Archive of Our Own

Life has occasioned to kick Jack Abbot in the teeth more times than he can count. More times than he has fingers, more times than the five toes he lost or the five toes he still has. He keeps this in mind when Samira Mohan emails him asking permission to submit the article they co-authored two summers ago, Efficacy and Complications of Intracardiac Pigtail Catheterization in the Emergency Room Setting, to present at a conference in Philadelphia. 

Jack Abbot doesn’t like attending conferences, as a rule. He doesn’t sleep well in new places, all his military training crowded out by hypervigilance and racing thoughts. He doesn’t like crowds, or unfamiliar locations, or public speaking. But he likes Samira Mohan and misses her so very much, so he writes her back immediately with a yes.

He has not seen her for almost two years. It took six months for him to get her new phone number, and another six months after that to convince her that he really meant it when he said that he wanted to keep in touch. 

Life likes to kick Jack Abbot in the teeth. He knows, in a far-reaching, academic sort of way, that it has taken the time and opportunity to knock Samira to her knees as well. It is why he is surprised, but not so surprised that he is unable to react, that the doctor whose negligence killed her father two decades ago is seated in the audience of their presentation. It is why, once they wrap the Q&A portion of their talk and he is able to usher Samira out of the hall—his hand on the small of her back as he navigates their way out of the convention center, the two blocks to their hotel, and through the lobby to the bar—he is cosmically unsurprised by the automated email sitting in his inbox informing him that the drunk driver who killed his wife five years ago has been released early from SCI Pittsburgh due to good behavior. 

Because sure.

Why not? 

“I have accepted that I will never reconcile with the way I lost her,” Jack says, staring into the bottom of his bourbon. “But I have reconciled with the way I grieved her.” 

“How?” Samira whispers.

They made it to the hotel bar. He’s surprised that Samira didn’t hoist herself onto a bar stool, plant her elbows on the lacquered wood, and demand a bottle of liquor, but she flashed him one of her stiletto heels as a reminder of how tired her thighs already are. No perching. Pressing the heel of his hand into her hip, he directed her to the back of the room, to a quiet nook filled with a U-shaped leather booth, a marble-topped table, and little else. 

And then he got them a bottle of liquor. 

Woodford Reserve, because she asked for bourbon. A small plate of orange garnishes because he’s watched her drink at bars before, has watched her pinch a slice of citrus between her fingers and rim her glass before each sip. French fries, even if she won’t touch them. Because he knows she picked at her breakfast this morning. Because he watched as she hardly ate lunch. Because he’s her friend, and this is what friends do. 

“We talked about it, what we’d want the other to do. If one of us died suddenly. It was just usually—it was supposed to be me. Odds were that it was gonna be me.” Gen had a dark sense of humor. No, Gen had a morbid sense of humor. Gen would find it fucking hilarious that after years of calling herself a presumptive widow that she was the one who died, bloody and sudden in the summer sun. “But I know what she wanted for me. She never wanted me to grieve her for the rest of my life. She wanted—she wanted me to eventually remember her like—like a close friend who had fallen out of touch. With love, but—distance. We were both raised Catholic, but neither of us believed in life after death, or in heaven or hell. Being raised Catholic will, uh, work that out of you.” 

And maybe it’s something they both hoped for. They both hoped that God did not exist, because then it would mean that this life was nothing more than a test. They both hoped that God did not exist, because it would mean that he would be condemned to hell for the choice he made in a high school cafeteria in West Virginia at eighteen. He hopes that God does not exist, because it means that the reparations for his teenage belief that the slaughter of strangers on foreign soil would be worth free tuition could be made in this life. That they have to be made in this life. That his actions in this life have any meaning at all. 

“She was a chemist,” he says, and years ago he would have gone into detail about her doctoral dissertation, about the differences between organic and inorganic chemistry that he learned with love. “She believed in molecules and atoms and stolen electrons. In reactions and half lives. She believed that what’s scattered to the universe becomes a part of the universe. That one day she would die and whatever part of existence decided to create her would take her back. She was cremated. Her mother was pissed.”

Something in Samira’s eyes lights up, warm light catching her irises, illuminating them until the warm brown is honeyed, almost the color of the bourbon in their glasses.  

“Where did you scatter her ashes?”

No one’s asked him that in years. No one asks after you’ve done it, after you’ve stopped moving the cardboard urn around the house you bought together, the house where you tried to start the second half of a marriage, the house where you finally really considered and discussed children and pets and retirement accounts. No one asks after you’ve put the house on the market, after you’ve moved into an apartment five minutes from work. After you’ve pissed off your mother-in-law more times than you can count, and just decide to fucking scatter her ashes yourself, the way that she asked you to in the first place. 

“Up in Allegheny National Forest. We talked about buying a cabin up there. I did, about a year after the accident. After he—the drunk driver—was found guilty.” He got what he wanted. It felt important for him to do something Gen wanted as well. “What about your dad?”

The question startles her. 

Her father died twenty years ago. When was the last time someone asked? How many years has it been for her? 

“Back home, in Jersey. We drove down to Cape May, to the southernmost tip. It would have been—we didn’t have the money to fly him home, and the ceremony is supposed to happen shortly after death in the first place. And because of the nature—he was autopsied. It’s how we found out it was hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. He had um, coronary artery bridging, and it led to an MI,” she explains, twisting her stack of three gold bracelets around her wrist. She never wore jewelry to work; he’s always wondered if it had something to do with infectious disease control. “South Asian funeral homes aren’t difficult to find in Central Jersey. He was very religious. He believed very strongly in the soul’s journey. Believed very strongly that he wanted his ashes scattered in the Kaveri River. My mother isn’t religious. She’s always been very practical.”

 He wonders what that’s shorthand for. Practical can mean many things—detached, cold, efficient. Maybe Samira’s mother is all three.

“But about a year after he died, I think when my mom realized we were going to lose the house no matter what she did, she just wanted to scatter his ashes somewhere in the water. That was the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school.” 

Jack Abbot was in his late thirties when it all came apart. Samira Mohan wasn’t even in high school when she lost her father in the living room of her childhood home. 

“How do you grieve for him?”

She starts to flinch, but catches it. Starts to flinch, but takes a sip instead. Folds and then unfolds her legs, adjusts her posture. How many times have her reflexes been tested, only for her to smooth the response away as intentional? 

“I don’t know. By being alive, it feels like,” she replies, staring into the middle distance. There’s a flicker of recognition in her eyes, a reminder to pull herself back into the performance. He hates it. He wants to tell her to stop. But he doesn’t know who the performance is for—him or Samira. “It feels like his death just got folded into my neurological development. Other kids were having their first kisses, going on dates, sneaking alcohol in basements and I—I was planning out the next twenty years of my life. Trying to make sure that it would never happen again. Trying to see if I could fix it. Like if I externalized every emotion I had about watching them code my father for fifty minutes then it would never hurt me.”

Oh angel, he wants to say when she gives him a little smile.

The kind that says: I’m over it, it’s fine. The kind that says: Don’t be nice to me about this, or I’ll break. The kind that warns: I have lost who I am without this sadness, do not even try to approach. I will let it break me because I do not know how to let it go. It has been so long that I am afraid to ask. It has been so long that everyone has left me behind. 

“Robby put me on mandatory leave, when the driver was found guilty at the end of the trial,” he says, thick with emotion that he wishes he didn’t feel. “I spun out so badly in the aftermath. I think I staked so much on it emotionally—and then he was found guilty, and he was sentenced, and it didn’t fix anything. He found me on the roof. Well, I found myself on the roof. He just followed me there.” 

“I’ve thought about seeing if any record of—if they did an M&M, anything. If I could use my research as a cover to get my hands on it,” Samira whispers like a confession. He wonders if she’s ever spoken any of this out loud before, or if she’s only ever planned out the particulars of her revenge fantasy in the dark, alone. “His name is David Raines. He’s fifty-two. Divorced and remarried, two kids and one stepkid. Lives in a big house next to the Metuchen Country Club. Less than a mile from JFK Memorial Hospital, where he still works.” 

“Do you think you could? Get your dad’s medical records?”

“No. It happened in ‘08. There’s no way anything related to his patient care still exists.” 

They would have kept the files for seven years maximum, and then shredded them for HIPAA compliance. No one learned from her father’s death except Samira herself, who learned that nothing would happen that she didn’t claw and fight for herself. She traces the rim of the thick, crystal cut tumbler in her hand. 

“Robby spent so much time trying to get me to transfer from the residency program. He only stopped after Langdon went to rehab. And then Collins left and Langdon returned and the Fourth of July happened, and… and he told me that I wasn’t cut out for it. For emergency medicine. For the Pitt. For him, I guess. That’s why I left. Found as many electives and away rotations that would take me. Ran out the clock.”

Her tone is casual, her posture is not. 

It’s not difficult to see that Robby plays favorites—Adamson did too. But Adamson at least was fair. Adamson at least didn’t openly prefer his white male students and colleagues. 

“You’re shitting me.” 

“No.” Shaking her head, she downs another mouthful of liquor, wincing at the burn. “He wanted me to transfer to psych. Oh, and geriatrics. He was pushing for geriatrics in the end. Because I’m slow. Not because it’s important, or because—because it’s a needed subspecialty of emergency medicine, or because he saw a gap I could fill in the Pitt.” 

“He—when you were an R3, he said you should transfer to psychiatry? What the fuck?” That’s as good as forcing her to leave the practice of medicine entirely. As good as forcing her to an emergency department desperate to hire someone without board certifications. As good as forcing her to practice out in the middle of the fucking boonies, a violent prospect for a young woman of color. “No, I—first of all, you belong in emergency medicine. Second of all, absolutely the fuck not. Third of all, he wouldn’t say that shit to any other resident.” 

“Yeah, he said a lot of things to me that he wouldn’t say to any other resident.” Taking a deep breath, she holds the air in her lungs for a moment, then nods curtly. Lets it all go at once. “I used to project a lot of my—daddy issues just sounds cringe, but for lack of a better word. But there was that period of good feelings after PittFest where all of us were encouraged to go to therapy and the EAP was covering more than just six sessions. So I went.” 

A lot of people did. It was encouraged, along with pre-emptive testing for bloodborne illnesses and amped up vaccine schedules for influenza and covid. There were glossy pamphlets and specialists from ATVA and free condoms in the breakroom. General wisdom given against sudden life changing decisions like marriage proposals and pregnancies. If he was less restrained, less in control of his baser urges, less in love with her, he might have given into the desire to invite Samira into the back of his car and work off the extra adrenaline on each other. He wanted to. 

He really fucking wanted to. 

And when she pulled three doubles the week after PittFest, each one coinciding with the nights he was scheduled to work—it seemed like she wanted to as well. Or at least thought about it, her eyes tracking him around the emergency room. 

“We didn’t really talk about PittFest. We ended up talking a lot about my relationship with Robby. I think I projected a lot of the absence of my father onto him.” Grimacing, Samira twists her lips into a contortionate kind of grin, eyes flickering. “Tried to, I don’t know, anthropomorphize the pain and the lack and the want onto him. Talked a lot about how my desire for his attention was tied into the absence of his approval. I wanted somewhere to point the grief. He was available.” 

He certainly was. 

“Fuck, that sounds difficult.” 

“It wasn’t great,” she chirps. Then, with a sigh, refills her glass. “What was Gen like?” 

“The Gen I was married to, or Gen who is my old friend from home who I’ve lost touch with?” he asks. 

The answers are farther and farther apart these days. Farther and farther apart the more he falls in love with Samira, the version of her that he gets over email and text messages and the occasional irate voice memo. Farther and farther apart, the more he considers what he might do if she asked him. Father and father apart—he left the ring at home this trip. He’s been leaving his ring at home more often, for trips to the gym and to the grocery store, for doctor’s appointments and therapy sessions, for shifts at the hospital and volunteer work through the VA.

He’s not wearing it now. 

“Either. Both. Whoever you want to talk about.” 

People don’t ask. 

There are people who knew him before she died, and people who met him after. Five years on, there are few people who knew him—really and truly knew him—as a husband. As her husband. As one half of Jack-and-Gen. Even fewer people want to hear about Gen herself. 

Just her absence. 

“Smart. Usually the smartest person in the room,” he starts, because it’s one of the easier things to remember about her, because people know how to hear it. “A little bit mean, but in a way I found enjoyable. Somehow both short-tempered but incredibly patient. She spoke three languages. She had strong opinions on computers. She fucking hated Apple.” 

She would still be a holdout, he knows. She would have never given up her Android phone. 

“Um, she came from a military family—it’s how we met. She was visiting her brother and sister-in-law on base. She fucking hated the Army, swore up and down she’d never marry someone in the armed forces, let alone an officer. She was incredibly independent, sometimes resented having to factor in another person into her decisions. We used to joke that she preferred it when I deployed.”

It was how her mother felt about her father, how her sister-in-law felt about her brother. Household stasis was a testament to separation. Gen was focused on her career, and in his absence she only had to keep up with a husband who scheduled weekly flower deliveries from Afghanistan and mailed letters that arrived a month late. When he was promoted to Major, they would get the occasional sparse minutes of conversation over a satellite phone. Her picture was always tacked to the inside of his flack jacket. His obituary was pre-written and sitting in a word document on her desktop. She shipped nude photos taken on a polaroid camera for his birthday

Would he want that again? 

Would he want someone who could view his absence as routine? Would he want someone who would tolerate not knowing his location for weeks, months at a time? Someone who wouldn’t know when he was coming home, or if he was coming home at all? 

“Neither of us handled it well when I lost my leg.” It was a surprise to them both, how poorly they reacted. “It’s odd to think about her as my wife, close to five years out. I’m an entirely different man than the one she was married to. She stopped at forty-three and—and my grief for her turned me into a different person. I stopped being her husband, somewhere along the way. I never stopped loving her. But I stopped being her husband. I started being the caretaker of all these memories I have of her.” 

Some days, he wakes up and doesn’t remember he was ever married until a few hours later. 

Some days, he doesn’t think about her at all. 

On those days, he thinks of thick black curls coiled into a knot at the nape of a long, graceful neck. He thinks of soft skin the color of raw umber, a warm ochre that he wants to mix into paint, pigment he wants to see spilled against his own flesh, pink and cold and pale. He thinks of dark eyes that hook into his gaze, of soft dusky lips, of the little container of aquaphor in the pocket of her scrubs. He thinks of delicate, deliberate fingers tapping out notes on a patient’s chart, of the furrow of her brow when something doesn’t quite make sense yet. He thinks about her graceful jaw, her angular cheekbones, the bold slop of her brows. He thinks about her so much, so often, that it would be easier just to sink his fingers into his chest and crack open his own ribcage about it. 

He thinks about how he lost Samira Mohan on a hot summer day, just like he lost Gen.

“My dad was kind. Really kind. He could also be a massive asshole,” she elaborates, crinkling her nose. “He could be mercurial, would be the word for it, I guess. Generous and compassionate and lighthearted, right up until he wasn’t. He had a temper. Sometimes when I was little I remember being afraid of him. I think at some point he figured that out. He tried not to point it at me.” 

One manicured brow quirks upwards. She laughs, low and dry and mostly at herself. Jack watches her, because he always wants to watch her. She’s never worn a dress in front of him before, not that there has been a glut of occasions. The one year Robby designated her attendance as mandatory for the PTMC gala was one of the years he was off the hook. The kind of parties that the denizens of the emergency department host don’t tend to come with a dress code—he’s seen Samira in sweaters and jeans, in a hoodie and athletic shorts, in faded leggings and a t-shirt. 

Today, she stepped out of her hotel room in a black dress. Some kind of cotton blend, owing to the weather. Sleeveless, if the black pinstripped blazer tugged over her arms is anything to go by. His eyes keep catching on the little enameled gold buttons, on the slim heels of her black leather stilettos. Three inches—putting her almost at the same height as him.  

“A lot weighed on him,” she continues, extracting her conference lanyard from around her neck, threading it out from under her curls. 

It drops onto the table between them with a small plasticky plink. 

“My mom immigrated when she was a child, but he came here for university. He went to Rutgers.” She’s thinking, recalling. Condensing her origin down to base facts as she takes two barrettes out of her hair. “Worked for Rutgers when he graduated, in the athletic department. My mom worked night audit at a massive hotel—conference center. I think he always wanted to go back home. But he was—one foot in New Jersey, one foot in Tamil Nadu. He liked his coworkers, and his friends. The local temple. Tamil New Year and Pongal and Deepavali. He also loved Christmas and football and professional wrestling and NASCAR. He was terrified of me losing my culture, my ancestry. He was right. I barely speak to my family. I haven’t been back to India since I was in undergrad, for a cousin’s wedding.” 

“What was his name?”

He should know it. Someone close to her should know it. Someone she sees more than once a week should know it. 

“Mohan Ganesh,” she says, and then purses her lips. And then takes a deep breath.  “It’s the—it’s a Tamil naming convention. My mother is Aditi Mohan. His father’s name was Ganesh. It’s a—patronymic, I guess is the word for it.”

The words are rote. Her tone is bland. But her hand shakes around her glass, belaying something in her that lies dormant and untested. 

“That’s why you tell everyone to call you by your first name?” he asks. 

He tries to sound casual, tries to sound like he isn’t aware of the separation she holds between herself and the rest of the world. As if he doesn’t know that her isolation is carefully cultivated, as if he doesn’t recognize the choice of loneliness that she makes, also within himself. Jack shrugs off his suit jacket, letting it crumple into the booth beside him. A waiter finally brings over their french fries, fresh and heavily salted and smelling of malt. 

“In part,” she says, reaching for a pinch of three shoestring fries, shoving them into her mouth. “And part because Americans butcher the pronunciation,” she continues, smirking at him. “And part because if I insisted on being Dr. Mohan then I’d never hear my given name, ever.” 

And that is all Jack needs to hear to know about Samira’s relationship with her mother. About her relationship with loss. About her relationship with herself. 

“Do you wanna go back?” he asks her eventually. “The session you wanted to attend on post bone graft pain management starts in ten minutes.” 

Samira smiles, but only sort of, and then scrunches up her nose. “Not really? Is that bad to say? I just wanna stay right here. I think if I see that guy again—it’s bad enough that I could figure out his current boss if I really wanted to. Thank god he didn’t try to introduce himself to me.”

The cascade of events is clear in his mind, even in the hypothetical. In every way he runs the scenario, he’s standing next to her, and can see the way her face and body language are transformed by grief and rage. She never really collapses, it’s always subtle. But he’s learned her, really learned her, and can see the adrenaline surge and the way her hand tightens around the strap of her purse, notices the shape of her spine as it moves, adjusts to her weight sinking back onto the heels of her feet. 

“I could punch him,” Jack replies. “It’s been a minute since I’ve been arrested, but I remember how to post bail. I brought my Amex, even.” 

Samira barks a laugh, a little astonished. “No sir. No assault charges. I’m not explaining any of this to Robby. If you make me talk to that dickhead after two years of successfully avoiding him—” 

Why not? He thinks it would be funny.  

“Fair enough. Offer’s still on the table. No expiration date.” 

Rolling her eyes, she thumbs at the plain gold necklace around her neck. It’s delicate, glinting in the warm light, the pendant of a lotus flower shifting up and down the chain. “You’re sweet. You’re drunk.”

Nah. He’s not dumb enough to get drunk in front of her. 

“Not yet I’m not,” he says instead.

But he can imagine it; he knows the man he becomes when he’s had too much to drink. Knows that after a certain point, alcohol ignites the part of his brain that is starved for touch, thirsts for affection. Two more glasses of bourbon and he’ll be desperate to glut himself on her, to figure out how to make her open up, soft and tender. 

He’s always been a bit of a whore, always been more than a little bit needy. And he wants more than that, with her. He wants a beginning, he wants the promise of a first step, an opening salvo. He wants to kiss her, and to know it isn’t the last time he’ll be allowed. To kiss her, to make her bloom open for him, to learn all the ways he can make her say his name. He wants her to tolerate being known by him. 

“How are you feeling, Samira?” he asks. 

“Tipsy,” she says. Then a deep breath, followed by a soft exhale. “Not so tipsy that you’re gonna get away with the fact that you just called me Samira for the first time.”   

Because that’s true, isn’t it? 

It’s entirely avoidable, calling her by her given name. So he avoids it. 

No one introduced them—she was a name in an email from the program administrators, and then a headshot in a faculty meeting presentation on the incoming intern class. Whatever impression she made during her externship under Adamson before the pandemic was washed away by the chaos that followed. Robby kept her on days those first few months for orientation and her first ED rotation, and then the next six months she was with orthopedics, OB/GYN, pediatrics, ultrasound, and cardiology. He didn’t really meet her, let alone work with her, until she was an R2 picking up doubles to prepare for a rotation with EMS and his mother-in-law was leaving a voicemail a day asking for him to send Gen’s ashes home. 

He’s always called her Mohan. 

“It was important to me to maintain a little distance between us.” He ignores the thick knot at the back of his throat, washing it away with a mouthful of liquor. “Because of the tension.” 

The things he wants from her, with her—he can’t speak them. 

Can’t think them. 

“What… What tension?” she asks, setting her glass down onto the table between them, a dark look flashing across her face. For a brief moment, he worries that she might ignore the U-shape of the booth they’re sitting in and scramble over the top of the glossy marble, pin him down with her weight in his lap. “No, don’t look away from me, you jerk. What tension? Is this why we were never close when I was at PTMC?” 

“I am your friend,” he mumbles. “I am supposed to only be your friend.” 

He wants so much more. 

A stunned noise punches out of her throat. “Oh. Oh. Is that why I could never tell if you were actually flirting with me? Is that why I’ve been so goddamn confused?” 

“You were a resident, and I am a senior attending.” 

It’s not the answer she’s looking for, but it’s the only answer he has. 

“You’re not my boss. Not anymore. You weren’t even my boss back then.”

“There was still a massive power differential. I couldn’t—I wouldn’t make you uncomfortable in your place of work. And I—if our positions were reversed, and I learned that the attending who wanted to work with me and wanted to teach me and talk about my research and sent me bonkers case reports from other continents—that he wanted to fuck me? I’d be pissed. My interest in your career came first. It always had to come first. I respect you too much to do that to you. And now—now I regret it. Because maybe if I said something, maybe if I intervened—” 

The things that he would do to simply not care. 

To just have allowed himself to be the dirty old man, the sleazy attending willing to take a resident into his bed. Willing to ruin her reputation, to care so little for her integrity, her career, her training. To be Robby. And the worst thing is, he wants her so badly that he considered it. They’re both smart people, they could have snuck around. They could have hid it.

He could be good for her, be good to her. He so badly wants to be good to Samira Mohan. 

“I take it back. You’re not sweet,” she says, scoffing. “You’re a moron. I’ve been killing myself for the chance to follow you into the back of your Jeep and do filthy things to you for like, over a year now. Why do you think I wanted to present together at this conference?” 

The blood in his body starts evacuating south. 

“You can’t just tell me these things.”

Because he wants her to. God, how he wants her to. He wants her to shove him against the side of the Wrangler, wants the back of his skull to smack into metal and steel, wants her to climb him before shoving him into the backseat. Wants her to ride his cock like she knows that she owns him, wants her to hook her fingers into his mouth, wants to gag himself on her needs. 

“You want to do more than just fuck me.” Her eyes are wide, stunned. Fingers flat on the table, she spreads her hands open, stares at her shaped and filed fingernails. “I felt like a dumb little girl with a crush. I had elaborate fantasies. I named my vibrator after you. I concocted stupid storylines in my head and thought about them while I fell asleep. ” 

“And I would love to hear about them, in depth,” he says, instead of trying to refute her. 

Tongue poking through her lips, Samira shakes her head. When she looks up at him, there’s something mirthful in her gaze. “Nu-uh. Absolutely not. Now I have to punish you.” 

His mouth quirks into a grin, heart thudding in his chest. 

“Honey, get in line. My therapist has been working on this particular little habit of mine for years.” Not that he can’t think of a few ways that he’d like to be punished by Samira Mohan. Their hotel rooms have king beds with tall, tufted leather headboards—the perfect height for her to cling to, dig her nails into, as she grinds down onto his face. She shakes her head, keeps her eyes locked onto his. Jack takes a deep breath, the last dregs of alcohol on his taste buds lighting up with oxygen. “I didn’t want to be a complication. I didn’t want to drop all my shit on you.” 

It’s why he mostly gets laid at conferences and other places where people don’t balk at the ring on his finger, don’t ask questions about his marital status, and don’t want questions about their own. 

Samira huffs a laugh. “I’m gonna beat you with a baseball bat.”

“Maybe I’d be into that,” he teases. 

“You drive me nuts.” Leveraging her weight up onto the heels of her hands, Samira pushes herself up off the leather booth, sliding towards the center. 

It feels like all he can do is watch her, evaluating the smooth movements of her body as she slides closer and closer. Ill-advised conference hookups are rote and routine. They’re happening all around them. They’re almost expected, once the alcohol comes out.

But this? 

“Yeah, well, I am nuts,” he says. “Have you considered that?” 

In Samira’s defense, she has. It was one of the first things she ever learned about him, even if it was hearsay. Even before his wife died, Jack was at least a little bit nuts. Smiling, she opens her mouth to tell him so.

His phone vibrating on the table interrupts her. 

“Oh, fuck me. That’s my attorney’s office, from the fucking civil suit. I don’t know why I let anyone talk me into wrongful death litigation. I don’t need the money and it just ties me to this asshole for the rest of my—Abbot.” 

With an abruptness that still feels familiar after three out-of-state electives and eighteen months in Cape May County, Jack cuts himself off mid-ramble and shoves his phone to his ear. 

“Yeah, yeah, John Patrick Abbot. Jack is fine. I know, I got the email this morning. Yes, I would like to file a restraining order. No, I do not care about filing a pre-emptive wage garnishment motion, I’m sure he’s just gonna find someone to pay him under the table. Yes, I know he also owes back child support, and I’d rather the mother of his children see that money before I do. Yeah, thanks—I do appreciate the call. Alright. Have a good one.” 

His voice is curt, like he’s dealing with an intractable patient. No, sir, you will not assault the nurse for refusing to give you more drugs. Your oxycontin is not PRN. Yes, you will be dealing with me for the rest of the evening. You’ll receive excellent care, only from me. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. 

“You didn’t have to think about any of that,” she observes. 

“Talked about it with my therapist years ago, when I was trying to let go of the whole vengeance is mine rage shtick I felt every time a drunk driver ended up in the Pitt.” He does that odd little neck movement she’s learned to mean a spike in his anxiety, a surge of adrenaline tightening the muscles and sinews of his chest. He gets wobbly, and not just on the prosthetic foot. “For the record, I would still like to punch that one drunk driver.” 

She told him her boogeyman. Now she wants to know the name of his. 

“What’s his name?”

“Daniel Taylor Hughes. So you know, if you ever read that specifically on a driver’s license in a trauma bay—”

“Punch him for you?” she asks, lips twitching together, tightening into a line. 

“I was gonna say make sure he was born in May of 1974, and then sure, you can punch him. If you want to. Or just let him know that he’s the reason I still can’t turn the police scanner off, after all these years. Heard dispatch read her license plate number on the open channel. I don’t remember anything until I got to her car on 379, mangled beyond recognition. I knew she was dead before—I didn’t have a go bag back then.” Swallowing hard, he takes another deep breath. His nervous system remains unconvinced that it’s getting enough oxygen, instead telling him that his red blood cells are depleted before it gets to his brain, his lungs heaving in empty, subpar air. “Are you gonna tell your mom, about seeing the doctor whose negligence killed your dad?” 

She could. 

They’re speaking again as of late; Amma and Divan are back in the United States after a three-month Mediterranean cruise. They’d given up the lease on their apartment in Jersey City to spend two months with his family in Ireland before boarding yet another cruise ship. Samira cannot find it in herself to get riled up about it anymore.

Amma and Divan are in love; companionate, or otherwise. 

Amma does not have any particular interest in her life. 

Amma will let her know when she has particular interest in her life. Usually at an interval of ten to fourteen weeks. Generally in the summer, when Amma wants to spend a few days at the beach. Or, on one memorable occasion, when they lost their passports in Hamburg. 

“I can’t. I won’t. We’re not—we were close, for a few years after Appa died. We did everything together. We were a team. We had to be. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want me to become a doctor, but she definitely didn’t want me to work in emergency medicine. She still has faith in medicine. But she doesn’t—I don’t know. I don’t talk to her about my work, or my research, or the people I work with. And she doesn’t ask. And there’s a massive hole shaped like my father in-between us that we’ve both tried to fill up in very different ways.” 

“That’s tough.” He pauses. “Did she ever remarry?” 

“Yeah, two years ago. It was um… it was quick. She didn’t invite me,” Samira explains, and even without the further explanation, he would have been able to tell it was a tender subject. “July of that year was not a good month for me. She married this guy she just met, sold the family home, quit her job, and went on a year-long cruise with the guy. It’s why I wanted to stay at PTMC. Well, when the month started, at least.” 

With a sigh, she drops the lotus pendant, the soft gold landing on her left collarbone. When the month ended, she wanted to die. Statistically, women are less likely to successfully commit suicide. She had access to the pills, but felt guilty about leaving someone with the clean up. 

“But after everything with Robby—I just stuck with the job I’d already accepted. Bought a condo. My mom never asked me to stay. And I couldn’t ask her to stay, either. I don’t know if it’s because it’d be too painful if she still chose to go. She can’t tolerate what closeness would ask of her. What closeness to me would ask of her. Sometimes it’s like—if I can’t figure out how to make my own mother interested in me, why would anyone else give a shit?” Her voice warbles; a swell of disgust rises in her throat. Shut up shut up shut up. “Mommy issues and daddy issues. Are you sure you wanna fuck me?” 

If it wouldn’t smear her mascara into her eyes, she’d worry the heels of her hands over her face. She asked this man to present their paper together in the hopes of discovering if what was once a desperate little crush was possibly something more. And now instead of flirting back with him, she’s allowed herself to turn into a maudlin mess. 

”Ugh, fuck. I need another drink.” 

To his credit, Jack pours her one. 

“You can’t grow old with someone who died,” he says, and then exhales shakily, jerking his head to one side. “Which—that’s the dumbest thing I’ve said in years, possibly. You don’t stay married to the same person over the course of your lifetime. You’re married to different versions of the same person. We’re not all one thing to all people, all the time, sure, but—in a successful marriage, you’re both constantly changing. You just made a vow to grow towards something, together."

That feels true, for the man she knows Jack Abbot to be. But she is not certain that was ever true for her parents. It’s odd to think of them as two people who might have fit together at the start, holding hands with dreams in their eyes under the mandap. How quickly did those people become lost to each other? 

“But then your spouse dies and you have two choices. You can stay the person they married forever, frozen in time. Stuck. Beating yourself up for all the ways that life and grief and time change you. Or you give yourself permission to change.” His voice gets thin, like the fraying edges of a rope. There’s still strength, still some semblance of structural integrity. But care must be taken, lest it start to unravel. “In the beginning it felt a lot like leaving her behind, even though it’s what I would have wanted her to do. It felt unfair, because it is unfair. But to accept that she was gone, to accept—I don’t know, to grieve her in the way she asked me to grieve her—I had to have a life. I had to try.” 

She’s tried so many times. It’s never worked. She can’t figure out how to make it work. 

“I’m so scared,” she whispers. “All the time.” 

There’s something wrong with her on a structural level. Form follows function, and she has grown up into the epitome of dysfunction. Her brain didn’t develop right. Her frontal cortex is shaped solely for planning, not for social connection or emotional regulation. Her adrenal glands are overpowered. Her temporal lobe launches her into the past, again and again and again. There is a current beating back at her, twisting her through the waves. 

Her amygdala is fucked. 

“You’re brave.”

Jack slides up into the curve of the booth, and Samira is reminded that he is a physical presence, not just a phantasmagoria of her late twenties. He’s close and he’s warm, and the experience tips her mind back towards sobriety. 

“I’m terrified.” 

She bites her lip. 

Jack drops his arm on the back of the booth, allows it to hover a few inches above her shoulders. She wants him to press even closer. She wants him to hold back. She wants to feel the pang of anticipation, and not be afraid. 

“And you’re the bravest person I’ve ever met,” he finishes for her. His voice is not quite a murmur, definitely not a susseration. But it’s quiet, and intense. “If I was you? If I saw the doctor who killed my dad? I’d be facedown in the pool. I’d have laid down in traffic.”

Samira freezes. 

Never for long, at least not usually. Her brain ascertains the threat, and then tries to un-observe it. Tries to undo it through sheer denial. Tries to place it into unreality. She does not have the capacity to fight, just as much as she does not have the capacity for flight. She stays, and she stays too long, holding perfectly still for whatever harm is destined to come her way.  

“Did you ever get an apology from Daniel Taylor Hughes?” she asks, tilting her head to face him. 

Jack clears his throat.

“I read a victim impact statement at his sentencing and he did not look at me even once.” 

It’s instinct, deep in her nervous system, that tucks her body into his side. He seems to anticipate it, making minute adjustments to his torso and his hip to accommodate the weight of her against him. Samira presses her cheek to the collar of his shirt. “Yeah, okay, that man should not be anywhere within punching range of either you or me. I wanna hit him with a car.” 

She is not the kind of person who is held. 

“Yeah that’s the, uh, general idea behind the restraining order,” he says, dropping his chin on top of her head. “Because God help me if he’s stupid enough to Google and find my page on PTMC’s fucking faculty page or some shit like that—I don’t want to feel angry, when I think about her. I used to. All the fucking time. I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want to think about how she’s dead. I want to remember her alive.” 

The tip of his nose finds her crown, his mouth presses against her scalp. 

It’s a kiss, not but. 

It’s something that aches, something that’s vulnerable, something that needs healing. 

“Fuck,” she whispers. 

Jack lifts his head. “What?”

“I feel angry. When I think about my dad. I only ever feel angry. And when I think about Robby, I just think about David Raines. And then I think about Austin Green, and then I start in on—” 

When she’s mad at Robby, when she’s well and truly seething with rage, she only ever turns it onto herself. Takes inventory of each and every patient she has failed. Tallies up the deaths she is responsible for. And relives their cases over, and over, and over again. 

“Did you know that there was a 2026 study that found that Western benchmarks for cardiac risk failed to predict heart attacks in South Asian men?” she asks, selecting one of the racing thoughts in her head to focus on like her therapist has taught her. 

She started going again, after she moved to New Jersey. 

There’s a psych NP who floats between a few different locations. A white woman, because psych NPs tend to be. But she took Samira’s challenge to find her a desi, preferably Tamilian, therapist. A licensed clinical social worker, not a psychologist. Someone with cultural competency and significant experience treating burnout and C-PTSD in healthcare providers. 

It took Lily less than a week to find someone who met her criteria, and set up the intake appointment herself, handing the details over to Samira on a pink post-it note. 

So Samira goes weekly. Sometimes virtually, sometimes in person. 

“I didn’t,” he easily admits. 

He didn’t, but she knows if she sends him a PDF of the article he will print it out, highlight the information that is most important to his practice of medicine, and annotate the margins. 

“I wish I didn’t spend so much of my residency fighting with Robby.”

She wishes Robby liked her. 

And that’s the childish truth of it; she wanted her department chief to like her. She thought that after persevering through undergrad, the MCAT, four years of medical school and exams and clinical rotations, she would make it to where she belonged. She would make it to a place where finally, people understood her. Where people would like her. Where she would be respected. Treated like a colleague. Even if it was temporary. Even if she wanted to move back to New Jersey. 

She was wrong. 

“You fought like you did because Robby’s a shitty teacher,” Jack says, needing no time to formulate his response. “He hates that you’re the younger version of himself who made all the same mistakes he did but is still a better doctor than him. You hate him because of all the other stuff.”

She answers without thinking: “I don’t hate Robby.”

Jack chuckles. It’s not condescending, but knowing in a way that rankles. “Eh, you do. Sometimes I hate him too.” 

That feels… ontologically incorrect. 

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah,” he says, replacing his mouth somewhere nearer to her hairline. “Never seen a responsibility he won’t abdicate when it gets too hard. He hoped you would go away. And then you did. That was great for him. Now he chooses residents based on who he can pity.” He pauses, and drops his hand onto the round of her shoulder, fingers stroking along her tricep. “Did you want to stay at PTMC? In a real way? Not just because you were panicking about your mother disappearing on you?”

She has to think about it. For just one shift, she was eager, almost desperate, to stay at PTMC. One shift. Twelve hours. Upturning opportunities, looking for advice, begging for someone to give her direction. For all that she was a planner, she lacked the ability to make decisions. 

“I thought I did.” 

“You could come back,” Jack says carefully, lowly. “I’d put you on the night shift. Then you’d only have to see Robby at faculty meetings and your annual performance evaluation.” 

Which would be lovely, but—

“Would I be allowed to fuck you if I’m on the night shift?” 

To his credit, Jack does not choke on his own spit. Swallowing hard, and then huffing out a sharp exhale, and says, “Cutting straight to the point, I respect that. There currently aren’t any rules against it. So unless you do something like sue the hospital because I botched shit so badly that you want compensation—”

“Jack,” Samira interrupts him. “Would you be okay working with me if we were in a relationship?”

“In the short term, we’re short-staffed enough that the real question is would we be okay with our schedules barely overlapping at all.” 

Currently, the Pitt is understaffed to the tune of four junior attendings and two senior attendings. Administration has been leaning on Robby to take the department into compliance with the newest round of operations standards, holding firm to a hiring freeze to wear him down. Robby would rather win against Gloria through attrition than concede to the board’s demands. 

These are things that Samira already knows, because Jack broke down and told her after working yet another unscheduled double while in the preparation phase of their conference talk. 

“My answer is yes, because it would give us space to figure things out. And on the nights that merit two attendings—weekends, holidays, whatever other predictive data scheduling uses for that shit—I haven’t had a problem working alongside you before now. I don’t know if that would change if we were together, but I’ve always compartmentalized well.” He hesitates; she rolls her head upwards, craning her neck to look at him. He pats her shoulder, slides his fingers under her blazer, and touches her bare skin. “I knew where the line was, when you were a resident. I don’t know where it is now. But I’d like to find out.” 

There isn’t a line. 

She can’t think of a single thing she wouldn’t let him do. And that’s the waning flare of codependency, the yearning to be an object that force can be applied to. She wishes to be somewhere for Jack Abbot to bank himself, to absorb from him everything she can fix, everything she can be responsible for. She wants his love and respect. 

She needs his love and respect. 

But she already has them. 

“So, if we went back to your hotel room, or mine…” she says, dropping her hand to his thigh, letting it rest there, warm and still. She’s not in his lap, but she might as well be. “What would you do?”

To me. That’s the unspoken end of the question. What would you do to me? Perhaps that’s the emergency medicine physician in her. Much of her world is parsed into what she does to other people. Scopes down throats, catheters floated into central veins, bones set, clots busted. 

What she likes the most about working in a standalone emergency room is that she can slow down. She can sit with her patients. She can hold their hands until they’re not afraid, she can call in their social workers, their patient advocates, their financial aid department. She likes that it takes, on average, three minutes for their patients to speak with a doctor after walking through their doors. She likes that they are a Level III trauma center, that she still gets to initiate care and resuscitate before transferring patients to a higher acuity medical center. She likes that she leaves work with her emotions in-tact, her muscles sore but not aching, her feet tired but not burning in her shoes. She likes that she can go to the bar with her coworkers, or the boardwalk, or the county zoo. 

There is no need for fairytales, for stories of sacrifice and martyrdom. 

That chapter of her life is closed. 

Still…

“If we went back to your hotel room, or mine, would you let me undress you? Let me take my time in getting your clothes off?” Jack’s mouth is at her ear. His hand moves no further from her shoulder. “Let me kiss you? Let me take my time with you?” 

Samira wants him to pick her up, to throw her, to pin her down. She wants his teeth on her throat, his fingers bruising her wrists, her calves, the meat of her thighs. She wants him to remind her how strong he is, how brutal their speciality can be. She wants him to show her that they are made of the same tough, complicated stuff. 

“I would,” she says. 

His thumb brushing over her trapezius should not make her shiver. His lips graze her earlobe. “I want to taste you. Would you let me do that? Let me put my face between your thighs?” 

There’s a pulse of heat at the core of her. 

“I want that,” she murmurs. She has no doubt in her mind that he’s good at it. 

His breath is hot, his body is throwing off heat. She is sweltering in her jacket and the silk lining of her dress. His teeth graze the cartilaginous shell of her ear. His lips and tongue press to the erogenous zone just behind it. His voice feels like a hand between her legs. “I want to fuck you so thoroughly, so completely, that you forget where you are. That you forget the face of the man who killed your father. Because I don’t think anyone’s ever treated you right, Samira Mohan. I don’t think anyone’s gotten to know your body that well. Your responses. Your needs. No one’s ever made you feel safe enough or seen enough to take your mind off it. Not in a real way. Not in a way that sticks.”

She hasn’t had sex in an astonishingly long time. 

When she first left Pittsburgh, she was desperate for reinvention. If her mother didn’t care about her, if Robby didn’t care about her, if PTMC didn’t care about her, she would find someone who cared about her. 

It resulted in a scattering of second and third dates, and mediocre coitus. 

“No one has,” she admits. 

“Then let me,” Jack says, the timber of his voice changing, becoming rougher. “I know what I’m doing.”

 She squirms. 

“I know you do.” 

Finally, his hand starts to move. First down her arm, the pads of his fingers curving over the slope of her bicep. Then it cups her elbow, then her hip, then moves back up again under her blazer. To her waist, then to the underwire of her bra, and still a little further up. She knows he can feel the point of her nipple through the thin cotton cup.

Stifling a gasp, her chin lurches back towards him. In effect, the bridge of her nose meets his mouth. Chuckling, Jack presses a kiss to her nose, then to her forehead, and her hairline. 

“Nothing you can say or do will scare me. I’ve been through almost everything that can happen to a person. I’ve seen it all and heard it all. You’re not too much. I’m not Robby. I’m certainly not your mother. I don’t care if it’s messy and I don’t care if you try to push me away because you don’t know what to do when things aren’t a challenge. I’ll chase you, if you want to be chased. I’ll court you, if you want to be courted. I’m not gonna make you ask for my attention, or my praise. I’m not a fucking coward.”

Is that what Robby is? 

A coward?

She apologized to him, the last time they spoke, out in the ambulance bay in the oppressive July humidity. Her hair was a mess, greasy and unwashed, her bun falling apart for the umpteenth time. She looked to him, begging for him to give her a reason to care, to stay, to believe in herself. She apologized to him. She let Robby decide her worth, and she apologized.   

“No, no you’re not,” she chokes out. “Fuck.” Her hand tightens on his thigh, the cotton weave of his trousers bunching up under her fingers.  “I’m not either.” 

Jack leaves a chain of kisses along her cheekbone. 

“No, baby. You’re not. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.” 

Baby. Will he keep calling her that, even after he’s gotten what he wants from her tonight? Will he still be kind, after she invites him into her bed? Will he still want her, even once he’s flayed her open, pried out every disgustingly vulnerable thought and painful emotion? Will she still be his baby, even then? 

“Jack?” she whispers. 

He kisses the corner of her eye, right at the tail of her eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“Will you walk me back to my room?” she asks, mind flashing forward ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Jack’s hand resting on the small of her back. Her hotel keycard hovering over the lock, the way the mechanism clicks when the light goes green. Her, sitting on the end of the bed. Jack, getting to his knees to get her feet out of her heels. Jack, kissing his way up her shin, around the dome of her knee. 

“Abso-fucking-lutely I will,” he answers, enthusiasm infused into the light little kisses he’s applying to the hinge of her jaw. 

“Can I call you my boyfriend?” 

“You can call me whatever you want.”

Her mind flashes forward ten days, ten months, ten years. Jack’s hand in hers, as they walk on the beach at sunrise in the calm weeks before tourist season starts. A ring on her finger, a diamond in a bezel setting on a gold band, a pack of silicone rings in her cubby at work to swap out when she goes on shift. Movers, lifting furniture and boxes into one of the beautiful Victorians—perhaps one on Pittsburgh Avenue, if the universe elects to have a sense of humor. Jack, resting his hand over the swell of her stomach. Jack, tossing a laughing toddler up over his broad shoulder and the divot of scar tissue, long gone numb. 

“What if I tell you I love you too soon?” she asks, heart beginning to race. 

Wedding vows at sunrise, down by the waves. Promises that belong only to them, smothered into silence by the water and the gulls. Working together again, waivers signed in the Human Resources office with no fanfare. Following spouse forms, industry standard. Coming home on time. Coming home to each other. Dinners cooked barefoot, eaten naked. Maybe their old Victorian house will see visitors. The night shift is dear to Jack. She's always liked them too.

“I’ve been telling you that I love you since this conversation started. Since you told me who that fucking ghoul sitting in the audience was, and begged me to keep looking at you.” His voice is painfully earnest. It makes her want to shy away.

Instead, she angles herself towards him; her right leg hitches up onto his lap. 

She will not become Michael Robinavitch. “I love you,” she says, because she does. “I love you,” she says again, because she might have realized it years ago when she was working doubles at least once a week. When her workspace in the evenings was always next to his, and he would leave case studies and interesting articles on her keyboard. When he would always stand next to her at handoff. When he would always bring her a latte with two extra shots to make it through to morning. 

“I know,” he answers. 

She wants to ask him how he knows, files the question away for some nebulous time called later. After they’ve gone to bed together. After they’ve kissed. After she’s learned what the weight of him feels like on top of her. 

“Can I kiss you? Right here? Right now?” 

Her fingers twist into his shirt. His hand curves into the back of her knee. 

“Of course you can.” Almost to prove his point, Jack ducks his head, briefly slanting his mouth over hers. His lips are soft, tasting of vaseline and bourbon. “Why wouldn’t I let you?” 

“And it can just be that simple? That easy?”

She wants to keep kissing him.  

“It can,” he husks out in response.  

“What if I asked you to touch me, hands under the table?” she asks, realizing in a distant, out-of-body way that they look very much like the picture of a medical conference cautionary tale. Two coworkers, one senior and one very much his junior, getting handsy in the hotel bar. In another universe, they’re an HR nightmare. In this universe, they’re a man and a woman reconnecting after a year of emails, text messages, and middle-of-the-afternoon phone calls conducted in grocery stores and the gym. 

What would have happened to them, if she had stayed in Pittsburgh? 

Would she have been capable of this? 

“I’d ask you where,” Jack responds, thumb caressing the side of her thigh. “Watch your face until it answered me. Because I know you’re testing me. You want to see how much I pay attention to you.” 

His hand starts to creep. Dry, calloused palms pull her right leg further into his lap, opening her up for him. She’s not wearing panty hose, just a pair of practical black boyshorts. The high-waisted kind without seams; no lines visible under her dress, even under the bright lights. They’re tucked far enough back into the deep U-shape of the darkened booth that someone would have to be standing right at the edge of their table to see what they were doing. They just look like two conference attendees getting close. 

“You want to know what it looks like in this context,” he says, kissing her cheek and her nose and her ear, everywhere but where she wants his mouth. Jack presses his face into her curls, scratching upwards at the delicate skin that leads to her core. Samira feels herself getting wet. “Outside of the trauma bay, outside of the emergency department, without the trauma gowns and safety glasses and nitrile gloves. Without all the rules we drop on ourselves. Without the protocol. You want to know how far I’ll push this. If I’ll put my hand all the way between your thighs, under your panties, right where you want them.”

She doesn’t do this. She suspects Jack doesn’t either. 

And yet, his hand creeps higher. The cuff of his sleeve brushes against quivering flesh. His fingers reach the leg of her underwear, peeling under the elastic. He finds the crease where her leg meets her pelvis, the downy curls spread over her labia and mons. 

Nipping at her earlobe, Jack at last licks his way across her throat, his tongue finding the sensitive, jumping veins just under the skin there. ”And I will, because the bartender is more focused on that eight top from Sacramento that just walked in than he is on us, and the waiter we saw twenty minutes ago is hungover in the back. So I can put my finger on your clit, right here, and no one besides us will know.” 

He does it, sliding one finger fully into her panties, pushing in between her folds. Nipping and sucking at her neck, he traces the swollen hood of that swollen bundle of nerves. Laughs joyously when her hips buck in his grasp. 

“Fuck, Jack—”

I need you, I need you, I need you, I want you. 

“Finish your drink, Samira,” Jack says, voice akin to a growl. “We’re taking the bottle with us.” 

He waits until she leans forward to pick the rocks glass off the table to slide his hand out from inside her underwear. Her hand holds the drink with an almost imperceptible tremor; she brings it to her lips, the smear of her lipstick visible on the rim. She swallows the last mouthful of bourbon. At the same time, Jack brings his middle finger to his lips to suck off the taste of her arousal. His eyes—hazel and gold, pupils blown wide with lust—don’t leave hers until she sets the empty glass down onto the cocktail napkin. 

With a shaky breath, he pats the inside of her thigh. 

Samira takes the cue as she’s bid, pushing up onto the heels of her hands to slide herself back out of the booth. She snags her blazer off the floor as Jack thumbs through the bills in his wallet, leaving three twenties on the table as a tip. 

Somehow, that’s the most attractive thing he’s done so far.   

On the way out of the bar, he wraps his arm around her waist, fingers clenching to her hip. His mouth comes close to her again, quiet and intense. “Do you just want to come, or do you want to feel desperate for something good?” 

That’s a question she’s never been asked before, let alone considered. 

But the answer comes to her quickly. “Desperate.”

“That’s what I thought.”

They share another double of Woodford Reserve as they peel each other out of their clothes. Samira’s blazer hits the floor first, with her bag. His jacket, her shoes. His tie, his shirt, his belt, before he gets his fingers around the button at the waist of her skirt. Samira reaches behind her back to undo the clasp of her bra. She’s down to her boyshorts and he’s fully naked when he crowds her onto the king sized bed, crawling over her as she scoots towards the middle. 

“I’m going to put my head between your thighs now, angel,” he says. 

And then he does exactly that. Jack Abbot is a man of his word. Hooking his teeth into the waistband of her panties, he pulls them down to her bellybutton and thighs, and uses his fingers to drag them down to her ankles. Samira kicks them off, sending them flying towards the armchair in the corner that hosts a sagging weekender bag.  

He inhales deeply; the bourbon they shared was an apéritif. The taste of her, undiluted, is stronger than any liquor. He’s always liked eating pussy, has liked feeling crowded by thighs and cunt and softest places on a woman’s body. He likes the little pouch of fat above the mons, the gentle round of a tummy that guards vital organs. He likes the sensory overwhelm when his face starts to glisten, his tongue flooding with the flavor of salt and honey and musk. He likes cataloging all the little gasps and heady moans, the uncoordinated jerking of limbs and rolling hips. Samira doesn’t disappoint in that area—her hand comes down to tangle in his curls, patting and petting before finally carding through and tugging, hard. 

“Oh!” she cries out. “Oh my god, Jack—”

Cramping his hand up to his chin, he slides one finger into her. Her body gives no resistance, allowing him to slide in another as he fucks back into her.

“Good girl,” he mumbles into her slick folds, the words sending a shock of vibration through her clit. “That’s it, baby. So good for me.” Scissoring his fingers, he twists his tongue over the tight little bud, testing the sides, seeing what gets him the most violent response. “Come on, Mira. Give me one. I know you can.” 

And she does, twisting up off the bed, into the warm-wet of his mouth. 

“I haven’t—I haven’t gone on a date in eighteen months. I have an IUD. I got tested at my last pap smear,” she pants out, blocking out the sunlight in the room with a forearm slung across her brow. “What I mean is, fuck. You can come inside me, if you want to come inside me. You can be gentle, if you want to be gentle. Or you—or you could be rough, if you want to make me forget everything but your name.” 

He would love to. “I can do all that. But I’m gonna keep eating you out first, Samira.” 

So that’s what he does, working her open onto a third finger. It’s horribly male and horrifically vain, but when he looks down at where his fingers are stretching her, he feels a pang of satisfied arousal at the way the ring of tissue flares out around the digits. She’s soaking his hand, wriggling down onto it with enthusiasm, insensate. Fitting his pinky finger into her, he puts his lips back on her clit, sucking it into his mouth. It’s swollen, almost pulsing, and he doesn’t let up until Samira rakes her nails over his wide, freckled shoulders. 

He grins, knowing that she’s leaving her marks. 

He welcomes them. 

Pushing up onto his knees, he walks backwards, off the bed. Gently pulls his fingers out of her, despite her protests. This is why he kept his leg on, despite the relief that would come from taking it off—there’ll be time for that later, once they’ve slaked this particular hunger. 

He’s wanted her for so long. 

Jack wipes at his mouth, sticks his fingers back into his mouth, savoring the moment, savoring her. Chest heaving, lovely brown tits on display, Samira reaches for him with plaintive, grabby movements. With a crooked grin, he complies. But instead of getting back up onto the bed, he gets a firm grip on her calves, and hauls her to the edge of the mattress. 

“Do you want it rough, or do you think that I like it rough?” he asks, voice scraping the bottom of its register. 

He pets at the insides of her thighs, watching the adductor muscles tremble. He can give her whatever she wants—but he needs to make sure that it’s what she wants. The delicate skin, decorated with silvery stretchmarks from a coltish youth, is damp from their exertions. Jack hitches her knees over his hips, giving her legs some relief by holding their weight up against his body. If he doesn’t, the muscles will start to overextend, and he can’t have that.

“I like it rough. I want it rough,” Samira whispers up at him. Her face is open, painfully vulnerable, eyes wide and dark and he feels the pang of every day he spent without her, all at once. Clearing her throat, she continues, “I trust—I trust you to fuck me as hard as I want and still respect me after. To fuck me as hard as I want but still treat me like you love me.”

His erection is hard, jerking up untouched towards his stomach in fits and spurts. Thoughts growing a little thin, he wraps his hand around the base of it, squeezing. He can’t remember the last time he was this turned on, with so little manual stimulation. The taste of her beautiful cunt drenching his face had him rutting against the eiderdown duvet, thankful for the cushion it provided between his cock and the firmer mattress. 

“I can. I can do that,” Jack says, stroking himself once, collecting the pre-cum dripping from head and working it down the shaft. “Did you pack your vibrator with you? The one you named after me?”

There’s no prize for making it more difficult for yourself; he wants her to orgasm, and to orgasm until she cries. He wants to empty out her brain, and leave nothing behind but his love for her. 

“I knew I’d be in close proximity to you,” she says, uncertain of where to put her hands. They start in the sheets, and then move to her hair, then her knees. Then she brushes the pads of her fingers down his abdomen, eyes roving over his chest and arms. “So yes, just in case.” 

Jack feels himself flush bright red. 

“Good. On your belly, Samira,” he orders, squeezing her waist and then patting her at her flank. “Did you really worry I would be immune to you? That I would see you again and not want to touch you like this?”

The dreams he’s had of her. 

With a shy sound, she rolls onto her front. “Maybe. Yes.” 

No, he thinks, That won’t do. 

“I’m gonna make sure that you never worry about me again,” he exhales, nipping and sucking along the gorgeous arches of muscle and tendon, enjoying the way she gasps and bucks when he sinks his teeth into her left-side latissimus dorsi. His hands press and rub down her back, forcibly relaxing the muscles on either side of her spine. Sure enough, she starts to loosen for him, limbs going lax. Her feet dangle, toes brushing along the floor. 

It’s not hard to find her vibrator, sticking up out of the weekender bag, still attached to its charging cord. He grabs the towel she must have used this morning too, to lay under her hips. He knows how to make this good for her. 

“Relax for me, Samira,” he murmurs, caressing and petting, applying pressure to keep her posed just so. 

Right where he wants her. No need for her to think, he’ll handle this part. Thumb sliding over the buttons on the side of the miniature vibrating wand, he tries out all the different settings, selecting what he thinks may be the goldilocks frequency. When he lifts her hips to place it under her, it feels like she weighs nothing at all. When he settles her into place, her moans start up again immediately. And when he notches the head of his cock at her entrance, already stretched and ready for him, she turns her head back and forth, trying to crane her neck back to get a look at him. 

“Just relax,” he tells her, pleased with the way his pale hand looks arranged over the warm brown skin covering her lower back. He presses her down into the bedlinens, down onto the vibrator, entering her in one slow, elongated stroke. “Attagirl,” he says, with the last of his composure. 

“Jack—oh my god.” 

He circles his hips, testing her with a slow, lazy grind. 

The sound that punches out of Samira’s throat might be classified as a grunt, eeking towards the desperation she asked him for. “That’s it, pretty girl. My smart girl. So fucking smart, let me handle that big brain for you. Let’s give it a rest for once.” 

“Uh—oh. Oh. Oh my god.” 

Her whole body shivers, and then shakes, and by the time her pussy clamps down around his length, he’s not surprised by her orgasm at all. 

There’s a hazy, interstitial moment afterwards. After she’s shooed off his offer a warm, wet washcloth and gotten up to use the toilet so she can clean up the mess he left between her thighs, but before either of them have made any moves to clean up the tableau that resulted from their rush to intimacy. Their bodies are tired and sore, thrumming with feel-good hormones, painted with new bruises and scratchmarks. Jack has finally ridded himself of the prosthetic and the silicone sock, discarding it over the foot of the bed. Samira remains close to him, rubbing her cheek against his chest like a cat. 

“It doesn’t have to be Pittsburgh,” Jack says. It’s not the first time he’s had that thought. He’d follow her to Jupiter, if he had to. 

“Hmm?”

Her dark eyes blink back open, head tipping back into a spill of black curls on the stark white pillowcase. The way her pupils struggle to put him into focus is endearing. He wants to wake up to it every afternoon. 

“Do you like where you’re working now?” he asks. 

Jack would be lying if he claimed he hasn’t run a cursory internet search on her new employer before now. He has, several times since he got the notification that her LinkedIn profile had been updated with a new place of work. There was a new photo too, a headshot taken by a professional. Samira’s hair was down, a wide, honest smile on her face. She wore a white coat embroidered with her name in dark blue script. Samira Mohan, MD, BCEM. Above her name is the practice logo, three sinus-rhythm waves overlapped to look like waves in the ocean in navy, teal, and green. 

The purple rings under her eyes were gone. Her hair was clean, and styled. The look in her eyes was calm, a far cry from the manic, exhausted countenance she wore for much of her residency. She looked like herself again, after far too long. 

“I guess. I haven’t been there long,” she equivocates, and then pauses, reconsidering. “I do,” she says, drawing out the vowel sound longer than necessary. “The work is good. My position is a partnership-track position. I get to have a say in how the practice is run. A real say. I don’t have to fight to be heard. I don’t have to fawn or apologize to be heard. There’s no fighting with hospital administration or worrying about the politics. We’re fully private, and democratic. We don’t rely on government funding. I can do my research without being told I’m a DEI initiative.” 

“Tell me about it,” Jack says, brushing her hair back from her face. “Tell me more about it.” 

Samira hums, allowing her eyes to fall closed again as he plays with her hair, combing his fingers gently through the snarls he created by fucking her across the mattress. 

“It’s entirely private practice, which sounds ridiculous for emergency medicine. We’re physician-owned, like a lot of surgical centers are. Most of our standalone emergency rooms are located in underserved areas, or areas with a very high discrepancy between average cost of living and median income,” she explains, and Jack knows without any follow-up that if he asked, Samira could rattle off the socioeconomic and racial demographic statistics for each and every location, and how they played into the selection criteria by the partners.

There’s a lot that two years can change about a person. 

But some things are intrinsic, applied directly to the soul.  

“I initially was going to be placed at a location much closer to home, but after my mom sold the house, there was an opening at the Cape May County location,” Samira continues, stretching and preening when he starts to massage her scalp. “I wanted it. So I applied. I live pretty much on the beach. I live across the street from the beach. It’s actually—it’s really nice. I feel closer to my dad than I ever did inside an emergency room.” 

He can imagine what peace might mean for her—the air whipping through her curls as she walks along the shoreline at sunset, bending down every so often to collect a seashell or a piece of sea glass that she’s spotted. Throwing her head back, laughing without a care as she plays mini-golf with her friends. Going running along the boardwalk on a nice morning before the sun clears through the haze. Running her fingers along a piece of antique furniture at a consignment shop. Climbing up onto one of the lifeguard stands when the season is over, reading a book or a journal as she tans in the still-warm sun. Swimming in the surf, leaping over breakers, laying down on a towel in a fluorescent two-piece. 

That’s what he wants for her. 

A life that brings her peace, and fulfillment. Not a life lacking in hardship, or dark days. That kind of life doesn’t exist. But a life where she can simply clock out of work, even on the hardest, cruelest days, and go home. 

That life didn’t exist for her in Pittsburgh.

“That does sound really nice,” he agrees. 

“How does the leg work, with the sand and the saltwater?”

“Special prosthetic. Just like if I wanna hike or go running. It’s not strictly necessary for the beach, though. I can put the regular prosthetic through pretty much anything so long as I’m willing to tear it down and rinse it with freshwater after. The real problem is if I sunburn the stump. Then I’m on crutches or in a chair until it heals,” he replies, loosening the circle of his arms around her so she can shift against him slightly. “What happens if someone needs surgery?”

There are some standalone emergency rooms that don’t even have a trauma rating; he doubts Samira would want to work for one. 

“We have four ORs on-site, and surgeons on staff. We’re not a Level 1 Trauma Center. But, well, emergency medicine is the primary care of the future. And the present,” she says, muttering the last line under her breath. Jack thinks of the eight-to-ten hour waits in chairs, the non-stop triage, the endless patients without insurance who are forced to come to them for ear infections and the flu. “A lot of people hear Cape May and think money. But the people who support the tourism industry at the Jersey Shore are underemployed and underinsured. We have a cath lab and a stroke team on site. Full specialty backup, including robust hospitalist support, stroke neurology, psychiatry, and 24-hour radiology. The Cape May facility has seventy-five beds. I work sixteen eight-hour shifts a month.”

That sounds a lot more appealing than his contracted twelve-twelves, and all the overtime he picks up in addition. The Pitt is always understaffed. His overtime bonus always generously clears five digits. He has far more money than he would ever know what to do with. His credit score is in the 800s. He pays off his cards every month. He maxes out his contributions to his Roth IRA. He drives a ten-year-old car. 

“Eight hour shifts? Sold.” 

 His thumb slides over a knot behind her jaw, pressing inwards against it. 

“You can’t be serious,” Samira balks; the leg thrown over his hip tenses, the heel of her foot digs into his hamstring. 

“I’m serious about you.”

Her dark, heavy brows furrow together. She doesn’t open her eyes, but the look on her face is troubled. Not like she doesn’t believe him, but more like that she doesn’t trust his judgment of her.

“Why?”

It’s not immediately obvious to him what will make her believe him. The credentials he has are no frame of reference to her. He cannot say that he knows what love like this is; he is fortunate enough to have felt it twice now in his life. He has lived and buried this type of commitment before; he is willing to do it again, with her, because Samira Mohan is worth all of the pain and joy and the wild, ceaseless absurdity of life. Because she danced in the dark with him. Because even exhausted and scared and cornered, she chooses to be kind until her body and mind fail her. Because she’s a good teacher. Because it is of no meaning to him that she believes she is a bad daughter, a bad student, a bad protege. 

He knows her. 

“Because I like you. Because I love you. Because I learned a long time ago that there’s no virtue in leaving a good woman waiting. Last time I did that, I almost lost her. Took me months to track her down again,” he says, tucking a curl behind her ear over and over again.  

It was frightening, to suddenly not know where in the universe she was laying her head, even though that was Gen’s reality as his wife for over a decade. Samira was gone without warning, and he was four days into a non-stop somatic flashback before his therapist gently suggested why that might be triggering to him. 

Samira was gone, Samira was missing, Samira was being forgotten. 

Until finally, fucking finally, her name showed up on a case report out of Robert Wood Johnson/New Jersey Medical School. He looked up the emails of other faculty and staff, applied the same configuration to her own name. Sent her a message, wishing her well. 

And four hours later, got a reply. 

He almost burst into tears, every cell in his body flooded with relief. 

“You don’t have to panic. I’m not gonna move into your condo next week, take a breath. But there’s nothing keeping me in Pittsburgh. Not really. Not anymore. I don’t have to stay long enough to care about the next batch of interns or this new round of medical students or the newest mess Robby’s gotten himself into that he won’t accept help back out of. You decided to leave. Maybe I should too.” When he was at the lowest of his lows, he poured all of himself into his night shift. But now, most of his residents from those years have moved on. Shen is back in California. Ellis has gone home to New York. Crus finished out his fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic and stayed on as an attending. Lena retired. Mateo took a job at Presby. “Actually, fuck it. I know I should too.” 

“Six months,” she says decisively. 

“Six months?”

Samira shifts again, pressing in closer. Their faces are inches apart. When she speaks, he can feel her breath puffing against his lips. “We have to be together for six months. And then you can decide to quit your job and move to New Jersey for me.” 

That’s all? 

“Deal.” 

There’s a puzzled look on her face, like she’s missed a piece of data she should have factored into her differential diagnosis. And she’s not wrong. 

“Even if we don’t see each other for those six months?” she asks. “If our PTO doesn’t line up and neither of us can make the trip and we just—we just keep emailing and texting and sending each other nudes,” she says, as if he would, for some insane reason, be opposed to that. “And we never find out if this was more than just a flash in the pan and moment of re-connection and maybe it would be wiser to let the flame burn out. A lot of people don’t do long-distance. It’s a dealbreaker for them. And six months can be a long time, a lot can change.” 

Part of it is that she’s only thirty-two. 

“Baby, you’re describing the material conditions of my first marriage,” Jack says, continuing to work on breaking up the adhesions in her jaw muscles. “It hasn’t been so long that I’ve forgotten how to do it. I’m old enough to know what I want and not second-guess myself. And I want you. I want to be close to you.”

In whatever way he can get. 

“Oh.” A sheepish smile crawls its way onto her face. “I’m dumb.”

He says warmly, chasing the tension to her occiput, applying pressure to the release points at the juncture of her skull and her cervical spine. “Not dumb.” 

“I’m kinda dumb,” Samira says, ghosting out a laugh. “How long is a standard deployment?”

“Eleven months.”

Some were longer, some were shorter. For example, the deployment where he got his leg blown off was decidedly shorter, in more than one fashion. 

Groaning, she squeezes her eyes tightly shut. “Definitely dumb.” 

He doesn’t like that. Gently, he works his middle finger and thumb into the cords of her neck, slowly working his hand down to her shoulders. “Tell me about your condo. You know, for when our PTO doesn’t line up and that somehow stops me from flying to, what? Philly? And renting a car to get me the rest of the way. Because for some reason, you think I won’t just lay around your fancy beach condo reading, waiting for you to come home after working your nine to five.”

Slowly, Samira starts to melt into his touch. The muscles of her hips and lower back start to relax again, her pelvis rotating forward again, lax and loose against his. 

“It’s seven to three, actually,” she corrects him. 

A classic first, second, third shift schedule. Avoids rush hour and makes juggling school and childcare easier for the parents on staff. Makes perfect sense to him.  

“See? Those are my sleeping hours. It’s perfect.” 

That makes her dusky pink lips shape into a grin; he feels no small sense of victory at the sight.  With a sigh, Samira settles further into his touch, and further into the sheets. He’s glad he had the foresight to put a towel down; it would be an outsized tragedy to be navigating a wet spot in an afterglow as good as this one. 

“My condo is on the third floor. The first floor is just garages and storage. There’s an elevator. It’s mostly me and little old people year-round, so I’ve sort of become everyone’s adoptive granddaughter and in-house geriatrician.” She laughs at an inside joke he’s not party to. It doesn’t hurt his feelings; he has no doubt she’ll explain it some day. “Summer is an entirely different story. It’s pretty small, two bedrooms, one bathroom. I’d love to buy one of the huge Victorians one day, but I’ll settle for the oceanfront views in the meantime. My mom hates it. She thinks it’s too small. She was excited at first, because she thought it would mean she could use it as a vacation property. But uh, it’s less than a thousand square feet. But it’s just me and my cat. I don’t need more than that right now.” 

He has the order correct, now.

Jack knows that after that Fourth of July shift, Samira took three weeks of PTO. And then she cashed in a favor with an old professional mentor at University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, for an open geriatric emergency medicine elective. It was scheduled for six weeks, and then she extended it another four. After University Hospital, she took a letter of recommendation to Newark Beth Israel for a month-long away rotation in EMS. She went to New Jersey Medical School next, carving out a niche and funding for her research from already established projects. Finally, she spent eight weeks at Atlantic Emergency Associates putting in the last of her required residency hours under what was ostensibly labeled a rural emergency medicine experience.

At the end of that awful, terrible, crushing day, she could have traced his and Robby’s paths and gone up to the roof. 

Instead, she left. 

He’s proud of her. He envies her. 

“You got a cat?” he asks. He remembers she had one, at least for the first few years he knew her. He remembers the picture of a black tuxedo cat in her locker, the lone sign of personality or a personal life she showed at work. 

“I did.” She frowns. “Are you allergic?”

It wouldn’t matter to him if he was. There are shots for that now. He would get them, and he would fall in love with her cat and be a bit sneezy while he waited to get through the full course of treatment, and then it would be fine. 

“No. I’m just glad you have something to love.” 

“Oh. I do.”

It’s important to the condition of being alive. “Tell me about your cat.”

“She’s a rescue,” Samira starts, brightening. “She was hanging around this place on the boardwalk that has a pizza window. The kids working the register over the summer would feed her. And then the summer ended, and she had nowhere to go. I used pizza crusts to get her to follow me home one day. Now it’s like she’s forgotten she was ever an outside cat.”

The image of Samira crouching down on the worn wooden planks of the Cape May boardwalk in cut-off shorts and a hoodie, discarded pizza crusts in her hand, pss pss pss-ing at a dismayed street cat is so endearing he thinks his heart might burst. PTMC has its own assortment of strays, though they typically know to avoid the ambulance bay, choosing to linger near the dumpsters outside the cafeteria. 

“What’s her name?” he asks. 

Without warning, Samira sits up, bracing one hand behind her on the tufted headboard. Squinting, she looks at the two nightstands, before leaning over him to look at the floor. “I can show you pictures—give me my phone.” She points down at the spillage from her purse, laid out on the cushioned beige carpet. “Her name is Petunia. I call her Looney Toon. Or Loon. Sometimes Road Runner.” 

Bracing himself on the bedframe, Jack leans out off the mattress, fishing Samira’s phone out from the pile of her purse’s contents. After he hands it off to her, he wriggles towards where she’s positioned herself, sitting up but reclined against the headboard. He rests his cheek atop her thigh, drapes his arm across her lap. 

Samira unlocks her phone with a swipe of her thumb, taps a few times, and then shoves the screen into his face. He has to grab her wrist to adjust the distance of her phone from his eyeballs, accounting for his own farsightedness. When his corneas can finally focus, Petunia is revealed to be a bewildered gray tabby, peering up at the camera from an olive green couch. Her feet are tucked up under her, and her green eyes are wide, but vacant. 

“She’s cute,” he decrees.  

“She’ll like you,” Samira says, confident in the matter. “She likes men.”

“Yeah?”

What men are you bringing around to meet your cat, Mohan? he wants to ask, but doesn’t, because he can be a possessive motherfucker when given permission but he isn’t insane. 

“She’s a big fan of the eighty-something year old man who lives in the unit next door,” Samira explains, locking her phone again to drop it onto the nightstand within her reach. Hands now empty, she sinks one of them into his hair. Happily, he sighs, nuzzling further into her thigh. “Sometimes I drop her off with him when I choose to work a double just to remember what it’s like to feel alive. They watch game shows and daytime TV together and then he feeds her tuna from a can. His daughter and grandkids only live about thirty minutes away, but he doesn’t drive anymore. His oldest granddaughter just got her license, though. So she’s going to start visiting more, and picking him up for little adventures. She’s a sweet kid.” 

Her fingernails scratch lightly at his scalp, and then her stomach rumbles. 

“Are you hungry?” Jack asks, finding new places to leave kisses on her long, lithe legs. He was fairly thorough earlier, but it never hurts to double check your work. 

“A bit. Yeah.” Samira relaxes against the headboard, finally, fully. Her body makes a concave shape, soft breasts hanging down to the rolls of her tummy. “I was too anxious to eat much this morning.” 

At that admission, he reaches backwards for the little card he knows is on both nightstands, a QR code printed on thick ivory paper. The academic assembly is nominally hosted at the Philadelphia Convention Center, with events spread out into the surrounding hotels. Samira, thankfully, did not question him when he booked two rooms at the Ritz-Carlton. 

“Room service?” he asks. 

“That sounds nice.” She arranges the leg he’s not laying on into a variety of angles before settling into a right-angle shape that must agree with her hips. “Really limits the chances of running into Dr. Raines again. I don’t wanna bail you out. I just wanna stay in bed. You know, with you. Like this.” 

There’s still another day of panels and talks and presentations. The Samira he knew back in Pittsburgh wouldn’t have been so unbothered about missing them. But Jack also knows that many of the panels and talks and presentations are being livesteamed—maybe they can figure out a way to watch them from her hotel room, stream them on the TV. He’s never had sex with other medical professionals as background noise, but he thinks it could be an edifying experience. 

“Yeah?”

He drops kisses along her rectus femoris, her vastus lateralis, her sartorius, her tensor fasciae latae, naming the muscles in his head as he goes. 

“Yeah,” she says on the tail-end of a yawn. 

His heart thuds against his sternum, excited and in love. “Me too.” 

Sometimes, she wonders if it would have changed anything. 

If she had known that July 4, 2026 was the last time she stepped inside Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, would it have changed anything about that day? Would she have been bolder, more aggressive? Would she have turned off her phone, chucked it into her locker? Would she have flirted with Jack in the exam room as she tended to his shoulder? Would she have made sure he had her cell phone number, her personal email? Would she have found him before or after she followed Orlando Diaz up to the ICU? Would she have asked him for a letter of recommendation? Would she have collapsed at his kindness? Would she have accepted comfort and solace? 

She wonders if it matters. 

It’s never too late, she told Robby. Never leave a good thing waiting, Jack told her. 

On January 23, 2029, the National Weather Service issues a Blizzard Warning for Cape May County, New Jersey. By the early afternoon, the Governor of New Jersey declares a state of emergency. 

Petunia, who likes to spend her mornings dozing on Jack’s chest, mewls with joy, and then with consternation when Jack takes Samira’s car keys, brushes his lips across her cheek, and decides to move her car from the garage to a lot a few more blocks inland. A true, proper Nor’easter, she has learned, means storm surge like you see in a hurricane. The city of Cape May is under a voluntary evacuation. Jack knows better than to offer to book them a hotel, not when her cadre of little old people won’t be leaving. There’s a surprisingly active group chat for the condominium association’s year-round residents; she knows exactly who’s staying, and who’s going. When Jack returns from depositing her sporty little Kia in the Jackson Street lot, she’s busy taking inventory of her go-bag, Petunia winding her way through medical supplies. 

She does hope that they can simply hunker down through the worst of the storm, cuddled up together on the couch. She does hope that if they lose power, they can light the packs of emergency candles and curl up together under her heavy duvet, keeping each other warm with wandering hands. She does hope that she falls asleep with Jack pressed to her back, his hands latched to her hips, his breath gusting against her neck as the wind howls outside. 

Instead, she gets a frantic call from her downstairs neighbor that her husband doesn’t seem to know where he is, and has started speaking nonsense. 

Jack holds the wife’s hand—Dolores, Samira tells him, or Mrs. Ruggiero—as he takes a patient history. Samira hooks up her Butterfly ultrasound to her cell phone as she prepares to give the husband—Michael, balding, seventy-six years old—a transcranial doppler ultrasound. She’s seen the stroke team at Atlantic Emergency Associates perform them, she’s performed them herself with the guidance of the one neurologist on staff who doesn’t have the personality of stale graham cracker, she’s just never done one herself, completely on her own. 

The first time Jack witnesses her practicing medicine two-and-a-half years, she’s administering a thrombolytic in the Ruggerios’ living room as they await a county ambulance to make it through sixty mile per hour winds and nearly a foot of snow and ice. They return to their old rhythm, Jack handing her an IV start kit, handing her fluids, handing her the pulse-ox. She clambers into the back of the ambulance, giving report to EMTs she’s become familiar with over the past year, and doesn’t have to tell him that he should put Dolores in the Ruggerios’ practical SUV and follow the ambulance to the emergency room. It’s not until she hands Michael and Dolores off to Ysenia and Dr. Kilkearney on the stroke team, that she realizes she is standing in the middle of the floor in pajama pants, an ancient Rutgers University hoodie, and a pair of Ugg boots that have become sodden with ice-cold water. 

Jack is leaning against the nurses station, speaking amiably to Lily and Bagwis. When he notices she’s drifted to an aimless halt, he taps the counter twice, and pushes off in her direction. His demeanor is at once inscrutable to her—lighthearted but stern, determined but at the same time, unsure. 

“What are you thinking about?” she asks, lungs burning with exhilaration. 

He rubs the end of her ponytail between his forefinger and his thumb, staring down at the strands of hair, standing out in contrast against his skin. When he speaks, his voice is thin, verging on strained. “I’m not going back to Pittsburgh, this time.”

 This is what changes everything: the fact that in thirty months, everything has changed between them, and yet somehow, everything has remained exactly the same. They can still speak without speaking. They can still revolve, exist in orbit, the masses of their bodies pulling and tugging inside the same gravitational flow. They can be in love, but the underpinning of their relationship has not changed. Medicine is what speaks sense to madness. 

“Yeah?”

She is not wearing socks. 

She cannot feel her toes. 

Rocking back onto her heels, she curls her fingers into the open halves of his Carhartt jacket, and leverages herself closer to him. 

“Yeah,” he rasps. Then, taking a deep breath, he cocks his head to the side, that sure-fire smile she loves so much returning to his face. “Also kinda thinking about how much I wanna kiss you for that little stunt you pulled back there.”

 Her nose crinkles up when she grins. Tugging him even closer, she holds tightly to his jacket, not minding with the halves of the zipper bite into her palms. “My coworkers know you’re my boyfriend,” she whispers conspiratorially. “You could. If you wanted to. And it sounds like you do.”

So he does. 

Life likes to kick Jack Abbot in the teeth. He knows, in a far-reaching, academic sort of way, that it has taken the time and opportunity to knock Samira to her knees as well. But it’s a calm morning in April when he meets her on the beach with their morning coffee, dropping down next to her on the sand. A hundred feet in front of them, the tide is coming in, gulls calling over the sparkling horizon. 

Samira has a peculiar look on her face. 

“What?”

He hands her the mug, one of the few things he brought with him from Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. The blue and orange paint is chipped from being run through the dishwasher so many times. He considered tossing it, when he was packing up his townhouse in Central Northside, but Samira put it in the box labeled kitchen and that was that. 

“My period is officially late,” she says. 

Or rather, confesses. 

“I know.” He’s logged into her period tracker app on his phone; it has been since they started this little endeavor that they’ve been jokingly referring to as their newest co-authored study. “Did you—did you take a test?”

Licking her lips, Samira reaches into the pocket of her sweatpants. “Yeah, Jack. I did.” 

And there it is: the kick in the teeth. The pink-and-white piece of plastic is placed into the palm of his hand. The second line isn’t dark yet, and won’t be for a few more days. And that’s if they’re lucky. If it sticks. If the cells keep dividing like they’re supposed to, if the embryo nestles into her uterine lining like biology demands, if Samira’s body recognizes the pregnancy. The tests they bought start detecting human chorionic gonadotropin at 25 milli-international units per milliliter. You’re considered pregnant if your levels are higher than six. But so much goes wrong. They both know how much can go wrong. 

Still—

“Holy shit.” 

A baby. 

“Yeah. I don’t know why I’m so surprised,” Samira says, starting to laugh. She scoops up a fistful of sand, and lets it fall back out. The grains catch in the wind, blowing sideways. “You took my IUD out on the kitchen table three months ago. I’ve been tracking my basal body temperature. We’ve been using OPKs. My period is late, and my boobs hurt, and I fell asleep on you during Jeopardy last night. And still I was shocked to look down and see two pink lines.” 

There are so many moments in life that solidify before you can understand that you’re in them, becoming irrevocable. Cars crash, necks snap, fathers die. There is little in life you can control. Not how much other people drink, or the way a radiologist reads a test. Not the way your mentor decides to abuse you, or when it’s time to leave a place behind. 

“It’s a kick in the teeth,” he says, as his vision goes blurry. Tears spill out and over onto his cheeks, but he makes no move to wipe them away. “Just, you know. A good one.” 

Samira places her hand over his, sandwiching the pregnancy test between their fingers. 

“A really good one.” 

She’s crying too. 

“Yeah, baby. A really good one.” 

Life has occasioned to kick Jack Abbot in the teeth more times than he can count. More times than the ten fingers their baby will grow to have, and the ten toes. 

Because sure.

Why not?