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Samira isn’t quite sure what to expect when she arrives at the restaurant on the ground floor of Jack’s hotel.
There’s no question: the two of them are close, enough so that when she hears through the grapevine (read: Parker Ellis) that he’s been incrementally transferring his PTO to the residents, she tells him he should save some and visit her.
Enough so that he books the trip immediately.
(There had been something intoxicating about his eagerness, and not for the first time, she’d fallen asleep that night only after getting herself off to thoughts of him: what it might be like to feel his hands on her, in her, finally.)
But for all their preexisting rapport and their attempts at bridging physical distance over SMS—for all the ways they are anything but shy with each other in her fantasies and, though Samira isn’t yet aware of it, in his fantasies as well—this is still the first time they will have seen each other since she moved 400 miles away for Weill Cornell Med, and she can’t help but wonder: What if I’ve been misreading everything? What if things are fundamentally different now? What if—
“Samira.”
What if Jack is somehow handsomer now than he was when she last saw him in Pittsburgh. What if he’s standing in front of her now, crow’s feet out in full force and affection laid bare on his face.
“Welcome to New York,” she chirps brightly as he tugs her into a hug.
A laugh fizzes out of her like champagne bubbles, half-nervous and half-thrilled, when he presses a light kiss to her cheek.
“Happy to be here,” he murmurs in her ear.
Whatifwhatifwhatif.
—
Dinner is, by all metrics, excellent. She has the brown butter pumpkin gnocchi, him the braised short rib, but it’s conversation that keeps their mouths busy: patient hijinks, the occasional zebra, gossip about old and new colleagues alike. Anything, everything. No detail is deemed too little, no grief or joy left unturned.
It’s a little ridiculous that he’s wining and dining her in her own city, she thinks aloud, but she indulges his arguments like the good sport she is: well, no, she is still not making an attending salary, and no, he no longer gets to bring her coffee and/or matcha every week—and usually it had been ‘and’—so this three-dollar-sign meal is a suitable substitute for the “debt” he has accrued.
Still—”Since when are you a foodie?” Samira asks cheekily.
“Hey, now,” Jack chides. Despite the playful glint in his eyes, his voice is low and molten when he adds, “I know how to appreciate the finer things in life, Samira.”
She sinks her teeth into her bottom lip as she grins, grateful for the tandem effort of her complexion and the moody restaurant lighting in hiding the blush she can feel flaring across her cheeks, bolstered by the gin and vermouth from her martini. She’s mostly drunk on his singular attention, though: the heat of his gaze, heady as it had always been in the Pitt; his warm, easy laugh, crashing over her like a wave; the occasional nudge of his foot against hers.
“I must just be unrefined then. Like, take red wine. It’s wasted on me. It all tastes the same to my palate, I’m afraid.”
“It’s a muscle. You just have to exercise it. Here,” he says, extending his glass to her. Its thin, delicate stem looks almost vulgar in his giant grasp. She squeezes her legs together reflexively. “Try this.”
She isn’t sure what possesses her, but instead of taking the glass from him, Samira leans in. Swears she sees his eyes darken, too, when he realizes what she wants, and he tips the glass just enough to spill the liquid into her waiting mouth.
“Well?” he asks once she’s swallowed, his voice unmistakably gruffer.
She’s shocked when she’s actually able to distinguish different notes layered into the taste: berry, and peppercorn, and a hint of another spice that reminds her distinctly of fall in Pittsburgh. Cloves, she thinks.
A little uncanny how much she likes it, but that was Jack, through and through.
“That’s really nice.”
He smiles, pleased. “Good.”
She shouldn’t be surprised, then, when he catches the waiter’s eye and orders the rest of the bottle to-go in lieu of seeing a dessert menu. “What?” he asks at the endearing, indignant sound she makes in response. Holds her gaze as he adds, “I like helping you figure out what you like.”
—
(No, there was no way she was misreading that.)
—
Neither of them hesitates before declining the dessert menu in favor of taking the bottle upstairs, but Jack disabuses her of any doubt that may remain with the span of his hand at her lower back, his touch careful but searing.
Samira’s never been afraid of heights, but she finds herself getting dizzy the higher the elevator goes, the longer his thumb rubs lazy little circles at the base of her spine, not even abating when he pulls out his keycard and scans them in.
The room is fairly minimalist, all clean white and navy lines to ensure the central focus is the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the New York skyline. Samira barely registers the view, though. Couldn’t possibly with the muted thunk of the bottle of wine being relegated to the table to be forgotten, or with the slide of his mouth against hers, sweet to start but quickly filthy. Desperate, both of them.
“For what it’s worth, I do think it’s silly that you booked a suite. You could have stayed with me.”
Sure, her place is on the smaller side—it is New York City, after all—but she’d felt a stab of kismet upon seeing the built-in shower bench when she’d first toured the unit. There were many other reasons she said yes to the place, but she'd tucked the perk in her back pocket like a talisman.
Just in case.
“There is something very appealing about the thought of fucking you in your own bed,” Jack concedes. Backs her against the mattress, his mouth curling as she crawls back and comes to a reclining position on her elbows. He takes his time skimming his hands up to ruck her corduroy skirt over her hips, then down to peel her tights off, his lips parting as she spreads her legs in invitation. “But this is pretty nice, too, don’t you think?”
“Really nice,” she exhales in an echo from earlier as he gently strokes her through her underwear, the lace already damningly damp. He thumbs the fabric to the side—and why was that so much hotter—then, in one smooth movement, he kneels and his mouth finds her.
“Yeah? Good,” and god, fuck, she can feel him grin into her, can’t help the whine that the simple action pulls from her. For all her worrying that she’d misread their interactions years over, she’d never once doubted that being the subject of his focus like this would crack her open, positively ruin her.
She’s never been happier to be right.
“Besides,” Jack adds after a while, releasing her clit with a lewd, wet sound, “I didn’t want to impose.”
Despite the pressure building fast, hooking behind her navel and rising all the way to her throat, Samira’s answer comes easily. “You could never be an imposition, Jack.”
“I didn’t want to assume,” he corrects, then returns to laving at her, sliding one thick finger then another in beside his tongue and reveling in the choked moan she makes in response. “Fuck, Samira. Oh, she likes that.”
“I wi—ohshitI’mclose—wish you would have assumed sooner.”
He chuckles at that, the vibrations making her rock harder, more erratically, against his mouth. “Yeah, honey,” he says in agreement and encouragement, “I do, too. How about I make it up to you now?”
She can’t get her yes out in time, though, because he slides her leg over his shoulder then, and the new angle is just what she needs to come apart, her back curving in a deep, quivering bow. He groans, shaking his head from side to side to get closer, get more, like some primal thing that simply can’t stop feasting as she clenches hard on his fingers then clenches again on nothing at all, utterly bereft, as he forces himself back and rises to his full height to shed the rest of his clothes.
What had he called it?
She watches through half-lidded eyes as he slides a condom on and pumps himself a few times, then slowly, slowly, stretches her open on his cock.
That’s right: a muscle.