Work Text:
Frank is eating lunch alone at a table by the window when Mel spots him from across the cafeteria.
“Doctor Langdon!” she calls—waving like one of the Muppets, coming perilously close to dropping her tray. “Can I join you?”
“Uh, yeah,” Frank says, nudging a chair out for her with one sneakered foot. “Sure thing.” He’s not in the mood to talk, particularly, but it’s also not like he’s in a position to be turning down anybody’s collegial workplace overtures. He’s been back a couple of weeks now; Robby is off on his fucking walkabout, which is a relief, but the rest of them will still barely look at him, dropping their voices abruptly when they see him coming down the hall. Frank doesn’t blame them, not really, though it’s easy to forget that. He’s a car wreck; he’s poison. He’d probably act the same way, if the situation was reversed.
The only person who seems sincerely happy to see him is–well, Mel, actually, who’s cracking the cap on a bottle of pink lemonade and beaming at him across the table. She’s got a turkey burger from the grill, which is what Frank had for dinner last night. Since coming back to work he eats all his meals in the cafeteria, except for the meals that are Power Bars, which he eats standing up beside his new locker or over the sink in his new apartment, an efficiency two-bedroom a ten-minute walk from the hospital with mildew in the shower and the smallest stove he’s ever seen. “How’s your shift been so far?” she asks. “Any update on the chest pain lady?”
They talk about patients for a while, and how hot it is outside, and whether they have plans for the weekend. “I’ll be here,” Mel reports. Frank will be here, too. He used to hate working weekends, the feeling of being stuck in the ER while everybody else was out riding bikes to the fucking farmer’s market or whatever other families did on Saturday mornings. Now, though, a 12-hour shift sounds positively idyllic compared to spending the day sitting alone on his couch watching old Vin Diesel movies at the Sad Dad Home for Recovering Addicts Whose Wives Have Kicked Them Out.
In Abby’s defense, Frank thinks as he opens a bag of kettle chips, it’s not like he was husband of the year even before the benzos. A trial separation, they keep calling it. “Are you going to, like–what,” he asked when she proposed the idea, his voice cracking a little. They were standing in the kitchen, the kids’ lunchboxes half-packed on the counter. He was holding a jar of sun butter in one hand. “Are you going to fuck other guys?”
“That’s what you’re asking me right now?” Abby rubbed a palm over her face. “I don’t know, Frank. Honestly, at this moment I cannot even imagine how I would summon the energy.”
Mel is still talking, halfway through a story about her sister somehow setting off the fire alarm in their apartment with an essential oil diffuser. Frank forces himself to lock back in. He likes Mel—the refreshing straightforwardness of her, her neat little no-bullshit braid. And yeah, he’s clocked the fact that she might have a tiny—whatever. A crush, aimed in his general direction. But that’s harmless, Frank thinks; it’s sweet, even. It’s actually kind of reassuring that there’s even one person in all of metropolitan Pittsburgh who doesn’t think he’s a total and entire waste of space.
“I should get back down there,” he says at last, balling up his napkin and offering her the kettle chips across the table. “You want to finish these?”
“Oh, yeah, totally,” Mel says, her fingertips brushing his when she reaches up to take the bag. “Thanks, Doctor Langdon.”
Frank huffs a laugh, he can’t help it. “You can use my first name, Mel.”
“Really?” Mel half-smiles, the bashful expression on her face making her look even younger than usual. “Are you sure?”
Frank nods. “I think that’s fine,” he says seriously. “I mean, we’re snack-sharing friends at this point, so.”
“Snack-sharing friends,” Mel repeats. “Is that what we are?”
Careful, Frank thinks to himself out of nowhere, the voice in his head sounding suspiciously like Robby’s. But: “Yeah,” he says out loud. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Okay then,” Mel says—still smiling, looking down at the chip bag. Her eyelashes cast little shadows on her face. “See you down there.”
“See you down there,” Frank agrees.
*
So. They’re snack-sharing friends after that, assuming the definition of snack-sharing friends is “coworkers who sometimes get each other Takis from the good vending machine and pull each other in on interesting cases”. It’s funny: Frank remembered Mel as coltish and uncertain, as being talented but really fucking green, but in the months he’s been gone she’s gotten her legs underneath her, is quietly but visibly confident in a way he hadn’t noticed before. Frank feels—this is stupid—but as the weeks go by he finds he feels weirdly safe with her, like nothing too terrible is going to happen as long as she’s there in the room with him. Every once in a while he realizes, embarrassingly, that he’s been following her around all day like he’s her fucking dog.
They work a bunch of shifts in a row together at the end of the summer, when everybody with someplace to go is on vacation—the two of them taking their breaks at the same time if it’s quiet, standing outside in the heat of the afternoon. On Wednesday he brings her a can of cheesy Pringles. On Thursday she brings him a pack of oatmeal pies. On Friday he brings two pints of Ben & Jerry’s in an insulated lunch bag, and the look of pure delight on her face when she unzips it makes him feel about ten feet tall.
“Is it sad that this has been basically the best week of my entire summer?” Frank asks her on Sunday. It’s a new schedule now, people trickling back from their various trips to the Great Lakes and the Poconos. Dana caught them heading outside together with matching bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and gave them both a funny look.
“Oh, yeah,” Mel agrees. “That’s really sad.” Then, peering at him a little uncertainly: “Wait. You’re making a joke, right?”
Frank clears his throat. He hasn’t told her about Abby, who took the kids to visit her mom in Cleveland for two weeks without talking to him about it, who mentioned recently that she’s been seeing a CPA who lives in Point Breeze. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, no, of course.”
And look: Frank knows he’s lonely. He hasn’t lived by himself since–he’s never lived by himself before now, not really. He misses being properly married. He misses his kids: their warm, heavy bodies, their dank morning breath. Eating shitty junk food in the ambulance bay with Mel doesn’t make any of that ache less. But also–and Frank has spent enough time in fucking counseling this year to be able to admit this, even if it’s only halfway and just to himself–it isn’t nothing, either.
“Break’s over,” Mel announces, both their phones beginning to vibrate in tandem.
“Break’s over,” Frank agrees, reaching out to tug her braid on their way back inside.
*
The first week the public schools are back in session they lose two little kids to a drunk driver, their small bodies smashed beyond recognition, their perfect brains bashed to pulp. Four and seven, both of them still wearing the same Native-brand water shoes Tanny and Pen ran around in all summer. A nightmare. A pointless fucking waste.
Hey, Frank texts Abby when it’s over–standing alone in the stairwell, trying to catch his breath. Can you have the kids FaceTime when you pick them up? Tough one here. It takes him a long time to type the message, his hands shaking so hard he keeps almost dropping the phone.
Frank bends over with his palms against his knees, trying to focus. On a normal day he actually misses the drugs a lot less than he thought he would, but he sure as shit misses them now, the way they narrowed his field of vision and filed all the sharp edges away. It feels like too much all of a sudden: the way he couldn’t save those kids, the way he can’t save his fucking marriage. The way he’ll perpetually, for the rest of his entire career, be one false move from never being able to be a doctor ever again.
He hears the door to the stairwell creak open, the familiar squeak of Mel’s sneakers on the linoleum. “Hey,” she says quietly, “Doctor Whitaker said he thought he saw you come out here. Are you okay?”
Frank straightens up so fast he gets lightheaded. “I’m great,” he announces–sniffling, swiping the heel of his hand across his face. Fuck, this is humiliating. “Why, do I not look great to you?”
Mel doesn’t laugh. She’s changed into a clean set of scrubs, her expression calm and curious. “Can I ask you something?” she says. “Are you a hugger?”
Frank snorts a wet-sounding laugh. “Fuck no,” he says vehemently, then opens his arms so that she can walk into them. “Come here, though.”
Mel comes. They stand like that for a long time, her arms locked tight around his waist and her head on his shoulder, his hand curled around the back of her skull. He can feel her heart beating against his chest. Eventually Frank starts to relax, his own pulse slowing down, his eyes slipping shut for a second or two. It could be nice, he thinks before he can stop himself, to hold her like this all the time.
“Oh-kay,” he says, pulling away so fast he almost trips backwards and winds up sprawled across the staircase. “Back to work, right?”
Mel blinks–stepping back also, wiping her hands on her scrub pants. “Back to work,” she agrees.
Something changes between them after that. Frank doesn’t know how to describe it except that the definition of snack-sharing friends has broadened to include people who touch each other’s lower backs instead of saying excuse me, who sometimes lace their fingers together for a second after they high five. It’s nothing especially intentional. It’s not, like, overt. It’s nothing, Frank thinks, that anyone else would ever even notice, except one day as they’re leaving a patient’s room he reaches over to tuck the tag of Mel’s hoodie back into her collar, his fingertips just brushing the warm skin of her neck, and he hears someone make a quiet, cough-adjacent sound in the distance. He looks over and sees Santos watching them, an unmistakably suspicious expression on her face.
Frank drops his hand immediately, then raises it again, tugging reflexively at his stethoscope. Fuck, that’s all he needs, a sexual harassment complaint in his file on top of everything else. Can you make a sexual harassment complaint on someone else’s behalf, he wonders? Jesus Christ, does Mel think she’s being sexually harassed?
If she does, she isn’t acting like it: “Where’d you go?” she asks, turning around when she realizes he isn’t right behind her like he was a second ago. Then, frowning at him owlishly through her glasses: “Yikes, you look like you’re about to be sick.”
“Uh, yeah,” he says. He’s frozen in the middle of the hallway, trying not to glance over to see if Santos is still looking. “I mean, no, no. I’m good.”
“Okay,” Mel says uncertainly. “Well, I’m going to run up and grab lunch in a minute, if you want to come with?”
But Frank shakes his head. “I’ve got some charts to catch up on,” he lies. “I’ll see you later.”
*
He doesn’t see her later. In fact, he avoids her almost completely for the rest of the week, volunteering for a shift in triage purgatory and trading for an overnight that leaves him groggy and mean. He tells himself it’s for the best–the whole situation was getting weird, clearly, and Frank has been letting it happen because he’s starved for positive attention and there’s literally nothing else going on in his life, but enough is enough. They’re coworkers; he’s her supervisor, technically. This is his entire fucking career.
She catches up with him as he’s leaving the ED on Friday night, zipping up his jacket in the ambulance bay and ducking his head against the chill in the air. It’s the end of September, real fall coming; they’re forecasting rain all weekend long. “Doctor Langdon!” she calls, jogging a little until she reaches him. “Um. Frank.” She smiles, out of breath. “There you are.”
“Here I am,” Frank says, still walking. “How you doing, Mel?”
“Good.” Mel trots along beside him for a minute. “Hey. Um. I just wanted to–are we okay?”
Frank stops and turns to look at her, scrubbing a hand through his hair. He missed her all week, is the truth: her dorky jokes and the way she never tries to pawn off procedures that are gross or annoying, the way she makes funny faces at him sometimes if she catches his eye across the charge desk. He missed making funny faces back at her. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah, of course we’re good.”
“Okay,” Mel says, her expression wavering somewhere between relieved and profoundly unconvinced. “Well. The reason I’m asking is because it felt the last few days like maybe you were…avoiding me.”
“Did it?” Frank asks blandly. “No, not at all. Just busy, I guess.”
Mel accepts that with a nod, tucking her hands into her hoodie pockets. “Okay,” she says again. “Well. Good.”
They stand there for a minute, neither one of them saying anything. They breathe. Frank feels like a total bastard, both in general because he knows it’s shitty, gaslight-y behavior on his part and specifically because it’s Mel on the receiving end of it, Mel who takes everything both to heart and at face value. She deserves a better man than him.
Fuck, not that he’s—that they’re—
“Listen,” he hears himself say, glancing over his shoulder at the sliding doors of the hospital. “You leaving right now? You want to go grab some dinner?”
Mel’s eyes widen. “Really?” she asks, lighting up from the inside out like the houses in Shadyside at twilight. “Don’t you have to get home?”
“I don’t, actually.” Frank shakes his head. “Abby and I are–taking some time apart.” It’s the first time he’s said it out loud to anyone other than the counselor and it feels terrible, no mistake about it, though not actually as bad as he would have guessed. “So. Nobody’s waiting on me.”
A thousand expressions flicker over Mel’s face in rapid succession: surprise, confusion, something else he doesn’t totally recognize. “Oh, no,” she says, sounding sincerely sad for him. “Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“It’s fine,” Frank reassures her, wanting to dispense with this part as efficiently as possible. “It happened a while ago. It’s for the best.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, if you need to get home to your sister, or–”
“No,” she interrupts. “No, I don’t either.”
They go to a taco truck on the far side of the park. There are benches nearby, a couple of metal picnic tables, but the rain starts just as the cashier passes them their food through the window, the temperature dropping what feels like ten degrees all at once. “My apartment is like a two minute walk from here,” Frank offers. Then, hearing how it sounds: “I mean, if you wanted to come and eat there. Watch bad TV for an hour or something.”
Mel smiles. “Is that what you usually do after shift?”
In fact what Frank usually does after shift is go to a meeting, FaceTime his kids to say goodnight so they don’t forget who the fuck he is altogether, then jerk off in the shower before falling face first onto his headboardless bed, but: “Sometimes,” is all he says.
Mel nods. There are raindrops on her glasses. “Okay,” she says. “Lead the way.”
It starts to feel like a supremely bad idea as soon as they approach his building. It’s mostly hospital people who live here—mainly interns and PAs, and nobody Frank knows especially well. Still, that doesn’t mean he necessarily wants anyone to catch him bringing Mel up the stairs to his apartment on a Friday night. In the end the hallway is empty, though; Frank unlocks the door and drops the keys in the little clay pot Tanner made him at summer camp, flipping the switch for the overhead light before immediately turning it off again and reaching for a floor lamp instead.
“So this is it,” he says, motioning around at the contents of the living room: the ancient papasan chair his brother had in storage, the little indoor trampoline he got as a bribe for the kids. I own a house with a yard, he wants to tell her. I’m a functioning adult; I’m a man. Instead he nods at the couch, which was the second-cheapest model on Amazon and which groans precariously every time anyone is bold enough to sit down on it. “I would say make yourself comfortable, but unfortunately that’s fully impossible in here.”
Mel shakes her head. “It’s not so bad,” she says. “I like it.”
Frank smirks. “Is that the first lie you’ve ever told in your entire life?”
He’s joking, or sort of joking, but Mel doesn’t laugh. “It’s not a lie,” she says, looking around thoughtfully. “It’s small, but it’s got big windows. And it smells like you, so I like that.”
She says it without any particular affect, so there’s no reason for Frank to feel like someone has reached directly into his chest and squeezed. He likes how she smells, too—clean, like drugstore shampoo and medicated Chapstick, sometimes like the honey packets she squeezes into her tea—but the idea of saying it out loud makes him feel like a pervert, so instead he busies himself getting a couple of plates from the kitchen while she goes into the bathroom to wash her hands.
He texts his sponsor while she’s in there, too, a restaurant chef named John who’s been clean for 11 years and inexplicably communicates like a preteen girl from 2004. I want to do something really stupid, Frank types, hitting the button to send before he can talk himself out of it.
John’s reply is immediate: r u going to use?
Worse, Frank thinks. No, he types instead. Not that.
Go 2 a meeting neway, John advises. Text me when u get there.
Frank replies with a thumbs up just as Mel comes out of the bathroom. “Everything okay?” she asks.
“Everything’s great,” he says, tucking the phone back into his pocket. “You want something to drink?”
He gets her a can of seltzer from the twelve pack that’s basically the only thing in his dorm-sized fridge, and they sit at his two-person table eating their tacos and watching Treehouse Masters on Apple, which Mel promises is really interesting. It’s not, but Frank doesn’t particularly care. He likes having her here, likes how intently she’s looking at the TV screen. He likes watching her eat.
It’s almost ten o’clock by the time the second episode is over. Mel gets up and stretches, a sliver of stomach just visible between her scrub pants and her shirt. “It’s a good show, right?” she asks him cheerfully, heading into the tiny galley kitchen to throw out their trash.
“Yeah.” Frank hesitates for a moment, then gets up and follows her in there, watching as she sets their plates in the sink. He doesn’t want her to go, but he doesn’t know how to tell her that except to just come out and say it, which would catapult him clear over the line. Mel is incredibly literal: he invited her here to eat tacos, and they have now eaten the tacos, which in Frank’s experience means as far as she’s concerned this interaction is ov—
“So, you’re separated?” she blurts.
Frank blinks. “Yeah,” he says slowly, stopping cold in the doorway of the kitchen. “I’m separated.”
“Are you going to get divorced?” she asks, then blushes. “Sorry, I know that’s none of my business, I just meant—“
“It’s okay,” Frank interrupts–coming a little bit closer, curling one hand around the countertop. “I don’t know, honestly. I think probably yes.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
“Is that a lie?”
Just for a second, Frank lets his gaze drop to her mouth. “Yeah,” he admits, “a little bit.” He swallows, hearing his throat click. “It’s not the first one I’ve ever told, though.”
Mel bites her lip. “Dr. Santos talked to me about you,“ she confesses quietly.
Oh, of course she fucking did. The fury is immediate, startling in its intensity; Frank forces himself to take a breath. “Yeah?” he asks casually, trying to keep his voice even. “What did she say?”
“That she…had noticed how I act around you sometimes. Or how we act around each other.” Mel sounds embarrassed now, not quite looking at him, one hand gripping her opposite elbow. “And that I should be careful.”
“Careful of me?”
Mel nods.
Frank tries to absorb that for a minute without reacting, which is something he’s been practicing with the counselor. It’s decent advice, probably, which doesn’t change the fact that the thought of anyone saying it to Mel makes him wish he was dead. “What do you think?”
Mel doesn’t hesitate. “I don’t think you’d ever hurt me,” she says, shrugging a little belligerently. “I just—I don’t think you would.”
Oh Jesus. Frank takes two big steps across the kitchen and kisses her. There’s no moment of deciding to do it but it’s also not really surprising, given how hard he’s been trying not to and the well-documented shittiness of his impulse control. Mel doesn’t actually seem that surprised, either: instead she kisses him back right away, her hands fluttering at her sides for a moment before landing on his shoulders and squeezing. Squeezing again. Frank hasn’t kissed anyone but Abby in fifteen years and it’s strange, the feeling of it: Mel’s pulse thumping rabbit-fast at the base of her neck, right where his thumb is. The slight but not-unnoticeable clumsiness of her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” Frank says finally, pulling back and knocking his forehead lightly against hers. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t–this is really fucking inappropriate.”
“Is it?” Mel sounds almost curious. “Because it’s not against hospital policy.” She shrugs again when he raises his eyebrows, wondering how she would possibly know that. “I looked it up once. Just to see.”
Frank feels like his heart is going to break. “Mel,” he says quietly, and kisses her again.
It goes on like that for a while: her back against his kitchen counter, his cock pressed against her hip. Eventually he walks her down the short, narrow hallway toward his bedroom, still kissing her: on her mouth, on her soft neck, on her cheekbone underneath the tiny mole there, which he’s been trying not to think about for the last three weeks at least. He tugs at the hem of her t-shirt once they’re standing beside his mattress, his fingertips just grazing the warm skin of her waist. “Can I take this off you?” he asks.
Mel nods, and he strips it over her head: she’s wearing a sports bra underneath, the military-industrial kind with thick molded cups and a bunch of crisscrossed straps at the back. Frank palms her as best he can through three layers of Spandex, rubbing his thumb across her nipple until she lets out a quiet squeak. “Is that okay?”
“Yeah,” she promises, pressing herself into his hands like a cat looking to get scratched. “Yes.”
So Frank keeps touching her: mapping her breasts and her ribs and her stomach, squeezing her ass with both hands. He works her scrubs down over her hips, then her plain black underwear, nudging her backwards until she’s lying fully undressed in his bed. Her skin is so pale, her small pink nipples drawn up hard and tight in the light from the IKEA lamp on the dresser. Looking at her makes Frank’s whole body ache.
“Come here,” he says, kneeling down in front of her, hooking his hands behind her knees to pull her to the edge of the mattress and wrapping an arm around her thigh. He’s desperate to get her off, desperate to prove he can take care of her. I don’t think you’d ever hurt me, she told him–the unspoken implication being, of course, that everyone else thinks he would.
He licks her for a long time, sucking gently at her clit and working one careful finger inside her. He’s good at this; at least, Abby always said he was good at it. He guesses she could have been lying. He can’t tell one way or the other, with Mel; she’s so new to him and so quiet, her hands fisted tight in the sheets. “That feel good?” Frank asks her finally, turning to rub his face against the inside of her thigh.
Mel flinches. “Um,” she says. When he glances up he sees her eyes are open, her gaze trained on the crack in his bedroom ceiling. “No, not really.”
Frank blinks. “Okay,” he says carefully—sitting back to give her space, trying not to react to the bluntness of it one way or the other. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No, I want–” Her hips shift against the mattress, fretful. “I don’t want to stop.”
Frank swallows. “What do you want?” he asks, tracing a circle over her kneecap with his thumb. “What do you like?”
“I don’t know.” She sounds slightly panicked. “I think I’m, like–too naked.”
She’s not, actually. In fact, if there was a way for her to be even more naked than she already is, that would be Frank’s preference, but: “Okay,” he says again. He’s still fully dressed, his leaking erection pressed uncomfortably against the inside of his jeans. “That’s okay.” He climbs onto the bed beside her, pulling the blankets up over them both. “That better?” Then, when she nods: “What do you do when you’re by yourself?”
“What, you mean like–?” Mel throws an arm over her face, visibly scandalized. “That’s a very personal question.”
A very personal–Jesus Christ. “Sorry,” Frank says. Fuck, this was a bad idea; he knew it was a bad idea, and he did it anyway, because he’s a self-sabotager with no morals or consideration for how his actions might affect other people, and now– “I didn’t mean to–”
But Mel shakes her head. “No, I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t–this is embarrassing.”
“It’s not embarrassing,” he says, peeling her arm off her face so she’ll look at him. “Why is it embarrassing?”
Mel squirms, still hesitating. Frank’s about to call the whole thing off–the last thing he wants is to accidentally push her too hard, to be some douchebag who can’t be bothered to hear what a girl isn’t explicitly saying–but then her hips shift again and all at once he realizes: it’s not that she’s uncomfortable. It’s that she’s frustrated. It’s that she’s turned on.
“It’s hot,” he promises immediately, his mouth right down by her ear. “I think it’s so hot, Mel. You don’t have to show me anything you don’t want to show me but please hear me when I say the thought of you getting yourself off is, like, the very opposite of embarrassing to me.” He ruts against her hip for a second, half-helpless. Fuck, he’s so fucking hard. “Do you feel that?” he asks. “That’s how hot I think it is. Nobody needs to be embarrassed, okay? Let’s make a deal that nobody needs to be embarrassed at all.”
“Okay.” Mel gasps raggedly. “Okay. Okay. I usually–” she breaks off, gesturing vaguely. “On my stomach.”
Franks nods about a thousand times. “Okay,” he echoes, his voice cracking a little. “On your stomach, then.”
She rolls over and slides one hand underneath her body. Frank slings a leg over her hips, dropping down on top of her so his chest is against her back, bracing his weight on one elbow to keep from crushing her. “Can I help you?” he murmurs in her ear.
Mel nods into the pillows, lifting her hips to give him access. Frank palms her stomach, then slides his hand down her body–feeling the rise of her, scritching his fingers through the hair. She’s rougher with herself than he would have thought to be. Frank slips his own fingers lower, working one of them back inside her; Mel whines a high, needy sound, then murmurs something he doesn’t quite hear. “What?” Frank asks, dropping his face down alongside hers. “Mel, honey, tell me again?”
Mel lifts her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “I said, I can take more.”
“Oh, fuck.” Frank gives her what she’s after, adding a second finger and then a third, trying to think about anything but how hot and tight and wet she is around him. Trying not to come inside his pants. He loses his balance for a second with the effort of it, the weight of his body pitching forward so he’s briefly flush on top of her, pressing her down into the bed. “Sorry,” he says, righting himself quickly, but Mel shakes her head.
“Wait,” she gasps. “Wait wait wait, come back. Do that again.”
Frank blinks, abruptly getting it—giving her his full weight, pinning her down against the mattress. “Like that?” he asks her quietly, and Mel nods.
“Yes,” she whispers. “Oh, my God, yes please.”
In the end he thinks it might be the full-body pressure as much as anything else that does it for her, the way she gasps and cries out and reaches back for him, her hand groping for his hair. She touches the side of his face, her thumb slipping haphazardly into his mouth; Frank closes his eyes and scrapes his teeth along the pad of it, trying not to grind himself too obviously against her ass.
He slides his fingers gently out of her when she’s finished, licking them clean as she sits blinkingly upright. “Um.” Her cheeks are bright pink. “Thank you.”
Frank huffs a laugh. “You’re welcome,” he tells her. “I liked that.”
“Me too. Um. Obviously.” She looks sweetly sheepish—her hair falling out of its braid, frizzing up all along her hairline. She’s still wearing her glasses. “What about you?”
Frank shrugs. “What about me?” he asks—as if his raging hard on isn’t obvious, as if he doesn’t want to fuck her more ferociously than he’s wanted anything since he finally got clean. “I’m good; I’m gonna go out there and watch a little more Treehouse Masters, maybe check the score of the Pirates game.”
He’s teasing her, but Mel blanches, and right away Frank feels like a dick. “Mel,” he says, reaching out and running his knuckles up and down her arm. “I’m kidding.”
“Oh,” she says, “right. Of course.”
They’re quiet for a minute, the silence awkward and elastic. Frank doesn’t know how to ask her to touch him, how to ask her for anything; the idea of making any kind of sexual request seems suddenly and profoundly untoward. “I want—“ he tries, then snaps his mouth shut. “I mean, can I–”
“What?” Mel looks at him carefully. “Hey. Are you embarrassed?”
“No, it’s not—I don’t know.” Frank scrubs a hand over his face. The smell of her is on him everywhere, his chin and his shirt and his fingers, and it’s driving him half-insane. “Yeah, maybe a little.”
“We just made a deal, though, right?” Mel smiles. “No one needs to be embarrassed.”
Frank nods faintly. “We did,” he agrees, and takes a deep breath. “Mel, have you ever—?” He breaks off, wanting to be very, very careful here. “With another person, I mean.”
Mel frowns, then: “Oh, like, intercourse?” She shakes her head. “No, never.”
Frank nods. He’d already guessed that, he supposes, somewhere at the back of his secret brain; otherwise, he wouldn’t have asked. Still, the concrete knowledge of it–the fact of her telling him, how enormously much it suddenly matters to him that she trusts him to be first–hooks itself into some dark, shameful part of him and yanks. “Do you want to?” He holds his breath.
“With you? Now?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yeah, honey,” he tells her. “But that’s what I’m trying to say, that doesn’t mean we have to–”
“I want to,” she interrupts him urgently. “Yes.”
Oh Jesus. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Frank swallows hard. “Okay,” he says, his heart suddenly slamming away inside his rib cage like possibly it’s his first time, too. “Let’s…do that, then.”
He stands up for a minute to get his jeans off, reaching back to yank his t-shirt over his head. Mel watches him intently, one leg pulled up, her chin resting on her knee. “You’re very muscular,” she comments, and he laughs.
“Thanks.”
He does his boxers last, then takes a step toward her, one knee up on the mattress. Mel lifts a hand in his direction, then drops it halfway, leaves it hovering uncertainly in midair. “Can I—?”
“Yeah,” he says, a full click too eager. “Yes. Please.”
She touches him tentatively at first–running her palm over his chest and his stomach, tracing her finger along the thick line of hair that stretches down from his navel toward his cock. Frank groans loud and jagged when she finally wraps her hand around him, bucking up mindlessly into her fist.
Mel grins—a real grin, unselfconscious and lovely. “Oh, wow,” she murmurs–jacking him slowly, watching her own hand move. “You really like that, huh?”
She’s not even fucking teasing him, she’s literally just stating an empirical fact as she has observed it, but just like that Frank’s way too close. “Yeah. Stop, though, honey.” He grabs her wrist to still her, breathing hard through his nose. “Stop for a sec.”
Her face falls. “Is that not–?”
“It’s great,” he promises quickly. “You’re so good, you’re perfect, I just want to–” make sure I get to fuck you, he thinks and doesn’t say. “Come here to me.”
He lies down on his back and shoves a pillow behind his head, motioning for her to climb up on top of him. “It’ll be better like this,” he promises; then, thinking of how it went earlier: “and if it’s not we’ll try something else until it is.”
Mel nods seriously, hovering above him. Frank reaches between her legs and touches her for a minute, wanting to make sure she’s ready. It would be better if he had lube for her, but he doesn’t; he’s lucky he even has condoms, an unopened box in the nightstand that he picked up right after he moved in as a silent fuck you too to Abby and has had absolutely zero occasion to use until now. He licks his thumb instead, pressing it against her clit until she starts to rock against it, until he can feel her getting wet again. He rolls the condom on and reaches down to line them up.
“You’re in charge, all right?” he promises, trying to hold as still as humanly possible.“You’re the boss.”
“Okay.” She’s got a look on her face he recognizes from work, her brow furrowed with concentration. She catches her tongue between her teeth as she works herself down onto his cock, taking him one slow inch at a time.
“That’s it,” Frank tells her, rubbing up and down her long, tense thighs. He wants to see her hair down; he wants to take a shower with her; he wants to pull her behind a curtain at work and suck a secret mark into her neck. It isn’t love, he reminds himself firmly; that’s not what he’s feeling here. He doesn’t know if there’s a word for what it is.
“I’m going to come again?” she says suddenly—asks, really, the surprise evident on her face. “I think?”
Frank grins, feeling like a genius, feeling like the smartest person in the world. “Yeah you are,” he promises as he drags her down against him, wrapping his arms around her and squeezing hard. “Just for me you are.”
“Oh,” Mel says softly, burying her face down into the crook of his neck and grinding herself down onto him. “Oh, my God, Frank.”
“Look at me,” he blurts, before he quite knows he’s going to say it. As soon as it’s out it’s all he can think about, the only thing he wants in the entire world. “Mel. Mel Mel Mel, please look at me.”
In the end she only does it for a second, but it’s enough to get the job done, the orgasm ripping through him like a train crash, like an explosion, like an emergency. He can’t stop saying her name.
They lie there for a long time once it’s over, not really talking. He thinks she probably needs to go home to her sister at some point, but he also thinks if he mentions it, she’ll get up. He’s half asleep when he feels her tracing her fingertip over his eyebrows, one then the other. Frank opens his eyes. “Hi,” he says.
“Sorry,” Mel says, a little guiltily. “Is that okay that I just did that?”
Frank tries to remember the last time anyone touched him that gently, and can’t. “Yeah,” he says, his voice cracking again, something dangerous happening deep inside his chest, and oh, this is going to be a problem for him, this is going to be so fucking bad. “Yeah, honey, that’s fine.”
Mel grins, looking sheepish. “I always wanted to,” she admits, “from the very first day I met you.” She rubs her nose against the soft inside of her arm, yawning a little. “I always thought it would be really nice.”