Chapter Text
“Why are you checking your emails?” Santos asks, and Mel nearly drops her phone. She’s as subtle as ever.
“No reason,” Mel says, but it comes out as more of a squeak.
Her, Santos and Javadi are sitting drinking on their usual bench. Everyone else had slowly filtered out until it was just the three of them left to confront the fact that they really had nothing better to do on a Saturday evening. Normally Mel would have plans with Becca, but that’s still tense right now. And Mel’s pretty sure Becca is with Adam tonight.
“Do you just check your emails when you’re drunk the same way people check dating apps?” Javadi asks, leaning over to try and look at Mel’s phone. “Or are we just really boring?”
“I’m just waiting for a response to something,” Mel says, angling her phone away. It’s not a lie, but Santos and Javadi look unconvinced. “My friend just said they would message. It’s nothing.”
“Why are you talking to your friend over email?” Javadi asks.
“We’re internet friends. It’s not that weird.”
“What, and you don’t have anywhere else to talk? I have tons of internet friends, and we don’t email.”
Mel shrugs. “That’s just the way we do it. It’s more anonymous.” She isn’t about to tell them that it was either here or over Reddit DMs. She has a feeling that Santos would never let her live it down.
“Anonymous? So you could be emailing a weird seventy year old guy?” Santos asks, her eyes narrowing. “How do you know he isn’t a creep?”
“I’m not even sure that it’s a guy,” Mel points out. “And they don’t know anything about me so it’s completely safe. Please can we just drop it?”
Santos takes another sip of her beer. “Whatever, it’s your life.”
“If they get weird then let me know. I know a guy who can track IP addresses,” Javadi says. When Mel and Santos give her concerned looks at this, she just shrugs. “I know him from TikTok. I take internet safety very seriously.”
The thing about working in an ED is that you need to have something to distract you after a shift. Something that completely and totally takes your mind off whatever horrific things you might have seen that day.
Mel knows that Javadi makes her TikToks, and that she lurks on other social media sites. Mel’s pretty sure that once she went into the break room and caught her on Wattpad, which neither of them has ever brought up again.
She knows Samira started going to a pilates class at 5:30am. Mel sees her pastel workout sets and yoga mat sticking out of her locker sometimes as they start their shift. Personally, Mel can’t think of anything worse than having another thing to do in the mornings before work when they already need to be up that early, but it seems to work for Samira.
She knows that Whitaker does some farm work on his days off. Santos mentions it sometimes, and over the last few months it’s become a lot clearer that Whitaker has had some form of workout. He’s definitely bulked up.
Santos watches a lot of reality TV. Back when Mel had that embarrassing crush on her, she would hang on to Santos’s every word about whatever version of Love Island was currently airing. She had the app and everything, even though she claimed to hate most of the couples.
“The men on this show are the worst,” she had said. “Usually I just vote for whichever couple seems the least evil.”
And Mel had had Becca. She used to pick her up after work, and they would order food in, and Becca would pick a movie, and the two of them would sit quietly together to decompress. It had been a good system, and it had worked. Until Becca had decided she didn’t want to do it anymore.
“Do you not have any friends?” she had asked Mel one night. And Mel knew she didn’t mean it badly, that she was genuinely just asking, but that had made it a lot worse. “We do this all the time, and I’m getting bored. Sometimes I have people I want to see. You can do other things, right?” She still saw Becca, obviously, but it became more and more infrequent and some of the time Mel would feel like Becca didn’t want to be there. And, to be honest, Mel didn’t really have friends other than Becca.
So Mel had started drinking in the park after shifts and trying to ignore the loneliness that had clawed its way into her. But she missed the way things had been. She missed Becca, and she missed their dinners, and she even missed hate-watching Elf.
When the park wasn’t enough of a distraction, Mel had made a habit of finding a way to kill time after shifts. She was too tired for any sort of activity, and she hadn’t kept up with any of Santos’s shows since it became clear that whatever she had going on with Garcia wasn’t going to end anytime soon. She ended up sitting reading stories on Reddit, sometimes commenting, but mostly just lurking. It was fun. Entertaining, low stakes, and a good way to actually interact with her interests. She would scroll through ren-faire stuff, posts about her favourite musicians and look at interesting medical stories.
But Mel’s favourite thing to look at was the confession posts. Detailing whatever major life event was happening, seeking advice or just an audience. First dates, weddings, breakups, family issues, feuds between coworkers. Mel, whose life was painfully uneventful, found it cathartic. She could lose herself in the stories, and it didn’t require any attention that a movie or TV show might have demanded. This was what she did after a shift that was stressful but not horrific, when she had no reason to not be painfully aware of how quiet her apartment is.
It was a night like that when she found the post. The user had described their relationship with their wife, and the fact that there had been problems for a while that had built up. That the problems were their fault, and their wife had stayed through every painful trial and they still needed to leave her. They talked about mistakes, and the inability to break from whatever perception people had already had of you.
Obviously she had read other sad posts, but this one in particular struck a chord in Mel. She wasn’t divorced, obviously, but she did know what it was like to have people have an inaccurate perception of you. To the world, she was at once naive and childlike and a strong and dutiful caretaker. But in reality, Mel was just really lonely and missing her sister.
So Mel had commented something vaguely supportive, and the stranger had upvoted it and thanked her. She went through their post history and found a comment from the last couple of days on a victorian history forum, and she had felt a strange urge to message them.
u/CognacQueen1479: Hi! I really get what you’re talking about with people having incorrect perceptions of you. I know this is probably really weird, so feel free to ignore this but if you want to talk to someone who doesn’t have any preconceived ideas about you I would be happy to listen.
Mel didn’t receive a reply for a couple of days, which she wasn't all that upset about. It was Reddit, after all, and she knew the stereotype about the type of people on that app. For all this person knew she could be a complete creep. Maybe that was why she had felt comfortable saying something in the first place. It was a very un-Mel thing to do.
Her stomach dropped when she saw the message sitting in her inbox the next time she went onto the app.
u/GenuineOcean386: Hey, I really appreciate the offer. It feels good to know that it isn’t just me who feels like this, everyone else seems to have everything together. Sorry it took me a couple of days to get back to you, I only made an account a couple of days ago so I could post this and I haven’t really been back since. Is there any other place I can contact you?
Mel had considered her reply. This was the type of thing that she knew could only work anonymously, and she didn’t really want a stranger knowing her name or anything about her. So Mel had given out an old email address she had made back in high school, and waited for him to send something over.
The emails so far had been fairly tame, but Mel pushed a little bit in the last one she’d sent. She had asked about their divorce for the first time, and their reply still hadn’t come through.
Mel tries to focus back on what Santos and Javadi are talking about, making sure to nod at the right moments.
“I need out of that house, but it’s so hard finding somewhere. Who would I even live with? I don’t think I could afford to live by myself,” Javadi says, kicking at the ground.
“Do what Huckleberry did and just take a spare room,” Santos says. “Mel, can Crash stay with you?”
“My spare room needs to be free for Becca,” Mel says, smiling apologetically. Not that she wants to stay there anymore, she thinks to herself.
“Well shit, that’s us out of options.”
“I could always ask an actual adult. Like McKay or someone. Fuck, I’d even take Robby over my parents at this point.”
“Hey, we’re actual adults,” Santos argues.
“I’m thirty in two years,” Mel admits. “Which I hate.”
“Really?” Javadi says, her eyebrows raising. “Shit, I forget how much older you guys are than me.”
“Ouch,” Santos says, lightly elbowing Javadi. “Why do you hate it, Mel? You seem like you’ve got your life together.”
Mel snorts. “I’ve really not.”
“You have your own apartment,” Santos says, listing it off on her hand, “everyone at work likes you, you’re capable and good at your job. You have everything under control, it looks like.”
“Langdon was married with kids at my age,” Mel points out.
“Langdon’s just out of rehab, I think he had other stuff going on,” Javadi says. “Also, those kids were absolutely an accident.”
“Definitely an accident,” Santos agrees. “Who gets their girlfriend pregnant when they’re in med school?”
“He’s still married with kids though,” Mel says.
“That’s a heteronormative way to measure success,” Santos says. Mel isn’t sure if the know-it-all voice she’s putting on is a bit or not. It’s always hard to tell with Santos.
“I know that, obviously. I’m just saying, compared to that, I’m not all that well adjusted. Not more than anyone else our age, anyway. You have your own apartment as well, you’re doing fine.”
“If I’m still thirty and living with Dennis I think I’ll go clinically insane.”
“At least you didn’t live with my parents for twenty years.”
“Maybe I could try that. How committed are your parents to their marriage?”
“Very. Can we please stop this conversation?”
They go home soon after that. Javadi splits off at the park entrance, and Mel and Santos walk together for a little bit. She pretends not to notice the way Santos blushes when she answers her phone, since Mel doesn’t think she’s technically supposed to know about her and Garcia seeing each other. She must have overheard the nurses talking about it one day, or maybe she had just paid too much attention or accidentally eavesdropped on a conversation between the two of them. When Santos abruptly says she’s had a change of plans and needs to pick something up, Mel doesn’t say anything. She just watches her walk off in the opposite direction of her apartment, and tries not to feel like a second choice.
It’s silly. Her coworkers have already spent time with her after a tiring twelve hour shift, and the feeling of wrongness doesn’t go away. It’s annoying, in fact.
Mel collapses into her bed and opens her laptop, managing to wait about fifteen minutes before she checks her email.
They replied.
Mel sucks in a breath and opens it.
From: [email protected]
Grey,
To be honest, I’ve been waiting for you to ask about it. You definitely waited a lot longer than I would have. But yeah, it all got finalised today. It wasn’t as emotional as I had expected it to be. We were both upset, but I think this whole thing has dragged so long we were just glad it was over. I get to see the kids a lot more than I expected. I won’t get into it here, but just know that stuff has gone down that made me think I would be completely fucked in a custody battle.
I still wear my ring in public. I should probably stop doing that now that everything’s over, but it feels like I’m admitting defeat. I know if I was to tell people I got divorced they would assume they know exactly how and why it happened, and I don’t have it in me to correct them. I don’t even know if my parents believe me when I tell them that it had just stopped working.
I also don’t think it’ll be fun going from people seeing me as someone who even slightly has their life going smoothly to a thirty-three year old divorced guy. I don’t know, it feels kind of young for a divorce. In my head divorced dads are all in their 40s or 50s. At least the divorced dad playlists are going to feel more authentic now.
Don’t feel bad for asking about this stuff. You’ve been really respectful, especially for a stranger off the internet, so thank you for that. Ask whatever you want, and if I don’t want to talk about it I won’t answer. It actually feels good to have someone care about how I’m doing and ask.
How are you doing? How was your day? (See how nice it is to have someone ask? You should do it more often without feeling weird about it.)
- Roboto
From: [email protected]
Roboto,
I promise I’m not being weird about it. I just didn’t want to force you to talk about something you didn’t want to talk about. I have a hard time knowing when to push or not, so I was just making sure you weren’t uncomfortable. Expect lots of annoying questions now that you’ve given me permission to ask whatever I want, though. You’ve been warned.
I really do get what you mean about the ring thing. I can imagine there’s a lot of people who would notice, and then you’ll need to talk to all of them or let them come to their own conclusions. It’s a sucky situation.
If it makes you feel better, I think people always think everyone else has their lives together more than they do. I had a couple of my coworkers say that I seem like my life is completely together. I think they said it because I have my own place, but other than that I still feel the way I did when I was twenty-one. I’m still kind of a loser, and I still don’t really have friends. So I’m sure you’ll be fine. If they think I’m doing well, I know people will be able to see you’re doing well too.
I’m curious how much better the playlists are when you’re actually divorced. Maybe the old man music will actually start to sound good. You’ll have to let me know.
My day was okay other than the revelation that I’m a lot less accomplished than my coworkers think I am. Maybe it’s a compliment though?
I do hope you feel better soon. I’m sorry about your sucky day.
- Grey
Mel shuts her laptop over and stares up at her ceiling. She supposes that the sharing is a two way thing, especially now that she’s been asked about things, but it still feels weird to have to talk about her feelings.
She can also feel herself starting to wonder about Roboto. She now knows he’s a guy for one, and she also knows that he listens to bad rock music. She had actually been picturing a guy in his 40s or 50s, who’s probably a little lonely and just needs an outlet. It’s strange to realise that he’s only a few years older than her. It’s nice to actually feel good at talking to someone her age, someone she could theoretically be friends with. With her patients, she’s never great at calming them down and usually says the wrong thing or makes them uncomfortable.
She finishes her book and then falls asleep. It’s a good night overall, she supposes.
***
“What did your friend say?” Santos asks the next day, not looking up from her computer.
“Huh?” Mel says, fidgeting with her stethoscope.
“You said your friend was wanting to send you something. What was it?”
“Oh, it was nothing.”
Santos looks up, frowning. “It didn’t seem like nothing.”
“Drop it, Trinity,” Samira says, joining the two of them. “Leave Mel alone.”
Mel smiles awkwardly at both of them. “I promise it’s not important. It’s a penpal situation. I was just waiting on an email.” She says this mostly because it seems innocuous enough that she thinks it’ll make the two of them lose interest. But when even Samira raises her eyebrows with curiosity, Mel knows that she’s miscalculated.
“Penpal emails? That sounds cool,” Samira says. “Is it through a website or something? What’s their name?”
“Mel doesn’t know anything about them,” Santos says.
“I did find out it’s a guy in his thirties,” Mel clarifies. “But I don’t know his name or anything.”
“Is that not dangerous?” Samira asks, frowning.
“No, because he doesn’t know anything about me either. I was the one who asked to start emailing anyway, so it’s not like he’s stalking me.”
“What do you mean you asked?” Samira asks.
“He made a confession post thing, and I gave him my email in case he wanted to talk about things.”
“That’s really dangerous, Mel. Can’t people track your email addresses?” Samira’s frown deepens and she studies Mel closely.
Mel squirms. “I’m sure it’s fine, it’s an old one from middle school and it doesn’t have my name in it.”
“Wait, it was from a confession post?” Santos says slowly.
“Yes,” Mel says, feeling as though she’s missed something.
When Santos looks at her again, her grin is shark-like. “Mel, did you meet this guy over Reddit?”
Shit. “No,” Mel says, but it clearly isn’t convincing enough. Santos bursts out laughing.
“Oh my god, you have a Reddit boyfriend.”
“No I don’t! He isn’t my boyfriend, I was working under the assumption that he was a fifty year old guy. I wouldn’t go after someone that old.”
Samira coughs awkwardly, and Santos glances over at the trauma room Whitaker is in, smirking.
“And he doesn’t really use Reddit, that’s why we switched to email.” Really, Mel thinks, it’s more likely that she’s the Reddit girlfriend. Although she hasn’t been on the app as much either since the emails started. It’s funny how things work out.
“I’m just teasing,” Santos says, uncharacteristically genuine. “It’s probably good to have friends outside of work. If he’s weird, you can always get Javadi’s guy to break his kneecaps or something.”
Mel is oddly touched by the implication that Santos thinks she has work friends. Maybe the drinks in the park are actually starting to make people like her.
“Are you coming to karaoke?” Santos asks both of them. “I’m trying to get Dennis to agree to go out so I want backup.”
“Yeah,” Mel says, smiling. “I think I will.”
***
Mel knows she has a type. She’s always had a type, and she probably always will. One thing about the King sisters is that they’re consistent. Mel wasn’t surprised when she met Adam and saw that he was a tall funny redhead, because Becca has always liked tall funny redheads. It probably started with Elf, the way everything did with Becca, and nothing much changed over the next twenty years with her type in men.
Mel didn’t realise hers until a little later. She was sitting next to one of the football players in biology class when she was fifteen, and his friend gave an outrageously wrong answer to a question the teacher had asked. He looked at Mel and rolled his eyes as if she was in on the joke, before tearing a page out of his notebook and crumpling it into a ball and throwing it at his friend when the teacher had his back turned. Then he raised his hand and answered the question correctly, smirking.
The butterflies in Mel’s stomach didn’t go away the rest of the day.
This football player had short dark hair, and he was cocky in a way that he could back up. He thought he was the best athlete in the school, but he actually was so it wasn’t egregious. Mel never ended up working up the courage to speak to him.
So yeah, she liked arrogant, pretty, mean brunettes. But apparently everyone else does too, because usually she isn’t the only one who likes her crushes.
Football guy was dating a cheerleader, because of course he was.
The guy she liked in med school would flirt with the girl who sat in between him and Mel constantly. She saw on her Instagram the other week that the two of them had just gotten engaged.
The girl she started with in her intern year had a string of dating app conquests she would give Mel far too much information about.
Santos had whatever was going on with Garcia.
Frank Langdon had a wife and children.
It’s not like she wasn’t always aware of that with Langdon. He had a wedding ring and wore a bracelet made by his daughter, for crying out loud. But he had been so kind to Mel that first day, comforting and supporting her without being patronising. And then he had come back to PTMC when it would have been so much easier not to, and he had proven himself all over again.
So when Mel passes him at his locker and sees he isn’t wearing his ring, she stops in her tracks.
He doesn’t see her at first, but he must sense Mel staring because he turns around and gives her a nervous smile.
“Hey, Mel,” he says, shutting his locker over and slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Mel says, giving what she hopes is a reassuring smile. “I’m good. How are you?”
“I’m alright,” he shrugs. “The kids are going back to school this week, so I’m trying to organise all that on top of work stuff.”
“I don’t know how you can balance all that. I barely have the energy to do anything after work.”
“Don’t you look after Becca?” Frank asks, looking at her with genuine curiosity.
“Yeah, but she’s at the facility a lot these days.”
“So she is.” He shakes his head apologetically. “I remember you telling me that. But with the kid stuff I think it helps that I have Abby.”
Right. Maybe his ring was just off so it didn’t get damaged as he treated patients. Mel was being silly, and had way too much wishful thinking when it came to this stuff.
“It’s really important to have support,” Mel agrees, keeping her voice even. “That’s why I’m coming out tonight to karaoke.”
Langdon smirks at her. “You’re doing karaoke?”
Mel nods. “Yeah, Santos wants to distract Whitaker. She says he’s at this girl’s farm too much and he needs to loosen up. I’m trying to be more social.” Mel very pointedly doesn’t think about Becca pointing out that she has no friends.
“Interesting,” Langdon says. “What are you going to sing?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll see what songs are there.”
Mel isn’t about to queue a bunch of rap songs on karaoke, especially if she’s going to be sober and it’s just after a twelve hour shift. She doesn’t need her coworkers to see that side of her anytime soon.
“Do you want to join?” Mel asks.
“I don’t know if Santos would want me there,” Langdon laughs. “And I should get home soon anyway. I have to be up early for the kids.”
Mel nods. “You should come sometime though. It would be fun.”
Langdon smiles warmly. “Maybe I will. Only if I can see you singing, though.”
Mel groans half heartedly. “Fine. But I won’t be happy about it.”
***
She checks her emails once they’ve sat down, tilting her phone away from everyone else. Roboto has emailed in the last ten minutes, but Mel realises she’s probably being very anti-social so she switches off her phone and tries to pay attention to what everyone else is talking about. Santos is going through all their star signs and deciding how accurate everyone’s birth chart is, and Javadi is up queueing everyone’s karaoke songs. Mel is very pointedly not thinking about Langdon.
Her crushes normally faded once she knew they wouldn’t happen. But for some reason Langdon was the exception to this rule, never ceasing to appear in her mind in moments of boredom or loneliness.
What made matters even worse is that everyone seems to have noticed it.
“I saw you talking to Langdon after work,” Whitaker says knowingly. “You guys get along really well.”
Mel forces a smile. “Yeah, we’re friends. I think.”
“Friends?” Santos says. “You guys look like you want to jump each others’ bones.”
“That’s a bit hypocritical. Have you seen how you act with Garcia?” Mel points out to a chorus of shocked laughs.
That’s something Mel hates. She can’t make a joke or be sarcastic without everyone being surprised by it. Mel can be funny, she knows she can be funny, so she bristles a little at everyone’s shock.
“I can make jokes. It isn’t that weird.”
“And I encourage it,” Santos says. “I’m a big girl, I can take it.”
Out of everyone, Santos is probably the least fazed when Mel breaks from whatever archetype she’s been pushed into. She can be rude and blunt, Mel supposes, but she’s like that with everyone. Mel is oddly charmed by it, especially since she isn’t hopelessly trying to get her attention the way she did back in Summer.
“We don’t mean anything by it, Mel,” Samira adds apologetically. “You’re just very different at work.”
“I’m very in favour of more people bullying Santos in the workplace,” Whitaker says, and Santos elbows him.
“Nothing would happen anyway. He’s married,” Mel says. She thinks she manages to not sound as bitter as she feels, so she takes that as a win. She considers mentioning the wedding ring, but something stops her.
When her and Santos do a song from Wicked that night (Santos’s choice), Mel manages to forget about the whole interaction from earlier.
***
Before she goes to sleep, Mel opens her emails again.
From: [email protected]
Grey,
So, I think I might have fucked up a little today. And I realised I actually don’t have anyone to talk to about this sort of stuff, so I hope you don’t mind me telling you about my very stupid problems.
Without getting too into it, I have a very dumb crush on a coworker. It’s dumb because I’ve literally just finalised a divorce, which I still haven’t told her about, and I‘m trying to keep things friendly but I suck at it. There’s someone at work who hates my guts and she keeps saying that I eyefuck my work crush, which is probably true but I really don’t want to make things weird. The two of us are kind of friends, so I’m really scared this’ll get back to her and she’ll feel awkward. The one thing I have going for me there is that she’s so oblivious. Crazy smart, but she does not pick up on it when anyone is flirting with her.
She tried to make plans with me and I blew her off. I had good reasons for it, but we never see each other outside of work. I guess I feel like I lost a chance.
Anyway, I got bored and looked up Jane Grey because of your email address. I had heard of her, but I didn’t know her very well. Most of what I know about history is American stuff I heard about from the Fort Pitt museum that I would research when I was younger. I was really cool as a kid, obviously.
But I can see why you’d be interested in her. It’s a really tragic story, and I feel like you’ve given me a rabbit hole to fall down. I’ve just put the kids to bed, so I might have to look more into this.
Thank you for that, Grey.
- Roboto
Fort Pitt. Roboto lived in Pittsburgh, maybe even still lives there. Mel thinks about what Santos and Samira had said about stalkers, but brushes it off. Why would a stalker reveal how close they were to you? It’s just a weird coincidence, Mel is sure of it, but it still leaves her with an uncomfortable sensation. A familiar one that she cannot name.
But that’s hers to deal with. Roboto hasn’t done anything other than live too close to her, and Mel isn’t about to ghost him over something that harmless.
From:[email protected]
Roboto,
I’m so excited you’ve looked into Jane Grey. She’s one of the most fascinating historical figures, in my opinion. I made this email address after I got really obsessed with researching her in 8th grade, so I’m happy to finally find someone who wants to listen to me talk about her. My family was sick of me that month.
I’m really sorry about your coworker crush. If it makes you feel better, I’ve had two unsuccessful ones in the past year. They’re scarily similar, and they both hate each other’s guts, which I find really funny.
I got over one of them. I’m kind of friends with her now, and she’s seeing someone. It’s a situationship type thing though, which I don’t really get. You’re dating or you’re not, right? Why make that stuff even harder?
I really should be over the other one. He’s married with kids. I’ve known this since I met him, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to help me move past it. It’s fine, though. It’s not like I’m obsessed with him or anything, I just have a hot coworker to think about sometimes. It’s not an intense thing I’m going to act on so I don’t feel as awkward around him.
Maybe if you think about your crush as a more casual thing it’ll feel easier? That usually works for me. But then again, I know I’ll never do anything about mine. Given the marriage. Maybe try thinking about it like that?
You need to give me a rabbit hole to go down now. It’s only fair.
- Grey
Mel feels lighter when she turns her lamp off. Roboto seems to have a lot of similar problems to her, and it’s good to have someone to talk about these things to. She wouldn’t ever bring it up to her other coworkers. The thought of saying some of that stuff to Samira or Santos, and especially Langdon made Mel feel a little ill.
She should maybe send him some articles on internet safety, though. In the last twenty-four hours he had already revealed the city he grew up in and his age. He really had no reason to trust her that much, and he was bound to slip up more if he wasn’t careful.