Archive of Our Own

DIALECTICAL TENSIONS: Opposing forces people experience in their relationships

They say that modern love's a cruel endeavor / and to that I say, "Fuck it, whatever."
U + ME = <3, OLIVIA RODRIGO

Samira’s day included: one GSW, through-and-through; an MI where she talked Coates, her R3, through a PCI; a migraine treated with prochlorperazine, diphenhydramine, and ketorolac; a pencil up a first-grader’s nose, and a handoff so smooth she was in her car by 7:15. Tapping her fingers against the steering wheel, she turns into the court. The sun is just setting, a vibrant orange and lush violet. Temperature in the low 60s. Samira wonders if they could eat dinner on the back patio, if the mosquitoes have died off enough, if the barriers are still working.

She’s off tomorrow, and so is Jack. The pleasant, homey feeling of it settles in her chest as she pulls into the driveway and turns off the car. Maybe they’ll go out for coffee, grocery shop, sit side-by-side on the sofa while she works on organizing her research notes. Her today and her tomorrow have made Samira excited instead of dead on her feet, a smooth, liquid joy spreading through her that isn’t adrenaline looking for a crash.

After slipping her bag onto the bench by the door, she hangs her jacket on her designated command hook and toes off her shoes. She plays with her keys as she heads towards the kitchen and the clay bowl she’ll toss them into. Samira molded the bowl in elementary school, a misshapen blue and purple thing. It is the only piece of childhood art she still owns, and Jack insisted they use it instead of the more practical wall holder he had at his old house. It made Samira feel all gross and gooey. Loved.

“Jack?” she calls. There’s a clatter as the fob echoes against ceramic. The light is on in the kitchen, but it's empty. “Honey?”

“I don’t know if you should be calling me that,” Robby says.

Samira flinches. “Oh. Hi, Robby.”

He’s leaning against the archway separating the kitchen and living room, one ankle crossed over the other. “Hello.”

She is aware, suddenly, that she smells like sweat and antiseptic, that her greasy hair is in a smooshed bun at the nape of her neck, that she’s 32 and has a visible pimple on her forehead by her hairline. She grabs a glass, because her mouth is dry, and because she needs something to do. “Do you want something to drink?”

He throws his thumb over his shoulder. “Jack got me a beer.”

“Good.” Samira fills her glass with water from the refrigerator and gulps down half of it. “Do you want something to eat? I think we have chips…”

“Jack’s picking up takeout. He thought he’d be back before you got here.” Robby looks at his watch, and it feels like he’s mocking her. “Not even a quarter ‘til 8. Impressive.”

“Presby’s well-staffed,” she says. “It was a good day.”

“Ouch. I hope you’re not stop-watching how long it takes Jack to get home after work. You know I try to kick him out of there as fast as I can. Just can’t get him to leave sometimes.”

Samira blinks and swallows down the urge to explain herself. She knows what he’s doing. The dregs of a time when she desperately wanted Robby’s approval still flutter around her stomach, but she doesn’t want it anymore. She doesn’t need it. She takes another sip of water and sets her cup down. “Is there a Pirates game tonight?”

“Thursday night football,” he corrects, eyebrows arching up just enough to make her feel like an idiot.

She nods. “Right. If you excuse me, I’m going to change.”

“Be my guest.”

Samira shuffles down the hallway, rolling her eyes when her back is to Robby. She opens the bedroom door and closes it solidly behind her. She sits on the edge of the bed and curls her toes against the carpet. She takes a deep breath. Wiping her palms on her thighs, she cracks her neck.

She had a great day. A shift that flowed, challenging and rewarding. Stella Myers, a 37-year-old woman with menstrual cramps so bad she regularly faints, took Samira’s hand and told her that nobody had ever believed her about the extent of her pain before. Coates had instinctively known she’d need to place a stint to keep the artery open. By the time Samira left, there were a handful of open seats in chairs. It was the rare kind of day in the ED that makes Samira feel useful, hopeful, good.

But she must have made some incredibly stupid, bad choice somewhere along the way if she’s coming home to Robby in her house.

Samira breathes in, exhales audibly, and pushes up. Peeling off her scrub top, she tosses it onto the armchair in the corner. She goes into the bathroom to pee, wash her hands, wash her face, reapply deodorant, and redo her bun. Pulling on a threadbare cardigan, she sits where she already wrinkled the duvet, feeling the same way she did when she was seven, when an aunt and uncle she couldn’t remember spent a month at their home and she had been afraid to go downstairs for breakfast in case she revealed herself to be incompetent, a failed embarrassment of a girl spilling milk when making cereal, orange juice dripping down her chin and into her curls.

There’s a knock on the door before it cracks open. “Hey kid,” Jack says, soft and fond. When he enters their bedroom he doesn’t close the door behind him. “Long day?”

“No.” She blinks up at him, palms cupping her knees. “Yes. I mean, it always is, but it was a good day.”

He reaches for her. “There’s Crab Rangoon and an order of shrimp mussaman with your name on it. And if you want, I’m willing to let you have some of mine.”

“Would I have to pick around beef?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says, tucking his chin and pretending to be very ashamed.

“Kung Pao or Hunan?”

“Kung Pao.”

Samira scrunches her nose even though she might take him up on the offer. Grabbing his hands, her skin feels papery the way it often does after a shift. She should have put lotion on in the bathroom. “What did Robby get?”

“Chicken chow mein.” He grunts as she stands, and she rolls her eyes. “Why? You want that instead?”

She thinks about saying yes, just to see if Jack would give it to her. But she knows he wouldn’t. He might put in another order and pick it up, leaving her alone in their house with Robby again. A nightmare. “Mussaman is perfect.”

He kisses her, soft and chaste, humming against her mouth. He squeezes her hands. “I missed you.”

Jack says it every time she comes home from UPMC. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been working opposite schedules for a week or if he saw her off in the morning. Samira thinks it might just be a habit, like “I love you” is the special thing he doles out seriously and “I missed you” is the consolation prize.

She lets him lead her toward the kitchen, dropping his hand when Robby comes into view.

Samira piles food onto her plate and retreats to the upstairs study. She looks over her research until her head starts aching at the temples, and then she braves downstairs. Setting her dishes in the sink, she eyes the now cold takeout still spread on the counter. Robby grunts something at the television, and Jack grunts in agreement.

Samira considers going back upstairs and sleeping in the guest room.

Two weeks after July 4th, Samira asked for a recommendation letter. The bags beneath her eyes looked like bruises, her lips were chapped, and her hair was frizzy around her head like a halo. She was the most beautiful woman Jack had ever seen, and he kept trying to convince himself there was no way that was true.

At some point, though, you had to admit you were beat.

“Absolutely,” he said. “What are you thinking?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Geriatrics.”

“You are good with the elderly.”

Samira clenched her jaw and flexed her fingers, the accompanying eyeroll resigned. She was drooping. Jack didn’t know how else to describe it. Even when she was standing straight, there was some burden weighing her down.

“But that doesn’t surprise me. You’re good with everyone.”

She looked at him then, a spark of life in her eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah, you know that. We’d be lucky to have you, and so would any hospital.”

“So, if I wanted to do something else, you’d still write a recommendation letter?” she asked. Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, she pressed her iPad into her stomach. She wasn’t physically holding her breath, but it felt like she was, as though she was on the precipice of something and his answer would be a determining factor.

He rolled his shoulders and twisted his wedding band around his finger. “I’ll write you any recommendation letter you want.”

Jack couldn’t have imagined an easier recommendation letter to write, whether Samira wanted to do toxicology, research, pediatrics, or something else entirely. He’d never been more impressed with a resident. He’d never liked a resident more, and he liked plenty of residents plenty. He liked Shen so much he got his ass in front of Gloria to say he’d quit if she didn’t agree with Robby and offer him the attending position. She called Jack’s bluff, but it was the thought that counted.

“Really?” Samira asked again. Her eyes were big and brown and bright.

Jack’s chest felt tight, like he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs, like he was hypopneic. He would worry about that more if Samira ever acted freaked out by it, but she was far too kind to embarrass him. “Absolutely.”

She smiled, a small curve that only creased one dimple.

Yeah, definitely the most beautiful woman Jack had ever laid eyes on.

Samira wakes to the heat of Jack at her back, body molded against hers, arm hanging limp over her waist. His breathing is slow and deep but not quite steady, as though sleep is close but hasn’t yet arrived. Grabbing his hand, Samira presses it against her stomach.

Jack groans into her hair.

“Morning,” she whispers; she doesn’t want to disturb the stillness, the pleasant, silky feeling of a leisurely start, honey-thick and sweet.

He brushes a kiss to the back of her head before nudging his nose along the line of her neck. “Good morning, sweetheart.”

“You need sleep?” she asks.

When Samira reflects on it, their ability to communicate settles warm in her chest, worn in and comfortable, fraying familiarly like her favorite pair of sweatpants, threads loose from constant use. It’s like they’ve already said everything to each other, told every story, even though they haven’t (there are still humiliations, wounds, vulnerabilities she’s taking to the grave). So, maybe every story that matters.

They talk, though. They always find new things to say. They share cases and Jack asks her advice like he actually wants it (when and if she would do a temporal artery ultrasound on a patient presenting with isolated ocular symptoms to help determine GCA or stroke of the eye). They look out the window and wonder how long it will take the neighbors to distribute the ginormous pile of mulch in their driveway (Jack says at least a week, because their Christmas decorations are still in their windows, and Samira says four days, because surely they’ll spread it in their garden and on their lawn by the end of the weekend).

And they talk in bed.

Jack has always whispered words into her ear, against her skin, told her how beautiful she is, how good she is, sweet and soft and special. It tingles in the whorls of her fingertips, flexes her ankles and curls her toes, vibrates along her spine and spreads viscous between her ribs.

“Not tired,” Jack mumbles, lips against the skin of her neck, voice syrupy and low. He brushes his thumb back and forth over her stomach, catching on her belly button and wrinkling the white undershirt she wore to bed.

Samira wriggles back, closer.

Jack kisses up her neck to the hinge of her jaw before nipping at her earlobe.

“How was work?” she asks, eyes drifting closed.

“It was work,” Jack answers, which means he doesn’t want to talk about it, but it probably wasn’t traumatizing. His teeth scrape gently down her jaw, and his hand slips beneath her shirt, palm hot and callused against her skin. “You’re much more interesting.”

“I doubt it,” she says, not to be self-deprecating, but because there’s something fascinating about performing a lateral canthotomy, giving a patient with cyanide toxicity hydroxocobalamin and watching them turn purple, a teenager coming in because they tried to pierce their belly button with a nail gun.

Fingers digging into her stomach, Samira feels Jack shifting. She laughs at the loud buzzer noise he vibrates into her ear. He tickles her belly, causing her to laugh louder. Her knees come up instinctually to protect herself from the onslaught, and she pushes her elbow back, attempting to land a hit wherever she can.

“Wrong, Samira.”

She swats at his hand to stop the tickling before holding it against her abdomen. She doesn’t want him going away. Her voice is slightly breathless: “It is more important to ease a patient’s pain or save a life than kiss my neck.”

“Wrong, Samira,” Jack repeats, quiet and serious. His fingers brush beneath the waistband of her basketball shorts and pad against the elastic of her underwear. He kisses her neck where it curves into her shoulder. Her insides flutter, and she feels like light is passing through her, brightening her from the inside. “We help people so they can do things like go home and kiss their girlfriends’ necks.”

“Is that why you do it?”

“Samira,” he says her name again, gravelly and reverent, fingers stroking through the curls above her cunt the same way they thread through her hair when she leans her head on his shoulder. “You know I’m not that nice.”

“Jack,” she says, just to taste it on her tongue. She remembers when the syllable had been foreign and unnatural in her mouth, a jolting thing now as sweet and smooth as her morning coffee. “I know you are that nice.”

She pushes back into him. His fingers are still brushing through her pubic hair, and his mouth curves into a smile against her shoulder. He smells clean like the bar soap he purchases from Costco, and even though he hasn’t kissed her on the mouth (and won’t, because she hasn’t brushed her teeth, cottony morning breath still coating her tongue and gums and roof in a way that doesn’t appeal to Samira more than it doesn’t appeal to him), she knows he would taste minty.

Jack peppers kisses along her neck, at the nape and around her hairline, traveling up behind her ear and down again. Soft and chaste at first, and then open and wet. She shifts her hips, trying to increase the pressure, and he grins against her skin. “More?”

“Please,” she says.

She is always nice like this, morning light peeking through the fluttering blackout curtains, cool breeze sifting through the open window. Samira hears the occasional chirp and twitter. If every wakeup was this calm and easy she would probably be a radically different person.

Jack’s finger slips between the lips of her cunt, and he grunts into her ear. “You’re already wet.”

Wiggling back, she feels his dick, interested. “You’re right here with me.”

“Probably ahead of you,” he says, teeth gentle at the curve of her ear. “Sometimes I get half-hard on the drive home just thinking about you in one of my undershirts drooling on my pillow.”

A whooshing, quiet laugh escapes her. “Shut up.”

“’s true,” he slurs against her skin, wet and open-mouthed, hot little pants of air hitting her like she’s the one with her hand down his pants rather than the other way around.The fabric of Samira’s shirt has grown damp beneath his lips.

Jack’s fingers glide between her labia majora and minora, thumb brushing across her clit on every other pass. Samira shivers. Goosebumps erupt on her skin, and she rucks her hand up her shirt to touch her breast, nails grazing around her pebbled nipple. Her body feels like a livewire, sensitive. “Yeah,” she says, half in response and half because her mouth is agape.

“Yeah,” Jack agrees, circling her clit in earnest now, the perfect amount of pressure. The first time he touched her like this, she had been flat on her back, and he had hovered above her, eyes meticulously sweeping across her face, and Samira had felt pinned beneath a microscope like a science experiment; his thumb was up and down, back and forth, slow, fast, faster, light, hard, harder. He asked, “Is that good?” and she watched his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. She had nodded, because she was afraid of what embarrassing thing would come out of her, and he had known somehow, from the look on her face, and said, “You can tell me. You’re so good. I want it to be good.” And it wasn’t quick, Jack figuring out her body, but his eyes were blown, and his mouth was bitten red by her teeth, and his focus, his interest, was so exacting and sincere that Samira felt flayed open, skin prickling and too hot, and when she came it spread like liquid gold through her whole body. And then she hid her face, embarrassed, and Jack grabbed her by the chin and said, “Thank you. Thank you.” And Samira felt too big for her skin and started crying, and he apologized, and she said, “No. No, it was good. You were good,” and her voice was low and shot, and the punched out look on Jack’s face was so beautiful that she considered never seeing him again because of how awful it would be to be looked at like that even once, but especially twice or ten times, and then never again.

He buries his face against her shoulder, nose pressed against her neck, breathing hot and wet. “You’re so beautiful,” he murmurs. “Dangerous. I think about you all the time.”

He slips a thick finger into her cunt, curling it just right, and Samira’s thighs start twitching. She groans, nails brushing against the underside of her breast. She’s warm all over, and Jack grinds forward, dick hard against her ass. It coils inside her, how much she wants and needs and loves him.

“That’s it, honey,” he says. And his other arm has wriggled around her shoulder, and his thumb brushes against her cheek, and Samira grasps his wrist and takes his pointer and middle fingers into her mouth. She sucks on them once just to feel the way his moan rumbles against her skin. Jack lets her drag his fingers out of her mouth, teeth gentle against his knuckles, lets her press his wrist against the pillow and her mouth against his palm. Her insides are twisting, turning tighter and tighter with each circle of his thumb against her clit. Her hips chase the sensation.

He says, “I want you so much,” and his dick rubs against her, his moan desperate. “So wet, Samira. So soft. So good.” A litany of praise traveling directly from his mouth and absorbed into her skin. It’s like he can’t help it, but feels what it does to her, sparking everywhere, bright and blinding and so, so good.

Samira inhales against his palm and rolls herself against his other hand. He’s all around her, overwhelming. She hears the wet squelch of her cunt, and Jack slips a second finger inside her but doesn’t move, just lets her clench down around his knuckles while his thumb works her over.

“Like that,” she says. Even though he knows now. Knows how she wants it, knows how to give it to her, how to read the hitch in her breath and the twist of her head like she’s trying to hide from herself. He knows how to make her feel it all, a heady combination of surprised and safe.

Samira’s hot and vibrating, and her moan catches in her throat, muffled by his palm when her body pulls taut and her orgasm pulses through her, Jack’s thumb still circling her clit as her thighs trap his hand between her legs.

He presses a “Missed you” against her warm cheek, fingers still playing with her pussy and sending little sparks through her.

Reaching back, Samira pats his face gently and pushes his nose away from her mouth. She inhales, exhales, breathing uneven as his arm moves from her shoulder to beneath her waist, hand splaying over her expanding and contracting stomach. “Love you,” she says.

“The endorphins will do that.” She elbows him. “Love you, too, kid.”

They settle for a minute, his other hand still cupping her cunt, his cock pressed up against her ass, his arm wrapped around her middle, and his nose tucked behind her ear. Like this, Samira could fall back asleep, the dregs of the double she worked still pulling at her limbs despite the sleep she must’ve gotten – Ten hours? Eleven? She feels cocooned, happy. But she knows drifting off again will leave her with a mild headache and the frustration of a wasted morning.

When she rolls her hips into Jack’s palm, then back against his erection, he groans. “What’d’you need?” he asks, meeting her now, grinding slow and languid.

“This,” she says.

“Just like this?” Jack asks.

She hums.

“This good, Samira?”

“It’s nice,” she says, more air than sound. The synchronized movement of their bodies undulating, slow and steady, flows through her. It feels good, the spark of anticipation thrumming in her blood, because she knows she’s going to push down her shorts, kick them somewhere tangled in the top sheet, and when she moves her pillow beneath her hips, Jack is going to shift his beneath her head.

Sex feels like something they do together, whether Jack’s got his head between her legs or she has her hand wrapped around him, whether she’s whining as she grinds against his palm and he refuses to touch her clit, or he’s got his hands in her hair, begging her to put his cock in her mouth. Like they’re both getting something they want out of it. Samira is sometimes run over by the acute sense that Jack derives pleasure from her mere existence. The terror of it, like one day he would see her as she really is and surgically remove himself from her life, clean and easy, with hardly a scar for her to know he had been there at all, has given way to something steady and inexorable.

“You’re good,” she tells him.

“You’re so good,” he echoes.

Another minute or two of the slow roll of their hips, and Samira feels wet and empty again, heat blooming and pulsating in her cunt. She pants, needy and warm.

“What do you want?” Jack rasps.

“Whatever you want,” she says.

“Samira,” he groans. His eyelashes flutter against her skin, and his stubble rubs against her jaw.

“I want you to fuck me.”

“Yeah,” Jack says, a hard, punctuated roll of his hips against her ass. He pulls his hand out of her shorts and fiddles with the elastic. “Yeah, you do. You deserve it, Samira. Whatever you want.”

It’s like a dance, the undressing that leaves her in her (his) white undershirt, the pillow beneath her hips, the smooth, shallow thrusts as he works her open on his cock, fingers pressing into her thigh as he holds her open.

Jack feels incredible like this, filling her so well, telling her how good she is, how she makes him feel. Samira pants and grunts and squeezes his free hand tightly. So, so tightly. Her second orgasm undulates like their hips, cresting, rolling through her, elongated by Jack’s continued slow and steady and purposeful thrusts, an answer to her babbling “don’t stop” and “oh my god” and “please” and his name over and over and over again.

Jack comes inside her and a shiver rockets up her spine, tingling so nice. It’s all so nice. His sweaty chest pressed against her wrinkled shirt, his thumb against her clit, the red marks of her blunt fingernails embedded into the back of his hand.

It’s so nice when he crawls down her body and eats his spend out of her. Samira’s third orgasm makes her feel boneless and floaty. It’s so nice when he kisses her temple and asks if she wants breakfast. So nice when she cleans herself up, brushes her teeth, and pads into the kitchen where he’s making French toast. When Samira finally kisses Jack, he tastes like a mixture of herself, himself, and the strawberries he’s cut up and placed in a little bowl.

Samira earned the ultrasound fellowship at UPMC, and Jack signed the card Al-Hashimi passed around generically: Congratulations! They’re lucky to have you.

He did not let himself think she would want to keep in touch, even when he came across a study about racial and ethnic disparities in catheter ablation. She’d probably already read it, anyway. It was one thing to email her when she was at PTMC and they could discuss a study’s methods the next time she picked up a night shift, and another thing entirely when she had left.

But in September, the weather pleasantly cool and cloudy, Samira emailed him from what appeared to be a personal email address asking if he’d ever tried a SCEPTRE and, if so, what did he think of its suction capabilities? Jack wrote that there was one when he volunteered with SWAT, and like most field medical devices, it would do.

When she asked if he wanted to discuss some cases she’d read recently over breakfast, she gave him her cell number as though he hadn’t saved it in his phone during her R2 year after she’d picked up her second night shift (he had all his staff’s numbers in his phone in case of an emergency, but it did hurt a little to know she’d never saved his).

Jack knew when Samira accepted an attending position at Presby (because Admin was supportive of her research interests, and her coworkers were nice, and she liked her shitty studio apartment), because she told him over coffee. He knew her mom had eloped without telling her, because her phone lit up while they were discussing sticking a Foley catheter up a bloody nose to stop the bleeding, and she hit the ignore button so quickly she bumped her knife with her elbow and it clattered to the floor. He knew she wasn’t dating anyone, because he made a joke about her partner getting upset that he was occupying her rare free time, and Samira had looked down and mumbled that she didn’t have a partner (It wasn’t very smooth reconnaissance on Jack’s part, but he had worked five nights in a row, and her eyelashes were casting very enticing shadows across her cheekbones).

They were waiting outside a restaurant after splitting a bottle of wine over dinner when Samira said, “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” She looked across the street at construction: scaffolding, a crane with its boom at 60°, and a mound of dirt. She said it very simply, matter-of-fact. It was something she had clearly considered long before she voiced it.

Jack was surprised, because he thought they had had a good time, had been having a good time, and that he hadn’t done anything too egregious. He tried very hard to suppress all impulses that led down paths she may not want to walk with him. “I can try to be more professional.”

“I don’t want you to be professional,” she said. It sounded like it should be accompanied by a stomp, like she was a toddler throwing a tantrum.

Jack looked at her and shoved his hands into his pockets. Her eyes blinked more than usual, and her mouth twisted together.

It was unfair of him to make her be the one to say it. Samira had just come off a double and probably hadn’t gotten more than five hours of sleep in the last 24. She was exhausted and raw, and even though he was cognizant of the fact that she might want him to do it, that it would be nice of him to relieve her of the responsibility, he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Jack wasn’t one of her attendings anymore, but he had been. He was also a white man almost two decades older than her, and he knew that if she didn’t want professionalism, she would have to be the one to cross that line.

It was an excuse as much as anything resembling chivalry. Jack had been in combat, had used sternum wire through a tendon flap and a screw in a tibia to fix a tendon rupture, and routinely put himself in situations that could get him shot. His therapist did not call it bravery, but Jack figured his propensity toward risk and lack of self-preservation instinct were close enough.

Samira, however, made him cowardly, and spending more time with her hadn’t helped. All it did was show him how much he would lose if he fucked it up.

“Oh, well,” he said. A few strands escaped the clip in her hair, and there was a wrinkle of frustration between her brows. When she looked at him, pupils wide and black with annoyance, his breath caught in his lungs. Jack’s gaze slipped to her wine-stained mouth, and he added, “I can be less professional.”

She groaned, low and barely audible. Jack felt it pulse in his dick.

He saw Samira shift as though he could see all the muscle and bone moving beneath her jacket: glenohumeral joint, deltoid, brachialis. She moved deliberately but quickly, impatient and frustrated. Her hands twisted in his jacket and her body knocked him backwards. She went heavy against him, as though she couldn’t hold herself up any longer, and when her mouth found his, it was soft and unsure. The kiss was a hesitant press.

Jack swore he could feel her eyelashes brushing against his skin. Her knees knocked against his, and the fabric of his coat pulled against the small of his back as her knuckles pressed against his ribs. Samira smelled like garlic and antiseptic. Her lips were dry and closed and cold, and he could feel her pulling back in embarrassment even as she shifted forward.

His heart felt too slow and small and laughably unworthy. And he was too thrilled to do anything about it or offer a disclaimer. He needed to bring her close, to convince her to stay. Jack’s hands found Samira’s waist. Her coat was bulky, the waterproof fabric rough and slippery in his fingers. Jack held her there. He kissed her back. Samira made a small, surprised sound in the back of her throat that had an electric pulse buzzing through his skin and thrumming in his brain.

He worked her mouth open, and it felt as precise and easy as a surgical cut, taut fascia giving way to spongy fat. Smooth and satisfying. Something raw and wanting curled in his gut, as familiar to Jack as the press of his fingertips against his arms whenever she had smiled at him at PTMC. The longing had made a home inside his chest, a warm and lonely friend now twisting, alive and greedy. Samira tasted like wine and tomato sauce, lush and buttery. Her mouth had grown confident, soft and hungry against his, and it was good. She was so good.

When they parted for air, gasping as though they couldn’t breathe in enough oxygen, Jack ran his nose against her cheekbone and felt her trembling.

“You need to go home, Samira,” he said.

She hummed, eyes closed.

He placed his hands over hers where they were still gripping his coat. “You need to go to sleep.”

“Yes,” she agreed. Her eyes fluttered open, wide and dark and beautiful.

“Are you okay to drive?”

Her mouth pinched down. “Yes.”

“Let me walk you to your car.”

“Oh,” she said, like she hadn’t really understood what he had been saying. She shook her head and took a step back, flexing her fingers at her sides. “Sorry.”

“Not on my account, I hope.”

“I’m so tired.” Samira pressed the heels of her palms against her eyelids. When she dropped her hands, her eyes were red. “If you don’t like me, please just get it over with. This is mean.” She clenched her jaw, shoulders back. Jack was reminded of the way she presented to Robby in her last few months, like she was prepared to take a hit, her ready argument tucked beneath her tongue and swallowed down.

“You need to get some sleep,” he repeated. She pulled her fingers inside her coat sleeves and looked across the street again. Her mouth wobbled. He wanted to keep kissing her. “And if you want to see me again, I’d love to take you to dinner.”

Samira’s gaze snapped back towards him. Her eyes were narrow and blinking, and Jack realized he really was being mean; he could sense how sluggish her brain was and personally knew how exhaustion rippled at the edge of your vision after a double. Just another unfair advantage, another thing for him to feel guilty about when he went home and cracked the spine of a paperback, police scanner buzzing in the background as he imagined how it would feel to press himself against her sans winter coats.

“I like you very much, Samira.”

She wet her well-kissed mouth, and it rumbled inside Jack like an earthquake.

“I like you, too,” she said. “And we just went to dinner.”

Jack tried to clamp down his smile. “Does your generation not know what a date is?” She rolled her eyes, and he could sense how much trouble he was in. To say he liked her was putting it so mildly it could be considered perjury on a witness stand. “Let me do this right, okay? When you’re well-rested enough to have full control of your faculties, if you still want to… go out with me.” And he was suddenly aware he wasn’t sure that’s what Samira wanted at all. Maybe all she wanted was sex. “Or something else, we can do that.”

She mumbled something about how he’s the one who imbibed her with wine before relenting: “Fine, but only because I’m starting to get a headache.”

He walked her to her car, hovering so close their coats made a swishing sound with each step. The night air was bitterly cold, and he almost asked if she had gloves.

Samira slid into her car, buckled her seatbelt, and started the engine before rolling down her window and gesturing for him to come closer. “I hope you know that I don’t do things I haven’t thought through,” she said. Her eyes were big and bright and scared, like this admittance was the greatest risk she’d taken all night.

“I know,” he said. He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to hers, sure and deep. He cupped her cheek in his palm and felt her start at the touch.

“Cold,” she mumbled, leaning into it.

“Text me when you get home.” She eyed him like it was an insult. “Goodnight, Samira.”

“Goodnight, Jack,” she said, and the thrill of his name in her mouth still sent a delighted shiver down his spine.

He watched her pull out of the space, pull out of the parking lot, and turn right without signaling.

Samira closes the garage door and jimmies open the door to the house while juggling two boxes of pizza. The food smells greasy and delicious, and the cardboard is sturdier than it looks.

She announces, “Pizza’s here.”

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Jack says. He moves the bowl of pretzels from the center of the coffee table to the corner. He lifts his coaster and beer, setting them to the side. “Just put them here.”

She does as requested, and Jack begins opening the boxes.

“Do you want plates?” Samira asks.

“That would be great.”

Robby, sitting back, hands resting on his knees, makes a sound just barely noticeable over the Pirates game.

“Got it,” Samira says.

Robby starts saying something about the boxes, but she doesn’t stick around to hear it. Instead, she grabs a stack of three plates from the cabinet above the dishwasher and focuses on the soft clinking of ceramic. She googled how long baseball games normally last, so she figures there’s about two hours left. Two hours to read some of the latest issue of the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. Samira bookmarked a few articles she thought sounded interesting and purposefully didn’t read any of them this morning.

Handing Jack two plates, Samira reaches for a slice of mushroom and green onion. The cheese stretches like taffy until she uses her fingers to break it and pile the threads on top. She takes a second piece, and when she turns, Jack’s fingers find her wrist.

“Stay,” he says, easy, shifting on the sofa and tugging her gently. “At least while you eat.”

Robby leans forward to catch her eye. “I thought you didn’t like baseball?”

“I don’t,” Samira confirms. She could interpret it as helpful support of her intended plan to go upstairs and barricade herself in the study until Robby’s motorcycle pulls away from their house. Instead, it bristles along her spine. He wants her to leave just as much as she wants him to leave, so Samira twists her wrist until she can squeeze Jack’s hand. “But I’ll stay.”

Jack offers up an encouraging smile, elbowing Robby and scooting over. “Great. I missed you.”

Samira smiles back, a small press of her mouth. Her slices slide around as she sits, and she lifts her knees to steady her plate. There’s grease on her fingers, no napkins in sight, and someone swinging a bat around on the TV, waiting for the pitch.

“Doesn’t look like there’s any sausage on that,” Robby says, gesturing toward the open box of pizza closest to Samira. He takes a large bite of his own slice: chicken, tomato, basil, green pepper, olives.

“Samira doesn’t like it,” Jack says.

Robby hums. “Changing him already, huh?”

It’s a sharp dig between her ribs, and Samira presses her arms against the sides of her body. She sits up straight and rigid and refuses to collapse under its intended effect.

They had a housewarming party in the middle of August, which seemed like a good idea because everything was more or less in place: the dishes stacked in the kitchen cabinets; books unboxed and arranged on the shelves, nonfiction by subject then author, fiction by author then title; the new bedframe set up in the guest room upstairs; behind the sofa, the framed photo of Jack and his sisters at a lakehouse, and the photo of Jack and Julie in front of the lit up Eiffel Tower, and, in-between, the picture Emery took of Jack and Samira in front of some redbuds before Emery, her wife Beth, Shen, and Jack went to a Pirates game (Jack had wanted a fourth photo of Samira and her mother at her graduation, or Samira and her father, but Samira insisted three was the more aesthetically pleasing number, and the idea of his suggestion formed a lump in her throat that made her feel horrible for reasons she wasn’t willing to interrogate).

It seemed like a good idea because Dana had, apparently, been pestering Jack about it. She even caught Samira while she was picking him up after a shift and said, “You two kids ever gonna invite us to your new home, or is it an underground bunker situation? I got a flower vase with your names on it.” And she actually had brought a small, white flower vase filled with coneflowers. Samira had placed it on the coffee table, empty except for the stack of marble coasters that had, like most of the things in their house, belonged to Jack.

It seemed like a good idea, but the weather was humid and muggy, and Jack insisted on grilling on this old charcoal Weber he bought off eBay. So everyone gathered outside, pressed too closely around the small table they’d bought for the patio or milling about in the dry, green grass. Samira was pleased that Cassie, Mel, and Frank made it, was touched when Ariotti, Schmidt, Donna, Madison, and a few other people from Presby stopped by. She swallowed it down and tried to play good hostess: “Do you need a refill?” and “Bathroom’s down the hall to the right,” and “Can I get you anything?” and “Please, feel free to go inside where there’s A/C.”

When most people had graciously left, full of hot dogs or burgers, fruit salad and chips, cupcakes made from boxed mix, Emery and Beth, Robby, Dana, and Bill, one of Jack’s army friends, remained clustered around the patio table.

“It’s a real nice house,” Dana said, raising her beer. “Good bathrooms.”

“Your drainage looks like a dream,” Emery added.

There were so many things Jack knew to ask about when they were looking for a place together: he checked the drainage and peeked over the fence to see the state of their neighbors’ yards, he opened every cabinet and noted if they stuck. But Samira had done her own research and made sure to know exactly what each light switch did. She also noticed the dishwasher hadn't been run between their initial tour and inspection, a single solitary glass in the same spot each time, only to confirm the dishwasher was broken. In the final sale, the majority of the cost for a new one was knocked off.

“Can’t have the basement flooding,” Jack said.

“Of course not,” Emery agreed. “I bet that’s where Samira makes you store all of your weird shit.”

“She loves my weird shit.”

Emery looked at her, and Samira scrunched her nose, shaking her head. Emery barked out a laugh, and Dana grinned. Samira smiled, feeling light and good as she took a sip of lemonade, condensation dripping down the glass and wetting her fingers.

Jack reached out, hand settling hot on her knee. “She doesn’t think I have weird shit.”

“Most of his weird shit went to Goodwill,” she corrected.

“Police scanner in the upstairs study,” Beth pointed out, like it was the weirdest thing she knew anyone to own.

“Better than a white noise machine,” Bill said. He wore a baseball cap, and there was a long, white scar threaded up his left arm. He lived in Harrisburg but came around Pittsburgh to see his cousin every once in a while. The first time he met Samira he looked at her so intensely she bristled. Then, he looked at Jack and said, “Buddy, if you screw this up, I’m never speaking to you again.” She felt, very briefly, like a piece of meat, and then he held his hand out for her to shake and told her, very seriously, it was good to meet her. Bill included her in the dinner conversation as though it was effortless, and Samira found it was actually quite easy to like him.

“Better than the kitchen table,” Dana offered.

“You hear that, honey,” Jack said to Samira. “I’m not allowed to have hobbies.”

“Reading is your better hobby,” she said. He knew how she felt about his penchant for listening to the police scanner and volunteering with SWAT – not great. His reading, on the other hand, was admirable. He read more than anyone she knew, and when Samira contracted the flu, he sat next to her in bed, hand occasionally coming down to brush a sticky piece of hair off her forehead, and read her one of those murder mysteries he likes so much, voice deep and soothing. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so cared for.

He nodded. “Keeps me sharp.”

“Where’d you put that atrocious singing bass?” Robby asked.

Jack exhaled a faux put-upon sigh and splayed a hand across his chest. “Samira was too young for The Sopranos, insisted it was annoying, and dropped it in a Goodwill box like it was nothing.”

“You’ve never seen The Sopranos?” Bill asked.

“It’s gooood,” Dana said, elongating the vowel.

And then, to Jack, Emery said: “Oh, you’re more pussywhipped than I thought.”

Samira felt herself flush. It was embarrassing to know that Emery thought, even in passing, even in a jokey way, about her sex life. It made her stomach turn.

Jack laughed, tips of his ears pink, and Dana laughed, too, hand in front of her mouth like she had just taken another sip of beer. Bill’s chuckle was gruff, expanding to fill the space like it always did (Samira thought sometimes about how nice that would have been while deployed).

Beth smacked Emery gently with the back of her hand, and said, “I’d be concerned if he wasn’t.”

Robby laughed, too, and Samira was unable to conceive of his laughter as good-natured. If Emery and Dana laughing, people she had worked with and under, felt uncomfortable and unprofessional (as if Samira hadn’t already blurred the lines by fucking one of her former attendings. Sure, she was already at UPMC when it started, but who else was to blame for this turn of events but herself?), Robby laughing felt downright mortifying. Her face was so hot, and her hands felt numb, and her tongue was too big inside her mouth. She wanted to crawl underneath the table and never see or be seen by anyone ever again.

“Trust me,” Emery said to her wife. “I feel that way about you. More, actually, because I’m better than this guy.” A finger pointed at Jack.

And Samira knew it was friendly ribbing. She knew Emery liked her and thought she was good for Jack. It was fine.

It was totally fine.

But when Jack’s palm found her knee again, thumb rubbing back and forth across her patella, Robby’s laugh echoed in her ears, his eyes cutting briefly to the point of contact, and it took everything in Samira not to twist away from Jack’s hand.

In the living room, Pirates game on the television, Robby says, “Changing him already, huh?” and Samira remembers that humiliated feeling. It is a tangible thing brushing unpleasantly against her fingertips. Overstimulating and awful. It has a pungent smell, overriding the pizza.

“I like mushrooms,” Jack laughs. “I’m sure this is better for me, anyway.”

Samira says nothing.

She nibbles carefully on her first slice until it’s gone and dutifully starts on her second. Each bite turns over in her stomach, settling heavy and uncomfortable. She speaks only when spoken to, which is twice (if only her amma were here to be impressed). When she finishes eating, she runs her tongue over her teeth and breathes very steadily.

She is calm and collected.

“I’ve got research to do,” she announces. It sounds false to her own ears, but she ignores it.

“You sure?” Jack asks. He looks at her sadly, disappointment crinkling the crow’s feet around his eyes. Samira doesn’t feel bad, because it’s not like she has anything to contribute to the conversation, and if she asked questions, it would just be distracting.

“Yeah,” she says. “Go Pirates.”

His mouth curls up, and he says, “C’mere.”

Samira does, letting him press a chaste kiss to her mouth that increases the knots tightening in her gut.

She sets her plate in the sink, refills her water, and climbs the stairs at a slow, even pace.

It was easier before they lived together. Easier to scoot out of Jack’s house with an excuse about running errands whenever he said Robby was coming over. Easier to pretend she needed to clean or call her amma or work on CME requirements. It was his space, and he could entertain anyone he wanted. It wasn’t Samira’s business, and she didn’t feel slighted.

But this was her house, too. She put down half the down payment and paid half the mortgage every month, an even 50/50. Her mother had told her this was a bad idea, that Samira needed to get married first. She framed it as a practical concern (how would they deal with the house if they broke up?) as much as about propriety (“What am I supposed to tell people, Samira?” “You don’t have to tell them anything”). Jack had offered to take her to the courthouse whenever she wanted, and it wasn’t unromantic, because his hand held hers with certainty and gentleness, and his hazel eyes sparkled, and his mouth curved up like half the moon. She felt like the center of gravity.

And she hadn’t wanted to get married yet, but she had wanted to share space, to tangle their lives together without having to sleep in a bed that didn’t really belong to her.

And now Robby was in that space.

And Samira felt small and silly and so, so stupid.

Jack visits UPMC before or after his shifts so often that everyone knows him: the ward clerks wave hello and buzz him back without hesitation, and the nurses or residents tell him where Samira is without needing to ask.

Today, he finds Donna, Samira’s favorite charge nurse, running things from the center of their hub.

“Hey,” he says, checking his watch. He’s got time.

“Look what the cat dragged in.” She grins, red lipstick dried and faded on her chapped mouth. Donna’s white hair is clipped back, face wrinkled with joy. She thinks he’s cute, or she thinks it’s cute he’s always stopping by. Samira told him once that if he dated Donna, their age gap is such that he would be the Samira and Donna would be the Jack. She had insisted he shouldn’t immediately dismiss the possibility because being her was pretty good. Her eyes were mischievous and sparkly as she tilted up to kiss him.

“Mouse or rat?”

Donna’s laugh crackles. “Dr. Mohan should be out of 8 soon.” She points to her left, hip resting against the counter. “Between you and me, there’s a young lady in there who keeps asking her out.”

“Hmm, you think I could take her?”

She tilts her head, considering. “Presented with vertigo.”

“I got a fighting chance.” Jack throws a few jabs against the air before pretending to take one on the chin.

As Coates approaches the hub, she says, “Dementia getting you now?”

“Ouch.” Jack clutches at his chest.

“MI?” she asks.

“I’m going to tell your boss that you’re being mean to me.”

“Please do.” Coates scans the board, quick and efficient. “I’ll take the wrist sprain in 15.”

“Sounds good,” Donna says and turns to update the board.

Jack leans against the counter and checks his watch again. Still got time. He scans around Presby’s ED. He’d been here with SWAT and a few different ambulances, and he knew the layout well enough before Samira started her fellowship. Most EDs aren’t drastically different from each other: the hum and beep of machines, the grumble of patients waiting too long, the squeak of trainers against laminate. But the air feels different now, like Samira’s goodness and intellect have touched every surface and made it worth Jack’s time. It’s important, somehow, to know that Donna has worked here for 40 years, that Schmidt offered to drive Samira home when her car was in the shop, that when Ariotti decided not to return after her maternity leave, she encouraged Samira to apply and put in a good word. Ariotti sent a birthday card in the mail, and Samira felt so guilty about not sending one for her twins, she asked Jack to make a lasagna she could drop off.

He sees Samira rounding the corner before she spots him, so he gets to watch the way her eyes brighten, how she presses down her instinctive smile. Jack loves her so much he doesn’t even mind the “Gross” that Smith, one of her R2s, coughs into his fist as he passes. Smith is probably right. Jack is probably “cringe,” as his newest med student, Mishra, has explained.

“Hello,” Samira says. She leans against the counter, mimicking his posture.

“I heard I have some competition in 8.”

She frowns, wrinkling her nose and furrowing her eyebrows. “Ew.”

Her disgust is so palpable he can taste it on his tongue. “Donna, did you bury the lede? Is this young lady ugly?”

“Jack!” Samira smacks his bicep. “She’s 22.”

He considers this new piece of information and the adorably repulsed scrunch of Samira’s face, mouth puckered like she ate a lemon. Dropping his voice low, he bends forward: “Are you saying I’m a creepy old man?”

“Yes.” She narrows her eyes but bends forward, too. Like the game his nieces play where they copy everything he does, each gesture mirrored back at him. “I am.”

“What does that say about you, sweetheart?”

“I’m at work,” she hisses.

“That’s why I’m whispering.”

Samira sighs, fake exasperated (he thinks), and shoves him back with a gentle but unmistakable pressure. “I thought I already told you I like being me. I don’t want to be you.”

“‘Cause of the leg?”

She rolls her eyes. “Don’t you have to go to work?”

Jack looks at his watch. He does. He sways closer and cups her face between his palms. Her cheeks are smooth and soft, and he brushes his thumbs across the bones. “There’s casserole in the fridge and directions on how to heat it up.” Samira makes the same disgusted face at the word ‘casserole’ that she always does, as if she’s picturing some spam and marshmallow monstrosity. “I’m stopping by Whole Foods after work, so if you think of anything you need, text me.”

“Okay,” she says, pressing her hands to his forearms and leaning forward.

He kisses her, solid, chaste, and closed-mouthed. He feels Samira’s face warming beneath his hands and her fingers squeezing against his radius and ulna.

“Have a good night,” she says. “I love you.”

It thrills Jack just like it did the first time she ever said it, rockets up his spine and thrums through his blood. A physical, tangible sensation. More potent than any drug or steaming cup of caffeine. “I love you, too,” he says. He turns to Donna: “Let me know if the woman in 8 makes any headway.”

Jack watches Robby’s motorcycle until he turns the corner, helmet – thank fucking god – on his head. It hadn’t been when he showed up just before five with bloodshot, glassy eyes. He had a bad shift yesterday, with Dana calling in sick, a five car pileup from 279, and a pneumothorax that went south. Despite all of that, apparently, his night and day off were worse.

Jack was grateful to see Robby even if it made his lungs shallow to know he was struggling. He invited him in with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes and a too heavy hand on his shoulder.

They hadn’t talked much. Robby still bucked against discussing the shadows and cobwebs in his head and struggled to view himself as someone who deserved to share his burden. So Jack put on ESPN and cracked open some beers. He mentioned some cliché advice his own therapist had given him and told Robby about a case of osteomyelitis in a diabetic patient that their intern almost misdiagnosed as gout. He couldn’t tell if shop talk was hurting or helping, and then stopped talking altogether.

He warmed up the rest of the baked ziti and tossed together a salad for dinner.

When Samira came home from work, just after 8:20, her eyes were narrow and dark, and there was a pinch between her brows. She let Jack kiss her hello, grabbed some room temperature ziti and a bottle of wine, and went upstairs without saying more than five sentences.

He figured her day was as bad as Robby’s 24-hours had been.

With Robby gone, hopefully feeling like he matters to somebody (and fuck, he really does), Jack heads upstairs to comfort Samira.

Truthfully, he finds it easier to take care of her than Robby, as though the logic of her brain is much simpler to unlock. She’s smarter than him, could lay traps if she wanted, but her slow opening up has created a shared language that digs to the heart of the matter faster than a couple of beers and grunting over a fumble at the 10-yard line. As long as Samira doesn’t retreat, Jack feels capable of being what she needs.

He finds her in the study, legs curled up on his old leather armchair as she scrolls through her phone. Her ziti is half-eaten, the wine bottle is open, and her mouth is pressed into a frustrated little frown that creases her left dimple. Samira hasn’t changed out of her scrubs, but she is so beautiful Jack has to pinch himself.

“Hey kid, bad day at work?”

“Our Press Ganey scores went down.”

Jack raises an eyebrow. “Yours?”

“No.”

“That’s my girl.” He keeps his smile small, sensing how precarious her mood is. Samira flips her phone anxiously between her palms. Jack goes around the desk, leaning his crutches against the varnished wood and sitting in the swivel chair. “And?”

“A woman left AMA,” she says. Jack frowns. Samira hates that more than any other doctor, PA, or nurse he knows. “Madison slipped and hit her head on a tray – she’s fine,” Samira adds quickly. “The comments on my article are brutal, like, why-did-I-even-waste-their- time-typing-out-the-words kind of brutal.” She drops her phone, and it slips between the chair’s cushion and arm. Sighing, she rubs at her temple. “And then I come home and Robby is here.”

Jack winces. “Sorry about that. I shoulda texted.” He hates texting. Even a couple of sentences hurt his thumbs, and it makes him feel unbearably old.

Samira inhales and wipes her palms against her scrubs. “I don’t… I don’t want him here.”

Jack blinks. He works his jaw and lands on: “He went home. And I’m sorry his bad day coincided with yours, but it does give me some relief knowing that he’ll come here instead of trying to deal with it alone.” Jack hopes bringing himself into this will soften the hard look in Samira’s eyes.

It doesn’t work.

“You’re not his therapist,” she says.

Sighing, Jack nods. He is woefully aware how inadequate he is in that department. Turns out years of therapy don't automatically make you good at sitting in the other seat. Who knew? “I’ll make sure to text you next time.”

Samira worries at a hangnail. “Not just tonight, Jack. I don’t want him here ever.”

“What?” He knows Robby isn’t her favorite person, but this feels like a dramatic overreaction to a hard day. He bites: “Why?”

“He’s mean to me,” Samira says.

It strikes Jack as an utterly juvenile thing to say. She gets like this sometimes, angry and petulant, and mostly, with distance, he finds it rather endearing. Now he finds it exasperating. Hypocritical. The handful of times Robby has been over, she has done her best to ignore him. She acts like his presence bores her, and every time Robby tries to engage her in conversation, she shuts it down. Middle school bully behavior.

He knows, of course, how unfairly hard on her Robby was during her last year of residency. He had been struggling, and there was nobody he loved to take that out on more than Samira. It was ugly. It hurt her deeply. But Jack doesn’t see how it helps matters to treat Robby like a bug flying around her head.

He breathes in. He rolls his shoulders. “How is he mean to you?”

Samira scoffs. “Oh my god.”

“I’m trying to understand,” Jack says. “He’s my best friend.”

“Maybe you should try making better friends.”

Samira has long known that being friends with Robby is a character flaw. It had just never seemed so damning until now. It itched at her inion whenever Jack stared at her from across the ED. She pushed it away when he emailed case studies, because he was the only person not related to her who emailed her at all. She ignored it because she liked the way his callused hands brushed against the soft skin of her inner thighs and how his warm tongue felt heavy in her mouth. She craved the goosebump tingle that seemed to pulse at every nerve ending, at every millimeter of skin, whenever Jack’s attention focused solely on her at the end of a long day.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “You don’t even have friends, Samira,” he says.

Her instinct is to argue the point: every few months she gets dinner with Cassie, Frank, and Mel, but the last time they got together was early August, when it was still humid and sticky outside. Every month, the UPMC attendings go out to breakfast or dinner. She was on shift during the October breakfast, but she skipped last week’s dinner because Jack was off, and Samira likes coming home to him in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for a salad or flipping pancakes on the griddle or stirring a simmering pot of vegetable stew. She likes eating with him, sitting so close their knees touch. She likes being fresh out of the shower, hair still damp, and cuddling next to him while they watch television, some ancient sitcom he always chuckles at or a nature documentary. Their opposite schedules make their time together precious (Jack asked once if she wanted him to switch to days, and Samira was vehement that she didn’t). The thought that he might throw her desire to spend time with him in her face makes her want to cry.

It is also the meanest thing Jack has ever said to her.

Samira told him how lonely she had been, that before she attacked him with her mouth, exhausted, wine swirling around her stomach, the last person (excluding patients) to touch her was Dana seven months prior; it had been a warm, swaying hug at the end of her last day at PTMC. She told him how she loved her amma, but ever since her appa died, her amma hasn’t had the energy to deal with her. Samira’s own selfishness, she knows, is inherited, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less that she hasn’t factored into her mother’s plans since the moment she was out of the house. She told him that she had a best friend in elementary school, Shravya, but the summer before fifth grade a girl named Morgan moved in down the street. Morgan had long blonde hair and got pedicures with her mom every other week. Shravya was obsessed with her. Morgan signed Samira’s fifth grade yearbook H.A.B.S., which she astutely translated to “Have a Bad Summer” (Jack didn’t know about H.A.G.S., so she explained it to him: Have a Good Summer. And then he asked if the B stood for beautiful, and Samira gave him a small smile even though she knew, then and now, deep in her bones, that it hadn’t). Shravya stopped talking to her after that. Samira had other friends in school, but the kind made to have people to partner with for group projects and to avoid sitting alone at lunch.

She thinks, a hole in her chest, that those are the only kind of friends she has now.

“You’re right,” she admits. Jack blinks, surprised. Samira feels a sharp pain in the center of her breastbone when she inhales. “I’m sorry you have to deal with me.”

“Samira…” He sounds sad for her, sure, but also exasperated.

She is hard to love. She has been her entire life. She was fourteen, and her amma was on the phone with Neela Auntie and admitted as much.

She wonders if more suitable, lovable women just won’t deal with Jack’s work schedule. Maybe Samira is easy in this way. He doesn’t have to make time for her like he would for women with actual social lives. Women who wouldn’t stay home after work just for a few hours tucked into his side. Instead, they’d see the latest Colleen Hoover with their big group of friends or go to trivia night at a local bar and win $25 gift cards to split amongst themselves.

It annoys Samira, too, that if she had children, her current social life would be more than acceptable. But she doesn’t. So it isn’t.

She glances at the clock. “I have to go to sleep. I work tomorrow.”

He says her name again, but he doesn’t grab at her wrist as she bolts out of the room.

Jack moves to the chair Samira was in, still warm from her body. Her face had cycled through offense, anger, shame, and resignation. Her eyes had turned glassy with tears, but she blinked them away instead of letting them fall.

He knew, then, that he had fucked up. That he didn’t know what fight she was having with him, or if he did, he had changed it into something much worse.

He simply wanted to point out that people are complicated, that nobody is perfect. That Robby has gotten better since he was her attending but is still vulnerable. Jack answers calls in the middle of the night, sporadic, terrifying calls, and still finds Robby up on the roof looking weathered and finished with it all. He wanted to convey that history matters to him, and she may not understand what years of friendship can mean. He wanted to express all of that by pointing out how difficult it could be to make new friends.

Jack probably wanted to hurt her, too. He can admit that. But he hadn’t wanted her shoulders to slump as she walked away. He hadn’t wanted her to walk away.

Staring at the bookshelves crammed with medical journals, his fingers itch and his stomach knots. He grabs his crutches and goes to find Samira. He is relieved that she hasn’t collapsed onto the guest bed but is curled up on her side of theirs.

Jack can tell she isn’t asleep by the sound of her breathing. He sits down, giving himself a moment to adjust to the darkness.

When he reaches out and rests his palm between her shoulder blades, she whispers, “Don’t touch me, please.”

“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to go to bed angry?” he asks.

The pause stretches long enough that he considers Samira is deliberately giving him the silent treatment. He touches his wedding ring, hanging on a chain beneath his shirt, to ground himself.

“I’m not angry,” she says, quiet and hoarse. She had been crying.

“I’m sorry, Samira.”

“Okay,” she says. Jack can make out the sharp lines of her shoulder blades tensing beneath her t-shirt. “I really need to sleep now.”

He isn’t any more tired than he usually is, but there’s nothing he wants to do more than slip into bed behind her, throw a hand across her waist and mold his body against hers. Jack knows Samira would wriggle away if he did. She might actually get angry. He considers the possibility that her anger would be preferable to whatever she feels now.

He watches her lie there for a long, long time, until she finally falls asleep.

Jack and Robby would remain friends regardless of televised sporting events (and the occasional visit to PNC Park or Acrisure Arena). They had been through too much together for anything else to happen, committed and intertwined. They had been too lonely for too long for the friendship to rupture. But the sports thing sure did help.

Jack sipped his beer, following the puck as it crossed into Penguins’ territory.

Robby said, “I do like her, you know.”

Jack didn’t know, actually, what he was talking about. Maybe the telemetry nurse Dana said he’d started seeing. His eyes cut to Robby: shoulders tense near his ears, knuckles popping around his beer bottle. “Who?”

“Mohan – Samira,” Robby said. It sounded painful, like he had a sore throat and a destructive cold on the way.

Jack saw it for the offering it was. Robby wasn’t going to ignore the relationship and pretend it didn’t exist, shut himself off from a piece of Jack’s life just because it was awkward. Because Jack hadn’t even been the one to tell him.

He didn’t know what to say about it now, either. That he was so in love with Samira the world seemed brand new? It was melodramatic, and sometimes he woke up and everything was just as dark and gray and difficult as it had always been. But sometimes he woke up, and he could still smell Samira’s lavender shampoo, and Jack felt happy in a way he hadn’t in years.

He said, “I like her, too.”

Robby nodded. His jaw worked like he was struggling for something else to say. “She’s not the kind of person I pictured you with.”

Jack wasn’t offended. He was not good enough for Samira by more than a country mile. He was just grateful that she didn’t seem to mind.

And Robby knew Julie. Hadn’t known Jack in a time before her.

He loved Julie almost as much as Jack did, so he knew that she was gregarious, the life of every party. She talked with her whole body, hands gesticulating, head bobbing, swaying this way and that on her heels. Her laugh could frighten birds into flight and never failed to make Jack laugh, too. But Jack was the only one who saw her afterwards, at home, exhausted as she cuddled against his side. Afterwards, when she was so quiet a wisp of breeze could carry away the sound of her breathing. Julie was neat and tidy, bed made with hospital corners and stovetop wiped down every night. She had a PhD in public health and loved to debate, to learn, a rigor she applied to every aspect of her life. Sometimes, when Samira curled up next to him after her shift, and he brushed his hand over her hair and down her arm, Jack felt that, despite not believing in any sort of afterlife, maybe Julie had picked her out especially for him, that maybe it wasn’t dumb luck.

The Blue Jackets scored, and Robby groaned, and the conversation was cut short.

Robby didn’t circle back, so Jack didn’t make him.

Samira decided to break up with Jack at six months. Or, well, five months and 24 days. She didn’t think he was the type of person to celebrate a sixth month anniversary because it wasn’t a real thing, but she didn’t want to ruin it if he was, or be forced to wait an acceptable amount of time after. Her longest relationship was seven months, so it wouldn’t become some big deal in her life, something defining. Someone could say they wasted a year, but saying they wasted six months sounded silly. It could hurt without being devastating. That was good, too.

Still, six months felt like a good chunk of time to have something Samira had wanted so, so badly. She could keep the memory of it held securely against her heart and hope she would find something nearly as good.

All things considered, six months was perfect.

She chose a breakfast place they’d never been to before, arrived early, and sat with her back to the door because she’d noticed Jack never did. Samira ordered coffee for both of them, ripped open a sugar packet, and half of it spilled onto the table. The crystals stuck to her fingers as she gathered them into a napkin.

When Jack sat down, Samira said, “I think we should break up.” Best, she thought, not to waste time with pleasantries. What if the waitress came back and he ordered food? Would he really want to stick around to eat an omelet?

His eyes widened in surprise, hurt pinching at his mouth, and Samira felt perversely relieved that she wouldn’t be the only person upset about this. “Can I ask why?”

“I want to have kids.”

He blinked. “Oh.”

“Not now, obviously. I want to feel settled at Presby first, publish some research. But in three to five years. So, I really need to start finding someone.”

Finding someone had never been particularly easy for her. She would need all the time she could get.

“And you wouldn’t want to have a kid with me,” he said. Not a question. The surprise had shifted to a resigned understanding. Pain pooled in his eyes similar to the look patients got when she administered a shot of lidocaine. Not too bad. He would be numb to her soon.

Samira grabbed another packet of sugar and opened it over her mug. Half of the thin paper fell in, floating atop the liquid. Shit. “Kids,” Samira corrected. “Two, I think. I know they might not be best friends, but at least they’d have each other.”

He nodded. “That makes sense.”

Jack kept looking at her. His eyes had gone glassy, and when he swallowed his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

She waited for him to leave, to say something else. When he didn’t, Samira felt herself flushing and pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her palms, curling her fingers up to hold the cotton in place. The Google reviews about the restaurant’s air-conditioning were correct. “I want to have kids, and you don’t, so we should break up,” she summarized.

He blinked and his head jerked back a millimeter. His brow furrowed. “I don’t want kids?” he asked, a question this time. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

Samira thought it was obvious, what with Julie and all. “If you wanted kids, you would already have them.”

He nodded slowly, considering. His eyes softened, and she thought about how he’d probably never look at her so kindly again. She thought maybe they could still be friends, but dismissed the idea as soon as it entered her consciousness. It would be too hard for her. She felt like her stomach might cave in.

“Samira,” he began, voice scratchy and gentle. She felt it travel molten up her spine, which was very rude of both him and her body. “I don’t want to freak you out, because we’ve only been seeing each other for six months.” It flattered her to know that he was also rounding up. “But I would happily have children with you.”

“What?” She wiped her eyes with her sleeves.

“If you don’t think you’ll want to have kids with me someday, I understand,” he said, and she could hear the lump in his throat. It made her want to reach across the table and squeeze his fingers. “But if you’re breaking up with me because you think I don’t want to have kids with you, you have been extremely misinformed.”

“I’m sorry.” Samira rubbed at her eyes. “You want to have kids? With me?”

“I would feel lucky to raise a couple of little Samiras with you,” he said. A delighted, mischievous glint reappeared in his eyes. She could hear the sex joke already, and Samira liked him so much she felt it expanding in her lungs, pulsing in her fingers, buzzing at the base of her skull.

“In three to five years,” she said.

“In three to five years,” Jack confirmed, nodding once.

Samira had a hard time believing someone would be able to put up with her for that long. She wasn’t very good at compromise and so stubborn she could feel it clenching at all her muscles whenever she decided something. Painfully immovable. Annoying, her last boyfriend had said. Impossible, her mother said.

But Jack was looking at her fondly, mouth pressing together with the clear intent of not smiling too soon. The waitress came over and asked if they were ready to order. Jack made eye contact, head tilted in question, letting her decide.

“Not yet,” Samira said. She pulled out a couple of menus stacked between the wall and napkin dispenser and handed one across the table. “Could we have a few minutes?”

She didn’t allow herself to think about having a few more months or years.

Jack stands on the wrong side of the roof’s railing, but he isn’t any closer to wanting to jump than he normally is. He isn’t much further, either. The sunrise is a pale orange, like it can’t be bothered to color itself in. It’s windy and freezing, and the jacket Jack wears doesn’t do much to keep him warm. He wiggles his fingers. Maybe he’ll get frostbite.

Hearing the soft thud of the roof’s door, he looks over his shoulder as Robby approaches and leans against the rail. “Tough shift?”

“No.”

Around three in the morning, Jack considered calling Robby, waking him in the middle of the night, and asking if he’d come in early. Shen was off, and he thought about saying he needed to leave by five because he wanted to talk to Samira before she went to work. But then Jack thought maybe he would go home and find she wasn’t there, discover that she had packed a suitcase and was sleeping in a friend’s guest room. He thought about what Robby would say and decided he didn’t want to fucking hear it. So, he let Robby sleep.

Worry etches itself into the lines of Robby’s face. “Things getting bad again?”

Jack could easily say yes, things are bad, and that would be true. But not again, instead; they’re bad in a brand new way. “Samira doesn’t think you should come by the house anymore.”

“What?” Robby huffs out a laugh and pulls up the zip on his hoodie. “Like we’re in high school and I’m a bad influence?”

“I told her she was being ridiculous.” Jack’s eyes cut to Robby. Clearly, she’s not the only person he loves with an immature streak. “But I’m starting to think maybe she has a point.”

“And what would that be?”

“You have to be nicer to her,” Jack says.

Robby scoffs. “I am nice. I’m the fucking Dalai Lama.”

Jack wants to laugh. It’s funny. Robby is funny. Robby is his best friend.

But he can see it now, how statements Jack registered as friendly teasing hit Samira as prodding little digs. Jack had laughed at them. He wonders what Samira thought about that.

“You can’t treat her the way you treat Dana,” he offers. A point of reference is good. Samira always appreciates examples.

“Why? Because Dana can take a joke?”

“Samira can take a joke,” Jack says. “I’ll let her know when you finally tell one.”

Robby rolls his eyes, and Jack turns away from the street, leaning against the railing to mirror Robby’s posture.

“You and Dana are friends,” he says, “And you and Samira… you were hard on her.”

“Someone had to push her.” Robby cocks his head, mouth twisting smart. “And it clearly wasn’t going to be you.”

Jack grits his teeth. He isn’t deluded enough to believe he always treated Samira with objectivity. He won’t pretend he didn’t favor her. He could say he gave her the most complex, interesting cases at handoff because he knew she was detail-oriented enough to really take it all in; she wouldn’t miss anything and was smart enough to utilize all the symptoms and background to find the correct diagnosis. And that would be true. It would also be true to say he liked the way her eyes narrowed in on a chart, eager to solve the puzzle. He thought about how soft her cheek might feel cradled in his palm and tried very, very hard not to think about how her mouth, her cunt, might taste. He did not always succeed.

“Mike,” he says. “I know life sucks. It’ll take everything away just like that.” He snaps his fingers. He thinks about his leg, and he thinks about Julie. “But as long as nothing unfathomable happens, Samira is it for me, brother. She’s it.”

Robby drops his head, eyes slipping closed as he exhales. When he looks up, his pupils are dark and sad. “I know.”

“You know?”

“You’ve been gone since April of her R4 year.”

It’s a kind estimate.

Jack thinks he’s been gone for Samira since the week Robby assigned her to nights during her R2 year to help cover a vacation. A man came in with a nasty knife wound that he’d poured cayenne pepper into, and Samira had meticulously, gently irrigated it, asking all kinds of questions that put him at ease. And even though he reported that it had burned like a motherfucker, and she could not recommend he ever do it again, she had been delighted to report that the pepper actually appeared to stop the bleeding. She came in the next night with pages upon pages of research.

Robby’s mouth thins and exhaustion curls his shoulders. He looks afraid to be alone. Not as though Samira has taken Jack, but as though Jack has somehow been separated from him on a more molecular level. They had been united in their aloneness, in their inability to maintain functioning relationships. Since Julie died, exacerbated by the pandemic, it has been the two of them trying to survive, and now Jack has cleaved himself. Now Jack was trying to live.

“When you found out,” Jack says, “she was hurt I didn’t tell you.”

“I was hurt, too, brother.” Robby shakes his head. He had used his spare key to get into Jack’s house after the power at his own had gone out, and Samira had been there. “I scared her half to death.”

“She thought I was embarrassed of her, as though I was punching below my weight class.”

Robby snorts. “Other fucking way around.”

“Tell me about it.” His knuckles are red with cold, so he shoves his hands into his coat pockets.

Jack didn’t tell Robby because he felt that Samira was so lovely, so special, that if he spoke of her to someone she would vanish, like a fairytale where he’d broken the rules and had to be punished. Stupid fucking thing to think. He’d give up the fairytale for the real thing any day of the week.

“We’re not going to be able to watch the Steelers game at the house on Sunday,” he says. Decided.

Robby exhales, his breath fogging up the air. “I have a TV.”

“I know you fucking do.”

Robby reaches out and clasps a hand on Jack’s shoulder. He looks at him intently, searching. “You okay?”

He swallows and feels like he’s going to cry. Once, Samira flew to Alaska to spend a few days with her mom before she and her husband went on a cruise. Samira was gone for a week, and Jack missed her less than he does now, even though it’s been less than two days. Then, he knew he would pick her up from the airport, hug her close in the middle of baggage claim (borderline indecent), and inhale the scent of her lavender shampoo. He would help carry her luggage to the car and listen to all the good things and all the bad things on the drive back to her apartment.

If he stops by UPMC on his way home, he doesn’t know if she’ll let him touch her at all, or if seeing him will ruin her day just as it’s beginning.

“Yeah.” He scrapes a hand down his face. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

Samira comes home to a pot of potato corn chowder in the refrigerator and a pale yellow post-it on the counter with a scribbled message about a Tupperware container of chopped chives. She imagines the steady rhythm of Jack in the kitchen, shucking the corn, dicing the onion, the dull scrape of the knife against the cutting board as he pours celery into the pot. She rarely gets to watch him cook, but when she does, sitting on her stool at the island, it always fills Samira with a subtle, permeating sense of calm. He’s as self-possessed and sure in a kitchen as in a trauma room, even when a pot bubbles over or three timers start beeping at once. It is something she loves about him.

And as she goes to wash her day off before heating up dinner, it is something she resents.

Jack is acting, across their opposite schedules and in their shared space, like nothing has happened. Like everything is normal enough to leave dinner instructions and nothing else. He didn’t prepare one of her favorite meals or the first thing he ever cooked her (blackened salmon) or add that he’s sorry or he loves her to the post-it. He is moving like he didn’t do anything wrong.

Samira eats a bowl of chowder and a roll from the bread box, picking at the green and white fuzzy socks Jack’s sister Barb gifted her for Christmas. Creating a tiny pile of chenille fibers on the island, she stares at the backsplash above the stove, horizontal rectangles in staggered rows, gray and black and white. Samira hates them. She hates the neutrality of the kitchen, of every wall in the house painted retail white. Impersonal and impermanent. Her childhood home in New Jersey had been filled with vivid colors: the living room painted a rich spring green, the kitchen a buttery yellow, her bedroom Vallejo sky blue, paint picked out at Home Depot with her appa when she was nine.

There’s a pit in her stomach. She looks down at her phone screen and considers the time difference between Pittsburgh and Sydney.

Samira calls her mother.

“Samira?” her amma’s voice comes through smooth and detached. She’s probably drinking her second cup of morning chai.

“Amma, hi.”

“Is… something wrong?”

“I told Jack I don’t want Robby coming to the house anymore.”

There’s a long pause, and Samira rubs at her eye. Her amma says, “Who is Robby?”

Samira could laugh, but her throat is dry. As if Robby wasn’t embedded in her brain for four years. She thought about him more than she thought about anyone else during residency, wanting to impress him and prove her worth. When he came back from sabbatical, Samira thought she might be able to for longer than a couple of weeks.

Things had started well with a successful pulmonary artery catheterization and a sincere “Excellent work, Dr. Mohan” that tucked itself beneath Samira’s ribs and had pride expanding in her chest. By November, though, the bags beneath Robby’s eyes were large and bruised, and Samira couldn’t seem to do anything right. She stopped sleeping more than four hours at a time, carefully jotting down notes about journal articles and studying for boards in the dark winter mornings. Multiple times her dinner consisted of a protein shake and half a bag of Cheetos. In early February, when the snow had melted in the afternoon sun only to refreeze into a thick layer of ice, wind cutting against Samira’s cheekbones, she gave up.

Why try to earn Robby’s approval if he was never going to give it? It was humiliating. He’d crouch in front of her, the med student she’d taken to stitch up a toddler’s forearm standing over his shoulder as he asked why the board looked like that, why she ordered an x-ray for Mrs. Lee, why she hadn’t been in Trauma 2 when he needed her, as though she was meant to read his mind. And was she going to cry?

Gritting her teeth, Samira did not cry.

She stopped crying, and she bought a cat calendar for the sole purpose of counting down to her last day at PTMC.

“He was my boss during residency. And he’s Jack’s bes– He’s Jack’s friend.”

“Samira,” her amma sighs.

“He made the last few months of my residency horrible. He just decided he hated me.”

“I’m sure he didn’t decide to hate you.” Samira imagines her waving the idea away. “And you can’t tell people who they can have at their house.”

“It’s my house,” she snaps. Now that she has her mom on the phone, Samira isn’t sure why she broke their fifteen minute, biweekly phone call streak to call after a week looking for… what? Validation? Advice? Her amma doesn’t give the former and the latter is always more of an order than anything else.

Another long sigh. “Do you still love him?”

Samira doesn’t have to think about it. The feeling pulses in her fingertips and beats in her heart when she presses two fingers to her carotid and counts. She loves the way one particular strand of hair curls across Jack’s forehead when he returns from a run, the prickle of his stubble against her skin when he nuzzles her cheek, and the soft look in his eyes when she grabs his hand. She loves how he challenges her notes whenever she annotates an article he’s working on (because Gloria threatened to send him to every hospital fundraiser for the next two years if he didn’t publish something soon). She loves how capable she feels whenever she tells him about a tricky case from her day, and she loves how grounded in her body she is when he wraps his arms around her and she tucks her face into his neck.

“I do,” she says.

“Well,” her amma says brusquely. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

Pushing her chair back, it scrapes against the floor. Samira grabs her bowl, spoon rattling around as she carries it to the sink. Her stomach clenches, and she blinks her dry, sore eyes.

“Neela Auntie was telling me an engineer moved in down the street,” her mom hedges. “Rahul. Late twenties or early thirties, she thinks. She says he’s very handsome. Great job and a wonderful house; you know, the Chandler’s house. I can ask her to give him your number.”

Samira leans against the counter and rubs between her eyebrows. She doesn’t want to move back to Jersey, to her old neighborhood, knowing her childhood home is two streets over. And she certainly does not want to meet Rahul. If her amma wanted this for her, then she shouldn’t have sold their home to go traipsing across the globe. “Amma,” she warns. “Don’t do that.”

She huffs, probably as annoyed as Samira is. Silence stretches long and tense, and when Samira opens her mouth to say goodbye, her amma cuts her off: “Are you even going to ask me how I am?”

Embarrassment curls in Samira’s gut, and she scrapes her hand across her face. “Sorry, Amma. How have you been?”

“It’s been wonderful here. So beautiful. Hemansh and I are considering making it our permanent home.”

Samira doesn’t say anything to that. It’s what her amma said about the Netherlands and Arizona and even Alaska when she visited. She hums just so her amma knows she’s listening as she paces around the kitchen.

“Last night, I was very sleepy, but we have this huge television and this big leather sofa, and Hemansh wanted to watch a movie. Do you know what I did?”

“What?”

“I stayed up and watched a movie with him.” Her mother speaks like she’s throwing down a winning poker hand.

Samira knows it’s meant to be some kind of advice, but she doesn’t think it has anything to do with her, her relationship, or the fact that Robby still has the ability to make her feel horribly incompetent and small. She bites back a quip about how she and Jack have opposite sleep schedules. She doesn’t need to be scolded. Skating along the floor in her socks, Samira pushes against the counter like a little kid. “Okay.”

Her amma says, “Okay,” like Samira still failed at being respectful, so she makes an excuse about needing to get ready for bed and says goodbye.

The house is silent upon Jack’s return, and Samira’s absence is an almost physical thing, sucking the air out of each room. Empty and eerie. It smells like home, but it doesn’t smell like her.

He had been surprised to learn, on his umpteenth visit to her apartment, when she was settled enough to stop scrubbing everything clean before he came over to pick her up, that she leaves mess in her wake: dishes stacked in the sink instead of slotted into the dishwasher, socks balled up and stuck in the crease between couch cushions, pens rolling loose on a desk, and strands of hair clogging the shower drain. Jack typically found her inability to pick up after herself more frustrating than endearing. Today, however, it was a balm. The sink was filled with a glass, two mugs, a soup bowl, and a cereal bowl, a puddle of milk in the bottom of the latter. A scrunchie on the coffee table tangled in on itself. A black curl stuck to the shower tiles.

Their bed is unmade, sheets wrinkled. Jack leaves it that way when he crawls in to try and get some sleep. Her pillow smells faintly of lavender.

Samira was here, he thinks. Samira will be here again.

Mr. Stowe drives himself to UPMC and checks himself in, complaining about pressure in his chest and numbness in his bicep. Daily smoker, late 50s, BP 180 over 105, and a heart rate of 83 beats per minute.

He’s Coates’s patient, and she orders an ECG. When the results don’t indicate a STEMI, she orders Atorvastatin, Clopidogrel, GTN, and Ramipril. When he reports even heavier pressure on his chest and numbness tingling passed his elbow, Coates orders a second ECG. She’s decisive, by the book, and Samira’s coworkers have commended Samira’s ability to guide her in a way that inspires her, which was not the case when Samira started her fellowship and Ariotti pulled her aside and said she needed to learn to tailor her feedback to each resident, that her matter-of-fact critique could be misconstrued.

The word misconstrued had slid down Samira’s spine like ice. It had taken another month of wading through the program before she worked up the courage to ask Ariotti what she had meant, exactly. It did not particularly surprise Samira to learn that Robby hadn’t turned her into a great teacher. When she thought she was being kind, other people thought she was being condescending. It nicked open old wounds.

Ariotti, Schmidt, and Donna guided her through the process of giving feedback. She learned how to read med student and resident reactions in the same way she could read patient responses. She tried bullshit like compliment sandwiches and struggled to ask questions without committing herself to an expected correct answer. Samira worked at it until it became habit.

She found it did make her a better teacher. A better doctor, too.

Mr. Stowe’s second ECG comes back with ST elevation, and before they send him for a coronary angiography, Samira turns to him and asks, “Your wife is your emergency contact?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Stowe confirms. “But don’t bother her, please.”

Samira frowns and narrows her eyes. “Sir, you’re having a heart attack.”

“Oh, I know. But I’m like the husband who cried heart attack, and she’s real busy working on a quilt for our niece’s baby. Due in three months.” He holds his arm in his hand, and his words are gruff and reedy. He repeats, “I don’t want to bother her.”

Coates’s eyes go wide, and she raises a brow in Samira’s direction.

Samira sits on a stool as Donna pushes a wheelchair into the room. Mr. Stowe is clearly in pain, but he’s talking, alert, and they believe in preserving as much dignity as possible.

“She would probably like to know,” Samira says. “You might need surgery. This isn’t an overreaction on your part, and it is lucky that you came in today.”

Donna offers her hand to help him into the wheelchair. He shakes his head in denial, and Samira senses it’s for her, too. “She’s so busy.”

She catches his eye, sees the pain he’s swallowing down, the fear. Samira feels her own chest constrict. It’s easy to imagine a world where she is just like Mr. Stowe’s wife, not about a potential MI; the memory of her father’s chagrined face while leaving the ED hours before he died erases any risk of that, but caught up in her own world. The final draft of an article for AJEM substituted in for a quilt, the things that are important to her overriding everything else and turning people she cares about into an annoyance or distraction.

Selfish. Impossible.

“Please let us call her, Mr. Stowe. I would rather she regret coming here than regret being at home.”

“Can I blame you if she doesn’t finish her quilt?” He falls into the wheelchair with a grunt.

Samira nods, a modicum of relief easing the tension in her neck. “Definitely.”

“Okay,” he decides. “You can call her.”

Donna wheels him out, and Coates exhales, “Jesus.” She shakes her head. “That’s fucked.”

“Yeah,” Samira agrees.

She hasn’t seen Jack in three days.

If she’s being honest, she doesn’t miss him very often. It’s one of those broken things about her. When Samira’s at work, she’s busy teaching residents and running traumas, doing hip reductions and pulling toys out of children’s nostrils. When she gets home, she’s tired. The arches of her feet ache. She works on grant applications, research, and prepares conference presentations. Samira heats up dinner and goes to sleep. Jack stops by Presby before he goes to work or makes the bed Samira didn’t before she left for her shift. His presence is a comforting blanket even in his absence. He makes it so she doesn’t have time or occasion to miss him.

Maybe he’s as frustrated with her as she is with him.

Maybe he doesn’t want to see her at all.

Samira wants to see him so badly that the sudden force of it shocks her.

She misses Jack so much it tightens her chest and shallows her breathing. She feels the same way she did during her fellowship year, when he was still a mentor, a friend, if she was being generous, when she let herself want to kiss him and felt the intensity of it burn her up from the inside.

Terrifying how much she misses him.

Balling up the feeling, Samira pushes it down and gets back to work.

Steeling himself, Jack turns off his car, flips down the visor, and runs his fingers through his hair. He completed handoff with Robby by five after seven and delayed his homecoming by taking a shower. His hair is still damp, he smells like hospital soap, and he hasn’t shaved in days. There are circles beneath his eyes, and his residual limb kills. Work had been brutal, and only partly due to the woman who came in with a broken nose, covered in bruises, refusing to press charges.

He inhales, holds it, and exhales. He flips the visor back up and grabs his backpack from the passenger seat, the fob from the cupholder.

Inside, Samira pours coffee into his favorite mug: I’ve got a lot of patience patients. She presses her mouth into a small facsimile of a smile, eyes soft but guarded, and offers it to him. There’s a plate on the island with nibbled toast and half of a banana.

“Hey kid,” he says, taking the coffee. Seeing Samira makes him feel the way it always does, a jolt of excitement and a diffusion of warmth. He loves her. As simple as that. “How’re you?”

She shrugs one shoulder. “Do you want something to eat?”

“That would be great,” he says.

He goes to change while she sticks a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster oven.

Jack knows they need to talk about it. It’s not something they can leave hanging in the air, growing vines and threatening to choke the life out of this thing. It’s not that they haven’t argued before – at his old house, he kept a framed picture of Julie on his nightstand. When he placed it in its spot after they moved, he watched Samira’s eyes track it around the bedroom like it was staring at her from every direction. When Jack rolled over her in bed that first night, she reached out and knocked it facedown, and he had laughed. They’d fucked at his old place without the dramatics, but she shoved him hard and stormed away, hurt in ways he didn’t quite understand at the time. Now the picture lives on a shelf in the dining room China cabinet – but Samira’s reaction had been so different from the usual irritation in her eyes, from her vibrating avoidance. And the ongoing nature of it felt different, too.

He and Julie were together for 14 years, and in addition to more than he could possibly ever know or list, their relationship gifted Jack with more experience in domestic conflict than Samira has had throughout her entire life. It doesn’t make him an expert in resolution. Julie was a different person than Samira, and Jack was a different person than he is now. But Samira’s longest relationship lasted less than a year, and when her boyfriend broke up with her, she admitted to feeling sad mostly because she felt she should, that she considered there was something broken inside of her because she didn’t feel worse. The closest thing she has, really, is her mother, and Jack isn’t keen on comparing himself to her mom.

He pulls off his cargo pants and removes his prosthetic, massaging his residual limb and working his fingers gently into the scar tissue before putting the prosthetic right back on. As though he might need to chase Samira around the house.

When he reenters the kitchen, she has spread peanut butter on two pieces of wheat toast from his favorite bakery, because she knows he needs the protein. Slowly, carefully, she cuts up the remainder of her banana to add to a small fruit salad consisting of blueberries and part of an apple. Jack swallows down the lump in his throat and slides onto the stool in front of his plate.

“How was your shift?” she asks.

He tells her about the ornery patient with the kidney stones, and the woman with the broken nose, and the crike he talked Nazley through. Samira’s eyes go a little dark at that last one, and it thrills him. He says, “I missed you,” and her eyelashes flutter against her cheek like the words brushed against her wrist. She tells him about her own shifts, the little girl with appendicitis, a man with a STEMI, and Madison’s engagement (Samira looks uncomplicatedly happy for her, and mostly uninvested).

The conversation ebbs, and Jack takes a sip of coffee. With the blessedly bitter taste still on his tongue, he says, “Steelers game on Sunday.”

Samira’s shoulders hitch up. “Right.”

“I’m going to watch it at Robby’s.”

She stills for a second and her jaw clicks. Wrapping her hands around her mug, she nods. She stares at a spot on the table, but she doesn’t look like she’s on the verge of tears. That’s a start. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you.”

Jack watches her trace the handle of her coffee cup and waits for her to say something else. When she doesn’t, he rubs at his forehead. “Samira, we need to talk about it.”

“Why? It’s embarrassing.”

“It’s not embarrassing.”

Her eyes snap to him, guarded. “I told you how I felt, and you made it incredibly clear that it’s my own problem to deal with. That I’m emotionally stunted or something.”

“I didn’t think I said that,” he says softly, carefully.

Samira twists in her seat like she’s getting ready to bolt and rolls her eyes. “I appreciate you watching the game at Robby’s. Can’t we just leave it at that?”

“No,” he says. “Because Robby is my best friend.”

Her nostrils flare. “Right. So him making me feel unwelcome in my own home is irrelevant.”

Jack holds in his sigh. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize just to appease me.”

It makes him sad that she thinks he would apologize and not really mean it, and he dislikes how she might be right. He doesn’t believe he's doing it now, though. “I didn’t realize you felt that way, Samira. That he could still make you feel that way. And I needed time to think about it.”

She purses her lips, and he knows it’s because every jab felt sharp and clear to her. Unignorable.

“I’m sorry I didn’t see it. I think I get it.”

“Okay,” she says.

“But,” Jack begins. She tenses again, and he wishes she would just plant her feet, curl her hands into fists, and ready herself to put up a fight. While Samira is stubborn and pushes back, if she gets too much resistance she retreats. Their arguments have always been exercises in Jack learning how much he could nudge her toward compromise before she ran. “I do need you to try with him.”

Cleaving his life into two distinct parts, Samira and Robby, is unsustainable. He would have to become two different people, and the bloody separation of sinews and bone would hurt. He’s not sure he could hold himself together in two hands. Jack barely has the energy to function some days as is. He can’t be worried about getting a call from Robby at three in the morning and talking around it with Samira.

He needs her to try.

He thinks he needs her more, but he wants her to try.

Samira bristles.

She doesn’t want to try with Robby. It’s typical that he made her life hell for a year yet she is the one tasked with extending grace and kindness. Jack wouldn’t understand what that expectation is like. She is meant to make his life easier, Robby’s life easier, by forgiving someone who has never even had the humility to ask for it. Samira remembers the kids who made fun of her amma’s accent and the professors (plural) who assumed she’d go into pedes or become a PCP, remembers how she had to swallow it down and be the bigger person.

Anger floods her, white hot and sharp.

It’s unfair. It’s bullshit.

But Jack is looking at her with an intensity and seriousness that makes her sit up straight and take a deep breath. Samira feels, deep in her gut, that their relationship hinges on this moment, even if she’s not sure how, exactly. It’s not an ultimatum. She can refuse like she wants, her jaw clenched with the desire to tell Jack that Robby can go fuck himself, and actually, Jack can go fuck himself, too, and Jack will accept it. Maybe he’ll come back to this later, as though she just needs space and time, but he’s not going to leave her if she refuses. Two years ago she would have assumed so (more effort than she’s worth), but she doesn’t now.

“He agreed to try,” Jack adds.

Samira feels it like a statement of competition, like she needs to prove she’s better than Robby at being someone in Jack’s life. Stupid.

“A few months to let it all settle,” Jack says. He speaks very carefully, and it annoys her. “We’ll go to a coffee shop or a restaurant, I don’t know. And then we can see how it goes. He’ll try to be nicer.”

The crow’s feet around Jack’s eyes and the smile lines around his mouth are deep, and Samira wants to reach out and trace them with her fingers as much as she wants to shove at his shoulder and run away. She remembers what her mom said, and she still doesn’t quite understand how it was relevant, but the heart of it clicks inside her ribs.

Agreement seems like failure. It’s a feeling she’s allergic to, an itchy rash crawling up her arms, but she says, petulantly, “Fine.”

Jack brightens. The surprise in his eyes squeezes at Samira’s heart.

“I missed you,” she admits. Means it. She tries not to think of this as another kind of failure.

The look he gives her makes her feel tender to the touch.

“I missed you, too, honey.”

After residency, Samira very deliberately did not think about Robby. She did not think about what questions he would ask about a case or what critique he would have about her speed. Her success rate was middling, sometimes hearing his voice in her head while she was training, teaching, working. Sneering and belittling or coldly supportive. But like a muscle, she worked it until it was easy, subconscious. Until she really didn’t think about him hardly at all.

Now, she deliberately thinks about him.

When she’s dusting – Jack’s dad rock blasting through the house while he washes the windows – Samira imagines Robby running his finger through a layer she missed. She hears a snide little comment. Her stomach twists, she grinds her teeth, and she lets it go. She looks across the kitchen table, picturing Robby sitting there and slurping soup off his spoon. She feels her disgust, can’t tell if it’s with her mental image or herself, and brushes it off. When Jack gives her a foot massage after a long day, she considers asking how Robby is doing. She tries to want to know.

It is her own aberrated version of exposure therapy.

It doesn’t escape Samira that if Robby had liked her, she would find it easy to like him, too. But he hated her, tried to grind her down into nothing, so she decided to hate him right back. The grooves of her loathing embedded into her brain, stubborn, and now she has agreed to smooth them out. It feels like a herculean task that runs counter to her every instinct.

Whenever Jack goes to see Robby, he kisses her forehead and says, “I’m heading out,” providing no other details. When he comes home, he says, “I missed you,” and it curdles in her gut like guilt.

Samira is coming around to the idea.

After six months, Jack broached the topic of Samira joining Robby and him for dinner. She scrunched up her nose adorably and said she’d think about it. He waited a few days, a week, and when Samira didn’t bring it up again, Jack let it lie. She said she would try, and she has never been a liar.

Two months later, he woke up from a nap – he and Samira both had the next four days off, and whenever the universe colluded to give them more than 48 hours together, he preferred to fuck up his sleep schedule to spend as much of that time with her as possible – and walked into the kitchen will bleary eyes, intent on making a cup of coffee.

Samira said, “We can get lunch with Robby.”

Jack blinked. “Come again?”

“We can get lunch with Robby,” she repeated. Her voice was almost wobbly, and her body was visibly taut. “Or dinner. If I have to.”

He swelled with pride. His love for her was ever-blooming, like a flower that opens up in the sun each morning, fresh and renewed. Stronger when she murmured to herself while proofreading an email, or yawned without hovering a hand across her mouth, or looked at him in whatever way she pleased at the time. When she was there and when she was not.

“I’ll talk to him,” he had said, and two weeks later they’re sitting in a booth at a sports bar, Samira on the inside and Jack next to her.

Robby sits across from them, eyes drifting to the TVs as though he’s really invested in whatever minor league game they’re showing. Jack reminded him during their last two handoffs to be on his best behavior and sent a text before dinner driving the point home. Samira isn’t the one with something to prove (even if Jack, sometimes, wants to point out that she’s the one giving Robby the power to make her feel bad), and Jack is ready to smack Robby upside the head if he screws it up.

The first 20 minutes are spent discussing the Penguins failure to make it to the Stanley Cup finals. Samira picks at her wrap and pours worrying amounts of salt on her fries. Jack keeps looking at her, pausing as though she’ll have something to add, even though he knows she won’t. He hopes each glance conveys how grateful he is that she’s here, but her expression remains disinterested and neutral.

Eventually, Robby asks how she’s been, and Samira says good. She doesn’t add anything else, so Jack nudges her knee, and she says there was an interesting patient at UPMC recently.

“He was 38,” Samira starts. “Reported shortness of breath and chest pain.”

She sounds like she’s presenting a case to Robby, and Jack takes a long pull of beer to stamp down the urge to tell her to stop.

“Have to rule out an MI,” Robby says.

Jack grinds his teeth.

Samira says, “ECG normal. Labs showed anemia but high reticulocyte, and white blood cells below 4000.”

“MRI,” Robby says.

“Yeah,” Samira agrees.

“Did you get a urine sample?”

“Mike…” Jack warns, because Samira isn’t his resident anymore, and this isn’t some kind of quiz.

Samira’s eyes cut to him, half-amused and half-annoyed. “There used to be a few doctors at Presby who requested urine samples as part of their basic workup. Head lac? Urine sample. Sprained ankle? Urine sample. Norovirus? Urine sample. Nurses couldn’t always tell when the tests were necessary, so they mostly didn’t get done in a timely manner. Especially when patients insisted they couldn’t go. Now we only ask for one when it’s medically relevant.”

“And?” Robby arches an eyebrow, and Jack wants to reach across the table and throttle him.

“Cloudy but yellow. Excess iron, though.” Samira dips a fry into a puddle of ketchup. “You’re right,” she says, like she knows exactly what Robby is thinking. “Flow cytometry test confirmed PNH, and MRI confirmed renal hemosiderosis.”

“You’re sure his urine wasn’t dark?”

“Weird, right?” Samira shrugs and folds her fry into her mouth.

Jack looks at her: shoulders relaxed, eyebrows smooth, mouth flat. Fine. She’s totally fine.

Robby counters with an MVA that he and Jack worked together at shift change, and Samira shoots Jack a look like she can’t believe he didn’t tell her about this. She would have known Robby had been there even if he attempted to talk around it, and in their home, Jack has felt that Robby is an unspeakable topic. He rests his hand on her knee in apology.

Leaning forward, elbow on the table, interested, Samira asks questions the way she has since he first met her, smart and enthusiastic and devastatingly endearing. Jack finishes his beer and sees, for the first time since he learned it wasn’t working, that this could.

“Any plans for the weekend?” Robby asks.

“Samira works Saturday, but we’re doing one of those couple paint and sip things Sunday afternoon,” Jack says.

“You each paint half?”

When Jack attempts to throw the question to Samira, her jaw is clenched and she stares at her plate, thumb pressing into salt crystals. Huh. “Yeah. It’s a big tree at night. Moon in the middle. We need something over the bed.”

“Sounds nice,” Robby says, voice raspy. When Samira looks up, he adds, “Whatever your expectations are, you gotta lower ‘em. Jack doesn’t have a single artistic bone in his body.”

Samira blinks hard. “I’m not artistic at all.”

“No, Mohan. You’ve gotta be Van Gogh compared to him. Dana had us all do one of these things for her birthday years ago,” he explains. It was on Dana’s recommendation that Jack and Samira are doing this; she and Benji painted the same picture during their last date night. “It was this sunflower. Easy. But Jack’s looked like a giant blob. No distinction between any of the petals.”

There’s a laugh in Robby’s voice, and Jack hears his restraint. Good.

Samira looks at Jack, eyes guarded but not hurt. “I’ve never seen this painting.”

“Well, that’s because I threw it out immediately.”

She purses her lips and gets a cute little divot between her eyebrows. Turning to Robby, she asks, “Do you have a picture of it?”

Something in Jack’s chest unfurls.

He pays for dinner, and they wave to Robby in the parking lot when he speeds away on his motorcycle.

Samira exhales. They’re standing under a streetlight, hazy and yellow. Fireflies light up intermittently, and the air smells hot and smokey. Humid.

“How’d it go?” Jack asks. He was acutely aware of each breath Samira took during dinner, every minute shift of her face, but he has no track record of correctly gauging when Robby upsets her.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Good,” she confirms with a shrug.

Jack grabs her hand. “Next steps?”

She squints, twisting her mouth. He can practically see her working through it in her head like a math problem. “Give me another month. And then I want at least 24 hours notice before he comes over.”

“Done.” She smiles a small crescent, waxing a little bigger when he tugs on her hand and sways closer. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she says, leaning up to kiss the corner of his mouth.

“I love you.” His free hand splays across the small of her back and nudges her closer. “You’re my favorite person.”

Samira’s smile breaks into a full grin, all teeth and dimples. So beautiful. Jack slots his mouth over hers and kisses her properly. It feels like his body sighs in relief. She tastes like salt and lemon, and her lips are plush and soft. She goes pliant in his arms, and Jack’s breath catches in his throat. Desire pulses in his gut, his cock. His fingers count up the notches of her spine until he’s cupping the back of her neck. Gentle and firm.

“I love you, too.” Samira squeezes his hand. “Take me home?”

“Yeah, kid,” Jack whispers. “Let’s go home.”