Work Text:
1:38 A.M.
Sure. Now he had no problem taking a piss.
Frank wrapped his hand around the bathroom doorjamb, fumbling for the switch. Then he was squinting against the light as the familiar whirr of the fan in the ceiling kicked in. He’d always found that sound comforting, ever since he was a kid. It was the sound of privacy, or at least the illusion of it. In reality, you could only really hear the noise inside.
Good enough, he thought, closing the door behind him with his free hand. The other held his phone, which he’d used as a flashlight to navigate his way from his darkened bedroom. Tanner was still up when he’d gotten home late — Penny, mercifully, was out like a light — and Frank read The Hobbit to him from the phone until he fell asleep. They were in the middle of Bilbo and Gollum’s big riddle game, but Tanner had been too tired to shout out his “guesses,” which he’d memorized long ago. So as Abby watched from the door, Frank read to their son in silence. Like any silence involving Abby, he found it uncomfortable. The whirr was preferable.
Frank sighed as he closed the bathroom door behind him. No one wants to sit quietly and think about how much they relate to fucking Gollum. Tolkien’s great addict! Bill Burroughs, eat your heart out.
The tile floor was cold under Frank’s bare feet as he shuffled over to the toilet, eyes still half-closed. He briefly debated, in the lazy way he figured all guys did, whether to bother lifting up the toilet seat or just take his chances on good marksmanship, but the inner ring of the potty seat forced his hand. No way would he have aim that accurate after the day he had. I used up my precision pissing when that dude watched me fill that sample cup. He could still feel the warmth of his urine against its plastic sides as he handed the cup over. It was a feeling he’d never quite gotten used to, and he was never gonna get used to the awkward feeling of peeing for an audience. And that was, what, the fourth- or fifth-worst thing to happen to him on his first day back? Get this over with and get back to sweet oblivion, he thought.
He fished his dick out of his boxers and pajama pants. And for God’s sake, don’t wake Abby, she’s been through enough. She’d had to hear about each and every one of those bad things that happened to him today, after all. He had no secrets from her anymore. At least it fills the silence.
Frank’s eyes were fully closed when he heard the stream of his urine hit the water in the bowl, snapping him awake. He was dozing where he stood, but if his years in the ED had taught him anything, it’s that you generally want to be awake when you urinate. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, then remembered the phone in his free hand. He lifted it to his face, blinked a few times, and started absently flipping around.
The phone opened on Javadi’s TikTok account. How about that? The nepo prodigy has real star quality. Frank knew she was an excellent doctor, but the cachet she had as an influencer surprised him, in a good way. He knew people found him charismatic, but it had never translated to the camera, through which he invariably looked awkward as hell. Dr. Langdon, he knew, could never be “Dr. J.” But her newest post was about the horror show that happened to Jesse with those ICE assholes, and he’d learned to regulate negative inputs like that when and where he could. I can’t do anything for Jesse and his patient right now that can’t be done better in the morning.
He scrolled on. He was several bikini-clad women deep into TikTok’s demented algorithm when he peeled himself away. It’s not like he minded the sexy stuff, but watching Javadi’s material was the only reason he’d downloaded the app in the first place. Instagram was more familiar territory for him. Maybe Robby started an account for his cross-country road trip, he thought, semi-hopefully. Then: He should be someplace where they take away your phone.
Still peeing — he’d had a La Croix right before bed — he started scrolling IG. Friends, family, Anne Hathaway, co-workers, med school buddies: the usual assortment of fancy-dinner photos, vacation footage, some stuff about the No Kings protests from a few weeks ago, his idiot cousin’s gender reveal party. It’s a boy, he thought. Sorry you’ll be taught not to have feelings, kid.
He was just about finished when he hit Mel’s latest post and stopped dead. It definitely looked like Mel was in front of what definitely looked like a microphone at what definitely looked like some bar’s 4th of July karaoke night.
Hold up, Frank thought, as the shook and squeezed the last few drops out of his penis. Mel? Singing? In front of people? The woman was a superlative doctor, but she’d spent the last few hours of their shift fretting about how she’d bombed her deposition earlier today, and that didn’t have an audience. How drunk would she have to be to…
Now this I gotta hear, Frank thought, turning the volume on low.
“—want nothing but
the best
for
you both”
Mel was rocking out in the most Mel way possible, holding the mic for dear life, half head-banging and half-stimming.
Frank laughed quietly. “Alanis?” he said out loud, grinning from ear to ear.
Then he saw who Mel was duetting with, and his grin froze. Santos. So his biggest fan in the hospital was friends with the woman who’d—no, no, what happened to his life was his responsibility. He’d gotten over what she’d done, which was only what she’d had to do, after all.
But Santos had not gotten over it. God, how did I think that was gonna go? “Welcome back Frank, all is forgiven?” She wanted him back in the ED even less than Robby seemed to, and Robby had the excuse of very clearly not wanting anyone around. For Santos, the issue was more personal: She felt he’d skated, that he’d been let off the hook, and until he hung himself out to dry she’d consider every word out of his mouth bullshit. He hated that she had a point.
The theft was going to be a sword of Damocles dangling over his head for as long as he remained a doctor, he knew that. But somehow he doubted Santos would be the one to cut the thread, as much as she obviously disliked him. For one thing, if she’d wanted to rat him out, she’d have done it six months ago, or any time since. Instead, she hadn’t even used his actual return to work as an excuse to pull the trigger. She really was leaving it up to him, but not, he thought, out of kindness. Asking a man to choose between his honor and his career, his livelihood, likely his family — that was a special kind of cruel.
It’s cruelty I deserve.
Frank shook his head again. Fuck, this had taken a turn, hadn’t it? Couldn’t he just be happy that Mel had found a friend other than her sister, whose social life was apparently a lot more swinging than Mel’s was? So what if it was the one doctor in the hospital who really hated him? At least, he thought she was the one doctor. She was dating Garcia or something, right? After nights of pillow talk with Santos, he wondered if the surgeon’s constant jibes about him now had a Santos-ian edge to them. I guess I’ll find out.
Whoever was holding Mel’s phone for her in the crowd had shaky aim, but the performance spoke for itself. They flubbed a few lyrics and missed a few notes, but this was bar karaoke, and no one was gonna be sober enough to assign a Pitchfork score out there. Frank remembered a time before both the kids and the pills when he and Abby used to do karaoke with their friends all the time, and he always thought that this was one area where passion beat talent every time. He had to hand it to Santos there. And to Mel, whom he’d never seen like this before.
The video looped. Mel was singing about going down on you in a theater. She was tearing into the chorus with Santos. She was whipping of her glasses so Santos could undo her hair, letting it fall loose and wild as they scream-sang Alanis Morissette’s poison pen letter to Uncle Joey from Full House.
“YOU
YOU
YOU OUGHTA KNOW!”
See? Frank thought to himself as he watched the two younger women throw their entire bodies into the performance. Passion.
He looked at Santos, really looked at her. Though it was contorted with 90s alternative rage, she had the face of a porcelain doll, and the biggest jeans he’d seen since the nu-metal era. Her shirt bared her stomach and one shoulder, smooth and cream-colored; next to Mel in her old green t-shirt it was revealing in a way that made him feel weirdly uncomfortable.
Yet so did Mel, somehow. He’d never seen her without her glasses on before, he realized suddenly. He’d never seen her with her hair down. He’d never seen her express emotion this…what? Unfettered? Unbridled?
And he’d never heard her talk about going down on anyone, either.
Her mouth was open wide. The microphone pointing at it insistently.
Tearing his eyes from the phone he looked down at himself, just for a moment. His penis, by now half-hard in a hand that had never stopped squeezing it, was warm and thick now.
Sometimes our bodies make decisions for us before our brains do.
Without thinking any further, without stopping to wonder what it would mean for Mel or Santos or Abby or himself, Frank raised his hand to his mouth. He licked his palm, getting it slick with his spit. Then he wrapped it around his cock and started sliding it up and down.
“YOU! YOU! YOU!” He hit mute. Shlikk, shlikk, shlikk.
The bathroom was a familiar place for this purgative ritual. It had been months since Abby had last touched him in that way; their last attempt was a disaster that left him crying while she just sat there, looking at him. Jerking off was something he was allowed to do, but not something she ever wanted to know about or hear about. Using porn was a form of betrayal to her, no matter how much more he made it clear he loved her, her body, her pussy than his hand and a screen.
So early in the morning or late at night, he’d lock the door, trust in the fan, and rub one out. Sometimes he’d load up something in the incognito browser. Sometimes he’d look at some actress or singer’s thirst traps. Sometimes he’d just play beat the clock, timing himself to see how quickly he could get it over with.
This was none of that. This was women he knew, which he never allowed himself to do. Women he worked with, for — ah, fuck — for Christ’s sake.
But even as the thoughts occurred to him they floated right out of what Garcia would only half-jokingly call his pretty little head. If there was one thing he could count on to take his mind off things post-sobriety, if there was one drug that worked on the pain, it was this. It was the few minutes he spent working himself up to feeling as good as a man can possibly feel.
Then the thoughts in his head would disappear, except for two: this feels good and I love women. They walked the yard, breathed the fresh air, felt the sun on their face like prisoners in solitary before heading back inside, in the tiny cell where they belonged.
While they were free, while he was stroking himself, while he was looking at beautiful faces and bodies, the images came to his mind relentlessly. He had no time for them to do otherwise. Santos and Mel naked, Santos’s face between Mel’s bare legs, Mel’s legs slung over Santos’s creamy shoulders. Mel kissing Santos’s neck, shoving her fingers up her cunt while Santos did the same to her. Both of them — ugh — both of them looking up at him where he stood, down on their knees, Mel swallowing his cock, Santos licking his balls. Any day you get your balls licked is a good day, Robby had told him during one of their few candid conversations about sex. He remembered the thought stopping him in his tracks. Sometimes it really was that simple.
He took his hand off his dick and licked it again, replenishing his saliva, before resuming. His hand glided effortlessly now, and he could already feel the churning sensation that let him know he was gonna cum. He looked at the screen of his phone. Santos was letting Mel’s hair down. Mel whipped her head up and down, sending her blonde hair flying.
In his mind, one more flash: He was fucking Santos from behind and Mel was beneath her, head below Santos’s cunt as he railed it, a smile on her face, waiting for him to cum so she could suck it out of Santos again. And that was that.
In the moments just before the semen began sliding up and out of his shaft, he saw her with perfect clarity. She was on top of him, straddling him, her cunt pressing his hard dick flat against his body. Her hair was hanging down all around her just like it did in the video, all around him beneath her. Her glasses were off, and she was ferocious, and she was beautiful.
Open up, Frank, she said.
He opened his mouth.
She spit in it.
Immediately he bent his legs at the knees, forced his erect cock to point downwards, and began shooting his semen into the toilet.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
“Frank?”
Even as he was orgasming his heart plummeted 60 stories into his stomach. Abby!
With his thumb he stopped the video. But he was cumming, he was still cumming, god, fuck, the feeling, but he had to answer her—
“Just a moment,” he told his wife through a rictus jaw, watching his cum spurt out for his coworker into the cold water below.
He slid his phone in the pocket of his pajama pants and put his penis away at the same time. He was still almost completely hard, but it’s not like Abby would have reason to notice. He ran the sink and washed his hands, drying them on beach towel with dinosaurs on it hanging from the back of the door. He was reaching for the doorknob when he realized he’d forgotten to flush; his semen hung suspended in tattered clouds until he depressed the handle, when the whirl of the water washed them away.
He turned back to the door and breathed deep. No more secrets. That’s what you told her. Something had just happened there, he realized dimly, his exhaustion suddenly catching up with him. Some secret thing about Mel, her hair hanging down, confining him, keeping him down, keeping him safe, keeping him open for her spit, for whatever she wanted to give him.
His dick was hard again. He tucked it in the waistband of his boxers and tugged his white t-shirt down low. And when he was ready, he opened the door.