Work Text:
I. for you page
The thing about being twenty-one was that Victoria Javadi had expected more of it.
Not more in the way of material things — she wasn't that shallow, despite what Joy implied every time Victoria pulled out a new lip gloss mid-shift — but more in the way of story. She had spent the better part of her life being exceptional. Early enrollment at thirteen. Two completed rotations by twenty. A mother who was a surgical attending and a father who ran the endocrinology department of the same hospital where Victoria was currently doing her rotation, which should have been a source of profound networking advantages but was mostly just a source of profound embarrassment. She had done everything right, everything early, everything fast, and somehow the universe had looked at all of that effort and decided to give her nothing in return except a private Instagram account she couldn't even enjoy, a TikTok channel she absolutely could not acknowledge at work, and a birthday that no one was allowed to mention.
The not-birthday had been Santos's idea, which meant it had been executed with the aggressive competence Santos brought to everything, including things she had no business being aggressive or competent about. The rules had been communicated via group text with the efficiency of a medical briefing: no "happy birthday," no mention of the number twenty-one, no hugs, no balloons, no gifts, no decorations, no candles. They would eat cake at a bar. For no reason in particular.
The bar was a low-lit place in Lawrenceville that Santos had selected on the basis of having good beer and no televisions, which Victoria respected. They had pushed two tables together near the back, away from the speakers, and someone — she suspected Whitaker — had ordered a round before she arrived so that by the time she got there everyone was already two drinks into the kind of relaxed that made the evening feel inevitable in the best way. The cake materialized at some point after ten PM, carried out by a server who had been briefed with the same instructions as the rest of them, the candles conspicuously absent. They ate it at the table for no reason in particular, Santos announcing that it was simply Tuesday and sometimes on Tuesdays you needed cake, and no one argued with this logic because Santos in full certainty was essentially a force of weather.
Victoria had looked around the table — Santos, Whitaker, McKay, a few of the nurses, Mel beaming about something she was mid-explanation of — and felt, briefly and without irony, like the luckiest person in the room.
Then her eyes had found the corner.
Ogilvie and Joy had commandeered a small table near the back wall, shoulder to shoulder over Joy's phone, and were playing what appeared to be a memory test — the online kind, where you studied an image for thirty seconds and answered questions about what you'd seen. Victoria pieced together the rules from observation: with each level, Joy took a tequila shot before viewing the image. The logic, presumably, was to test whether her photographic memory held under increasing impairment. The background logic, which Ogilvie articulated at one point loudly enough for the main table to hear, was that Joy would eventually crack and he would finally beat her at something.
Joy did not crack.
By round six, Joy was substantially drunk, squinting at a photograph of a crowded market scene with the concentration of someone defusing a device, and she still recalled twenty-three of twenty-five details with Ogilvie, stone cold sober, at nineteen. The look on his face when the scores loaded — the half-second between the number appearing and his response to it, when he didn't know anyone was watching — was something Victoria filed away without meaning to. Then he laughed. Not the short, pointed version he used at work when he'd gotten something right, but something that started in his chest and escaped him slightly, genuinely surprised by how much it had gotten away from him, and he shook his head and said something that made Joy dissolve into laughter and lean sideways into his shoulder.
Victoria watched from the main table and thought: he's getting better at this.
She thought about the triple-A patient they'd lost three weeks ago. About Whitaker, who had ridden with Ogilvie in the ambulance afterward and had come back looking like someone who had said something important, and who had never told Victoria what that conversation contained. She had asked once, obliquely, and Whitaker had given her a look that was warm and entirely impenetrable and said only that Ogilvie was going to be fine. The before and after were distinct enough to document without knowing the cause. Something had been reorganized.
He had joined the street team. He had started taking an extra beat before committing — not the hesitation of someone who'd lost their nerve, but the pause of someone who'd acquired a fuller understanding of what was at stake. He had learned the staff one by one, in ways that were small and specific: what Whitaker needed, what Santos responded to, what made Mel laugh. He had gone easier on Joy in the memory game — Victoria was certain of it, Joy's photographic memory notwithstanding — and had been genuinely, unguardedly delighted about losing.
He had not stopped arguing with Victoria. This remained the one consistent fact of his presence at the PTMC.
She turned back to the main table. Mel was still explaining something, hands in motion, and across the table Langdon was watching her with an expression that had nothing to do with whatever she was saying and everything to do with the fact of her saying it. Their shoulders were touching in the way that happened when two people had stopped being careful about the distance between them.
Victoria looked at them for a moment longer than she should have.
The thing about Langdon and Mel was that they were objectively, cosmically unfair as a unit. Both of them somehow love-at-first-sight and slow burn simultaneously, like the universe had wanted to make a point. Mel with her color-coded binders and the small involuntary bounce she did when she landed on a diagnosis she'd been chasing — and Langdon, who had come back from his leave quieter and more present, attentive in a way that was not performance but genuine renovation. They understood each other in the wordless way Victoria had read about in approximately four hundred fanfictions and three dozen romance novels and had genuinely, fully, non-ironically expected to experience by now.
She was twenty-one. This was supposed to have happened.
I am spiraling, she thought, and ordered another drink, and went back to being present at her own non-birthday. From the corner, she heard Ogilvie laugh again.
II. suggested for you
She was on her couch at eleven forty-seven PM three days later, doomscrolling Instagram with the particular vacancy of someone avoiding a patient reflection journal they'd promised themselves they'd finish tonight, when the algorithm served her something she hadn't requested.
A suggested account. Public profile. Forty-seven mutual followers, which was alarming — how did he have forty-seven mutual followers with her? — and a username that was simply his full name, unmodified, because apparently James Ogilvie had given personal branding approximately zero seconds of thought.
She stared at the profile picture for three full seconds.
She should not tap on it. There was no reason to. She knew James Ogilvie in person. She argued with James Ogilvie in person four days a week. She did not need to know what he looked like on Instagram.
She tapped on it.
His grid was chronological chaos: no aesthetic, no curation, five years of actual life laid out with complete indifference to presentation. Photos from UCLA — large groups of friends with the slightly overwhelming enthusiasm of people who knew they were having the time of their lives. A museum phase, spanning what appeared to be the better part of a year, with captions that read more like exhibition notes than Instagram captions. This should have been insufferable. It was instead the first thing that made her pause and zoom in. Vinyl records fanned out on a wooden floor, the captions explaining at length why a specific pressing mattered. A bookshelf, black and white, that she zoomed in on because she was a completionist.
She noted the titles. Filed them away.
There was a girl. Red curly hair, green eyes, freckles, arms with small tattoos. Tagged consistently as Maya — freshman year through part of sophomore year, no formal ending, just a gradual absence, the way things ended when two people moved in different directions rather than against each other. Victoria went briefly to Maya's profile — public, easily found — and found her currently in Edinburgh, currently appearing in photos with a rugby player of some apparent regional significance, looking like someone who had landed exactly where she was supposed to be.
Good for Maya, Victoria thought. With complete neutrality.
She found his Spotify through a story he'd reshared. She found his Goodreads through the Spotify bio, where he had linked it as if that were a normal thing to do. His Goodreads was curated with a seriousness that implied genuine investment: long, specific reviews with opinions about sentence structure and thematic coherence. He had written four paragraphs about Steinbeck's use of geography. He had given Of Mice and Men five stars and simply written: my father assigned this. he was right. He had a list titled "things to reread when the world is a lot" that contained, in order, The Old Man and the Sea, Travels with Charley, and East of Eden, with the note: Steinbeck knew about being far from home.
Victoria put her phone down.
Picked it up.
Put it down again.
She opened her patient reflection journal, typed see previous entry, and went to sleep.
III. mutual followers
November became early December in the way Pittsburgh managed it: overnight and without apology, the cold arriving as if it had somewhere else to be.
The day shift ran 7AM to 7PM and Victoria had learned, over the months, that the hours between two and four in the afternoon were the most revealing — when the adrenaline of the early cases wore off and people stopped performing and simply were. She had learned a great deal about a great many people in these hours, often without intending to.
She was at the nurses' station at two-fifteen, writing up a chart, when she heard Ogilvie laugh.
Not the pointed version, the one he deployed when he'd gotten something right. The other one — the one from the bar, the one that had started in his chest and escaped him slightly. She looked up without deciding to.
He was at the end of the hall with Mel. She was explaining something with her full body, hands moving, and Ogilvie was listening — actually listening, not loading his response while she talked — and then he said something that made Mel's face open into a wide grin and she swatted his arm and turned back to the patient board still smiling.
Victoria looked back at her chart. Her handwriting had deteriorated significantly in the last twenty seconds.
Later that week she found his Spotify again through an old notification, and he had added Megan Thee Stallion and a Kelly Clarkson ballad to the same playlist, separated by a single Sufjan Stevens track as though that constituted a bridge between them. She stared at this arrangement for a moment. Then she closed the app.
He still argued with her constantly. The improved thoughtfulness that had reached everyone else had apparently not found her address. He still pushed back on her clinical decisions with the specific energy of someone who experienced her being right as a personal challenge, and she pushed back on his with the energy of someone who had spent her entire life overqualified and underestimated and had never been given a reason to stop proving herself.
The arguing was, she had come to understand, the most honest she got to be at work. With everyone else, Victoria performed — capable, competent, not-too-young, definitely-not-a-nepobaby. With Ogilvie, the performance fell apart because he didn't give her room for it. He pushed back too immediately and too specifically. She had to be real just to keep up.
She had not decided what to do with this understanding.
One afternoon a follow request arrived on her private Instagram. She checked it with the thoroughness her upbringing had installed in her: any connection to her mother's surgical practice, her father's department, the colleagues who liked her mother's Facebook posts in a way that suggested active surveillance. The account — a girl named Sarah, apparently a third-year medical student from Wisconsin, a grid of coffee shops and a golden retriever and university buildings — had none of the red flags. No Pittsburgh connections. No hospital adjacency. Nothing that reached back toward her parents' world.
Victoria accepted the request and thought nothing more about it.
IV. close friends
The argument with her mother happened on a Tuesday, in the corridor outside the ER, in a location her mother had selected unilaterally and Victoria had not agreed to.
The content was the usual content: the field of medicine Victoria hadn't chosen, the residency she wasn't committed to, the career path mapped out before Victoria had finished high school and that Victoria had been quietly, persistently, stubbornly refusing to simply walk into.
"I'm not saying surgery is your only option," her mother said, with the tone of someone absolutely saying that. "I'm saying you have every advantage—"
"I know what advantages I have," Victoria said. "I also know they're yours, not mine."
Her mother's expression did something complicated, then went carefully neutral. Which was worse than anger.
"We'll discuss this at home," she said, and walked back through the ER doors, and Victoria stood in the corridor and breathed with great deliberateness for approximately thirty seconds before the breathing stopped working and her eyes did the thing she absolutely could not afford for them to do out here.
She was still standing there four minutes later when she heard the door.
She turned with the expression she wore for colleagues already assembled, and found Ogilvie.
He stopped. Took in the situation with the diagnostic specificity that made him good at emergency medicine and occasionally unbearable as a colleague. She watched him calculate.
"You okay?" It came out carefully, like a register he didn't often use.
"I'm fine."
"You're crying outside the hospital."
"I'm aware of that."
He didn't push. He stood beside her for a moment and looked out at the parking lot in a way that communicated he wasn't going anywhere but was not requiring anything from her either. She couldn't tell if it was a calculated move or genuine restraint and the uncertainty of it did something unhelpful.
"I don't want to go home," she said. It came out more honest than she'd planned.
"Okay." He pulled out his keys. "I live six blocks away. I'll drive you."
She looked at the keys.
"For tea," he said.
She got in the car.
He drove without talking, which she was grateful for. Pittsburgh moved past the windows in its particular evening way — the bridges, the rivers catching what was left of the light, the hills that turned the city into something layered and unexpected every time she stopped taking it for granted. She looked out the window and breathed, and by the time he pulled up outside a building on a quiet street in Shadyside some of the tightness in her chest had loosened from unbearable to merely present.
His apartment was small and lived-in in a way that had never been staged for anyone. Books everywhere — medical journals cohabiting with fiction and the kind of dense mid-century American novels that required sustained attention, all stacked without organizational philosophy. A record player on a shelf near the window, surrounded by vinyl. A kitchen that had a very good kettle and evidence of nothing else.
She sat on his couch and looked around while he made tea. She could see him through the doorway — unhurried, finding mugs with the ease of someone for whom this was simply what evenings were.
He brought the tea over and sat at the other end of the couch, both hands around his mug. Victoria looked at the bookshelf. Let her eyes move across the spines.
"I didn't know you were into Steinbeck," she said.
Something in his expression shifted — not closed, but recalibrated. He followed her gaze to the shelf. "Yeah."
"The whole lot or—"
"All of it." He paused. "My dad teaches high school English. He would have assigned all of it." A shorter pause. "We don't really talk anymore. But I kept reading everything he would have put on the syllabus."
Victoria looked at her tea.
"I didn't know that," she said.
"You wouldn't."
The apartment was quiet. Outside, a car passed on the street below.
"What field is your mother pushing?" he said.
"Surgery." Flat, to avoid the weight of it.
"Is that what you want?"
"No."
"What do you want?"
She looked up at him. He was watching her with the quality of attention she had been categorizing incorrectly for months — rivalry, irritant, competition — and still didn't have the right word for. "I don't know yet," she said. "Which is the whole problem."
"That's not a problem," he said. "You're twenty-one."
"That number is banned."
"I'm not following Santos’s party rules in my own apartment."
The corner of her mouth moved without permission. She looked back at her tea. They sat in a silence that was not uncomfortable — which was its own kind of information — and then he drove her home, and they stood outside her building for a moment that neither of them named, and then she went inside.
She chose not to look back to see if he watched her go.
V. following
She saw the comment on a Thursday morning, four minutes before shift, while standing in the locker room pulling her hair up.
Maya's most recent photo: Edinburgh in winter, red hair against grey sky, genuinely beautiful in the way of someone who wasn't trying. In the comments, second from the top:
@jamesogilvie: reconnecting with you after all this time — somehow you've gotten even more beautiful.
Beneath it: @maya: @jamesogilvie everything is falling into place.
Victoria went to Maya's profile. The rugby player was gone — all of those photos, the ones from Leeds and the matches and what had appeared to be a very nice trip to Lisbon — replaced with solo shots and Edinburgh streets and the quietly deliberate grid of someone recently and intentionally single.
She put her phone in her locker. Stood for a moment. Opened it and put it back.
So that was it, then. She had seen the UCLA photos. The two of them through freshman year and part of sophomore, before the distance had made the math not work. She had looked at that gradual fading-out and read it as something mutual and concluded, clean and final — but it hadn't been, had it. He'd been waiting. He'd been at the PTMC doing his rotation and learning the staff and getting better and all of it, all this time, and quietly waiting for Maya to become available again so he could post a comment on her photo about how beautiful she'd gotten, and Maya would post something back about everything falling into place, and apparently everything was falling into place, for everyone, just not for Victoria.
Has he no decency, she thought, and went to start her shift.
VI. private account
She was professional about it.
She was completely professional about it until approximately 11AM, when Ogilvie appeared at the imaging screen and offered a considered alternative approach to a pediatric case and something in her released in a direction she hadn't prepared for.
"I know the patient's history," she said, before he'd finished.
"I know you do. I also know that—"
"Then you know why I made the call I made."
"I know why you made the call. I'm suggesting that a follow-up—"
"I'll determine what follow-up is indicated."
He was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "Javadi."
She kept her eyes on the screen.
"You've been snapping at me since seven AM."
"You've been annoying since seven AM."
"I've barely spoken to you today."
This was, infuriatingly, accurate. She turned away from the screen. He fell into step beside her, slightly ahead, and she understood he was steering them somewhere, and she let him because the alternative was having whatever this was in the main corridor. He turned into an empty assessment room not currently in use and held the door. She went in. He closed it behind them.
Small room. The contained quality of a space meant to hold things that couldn't be held in the open. He turned to face her — arms at his sides, not crossed, which meant he wasn't defensive, he was waiting.
"What's going on?" he said.
"I saw the comment," she said. "On Maya's photo."
He looked at her steadily.
"I didn't think you were one of those guys." She kept her voice even. "Who spends years waiting for his moment. Who sits on it and waits and waits, and then the second she's available—" She stopped. Recalibrated. "It's none of my business. Never mind." She turned toward the door.
"Are you jealous?" he said.
She stopped.
"I'm not—" The words that came next were not the words she would have chosen with more time. She didn't have more time. "What would I even be jealous of? Some boy who spent his UCLA years going to museums and writing four-paragraph Goodreads reviews about Steinbeck and what his father would have thought of them—"
A silence.
"—who links his Goodreads in his Spotify bio as if that is a thing people do, and who has five years of his life on a public Instagram that I may have gone back approximately eighteen months into—"
Ogilvie had gone very still.
"—and who adds Megan Thee Stallion to a Kelly Clarkson playlist and uses Sufjan Stevens as the bridge, which doesn't work and somehow works completely — and who I watched at the not-birthday going easier on Joy in the memory game so she'd have a good time and then genuinely laughing when she beat him anyway — and who learned every single person on this team, one by one, figured out what they each needed—"
She stopped. Started again, quieter.
"Everyone except me. With everyone else you figured out how to be careful, and with me you just kept arguing, and I told myself that was fine, that it was actually the most honest I got to be at work because you pushed back and I had to push back and there wasn't room for the performance, there wasn't room for any of it, I just had to be exactly what I was and say exactly what I thought, and I—" Her voice did something she hadn't authorized. She straightened. "And I thought you were getting better. And then I saw that comment and I thought you'd been pining over her this whole time, just waiting, and it was—" She stopped. "It doesn't matter."
The room held the silence.
"I owed Maya a favor," he said.
Victoria looked at him.
"She texted me and asked me to post something on her most recent photo. We have a deal from college — no questions asked, both ways. She calls one in, I do it, no context required." He paused. "I had no idea why she needed it. I had no idea about the rugby player until approximately right now."
Victoria stared at him. "She asked you to post that."
"She asked me to post that."
"You had no—"
"None."
"You weren't — you haven't been waiting—"
"No," he said. Simply and clearly. "I have not been waiting for Maya."
The information rearranged something. Victoria looked at him.
"That is not," he said, "how I flirt."
"Then how do you," she said.
"I asked Maya out after we argued in chemistry class," he said. "Freshman year. She'd been wrong about an organic chemistry calculation and she'd argued the point for ten minutes after I corrected her, and at the end of it I thought—" He held her gaze. "So yes. That’s my version of flirting. I have been flirting with you since the first week."
Everything she had been categorizing incorrectly rearranged itself — all of it, the arguing, the pushing, the specific quality of his attention when it was directed at her. Not because she was the person he hadn't learned. Because she was the person he had.
She stepped forward and kissed him.
Or he kissed her. The record was genuinely unclear — both of them closing the remaining distance at something close to the same moment, which felt right, which felt like the end of an argument where both people had turned out to be correct. His hand came up to her jaw with intention, and her hand found the front of his black scrubs and held rather than pushed. It tasted like bad hospital coffee and eight months of every argument in every corridor and the tea at his apartment and the twenty extra minutes neither of them had named.
It lasted considerably longer than was appropriate for a Wednesday at 11AM.
When she pulled back, both of them slightly breathless, she said: "What was yours?"
He looked at her.
"Your no questions asked," she said. "She used hers for the flirty comment. What did you use yours on? What did you get from her? What did you need badly enough?"
Something moved across his face — the particular expression of a man calculating how much honesty the moment could hold and deciding it could hold all of it.
"Maya has a fake account," he said. "She built it years ago. She uses it to look at people's private profiles — people she knows, people she's curious about, exes, whatever. It was just a thing she had." He paused. "I knew about it from college. I asked to borrow the login. No questions from her. She handed it over. She doesn't know who I was looking at, what I was doing with it, any of it."
Victoria looked at him for a long moment. Something was assembling itself, piece by piece, in the back of her mind.
"The account that follows my private Instagram," she said slowly. "The girl from Wisconsin."
"Is me," he said. "Yes."
"You," she said, "used Maya's fake stalking account to follow my private Instagram."
"You went back eighteen months on my public Instagram and then navigated to my Spotify and then to my Goodreads through the bio link and read my book reviews," he said. "Including the one about my father."
A beat.
"You knew," she said. "When I mentioned Steinbeck. At your apartment."
"I suspected. The Goodreads was linked publicly. Anyone could have found it." He held her gaze. "But yes. When you mentioned it, I was fairly certain."
"You didn't say anything."
"You didn't say anything."
Victoria pressed her fingers briefly over her eyes.
"We're even," he said. The corner of his mouth was doing the thing she recognized from the bar — the unguarded version, arriving before he'd decided to allow it. "You went deep on my public profiles. I borrowed a fake account to see yours. Morally equivalent."
"Those are not morally equivalent—"
"They're practically equivalent—"
"One of them required a fake account—"
"One of them required going back eighteen months—"
"Ogilvie."
"Javadi."
She laughed — properly, not the controlled version she used at work — and his expression when she did it was the one she had been collecting in peripheral vision for months without acknowledging she was collecting it: open, specific, a smile that had only one intended recipient.
She kissed him again, shorter and deliberate, and when she pulled back she kept her hand where it was against his chest.
"Do you want to know why?" he said.
"Tell me."
"You perform at work," he said. "You're good at it — most people can't tell. But you perform. And I wanted to know who you were when you weren't." He paused. "It looked like you. The private account. It just looked like you."
Victoria held that for a moment.
"There's one more thing," he said. "In the spirit of complete transparency."
She waited.
"I've seen all your Doctor J TikToks. Joy let something slip back in July and I found the account after." He said it simply, watching her absorb it. "I should have told you that day that it was fine. I'm sorry I didn't."
She looked at him. The Fourth of July shift assembled itself in her memory — the hours she had spent convinced he was about to tell everyone, the specific targeted dread of it, and him saying nothing, telling no one, going home and finding her account instead.
"You're the same person," he said. "In the ER and on the TikToks. The same way of caring about it. I don't think you know that about yourself."
The overhead speaker called a trauma code to Bay 3. Neither of them moved.
"I remember everything that has to do with you," he said quietly. "Because it's important."
She kissed him once more — briefly, certain — and kept her hand where it was.
"The arguing doesn't stop," she said.
"No," he agreed. "It doesn't."
"Good," she said. And meant it.
VII. read receipts
The shift ended at 7PM.
They walked out through the main doors into the cold, the ER continuing behind them, the city continuing around them.
"For the record," she said, "you are still the most obnoxious person I have ever met."
"In clinical settings," he said.
"In clinical settings. And social ones. And in empty assessment rooms."
"Notably." He looked at her. "Steinbeck," he said. "You went to my Goodreads."
"Your Spotify bio links it."
"You went to my Spotify first."
"Your Instagram story reshared a link."
"You went to my Instagram first."
"The algorithm," she said, with great dignity, "surfaced your profile."
"And you thought, let me see what this person is about."
"I thought I would look for four minutes and close the app."
"And instead you found the museum phase."
"The museum phase was eighteen months back."
"It was a sincere phase," he said.
"I know," she said. "I read the captions."
He laughed — the real one, unguarded, the one she had memorized without deciding to — and the evening air tasted like cold and Pittsburgh and the specific relief of something long unresolved finally settling into its right shape.
"Six blocks," he said.
"I know where you live," she said. "I've been there."
"Come back for tea."
"I'm not coming back for tea," she said, and fell into step beside him.
Later, Victoria would think: twenty-one. Not bad at all.