Chapter Text
Samira was tired.
Not just the dull, physical fatigue that came from being twelve hours into her fourth shift of the week, though that was there too, settled deep in her muscles, making every movement feel a little slower than it should have. It wasn’t just the headache, either, a low, persistent pressure behind her eyes that the hospital’s unforgiving lights always seemed to trigger. And it wasn’t the kind of tired that came from the fact that all she’d eaten since six that morning was half a protein bar she barely remembered tasting.
No, the real reason that she was tired was that, sometime around ten to two the previous night, in a moment that hovered somewhere between boredom and poor judgement, she had downloaded a dating app.
Calling it a dating app was being generous. Misleading, at best. Santos had made that very clear when she’d mentioned it in passing during their lunch break yesterday. She’d laughed, actually, a low, knowing sound that suggested Samira was about to step into something she didn’t fully understand.
‘It’s not Hinge,’ she’d said, stirring her coffee with unnecessary force, ‘you’re not going to find someone to go for brunch with.’
Samira had rolled her eyes at the time. ‘I’m not looking for brunch.’
Santos had just raised a single eyebrow. ‘Sure you’re not.’
She hadn’t thought much of it then. Not really. It had been late, she’d been restless, and the quiet of her apartment, which she usually found comforting had felt unusually heavy.
So she’d downloaded it.
And then, almost immediately, regretted it.
It wasn’t the premise. She wasn’t naïve. She knew what hook-up apps were, broadly speaking. But there had been something confronting about the specificity of it, the way that everything was laid out so plainly, stripped of any pretence. The app had asked for her interests, and the options didn’t include ‘staying up late reading medical papers’ or ‘holding hands across restaurant tables’. Instead there was a dense scatter of acronyms and terms that made her flush even alone in her bedroom. MMF. Threesomes. Submissive. Bondage. Words that felt both clinical and deeply personal at once.
She’d let out a short, disbelieving laugh then, in the silence of her bedroom, thinking of Trinity leaning across the break room table yesterday, eyes bright in the low orange light. Just try it out. God knows you could use a little excitement. There had been something teasing in her expression, but not unkind.
Samira nearly closed the app then. Her thumb actually hovered over the screen, ready to delete it entirely, and she almost did.
Almost.
Because the uncomfortable truth was that Santos was – annoyingly, uncomfortably – right. Recently, her life had narrowed into something narrow and repetitive. Work, food, sleep. Occasionally a lukewarm beer on a park bench with her colleagues, conversations that circled endlessly around shifts and bed shortages and patients who were either too demanding or not demanding enough. There was a rhythm to it, and for the most part it was a comforting one. But recently it had started to leak into monotony, boredom. She was thirty-one years old, and the weight of that had come unexpectedly. Thirty-one, and constantly orbiting the same routine, the same expectations and habits and tedium.
So, instead of deleting the app, she’d uploaded a couple of photos of herself and selected the interests that felt safe but not untrue. “Casual”, “fun”. They felt vague enough to hide behind. Then she started swiping.
She knew the psychology behind dating apps, knew that they played on the same neural processes that made gambling so addictive, that anticipatory, dopamine heavy release that made you want to keep going, because surely a winner was just around the next corner. And at first, it had been kind of fun. A distraction of profiles flicking past in quick succession – faces, body parts, fragments of people condensed into a handful of images and a few lines of text. Some were carefully curated, others almost aggressively careless. A surprising number involved gym mirrors.
After a while, though, the novelty wore thin. The profiles all seemed to blur together. She’d paused on one photo, frowning slightly. It was difficult to tell quite what she was looking at – poor lighting, an odd angle. She found herself instinctively catergorising it the way she would a clinical image.
Possibly soft tissue. Indeterminate. Could be–
She snorted to herself softly.
‘Absolutely note,’ she’d murmured, swiping past.
By two-thirty, she was ready to give up on the whole venture. Not a single right swipe. Her eyes had started to sting in a way that told her she’d reached the overtired stage of sleeplessness, and the glow of her screen was starting to feel too bright in the darkness of her bedroom. She told herself she’d try one more, and then she would actually delete the app and forget the whole thing.
One more.
She swiped.
And then she stopped.
Dr J.
For a moment, it hadn’t registered. Just another profile, another partial image. The back of a man, standing on a balcony, looking out over a cityscape she didn’t recognise, somewhere warm, warmer than Pittsburg ever managed.
But something about the shape of his shoulders caught her attention. They were broad, familiar. Greying curls looped at the back of the thick neck. She held the screen closer without realising she was doing it, and her breath caught as recognition settled in. She swiped to the next photo. This one was closer. The man was facing the camera, shot cropped from just below the chin to the top of his belt. Arms folded, posture relaxed by deliberate. The fabric of his t-shirt was pulled tight enough to make the underlying structure of his muscled torso clear. The third image was closer still. A side profile, the line of a jaw, rough with five o’clock shadow. The curve of a muscle in his arm, freckles standing out against pale skin.
Samira had gone very still.
Of course she’d noticed Jack Abbot before. It was impossible not to. The way he carried himself, the ease with which he moved through the department, the quiet authority that made even the most chaotic shifts feel manageable. She’d watched him teach. Watched the way he explained things: clear, precise, patient. She’d watched the way his hands moved when he demonstrated procedures, confident without being showy. And sure, it would be a lie to say she didn’t sometimes find herself getting a little lost in the overwhelming green-blue of his eyes.
That had all felt harmless. Abstract.
This did not.
She scrolled down, her thumb slower now.
No bio. Age listed as fifty-one. Older than she’d thought, and older than her by twenty years. That thought landed with a small, disorienting weight. Below that, a list of interests. She read through them once, then again, as though repetition might soften the impact.
Dominant.
Intimacy.
Sensual.
BDSM.
Aftercare.
Her mouth had gone dry, and there was an insistent, pleasant heat between her thighs. For a moment, she just lay there, staring at the screen, her mind unable to settle of any one thought long enough to make sense of it. Then, before she could reconsider – before she could think through the implications – she tapped the heart icon. The profile disappeared.
‘Fuck,’ she said, the word barely more than a breath.
Sleep had not come easily after that, and now, hours later, the consequences of that tiny, impulsive decision had settled into something heavy in the pit of her stomach.
Samira glanced up at the clock mounted above the nurses’ station. Ten to seven. Two hours left of her shift. She readjusted herself in her chair, rolled her shoulders in an attempt to ease the tension that had been building up there over the course of the day. The case notes on the screen in front of her blurred into one rolling, indistinguishable block of text. The fatigue had settled deep in her muscles, corded through with something sharper. Anticipation, maybe. Or dread.
Abbot would be in soon. He was always early. He’d told her once that he preferred it that way. He liked to have time to orient himself before his shift began, time to review cases, talk things through with Robby, discuss anything that might need particular attention.
‘Nothing worse than rushing into things,’ he’d said.
At the time, she had nodded, tucked away the information as one of those small pieces of advice that would only apply to her if she ever made it past her residency. Now, the thought of him coming in in less than ten minutes, of seeing him, face to face, made something low in her stomach tighten. She forced her attention back to the chart in front of her. Seven-year-old male. Bike chain laceration. Superficial, no evidence of deeper tissue damage. Cleaned, dressed, to be reviewed before discharge. Her mouse hovered over the page.
He probably hadn’t even seen it, she told herself. It might not even be him. There had to be other men – other doctors, even – in the greater Pittsburg area with similar builds, similar features, similar freckle patterns. It wasn’t impossible. Unlikely, maybe, but not impossible.
A soft breath escaped her, an almost laugh.
‘God, I can’t wait to get home,’ Santos appeared suddenly at her side with the kind of quiet efficiency that always caught Samira off guard. ‘did you hear about the woman in North three?’
Samira blinked, dragging herself back to the present, ‘what?’
‘North 3,’ Santos repeated. ‘Puked all over Whittaker. Three times. I think it was deliberate.’
Samira let out a faint sound of acknowledgement, ‘right.’
‘You good, boss?’
Samira forced a small smile, finally meeting her gaze. ‘Yeah, fine. And I’m not your boss. You’re a resident now.’
Santos’s mouth curved slightly, ‘Whatever you say, boss.’
Samira smiled as Santos drifted away, the younger woman already launched into a conversation with Javadi before she’d fully turned her back. The smile lingered a second longer than it needed to, then slipped as Samira’s gaze flicked up to the clock again.
Five to seven.
Something in her chest tightened again. Her phone, tucked into the pocket of her scrubs, suddenly felt impossibly heavy. It had been there all shift, of course, but now it seemed to press insistently against her thigh. A hot, illicit weight. A reminder. She became acutely aware of it. Of what was on it. Of what she’d done. Don’t, she told herself, not here. But the thought had already latched into her conscious mind, taken hold. Had he seen it? Had he liked her back? Had he laughed? Ignored it? Her pulse ticked up another notch, and she exhaled steadily through her nose, forcing her shoulders to relax. She clicked out of the patient notes with more care that necessary. The screen flickered back to the main system and the noise of the department seemed to rush in around her again, monitors beeping, voices overlapping, the distant rattle of a trolley being wheeled a little too quickly down the corridor. Normal. Everything was normal.
Samira pushed back her chair, the wheels squeaking faintly against the linoleum floor, and stood up. No one looked at her, even though she felt like she had a giant arrow over her head, a neon flashing sign that should have said IMPENDING HR VIOLATION.
The women’s bathroom was tucked just off the main corridor. It was perpetually in some vague state of disrepair, and one of the lights flickered ominously as she pushed her way inside. They still hadn’t repaired the leaky second sink, even though Dr Collins had reported it to maintenance three times now, and there was a hairline crack across the mirror that split reflections into two. But it was quiet. Private. She slipped into the first cubicle, nudging the door closed with her foot. The hum of the department had faded, replaced by the faint buzz of the faulty extractor fan. For a second she stood in the cubicle, resting her head against the cool plastic of the cubicle door. Her breathing was faster than it should be, her heart thumping in her chest.
This is ridiculous, she told herself. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. The screen lit up. A text from her mother, something innocuous about her cousin’s baby shower, and, beneath it, a non-descript notification from the app. Her thumb hovered over it. She shouldn’t open it. Not now. But she already knew she would. She tapped it, and app opened, the interface sliding into place with a kind of cheerful efficiency that felt entirely at odds with the tightness in her chest.
New match! The interface told her. The feeling is mutual with Dr J. Start chatting?
For a moment, she didn’t move. Her eyes traced the words, slower this time, as though they might rearrange themselves into something less definite if she gave them enough time. They didn’t, of course. A strange, weightless sensation spread through her, something like vertigo.
He’d seen it.
He’d recognised her. Obviously – she’d used clear photos of her face, stupidly hadn’t made any attempt at anonymity on her own profile. But then she’d not put anything particularly incriminating on it, had she? ‘Casual’, ‘fun’. Those were perfectly legitimate wishes for a thirty-one year old who needed a little excitement in her life, weren’t they? Abbot could hardly make any judgement on that, could he?
But of course, his profile hadn’t been so innocent, and she’d swiped on him. And he’d matched with her.
Her grip on her phone tightened slightly.
‘Fuck,’ she said under her breath, the word pressed out between clenched teeth.
She let her head fall back for a second, staring at the ceiling, at the faint water stain spreading out from one corner. This changed things. This wasn’t an abstract, idealised crush anymore. It wasn’t a late night impulse that she could ignore, file away under poor decisions and move past. This was real. He was real. And in – she checked the time again – less than two minutes, he would be here.
Samira looked back the app. The message prompt blinked up at her, patient, expectant. Start chatting? Her thumb hovered over it, closer this time. Then she locked the screen.
‘Not here,’ she muttered, as though saying it out loud might anchor her back into something resembling sense.
She shoved the phone back into her pocket, pressing her palm briefly against the fabric, then pushed her way out of the cubicle.
When she caught her reflection in the cracker mirror, it startled her slightly. Her expression was tighter than she’d expected, eyes a little too bright, brow damp, like she was running a fever.
‘Get a grip,’ she told her. Above her, the fluorescent light flickered once, then settled.
Samira straightened, smoothed down the front of her scrubs, and took one slow deliberate breath before reaching for the bathroom door. When she stepped back out into the corridor, the rush of the department’s noise hit her, comforting and grounding in her familiarity. Her eyes flicked up to the clock above the nurses’ station.
One minute to seven.
And now, undeniably, a match.