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"So explain to me again," Shen prefaces as he spins on a stool like a toddler left unsupervised while sipping on an electric blue 7-Eleven Slurpee, "how you are going to a weeklong west coast conference while I get to go on…a day trip to Philly to watch Ellis present a case report on aortic dissection manifesting as facial hyperfamiliarity?"
"Hey!" Ellis pretends to scratch her nose so she can give him the middle finger.
Shen grins at her. "No offense."
Ellis rolls her eyes and snaps, "Yeah, well, I am offended."
If this conversation had happened four months ago, she would've tacked on jackass at the end of that sentence, but Robby's still around finishing up his charting and no one wants a repeat of the bumbling speech their department head gave about professionalism on Shen's first day as an attending. Robby probably thought he was being helpful – God knows being a new attending on the first of July was hard enough without doing it at the place where Shen was a senior resident on June 30th – but drawing attention to it just led to everyone calling him Dr. Shen with such exaggerated deference for the rest of the shift that the only reason he didn't crack was because scientists have not yet discovered a substance that doesn't roll off John Shen's back like it is cascading down a water slide. If Jack thinks back, the last time he was as unburdened as Shen is seemingly every day was probably when he was in Little League and his only worry was trying to figure out which flavor of Big League Chew to buy with his allowance before the game.
It is one of those very rare slow nights in the ER. For once, the public has listened to the warnings to stay indoors during this unexpected end of March snowstorm, but they all know that this reprieve will last only as long as it takes for some moron to do ninety on the unplowed highway and cause a five-car pile-up. Still, having a manageable trickle of patients for once means that Ellis will have all the time in the world to "accidentally" stab Shen with a pair of trauma shears when he reminds her that the only reason she picked up the face woman in the first place was because he was busy giving the med students their mid-rotation feedback so, at the very least, Parker should've thanked him in the acknowledgements section of her case report write-up.
Before they create a situation that results in more paperwork than he cares to deal with tonight, Jack says, "I'm only going because Gloria won't let me get the rest of my Continuing Medical Education credits online."
"You don't even want to go?" Shen asks, inexplicably baffled that a guy who literally can't surf and is too Irish not to turn into a tomato after twenty minutes in direct sunlight wouldn't choose to spend his time in sunny California. Desperately, John turns to Robby and asks again why they can't switch – he needs the CME too and, unlike Abbot, he's not allergic to drinking fruity drinks with tiny umbrellas on the beach. "Fun and sun is wasted on him!"
"That's what I said," Jack agrees.
"Which is exactly when Gloria decided that making him go to the annual trauma conference was the only way she could force Jack to take a vacation." With a smirk, Robby adds in a golf announcer whisper, "It's part of our new wellness initiative."
"Walsh is on a panel for that," Garcia announces from behind him as she snaps her gloves off and drops them into the garbage.
"Emery Walsh is giving a talk on wellness?" Jack asks incredulously. "Did she lose a bet?"
Robby looks like he wants to diplomatically remind them that wellness is important for everyone. Ever since he started going to therapy, Robby has been keen to drop cheesy one-liners that are about as introspective as a celebrity's weekly lifestyle brand's newsletter. Jack can only tolerate so many pivots to mindfulness or reminders from Gloria that, instead of shoring up their staffing, she purchased a massage chair for the lounge that the ER staff can use to unwind during the downtime that they never have because they're so short staffed.
Garcia snorts. "Why would Walsh talk about wellness? She's on a discussion panel about the application of robotics for injury determination in trauma surgery."
It's like Garcia also knows where this conversation is headed because she quickly turns to Ellis and tells her that the foreign body kid is not surgical so she should call GI to take care of it.
"So they can give him a suppository? He's not going to poop out six magnets, Garcia."
"Tell them to scope him, Ellis."
"What if he perfs before he gets to the endoscopy suite?"
"So call them stat," Garcia advises unhelpfully, "and if he perfs, then it'll be a surgical case."
"I really hope you get replaced by a Roomba!" Ellis calls out to Garcia's retreating back.
*
"I'm not a trauma surgeon, Gloria," Jack reminds her in a last-ditch attempt to get out of attending the conference.
Gloria fixes him with a glare and asks where this self-awareness was when he was turning the ER bay into his personal operating room before reminding him – much like she has once a week since Pitt Fest– that the malpractice lawyers are still trying to justify how they had time to bring down lap pads from the surgical suite to do a retroperitoneal packing procedure but they didn't have time to take the patient upstairs to the OR to follow standard of care.
"Consider this as doing community service in lieu of being faced with disciplinary action, Dr. Abbot," she says magnanimously before dismissing him with a wave.
Jack supposes he should be happy that Gloria at least realizes this is a punishment and not a perk, but that does not stop him from pointing out that the only reason the patient is alive to sue them is because of his out-of-the-box thinking. Jack doesn't know if that's a tick in the win or lose column for a paper pusher, but Gloria is already shoving him out of her office so she can make her zoom meeting on time with one of the few Philadelphia private equity firms left that Robby hasn't pissed off yet.
*
Jack has had insomnia for his entire adult life.
In med school, he'd go for a run before bed every night because the lull of repetition and familiarity of hearing his feet hit the same well-worn path winding around the Hopkins campus would put his brain at ease.
In Afghanistan, there was too much going on to ever court sleep. The helicopters dropping off the wounded had no set schedule so neither did he, which meant that Jack took restless cat naps between chest tubes and closed his eyes in the short stretches of time between field amputations.
After Afghanistan, when his pace no longer sounded the same and any attempts at running were accompanied by a spark of phantom pain, Jack had to figure out other tricks to put his brain to bed. He started with scotch, but one finger became two fingers became half a bottle every night until the first time he got paged at home to cover another attending's sick call, he had to lie about being out of town because he was too drunk to do patient care.
So Jack stopped keeping Johnnie Walker by his bedside. He started coming home from work so exhausted that his body simply couldn't keep up with the grind, his form of self-care manifesting in stacking his shifts for the week so that he'd at least have some form of consistency. But in the time between work obligations, Jack found himself firmly planted in the purgatory of being both hyper alert and immensely fatigued. He tried melatonin, and then Benadryl, and then Ambien until finally his sister suggested buying a white noise machine because she swore that it helped her youngest when he had colic.
"Except I'm not a baby, Steffy," he'd replied with an eye roll that Jack knew she could hear over the phone while he watched his laundry spin in the washer. Perhaps if he followed the circles his gym socks made closely enough, it would hypnotize him into falling asleep.
"You sure sound like one right now, Jack," she shot back in a tone that made it clear that she was giving him the bird even though he couldn't see it. "I'm sure there's an app. What could it hurt?"
Intellectually, Jack knew that the only thing that had helped with his nephew's colic was giving him time to grow out of it, but he downloaded a white noise app anyway, mostly fueled by a desire to say I told you so when Steffy called him again next week and he told her that it didn't work. But surprisingly, making his bedroom sound like a gentle wind tunnel tamped down on the recurring soundtrack of Humvees driving over landmines and being just within the blast radius of an IED that had just gone off. He still only got like four hours of sleep, but it was enough for Steffy to gloat about for the next month.
It is not surprising then that Jack sleeps like a baby on the five-hour flight from Pittsburgh to San Diego. After all, isn't being on a plane basically like being inside a giant white noise machine? He's about to text his sister just that when the seatbelt sign goes off once they land. As everyone stands up to grab their carry-ons from the overhead compartments, Jack spots Emery Walsh in the aisle five rows behind him. He seriously considers ducking back down into his window seat and waiting for everyone to pass – Jack just got his first restful sleep in five years and he's not about to waste this feeling on her – when Walsh gives a singular head nod in his direction. He feels a strange sort of panic that she's not feigning face blindness this far away from home and lifts his palm in a half-wave that makes it seem like he's directing traffic. As the worst-case scenario starts to spool out of his brain – that his relaxing vacation will turn into some sort of inescapable social obligation – the throng of people at the front of the plane start to move towards the exit.
Unfortunately for Jack, it takes the person in the aisle seat next to him an extraordinarily long amount of time to gather all her things so that by the time she is shimmying into the line of passengers already shuffling forward, Walsh is close enough that once he grabs his duffel from the overhead compartment, she's only three rows behind him.
It's not like he expects her to suggest carpooling to the Grand Hyatt that they're both staying in, but rather than take the chance, Jack makes a beeline for the restroom as soon as he gets off the plane. He locks himself in a stall, renews his driver's license online, and completes four overdue resident evaluations on New Innovations before finally forcing himself to stop hiding out like a little bitch. By the time he walks past baggage claim and towards the exit, Emery Walsh is nowhere to be found.
*
Of course, Gloria registers him for a conference that happens to have a military symposium on the second day. As with most of Gloria's attempts at being helpful, it backfires spectacularly. He makes it through the military-civilian trauma integration lectures fine enough, but the thought of making small talk with a bunch of vets who are also coping as poorly – or worse, not as poorly as him – while pretending that they're doing just fine is enough to make Jack lose his appetite. His head is pounding when he breaks away from the rest of the physicians exiting the conference room to head towards the lunch hall.
He is trying to remember how to breathe and is so focused on the sensation of his foot hitting the ground as he speed-walks towards the elevator that he barrels right into someone. Jack is already mid-apology before he opens his eyes to find Walsh glaring at him, the remnants of an iced matcha latte now all over her shirt.
"Shit, sorry!" Jack blurts out as he takes one massive step back four seconds too late.
"That might be the first time you've ever apologized to me," Walsh says with a frown as she tries to shake out the ice cubes that have found their way inside her blouse.
"Only because it's the first time I've ever had anything to apologize for in your presence," Jack replies with a smirk.
Before she can disagree with him, he's swinging his backpack off his shoulder to reach into one of the front pockets for napkins from his trip to In-N-Out Burger last night. He pulls out a fat stack while Walsh watches like she's in the audience of a show at SeaWorld.
"You look like a med student carrying around that thing," she says as he hands her the napkins. She half-heartedly dabs at her chest, but clearly Walsh knows how to clock a lost cause when she sees one. He's in the middle of offering to pay for her dry cleaning when she suddenly asks, "What else do you have in that go-bag?"
"You want like…an itemized list?"
Walsh glances at her watch, mutters a curse under her breath, and then looks up at Jack to ask very seriously, "Do you have an extra shirt in there?"
"I told you I'd pay for—"
"The hands-on laparoscopic common bile duct exploration seminar starts in four minutes. Do you have a shirt in your Boy Scout pack or not?"
He grumbles that he was never a Boy Scout, but Walsh chuckles at his Pittsburgh loyalty when Jack pulls a Steelers hoodie out of his backpack. She shoves her Broadway Musical Alphabet tote bag into his chest to guard and then leaves to get changed in the women's bathroom. His looming migraine has clawed back into the recesses of his mind, but Jack still wants nothing more than to go back up to his room, order a burger from Top of the Hyatt, and zone out with one of those HGTV home renovation shows playing in the background.
Unfortunately for him, his phone dings with a text a minute later:
Emery Walsh, MD (Trauma Surgery): bathroom line is long
Emery Walsh, MD (Trauma Surgery): workshop is in A304 so go sign us in before they run out of spots
Emery Walsh, MD (Trauma Surgery): and grab seats at one of the middle stations – NOT THE FRONT
Emery Walsh, MD (Trauma Surgery): wouldn't want you to play to the nerd stereotype
Before Jack can text that he has other plans and that he was a jock in high school, Walsh texts him a picture of the anthropomorphic smiling backpack from Dora the Explorer.
*
Jack's initial plan had been to sneak out the moment Walsh got to the workshop. However, apparently, Walsh is not wrong about what a hot ticket this thing is because he arrives just in time to sign them up for the last two spots before the organizers start turning people away and asking them to come back for tomorrow's morning session if they're still interested. His Catholic guilt gets the best of him so Jack can't possibly leave after that.
But laparoscopic exploration of the common bile duct is not in Jack's wheelhouse as an emergency medicine physician so this feels like a gigantic waste of time. When he tells Walsh this, she chuckles and replies, "Well, if you had your way, you'd open the patient up in the ER waiting room with an X-ACTO knife and a spool of fishing line."
Jack gasps in faux offense.
"Hardly!"
"And then justify it by quoting an obscure Bulgarian case report from a journal that has a subscription base of twenty people."
"That, Dr. Walsh, is what they call recency bias."
"Am I not wearing your hideous yellow hoodie?" Walsh makes a face like that was his idea and not hers. "Stop with the formalities, Jack, and call me Emery, for fuck's sake!"
As much as Walsh – Emery – gives him shit for practicing jungle medicine in the first world, she also grows bored rather quickly of the demonstration and workshop objectives so after ten minutes of exploring the virtual common bile duct at their station, they go off book and turn it into a laparoscopic game of Operation.
"How are you so bad at this?" he asks as he excises the pancreatic duct from the organ on the screen in front of him.
Emery rolls her eyes. "I didn't become a surgeon because I'm good at video games. I became a surgeon because I'm good at slicing and dicing."
"Now who's the rogue cowboy?"
"Yee-haw," she deadpans as she removes a splenic vein and their fake patient codes.
*
As far as conference afternoons go, it's fine – fun, even – but before Emery can ask if he has dinner plans, Jack blurts out that there's a military reception at the conference tonight.
"Invite-only," he says with an apologetic shrug.
Technically, it's not a lie. When Gloria checked off that he was a veteran, they did include the reception dinner as part of his registration. And the dinner is invite-only. The part that Jack leaves out is that there's no way in hell he's going to that thing, but just because she waylaid his afternoon room service plans for a few hours doesn't mean he's going to give up his one-man dinner plans.
"Did I ask?" she laughs.
It dawns on him that, no, she did not. In fact, for all he knows, when she accepted the other workshop attendees' offer to meet up in the lobby in an hour so the group could go to Eddie V's Prime Seafood – "Gotta use up that CME money before June, right?" one of the Stanford surgeons chuckled – Emery was not accepting on their behalf because she recognized that the last thing an ER doctor with PTSD wanted to do was spend the night talking about GSWs with a bunch of trauma surgeons.
"I didn't want to be rude," he says cavalierly while silently praying for the universe to open a hole and drop him into it.
"Since when? Hey, you're coming to the panel tomorrow, right?" Without waiting for an answer, she powers on with, "You can tell me how brilliant I was and then I'll give you back your hoodie."
Jack frowns as he waves his keycard in front of the elevator sensor so he can hit the button for the eighteenth floor. "So in order to get my stuff back, I have to lie to you?"
Emery shoves him out of the way and pushes fifteen on the panel.
"Just for that comment, I hope your chicken is extremely dry tonight."
*
"Well?" Emery asks Jack like a dozen people haven't already stopped to talk to her during the break between panels after she got off the stage. He's not surprised that she's fishing for compliments because it's in a surgeon's DNA to seek external validation for their work, but who would he be if he offered it so freely?
"Kind of hilarious that you went on a panel about innovations in robotic surgery only to talk about how it was total bullshit."
"I did not say that! I merely cautioned against losing our skills by relying too much on fallible technology."
"Because humans are infallible, of course."
Emery grins. "I certainly am."
Instead of justifying that with a response, Jack asks, "Isn't your argument basically the plot of Terminator?"
Emery ignores his question and asks what his plans are for the rest of the day. She must see the panicked look on his face because she rolls her eyes and says, "Relax! I'm not stalking you."
"I didn't say that you were!"
"Tell that to your face." As he schools his face into a neutral expression, Emery asks if he wants to get lunch.
"Isn't the point to meet new people?" he blurts out in response and then immediately feels like a jackass once the words leave his mouth.
If he's worried that he has hurt her feelings, he doesn't have to be. Walsh smirks at him and replies, "It's not a singles mixer, dude."
"I meant networking," he clarifies even though Jack has never networked in his entire life.
Emery exaggerates her movements as she looks around his empty table before leaning in so she can deadpan, "Looks like you're a real social butterfly, Abbot."
Jack presses the heels of his hands against his forehead and groans. With his eyes still closed, he grumbles, "Where do you want to go for lunch?"
*
They're strolling along the Mission Beach boardwalk so that Emery can shoot down every restaurant suggestion he makes as they pass it – too pretentious; not pretentious enough; who eats boardwalk sushi? – when Jack finally notices that she has stopped walking to tilt her head and peer at him like she just discovered a new species.
"Don't you own a color?"
She gives him a once-over that adds color to his cheeks.
"Black goes with everything," he says defensively.
"Is that really an argument you can use if everything you wear is black?"
"I really don't think the beach house taqueria has a dress code, Em."
The Em slips out of its own accord, but before he can make it weird by adding on the -ery ten seconds too late, Walsh is nudging him towards a store with a Godzilla-sized red Adirondack chair outside of it that says Mission Beach in loopy white cursive over the top. Above that is a big sign that reads Trendy & Tipsy and makes Jack want to take a long walk off a short pier so he protests that they're supposed to be having lunch, not shopping.
"Consider it a working lunch then," Emery replies dismissively before pushing him towards the section with all the gaudy floral-printed short-sleeved resort shirts. As she starts thumbing through the racks, she calls out, "Do you have strong opinions about tropical birds?"
*
After Jack vetoes the birds, Emery decides that her idea of "a splash of color" is to choose shirts for Jack that have all the colors of the rainbow clashing against each other like multiple Jackson Pollock paintings battling for dominance on the fabric. By then, he has already decided to buy the least offensive shirt on the rack, never wear it, and burn it the moment he gets home, but Emery insists that he needs to try them on with the same no-nonsense look she usually reserves for when she thinks the ER's management is going to kill the patient before they can get up to the OR. But whereas Jack can usually justify his unorthodox methods with the literature, it's a lot harder to get out of this when she's crossing her arms and full-on glaring at him like he just carpet bombed Squirrel Hill and left her homeless.
"Come on, dude. I'm starving."
"So let's go eat," he suggests before doing an about face to head towards the door.
But Jack can hear the clang of multiple hangers as she holds them out to him. "As soon as you try on these five—"
"Five? I'm not shopping for prom."
"You think I only tried on five dresses for prom?"
He turns around and raises an eyebrow. Her brown eyes spark with the excitement of a challenge as she shakes the hangers at him.
"One."
"What kind of movie montage is that? Four."
"Top three. Nothing avian-themed," he says before grabbing one of the hangers and putting it back on the rack, "or featuring people riding bikes."
Emery rolls her eyes and puts another shirt back before handing him the rest. He grumbles that he cannot believe he's doing this, but it's almost worth it with how immensely pleased Emery looks when he walks out of the dressing room in a turquoise button up with cartoon hula girls all over it.
"Told you we'd turn around this singles mixer for you," Emery says with a clap. He already knows that he's never going to live that comment down so there's no point in fighting it anymore. "You look way less depressed, GI Jack."
"I feel more depressed," he deadpans before putting his hand out to cover the lens when she lifts her iPhone to take a picture. "Also don't call me that. And no photographic evidence."
The next shirt has got some sort of vine motif that isn't any better, but it beats the last thing Emery picked out: hibiscus flowers on a purple background. It's such an eyesore that Jack flat out refuses to leave the room with it on. Instead, he grabs a shirt hanging on the garment rack of clothes abandoned in the dressing room and waiting to be restocked.
"This one," he grumbles when he walks out wearing a navy-blue shirt with a tiny gray hexagonal pattern on it. He still plans on burning it, but maybe he'll wear it during one of the poster presentation days of the conference when he can easily evade anyone that he might know if he spots them.
Emery makes a face. "That's awfully close to black, Jack."
"We're not negotiating," he grouses, but Emery is already tapping away on her phone. A second later, his back pocket dings. He swipes the screen to open the text message from her with a picture of his retreating back in the first shirt. Turning the screen towards her, he snaps, "We said no pictures."
"I never agreed to that," Emery replies with a smirk. She narrows her eyes and pushes her face closer to the screen. "Oh my God, is that how you have me listed on your phone?"
Jack looks at the top of the screen. "What's wrong with it?"
"We're sort of friends now."
Jack arches an eyebrow at her and draws out the word okay, not because he necessarily disagrees but because he doesn't see what that has to do with anything. For whatever reason, Jack's confusion only makes Emery even more mad. He continues to look at her blankly until she breaks the silence by asking how he has Robby listed on his phone.
"As Robby," Jack says. Obviously.
"Exactly."
"Exactly what?"
"It's not a hospital directory, man!" Emery snaps. "You have my credentials in there like it's a CV, you weirdo! All that you're missing is my NPI number!"
"Well, how do you have me saved on your phone?" Walsh opens her contact card for him and flips the screen around so he can see Jack Abbot, ER douche. Frowning, he asks, "How is that better? If anything, it might be worse!"
"At least it doesn't look like I hacked LinkedIn for your personal information."
"Okay, fine! Sorry!" He massages the back of his neck. Wasn't this week supposed to be relaxing? "I'll take out your specialty."
Emery rolls her eyes and says, "And you're buying the flower shirt."
"No freakin'—"
"I just wasted half the afternoon hanging out with someone who might not even regard me as an acquaintance—"
"I didn't say that."
Emery stares him down so Jack sighs and trudges back to the dressing room to put on the stupid shirt. He sits down on the little bench in the changing room to make her wait it out just a little bit – it would do this newfound friendship no good if Emery was under the impression that she'd always get her way – and hits the edit button at the corner of the phone screen before quickly typing something in.
"You look great," she says when he goes back outside to where she's waiting for him.
"I look colorblind."
As he twists to let the salesperson scan the tag and ring him up, Jack takes out his phone and tells her to smile. Naturally, Emery sticks her middle finger up at him just as the flash goes off. After attaching the picture to her contact card, he saves the updated information and then tosses his phone to her.
"Happy?"
She looks down at the screen and grins when she sees that Jack has changed her name to JOHN CONNOR in his contacts.
*
It takes Jack two shots and a rum-and-coke before he stops noticing the smirks of the passing waiters and patrons at the tiki-themed brewpub that Emery chooses for lunch. He looks like an idiot and, after he comes back from the bathroom to find that Emery has ordered them both Bay Breezes, feels like an idiot, but she laughs and insists again that the patterned monstrosity is doing him wonders.
"You no longer look like a Victorian sick child." Jack didn't even look like a child when he was a child. He rolls his eyes and drags a chip through the bowl of salsa between them. He's got it halfway to his mouth when Emery says, "You were such an asshole to me the first time we met."
Jack doesn't remember anything about the first time they met, but judging from her grin, she has clearly gotten over it. He pops the chip into his mouth and asks, "Well, were you being a jerk?"
Emery rolls her eyes.
"It was the first time I was covering a holiday weekend as a new attending at a new hospital while the rest of my colleagues were away for Labor Day." After a beat, she adds, "Of course, I was being a bitch, but you didn't need to be such a prick about the thoracotomy."
Jack chuckles.
"And you've been stewing about it for…how many years again?"
"Five and, also, fuck off," she laughs. "I'm over it, but as an elder statesman of the ER—"
His eyes go wide. "Elder statesman?"
"You should really set an example of collaboration."
It is amazing that she can even finish that sentence with a straight face. Jack tries to think back to meeting Walsh five years ago, but there's only one thing he remembers from the end of that summer and it has nothing to do with being curt in the ER.
"I signed my divorce papers that morning before work."
Emery's eyebrows shoot up. He thinks she's about to tell him that she's sorry, but she looks down at his left hand and says, "You're supposed to take off the ring afterwards."
Jack should be offended that her first assumption is that he's a sad sack divorcee and not that he has found love again, but he'd probably think less of her if she'd jumped to any other conclusion. He spins the ring on his finger with the thumb and middle finger of his other hand before telling Emery, "It's to remind me that failing at something once in a while won't kill me."
Emery tries unsuccessfully to stifle her laughter as she asks in disbelief, "You turned your divorce into a motivational talisman?"
Jack grins. "It also keeps Myrna from hitting on me."
*
Against his better judgment, Jack finally comes down to the buffet for the first time during this entire conference the next morning to have breakfast with the other attendees. Before he can convince himself that it's a bad idea, Walsh waves him over to join her at a table with her former fellow from Penn – a douchebag named Quinn who can't stop name-dropping all the rare surgeries he has taken part in since joining the staff at Cedars-Sinai – and the head of trauma at Cornell who might need an ophthalmology consult soon if she keeps rolling her eyes at Quinn's humble brags.
Quinn has just started talking about a Whipple procedure he did last month when Jack announces that he's going to go check out the presentation on the paper about the utility of E-FAST exams for penetrating thoracic trauma. Emery practically topples her chair over backwards in her rush to grab the out and declare that she's going to join him. They are barely out of earshot of the table when she mumbles to Jack that Quinn is as much of a douchebag as she remembered.
But instead of taking the lobby elevator to the second floor where all the poster sessions are taking place, Emery hooks her arm into the crook of his elbow and drags him towards a door leading them to a different elevator.
"What are you—"
"I read the abstract already. The results were not statistically significant."
"There are other papers that I wanted to—"
"God, don't be so boring, Abbot! We have to celebrate."
"Celebrate what?"
"You've finally started to embrace the silver fox aesthetic."
Did he wear a grey shirt so that she'd stop giving him shit? Yes. Is he surprised that she's still giving him shit? Not at all.
"Did you just tell me that I look old?"
Emery looks him up and down appreciatively.
"Mature."
*
"How do you have two LMAs, a bougie, Telfa, and a 16-gauge needle in that backpack but no sunscreen?"
"I didn't know you were dragging me to the outdoor pool!" Jack says from his lounge chair.
She had prefaced it by telling him that the only reason they weren't working on their tans at the beach was because he got very grumpy about the sand when she mentioned it the other day. If this was Emery's way of heading off an argument at the pass, it worked. Jack acknowledged her sacrifice and agreed not to remind her that the hospital had sent them to this conference to get something useful out of it and not to work on their tans.
"Did you think that I was dragging you to a war zone instead?"
Jack snickers. Everyone else tiptoes around his time as a marine with combat experience like they're worried that talking about it will suddenly remind him of something that he has not been able to forget since he returned home, but Walsh brings it up as casually as she does stories of lining up for Standing Room Only tickets with her friends to see the original run of Wicked when she was an undergrad at NYU and then getting drunk at someone's rooftop afterparty and marveling at the New York City skyline.
"All I wanted to do was learn about pelvic angioembolization today," Jack says with a frown. He watches her dig into her tote bag, pull out a bottle of Sun Bum, and toss it at him.
"Put that on before we have to admit you to the burn unit."
*
"Are you seriously not getting into the water?" Emery complains from the pool.
Jack shakes his right leg in her direction and pops the 'p' when he answers, "Nope," with a wide smile. The problem with spending half the day lounging by the pool is that he has lost track of which number Campari Spritz this is, or how many mojitos they had before they made the switch, or how many margaritas they had before that.
"They can bring you an inflatable raft!"
When Emery points out that there's no one else here, Jack replies, "That's because we're the only delinquents who decided to skip the entire day of presentations—"
"Nuh uh, we're the only ones who didn't skip it at the beach."
Jack sits up in the chaise lounge and flips his sunglasses up to the crown of his head so she will get the benefit of seeing him roll her eyes at her. But Jack has spent the last three hours listening to science and medicine TED Talks with his eyes closed and getting steadily day drunk so when he turns his attention to her, all Jack can do is gape at Emery as she floats on her back in the water in a fire engine red bathing suit. It's not like it's scandalous, really – they're still at a fucking medical conference, for Christ's sake – but unless it's on a network television show, scrubs have a way of turning everyone into the same shapeless entity. They all might as well be wearing paper sacks to work with how much any of them notice that there's a body underneath those glorified pajamas.
But now there is no denying that Emery Walsh – his work colleague and sort-of friend, the thorn in his side every time he tries to admit a patient to the surgical service and perpetual bubble-popper whenever he can put a technique he learned from a case study into action – is all body. His logical left brain is practically screaming at him to look away, to stop staring at her like a lecherous old perv and go back to listening to a Doctors Without Borders podcast instead before she can feel his gaze on her, but his non-verbal right brain might as well have taken over completely when Emery asks Jack to hand her the watermelon Moscow mule next to her lounge chair and all he can do is make a kind of strangled noise into his own drink like he has forgotten how to breathe.
"Dude, are you okay?" She flips onto her stomach and swims to the edge of the pool closest to him.
"Piña colada went the wrong way," he lies.
Jack can see her eyebrows dip down to the cover of her shades as she tells him that he looks like a cherry tomato. "Do you have heat stroke?"
"It's not hot enough to get heat stroke, Walsh."
Altered mental status, confusion, delirium, the way his entire body is buzzing like he's having mini seizures – he might as well be having heat stroke.
Emery holds her hand out to him and for a second he's wondering if she wants him to pull her out of the pool and flush against his own feverish body. But upon seeing the confusion on his face, she asks once more, "My drink?"
"Right."
Jack thinks that he is replying quickly but his brain is so fuzzy from everything that his mouth drags the word out at quarter speed so that by the time the rest of his body has received the signal to get off his chair and walk five steps towards the pool, it feels like he's wading through molasses just to get to her.
When Jack finally crouches down to pass her the drink, Emery swims over to rest her arms on the waterline pool tile next to him. She takes her sunglasses off, shifts a little so that he's blocking most of the direct sunlight with his head, and then looks up at him.
"You should really get in the water, Jack." Grinning against the lip of the copper mug, Emery adds, "Just dip a toe in."
Jack laughs. "You're such an asshole."
"I'm a concerned citizen!" she insists. "You look overheated."
He feels overheated.
"You do remember that I was stationed in Afghanistan, right? In the summer, the temperature in Dasht-e-Margo got up to a hundred and—"
"Just remember that I promised to first do no harm," Emery blurts out.
Before Jack knows what's happening, Emery yanks on his forearm and pulls him forward, the shock of her bare palm on his skin so startling that he remembers much too late that he's supposed to be shifting his weight and pitches headfirst into the pool. If not for the instinct to tuck and roll into the motion, Jack would certainly have a concussion to show for Emery's devotion to the Hippocratic Oath. He resurfaces near the shallow edge and props the sole of his right shoe behind him against the wall of the pool.
"What the fuck, Em?"
Jack sputters through a mouthful of chlorinated water before running his hands through his hair and trying to shake the water out of his ears. When he looks up, Walsh is beaming at him, but it's not with the usual smug joy of one-upping him. She looks so fond that it makes him feel stupid in a way that he hasn't in a very long time. If Jack was wearing a Holter monitor right now, it would pick up on so many skipped beats that the cardiologist reviewing the data afterwards would wonder how he was still alive.
She slowly wades closer to him, but by now Jack's heart has sped up so much that she might as well be a shark that has sensed blood in the water. He could lift himself out of the pool, but he feels paralyzed in place with no option other than to tread water until Emery decides if she wants to go in for the kill.
She's so close now that Jack is fascinated by how her irises look amber when the sunlight catches them at just the right angle. Emery's hands reach out to rest against his clavicles and, for one brief moment, Jack thinks that maybe she's going to dunk him under the water. But then her palms slide along the back of his shoulders, following the planes until she has them hooked against the nape of his neck. It is simultaneously both the most unexpected and expected thing that could've happened to him today and yet Jack feels like he can neither catch his breath or release it when Emery leans in and whispers against his ear, "I think I like it when you call me Em."
His hands frame her hips to keep them both balanced. He turns his head so he can get a better look at Emery before saying, "I'm not changing your contact info in my phone again."
"You are so resistant to change," she says with a grin.
A moment later, Jack surges forward and kisses her. Emery's fingers curl into his hair as she deepens the kiss. Jack feels like a floating paradox. The tile is cool against his back, but the rest of his body feels like a brush fire picking up strength and Emery keeps feeding the flames with oxygen until the only thing tempering the wildfire between them is the water around them.
*
If the pool was a bad idea, then the pool shower is a really bad idea but even as Jack knows this, it is Emery who finally presses her palm against his chest and laughs into his shoulder, "As fun as it is to pretend like we're sneaky summer camp counselors, we are staying at this hotel, you know?"
"I…what?" he asks, embarrassingly out of breath.
Jack has no idea what she's talking about nor does he, at this moment, very much care. He tilts her jaw with his thumb so he can lick into that divot where her throat meets her clavicle because Jack wants to hear that half turned on half infuriated-that's-she's-turned-on gasp again. Emery drags her blunt surgeon fingernails along his flank hard enough to make him groan but not sharp enough that it'll leave a mark.
It's the perfect crime, Jack thinks absently. Except what's the objective of the game? Everything between them is a competition, even this. Maybe especially this. Obviously, no one can know, but does winning mean to let the tree fall in the forest when no one is around so no one can hear the sound or to chop down the tree without a care as to who is around and then gaslight everyone into believing that it was ever standing upright in the first place? Her hands are all over his body, but no one would ever know – no one would ever believe it without the evidence that she is careful not to leave behind. But Jack is all teeth and lips and hickeys that he'll probably have to apologize for later if she ever decides she does want to make it out to the beach before this trip is over.
His drenched sneakers make a squishy noise on the tile as his arm winds tighter around her waist and he tries to move them away from the shower's spray. Whatever chlorine was on them is long gone and now all he's got are extremely waterlogged sneakers and a trek through the hotel in wet clothes. Emery fists the hair above the nape of his neck to slant Jack's head back so she can lean forward for another bruising kiss, her lips curving into a smile as she says, "I'd really rather not have Mass General's head of surgery walk in on my co-worker getting handsy with me, Abbot."
As if her hands aren't dangerously close to his waistband.
"You're the one trying to put your hands down my pants, Walsh," Jack replies with a smirk against her lips. "I'm just trying to be…what did you call it? Collaborative?"
Emery is in the middle of rolling her eyes when the outside door to the bathroom slams open and someone runs in for a towel. From the relative cover of the shower stalls, they can briefly hear children shouting outside by the pool, the splash of cannonballs and laughter carrying inside to reverberate off the subway tile before the door swings closed again.
"The third-floor pool is closer to the fifteenth floor than it is to the eighteenth," he blurts out.
"Trying to score an invite to my room with the power of math?" Emery laughs. "Hot."
*
In retrospect, premeditation is the key. Emery knew when she woke up this morning that she wasn't going to attend any of the plenary presentations on the schedule for this afternoon so she had the foresight to bring sunscreen and a change of clothes and sandals in her massive tote bag. She's nice and warm whereas Jack is standing in the frankly too cold elevator in his wet clothes and trying to tighten the hotel robe that he snatched off the rack next to the complimentary pool towels before he develops pneumonia. It's going to be a bitch to get the chlorine smell off his prosthetic later, he thinks, as the toes of his left foot squish against the saturated sole of his sneaker. His eyes shift from his feet to Emery's next to him, her toes wiggling on either side of the toe post of her flip-flops. The red nail polish matches the bathing suit he watched her stuff into her bag as they left the pool just as everyone who had spent the last few hours listening to distinguished speakers bore them to tears spilled in to have some fun. Was that premeditated too? Was he really that easy?
Before he can have an existential crisis about it, Jack sneezes as the elevator stops on the fourth floor. The kid who had exited just as they entered had left them with the gift of having pressed every button on the panel so now it really does feel like they're in Hotel California, stuck in this metal box forever when where he really wants to be is—
"I never went to summer camp," Jack blurts out to stop that train of thought. Faced with Emery's baffled look, he explains, "Back in my day, we spent the summer break getting drunk at house parties."
Emery rolls her eyes. "Okay, Grandpa."
Jack leans back against the bar running along the elevator walls.
"It really kills the mood when you call me grandpa."
"Not as much as when you start sentences with 'back in my day.'"
Except they're both grinning at each other as Emery takes a step closer. Her flip-flopped feet bracket his metal one as she leans in. How does she smell like honey when she was in the pool longer than he was? Jack's about to ask when the elevator dings again and opens to a couple of medical students in suits talking excitedly about their posters.
Emery springs back and away so quickly that he wouldn't be surprised if she minored in ballet at NYU. By the time the residents look up to see where they're going and enter the elevator, she's leaning on the railing next to him and casually examining her cuticles.
"This is a bad idea," Jack mutters under his breath as a handful of surgeons get on at the next floor. Which part of it is a bad idea exactly? The part where he wants to kiss her again so badly that he almost doesn't care that half the trauma surgeons in the country might witness them making out by the time they get to her room?
Out of the corner of his eye, Jack can see the corner of her mouth tug up as Emery whispers, "Tempering expectations already?"
But the cold-water plunge of maintaining a veneer of professionalism in front of med students who aren't even their med students has reminded him that they'll still have to see each other once they get back home and Jack goes back to wearing black scrubs exclusively and loudly disparaging butchers whenever she refuses to admit a surgical patient to the surgical service because he has urosepsis.
"A very bad idea," he repeats, his voice lower now.
She sneaks a quick glance at him and then nods like maybe they both needed someone to say it first. Emery appears to consider it for a second longer before reaching past Jack to press the button for eighteen even though it's already lit up. They watch as the lights blink on and off while the elevator ascends slowly and happier people get in and out of the car.
They're on the thirteenth floor when she finally repeats, "It is a very bad idea."
"Right."
Ding. Fourteenth floor. An elderly couple gets on the elevator and smiles at them. Jack's finger itches to touch Walsh again so he shoves his hands into the deep pockets of the white robe.
Ding. Fifteenth floor. Emery's arm brushes his as she moves around the old people to make her way to the door. As she's stepping onto her floor, she calls over her shoulder, "Although, I thought acting on bad ideas was your whole thing, Dr. Abbot."
Ding. The door closes before he can answer.
*
By the time he has showered and raided the minibar of several tiny bottles of vodka that the hospital will not comp him for on the itemized bill, Jack is even more keyed up than he was during the journey up the last three interminable floors to get to his room. As he makes the trip from the business center up to the fifteenth floor, Jack rolls the sheets of paper in his hand into a tighter and tighter cylinder until it's so taut that he could use it to do a line of coke by the time Jack is knocking on her door.
Emery answers the door wearing a fluffy white robe and a towel wrapped around her hair. She's got the hotel cordless phone pressed against her ear when she looks briefly surprised to see him standing there before stepping aside and motioning for him to enter.
"Actually, can you change that to two burgers?" she says into the phone.
Jack raises an eyebrow. "Is this a date?"
His obnoxious smirk is enough for Emery to interrupt the room service person asking on the other end of the line if she'd like anything to drink with her order.
"Actually, please nix the second burger and send up the saddest salad the kitchen makes. You know, just wilted lettuce seasoned with tears."
Jack guffaws. "Real nice, Em."
He knows exactly what he's doing. His heart beats a little faster when she blushes. It's the same jolt of adrenaline Jack feels every time he walks an intern through their first successful intubation. The difference in barometric pressure between searching for the cords and slipping the endotracheal tube past them is enough to momentarily make him forget that the world is a shit show because for that one perfect moment when the tube is in and the color changes on capnography, everything is working exactly as it should.
Jack must still look smug because Emery seems slightly annoyed when she gets off the phone and takes the towel off her head to dry the ends of her hair. She lets her eyes wander down his body before chuckling, "You wore dress shoes to a booty call?"
He doesn't tell her that these are the only other shoes he brought with him, a lesson learned from the time he and Robby went to an ER conference and realized too late that the dinner with the keynote speaker was business-casual and not casual-casual. He also doesn't tell her that it was a massive pain to peel his wet sneakers off the prosthetic and that he has currently got them propped up on the balcony in his room, but the chances of them drying out before his impatience kicks in and he chucks them off the eighteenth floor are slim so he's probably going to have to buy a pair of fluorescent orange Nikes just for the trip home because everyone on the West Coast is obsessed with color.
Instead, he simply says, "This is not a booty call," before unfurling the article he printed from PubMed and handing it to her.
"Evacuation of coronary air embolism with pigtail catheter insertion," Walsh reads out loud.
"It was actually a case series from South Korea."
Her laugh is so uninhibited that it throws him for a loop. Jack wants to record it and play it on a loop with his wind sounds and rainfall white noise, but before he can even think to say something that unhinged out loud, Walsh exclaims, "Oh my God, I can't believe you're trying to seduce me with evidence-based medicine!"
"I'm not trying to—"
She pulls him closer by the front of his t-shirt – white because he's trying – and says with even more surprise, "I can't believe it's working."
*
This time, Jack decides not to be stupid so his mouth is on hers the second she extends the invitation. At first, he's happy just to be kissing her. It's only been like two hours since he last did that, but it might as well have been a lifetime. The thing about Jack is that he has an excellent memory and, while most times that feels like a curse, it's clearly working in his favor right now. He remembers to apply just enough pressure to draw out a moan from her, knows when to bite the bottom of her lip oh so softly and exactly how to run his tongue along her palate to make her toes curl.
"Did I mention that I'm an autodidact?"
"Shut up," Emery grumbles as she drops her head to the junction of Jack's neck and shoulder and tries to catch her breath.
It looks like Emery wants to ask him how he's so good at this but talks herself out of feeding his ego by reaching for the back of his neck to pull him closer. She kisses him fervently like the big red clock in the OR is ticking away and they're on a time crunch. Not one to slow anyone down, Jack's got his hands on her waist in record time after that, crowding her against the wall like it's not embarrassing that he's at half-mast from kissing alone.
Emery curls her arms around the back of his shoulders before he lifts her up so she can wrap her legs around him.
"Okay?" she asks.
"Very."
When Emery scratches her nails against his scalp and squeezes her thighs tighter around him, his hips give an involuntary thrust that makes her chuckle in his ear. She pulls back a smidge to take in his blown pupils, but Jack's lips immediately try to chase hers before she orders with a laugh, "Come on, Abbot. As impressed as I am with your commitment to arm day, take me to bed already."
Jack groans but listens dutifully as he walks them to the queen bed. He presses her back against the mattress and his body against hers, hand snaking between them to undo the knot of her robe. Jack trails his mouth down her neck as he pushes the terry cloth off her shoulder before dropping a kiss against her navel.
Emery immediately arches up and groans, "You need to be wearing far less clothing right now."
He sits up with one knee braced on the bed and his other leg still planted on the ground. Walsh pushes herself up to hook her index fingers against the loop of his jeans and bring him close enough to easily tug off his shirt, roll it up into a ball, and toss it in the direction of the wall he was just about to fuck her against.
His body starts to heat up from the pinpoint attention of her piercing gaze. No one has looked at Jack like that in years – he'd forgotten how good it felt to be at the center of someone's world for even a brief time. She must be thinking the same thing because her eyes drift down to his lips just once before Emery involuntarily – or voluntarily; it's hard to tell with her – licks her bottom lip. The flash of her pink tongue shakes something loose in him so Jack surges forward for another kiss, but Emery presses her palm against his chest to stop him before nodding at his right foot and saying, "You can take it off, you know. It's not going to freak me out."
Logically, he knows this is true. Walsh is a surgeon and a damn good one at that. He doubts that there is very little about the human body that would freak her out. And logistically, he knows that he should because there's nothing that puts a damper on a good time faster than whacking someone's shin with four pounds of carbon fiber. But suddenly Jack feels nervous in a way that he hasn't since the early days of putting the phantom limb he once had out of his mind.
"Worried that I've got one foot out the door already?" Jack asks, his voice straining to make it sound as jokey as possible.
California Jack who wears color and skips out on all the medicine in a medical conference is not supposed to have this kind of baggage. All of California Jack's trauma is from what he's seen under the fluorescent lights of a sterile hospital emergency room and not because of all the men and women he couldn't save when he was seven thousand miles away in hell.
When he glances at Emery, Jack expects to see pity on her face, but instead she's stifling a grin as she says, "Well, I mean, you've only got the one so…"
The laughter bubbles out of him unexpectedly, but once it is unleashed, he can't stop. Jack grabs his side as he wheezes between chortles.
"You are such a dick, Walsh!"
But it gets him to drop down on the edge of the bed and ease the prosthesis off his patellar socket. He sets his foot down next to the bed while Emery tells him, "I'm just saying that in college, I slept with this guy who—"
"I really don't want to hear about the nerds you fucked in college, Em," Jack says with a grin before he pivots in his spot so he can curl his right palm along her cheek and kiss her with tongue.
He can feel her smile against his lips as he scrambles to get his pants off, her hand dipping into his boxers even before he has kicked off his jeans. Jack tries to release measured breaths through his nose as Emery's hand wraps around him and strokes up and down. His whimper is like a white flag but before Jack can tell her that this is going to be embarrassingly short if she keeps doing that, Emery releases him with a grin in favor of latching onto his neck, eager to leave a hickey there so she won't be the only one grumbling about it tomorrow. When he tells her that she's incorrigible, Emery bites down on his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark.
"Do you know how dirty the human mouth is?" Jack asks.
"You better be about to show me," she laughs, maintaining her grip on his hair as he charts a path down her body with his tongue.
"So bossy," he mumbles into her skin.
"That's why I've won the attending teaching award—" Emery gasps as Jack pushes aside her underwear to slide two fingers inside her wet, wet heat. "Fuck, Abbot."
"Patience, Walsh," he chides smugly. Emery yanks so hard on his hair that he's pretty sure he's down a few follicles when he lifts his head to look up at her from between her legs. She is shooting him a glare when he laughs, "Don't get mad."
It takes a powerful woman to insist in no uncertain terms that he's not responsible for any of this even as she's stifling a moan while riding his fingers. Jack presses a kiss against her inner thigh and concedes that it must be the riveting updated compilation of abstracts with poster boards at this conference that the organizers e-mailed to everyone earlier that's got her soaked then.
"Must be," she breathes out, voice all high and tight until she finally concedes that she's so fucking close, come on.
Jack considers making Emery beg for it – when would he ever get the chance to hear her say please again? – but when his dick twitches against her thigh, he knows he won't last that long. He drags her underwear off so that he can use his thumb to swipe a quick pass against her clit. His index and middle fingers ease her towards the edge until she's clenching around his fingers. He can feel how close she is and at the last second, lives up to his promise and dips his tongue inside her core to lick at her like a starving man. His teeth scrape against her clit to give Emery a jolt while his fingers move out of sync with his mouth until she's coming with his name on her lips.
If he knows Emery – and he's pretty sure by now he does – screaming his name has got to piss her off just a little but before she can get embarrassed about it, he pushes himself up her body to kiss whatever snappy thing she was going to say to him right out of her mouth. As she tastes herself on his tongue, Jack can feel the heel of Emery's hand rubbing against his cock like she needs more until he finally slides into her with a groan.
"Jesus," he groans at how tight she is. Emery tries to pull him closer, but Jack stays immovable for a second so he can take in the want on her face. He has no doubt that it is mirrored in his own.
"Get over here," she begs as her arms wind around the back of his neck.
After what feels like forever, Jack finally rocks into her, Emery's pursed lips letting out little gasps as he hitches her leg higher on his hip until he gets so deep that her walls immediately clench around him. Jack fucks up into her like he's got all the time in the world even though he feels the sparks at the base of his spine. He drops his forehead to her shoulder and tilts his face so he can kiss the side of her neck as she threads her fingers through his hair and hisses for him to move faster. It's all the permission he needs to set a brutal pace until Jack feels his tenuous grasp on control faltering as Emery starts telling him how much she wanted him today.
"You should've said something sooner," he grunts. "You could've had me a lot sooner."
"There's something to be said about playing hard to get," Emery says like she's still issuing him a challenge, like he's not already buried to the hilt inside her when she grabs his ass and tries to nudge him deeper. They both release punched out groans as she meets his bucking hips thrust for thrust until he's spilling into her, the cry of her name lost in the press of their lips as they pitch themselves off the cliff's edge together.
*
The saddest salad that the Grand Hyatt San Diego has to offer is indeed extremely sad – a handful of iceberg lettuce with a few shriveled-up cherry tomatoes and half a Persian cucumber – so Emery takes pity on him and pushes her sweet potato fries towards him as they pick through her now-very-cold room service order in bed.
"That's uncharacteristically nice of you," he muses as he grabs a handful of fries.
"Only because we're going again at least one more time before I kick you out of my room."
Her matter-of-fact tone makes Jack laugh. She is somehow bossier after he's left her boneless, which is a truly impressive feat, but Jack knows that if he were to comment on it, she'd deny curling up against him the moment he'd rolled off her and onto his back. He dips a fry into one of the vanilla milkshakes that she'd had the insight to order for them both. Emery's tapping away on her phone with one hand and holding onto her burger with the other so Jack braves a chance for the sake of his grumbling stomach and takes a huge bite of her veggie burger while she's distracted.
"Hey!" she calls out, elbowing him in the side. "Don't bite the hand that feeds, buddy!"
"I need sustenance to be your sex slave," he justifies with a laugh.
"Shouldn't have been a jerk when I tried to wine and dine you then."
"So this was a date!"
Emery makes a face. He'd forgotten how label-averse millennials were.
"For it to be a date, you would've had to put in some effort, Jack."
Jack leans in closer and smiles so wide at her that even Emery has to give up the ghost and grin back at him.
"Are you saying that when I made you come four—"
"Three and a half."
"Three and a half? What exactly does half an orgasm sound like?" Emery shrugs, bites into her burger, and viciously tells him that his greatest hits reel is probably full of them. Jack doesn't even bother justifying that with a response before continuing, "So what you're saying is that I'm so good in bed that every time I made you come, it felt effortless?"
Emery rolls her eyes and tells him that's not at all what she is saying and his patient satisfaction rates must be abysmal if he only hears what he wants to hear with them as well.
"No one has ever complained about my bedside manner before," Jack declares before putting both of their milkshakes on the night table. He turns to Emery and pulls her in closer by his Steelers hoodie until she abandons the rest of her burger and climbs on top of him.
"What about sustenance?" she asks with a raised brow as her knees straddle his hips.
"Turns out I'm not really hungry for quinoa burgers, go figure."
"Me either," Emery says with a smirk.
Jack's eyes catch her bright phone screen face up next to him a second before she pulls him in for a kiss, his mouth curving into a smile as he reads her updated contact card for him.
Jack Abbot, ER dick.