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It really did start out innocently.
So innocently that they don’t even bother hiding it from their colleagues. At least five of them now know that sometime after midnight, Frank Langdon made the completely wholesome decision to walk out of his apartment and drive to a bar he'd never been to, just to give Mel King a ride home from girls’ night.
He is, of course, available when she asks.
Because he is divorced and alone.
His kids still have a bedtime that happens before he's even out of work, and he can't pick them up until morning. He’s been pulling his phone out of his pocket and texting Mel all night, anyway, and where she is concerned he is more readily available and willing than an Uber driver who is behind on rent.
He calls her when he pulls up to the curb. He sees the way her face changes when his name pops up on her phone and gets to witness her actual reaction when she hears his voice at the other end of the line.
It's like light hitting her in the dark.
Visible relief moves through her before she even spots his car, and it's immediately answered by something inside of him that feels anything but relieved. That's when the idea that this is altruistic begins to fall apart.
Her hair is down now, worked loose from its braid at some point since they parted earlier this evening. Another man might have noticed that first. He notices that she's happy. There's a warm, satisfied look on her face when she tells him hello, even though they have yet to say goodbye to one another in any meaningful way since he got back after rehab.
He doesn't know if she realizes what he sees—that tonight she had wanted him, specifically, and was pleased with herself when she discovered just how easily she could make him come.
He and his platonic decency are both in shambles by the time she buckles her seatbelt.
They both seem to register it in real time while he drives her home. Maybe, just maybe, she doesn't want anyone else at the end of the night. And maybe he stayed awake all evening with no one else left in his life to wait up for, hoping she would give him a reason to be needed.
It's a breathless feeling. Heavy.
The unspoken thing has somehow been yelled out in the center of a quiet room.
Now it echoes.
There had been no plan. That seems important—as though intention could absolve them when they had set themselves on this trajectory. Still, neither of them can miss the finality of it when he gets out of his car to walk her to her door.
They make it almost halfway.
Mel halts in the middle of the sidewalk, her keys in her hand. It's so abrupt that he ends up stumbling over his own two feet as he stops beside her. She grabs his sleeve to steady him, laughing quietly under the moonlight, and his hand goes to the small of her back before he can stop it. It's not even close to the first time he's caught himself doing it. It's a reflex by now, like blinking. She never seems to mind when he slips.
Her fingers tighten on his sleeve and she gives him one long, appraising glance, like she wants to remember the way he looks before they have to redraw these versions of one another entirely.
He's staring at her mouth.
It's also not the first time he's caught himself doing that, but it might be the first time she catches him.
Her eyes flick to him and then quickly away again as she sucks in a breath. For one terrible instant, he thinks she might save them both. Then she looks back at him, and her eyes drift slowly to his lips.
The kiss crashes into them.
There's no careful beginning. No polite, cautious experiment they can walk away from and laugh about later as some funny, weird thing they tried once as friends. She tastes like ginger ale and grenadine, sharp spice and syrup-sweet. His hand tightens at her back, pulling her against him until her keys are biting into his ribs and her mouth opens eagerly beneath his. He bends into her, chasing the kiss.
Her hips press into his. Hands slide beneath jackets.
He has no actual memory of how they get inside her apartment. He just knows that eventually, the keys are no longer digging into him and the jackets are gone. She's backed against the wall, letting him put his hands all over her with his knee pushed between her thighs and his tongue against her teeth.
Mel has never outright told him that she's a virgin. It would have been an odd conversation to have casually with a co-worker between codes. But he suspected it anyway. From the conspicuous omissions in the stories she tells about herself. The carefully composed comments she adds to discussions. The questions she asks that sometimes land completely sideways.
Now he knows that she is, just from the way she reacts when he touches her.
She makes a devastatingly surprised little noise when he drags her hips forward, her lips briefly going soft and round with shock. Mel doesn't wait for him to do it again. She moves into the pressure. Restless and seeking, the small tells are all over how she holds him to her and moans into his mouth when she finds what she needs.
It lays his own desire wide open. He can't get his body on hers in enough places. Can't give himself to her fast enough. He tears the button of her jeans open and shoves his hand inside, the zipper biting his wrist like razor wire.
Her head tips back against the wall with a gasp as he finds the wet heat of her for the first time. He's barely touched her. He's not even under her panties. She's soaked through them, the thin fabric clinging to her.
The questions form with horrifyingly clinical clarity, the kind that can only be earned from too much time spent in a hospital, if he’s thinking of them even now.
Onset. Severity. Contributing factors.
How long ago did this start?
Had it been when they kissed? While he was driving her home? At the bar, when he had ruthlessly monopolized her attention during girls’ night with his instantaneous replies to her texts, and perhaps her body had acknowledged just how far having his attention could take her?
Or—god—had it been that morning?
Before the sun was even up all the way, when she greeted him with the smile she only ever has when he walks into a room. The secret little grin she has to studiously tamp down so Robby doesn't ask her why she isn't listening during rounds.
Had she been walking around wet like this all day?
Because he had been half erect while trying to remember what the speed limit was. Staring at his own lap before that, discussing her karaoke options via text while contemplating jerking off in his living room. Forcing himself to think about necrotizing fasciitis that afternoon, just to get through pressing his body alongside hers to help her get the angle she needed to reduce a dislocation.
Over the last few years, he's had to confront his deepest flaws. He's just discovered an entirely new level of greed, coupled with arrogance the likes of which nothing he's accomplished in his life has managed to inspire.
She wants him.
He wants to make her come.
To be the first one to do it, and do it so well that it ruins her frame of reference entirely and she never wants anyone else but him.
He could work his way under the edge of her underwear right now. He's got very precise hands. Denim wouldn't stop him from getting to her. But he doesn't want to settle for pushing her clothes aside. He wants to get her out of them entirely.
Needs to, he amends.
The living room is closer than her bed.
By the time they get to her couch, he's already made his way under her shirt and she's helping him work her jeans down her thighs between kisses.
He slows himself down, somehow.
He has to—reverence demands that he take one goddamn second to appreciate how her shirt slides off of her and into his hands as he lifts it over her head, the breathless way she laughs when he pulls her against his body because her pants aren't cooperating and his patience fails him.
Then she's standing in front of him in just her bra and panties. There's no nervousness. Only damning evidence of wanting him written all over her and the faint traces of it that he's already left on her body. The line of her lips is a little bit softened from their kisses, and the scrape of his stubble has marked its way all along her jaw.
She reaches behind her and pops the clasp of her bra open with much more efficiency than he could have managed. It's an easy movement, a deceptively simple thing for a man to find himself completely vulnerable to as the straps slip down her shoulders. She doesn't look up from the task as she hooks her thumb under the waistband of her underwear and takes them off next, still hiding herself behind the careful concealment of her thighs.
He's no stranger to the architecture of the human body. It's as familiar to him as the alphabet.
Mel makes him illiterate.
She is written in some lost monastic hand, meant only to be read by the eyes of God.
Frank is currently only fluent in obscenity, but he would very much like to learn her. The naked, delicate curve of her breasts, rising and falling as she breathes. The dip of her navel along the pale softness of her belly. The loose, golden spill of her hair across her shoulders and over her chest, echoed lower where her thighs press together.
Soft.
Pretty.
Mine, something deep and undeserving demands, and his breath catches hard at the sight of her.
She pushes her hair out of her face and finally looks at him, her chin tilting up to meet his kiss, lips parted in half a smile that cracks wide open at whatever she finds in his expression before he's too close to see. She tangles with him eagerly, giving a satisfied gasp when he finally trusts himself enough to touch her. His hands palm her ass and draw her to him—her bare skin against his clothed body.
He makes sure that she can feel what this is doing to him, too.
And…fuck, she's curious. He knows her well enough to pick up on it, even in the middle of everything. The way she pauses thoughtfully and her hands make some small, impulsive flutter of interest against his fly.
He won't survive letting her explore it.
He kisses the thought out of her in a desperate act of self-preservation and moves her backward to the couch, settling her onto it with little soothing touches of his lips to hers before he sinks to his knees.
His hands go to her waist first. They follow the swell of her hips down to her thighs as she leans back against the cushions and spreads her legs for him.
She's perfect.
He knew she would be. He had thought about it enough to be sure.
So fucking perfect.
Bare and open and visibly ready for his mouth. Flushed pink with arousal, shining and slick.
It's the prettiest cunt he's ever seen.
Even thinking a thing like that about something so exquisite feels crude, and yet it's not nearly vulgar enough to describe what it does to him. He wants to eat her pussy until she forgets her own name. She'll have to wear her badge clipped to her shirt at all times, just in case anyone asks her what it is.
Melissa. King. Doctor, actually.
His cock throbs, trapped in his pants.
He doesn't know where he finds the willpower it takes him to do this right. To drag his mouth over the soft skin beneath her navel, then lower—but still not low enough—kissing his way from hip to hip while she trembles under the attention. He works his way to the tops of her thighs, lingering there until she opens them wider and her breath turns quick and uneven.
He is going to be mercilessly careful with this. That's what he intends to do, at least. The first gentle press of his lips between her legs is already made reckless by the quiver that goes through her, a helpless tremor that moves through his ego like a fucking seismic event.
She parts under his tongue, her thighs easing wider around his shoulders and her hips tilting up for him. He groans against her, another shiver of response as his reward. Her hand settles lightly on the top of his head, fingers threading through his hair experimentally, her nails running over his scalp.
He drags his tongue across her again. Slower this time, learning her response to every calculated inch. And god, she's sweet. Worth every minute, every second it took for him to find his way right here. Her fingers close in his hair with a plaintive little gasp, her thighs flexing under his hands.
There.
He finds that specific combination of pressure and angle again with a precision that draws her whole body tight against his mouth and then he settles there, letting her learn what his intention feels like when it's all hers alone to have. He could stay like this for days, studying her. Feeling the way she responds to him, trying every single way he's ever so much as considered touching her body and learning every single thing that makes her come apart.
It's not enough to touch her in one place.
One hand skims across her hip and then over her ribs to her chest, her nipple tight against his fingertips when he brushes against it. She arches so sharply that he presses her back down without thinking, steadying her. The sound she makes is something he feels more than he hears, buzzing through his fingertips as his mouth follows it deeper.
He can taste how wet she is. Feel how soft and silken she's gone for him, and imagine burying himself inside of her with shameless want that is second only to the need that had its claws in him first. Nothing between them but her pleasure, and him giving her what she needs.
Every look he's stolen at her from across a room. Every conversation cut short by life and death colliding between them. Every single, miserable moment he wanted to touch her but couldn't—it’s gathered here. All that longing, finally made useful.
He's so hard he could break.
He manages to reach down and get a hand between himself and the couch, quickly undoing his zipper and shoving his pants and boxers low enough to give himself room. He presses his heel against his cock, just barely. Feels the shock of it going through him—that little bit of pressure, the insignificant friction—and knows he isn't getting out of this with his composure intact.
Then she moves beneath him, and his own body becomes irrelevant. He returns to her with purpose. Broad, filthy strokes. Hungry, desperate certainty as he feels what it does to her when he seals his mouth to her and stays there.
Her heel digs into his shoulder, and he feels the tension begin to climb. Her body goes still with promise. Breath catching, her chest heaving. Even the barely there wordless pleas go quiet in her throat just before it breaks, the world narrowed down to agonizing anticipation.
Unbearable. Sublime.
Neither of them can do anything now but let it.
Her thighs squeeze tight, body bowing with a force he doesn't even try to stop, knowing there's no holding on to it when it happens. He feels the shocked, slick pulse of her under his mouth, her hand twisting in his hair as his own body jerks in sympathy.
She comes so hard he forgets his name. But he thinks it's—
“Oh, God, Frank,” she gasps.
Parts of that sounded right.
He groans helplessly and doesn't pull back. He takes everything she gives him, every little gasp and shudder, his own hand barely managing to close around himself before she takes him with her, without even a single stroke to leave the illusion intact that there was any choice about it on his part.
His hips drive into the meager contact, the feeling hitting him low and with violent force. He comes because she is coming, barely managing to curl his hand around the head of his cock in time to catch the rush of release in his palm before he marks her couch with it. Hot, messy, abundant. More than he's prepared for as he empties himself into his own hand with a hungry, broken sound against her.
Even with his own orgasm tearing through his body, his only coherent thought is to contain it, somehow. The fact that he manages it, and keeps his mouth on her through it all, has less to do with control than it does with luck. She's still caught in the last of it, and he eases the pressure as her body begins to soften. Her heel falls away from his back and her thighs loosen.
Her hips still shudder with each slow pass of his tongue, but gently now, as she sinks against the couch and finally pulls him away by his hair before she lets go entirely.
Her arm is draped across her face, glasses pushed askew. One leg is still thrown over his shoulder like she's forgotten about it. All of her is lax and flushed and deliciously debauched. Frank just stares at her, knowing he, too, is a picture of ruin. His pants open, cock going soft, hand covered in cum. Still tasting her on his lips.
For the first time in several years—since well before his addiction, even—he sees his own future with any kind of clarity.
She's in it. Every part of it.
Whatever happens next, she's there. In front of him. Next to him. In his bed at the end of every night and at the start of every morning. She's going to be in the rest of his life, he realizes with brutal certainty. Still half-asleep when the kids drag her downstairs because breakfast is ready. Shoving her way between him and a patient because she'll get the airway quicker than he can. Laughing in the front seat of his car with her lips stained red from maraschino cherries after girls' night, forever.
Because he's in love with her.
Not a little bit. Not falling. He's completely gone. The truth of it would be enough to bring him to his knees if he wasn't already on them. He's going to move out of his sad bachelor apartment. He's going to get a house. No—he’s going to buy her a house—a fucking castle, if she wants one, and he's going to find that little secret grin she keeps just for him in every room of it.
He almost says the words.
It's enough that he knows what they are.
She looks down at him, her expression all tenderness and dazed wonder. Every unhinged thought of soaring turrets in Pennsylvania and Mel—his, always—feels dangerously possible as she reaches for him, her lips curving into a line that leads him straight back home.