Work Text:
You can fuck
anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?
– Ilya Kaminsky
Samira doesn't think the Jack Abbot she knows is the same one everyone else does.
The Abbot they get is confident bordering on cocky, walks with a bounce to his step, tossing quips over his shoulder with an ET tube pinched between his fingers. Patients love him easily. Ask for him when he's not there. Women and men, all ages, everyone. The residents do too. He's unfazed by anything; horrific traumas, belligerent family members, pain that turns grotesque and unbelievable. Looks in the face of it all with his shoulders set, cocking an eyebrow. He doesn't smile often, but when he does it's like he's forgotten himself momentarily. Crooked teeth that turn his face boyish and open, make it easy for people to imagine the man he might have been twenty, twenty-five years ago. Red hair, some army base in the Middle East. Head tilted back, laughing.
With Samira he's serious. Quieter, more cautious. She can count on one hand the number of times he's cracked a joke when it's only them in the room. She'll notice him studying her, sometimes, when he thinks she can't see. He'll look at her intently, briefly, and then just as quickly unfocus his gaze. Trapped animal, guilty kid. She thinks for a long time that means he doesn't like her. Poisoned against her by Robby's complaints probably, traded on a park bench over beers, exchanged between patient rooms during handoff. Slow. Over-cautious. Too compassionate. Too analytical. Both, by turns. Robotic. Soft. She can't keep track.
But sometime midway through her second year, Jack is leaning against her locker when she goes to leave for the day. Staring down at his shoes, back stiff against hard metal. He looks up when he hears her. Twist of his lips into something like a smile.
"I—" He clears his throat, voice scratchy from the cold. "I read a study I thought you'd find interesting. Racial disparity in door-to-balloon times in rural hospitals." There are flecks of snow on the knit hat he's wearing, melting, wet, and he twists his wedding band around his ring finger. Dark, heavy tungsten. Material like military armor, worn for long enough that his finger bears the indent even when he moves it. His wife has been gone nine, maybe ten months. Sudden. Drunk driver. She died at a different hospital and Robby told the staff one by one a few days after, hollow dark circles under his eyes. By the time Samira tries to meet Jack's gaze, he's looked away again. "Can I email it to you?"
"Of course," she says. Touched, really. Warm. He was right, she would find it interesting. He'd noticed. So long she's felt small, walked-on, stepped-over, and Jack has seen her. He looks at her then, really, and his eyes are lighter than she thought they'd be. Green-brown, darker at the edges of his irises. She feels a surge of something low and electric in her body, like the hum of machinery. It makes her smile. "You know you don't have to ask for permission," she adds, and Jack shakes his head, a blush spreading up his neck.
"You impress me, Dr. Mohan," he says. "I want to make sure I'm worthy of your time."
So maybe he doesn't dislike her. Since then, they've exchanged journal articles and case studies weekly, returning them to each other annotated, questions in the margins. Dense emails with subject lines like I'm sorry I did not mean for this to be so long. They get breakfast together after night shifts, sometimes, when Samira works a double. Talk about research over eggs at a diner she likes. Sunrise, hot strong coffee. Jack pays before she can offer, bills on the table and an excessive tip, and he doesn't offer up any information about his life and Samira doesn't really know what questions to ask anyway. Observes him instead, the way he folds his arms across his chest when he's thinking, his neat handwriting, cream in his coffee and sugar and the evenings that he shows up for work with eyes red and tired. Files them away for something, to sort through later, to grasp at.
It's not friendship. Not really even adjacent to it. It's certainly not what Samira sometimes thinks she might like it to be. His hands against a patient's body, pale thick fingers in blue gloves. Wonders if he'd wear that same look of concentration if they were on her face, her back. Between her legs.
Lately, she's found herself searching him out at shift change. Little bell ringing in her chest when she spots his gray curls. Feeling like being bathed in warm sun. Relief. Even if they don't speak. To be near him only. And he stays Abbot, never Jack. Always an arm's length away.
Samira's six hours into her shift when she hears the chaos of SWAT bringing in an officer, knows without looking that Jack is with them. Rough scratched-through sound of his voice giving the rundown. She's with a patient and his presence prickles at the back of her neck. She's seen him like this before. Fatigues, tactical bulletproof vest. The staff whispers, Robby whistles after him. Mostly it just makes Samira think of a version of Jack before he was the way he is now, a version she'll never get to see. More layers to peel back, someone who she probably would have an even harder time understanding.
Twenty minutes and she's standing at the Hub when she sees him push through the doors of Trauma One, stripping off his gloves. He doesn't see her. She watches his back like a blur moving down the hallway and the stretcher after him with one of the vascular surgeons, heading towards the elevator. Robby shoves out shortly after and catches her eye, nodding his head in the direction Jack just disappeared.
"Will you check on him?" he says once he gets close enough. "He's got something— blood on his shoulder. He wouldn't let me near it in there."
"What?" Samira feels all the blood in her own body drain down somewhere below her knees. "He's hurt?"
Robby shakes his head, then nods, lands on some kind of bizarre half-gesture. "He's stubborn."
"Why would he let me, then?" she asks, but even as she does, she's turning on her heels. Robby's face is like always, screwed up in an expression she half-recognizes.
"I don't know that he will," he says, guarded. "But he trusts you, and he won't let me see him like that. Anymore."
Anymore. She doesn't know what to do with that. She can't imagine what the fuck he means, but she doesn't have to, because some force outside of herself is carrying her feet down the hallway in Jack's direction, leaving Robby looking after her, hands shoved in the pockets of his cargos.
It takes a few minutes of popping her head into the rooms of patients that don't belong to her before Samira finds him, yanking back the curtain in Central 6 to be met with Jack pulling a blood-stained T-shirt over his head, and the first thing she notices isn't the the exposed wound near his shoulder blade, open and angry-red, but the actual animal fact of his body in front of her.
His back, the wide pale expanse of it, the dark weather-beaten skin of his neck. Freckles sprayed across the tops of his shoulders, crowding the openness of his skin with something like texture. Tightening of the muscles there and then his arms. Unintentional, reflexive. She sees so many bodies, every day, in various states of undress. Today alone she's cut the clothes off of at least five people, trauma shears slicing through fabric to get at lacerations, to insert a tube between the intercostals, to attach cardiac monitors to their chests and backs. This is different, must be different. She feels her heartbeat in her stomach and lower, lower.
Jack whirls around to face her, posture almost defensive, and Samira can only think of the big cats in the nature documentaries she watches sometimes, when she can't sleep. The way they move, strength rolling under their skin. The way they'd rip another animal apart. She doesn't know why she's thinking about that. He's so pale under the fluorescent lights. He's bleeding, some, the bright red of it like paint.
"Sorry," she says.
The slightest tilt of a smile then, tugging up at the corner of his lips. Jack tosses the t-shirt down onto the bed and sits facing her. He's sweaty, curls plastered to the edges of his forehead. "Robby sent you to check on me?"
"He wanted to make sure you weren't administering your own medical care," she says just as Jack pulls the surgical tray towards himself and sets to ripping pieces of tape off the holder, sticking them along the edge. Practiced, matter-of-fact. "Which— I guess I should just tell him not to worry, then."
Jack laughs then, a little, and the sound is hoarse and a little alarming. She doesn't think she's ever heard it before. "I'm surprised he's not in here himself."
"He said you wouldn't let him see you like this anymore." The words trip out of Samira's mouth before she can stop them, and Jack's eyes flick up to meet hers, a question in them before he looks away. Swallows. "I don't know what that means."
"Mm, Robby's treated enough of my injuries for a lifetime." Jack makes another noise like laughter as he looks down to rip open a packet of antibacterial gel. Samira wonders if he'd hit his head. She peeks around at his back and sees a trail of fresh blood making its way from his shoulder blade that Jack seems unconcerned about. She doesn't know how to approach it, exactly. Knows what she would do if he was a patient, a real one, how she'd talk long enough to get her hands on him for an examination. As it is, she's frozen, isn't even sure how to ask. Can I touch you? You're bleeding and also it's all I think about.
Samira takes a step towards him and then back. Hesitates on the balls of her feet. "You're sure you're okay? You seem—"
Jack's eyes flick up to meet hers, a little surprised, before he looks back down at the tray in front of him. She watches his jaw clench, and her eyes trail down his neck to his sternum. Dusting of hair at the center of his chest, red gone mostly gray. Hair the same color trailing over his abdomen and down into the waistband of his pants. Dense muscle of his chest, the softened thickness of his waist. Jesus. Samira forces her gaze back to his face.
"I'm okay," he says. "Sorry, the adrenaline—" He grins, smile wider than she's seen before. "It'll wear off soon."
Samira takes another step towards him, careful, and his head stays still, but his eyes follow her movements, tracking them. Animal, again, but this time twitchy. Like prey. She feels guilty, moving into his space, but she gets closer, slowly, bit by bit, and he lets her.
"Can I take a look at your back?" she asks, and Jack tenses.
"It's okay," he says. "I got it."
Samira hums. "I know you do," she says, the words coming from somewhere entirely out of her body. "I just want to clean off some of the blood. Can I do that?"
After a long, impossibly still moment, Jack nods, and Samira's feet finally jolt her into movement, carrying her across the room to him. She reaches for a pair of gloves. Sensation of pulling them on almost grounding. Snap of nitrile at her wrists. Less nervous, like this. "I'm going to step behind you, okay?" she says, and Jack's quiet for a moment before nodding again, and then she's at his back, brain flicking through the differential.
Non-arterial, blood slowed now to a slow trickle, blooming and falling. Not a gunshot, although she wouldn't put it past Jack to be walking around completely normally afterwards. Something else then, sharp object that grazed the skin. Like he can sense her about to ask, Jack says, "Bullet got the edge of my vest."
Samira can't keep the surprise out of her voice. "You were shot?"
Jack huffs softly. "Shot at," he says, like it's an important distinction. Maybe to him it is.
"Can I touch you?" she asks then, quiet, and he visibly tenses.
"I think— I'm okay," he says, turning his head, and he straightens slightly, the movement pushing another trickle of blood from the abrasion on his back. Samira can see the furrow of it now, the divot in his skin. It makes her want to wince. She feels his skin like it's her own.
"I'm going to touch you," Samira says. "Sorry. I'm trying to be nice, but—"
"But you want to touch me." The wrinkles at the corners of Jack's eyes and mouth deepen just slightly, and she doesn't know how, but Samira can tell even from behind him that he's smiling.
"Yeah, Abbot," she says, a laugh bubbling in her chest. "I'm dying to touch you. This was all an elaborate plot."
He hums, a quiet, agreeable sound. "I knew it," he says, and Samira takes the opportunity to touch her hands to his skin, press the tips of her fingers lightly around the wound. Jack tenses under her hands.
"I got you," she says softly. A reflex, like she's treating a spooked child.
"I know," he says. "Sorry, Mohan."
"Stop apologizing." Samira reaches for a square of sterile gauze and presses it to Jack's back, tracing a careful path from Jack's mid-back to the edges of the abrasion, and Jack sucks in a sharp breath, nods as he holds it and lets it out slow, a conscious four-count. "What happened?" she asks.
He shakes his head. "Later," he says, and his voice sounds a little thin.
"Is the officer going to be okay?"
"I think." Jack nods just once, like he's reassuring himself, before hanging his head between his shoulder blades and letting her work. Staunch the bleeding, check for debris, antibacterial gel that she coats onto a swap and applies carefully, gentle.
He's silent the whole time, still, but his breathing is reedy, shaky, slightly labored, like it's held in his chest, and it makes Samira ache. He smells like chalky deodorant and sweat and she can see it dripping down the back of his neck, and she must be possessed or driven insane by the heat or out of her mind in some other way because she brings her free hand up to rest on his opposite shoulder and traces her gloved fingertips over the spray of freckles there and on his upper arm. Thick, dense muscle. Touching him like a dream almost. It echoes in her whole body.
Jack goes very still then, and quiet, like he's waiting for something. He lets her touch him for one long, drawn-out moment, then says softly, "Mohan," and she jolts away.
"God," she says. "Sorry. I think I'm—" She drops the swab back onto the tray and reaches for the bandage and tape, sets to covering the wound on his back quickly and methodically, like he's any other patient. Cotton gauze against his skin and then the bandage. "Done. Did you make a chart?"
Jack shakes his head slowly. "Don't want the paperwork," he says, and when Samira manages to look back at him, he's holding her gaze finally. The abruptness of it, unexpected. His eyes are sharp like stained glass. "Stay for a second?" he asks, and she swears his voice shakes.
The enormity of the day, of the board full of patients with her name next to them, the jagged sound of Robby's raised voice urging her faster, all of it is gone in an instant. Samira grabs the rolling stool from along the wall and pulls it towards her, sits. Looks up at Jack then and his fists are gathered in the fabric of his cargo pants and he's somehow paler. She's a little too far from him to take his hand, and she shouldn't anyway. She wants to.
"Did I hurt you?" she asks, and he shakes his head. "Do you need something? I— can get Robby." She doesn't want to get Robby. She wants to reach for his hands. She wants to reassemble and heal and fix. She wants to know what's wrong.
"No," he says. "Just sit still for a second. Please." He's gone stark white and his breaths tremble in the quiet of the room. Samira thinks about touching him. She thinks about it and the moment passes and she doesn't.
"Why do this?" she asks instead, voice taking on an obstinate sort of bluntness she normally reserves for Robby or her mother. "I'm sure you struggled when you were discharged. You never talk about it, with me at least, but you must have—" Doesn't know how to put it, exactly. I notice you. I watch you, I see things. I know you take exactly 160 milligrams of propranolol when you get in for every shift. I know you see a trauma specialist twice monthly, and you've tried everything, even electro-convulsive therapy. I know a third of your leg was brutally torn to pieces by an IED sometime between 2005 and 2007 because I've seen pictures of you and Robby during residency and then pictures of your wedding after, when you still used a wheelchair. "I can imagine," she says, lamely. "So why keep getting shot at?"
Jack's eyes are closed tight, but he's breathing, practiced intention of a man who does his therapy homework. Samira was terrible at therapy. She argued and stonewalled and never did a single thing she was supposed to.
"I want to," he says after a minute. "Something's wrong with me." Scoffs, the sound hollow and ringing, his eyes still closed. "The guys on SWAT, they've got… families. Kids. I'm— you know, I can put myself in harm's way and it matters less." His jaw tightens. "Nobody's waiting for me to come home."
The silence between them is weird and loaded and impossible. "I am," Samira says, surprising herself, and Jack's eyes fly open. "I mean, not home, but— here."
He reaches for her then, a sudden, jerking movement. Grips her hand in his. It's white-knuckle-tight and sort of hurts but it doesn't matter. The electrical pulse of her heart is so strong she may as well have been shocked. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," she says. "I don't really want to get here one day and find out, I don't know, Dr. Abbot's never coming back, he got shot. I'd— I don't know what I'd do, but it would be bad."
The corners of Jack's lips quirk up, and his thumb brushes the back of her hand. "I've been shot a lot of times, Dr. Mohan," he says, and she's not sure but she feels like she might be sort of glaring at him, her eyebrows creasing. Feeling of it such a relief it makes her lightheaded, like she's finally not lying about something.
"You're going to be fifty years old soon, Abbot," Samira says. "If there's ever a time to stop."
He laughs again, really, and it sounds different. There's blood back in his face, blushing warm and pink down to his still-bare chest and he hasn't let go of her hand. "Come here," he says, and Samira stands up so quickly she nearly trips over the legs of her stool.
She half-steps towards him and all of a sudden his hand is at the curve of her waist, hesitating, touching lightly her scrubs, and that's enough. She takes a lurching sort of lunge forward and wraps her arms around him, clumsy, hands grappling for purchase against the still-drying sweat of his back, and Jack leans his head towards her, pressing his forehead into hers so tightly she feels it in her neck.
"God," he breathes. "God. Fuck. I want—"
"Me too." Samira's never wanted something so much in her life. She can feel it thrumming under her skin and she's pretty certain she's entirely soaked through her underwear already.
"Why?" Jack asks, and she almost laughs until she realizes he means it, and then one of her hands trails down just below his jaw. She can feel his pulse hammering in his carotid, fast and wild. Samira absolutely cannot kiss him here, and he absolutely cannot kiss her back, but they're briefly close enough to feel what it might be like and when Jack breathes out against her mouth she tastes coffee and peppermint and honey.
"Is this still just the adrenaline?" she manages when she pulls away, stepping back a careful, plausible-deniability distance, and Jack huffs a laugh.
"No," he says.
Jack's driveway is made of gravel, and it crunches under the wheels of her car as she turns past his mailbox. Quiet, tree-lined street, white house with faded, peeling paint. She hasn't let herself imagine this, what he goes home to after a shift, and there's not much that would identify him anyway. Just the number above the front door, the two-car garage, an empty flagpole. Golden-hour sunlight through the trees and glancing off a poorly-maintained front lawn.
When Samira gets out of the car, every step echoes in her ears. Should be a warning, but instead feels like a rhythm, a beat urging her forward. She's still in her scrubs, should have gone home to change, to rinse off the lingering sharpness of rubbing alcohol and stale sweat, but she was too eager, drove here straight from the hospital, plugging the address that Jack had given her into her phone. Now she feels entirely unprepared, like she might shake out of her skin. What little concealer she'd put on that morning rubbed off hours ago, and the only makeup she has with her is chapstick. And she's standing on the doorstep of her attending, who she's had a hopeless crush on for the better part of two years, and who just a few hours ago touched her waist and her back and pressed his forehead into hers and breathed deeply against her body. Feels even now like she might be dreaming, might be walking into an ill-advised nightmare, a hallucination, and still she's never wanted anything so much. For the whole thing to unfurl beneath them, to ease him open and see inside.
He answers the door almost immediately, leaning against the frame, and he's showered, curls darker and wet.
"Hi," she says. "Sorry I didn't go home first."
Jack's eyebrows knit together. "I don't care," he says, a little confused, opening the door wider.
When Samira steps inside, what she can see of his house is neat and bare, basic utilitarian furniture and nothing on the walls, but there are big windows reflecting the sun onto the ceiling and the floors and it's quiet and calm and smells like pine.
"Do you want a drink?" he asks. "Or something. Water? I have beer, or orange juice. Or milk." Jack clears his throat. "Milk would be weird, now that I think about it."
"Um." Samira kicks off her shoes. She wants to laugh, to start laughing and never stop. She wants to kiss him. Mostly she really, really wants to kiss him. "Water would be nice."
"Yeah, of course," Jack says, and then he's off, walking away from her deeper into the house and making an abrupt right turn into the kitchen. She follows him, trailing a few steps behind. His kitchen has worn wood cabinets and a butcher block on the counter. A mop is leaning against the wall, and Samira realizes the floor is damp under her sock feet.
"You cleaned for me?" she asks. Oddly touched, something trilling in her chest, and Jack turns to look at her from where he's filling a glass with water from the tap. He smiles, swinging his head back to turn off the sink.
"You gotta have higher standards for your dates, Dr. Mohan," he says, stepping towards her with the glass, and she takes it from him, brushing his knuckles purposefully, barely, with the tips of her fingers.
"Is this a date, then?" she asks. Her tongue feels enormous and unwieldy in her mouth, like she could choke on it. Samira takes a sip of water and sets the glass down on the countertop. Jack is still close, watching her intently, and when she raises her eyebrows at him, he looks away, flushed. "That's not a rhetorical question, Abbot."
"Yes," he says, automatically, quickly. "I don't— yes. I mean, I'd have preferred to take you out to dinner, but when a beautiful woman has her hands on you and is asking for your home address—" He steps a little closer to her as he says it, and Samira takes the opportunity to grab Jack by the hem of his T-shirt and tug him towards her, pressing her lips to his. The sparking sensation of it is so immediate that her knees want to buckle. Unbelievable, completely.
He kisses more tentatively than she expected him to, but it's better, his lips feeling hers out softly, bit by bit, and then deepening. Small tight mouth opening. She winds her arms around his neck, tangles her hand in the curls at his nape. His hands on her waist, gripping her through her scrubs. Jagged little noises he's making against her mouth, like she's got her fingers wrapped around him already. Samira can't stop thinking I'm kissing Jack Abbot, I'm kissing Jack Abbot, like some kind of demented skipping record. Can feel him hard and hot in his jeans and reaches a hand down to cup him, sliding, squeezing, gentle, mapping out the shape of his cock, the feeling of him. After a minute Jack groans and pulls away, breathing ragged.
"Oh," he says. "Fuck. I— you—" His throat is dry, a desperate clicking sound with each word. "Shit. I'm a little bit afraid I'm gonna come, you know, before we can—" He's flushed, cheeks pink.
Samira raises her eyebrows, the words rushing through her and landing somewhere between her legs, sending static straight to the base of her spine. "Seriously?"
Jack can't exactly meet her eyes. He's taking long, steadying breaths like someone preparing to go underwater. "Yeah," he manages. "I—"
She pulls Jack back towards her, tilting her hips into his. Press of him heavy and solid. Heartbeat of her cunt against his body. "I don't care," she says. "I feel like I could— just against your leg, like this."
He makes a sound like he's been hit in the stomach, taking her mouth again, clumsy, firming up the press of his prosthetic foot into the floor, shoving his other knee up so his thigh catches between her legs, the perfect pressure. "Yeah? You want to make yourself come on my thigh? You wanna use me like that, Mohan?"
"Yes," she says, because she can't seem to form any other words, and then she's rolling her hips and grinding against the rough denim of his jeans and Jack's got his hands all over and behind her. She's so wet she wonders if it'll bleed through her pants, stain his. Can practically smell herself, sticky and wanting. She'll never be able to look him at work again without thinking of this. Flex of his thighs, solid and steady. A strong freckled arm wrapped around her waist. Her elbow collides with the glass of water still on the countertop and it topples and rolls and spills and drips and neither of them make any move to fix it. "Oh my god," Samira hisses through her teeth, her body locking up. "I want— I— fingers, will you—"
He spins her around so her back is against his chest, feels the hard length of him again. Strangled noise from his lips when she pushes her hips back. Head swimming. "Show me what you like," he says into her hair, hand teasing at the waistband of her scrubs, and Samira grabs his hand without pretense, shoves it into her underwear, through the coarse curls she never bothers shaving to the core of her, open for him, fluttering. Jack's head flops forward so his forehead is pressed to her shoulder. "Holy shit," he says. "You're so wet, Mohan. Are you always like this?"
She shakes her head, knowing he can't see her but can feel it, the shift of her neck. "I like you," she says, breathless, sincere, and Jack laughs.
"I like you too," he says, and Samira opens her mouth, wants him to know she means it, really, that this isn't just a thing she says, that she respects him and his hands and the way he can roll a patient's body like it weighs nothing and she read the last case study he published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine six times, but then his fingertips are at her clit, rough and a little clumsy and she can't think about anything other than the heat between her thighs, building and climbing into her stomach. "Show me," Jack says again, and Samira wraps a hand around his wrist, urges his fingers in light, fast circles. Lets her head fall backward onto his shoulder then and closes her eyes. His breathing changes when hers does, inhales quicker, frantic. It feels unbelievably good. It doesn't ever feel this good, and it's the way he's touching her, precise and determined, yes, but it's also because its him.
"You're gorgeous," Jack says into her neck. "You're so—" Words tripping over each other, tumbling. "Beautiful. Smart. Perfect. Fucking— I want to— can I—" He grapples for a moment and slides a finger inside her, and then another and Samira gasps, high and involuntary. She arches back into him. There's the stretch of it and an exquisite kind of pressure and she can feel herself dripping onto his hand as he keeps rubbing her clit with his thumb. Jack exhales hard, warm breath against her neck. "Feel good?" His voice is wrecked and he's rocking himself against her body, the rhythm jerky and irregular compared to his fingers. She wonders if he's close, if he's loud or quiet when he comes.
"So good," she says, nodding, helpless, and then he nods too, like he knows, like they're one person. His focus narrowed, everything inside her wound impossibly tight. Obscene sound of his hand, steady pulse of her cunt on his fingers. She leans further into his arms, reaching her hand to the back of his neck. "You feel so good, Jack." His first name falls off her lips like an accident, and Samira feels his hips stutter immediately.
"Shit, oh, shit, say my name again," he says.
"Jack," she repeats, eyes closed, and feels his chest heave against her back. "Jack, your fingers—"
"Oh, I like how you say that, Mohan. Samira." He leans his forehead hard into the muscle of her neck, speaking through his teeth, every muscle in his face shaking. "Oh, fuck." Strained, halfway to tears, he presses against her harder. "Shit, Samira, God, I'm so sorry. I'm gonna come, I'm so sorry, I can't—"
"Jack, I want you to," she says, and she wonders if he can feel that her entire body is throbbing, turned inside out. Red-hot and exposed like she's been flayed open. "Do you trust me?" she asks, and Jack groans again, and she thinks he might be crying now, really.
"Yes," he says. "Yeah. God, always—" Jack dips his head again and then, like an answer, he's shaking, undone, and she can't believe it's him, exactly, and she can't believe it's her, until she feels herself tip over the edge too, coming hard and for what feels like forever around his fingers. Samira can hear someone then saying Jack over and over like a chant or a prayer. It must be her. She collapses boneless onto her forearms against the kitchen counter, feels him lean into her still, wet face against her shirt, kisses smoothed long and adamant into her back.
He takes her to his bedroom, leads her there by the hand, where his bed is neatly made with white sheets and there are framed medals on the wall and the same big windows, tree branches tickling the panes. Samira barely has a moment to cast her eyes around the room, try to glean something from the things there, the things he's chosen and kept and displayed, before Jack's urging her back onto the bed, wiggling her scrubs and underwear down and pressing his mouth to her hipbones, her upper thighs.
The sun is setting outside now and the room is glowing pink and gold and they don't bother with the lights. Between her legs, Jack's face in shadow like a sketch. He makes her come again then, somehow faster, quick kittenish licks of his tongue and the press of his thick fingers, and then a third time with her clit sucked into his mouth, the barest hint of teeth. Samira realizes somewhere midway through the third orgasm that he's still fully dressed.
"Jack," she says softly, catching her breath, and he peers up at her, uses his arms to push himself off the edge of the bed. "Can I see you?"
He laughs. The sound is becoming familiar to her. "See what?" he asks.
"I don't know." Samira's aware she's flushed, skin hot, thankful her complexion is dark enough to hide it. Embarrassed at herself even now, the wanting, the wanting to understand him. "Your body. Your dick."
His gaze meets hers briefly, surprised, and then he glances away at the wall above her head. "Uh, there's not a lot going on down there at the moment," he says. "It usually takes— I mean—"
"I don't care if you're hard," she says, trying not to smile, and Jack is quiet then as he nods and stands and takes off his clothes for her. His shirt first, the parts of him Samira saw for the first time a few hours earlier, but now she gets to look her fill. Pale, freckled torso meeting the sunburnt, wrinkled skin of his neck and forearms. She can see where the lines of his body probably used to be more cut and defined, have since filled out with dense muscle and fat that makes her mouth water. Wants to bite him, wants to leave a purple mark, a bruise.
Samira sits up and reaches for him, and Jack steps a little closer, stands between her legs. She runs a hand over the planes of his abdomen and he holds his breath. Undoes his belt then, pulling at the clasp. A striptease almost, if the feelings in the air between them were different. As it is, time feels elongated, like they're cradling it in their hands.
Jack unbuttons his pants, shifts them lower on his hips. Fine gray hair that trails from his belly button into the top of his boxer briefs. Samira hears a greedy noise in her throat, tugs at his pants and underwear, but Jack grips her wrist, stopping her. Instead slides his hands up her waist, meeting the sensible white cotton of the bra she'd put on that morning without thinking. She feels hot everywhere, face burning. He palms at her breasts and reaches to her back, fumbles with the clasp enough that Samira has to reach around to help him, biting back a laugh. When it's off, he touches her again, thumbs at her nipples thoughtfully.
"Fucking perfect tits," he says, half-conscious, like he's appraising her, and Samira does laugh then at the seriousness of it and after a moment he joins her.
"Take off your pants, Abbot, please," she says, and he looks at her for a long time before nodding, shoving them down his legs and stepping out of them.
The first thing Samira notices is the wetness of his cock and the come plastering down the wiry red curls at its base. The second is the deep, horizontal scars across Jack's right thigh. Pink ridged lines, long-since healed but still stark, striped over the span of his leg from right to left and stopping an inch above his knee. It's the leg he's missing a third of, and she's familiar with the way the skin is marred and muscle atrophied below his knee, where residual limb meets prosthetic calf and foot. These scars are different.
"You did these," she says, and she doesn't mean to be so blunt about it, but it's clear to her, there's no surgeon that would make cuts like this, so close together and frantic. A kind of desperation to them, an attempted cleansing. "What happened?" Samira asks, touching lightly his thigh, and when she looks up at Jack his jaw is set tight.
He swallows repeatedly, teeth clenched together, throat working. "Uh— I had a lot of trouble when I got back," he says. "Phantom-limb pain, you know. I couldn't sleep. I'd lie on the floor at night fully dressed waiting for sniper fire to break the windows, and I felt like the part of my leg that wasn't there anymore was on fire, constantly, my whole leg really, and nothing helped. Not fuckin'… oxycodone, not physical therapy, not lorazepam or diazepam or whiskey or anything else." Jack inhales shakily. "And— I guess one night I was so exhausted I was hallucinating, practically…" He waves a hand in the air, vaguely. "I decided I'd just take the rest off, and that would fix it."
Samira's breath knocks out of her in one vicious rush. "Jesus, Jack." Her heart is thudding wildly, slamming against her ribcage, too fast. Her fingertips are numb.
Jack shakes his head, like he's trying to clear the thought. "I didn't get very far. I came to after a little while, and there was blood everywhere, and I called Robby." He laughs, a short breath through his nose. "He stitched me up, and slept on the floor next to me every night for a month."
"So when he said earlier that you don't like him seeing you like that anymore—"
Jack grimaces. "We've known each other a long time," he says. "He doesn't need to be responsible for me anymore."
Samira's eyebrows narrow. "I don't think—"
"He is," Jack says. "And I know he doesn't mind it, but he is. And he's got himself to worry about." He moves to sit down next to her, then, and she slides over on the bed just slightly to make room. Both of them naked, still, skin creasing and folding, sweat drying on their chests. "He's the only person that's seen— I mean, since—" He swallows again, hard. "And now you."
Samira reaches for him, hand landing unsteadily on his leg, fingertips on the raised skin, eyes trained forward. Everything she could possibly say feels caught in her solar plexus. Rush of understanding, all of a sudden, so heady it makes her want to cry. The vulnerability of it, him silent and still next to her, breathing. Vulnerable flesh underneath the armor split and cracked open. Sees herself in there, in it, somehow, teenage-her hunched in an upstairs bathroom riddled with grief, wanting to rip at her skin. Healing for everyone but herself. Knowing better and feeling it anyway, magnified. Can't imagine the loss Jack's seen. Others and himself. And still in front of her, standing, battered and open-hearted and holding his hands out to her.
"I'm so sorry," she says eventually, the words hanging between them, entirely inadequate and still somehow enough.
Jack shakes his head. "I'm better now," he says.
"Are you?" Samira asks. "You're routinely putting yourself in harm's way as, like, a recreational activity."
"Well, my therapist said I needed a hobby," Jack says, turning to her. He's wearing a smirk that becomes a grin, and she smacks his bicep, leaning into him to wrap her arms around his neck, press her head into his shoulder.
"I don't like it," she says. "I think you're being stupid. I'm sorry."
Jack laughs, his chin brushing the top of her head. "I know," he says after a moment. "I want to be close to you, Samira. For things to be different. I don't know what you want from— from me, but that's what I want." He swallows hard, looks at her, a little nervous.
"I've never really been that close to anybody," she says, so quiet it's almost a whisper, and Jack just nods, pulls her into him again. Samira buries her head in the crook of his shoulder, smells his shampoo, his sweat. His bare skin pressed against her cheek. Heat and light in her chest, spreading to the tips of her fingers. Jack inhales long through his nose, presses a kiss to her temple.
"Can I tell you something else?" he asks.
"Is this going to at some point need to be reciprocated?" Samira asks, and Jack laughs again, louder this time, looser.
"Not if you don't want it to be," he says, looking down at her as if to check, and she smiles. It feels easier with him already, impossibly easy, easier than she'd let herself imagine. Like she's letting her thoughts rise through her to the tip of her tongue and then saying them without consideration, and Jack's given them a place to land. Soft, feather-light. "I haven't been with anyone since Emma died," he says. "Not a date, not anything."
"Oh." Samira sits up, her face hot. "Oh, so that's why you—"
"Shot off like five minutes into kissing you?" Jack laughs, and he's blushing again, freckles blurring. "Yeah, not my finest work."
"I don't know," she says. "I really liked it."
He's looking at her, eyes dark in the low light. Leans one of his arms on the bed behind her, shifts a little closer to kiss her shoulder. "We don't have to do anything else," he adds, quieter. "I'm so happy, Samira."
"Me too," she says, means it. The dream of it real now, darkness outside and the heat dissipating. The materiality of him next to her, scarred leg and his lips on her skin. "But I haven't had sex since before residency, and I really, really would like you to fuck me."
Jack's eyes widen and the noise that he makes is somewhere between a laugh and a bark. "Yeah?" he asks, voice like gravel, and Samira traces her fingertips over the scars on his leg again, trailing her hand up his thigh until it reaches his cock. Takes him in her hand then and his dick twitches, his mouth opens.
"Is this okay?" she asks, mostly teasing, but waits for him to nod, feels him start to fill in her palm as she strokes him and then drops to her knees on the bedroom rug. Head of his cock she licks at, salt and skin on her tongue, remnants of his previous orgasm. Hasn't even given a proper blow job since undergrad, but Jack is making helpless sort of noises already and she's barely touched him so she thinks he probably won't mind.
Once he's fully in her mouth, Samira casts her eyes up to where he's sitting, gripping the bedsheets in his hands like he's holding on for dear life. "Oh, fuck," Jack's saying. "Oh, fuck, I like that." He gets his hands in her hair, holds it up off of her neck delicately, and Samira wraps her hand around the base of his cock and moves it in time with her mouth, and she doesn't stop until he's hard again, straining and tipping his head back and wet with saliva and precome. He's bigger than he felt even through his jeans, thick and veined and beautiful. She gets a hand down between her legs, feels herself aching, insatiable.
"Oh, no, no," Jack says, breathless. "Come here. I've got you, Samira. I got you," and then she's clambering up onto the bed on top of him, dragging her slickness over the length of him, gasping. Jack touches her breasts and then her back. Pulls her down to kiss him and he pants into her mouth. "Fuck, you feel so good. You like this?"
"Yeah," she says, air knocked out of her. "Yeah, I do." The way she's moving her hips is rhythmic and quick and she's not sure where she got this much coordination from but she's not complaining. Presses her clit into the head of his cock, red and weeping, and Jack hisses through his teeth, bucking up towards her.
"Shit," he says, turning his head away, and Samira puts her hand on his jaw and brings it back forward.
"You're not going to come until you're inside me," she says, and Jack whimpers, his face screwed up, pink all the way down to his chest. Her pulse is so fast and his is too, jumping at his carotid. "Okay? Can you do that for me?"
His pupils are huge, eyes glassy and unfocused. "I'll do anything," he says, and she gets it then, she thinks, why he's so different with her. Quieter and more tentative and she understands. Same way sentences trap themselves halfway up her throat when she tries to talk to people about anything other than medicine. Not because she doesn't care, but because it feels so important and she doesn't know how to do it. Needs some kind of guidebook, someone to put their hands on her and say this is it, this is what you do, and he needs the same. He wants to impress her, to be good for her, and he doesn't know he already is.
"Condom?" she asks then, and Jack nods, breathless. He slides up on the bed to open the nightstand drawer and dig around, emerges with a condom, squints down at the foil wrapper.
"When do these things expire?" he asks, voice a little frantic, eyes flicking up to meet hers, and Samira snorts with abrupt laughter, slapping a hand over her mouth. "This is pretty old, Mohan."
"I'm on birth control," she says. "We're clean. It's okay. Fuck it."
"Fuck it," Jack says, eyes shining, and he pulls her down again to kiss him. His tongue in her mouth, her face rubbed red from the scrape of his stubble. His cock is dripping against his stomach. "Sorry, let me just— is it okay if I take my leg off?"
"Of course," she says, climbing off of him, and Jack moves to the edge of the bed, unlatches the prosthetic and removes it, careful, a quiet wince and deep breath as he peels off the liner and checks his skin for damage. When he returns to lean against the pillows, Samira runs a hand over his leg, what remains of it, the Y-shaped scar that she's seen before but never touched. Digs her fingertips into it, lightly, kneading. "Can I—?" she asks.
Jack nods. Looks a little overwhelmed from where he is, wide-eyed, and Samira reaches one of her hands to hold his as she uses the other to massage his leg, gently, the way she's seen him do after a long shift, sitting in the break room or on a bench with Robby in the park. Ridges of skin under her fingertips, surgical scars and revisions, tapered muscle and bone. Warm and human like the rest of him.
When she looks up at Jack again, there are tears tracking their way down his face, his head turned to the side, jaw tight.
She yanks her hands away. "Oh, God, Jack, sorry. I'm hurting you."
"No," he says, voice thick in his throat. "No, no, it's really good. It's just been a long time since anyone else has done that." He wipes a hand over his face. "People don't usually like to look," he says. Sniffles and then laughs. "Sorry. Jesus. I'm really not putting my best foot forward here."
Samira grins. "Good pun," she says, and Jack runs a hand over his face, blinking.
"I didn't mean for it to be one," he says. "Come here." Pulls her up towards him, his arms, turning her onto her back and nudging her legs open with his knee. He leans over her, forearm braced by her head, the clean familiar smell of him, the fact that she knows what his mouth tastes like now. "You like it like this?" he asks.
Samira touches his face, runs her thumb under his eye, catching the last tears. She nods and he looks back at her the way he does across a gurney, the way he does when he hands her a scalpel and says you got this, and then he nods too and presses slowly inside her, shaking.
"I've wanted this for so long," she says once she's wrapped around him, the stretch of it echoing in her hips and her cunt and everywhere.
Jack groans, exhaling into her mouth as he starts to move. "Me too," he says. "I have too,." His hand, cold metal of his wedding ring against her cheek. Opaque mystery of him almost laughable now. Samira can see him, all the versions of him, the ones she knows and doesn't. The Abbot in the military, vest filled with medical equipment, hair close-cropped and red, hot sun the source of the freckles on his face. Uninjured body and spirit, young hazel eyes. The Abbot she sees with everyone else at the hospital, smart and calm and flirtatious, a brilliant doctor, an easy center of gravity in every room he enters. His crooked half-smile and steady hands. And the Abbot that's here now, scarred, exposed, more beautiful for it, gray curls and softness and the muscles flexing under his skin as he fucks her, stuttering little breaths in her ear as he calls her Samira, calls her sweetheart. The one that she understands most of all, because it's the one he is for her.