Chapter Text
Samira hated getting out of bed at 5am every Monday and Friday to roll up to her 6am class, on campus. She didn’t even know it was possible to have class that early, honestly—she’d been in school now for 7 years, and this was the first time she’d seen this happen. She thought after the age of 18 all normal adults with adult responsibilities valued sleep, and not forcing themselves and a class of about 80 people to be up at ass-crack of dawn to learn about emergency medicine.
But considering their geriatric professor, she could see why this was the timing he had set up. Insomnia gets worse with age, she supposed. She wondered if he had to drive to work with locked up knees, stopping at the 24/7 IHOP to get his breakfast with a side of their senior citizen discount.
“I’m going to hell.” She reprimanded herself for her cruel thoughts. Fine, so she was a little—or a lot—bitter about having to wake up early after so many nights of burning the oil on both ends. She was also scared about walking into an intersection without checking the pedestrian light, how she’d done this Monday in her sleepy stupor, so she forced herself to whip up some bullshit instant coffee in her travel thermos. She fantasized about the day when she could get 8$ cappuccinos daily and not worry about financing it on Klarna.
Since there was basically no traffic that early in the morning, the bus always dropped her off a little early to campus. She walked over to her lecture hall while listening to her pump-up music, wondering what would be her playlist for when she was a surgeon and senior enough that she got control of the speakers. Maybe Tamilian oldies, but there was also the risk of her getting too into it and pausing the procedure to belt along.
It was an amusing image to ponder in order to save herself from giving into her exhaustion. In the distance she could see Dr. Jack Abbot’s office, conveniently located just a few hallways down from where the lecture would be held. She wondered if she could get away with dropping a strongly worded death threat in his physical inbox—it made her mad to think of his students having to come out from their faraway hidey-holes to get to class, meanwhile he could stroll over in under a minute flat. She took a sip of her disgusting drink to calm herself down and not do anything drastic when she passed by.
In an effort to walk by non-chalantly, she didn’t notice that the light in the office shut off right before she got near it, and the door swung inwards. Out, and straight into her, walked Dr. Abbot as he turned around to lock his door. The opened thermos collided directly to his bicep and fell to the floor, rolling away from them and making a screeching metallic noise in the silent hallway. Samira flinched harder.
“Oh my god, Dr. Abbot, I’m so—I’m so, so, sorry! Can I—fuck, I didn’t mean to—I mean, you—“ She stopped herself just by a few milimeters from making panicked contact with his arms—or worse, do something like dab at his shirt with her hand.
He just raised a suspicious eyebrow at her and kept his expression neutral. Not breaking eye contact, he turned the lock to his office, and Samira gulped when she heard the snick. Well, here went her letter of recommendation that she was going to beg him for at the end of the semester. She wished he would stop looking at her so that she could find a railing to jump off of in peace.
“This is definitely one way to try to get me to cancel class, Samira.”
Kill her now. She wished someone would have some mercy and drop a chandelier at her head in that moment, Om Shanti Om style. “Oh god, I wasn’t—this wasn’t an attempt on your life, I swear, Dr. Abbot. I’m just—” Sleep deprived. A zombie. Homicidal.
“Calm down, I was kidding. This was a fun reminder of when I worked around dropping bombs. You never really know what the day will bring you.” He joked, still clutching his messenger bag around his other arm. She met his eyes and saw the mirth in them.
She was thankful that he was giving her an out from this awkward situation. Samira slowly followed her gaze down to his torso, afraid to look at what was surely going to be a sticky mess.
And it was. Samira winced looking at the vaguely tan stain spreading over the fabric, browner around the edges. “I would offer to pay for your shirt to be dry cleaned, and I will if you really need me to, but I’d have to probably take out another student loan to not go into overdraft. I’m really sorry, Dr. Abbot. I didn’t look…”
“No, it’s okay. You had the right of way. I didn’t check my blindspot.” It took her a minute to realize he was making a driving analogy. Sure, whatever gets the blame off of her.
“Do you—do you have any spare clothes in your office? I could run and get you some scrubs from the lab, it’ll just take me a minute, I am very fast.”
He pushed up the cuff to his button down to look at his watch. Samira followed to see too, and was struck by the beautiful thing—not as huge as men often wore in a misguided attempt to assert their dominance, or so little that it could be mistaken as delicate. It was a nice piece of vintage jewelry, gleaming silver and square dialed. She immediately pushed her gaze to the floor when she started to notice his uncovered wrist too, veiny behind the light arm hair and with a strong wrist bone protruding from its side, tendons standing out and disappearing under his sleeve. Also the unmistakable black band on his ring finger.
“I guess I have 5 minutes before lecture starts. I keep scrubs in my office, lab doesn’t stock my size. I’ll see you in class, Samira. Don’t be late.”
She let out a huff of laughter but didn't move. He gave her a serious look, so she took off running to catch her thermos that had rolled at least 6 feet away from them by now. Yeti would be hearing from her about their container design.
***
Abbot’s class was in a room that had seats arranged in rows raised by steps, each one higher than the last. At the bottom, there was an instructor’s station on the ground with huge whiteboards behind, and pull-down chalk boards on top that could be switched out as per need. A ginormous white screen hung from the ceiling waiting to be projected on. The hall was always brightly lit, hurting everyone’s eyes that early in the morning.
There was a certain element of possession when it came to who sat where—obviously, Dr. Abbot stood in the front of the class, so the first 2 rows were always filled by adoring fans who hung on to his every word. The last few rows were for the vast majority of the class that arrived late in increments of however many intervals. Samira always had the chance to snag one in the front, given the early arrival of her bus, but she inevitably chose to sit in the seats closest to the exits in the middle rows: enough distance that there was a low chance for eye-contact, but not so much that Abott wouldn’t be aware of her presence. She didn’t participate in the chatter before his entry, instead opting to glance over the reading he would present that day. His Canvas was furnished to only the barest of the bones, with just a syllabus, course outline, and grades tab. She looked up when he came in, not in the same outfit she’d seen him in this morning.
“Straight from the hospital today, doc?” Someone in the front row popped the question to him, chuckling as if he’d just noticed some extraordinary detail.
“No, just managed to spill something on myself. Oops.” He purposefully found Samira’s eyes, and she shamefully ducked her head into her laptop. “As usual, devices off, please. Eyes on me, and the board. If you didn’t do the reading, don’t bother skimming it last minute—just focus on listening and participating.”
A rustle went through the class as most people closed their laptops and put their phones away. It was kind of frustrating to be old school in this day and age, with no slides to follow or a set structure to go off of, but Samira didn’t mind it too much. Abbot was a great teacher who spoke articulately, was open to taking questions, and it felt meditative to jot down whatever he was saying in her notes. He would draw diagrams on the whiteboard, or project figures from the desk camera whenever the need for illustrations arose. Their introductory class didn’t have a lab component, since that came with the clerkships—instead, Abbot delivered lectures in the mornings while EM residents handled babysitting people through skills workshops.
People usually listened to Abbot raptly, since there was just something about him that demanded the full attention of a room—but today, Samira barely took any notes in the first 30 minutes of the lecture because she kept getting distracted by seeing him in scrubs for the first time. She could see now what he meant when he said the lab didn’t have his size—his chest seemed like it was wide enough to hide at least two people behind him, and his waist tapered off gradually from the sides. She could see the arms that were always covered by the sleeves of his button-downs, every head of every muscle bulging when he clasped his hands together. In sharp contrast to his black scrub top was a white undershirt, out of which she kept getting peeks of grey chest hair. She would start to feel ashamed for objectifying her teacher, then shovel her eyes firmly to her notebook, but they’d rebel and go back over to him.
While she did feel bad to ogle her professor like that—really, was it even ogling if that’s just how he looks—she also knew that attractive people were very rare to come by in real life, at least in her opinion. Her last relationship had been with a music major back in college, something relatively short and painless that had ended because they didn’t end up having that much in common, had such different workloads and non-coinciding free time. Ever since then, the only people she’d find attractive were people on her phone, celebrities and public figures discovered through social media and TV shows. It was exciting to have some unreachable eye-candy in the flesh now, observable from a safe distance knowing that nothing would ever happen given the myriad of barriers. All it took for her to notice it were some exposed, strong arms, and his rippling neck muscles unleashed from behind his collar. Her acknowledgment of his physique was very scientific.
After the lecture seemed to end sooner than usual, Samira made her way down to apologize one last time. She almost turned away after seeing him flocked by his admirers that were pelting him with questions— but stopped in her tracks when he addressed her.
“Bye, Mohan. Keep an eye out today.” He was looking at her with a sweet smirk on his face. The gaggle of people around him were also looking at her, them in confusion.
“You too, Dr. Abbot. Apologies again!” She waved and left, unable to wipe the stupid grin off of herself.