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He thinks he might be hallucinating when he sees her.
He’s not a stranger to Samira-induced psychosis. He’s quite familiar with the phenomenon. Every time he catches that warm, vanilla perfume she wears on her days off he feels himself go a little stupid and wonder what he did to be such a lucky son-of-a-bitch.
But Samira, his Samira, is standing in the doorway of the shitty little dive bar he forces himself into every few months to see his former squad members, wearing a dress he could not have conjured up in his wildest dreams.
She’s an unfailingly casual woman, a quality he finds incredibly endearing when he sees her in a soft, cable-knit sweater on their date nights, or tucked into one of his t-shirts and a pair of boxers, little silver glasses perched on her nose. She is most often soft, and rumpled by the day and it knocks the breath out of him every time.
But now he can see the smooth, brown expanse of her hips where his hands had been notched only an hour earlier through the cutouts on her dress. It’s stark white, sinfully short, and clings to her in a way that makes him want to ram his head into a wall. Like a homing beacon she spots him - he’s heard their supernatural ability to find each other in any room called unnerving but he can’t bring himself to be anything but utterly besotted about it. Her smile is one-thousand megawatts of electricity straight to his chest as she calls,
“Jack!”
He promptly chokes on his Miller Lite.
Next to him, Amy, Lawrence, and Rafael have all turned to stare at him with varying degrees of disbelief or shock, the normally raucous group gone stunningly silent.
Samira approaches them faster than he can mentally prepare for whatever this encounter is going to become. All bright white teeth and glossy black hair, there’s a semi in his cargo pants and he’s pretty sure he stopped breathing thirty seconds ago.
“Hi honey.” He chokes out, reaching out on autopilot to stand and press a solid kiss to very, very red mouth. It isn’t until he hears the pointed clearing of a throat he pulls away. Samira swipes her thumb over the corner of his mouth where her lipstick has smeared and there’s some sort of ‘ERROR 404’ message computing in his synapses right now. He finds the small of her back, warm and constant beneath the callouses on his palm and tries to mitigate the flush he knows is crawling up his neck.
“This is uh - This is my partner Dr. Samira Mohan, she works at the hospital with me.”
“It’s so nice to meet you all!” She interjects, extending a cordial hand to the table. “Jack’s told me so much about you guys. I’m not normally-” She makes a noncommittal gesture at herself. “But it’s a friend’s birthday and her only request was to look hot and go out.”
“Well you’ve certainly succeeded on both counts.” Amy laughs, inspiring a new round of snickers from the table.
Samira, to her deserved credit, is all smiles and affable thanks as she rubs her hand absently over Jack’s bicep. Across the bar he can see Santos, Javadi, and King crowd around the bartender in similar states of gussying-up.
“Well I’ve gotta go. We just stopped by to get Trinity’s wallet back from the girl she’s seeing. But I’ll see you at home. It was great to meet you guys!” She turns back to Jack and kisses him again, her tongue slipping to trace the seam of his lips with efficient brutality. She’s trying to murder him. “Love you!”
He somehow manages to croak out a response before falling back into the peeling, pleather booth. All energy sapped entirely from his body, Samira-induced psychosis, he thinks again. It’s only when he turns he sees three pairs of curious eyes boring into him.
“Ho-lee shit Jack-Rabbit!” Rafael crows jostling his shoulder. “What the fuck man? No offense but how the fuck-”
“She seems great.” Lawrence interjects, always the peacemaker.
“Great?” Amy scoffs. “She’s gorgeous. She’s a doctor, she’s what, fifteen, twenty years younger than you? Man you are batting so ridiculously far out of your league we need to put you on The Mets next season.”
Something lovely and comforting begins to pool in his chest, the memory of her soft hands and magnanimous brown eyes sending his brain all syrupy and saccharine. Jack rights himself and takes a long sip of his beer.
“You think I don’t know that? I’m thanking my fuckin’ lucky stars every day. Hell, I’d thank her if she just wanted to spit in my direction.”
Amy’s laughing then, ruffling his hair good-naturedly and calling him whipped with no real malice in her voice. He’ll never deny it. He’d crawl on broken glass just to see her smile - a concept he had no desire to discuss with his therapist but a concept still.
“Are you happy Jacky?” Lawrence asks, the cool, soothing baritone of his voice lulling the conversation into something more earnest. They’d all stood beside him at Caroline’s funeral - a promise never to leave a man behind, even long after their tour had ended. He could see it plainly in their faces, the genuine relief and quirked his mouth to keep from getting too emotional.
“Yeah I’m-” He thinks of Sunday mornings with Samira, the smell of pancakes and the old episodes of Gunsmoke on his couch. He thinks of her laugh, a boisterous, full-belly laugh that has her in tears. He thinks of his head between her thighs and the sound she makes when she comes. He thinks of her, sleepy and clinging to him insisting on ten more minutes of a journal before he scoops her up and forces her to bed. “I’m really fucking happy yeah. She’s incredible.” She’s the best thing that ever happened to me, he thinks. She brought me back to life. I thought I was a dead-man-walking and she slammed on my chest like God.
Rafael claps a hand on the back of his neck, noting his thumb in the hollow beneath Jack’s ear. “I’m happy for you man. That’s all we ever wanted for you.”
Yeah, Jack thinks, everything he could have wanted and more.