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Emery Walsh is screwed. She's screwed and she's furious because she did it to herself. It's the end of the world as The Weather Channel is predicting it and Walsh is stuck on in-house call for however long it takes for this blizzard to let up and the snowplows to start plowing again – even though she's supposed to be off for a three-day weekend – with an ER counterpart whose Catholic guilt is surpassed only by his God complex.
And it would have been fine – annoying, but fine – except Jack Abbot keeps flashing her the knowing grin of a man who, until recently, saw her naked on a semi-regular basis and who now has conveniently forgotten that he no longer retains the master key to her secrets. Jack is Wile E. Coyote leaving spring-loaded bombs all over the ER and Emery is the Road Runner pivoting to avoid them, but unlike in the cartoons, they'll both run out of space to keep this dance going soon and then, kaboom, game over!
*
Walsh isn't even supposed to be here tonight. That's the part that kills her. She could've been at home in her pajamas watching My Best Friend's Wedding, but instead she developed a bleeding heart at the worst possible time. Emery comes in to check on one patient and congratulate Garcia on not killing Mrs. Sanford while the devil – Jack Abbot, in this case – was whispering third-world guerilla techniques culled from a single non-reproducible case study the whole time that Emery was on the phone guiding Garcia through practicing the type of medicine that wouldn't get her license suspended.
The patient who probably didn't need a surgical thrombectomy in the ER with just a PICC and a prayer is being wheeled upstairs to the CICU when Jack sidles up to Emery and asks, "So…you were at Hibachi tonight, huh?"
"What?"
"Sorry," Garcia groans into her hands. "He made me call you on the iPad so I'd have my hands free and then was just…there?"
"To supervise," Jack clarifies.
Emery rolls her eyes. Of course, he was. She pivots on the balls of her feet to turn the full force of her glare onto Jack.
"Please do not tell me that woman just got an unnecessary procedure—"
"She had a clot. It was very necessary," Jack says before popping a cherry lollipop from the jar at the nursing desk into his mouth.
"—just so you could interrupt my date?"
"You were on a date?" Shen asks out of nowhere before rolling himself backwards into the nursing station on the chair he liberated from Dana before she left. Emery looks around the ER and wonders why everyone is suddenly here instead of running codes and sticking IOs in people who don't need them. It's certainly less loud than usual, but surely there are some actual patients that need assistance, right? Apparently not because Shen spins in a circle before sticking his hand out to grab the corner of the desk she's leaning against to ask, "Who with?"
"Who with?" Emery asks incredulously. Is familiarity the price of going through a mass casualty event with these people? If so, she's conveniently going to be out of cell service range for the next one. Walsh deadpans, "Jesus Christ, we're not having a sleepover, Shen."
"But it's boring tonight—"
"Seriously?" Ellis shouts from across the room where she has just finished evaluating a nosebleed. Emery suspects that this is not the first time that Shen has tempted fate in her presence.
"It was probably with an investment banker named Blaine," Jack hypothesizes, his voice rising to a nasal octave at the hypothetical name. When he scrunches up his nose, Emery isn't sure if she wants to deck him (yes) or kiss him (probably, also, yes) so she sticks to rolling her eyes again. Whenever she's in the ER, she's always worried that she will rupture an ocular muscle because every other word these himbos say is ridiculous.
"We are not talking about my love life."
"Must not have been a great date. It looked like you were having a lot more fun talking Garcia through cross clamping the saphenous than at Hibachi," Jack continues. "Besides, you don't even like Hibachi."
Before anyone can wonder how he knows that, Garcia asks, "What's wrong with Hibachi?"
Emery glares at her for feeding oxygen to the dying embers of this conversation. It's true that it wouldn't be her first choice in fine dining experiences, but since she had forgotten they'd made plans until two hours before they were supposed to meet, it felt like poor form to text her date back that it was hard to have a conversation while someone was setting an onion volcano on fire in front of them.
"It's cultural appropriation!" Shen insists now.
"And yet you fucking love Hibachi!" Ellis reminds him. "It was your suggestion for every residency dinner during interview season!"
Shen shakes his head. "What I love is watching a line cook with ADHD struggle to do stupid human tricks while trying desperately not to set some lady's beehive on fire."
"Beehive?" Garcia mouths to Ellis while Emery snickers, "So what you're saying is that the last time you went to a Benihana was in 1965?"
"Give me a break! I grew up in Natick, Mass!"
"That explains so much about you," Garcia says.
"Down to the Dunkin' obsession," Ellis agrees.
Walsh is, thankfully, saved from listening to Shen's impassioned defense of Ben Affleck's favorite coffee chain when she spots Seth Goldfarb, the trauma surgeon who is actually on call tonight, rushing towards her while looking like he is one more stat page away from experiencing a complete nervous breakdown.
"Thanks for the assist," Dr. Goldfarb tells her gratefully before dragging his palm down his face like that'll somehow wake him up. "I was scrubbed in on a bladder rupture that was more extensive than we thought."
"Couldn't let Abbot kill the patient," Emery says loud enough for Jack to hear from where he's loitering behind her pretending not to eavesdrop.
"Em, you know I'd never ask," Seth starts, his voice already taking on that beseeching quality that she hates before he even gets to the request, "but can you cover the last hour of my shift since you're here anyway? Finley's coming in at ten to take over and—"
"Abso-fucking-lutely not, Seth! This is supposed to be my golden weekend!"
"It'll still be a golden weekend if you stick around another hour!" he says desperately, which is patently untrue. It stopped being a golden weekend the moment she walked in through those ER doors! Now she has already come back to work once in the three days that she was supposed to be as far away as possible from it! But Seth starts begging, "It's my third night in a row, Walsh, and the first two nights were with that second year we discussed putting on remediation if he didn't get better!"
"Guessing he's not getting better?"
"I wouldn't let him operate on my kid's GI Joe." Emery winces. Seth leans in and confesses, "I told him to consider a switch to Family Med."
"Jeez!"
That's the bleakest feedback a surgeon could give to an aspiring one. She is not looking forward to when the attendings have to figure out a gentle way to tell this kid that he's got no hope of success in an operating room.
"Exactly! Do you see now how I've struggled?"
"How'd you fit a tiny violin inside your scrub pockets, Seth?"
"Please, Emery," Seth begs. "It's forty minutes to Portersville and I'm going to drive into a tree if I have to do it when the snow starts."
Walsh has no doubt that is true – and she would've said yes anyway – but she makes him agree to run the next journal club for the residents so she doesn't have to do it. Seth nods emphatically before tossing the on-call phone to her like it's a dirty bomb and hightailing it out of the ER.
"You are such a sucker," Jack snorts from behind her. She sticks her middle finger up in the air but deprives him of the satisfaction of seeing her turn around to do it.
*
As it turns out, no good deed goes unpunished. The previously imminent snowy conditions arrive too quickly so that they've already gotten really fucking bad by the time Emery comes back from the parking garage with her doggy bag from dinner tonight and the emergency duffel she keeps in the back of her car. Once she's done changing in her office and back down in the ER, the news reports are talking about unnavigable roads while charge nurse Lena is reading the hospital missive out loud that they're officially under emergency staffing contingencies. There's a wave of curses and groans and "we better be getting paid double OT for this" even before the attending phone buzzes with a text from Finley that he made it one whole block from his house before his car stalled in the street.
"Told you it was a sucker bet," Jack whispers in her ear. She can feel him grinning even without seeing his smug face.
"That I only got stuck making because you couldn't curb your attention-seeking behavior." Emery catches Jack off guard when she spins around to poke a finger into his chest. "Once again, you're at the heart of all of my regrettable decisions."
His eyes give off sparks of amber as he leans in and challenges, "Now say it like you're mad about it."
"That you're an asshole?"
"That's not very nice, Dr. Walsh," Jack tsks, looking so amused that she wishes she made a habit of carrying around a scalpel in her pockets like he did.
"I wasn't trying to be nice."
The heat flares in his eyes but before Jack can make what is sure to be an infuriating comment about how much he likes it when she is nice, Emery shoves him away so she can reach past him for a Sour Power straw. There's nothing like forced overtime to get the nurses to bust out the sugary snacks.
"You know," Jack drawls like he's from Texas and not Pittsburgh born and bred, "I'm only here because of you too so technically this whole thing is your fault."
Emery arches her eyebrows at him. "You're going to have to explain that to me, Abbot."
Jack slants his mouth against her ear and whispers, "We could've been fucking on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire in the Poconos right now."
Emery nearly chokes on the piece of green apple candy she had been chewing. She grabs the water bottle from his hand and chugs half of it while glaring at Jack the entire time. Instead of looking appropriately frazzled, Jack seems to be having the time of his life.
"First of all, bearskin rugs are flammable. Secondly, you complained for days about your back when we went to that B&B with the less-than-Tempur-Pedic beds so this vision you have of recreating a 90s music video is, at best, aspirational, Grandpa." Jack chuckles before miming a sword through his heart, but now that he's gotten her started, Emery can practically feel the flames of rage licking at her face. "But most importantly, I would rather get frostbite than go on a romantic weekend away together with a man who only thought to pitch it to me after his ex-wife texted to ask if they could swap timeshare weeks."
Jack frowns and is about to protest that it's not the only reason when Santos asks out loud from the other end of the ER, "What the fuck is a snowpocalypse?"
Emery looks up to see the intern squinting at her phone.
"Oh, my sweet California raisin," Garcia says with a smirk, "it's what Gen Z calls a blizzard to go viral on TikTok."
"Aren't you Gen Z, Yoyo?" Ellis asks.
"Shut your mouth," Garcia gasps. "I'm a Millennial all the way!"
"Not something to be proud of either," Abbot snorts with a laugh before clapping his hands together to get everyone's attention. He strides to the center of the room with a look of maniacal glee on his face that can only be found in those who enjoy being at work during a time like this. This is Emery's fault, her ass! "Esteemed colleagues, we have been waylaid by Mother Nature and Father Time so strap in and prepare to become the last line of defense—"
"Against the worst scum of the universe," Shen interrupts with a whoop. Surprisingly, even Jack understands that reference because he fist bumps Shen for his contribution to this extremely uninspiring inspirational speech.
"What does that mean?" Santos asks with a frown.
"Until they clear the roads and our relief can get here, we're all staying put and treating anyone who wanders in through those doors."
While everyone starts grumbling and taking out their cell phones to call loved ones or wandering over to the sandwich box before all that's left is tuna, Jack seeks Emery out in the sea of dissatisfaction and winks at her.
She groans. Karma is such a vengeful bitch.
*
Martinez from General Surgery is covering the floor and has more than enough eager surgical residents that he doesn't need an extra hand from Walsh. Apparently, the residents on inpatient were smart enough – some would argue stupid enough – to come in early in anticipation of the blizzard and are now all scrambling to find places in the hospital to sleep during the lull because there are too many of them and not enough call rooms.
Both the benefit and the curse of being at work during a weather disaster is that it's very slow until it's not. Apparently, most of Pittsburgh has heeded the AccuWeather forecast for once and followed the advice to stay indoors. For the first time in the history of PTMC's ER, the waiting room has cleared out and the only patients left in the ER are the boarders waiting for psych beds or the boarders waiting for the weather to ease up so they don't die of hypothermia the moment they step out of the hospital.
What this actually means is that Shen announces that he has a special treat for everyone before pushing the procedure cart out of Trauma 1 and into the nurse's station in the middle of the ER. He puts down a blue chuck with so much flourish that Walsh feels like she's in Vegas at a David Blaine show. If Jack Abbot is the MacGyver of mass casualty events, then John Shen is the MacGyver of cultivating a good time. He manages to fashion a DIY cocktail shaker using an IO gun and the mason jar that used to house popsicle sticks.
"What are you doing?" Emery asks. If she squints, she can superimpose Mardi Gras beads and a DJ booth with accompanying strobe lights around him. He must've been fun in college.
Shen brings out two gray plastic basins full of tiny cans of ginger ale and cranberry juice that Peds normally keeps around to PO challenge patients before discharging them home.
"Making Faux Shirley Temples, of course!"
*
Around midnight when everyone starts to lose steam, Shen gets a second wind that is inexplicable even to Ellis, who was on nights with him for years when they were both residents. He keeps tapping his pen and a laryngoscope handle against the corner of the desk like it is his mission to single handedly usher Coachella into the PTMC ER. In fact, Shen even asks Jack at one point if he can ask the ladies out front to pump up the jams through the PA system to keep everyone invigorated so "we stay sharp in case something goes down," an idea so shockingly bad that the nurses look like they're about to strangle him with his own stethoscope.
"Shen, are you on something?" Emery finally asks.
"Just high on life, Dr. Walsh!" he says with a grin. He looks like he just hit his first homer in Little League and his prize was all the Hubba Bubba bubble tape gum he wanted. "I've got my health; I've got my wealth—"
"Since when?" Ellis groans. "Weren't you just complaining about how your student loans are coming out of forbearance next month?"
"Perspective, Parker," Shen says as he taps his temple. "Earlier tonight, this guy came in with mild food poisoning. I saw that he had a high deductible and told him to just buy a six-dollar bottle of Pedialyte from CVS instead, but he insisted on the whole nine. Now he's going to be forking over two thousand dollars because he wouldn't believe me when I said that there was an outbreak associated with raw alfalfa recently."
"And what does that have to do with your wealth?"
"I will eventually pay off my student loans and then be able to enjoy my beaucoup bucks, but that dude will remain a fiscally irresponsible dill hole forever." When Emery snickers, Shen spins around on his stool so that he's facing her and asks, "Hey, aren't you rich, Dr. Walsh?"
"My family is comfortable," she clarifies with an eye roll because there is a distinction.
Her family's money comes with a board seat and strings, but Emery's a surgeon and has always been more comfortable with a knife than a silver spoon. When she sneaks a glance at Jack, he is examining a fig bar very intensely and trying not to chuckle.
Douche.
"If you had to quantify comfortable in terms of yachts owned though…"
"Shut up, John," she says. "I am not taking you sailing."
Jack makes no attempt to keep from laughing this time. She glares at him until he at least tries to curb that shit-eating grin. Before Shen can do something heinous like ask her for investment advice or mention his Sperry topsiders, Ellis stands up and announces that she's still going to be poor for a while so she's leaving to take a nap in North 1. It is the last empty exam room left, but before Santos can even argue that they should at least rock-paper-scissors for it, Ellis holds up her index finger and reminds the intern of the residency hierarchy.
"Jedi Master," she says as she points to herself. Then she points to Santos. "Padawan."
"What does that make me?" Jack asks.
"Darth Vader," Emery deadpans.
*
"You have to let them sleep," Walsh says as she once again blocks Jack's fork from spearing her leftover scallops from the quickly aborted restaurant date from earlier. Perhaps Mister-Always-Be-Prepared should have packed an MRE in his go-bag if he didn't want to eat yet another smushed PB&J sandwich.
"I'm not not letting them sleep," Jack replies, frowning as he watches Emery pop the last of the snap peas into her mouth.
This is precisely why they put Robby in charge of the residency program. The bureaucracy of the ACGME is not something that Jack Abbot has ever cared about so Gloria jammed the crown of residency director onto Robby's head to keep him from free falling; she knew he'd never be kind to himself for himself, but he'd try to hold it together if he was responsible for the next generation of physicians.
But Robby's not here so she watches as Garcia stops Santos from face planting off her stool and straight into the crash cart before Emery whacks Jack in the stomach with her arm.
"Seriously, Jack? This is your solution?"
"What am I supposed to do?" he asks defensively. "ERs don't have call rooms!"
Walsh rolls her eyes before calling Garcia and Santos over.
"Is there a consult?" Garcia asks as she looks around for a new patient. There hasn't been a new patient in the past three hours. There probably won't be a new patient in the next three either.
"Can I do another REBOA?" Santos asks groggily.
When they're not all half-dead from sleep deprivation, Emery is really going to have to talk to Garcia about poaching Santos from Emergency Medicine into the surgery residency. Once her star resident graduates next year, Emery will need a new resident to take under her wing. When she glances at Jack, he gives her that look that says don't even think about it – Santos is probably already his favorite given both of their proclivities to do crazy shit first and apologize for it later.
"Sixth floor trauma attending call room. Code is four-five-two-star. There's a bed and a Barcalounger—"
"I call dibs on—"
"In your dreams, Santos," Garcia cuts off with a scoff. "But what about you, Dr. Walsh?"
"I've got a couch in my office."
Jack places an arm around Emery's shoulder and beams, "Ladies, this is what we call inter-departmental cooperative spirit."
Every point of contact between his body and hers lights up like a flare. She doesn't know how no one else is blinded by it. From the corner of her eye, Emery can see Jack's mouth tilt up in the same grin he'd get when she greeted him with a kiss after coming home from a long day of back-to-back OR cases, when whatever he was making for dinner would inevitably get very cold by the time she finished saying hello.
But that was a different time. In the present day, it takes all the cooperative spirit Emery has in her not to break his fingers one by one. She tells the residents to keep their pagers on before shooing them away. After a beat, she spins around and calls them back.
"I am the Pope and that call room is the Vatican. God is watching," she hisses. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Garcia goes from looking tan to looking like a tomato in five seconds while Santos runs a hand through her hair and confusedly says, "I'm an atheist…"
"Loud and clear, boss," Garcia quickly answers before dragging Santos away while muttering that Scorpios are so stupid the entire way to the elevator.
*
It turns out that Leos are also idiots because an hour later when Walsh comes back from signing off on a week's worth of dictated op notes in her office, Shen announces that Jack went upstairs to "take the temperature of things," which is, of course, the dumbest thing she has ever heard given that every television in the emergency department is either playing The Weather Channel or playing a rerun of Family Feud with a chyron about the weather conditions scrolling in perpetuity across the bottom of the screen.
"Are you some kind of moron?" Emery calls out to Jack when she steps out into the flood lights of PTMC's roof ten minutes later.
She supposes she should be grateful that he's at least on this side of the guardrail. He's staring at the twinkling lights set on timers in the office buildings in the distance. The snowfall has eased up a bit and it's less windy than she thought it would be, but it's still freezing and all Jack's got on is a PTMC ER fleece. He has always run hot, something that used to thrill her in the fall when it was too cool for air conditioning but not cold enough to bring out a quilt. Emery remembers starfishing over him in the middle of the night until her limbs curled around Jack like she was an octopus trying to find her bearing in the world by the steady thump of his heartbeat against her ear. He'd pull her so close during the night that in the morning, he'd have to disentangle himself from her like the bomb squad following lead wires. Before he left to get the coffee started, Jack would slide his fingertips through her hair and place a kiss to Emery's temple to let her know that he hadn't disappeared with the tide.
"Hey," he says now with a nod when she crunches across the roof in her Uggs to stand next to him. The street below is blanketed in white and there is not another person in sight. The city is quieter than she has ever heard it, which should normally be peaceful but feels eerily out of place. "What are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the same thing."
He looks up at the sky and sticks his tongue out like a little kid. She watches the snowflakes catch on his eyelashes before he looks back at her with a smile. After a long beat during which Emery threatens to leave him here alone to die, Jack finally says, "Think we're still going to be stuck here for another couple of hours."
Emery rolls her eyes. "No shit. You don't need to freeze out here to come to that conclusion, Ray Petelin."
Jack tilts his head to grin at her, but his face quickly morphs into a frown. He pulls his beanie off so that he can smooth it over her head so carefully that Emery feels like she is being ordained. Jack Abbot usually barrels through life like a bull in a china shop, but sometimes he's so gentle that Emery wouldn't be surprised to learn that he had a side hustle as a glass blower. It makes it hard to stay mad at him when he's always keeping her on her toes. Unfortunately, Jack has also taken it as a personal challenge to piss her off at least once a week so he also makes it very easy to get mad at him.
But right now, he's not trying to piss her off. Right now, he's trailing his palms down until they're cupping her face, her cheeks immediately warming between his hot hands. Emery closes her eyes and sighs. When she opens them again, Jack has bent at the knees so that they're at eye level when he asks, "So…Hibachi guy?"
Emery rolls her eyes. A few weeks ago, she had gotten coffee with Hibachi Guy as a favor to her Pilates instructor who was convinced that they'd hit it off. She was wrong, of course, because he was an inoffensive kind of bland that Emery could no longer settle for, but she didn't want to piss off Rita so instead of giving him the brush off, Emery canceled on three follow up dates. She didn't have plans to go on last night's date either, but it had been a long week and she had simply forgotten to text him with an excuse. Thankfully, she wouldn't have to worry about that again because Hibachi Guy dumped her at Hibachi after she kept taking Garcia's calls during dinner. She tried to explain that she was trying to keep her ex from killing a patient by attempting a surgical procedure based on vibes and a half-remembered diagram in a defunct journal, but apparently Hibachi Guy had missed all the Good Samaritan parts of that sentence and homed in on the ex part instead.
"He's fantastic," Emery chirps now with too much fake enthusiasm for Jack not to immediately clock that she's full of a shit.
He rocks on the balls of his good foot before grinning at her.
"Do you two have any plans for the long weekend?"
"Oh, you know. Lots of sex."
Emery tells herself that it's the wind taking her breath away and not the smile on Jack's face that seems to be growing wider with each passing moment.
"And this guy is not upset that you being here with me—"
"And three hundred other people," she adds, unamused. "Don't flatter yourself."
"—is getting in the way of all that fucking?"
Emery shrugs. She is willing to die on this hill that isn't even a hill, that's a stretch of flatland leading to nowhere she wants to go.
"Tommy is emotionally mature enough to not feel threatened by past mistakes."
Jack's eyes flash with something that Emery can't quite identify before he rubs his chin thoughtfully. He looks like a complete asshole. Emery wishes she could stop remembering how that stubble felt against her thighs.
"He sounds very boring."
"And you sound very jealous," she counters.
"His name is Tommy?" Jack chuckles. "That's a name that's sure to get you wet."
"Oh, like Jack is any better."
"All the famous Jacks in history have been a hit with the ladies," he counters like he has had this argument prepared for years. "There was JFK…"
"A John."
"Who went by Jack."
"I'm not sure that's true." Except Emery knows it's true because her grandfather spent a summer with the Kennedys in Martha's Vineyard in 1959 where they played croquet all morning until it was time to switch from mimosas to martinis. There's probably still a picture of Grandpa Clive with Jackie Kennedy hanging up in the house on Society Hill.
"Jack Nicholson—"
"Jack Nicholson?" Emery asks incredulously. "Does he even leave his house anymore?"
"I meant young Jack Nicholson," Abbot retorts.
"Your references need updating."
"Fine," he huffs. Jack runs a hand through his hair, which has somehow gotten even curlier in the snow, and gives her an appraising look. "There's also—"
"Shut up, Jack."
Emery risks freezing her fingers off to grab the front of his fleece and pull him closer to block the wind. She can smell the mint on his breath when his face splits into a lopsided grin before he whispers into her ear, "If I had plans to fuck you all weekend, no weather phenomenon on the planet could keep me away."
Her mind short circuits for a second, the zap traveling down her spine until she feels the tingle down to her toes. She should shove him away. Hell, she should shove him off the roof, but instead the only thing she can come up with once her brain reboots is, "Good thing you never have to worry about braving the elements to fuck me again."
"Never is a very long time."
She tells him not to underestimate her ability to hold a grudge.
Jack snickers and then reaches out to tighten the cashmere scarf peeking out from underneath her coat. He lifts one hand up to brush a snowflake off her cheek with his thumb, so gentle that if Emery didn't have her eyes wide open, she would've sworn that it never happened. By the time he's smoothing his hands along the lapels of her peacoat and pulling Emery across what little distance exists between them, she's so far gone that she's leaning into the movement. She could stop him if she wanted to, but the problem has always been that she never wants to keep him away. It is, she has come to realize over the last few weeks, one of her fatal flaws.
"What are you doing?"
"I don't want you to freeze to death," Jack says so quietly that the only reason she even hears him over the howling wind is because they're so close that Emery can feel his breath against her nose.
"And whose fault would that be?"
He dips his head down low and laughs, "Just think about how long you'd hold onto that grudge, baby."
It's the baby that kills her, all the impossible want that she's been trying not to feel all night breaking to the surface until logic falls to the wayside and Emery gives in to how much easier it is to hook her arms around his neck, get on her tiptoes, and kiss him. And it's so unbelievably good that she forgets how stupid it is for several minutes. But the thing is that it is freezing up on the roof and, while it has been a very long three weeks, the idea of explaining to John Shen that she lost a finger to compartment syndrome because she was so horny that she couldn't stop making out with Jack Abbot outside in the middle of a blizzard is so mortifying that it's finally enough to make Emery pull back. Jack crowds her space again immediately. His lips trailing along the sharp angles of her jaw is enough to send pinpoints of heat through the rest of her body, but it's not enough to keep her teeth from chattering much like this is not enough to make up for all the time she has spent missing him.
"Inside," Walsh groans as she nudges his shoulder towards the door, "before I have to haunt you forever."
She can feel Jack smile against her lips when he says, "Promises, promises…"
*
Emery warns Jack to be chill as they get off on the seventh floor because she has no idea if there are cameras leading to her office, but in retrospect she should've said something more Boomer-friendly like, "Hold your horses until we get inside," because Jack is anything but chill as they make their way down the dim hallways of the administrative building. She took off her wet coat the moment they stepped off the roof, which means that now when Jack places his hands on her hips like they're in a conga line, she feels the pad of every finger through her scrubs like she's being branded. Emery tries to elbow him away, but that just leads to him following even closer until Jack is whispering against the shell of her ear how insane it is that in all the time that they've been together, this is the first time he's going to see the inside of her office.
"I didn't want you to drop by all the time," Emery says with a laugh.
"Too much temptation?" he hums against her pulse.
Yes, but she's not going to let him in on that superpower.
"For you? Definitely. But I have self-control."
If she was aiming for stern, she misses the mark by such a wide margin that she might not even be practicing at the same range.
"Valiant attempt to pretend that you didn't miss me as much as I missed you, Em."
Emery rolls her eyes as she swipes her ID card over the sensor. The moment the lock clicks open, she yanks Jack into her office after her. The door shuts behind the weight of their combined bodies as his back hits the wood. Jack immediately scrambles to touch her.
"I don't know, Jack," she purrs as her palm brushes against the hard ridge of his erection. Jack bucks up into her hand with a groan. Grinning, Emery leans in close and whispers into his ear, "Feels like you missed me a lot."
Jack tries to zero in on her lips, but Emery steps back at the last minute. His little whine is delicious as she puts even more distance between them to hang up her coat and then step the rest of the way into the room, the temperature set at a perfect sixty-eight degrees all the time after she bribed the head of Environmental with a very nice bottle of Malbec. When he sees that she's not going to come back, Jack groans and shrugs off his fleece to toss onto her coat rack too.
"Are you going to give me the tour?"
"Since when do you need closed captioning?" Emery asks, resting one hand against the bookshelf while she pulls off her boots.
"Technically, they call it audio description and it's a completely separate track," Jack says with a grin. Emery rolls her eyes and starts to ask if he was an AV Club nerd in high school when he crowds her space. He leans his hand against the bookshelf, his palm pressing against Sabiston Textbook of Surgery as he observes, "Sturdy."
Emery would roll her eyes but she's too distracted watching the flex of the corded muscles of Jack's forearms. She wants to trace the veins with her tongue, run her mouth all the way up to his broad shoulders, and leave a mark. Jack looks at her curiously right before his eyes sparkle like he knows exactly what she is thinking; he leans in ever-so-slowly to press his body against hers. This time when Emery turns her face, he wastes no time capturing her lips. And even though she knows that it's coming, the kiss still takes her breath away with how it is simultaneously reverent and fervent. She grabs onto the back of his neck to pull herself up while he takes one step closer to her, Emery's back pressing against a wall of New England Journal of Medicine issues and old anatomy textbooks that were left here by her predecessor.
As Emery tugs on his bottom lip with her teeth, Jack tugs on the knot of her scrub pants with his free hand. They're so close to each other that there's no room for the navy-blue cotton to puddle to the ground before Jack impatiently runs his index finger along the waistband of her underwear. Emery chuckles against his shoulder; there was always going to be a next-to-zero chance of Jack not trying to fuck her against a wall.
"What else is the point of having a titanium leg, Em?" he'd asked her the first time they couldn't even wait to get to her bedroom. "Gotta take the perks where you can get 'em."
As Emery tries to climb up his body now, Jack pulls back to ask what's so funny. Before she can answer, he lets his hand dip below her waistband to find her soaking. With a smug grin, Jack hums, "Looks like you did miss me after all."
Emery tightens her hold on him as Jack presses the heel of his palm against her. It has been so long since she's been with him that it sends a spark through her that rapidly turns into a four-alarm fire. Emery tries to grind down on his hand for some relief until Jack whispers in her ear that he's got her. He slips two fingers into her wet heat, the stretch so good that she doesn't even bother trying to stifle the moan that escapes her lips.
"Fuck," she cries out when he curls his fingers inside her. It's all the encouragement he needs to quicken the pace until she's wrapping one leg around him as Emery shifts her weight off the bookshelf and onto him to ride his hand to her first orgasm. His name spills from her mouth right into his ear, their faces so close together that Emery can feel the hollow of his dimples when he smiles. She briefly wonders if he's going to bring up his list of dated or retired pop culture icons named Jack but then forgets all about it when Jack tries to take a step back and her body decides to plaster itself even closer to him instead.
Emery kisses up his neck and notes that his pulse is erratic against her lips when she scrambles to push down his pants. She hooks two fingers against his waistband to bring their hips flush together and then groans, "Couch, baby."
Even though it might not seem like it down in the ER when he ignores all logic, Jack is very good with direction. He doesn't need to be told to hitch her up his body, Emery's ankles locking above his ass. His palm blazes hot against her spine as Jack presses her against him so he can kiss her again and again, a hundred tiny kisses trailing down her face and neck while he tries not to trip on his scrub bottoms and kill them both on the way to the sofa.
After what feels like forever, Emery feels the press of the leather sofa against her back and the even more welcome press of Jack's body against her own. He tugs up on her shirt and tosses it to the side so he can kiss down her body and keep telling her that he missed this and this and this and—
"I missed you being less of a prude than this, Jack."
He laughs against her ribs before sitting up to pull his shirt off with one hand. It's so obscenely attractive that there's no way he isn't peacocking. Emery rolls her eyes and pulls his hips down. He's about to ask if she's going to tell him that he's pretty when Emery's hand sneaks beneath his boxer-briefs to wrap around his length. Jack releases all the air in his lungs as she starts to stroke him. He drops his forehead to her shoulder with a groan, but all his attempts to get her to speed up are met with Emery's dedication to keeping up a steady pace. It is only when he whimpers that she's not being fair that Walsh turns her head and whispers into his ear that she needs him.
What she expects is for Jack to push down his pants and push into her, but what she gets is him moving off her with a groan. He sits back on his knees and drops his head into his hands.
"Hey, are you okay? Is it your leg?" Emery asks, scrambling to sit up.
He lifts his head. Jack looks as wrecked as he sounds when he admits, "Baby, I don't…fuck, I don't have anything on me, Em."
It takes a second for her to figure out what he's talking about because this is Jack. Last year, he brought an LMA to the residency retreat pub crawl.
"What do you mean? You're Captain Pragmatic!"
He flashes her an apologetic look. "I didn't anticipate—"
"You've been flirting with me all night!" she says as she whacks him in the stomach with the back of her hand.
"I flirt with you every night. I don't automatically assume you're going to lure me into your office to have your way with me because of it!" He flashes her a grin when she objects to his use of the word lure. "Look, it would've been really awkward if a condom fell out in front of a patient while I was pulling out a ten-blade!"
Emery leans her head against his chest with a groan. "Seriously, Abbot? You chose the worst time to stop being a boy scout."
He kisses her forehead. "Well, do you have—"
Emery glares at him. "For all the sex I'm having in my office during work hours? No, Jack, you'd be the first."
His face splits into a stupid grin as his dick twitches with interest. He's such a predictable idiot.
"I'll go get some," he offers.
Emery glances at the tent in his boxers and asks if he's just going to pray that everyone in the ER ignores his elephant in the room while he nips in and out of the supply closet for a condom. Jack laughs, his fingers featherlight on her hips as he tugs her closer. He pushes himself up to a better seated position so he can kiss her. Jack whispers that he can still make her feel good then. He's about to press her against the couch and get on his knees when Emery stops him and says that she needs him inside her.
"Baby, just fuck me," she groans into his ear. She's got an IUD for a reason, right? If boning Jack Abbot during a snowstorm isn't the reason, then what's the point? "I haven't been with anyone but you. And you better not have—"
"Only you, Walsh," he confirms, his voice strangled with desire when he asks if she's sure. If the choice is between fucking him right now and not fucking him right now, there's not much of a choice. Her entire body is sizzling with a need to be as close to him as possible and that's not going to go away with a riveting game of checkers instead.
"Hey egomaniac, I'm not going to beg you," Emery replies before nipping at his jaw.
Jack pulls back and grins at her, practically telegraphing that he's about to say something that will make her reconsider how much she wants him. He pulls on her arm until Emery is in his lap, knees on either side of him as Jack leans forward and chuckles, "I knew you wouldn't fuck a guy named Tommy."
"I'm about to ride you until we're both begging to come and you're thinking about Hibachi Guy right now?" Emery asks incredulously. She starts to push off him while asking if Jack wants her to arrange a playdate between them instead. Jack grabs her arm and pulls Emery back into his orbit before kissing an apology against her clavicle.
"But Emery, you're the one who went out on a date with him." He sounds mostly amused but there's also the smallest hint of resignation in his voice that she normally might not have picked up on if she hadn't spent the last year cataloguing all his little nuances.
She cups his face between her hands and makes him look up at her.
"Jack, I didn't even make it to the spatula spinning before I was driving back here to antagonize you. Who else is going to inspire that kind of devotion?"
"You are very committed to the bit," he concedes.
"And you're so easily distracted," she says before getting her hands back on him.
"You're very distracting."
Jack pulls her in for an extremely distracting kiss before he rocks up into her, both of them groaning at the familiar sensation. Emery can feel every ridge of him, her insides igniting with hot desire and then the soothing relief of getting everything she wanted. Her entire body seems to buzz on a different frequency when she kisses Jack desperately, the punched-out moan escaping her lips involuntarily once he's fully seated inside her. Jack watches her face for directions, the tacit acceptance of her inherent bossiness making everything so much better than it ever has been with anyone else.
"What do you need?" he whispers against her hairline.
"You," she breathes out as she lifts herself up before rolling her hips down onto him. Her walls flutter around him as Walsh groans, "You. Just you. Always you. God, Jack, I missed you."
Jack's fingers dig into her hips as he tries to be good and let her take what she wants from him without thrusting up. He's always doing that – letting her take, take, take even if it means giving her more space than either of them wants away from each other. She mumbles I'm sorry into his brow, smooths I didn't mean it against his chest, breathes you're it for me against his ear until his grasp on control frays and he's circling her clit with his thumb and telling her to let go, it's okay, let go, Em.
She comes with a shudder against him, his fingers still moving above where they're joined so that it feels like she never makes it down to the ground before the rollercoaster is cresting once more. She nods at him just once before Jack's hips are snapping against hers, Emery anchoring herself by grabbing onto his shoulders while he fucks up into her. She thinks vaguely about how thankful she is that no one else is stuck here tonight, the sounds emanating from her office bordering on obscene. The drag of him inside her is so good that she cries out his name even before her vision goes white, Jack groaning against her neck that he's so fucking close.
"Where—"
"Here." Emery tries to move even closer to him, to lock them in place even as his eyes go wide and then glassy as she scrapes her nails against his back. It's that final bit of pleasure-pain that cracks the dam, Jack pushing her over the edge with him until they're both coming with a kind of desperation that Emery hasn't felt for another person in a long time.
"Happy anniversary, baby," he laughs into her ear once the world finally eases off the bright saturation of technicolor from a minute ago.
*
"What are you talking about?" Emery asks when she can finally feel her toes again. "What anniversary?"
The clarity of getting laid has reminded her that she is technically still on call so it might be prudent to have some clothes on in case she gets a stat call from Garcia, but apparently Jack has no such qualms as he leans back against the couch with his arms out wearing his underwear and nothing else.
"It's been a year."
"Since what?"
Emery feels like she's going insane. He's saying words but she has no context for them.
"Since we decided to give this a chance?" Jack asks. He looks amused.
"No way has it been a year—"
"I got an e-mail from PetSmart congratulating me on a year of pet ownership this month," Jack tells her matter-of-factly.
He doesn't have to say anymore. Has it really been a year since they walked into the pet store on their way back from brunch and walked out with an aquarium and two Gold Nugget Mollies that he insisted on naming Moby and Ahab?
Emery still remembers holding the plastic bag full of water in her lap as he drove them back to her place and saying as casually as she could, "I'm not solo parenting these things—"
"Moby and Ahab," he corrected with a smirk.
"So I guess we're going to have to fuck each other exclusively."
Emery pretended not to notice the crinkle in his eyes or the way his entire face lit up when Jack shrugged at the red light, "Guess so. I hear custody arrangements are a real pain in the ass."
She slams a K-cup into her single serve Keurig machine now and turns back to Jack with a frown.
"Why didn't you say anything sooner?"
Jack laughs. "Why do you think I wanted to go away this weekend?"
"Because your ex-wife asked—"
Jack shakes his head. "I asked Maggie if I could swap summer for winter."
"What the fuck, Jack? You never said—"
"You were too busy kicking me out of your apartment! I wanted to mitigate the damage."
"You had three weeks!"
"I thought eventually you'd figure it out. I also had full confidence in my charming personality."
Emery raises an eyebrow before deadpanning, "No wonder it took so long to get back together."
"Well, I was going to drop by if you didn't cave by next week to ask for joint custody of Moby and Ahab as a conversation starter." Emery's shoulders fall as she sighs and slumps against the wall next to her coffee cart. She gathers her hair and twists it into a bun while Jack watches her cautiously. His voice is soft when he assures her that it's fine. "No harm, no foul. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?"
"I went out with Hibachi Guy on the day before our anniversary," she says miserably. "I'm every objectively terrible stereotype of a surgeon you could think of."
Jack springs to his feet, crosses the room to wrap his arms around her, and laughs into the crown of head that she's not objectively terrible. "You're actually pretty great."
"We were broken up for our anniversary, Jack."
"It's today so technically we were very much back on," he counters. "We can always celebrate on the bearskin rug next year, Em."
"It'll still be flammable then," she deadpans. "Besides, it's not the same."
Jack pulls back and says, "So next year we can celebrate the one-year anniversary of me blowing your mind in your office during a snowstorm."
Emery rolls her eyes. "Do you really need the ego boost? Also, how am I even going to explain that to Shamsi when I ask for the weekend off? Not to mention, it's way too wordy."
Jack smirks.
"Fine. First anniversary of when we decided to move in together."
"We didn't—"
He looks at her very seriously and says, "I think we should move in together."
"Are you saying this because you want something to celebrate next year?"
"I'm saying this because I had to sleep alone for three weeks and almost lost my mind. Because I missed my fish and I really missed you and I'd rather not do that ever again."
The corner of Emery's mouth quirks up. "I don't think you can just invite yourself to move into my apartment, Jack. That's poor form."
"So you do it."
She pretends to consider it for a second. She grabs the Popeye mug from the Keurig and takes a sip of Peet's medium roast before suggesting, "Say Jack, do you want to—"
"Yes."
"I could've asked you anything, you know?"
"The answer still would've been yes," Jack says before taking the mug from her and placing it on the table next to them so he can pull Emery in for a kiss. "You're not one to take no for an answer."
Before she can suggest a bunch of other things she would probably say yes to right now, both of their phones go off with stat pages.
*
They must have started clearing the roads because when they get down to the ER, there's a steady trickle of patients being put into rooms. Garcia waves at her in front of a room with a head lac while Jack meets EMS as they wheel a guy with the bone sticking out of his leg into Trauma 1.
"What's the story?" Walsh asks Garcia when she reaches her.
"Hemodynamically stable, but free fluid in the retroperitoneum on FAST exam."
"Get her a CT."
"Already ordered."
Garcia pauses for a second.
"And…?"
"So just for future reference," Garcia starts cautiously, "the thing about the Vatican is that…it's not soundproof."
And that is how Emery Walsh learns that her office is right above the attending call room.