Samira was looking at him like she always did – like he was everything, like he was all she needed – and something between them sparked. There was a charge, and then there was a flame. They didn’t kiss, but it was the closest they’d ever gotten.
They both pushed it aside then, chalked it up to a long day and fried nerves, even if it wasn’t that. It was never that.
It was a conscious decision they were making, or at least it was for Samira. But if he couldn’t take the leap, then there was nothing she could do about it, not back then.
It was different now. She was different.
“I don’t want you to worry about me,” he says now, his voice low. “You don’t need that in your life.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about what I need?” Samira whispers. She rubs her thumb against his cheek, his skin warm and his stubble rough. “You’re allowed to let people in, you know. There’s nothing about you that says you can’t.”
“No one needs all of this,” he says, gesturing to himself. The pained expression on his face kills her. “All of this fucked up baggage. You don’t want to deal with that. You shouldn’t have to.”
“No one has a gun to my head. I’m perfectly cognizant of this situation.”
“You’re not. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“Please stop,” she says, quiet but firm, leaving no room for argument. “You’re not listening to me. I want you . Nothing else matters. I’ve wanted you for so long, it’s second nature at this point. I’m tired of not letting myself have what I want, because of some stupid invisible line we’ve drawn in the sand. I’m tired of pretending like this isn’t something we both want, because we think we’re not supposed to. That’s stupid. We’re being stupid.”
“I’m fucked up, Samira,” he repeats, like he’s trying to make her stop. As if he could ever make her stop wanting him.
“So am I,” she shrugs. “We all are in our own way. I don’t care.” I love you anyways is right on the tip of her tongue, but she doesn’t want to scare him off completely. That can come later.
(And it will.)
“Kiss me, Jack,” she says instead. “Please.”
It’s the magic word. For whatever reason, it’s all he needs to hear. The restraint snaps, and he wraps one hand around the back of her head, pulling her in for the kiss of her dreams.
It sucks all of the air out of the room, all of the air out of her lungs. Kissing Jack is everything she thought it would be and then some.
Samira hasn’t had many serious relationships in her life. She’s been busy, putting everything into trying to be the best, first in high school, then in college, and on and on and on. She’s kissed a handful of people over her thirty-one years of living, even had a few significant others, but absolutely all of that pales in comparison to the kiss she’s receiving from one Jack Abbot right now.
He kisses her like he was made to do it. He kisses her like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. He kisses her, and the world honest to god tilts on its axis.
There are kisses, and then there is whatever this is. Frankly, calling it just a kiss would be doing it a disservice.
Jack pulls back eventually – minutes or hours later, who can say? – and drags his lips across her face, down her neck, nipping at the skin by her earlobe. She sighs his name like a reverie, and something about that makes him pull away.
He looks into her eyes, pupils blown and a beautiful red flush covering his freckled skin, and Samira knows without a shadow of a doubt that every single moment that conspired together to bring her to this point, here, with him, was worth it.
“Are you sure?” he asks for what feels like the eight hundredth time, and Samira can’t help it. She laughs.
Is she sure ? She’s never been more sure of anything in her life, actually.
She needs to sit – the pain and the meds and the entire day finally catching up to her in a way that makes it feel like she might collapse right then and there – so she maneuvers them until they’re sitting on her couch. Samira throws her legs over Jack’s lap, not quite sitting on top of him but as close as she could possibly get. Jack rests one hand on her knee, creeping towards her thigh, and the other he reaches up to brush her hair off of her face.
“I have never in my life been more sure of something or someone,” she says once she’s settled. She seeks his eyes out, because she needs to make sure he’s hearing her. “It’s you, and then it’s everything else. I don’t know why I ever thought this wasn’t something I could or should have, but I was wrong. We were wrong. We can figure everything else out later.”
“You have so much going for you,” he says, his voice low and rough. He looks down at the hand covering her knee. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. You could run circles around every single person in that ED, and you probably will for years to come. You don’t need to add my bullshit into the mix of things.”
“Says who?” she says, and she can’t help but smile. She reaches out and grabs his chin to force him to look at her. “I want your bullshit. I want you to have my bullshit. I want all of it, and I think you do too, if you’d get out of your own way.”
She leans in to kiss him again, softer this time and maybe with less intent but not feelings. When she pulls back, she rests her forehead against his. “I want this, Jack,” she says quietly. “I think you do too.”
“You have no fuckin’ idea, Samira.”
She smiles.
Everything else can come later. For now, there’s this: Jack and Samira, on her couch, a tangle of limbs and feelings and love, even if neither of them can say it yet. This: Jack and Samira, trying to get out of their own way so that they can enjoy this. And this: Jack and Samira, unsure what the next move is, but knowing it involves the two of them, together, always.
Always.
When Dana gets to work a few days later, she sees the two of them walking in together, hand in hand. Samira is looking at Jack like he’s the only one in the room, and Jack is looking at her like his world begins and ends with one Samira Mohan.
She smirks and sips her coffee. “Called it,” she says to herself quietly, and then she gets to work.