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Frank has never been a good sleeper. He's heard it his whole life.
“You didn’t sleep through the night until you were five,” his dad would say, resentment lacing the words in a way that felt too cruel for a child to hear.
“If you can't sit still, just go outside and run until you're tired.” That was always his mom’s favorite line, and maybe the only one that ever allowed her a few minutes of peace.
Except… Frank never got tired, no matter how far or how fast or how long he ran, his body and brain always buzzing, always on alert.
He started running cross country in middle school and added soccer in to the mix in high school. He ran five miles a day and lifted weights until his body ached. Still, he'd lay awake at night with endless energy, unable to turn off his racing thoughts long enough to sleep.
It wasn’t until his junior year of high school when he'd worked himself to exhaustion, barely able to trudge up the stairs after a soccer tournament, and then spent the next five hours trying to fall asleep by reading his SAT prep book, that he'd made peace with it.
No amount of physical activity would ever be enough to calm his racing thoughts. Maybe he just wasn't meant to sleep as much as everyone else.
Now, a decade plus later, he's pretty sure that's what got him through med school and his intern year with an infant during a global pandemic. It absolutely helps him do his job — he can go from almost asleep to alert and running toward a trauma in a split second, and yeah, he sleeps; he just doesn't need much to function.
He needs less sleep than anyone he's ever met.
And then he meets Mel King, and she changes that.
(She changes everything.)
He's been sober for almost a year, back at work for a couple of months, and honestly, feeling pretty good. Like, not I’m ignoring things and getting high, and thus I feel pretty good, good, but genuinely good, like, working on myself is hard as fuck, and getting divorced sucks, but I actually feel confident and have pride in my actions again good.
It's a nice change of pace. Work is fulfilling, the kids are good if wild, and Abby is friendly and forgiving, even amidst lawyer fees. He's fallen back into the mix of teaching the med students and helping his co-residents, and while he still gets long, worrying glances from Robby, in general, it's better than he anticipated.
But he's not ashamed to say he's bored. He's doing the work, attending meetings, seeing the kids on his days off, and any other time Abby agrees — so he's busy. Busier than he's used to, even. But it's like now that he's clear-headed and sober, nothing chills him out anymore.
If possible, he's sleeping less than he ever has. Which wouldn't be a problem, but in the middle of the night now, there usually aren't kids to take care of, and there's no one in bed next to him to turn to, and he can only read so many backdated medical journals and play so many levels of Tetris.
Which is why, probably, the whole falling in love with his coworker thing happens in the first place.
It's totally an accident, he swears.
It honestly starts innocently, which isn't something Frank can say very often.
His phone rings at 2:36AM on a Thursday, and his first thought is that something has happened to one of the kids. In the four seconds it takes him to drop the journal he's half-assedly reading and reach for his phone, he's cursing himself for ever being in a position to not be there for his kids 100% of the time.
Instead, his phone display shows Mel King, and as he swipes across to answer it, he runs a hand through his hair. He's not sure why. It's not like she can see him.
“Mel? What's up? You okay?”
There's a burst of familiar noise in the background, monitors beeping, and loud voices before she answers.
“Hi, Dr. Langdon. I'm so sorry to wake you up—”
“I wasn't sleeping,” he interrupts, as if this is important information for her to know.
“I— it's 2:30 in the morning. You weren't sleeping?”
“Couldn't put the June 2024 Annals of Emergency Medicine down, I guess,” he jokes. It's not funny, actually, he's in the middle of a really interesting study, and even if he was tired, he'd still stay up to finish it.
“Ooh, is that the one with the woman who—” a voice in the background interrupts her, and Frank grins before he can stop himself.
“Right, anyway,” she comes back, clearing her throat. “Um, the mother of the patient in North 6 says you were going to leave her a referral for a Dr…” she trails off, clearly looking at a note, “... McGolfsAlot? I don't know who that is.”
He's laughing before she even finishes her sentence.
“Sorry, Mel. I couldn't think of his name when talking to the mother. It's Brenner, in Heme-Onc? Golfs more than a PGA player, but I'd trust him with my kids’ life a thousand percent,” he says.
“Ohh,” she breathes out, and he can hear the pieces falling into place. “Okay, thank you. I can get his info for her.” Her voice has that distracted tone it gets when she's busy charting.
“Thanks,” he tells her. “I was trying to dispo like five patients before I left today and just forgot to add that to her chart.”
“At least you weren't running out to golf,” Mel says, a cadence to her words that he's begun to recognize when she's joking.
“Nah, not my sport,” he says, as the background noise on Mel's end quiets down. He waits for her to respond for a few seconds. “Mel, you okay?”
She stutters out a breath. “It’s just been a long night. He's really sick.”
“The kid in North 6?” His name is Jacob, and he's barely older than Tanner. Frank’s heart had sunk when his initial labs had come back.
He hears Mel murmur a yes, and he sighs.
“Yeah. Yeah, he is.”
“Sometimes, this job…” Mel fades out like she's run out of steam entirely.
He lets her stay silent for a few beats, until she sighs.
“It really, really sucks?” He finishes.
“Yes,” she whispers. “He's a sweet kid.”
“They always are,” he tells her, and it's a cliche that the sweetest patients are always the sickest. There's no science behind it, but it hurts all the same.
They're silent for a moment, and he shifts around in bed to get more comfortable.
“Have you had a break yet?” It's more than halfway through her shift, and he knows the 3AM hour hits hard.
“No, not yet. I should really just go—”
“Mel,” he whispers, trying on the tone he uses when he's trying to teach her (although most days now, it feels the other way around), “you need a break. You can take ten.”
She sighs, her voice quiet again. “I'm a little worried that if I sit down, I won't get back up,” she says, an embarrassed edge to the words.
“Then don't sit down,” he tells her, thinking quickly. “Where are you right now?”
“Uh, just in the lounge.”
“Okay, we can do better than that,” he says, leaning forward like she's there to share a secret. “You trust me?”
Her immediate “yes” flashes through him like a livewire, as honest as she always is. He swallows back a grin and continues.
“Good. Go take the elevator to the 6th floor.”
“Okay,” she laughs, and he hears the telltale creak of the lounge door hinges, the familiar bustle of a loud ED, and about 20 seconds later, the ding of the elevator doors opening.
“If anyone asks, you're just going to get some lab results,” he tells her.
“Lab’s in the basement,” she says, like he's new here or something.
“Then I guess it's good you don't actually need anything from there, huh?”
“I mean, I am waiting on a urinalysis for a probable pyelo.”
“Okay, well, urine is not part of this particular adventure,” he tells her, waiting for the rhythmic sound of her laugh. As it falls over the line, he hears the arrival beep and robotic elevator voice announcing she's reached the 6th floor.
“Turn right,” he tells her quickly, “and then turn left after the mural of the weird ducks.”
“The what?” She asks, but a couple of seconds later, “Oh, the ducks look so angry.”
“Yeah, trippy, right? Anyway, left at the murder ducks, and then take the hallway all the way down to the emergency exit at the end of the hall.”
“It's not gonna—”
“Mel, if this was a ploy to get you to set off the emergency exit alarm, I would've just had you go in the creepy ass sanitation room that exits straight out to the ambulance bay,” he laughs. “Trust me, this is worth it.”
“Okay— Oh,” she says, as the sound of the heavy door closing behind her comes through the phone. “Wow.”
“It's great, right?” The door opens onto a tiny balcony, rusty fire escape stairs off to the right. It's completely impractical for any actual patient evacuations. The real selling point is the view, though. It's just a straight shot right through to the water, and at night, lights from the city and the bridge cast glistening arcs across it.
“It's so quiet,” she says, and somehow, he knew that would be the highlight for her. “This is really… I don't think I've ever seen this much of the city at night.”
“It's a nice view during the day, too, but it's a whole other world out there in the dark.”
He stays quiet then, waiting for her to take in the whole experience. After a few long beats, her voice finds him again.
“How'd you find this?”
He laughs softly. If he told her the real story, the whole thing, it would ruin the appeal and the peace he's trying to share with her currently. So, instead, he settles on, “I was looking for a place where no one would find me.”
“Well,” she starts quietly, “now I guess I'll always be able to find you.”
In the quiet of his bedroom, alone-but-not with Mel miles away, he swallows. “Yeah, guess so.”
It feels a little intimate, listening to her quiet breathing across the line. She's absolutely his favorite coworker, but for as much time as they spend together, he isn't sure they really know each other beyond work.
He lets the silence linger until he hears her clear her throat quietly.
“My labs are back,” she says, and it's the most annoyed he's ever heard her sound about lab results.
“Can't keep pyelo waiting,” he says, for lack of anything else to say, but not wanting to hang up quite yet.
“No, and I've gotta go talk to Jacob’s mom,” she says, stress creeping back into every syllable.
“I'm sorry, Mel.”
She gives him a distracted mhmm, and then, “thank you. For… this. You were right; I needed a break.”
“I like to think I'm right at least once a day.”
That gets a real laugh from her, echoing over the phone and filling his quiet room.
It's nice, the way it livens up the place for a fleeting second.
He hears the quiet-slam of the door as she walks back down the hallway.
“I'll let you go,” he says, even though she's the one who called him, and he doesn't actually want to let the call end, for reasons he's not sure he's been sober long enough to examine.
“Okay,” she says quietly. “Thank you again. You're on in the morning?”
“Four short hours,” he confirms, a hint of a yawn finally edging out of him.
“Goodnight, Dr. Langdon.”
Frank, he thinks. Please, but he'll let it go for now.
“Night, Mel.”
His alarm goes off a few hours later, waking him from a dream of glistening lights on endless water and a voice that sounds familiar in a way it maybe shouldn't.
The same voice greets him in the staff lounge a little while later as he's filling his travel mug with crusty hospital coffee. He used to put way worse things in his body, so he figures it all evens out, really.
“Good morning,” she says, leaning her hip against the counter as he pours.
He nods a hello and takes a moment to look at her. Her hair is perfectly slicked back into her normal braid, but there's a smudge on her glasses like she hasn't had a chance to clean them in a while.
“How'd the rest of your night go?” He asks, holding the carafe out to her.
She shakes her head and then shrugs.
“We had a trauma at 4, but nothing major besides that. I got Jacob discharged about half an hour ago with Brenner’s info.”
“Good, good,” he says, turning to face her as he takes a slow sip of coffee.
“I don't know why that one got to me like it did,” she says, contemplative, like she's been giving it a lot of thought.
“Some just do,” he says. “Kids are never easy.”
She shakes her head like she's trying to clear the memory out. “Did you get any sleep?”
He shrugs. “About my usual amount,” he says.
Her eyes widen slightly. “You're usually awake at 3AM?”
“Give or take an hour, yeah. Never really needed that much. Or couldn't get that much, maybe.”
“I've always survived on about four hours, but people usually think I'm insane when I admit it,” she says.
“No judgment here,” he says, holding up a hand.
“So I guess I won't feel as guilty the next time I have to call you in the middle of the night.”
“Nah,” he assures her. “It was a welcome distraction.”
That piques her interest, her eyebrows raising a little, but before she can say anything, the door bangs open, and Dana sticks her head in, gesturing to him.
“Hey, we got a possible STEMI rolling in in two,” she says, ducking back out as quickly as she came in.
“And so it begins,” he tells Mel, grabbing his stethoscope off the counter. “You better get outta here before I keep you.”
“You could—” she starts, but he shakes his head.
“Nope, go,” he says, shooing her toward the door ahead of him. “You back on tonight?”
She shakes her head. “No, I'm off, flipping to days again.”
“Cool,” he grins, holding the door for her. He can hear the thrill of the siren out in the ambulance bay, his adrenaline pumping in a way that assures he won't be tired anytime soon. “See you later then?”
She nods, watching everyone prepare for the impending patient.
“For real, go,” he laughs, and she finally turns, heading for her locker.
It's not like he watches her go or anything.
On Thursday after work, Frank opens the door to find Abby holding Millie out to him. Her little face is red, and her tiny three-year-old fingers are tugging at her ear.
“Uh oh,” he says, reaching out for her as Tanner flies by straight to the corner of the living room, where Frank knows toys will be strewn about in like five seconds. “Hey bud,” he calls before turning back to Abby and Millie.
“Ear infection?” He asks, pressing his fingers against Millie’s earlobe to get a closer look.
Abby nods and rolls her eyes, and Frank can't blame her. “What, the third this year?” she says tiredly. “Antibiotics are in her bag.”
“Sorry, princess,” he whispers, pressing a quick kiss to the top of Millie’s curly head. “Wanna go play with your brother?” When she nods, he sets her down, and they watch her toddle off to join Tanner.
Abby is watching him when he meets her eye again. After so many years, it's a look he's all too familiar with. There's still love there, but it's born of begrudging understanding and acceptance. This is the hand they've been dealt, and she's okay with it now.
“You doing good?” He asks, when the silence has stretched a few seconds into uncomfortable.
“I got invited to join a single-parent playgroup this morning, which sounds horrifying? And maybe gave me a bit of an existential crisis?”
“Well…” he starts, rubbing a hand over his chin. “I don't know, Ab. Is this one of those things I'm supposed to apologize for? Like, is it that bad?”
There have been a lot of justifiable things he's apologized to her for over the last year (and probably a million more he could have apologized for before then.) Still, sometimes he can't tell if he's just supposed to listen and let her rant or if he's supposed to take the blame for something. It had been an issue in their marriage, too, but the line is so much murkier now.
If it's as dickish a question as it feels, she doesn't call him on it, but it does make her laugh, which is about as good as he can hope for these days.
“Oh, Francis,” she says, shaking her head. She's the only one who ever calls him that, and only when she's really trying to get under his skin. (She hasn't called him Frank once since he admitted his addiction, and it's been one of the more painful parts of the whole last year.) “I'm glad it's more socially acceptable to say your ex is a dick than it is to say your husband is.”
Well, maybe he was wrong.
“Not legally your ex, yet,” he reminds her.
“Cute,” she says. “I'm counting the days.”
Despite it all, she’s smiling. They've always had a teasing, bantering relationship — flirty and recklessly hot when it started but barbed and painful by the end. And the end wasn't the drugs or rehab like he knows everyone assumes, but some messy midpoint predating all that when they'd both stopped trying, first emotionally, and then physically, and then stopped wanting to.
In some ways, rehab had felt like a release, like a natural conclusion to their time together. It’s all but official, minus signing the papers, but there's a not-so-distant day circled on his calendar for that already. It hasn't all been amicable, because he's pretty sure when anyone says their divorce is, they're lying, but it’s been pretty close. Probably closer than he deserves, if he's being honest.
“I'd apologize for the lack of sleep Mills is gonna cause tonight, but secretly, I'm not sorry because I know you somehow thrive on exhaustion.”
He shrugs, because what can he say? She's been privy to more of his sleepless nights than anyone else. (She used to love them when they were first together, and staying up until 4AM was about drinking and sloppy sex, and there was very little responsibility required.)
She glances down at her watch and groans. “Gotta run,” she tells him. “Bye, babies!” If Tanner and Millie hear her, they don't respond, which gets another eye roll.
Secretly, it thrills Frank. When they'd finally decided that going their separate ways was the only option, he'd only really been worried about the kids. He knew he and Abby would bounce back eventually, as indifferent as that sounds. But he'd worried the kids would lose their shit without Abby, or that he wasn't as decent a parent without her, or or or.
But it's been okay. It’s hectic and wild and physically exhausting, but he wouldn't give up his one-on-one time with them for the world.
He says goodbye to Abby, closes and locks the door, and then turns to the kids.
“What do we think, guys, chicken nuggets or nuggets of chicken for dinner?”
They both giggle, loud and silly and wonderful, and the house is alive with noise again.
Mel has never really cared if she works days or nights. With Becca, days are easier, and she likes their dinner/movie routines, but other than that, the hours don't bother her.
What does bother her, however, is the transition between the two. She's never needed much sleep, but forcing herself into a weird sleep pattern just to get her circadian rhythm back on track is always rough.
This transition is no exception, mainly because it’s a short turnaround. She's been on nights for two weeks, and she'll be back on days on Saturday. She's been mentally exhausted all day since getting off work, but she's managed not to nap. She barely even sits down until she and Becca settle on the couch with takeout (Thai, because it's the third Thursday of the month, and it's become a tradition) and a movie (While You Were Sleeping, because Becca’s on a Christmas movie kick even though it's late September, and Mel might actually cry if she has to watch Elf again.)
“Do you think he's cute?” Becca asks, and Mel zones back in, seeing Jack on screen.
“Oh, yep,” Mel tells her. “He's so charming. And the floppy hair all in his eyes? Super cute.”
Becca laughs. “Your next boyfriend should have good hair like that. David was bald.”
“David wasn't— okay, maybe David was almost bald,” she admits, watching as Becca goes back to her food.
David was a nurse she dated for a few months during her intern year, absolutely nothing serious, and yes, he had a challenged hairline. (He'd also once told her that Becca should live full time at her care center so that Mel could “have a life,” so clearly, his hair was the least of his problems.)
Mel yawns a little while later as she and Becca are rinsing their plates in the sink, and Becca turns to look at her.
“I thought you said you were going to take a nap today.” Becca doesn't scold her often, even though she's the older sister, but this sounds accusatory in a fond, sisterly way.
“I meant to!” Mel tells her, but really, she's kind of glad she didn't. Being this tired will at least guarantee her a couple of hours of good sleep.
“I'm going to go finish my tuxedo cat, anyway. You should go to bed.”
Becca’s been majorly into LEGO lately, and Mel’s pretty sure she's trying to use the (admittedly cute) tuxedo cat set to make a case they need a kitten.
(It's not the wildest idea she's ever had, and they both love cats, but Mel already feels near overload all the time, and adding someone else to feed and take care of… it's a lot.)
“Yeah, okay. I should.” Mel finishes drying the dish she's holding as Becca turns to head to her room. “Love you most, Bec.”
“Love you most, Mel.”
Mel sighs, drying her hands and hanging the dish rag back up. She's tired physically now, too, and she knows she needs to sleep. But she feels antsy in a way that only yelling and codes make her feel, and she knows her brain won't chill out if she gets in bed now.
The couch is just as good, and she knows for a fact she's slept more nights on it than in her bed. When Becca first came to live with her during her first year of med school, Mel couldn't afford anything more than a tiny one-bedroom, so she'd made do with the couch instead of a bed, and it had served her well.
She settles down there now, pulling a worn afghan over her, and scrolls through Netflix to an old season of The Great British Bake-Off, one she's seen so many times she's pretty sure she could replicate the recipes now, even though she's by no means a baker.
She zones out to the background noise, her eyes closing before she even realizes she's falling asleep.
She startles awake, one of those harsh awakenings where you can't tell if a dream or reality woke you up.
She turns and gathers a throw pillow into a more comfortable shape against her, pulling her phone closer to check the time.
1:14 AM. Four hours — probably not long enough after how tired she was, but she's not surprised.
What is surprising, though, is the text notification waiting for her — Dr. Langdon.
She sits up, swiping her phone unlocked as she goes. His message is from an hour ago, and she's kind of surprised she slept through it.
Hey, hope this doesn't wake you up. I just didn't want to forget to tell you - McGolfsAlot texted while I was on shift earlier and said he worked Jacob in for an appt. on Monday.
She smiles. She'd thought about the sweet kid in North 6 off and on today, the simple way he'd pushed Hot Wheels across the tray table, and the complicated way his mom had looked at Mel when she'd referred them to Brenner.
She debates not replying right away, but it feels rude, somehow, so she types out a quick reply before she can talk herself out of it.
Oh, that's great. Thank you for telling me.
Before she can even put the phone down, the three dots that indicate he's typing pop up, and she can't seem to make herself look away.
‘Course. I meant to earlier, but got distracted by an ear infection.
She's still a little surprised he responded, and she can't stop herself from following up quickly.
A patient?
Nah. Millie. She's miserable. I can see why parents freak and bring their kids in for stuff like this.
Oh, poor thing. It's the worst when they're sick and you can't do anything for them.
Well. I assume. I don't have kids, obviously.
No, but you do have someone you take care of. It's a big responsibility regardless.
He's right, she knows. And she does worry when Becca is sick, even when she knows medically there's no real reason for alarm. It's hard to turn on the rational doctor mode when it's someone you love.
That's true.
She also appreciates that he gets it. There are so many things Becca can do independently that sometimes her friends have assumed it extends far beyond what it does. They haven't understood Mel’s devotion or responsibility, really.
That thought stops her, though, and she glances up from her phone to reorient herself a little. It's 1AM, and she's texting her senior resident.
Is Dr. Langdon her friend?
And if he is — and she suspects, maybe, that the evidence says he is — how did it happen without her realizing?
She'd anticipated him being back in a way that felt weird for someone she'd only known a day. And she'd worried that he might be different — and he was, from a health perspective — but they'd fallen right back into a comfortable pattern of working together and checking in, and she'd tried to make it obvious nothing had changed.
Except. Well, he had changed, and the way their colleagues, the ones he'd known for years, acted around him had changed.
And even though friendships usually feel like they take a ton of effort to establish for her, this one hasn't. She thinks, really, that they kind of just get each other.
Mel’s always done her best work at night, sometimes because it was her only free time, but usually because it's the only time the rest of the world feels quiet enough, when there's no expectation of her to fill the silence.
She's starting to realize that, maybe, that's the same thing that makes talking to Langdon so much easier than other people — he's never seemed to expect her to fill silences.
Her phone buzzes, and she looks down to read.
She finally passed out. Bless the chemist behind Motrin. I hope they're sleeping on a huge pile of money.
She chuckles. She hadn't expected him to carry on the conversation, but maybe she shouldn't be surprised — she'd once heard Princess and Perlah call him a “certified yapper,” which sounds less like a compliment than she feels it should be. He does have a tendency to talk a lot, but she, at least, always finds it interesting.
Stewart Adams. But I think he died. So I guess depending on your beliefs, he's maybe sleeping peacefully. Probably not on money though, I imagine the family kept that.
🤣 I bet they did. Always teaching me something new, Dr. King.
She shivers slightly, reading his response, but that's probably just because it's cool on the couch.
Except, well. He's always been good about bestowing praise and compliments in a way that doesn't make her cringe, like it has from others in the past. It's not that she's ever really felt unworthy of praise, especially when she knows how hard she's worked to get where she is, but… hearing it, sometimes, is too much.
With Langdon, though, she just seems to keep wanting more.
In the dark by herself in the middle of the night doesn't seem the safest time to think more about that, though, and she's happy for the distraction when he texts again a moment later.
I should at least attempt to get some sleep now because Tanner doesn't get that waking up before sunrise is rude. You should sleep too. Doctors… friendly suggestion.
She smiles in the privacy of her living room. She probably won't fully fall back asleep, but she appreciates the concern.
Sleep well. I hope Millie feels better.
By the time she blinks again, it's a few minutes before handoff on Saturday morning, and the Pitt is already chaotic, like it always is on the weekends.
She's putting her lunch (a usually hopeless endeavor) in the lounge fridge when Langdon walks in, beelining for the coffee pot.
“Hey, you're here,” she says, smiling as he spots her.
“A likely place for me to be,” he grins. “We gotta stop meeting like this, Mel.” He holds the coffee pot out to her first, but she shakes her head.
He squints over at her as he fills his cup. “Are you not a coffee person?”
“I'm more of a tea person, actually. Green, or maybe lemon balm, but it's harder to find,” she says, watching him stir in creamer from the old Hershey’s bottle she knows Dana fills and hides in the back of the fridge.
“Shh,” he winks. “She totally knows I use it, but we both pretend I get away with it.”
“Dana is very forgiving,” she tells him. His face contorts a little at her words, and she instantly tries to backpedal.
“I mean— “
“Nah, you're right. She is,” he says, taking a long, slow sip before he focuses on her again. “Did you get enough sleep after your nights?”
She shrugs a little, because that's easier than trying to make an excuse.
He shakes his head, like he's mock-scolding her, and leans just a little more into her space than he's ever intentionally been before, his lips close to her ear. “Guess it'll have to be doctors orders next time, then.”
And then he's gone.
(She's a little dazed, but she watches him go.)
Early into sobriety, his sponsor, Mark, had told him that after a little while, the days would start to bleed into each other again — time wouldn't feel marked by how many days has it been since I used, even though some part of him would always know the exact number. Instead, they'd be as close to normal as they'd been before, and that's when he'd have to be the most careful.
And honestly, Frank had kind of thought that was crap.
But then… the days started feeling normal again. His back still hurt, the kids still needed more than he could reasonably give, and work was just as hard as it always had been.
Normal was good, but normal was scary, because this was an entirely new normal. Just familiar enough to be comfortable, but new enough to be terrifying.
Mel, though.
Somehow, Mel has slipped right in and become part of his new normal.
It shouldn't be surprising, really. She's easy to talk to, and she listens, better maybe than anyone he's ever met, and despite their hours being unpredictable, they seem to keep a similar sleep schedule. The nights tend to drag now when he's not working, when there aren't little feet kicking him, when Millie or Tanner or usually both wind up in his bed, and Mel is good company.
She texted him on Saturday night, apologizing for not asking at work how Millie was (fine, wild, probably going to be resistant to amoxicillin at some point). It isn't until a week or so later, the third night in a row when he reaches for his phone to call her about absolutely nothing important, just because he wants to, that it hits him. This is what Mark meant about being careful.
Because Mel isn't dangerous — at least not in the ways he's used to — she isn't going to hurt him, ruin his career, or break up his marriage, like things he's been drawn to in the past.
But she's so quickly become a part of his new normal, of his life, that it's a little scary. It feels a little reckless, a tiny bit dangerous.
He looks even more forward to work now because it usually means they'll find themselves together during the day. She makes him laugh, and he learns a new way to show compassion to a patient every shift just by watching her.
He's also learned new things about her over the last week in the middle of the night — some work-related:
She initially thought she wanted to go into Peds, but she fell in love with EM the first time she helped get ROSC on a patient.
She almost accepted a residency spot at a small private hospital in the suburbs when they moved to Pittsburgh, because the pay was marginally better. But she worried it wouldn't be challenging enough to help her grow.
She hates (hates, she emphasizes) the sound a joint popping back into place makes. Ortho had been her first rotation in med school, and she'd considered quitting for a second the first time she heard it.
But most of what he's learned has been personal. Things he doesn't think she tells many other people:
She worries about work burnout more than she ever thought she would as a med student. She knows it happens especially often for EM physicians. But she worries about a backup plan (one she'd be happy with, at least) and security for Becca, if she ever can't do the job anymore.
Pitt Fest wasn't her first time treating GSWs, but it was her first real MCI, and she sat down with a hospital-appointed psychiatrist a couple of weeks later, because she couldn't stop thinking about a question a patient had asked (how do you deal with all this death and carnage?)
She's lived alone for exactly two months her entire life, the first couple of months of med school, before her sister had come to live with her. She wouldn't trade her life with Becca for anything, but she's always kind of wondered what it would be like.
Some things she tells him in the middle of the night are just for fun, though:
She doesn't like cilantro. She doesn't have the thing where it tastes like soap, it's just a texture thing.
She hates the word moist, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard.
She’s never been out of the country, but she wants to see the tulip fields in Amsterdam because those were her mom’s favorite flowers.
Most of the time, like tonight, he would rather talk to her than do just about anything else.
He's been listening to her talk about Becca's latest craft obsession (diamond art, which sounds tedious but also like a great dexterity exercise to Frank) when he remembers.
“Did she ever finish her LEGO cat?”
Mel had shown him a picture the other week at work, tiny LEGO pieces scattered all over the living room floor. (“I scoped 17 Legos about that size out of a toddler a couple years ago,” he told her, to her horror.)
“Oh, yep, the other day. It's actually really cute, with these bright blue eyes, but she can't seem to figure out a name for it.”
“Tell her to name it Frank. Really cute, blue eyes, it totally fits,” he says, grinning.
Her laugh comes over the line, bright like it always sounds like it's been surprised out of her.
And that's the problem, right there. That's why Mel is dangerous.
He cannot stop flirting with her, or wanting to make her laugh, or looking for her smile across a crowded ED.
It started out of nowhere, surprising even him: he'd leaned in, casual as anything, stopping just short of brushing his lips against her ear, and whispered, “Doctor's orders,” and he's pretty sure he hadn't been able to think straight since.
She hasn't reciprocated, not in any overt ways (and oh, Frank’s been paying attention), but she hasn't stopped him, and if there's one thing he knows about Mel, it's that she's great at setting boundaries. If she didn't want him to, she'd tell him, right?
(God, he hopes so.)
So it's just kind of kept happening, and usually, he'll move on to safer topics pretty quickly, but tonight, the silence lingers, and he lets it. It's not uncomfortable. It never is with Mel, but it's there nonetheless.
“I guess, maybe,” she says finally, “if she named it Frank, I'd get more used to saying the name.”
He laughs, loud and open like she tends to make him do. “I mean, if it makes you more comfortable, you can call him Dr. Langdon. Maybe Langdon during the day, professionally, and only Frank at night.”
“Oh, Becca likes consistency. She would never go for that,” Mel says.
“Well,” he says quietly. “Maybe you should practice.”
He's thought a few times recently, late at night with her voice filling the quiet, about breaking some unspoken promise to himself and FaceTiming her so he can see the way her smile causes her eyes to crinkle at the corners.
Now, in this moment, he wants to see if her face is flushed, because he'd bet money he doesn't have that it is.
“I am a pretty big proponent of practice making perfect,” she says.
“As any good clinician should be.”
“Mhmm,” she murmurs.
“Mel?” He prompts a couple of moments later when she hasn't continued.
“Sorry. I can't figure out a way to casually work your name in that isn't making me physically cringe,” she admits.
He laughs again. “Well, I don't ever want to make you uncomfortable.” He says the words quietly, not because it's late and their conversations always feel hushed, but because they feel too true to be spoken too loudly.
She's silent again, and this time he just waits.
“I think I felt comfortable around you the second we met, Frank,” she says, her quiet words ricocheting through him like a heavy dose of adrenaline.
He knows what's being left unsaid — that it's no small thing, and it doesn't always feel that way. His memories from the day they met are hazier than he'd like, but he knows he felt something similar.
He clears his throat. His name on her lips is new, but even more so is the restless feeling in his limbs, the surety he has that if she were here, only her dissent would stop him from reaching out to touch her now.
“Really, uh, excellent practice, Dr. King,” he says, letting his tone tease.
“That hardly seems fair,” she says, laughter in every word.
“I don't need to practice saying your name, Mel,” he whispers. “I think I've got it down pretty good.”
“Yeah, uh. I guess you do,” she says. Her words end with a yawn, and that's what finally makes him glance at the time.
1:43AM.
“You should get some sleep. Doesn't Becca go in early tomorrow for that day trip?”
(He knows her sister's schedule better than his own, maybe, and they've never even met face to face. Alarm bells should probably be blaring in his head, but he knows he'd ignore them even if they were.)
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess I'll go. You should get some sleep, too.”
“Probably,” he shrugs, feeling so teenagerish that he doesn't want to hang up. “Night, Mel.”
“Goodnight, Frank.”
The sound of his name echoes long after they've hung up.
“Have you always been a bad sleeper?”
It's a few days later, and Mel’s voice is quiet, flush against his ear over the phone. Tanner and Mille are asleep in the next room, and honestly, he's wrecked.
He loves his kids desperately and would defeat his deepest demons a thousand times over for them, but preschoolers are exhausting, and his back aches distractingly.
“Frank?”
“Hmm?” He zones back in, reaching a hand back to rub at his lumbar.
“Have you always been a bad sleeper?” She repeats, the same note of worry she gets when a patient is concerning her.
“If you ask my mom, yeah,” he says. “I personally have a hard time admitting to being bad at anything.”
He's joking, but he's not sure his voice conveys it.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” He grimaces, shifting further down against his pillows, trying to find a comfortable spot.
He's not sure when exactly Mel became able to read just his voice so well. He imagines maybe, that she didn't even have to learn, that it just came as part of feeling immediately comfortable around him, and her innate sensitivity. Either way, he knows she can tell he's lying.
“No,” he sighs. “My back has been killing me for hours.”
“Oh,” she says softly. “Did you do anything to aggravate it?”
“No. Just lucky, I guess.”
When she's quiet for a few moments, he runs a hand over his face. “Sorry,” he whispers. “I'm not trying to be a dick.”
(Abby would have followed that with, “Just comes naturally, I guess,” not in an overtly mean way, and honestly, they both would have laughed, but it would've cut all the same. He's not sure why he's bracing for a similar response.)
“No, I know.” (Not, “no, you're not,” or “no, it's okay,” which is telling.) “You know pain isn't just physical, it's physiological, too. A change in attitude isn't an uncommon reaction, unfortunately. Especially since you can't—” She stops abruptly, like a door slamming shut.
“Use my former favorite type of coping skills?” He asks, trying to make light of something that isn't remotely funny.
“I was going to say since you can't really take anything, but yes. Does ibuprofen help at all?”
“It doesn't touch it, so I'd rather just spare my liver.”
“Lido patch? I’m sure your PCP would write you a script, or I could, if needed—”
That stops him immediately. “Mel,” he says. “I appreciate you offering, but can you do me a favor?”
“Yeah, of course.” It's so quick, so sure, it makes his heart race a little.
He sighs, trying to even himself out. “Can you please not ever offer to write me a prescription again? Like, for anything? I appreciate it, but it's a slippery slope, and I don't ever want to put you in a position where I'm—”
He pauses, sighs again, and restarts. “I just don't ever want to take advantage of how kind you are.”
“I don't think you would do that.”
He shakes his head, even though she can't see him. “I wouldn't… I would never mean to. But it's a disease, you know? I just don't ever want to risk… this.”
“This?” She asks, quietly.
There's a loose thread in his duvet cover, and he pulls at it gently. “It's 1:30 in the morning, Mel. I don't have many— any — other friends I can talk to in the middle of the night. And even if I did… I wouldn't want to.”
“I, uh. I don't either… I wouldn't, either.”
They're both silent for a few beats, long enough that he breathes in slowly, twisting at the loose thread, and then lets it go, exhaling.
“I don't think of you that way, you know,” she says.
This surprises a laugh out of him, but he keeps it low and in check so he doesn't wake the kids. “What, like a friend? Ouch, Mel.”
He's joking. (Mostly.)
“No, no,” she says quickly. “Sorry. I meant I don't think of you as someone with a disease.”
He breathes in slowly again, but holds it this time, waiting.
“I mean, of course, I know logically that's true, I just, that's not the first thing I think of when I think of you. Maybe because I didn't know you before. I don't know—”
“Mel,” he says gently. “I get it. I appreciate having one person who doesn't only see me as the worst things I've done in my life.”
“I definitely don't see that when I look at you.”
What do you see? The words are on the tip of his tongue. He can taste them, they're so close to spilling out. They feel more dangerous than anything else he could say.
But then there's a shuffle of little feet and a tear-streaked face, and Tanner is standing in front of him, looking green.
“Daddy, my tummy hurts,” he basically whimpers, and before Frank can even react, Tanner pukes all over the beige apartment carpet.
“Oh, bud, jeez,” he mutters. “Mel, I'm sorry. I gotta go, I've got a puker over here.”
“Oh, yikes,” she says, and he all but hangs up on her as Tanner begins crying.
“I'm sorry, buddy. Let's get you cleaned up.”
Mel hasn't been able to stop thinking about the pause before Frank said, “...this” on the phone last night.
This, a word that really only means an entirely different word you're not saying, and on its own doesn't describe anything.
But she thinks, this might be good. She's repeated that silently to herself each time he's caught her eye today, which has been pretty often.
And now, it’s half an hour before shift change. The sun is slowly starting to set as she steps into the ambulance bay, and Mel can hear the screaming from inside the ambulance before the doors are even open.
A girl jumps from the ambulance out into the bay as the gurney is unloaded, tears streaming down her face, her hand wrapped tightly around the patient’s on the gurney. She has a few scrapes marring her arms from a single-vehicle car accident, but other than that, the medic tells them she's physically fine.
Her older sister, motionless on the gurney, though, is not.
Kiara has to almost pry her hand out of her sister’s, and something about it tugs hard at Mel’s gut.
Mel doesn't have that time-won instinct yet to know immediately how bad it is just by looking, but the look that Dr. Robby and Dr. Langdon share across the patient once she's wheeled into the trauma room is proof enough that it's really, really bad.
Frank meets her eye across the gurney, and for the first time today, she doesn't think this is good.
“Mel, do you wanna go talk to—” Frank starts, glancing out toward where Kiara is talking to the sister, and clearly trying to give her an out. But the sudden beeping of what right now sounds to Mel like a million monitors springs them all into action.
“Actually, let's have Dr. King on compressions,” Robby says, and then they're all a frenzied play of well-rehearsed motions, meds, and wires, and Mel does compressions until her shoulders ache, and she can barely breathe as she stumbles back to let Jesse take over.
She does what she knows she needs to, what Robby instructs, what Frank asks, on autopilot, but it isn't until she hears Robby call it — 19:14 — that she realizes her hands are shaking.
“Mel—” She glances up at Frank, then at the patient, and finally down to her blood-covered gloved hands.
They're still shaking as she strips off her gloves and leaves the room.
By the time Frank finds her, past the angry ducks mural, down the hallway, and out on the sixth-floor fire escape, the sun has set, and lights are twinkling across the water.
It's only been a few minutes — just long enough, she knows, to loop in Kiara and help prepare the patient for viewing — and her hands have stopped shaking some, but she still startles a little when the door creaks open.
“Hey,” he whispers, sounding too far away like he does over the phone late at night. “Can I sit with you?”
She glances up at him and nods, scooting over to make room, and then his spicy cologne wafts over to her as he settles down. He's ginger about it, and she watches him lean back against the door.
“My ass is blocking the entire fire exit door, so if there's an emergency, you never saw me here, okay?”
She lets out a quiet noise; it feels like a laugh, and when she glances at him again, he swallows and begins speaking slowly.
“Kiara was able to get ahold of their parents. They're on the way. It was her — Anna— it was Anna’s 16th birthday yesterday, and she promised her sister, Claire, they'd go for a drive once she got her license. There was construction on the road she usually took to get home, so she took another and misjudged a turn.”
“That's not fair,” Mel whispers. A tear slips down her cheek, and it's not until Frank nudges her and holds out a piece of gauze that she realizes she's been crying the whole time.
“It's clean, I swear,” he says as she takes it. “Pocketed some extra in case I needed it for that head lac guy in North 4.”
She nods, wiping her eyes and turning her head to look at him. He's watching her quietly, his arms wrapped around his bent knees.
“When Becca and I were little, we were in a car accident with our dad. We were all fine, but the doors wouldn't open and our dad couldn't get out of his seatbelt, and while we were waiting for the fire department to get us out, Becca had a panic attack. It was awful. She was 9, and I just remember holding her hand the whole time while she was shaking from head to toe. She wouldn't get back in the car without crying for the next year.”
Frank shakes his head. “That's horrible.”
She nods. “It was. And watching Kiara have to pull that poor girl away today, just… all I can think about is how she'll never get to hold her sister's hand again.”
“It's not fair. You're right.” He says quietly as she reaches up to wipe another tear. When her hand falls back to her knee, it's still shaking slightly.
She feels him shift next to her, and then his palm is warm over the back of her hand, his thumb stroking lightly, slowly across her skin.
“Okay?” He asks, glancing down at where he's touching her.
She nods, and only then do his fingers put any real pressure on her, his hand warm in the cool night air.
She appreciates him not saying anything else, not fumbling for words to make her feel better. He knows, she's sure, that sometimes there just aren't words to fix things.
They sit in silence, watching the lights dance across the water and listening to the muffled traffic below. She times her breathing with each slow pass of his thumb over her skin.
She clears her throat a couple of minutes later, looking out over the city in front of them. “It really is pretty out here,” she says quietly.
“Yeah, it is.” His voice sounds closer than before, and when she turns, he's not looking out at the city at all.
He's watching her.
This… this is good, she thinks again, finally.
A long honk bellows from the traffic below, and only that noise pulls her eyes off him and reminds her how late it's getting.
“I need to— I want to go get Becca,” she tells him, even though a large part of her wants to just stay here with him.
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he says. His hand is warm on her knee as he leverages his weight to stand, and she catches a hint of a grimace as he straightens up.
“That probably wasn't the best place to sit, for your back,” she says, following him inside.
“Worth it.” He's smiling over his shoulder at her, and she has to clasp her hands together to keep from reaching out for the warmth of his hand again.
Frank doesn't usually give much weight to bad timing, but when he sees Kiara walking two clearly bereft people toward the quiet room as he and Mel step off the elevator, his heart sinks, and he knows he screwed up.
The sobs that echo across the floor in the seconds between the door opening and closing only amplify that feeling, and when he glances at Mel, her face pale and tears pooling again, his heart sinks further.
“Come on,” he whispers, leading her off the floor to the bay of lockers. He's careful not to touch her, the weight of their colleagues’ eyes heavy on them, but all he can think about is getting her out of there.
She pauses when they reach the lockers, like some part of her isn't sure how they got here. He lets her linger there for a moment, making his way to his locker to grab his backpack and keys. By the time he's closing his, her locker is open, and she’s adjusting her backpack straps over her shoulders.
He leans against the locker bay, trying to take some pressure off his back, while he waits for her.
When she closes her locker, he expects her to turn immediately to leave, but instead, she makes a strangled noise, almost a gasp.
“I forgot about handoff,” she says. “You didn't go either.”
“Hey, Mel,” he says in what he hopes is a soothing voice. “It's all good. Robby had it covered. Your patients are taken care of.”
“But I just walked out of the trauma room,” she says, her voice sounding distant.
“Mel,” he whispers, reaching out to gently touch the back of her hand, his thumb pressing into her palm. “It's okay. We all have sisters or parents or loved ones. Some patients hit closer to home than others, and we've all been there enough to give each other some grace when that happens.”
She nods. “Right, yeah.” When she finally meets his gaze, her eyes are red, and she looks exhausted, but she gives him a shaky smile.
“I should go,” she says, finally, reaching up to wipe a tear away.
When she turns toward the exit, he follows her, but when he goes to make a right toward the parking garage, she pauses and points in the other direction.
“I'm going this way.”
“Oh, you didn't park in the garage?”
She shakes her head. “I walked, actually.”
“Let me give you a ride.” He jingles his keys, restlessly shifting from foot to foot, waiting.
“No, uh, but thank you, really. Walking… helps. It'll help me calm down before I get Becca.”
He bites his lip and doesn't miss the way her eyes are drawn there. “Can I walk with you, then?”
She starts to shake her head, but he continues. “Mel, please. You're still crying. I can't leave you like this. I'll bail before you get Becca if that's an issue.”
He watches her worry at her bottom lip and look away before she meets his eye again. “What about your car?”
He… hadn't given that a second of thought, but he shrugs. “I'll walk back for it.”
She watches him closely for a second, but then nods. “Okay,” she says. “If your back is up to it.”
It probably, really, isn't. But fuck it, he thinks. It would hurt regardless, and at least this way, he'll know Mel is okay.
“Fresh air will be good for it,” he assures her.
“That… that doesn't make any sense, medically,” she says, but they start walking anyway.
“‘Course it does. There's a journal article, I'll send it to you,” he tells her, winking so she knows he's just messing with her.
They've been walking in comfortable silence for a few minutes, and while he's usually not one to enjoy silence, he kind of gets the appeal, walking next to Mel.
He's also never taken the time to walk much further than the parking garage requires him to, and he can't remember the last time he spent time outside somewhere that didn't require running after toddlers at a busy park.
“Do you walk to work often?” He finally asks, because of all the things he's learned about her in quiet overnight conversations, this has never come up.
“When the weather is nice like this, I try to,” she says. “It's the longest stretch of time I get totally alone, and it's nice not to have to fight traffic and just go at my own pace.”
“Am I messing up your alone time?” He asks, genuinely intending just to turn around if she says yes.
But she shakes her head. “No. This is nice,” she says quietly. He can see a hint of a smile on her profile, and he nods.
“Good.”
She’s in the middle of filling him in on work gossip from while he was gone (“a lot of it was about you, honestly,” she says, “but Robby kept glaring at anyone he heard say your name.”) when his phone rings.
“Oh, damn,” he says, “I didn't realize it had gotten so late. This is my nightly FaceTime with the kids, but I can call back.”
“No, take it! I promise I don't mind.”
He watches her for a second, trying to gauge her reaction, but she just nods at him to go ahead as they continue walking.
He swipes across to answer, Tanner’s bath-wet hair filling the screen immediately.
“Hey, buddy,” Frank says. “How's your tummy?”
He ignores the little giggle that elicits from Mel, but shoots her a grin all the same.
He listens as Tanner rambles on (his tummy is fine, Dad, I got a new monster truck, and oh, Millie wants to say hi, night, Daddy, in quick succession.) And then Millie’s curls bounce into the frame, and she tries unsuccessfully twice to tell him a joke whose punchline she can't quite get right, and Frank can't begin to imagine. Then she wanders off, carrying the iPad a foot from the ground and, honestly, making him a little motion sick.
And then Abby’s face is in the frame, hair up in a messy bun more familiar to him than almost anything else after years of coming home to her just like that.
She watches him for a moment, squinting, and then asks, “where are you?”
“Taking a walk,” he says, making a maybe stupid deliberate choice not to mention Mel. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, but her expression is impassive.
“Like… for fun?”
“It's not not fun,” he tells her, shrugging. “Tanner good?”
She nods. “Yeah, it was probably the pizza. You know we need to eliminate gluten for a month and see how he does,” she reminds him for what feels like the tenth time. “Dr. John says that'll help.”
He barely avoids rolling his eyes, and he's fully aware of Mel next to him. “Dr. John barely graduated med school.”
“Whatever,” she mutters. “Wednesday morning, right?”
He nods. “Yeah, I'm working a half shift.”
“Okay,” she says, calling over her shoulder for the kids. “Guys, come tell dad goodnight.”
They do, a chorus of goodnights and love yous and daddy, here's my new truck, and then Abby says, “bye, Francis,” and the screen goes dark as she ends the call.
He pockets the phone and glances over at Mel, who is adamantly not looking at him.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “I didn't mean to not tell her about you. I just… y’know,” he holds his hands up, miming his head exploding, and she laughs.
Full on, out loud, eyes crinkling, laughs, and oh, he is way outta his league here.
“It's okay,” she says. “What were you supposed to say? I'm walking a coworker home because she wouldn’t stop crying?”
She smiles at her joke, but he pauses, stopping right in the middle of the sidewalk. He steps toward her, placing his hand on her arm.
“No,” he whispers. “I would've said, my friend had a hard day at our often traumatizing job, and I'm trying to be a good person, and I couldn't stand to watch her cry.”
She opens her mouth, but no words come out.
“It's important to me that you know that, Mel. You're not just my coworker. That's not how I think of you.”
She nods. “Okay, um, good,” she says, like she's been weighing the question for a while.
Let me tell you how I think of you. Please.
“Good,” he echos instead, slowly dragging his fingers down her arm as he steps away.
They continue walking, but it's only a few seconds before she breaks the silence. “I wasn't trying to eavesdrop, I promise, but I have multiple questions.”
He groans, cartoonishly loud, earning another laugh from her. “Yes, my name is actually Francis. She only calls me that to wind me up, and no, you cannot start using it, Melissa.”
She bites at her lip, and he swears, he swears she shivers when he says her full name, and that's an interesting piece of information he's going to lockdown and try desperately not to fixate on.
(It won’t work, he knows, because he's many things, but he's not stupid.)
“Noted,” she says, smiling and slowing down as they turn a corner. “I, uh, still have a lot of questions. But that's Becca’s center,” she points to an old brownstone nestled into the tree-lined street a few doors down.
“Okay,” he nods. “I know you need your sister time, but do you want me to walk you both home? Or grab dinner, maybe?”
She smiles but shakes her head. “Really, I'm okay. And introducing you to Becca, talk about a ton of questions,” she starts, lifting her hands and mimicking his head-exploding mime. “For you, not for me,” she clarifies. “I'm protecting you.”
That pulls a laugh out of him, but it’s quiet, and it feels affectionate, rumbling in his chest.
“I can handle it,” he assures her. “Someday soon, yeah? I wanna know who makes you you, Mel King.”
“Yeah,” she says, and even though it's dark, he's pretty sure he can see a blush flushing her cheeks.
“I'll let you go,” he says, taking a step back so that he doesn't take a step forward and do what he really wants to do, like feel the heat of her flushed cheek against his lips.
She lifts her hand in a wave, and he reciprocates, turning and getting a full three steps away before she's calling his name.
He turns, and then she's there, stepping into his space so quickly he can barely react. Her arms fall around his neck, and he has just enough time to wrap his arm around her waist before she’s whispering, “thank you,” against his ear.
He runs his other hand up her back, his fingers grazing the end of her braid in the seconds before she steps back.
“Anytime, Mel,” he tells her, pressing his hands deep into his pockets. “Get home safe.”
She nods, and then he turns around again (a much harder feat this time, honestly), listening to her footsteps recede in the dark.
“Okay, Melissa King,” Frank tells her later that night, his voice low across the phone. “Those multiple questions you had earlier? You get two.”
She smiles, reclining further back in bed. “I thought the game was called 20 Questions.”
“You're a genius. You don't need all twenty.”
She's positive she's blushing at his words, praise flitting straight through her veins in a warm, heady way. She had so many questions after listening (but trying to act like she wasn’t) to his FaceTime call, but now all she can think is that him jokingly calling her a genius at 2AM is, honestly, sexier than it has any right to be.
But she swallows that feeling, because she'll never turn down an opportunity to learn from him, no matter the subject. (And she knows, deep down, that there are few subjects she'd rather learn more about than, well, him.)
“Mmm, okay. Did Dr. John really almost not graduate med school? And related question, who is Dr. John?”
His laugh is deep against her ear. “Dr. John is the kids’ pediatrician. He wants his patients and their parents to call him by his first name, especially if said parents are pretty women who routinely bring their kids to their appointments solo.”
“Oh, gross,” Mel says.
“And I don't know about med school. It just irks Abby when I rag on him, and that's an easy target. He's a good doctor. I just have to dislike him on principle.”
“Well, principles are important,” she muses.
“You get one more question.”
“Technically, I asked two already,” she says.
“Ehh, consider this one a freebie.”
She considers for a moment, but it's impossible to narrow down. There are so many things she wants to know but doesn't know yet about him, but one realization from his face time earlier keeps coming back to her.
“I— “ she starts, “You have this whole other life I know nothing about. And that's okay,” she rushes to add, because it really is. He doesn't owe her every part of him just because it's almost 2AM, and he's the only person she wants to talk to. “But there are too many things I want to know to narrow it down to a single question.”
“You can have as many questions as you want, Mel,” he laughs softly. “I was joking before — not about the genius part, but…”
When she hesitates again, he continues speaking. “What if… how about I tell you something I've been meaning to?”
She swallows. It's dark in her bedroom, and his voice feels intimate and familiar in a way she still isn't sure it should. (She’s already fairly sure she wants it to; she's just not sure it should.) She nods, and then realizes he can't see her, and murmurs a sure.
She hears, nearly feels, him take a deep breath. “That thing Abby mentioned about Wednesday morning?”
“Mhmm?”
“We're meeting to sign divorce papers. I will… be divorced Wednesday.”
“Oh,” she whispers. “Wow.”
“I'm not sure why I hadn't told you before. Or if that matters.”
“No, um. It's okay that you didn't tell me? That's, you know, that's pretty personal.”
“Isn't that what friends are supposed to talk about? Personal stuff?”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.”
“Did I make it weird? Do you wanna go back to talking about Dr. John and how I'm positive he fainted in his first gross anatomy lab?”
“No,” she says, laughing softly. “I'm sorry, I just… don't really know what to say? Do I tell you I'm sorry, or congratulations? None of my friends have ever been divorced.”
She's not even sure she can say any of her friends have been married, honestly, outside of him.
He chuckles. “Somewhere in the middle, I think? It's been a long time coming, even before… everything. Which, I dunno, maybe that makes me sound like an ass. I care, I'm upset, obviously…”
“I think it's a natural reaction not to know how you feel about this, really?”
At least, she hopes it is, because she has no clue how she's supposed to feel, even though she's not directly involved.
“Well, good,” he finally says. “So that’s what's happening this week. And if I keep you on the phone later than usual every night until then, it's because I'm anxious about Wednesday morning coming, which is something I would only admit in the middle of the night to you.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” she whispers.
“Good.” His voice is throaty and rough, and it always is the later the night gets, but she's never paid as much attention to the exact rasp of it as she does now. “Tell me something, now. How was your night with Becca?”
And so she tells him, hoping her voice can carry him through.
“I love you, you know? I mean, I don't… but. You know.”
They're the first words Abby has spoken directly to him in 15 minutes, in the quiet elevator now that all I's and T’s have been dotted and crossed.
He nods. “I love you, too.”
“Don't you kinda wish we hated each other? Like, couldn't be in the same room together, call the cops, the kids in therapy for years, kinda hate?” She asks, rummaging in her giant purse, which he knows is only an excuse to not look at him.
“What?” He laughs and wonders if it's the first laughter this elevator has ever held. “No, that sounds awful.”
It actually sounds like something Frank-in-his-20s would have found hot, the way he'd always secretly loved it when Abby had been just a little mad at him, the way riling her up had always gotten them both off. He's pretty sure that's what kept them together as long as they were, which sucks to admit.
”I don't know. It would give me a good story to tell in my single mom playgroup,” she shrugs.
“Ex who diverted drugs and self-medicated his addiction and then almost lost his career isn't a good enough story?” It's gotten easier to almost joke about it, but laying it all out like that still makes him feel a little sweaty and sick.
“You haven't met these women,” she says, in the tone she gets when she has good gossip to tell.
“Aaaand I don't wanna,” he says, holding up a hand as the elevator arrives at the ground floor. “I think there's some fine print in the thousand pages we just signed that says I legally don't have to.”
“You know I don't tell random people your business, right? I don't know these women well enough to share that part of our— your life.”
He nods, but really, he didn't know that, not for sure.
“And besides,” she adds, sunlight falling across her red hair as they exit the building, “You've come so far since then. I know it hasn't been that long, but you seem so much more like… you, now.”
He shoves his hands in his pockets because her hair is doing that wispy flyaway thing that, a year ago, he would have tamed with his fingers if she'd let him. Now, he doesn't have any desire to, but sometimes muscle memory is the last to go.
“I'm trying,” he says. “And… thank you. You could have made my hell even hotter, and kept the kids from me or… well, I can't think of anything worse than that. But you didn't, after, and I'll always love you for that.”
“Just stop giving Tan gluten, and we'll be good,” she says, and her laughter has a bite, like she gets when she's been holding onto a complaint.
He just shakes his head, stopping as they reach her red CRV (that she somehow gets to keep and he gets to pay for, and doctors always joke about beefing with lawyers, but fuck lawyers, man.)
“You still off on Saturday?”
He nods. “Yep, I can come get them if that's easier.”
And this is the part of the divorce that probably won't ever feel easy. Their shared custody agreement is pretty flexible (thanks, maybe, lawyers), and Abby is willing to work with his unpredictable hours, but coordinating and compromising and not seeing the kids every single day will always be tough.
“We’ll figure it out,” she says, tired-sounding, and he knows she feels the same way.
“I've got a shift,” he says, hooking his thumb over his shoulder toward his car.
“Are we supposed to— can we hug?” She asks, her cheeks a little flushed in that embarrassed way they always do. (Will he ever stop noticing these little things about her?)
He nods. “I doubt most newly divorced people do, but yeah. Come here.”
She walks into his embrace like she has a thousand times — and nothing is surprising about the way his arms feel around her.
Hugging Abby now feels like a sad, but needed, goodbye.
The first patient Frank touches after he's signed his divorce papers is a guy who's overdosed. Robby tries to take him, and Dana looks on sympathetically when Frank refuses, because the patient is stable and responsive after Naloxone, and he's okay.
He's okay until he's not.
The patient crashes out of absolutely nowhere 15 minutes before shift change, and the whole thing honestly feels like a personal attack.
Mel is the first one in the room when he calls a code blue, the first time he's seen her for more than a split second in passing throughout a hectic shift.
“Hi,” she says, surprised, and that’s all she gets out before the room is packed, and they spend the next 20 minutes working on the patient to get him back and stabilized.
When it's all clear, Frank takes a deep breath and slowly exhales, but the adrenaline spiking through him doesn't subside. He needs…
Well, what he thinks he needs right at this moment, he can't have. Won't have.
“Frank, are you okay?” Mel’s voice is quiet from where she's peeling off her gloves beside him. “You're really pale.”
He feels like he's on fire, actually.
“Yeah, yes,” he mutters, brushing a hand over her arm as he moves past her. “I just need some air.”
He’s slowly exhaling a plume of smoke into the darkness when the fire escape door squeaks open next to him. He'd known not to sit up against it, knew Mel would find him before anyone else even noticed he was gone.
He hastily stubs out his cigarette as she sits, and then feels silly. Of all the things she knows he's done, smoking is not anywhere near the top of the offenses, but he still feels embarrassed by it, somehow.
“You okay?” She asks quietly, before he's even turned to look at her.
He starts to nod, but then thinks better of it and shakes his head, dropping his head between his knees and slowly inhaling and exhaling.
“We got ROSC; he's stable,” she says, and he knows all this.
“I know,” he whispers. “I know.” He lets out a groan and runs his hand through his hair. “I don't know why I'm acting like this is my first loss or something, when it wasn't even a loss.”
“Someone told me once that this is a tough place for sensitive people.”
He watches her for a moment, their conversation all those months ago coming back to him. He tries to come up with a sarcastic, self-deprecating joke, but nothing comes to him.
“Maybe you’re not sensitive in the same way I am, but maybe you're a little more vulnerable than usual today?”
“Because I signed divorce papers?” The words don't feel wrong on his tongue, but they feel new. Frank’s not used to being thrown off by new things.
“Yeah,” she says. “And… everything else. Maybe that patient just hit too close to home today?”
Maybe. It's Mel, and she knows him, and she's watching him now, like she doesn't really know how to help, but she wants to. It’s not pity — it’s compassion. It's not unlike how she looks at her patients when they can't quite describe what's wrong, and it makes him feel like his heart is beating out of his chest.
It's kind of how he always feels around her, in person, over the phone, at noon or 2AM — vulnerable and ripped open, but in an intensely good way.
“You asked me how I found this place? And I told you I didn't wanna be found?”
She nods, looking a little confused at his subject change. He glances away before he starts speaking.
“The first time I came up here, I had just stolen a vial of Lorazepam. Like, walked right out after a code with it. Robby was right there. I had pocketed pills and stuff before that, but never… never anything like that. And I thought, fuck, if I can do that and get away with it, I can do anything,” he says, finally letting his gaze meet hers again. “So I did.”
She just stares, blinking slowly. He scoffs, shaking his head, not at her, but at himself from all that time ago.
“Mel, this place was never quiet or peaceful or pretty for me; it was where I came to escape, in every fucked up way you can imagine. I used to sit right here and ignore calls from my wife, from my kids. I would steal drugs meant for patients and then come up here and…”
He pauses to look at her, the gentle way she's worrying her bottom lip and how she hasn't taken her eyes off him, despite all the horrible shit he's just revealed.
“I— I'm so sorry, but I have to ask,” she finally says. “Do I need to go get Robby, or call your sponsor, or…?” He thinks he can almost see her heart breaking as she lets the words out.
He shakes his head, adamant. “I swear, Mel, no. I— it flashed through my mind for a split second earlier, standing in that trauma room, and then…”
She waits, her gaze unwavering.
“And then you said my name,” he finishes, watching the silent way her mouth sighs out a surprised, oh. “Mel, I came out here on instinct. But not like before, not because I wanted, needed, to hide, but because I knew someone could find me now. I knew you'd come looking for me.”
She starts to say something, maybe, her lips moving over words, but nothing comes out.
“This place was never peaceful or quiet or pretty to me… until I shared it with you,” he says, and he really, really needs to stop because Mel still hasn't said anything, but of course, he can't make himself do that. “And now, god, Mel, it turns off all the noise in my head in a way drugs never could. And it's so, so pretty.” He says that last part quietly, staring directly at her, and he’s so, so fucked.
“Fuck, I'm sorry. I should have kept that to myself. That's all way too much to put on you. Maybe… maybe I do need to call Mark.”
“Your sponsor?”
“Yeah,” he says, reaching for another cigarette. He doesn't light it, just twirls it around his fingers like a carcinogenic fidget spinner. It isn't until Mel places her hand over his, stopping him in his tracks, that he meets her eyes.
“I think,” she starts slowly, “that it's been a rough day and that if there is any thought in your mind about calling your sponsor, you should do it. Asking for help isn't a bad thing.”
He nods. He knows she's right, and when he tells her as much, she gives him a small smile.
“Okay, good,” she says. “I do like being right,” she jokes.
And that's the thing, he's pretty sure. Mel is usually right, but not out of any compulsion to be right, to be the best, but just because she always chooses to do the right thing. He thinks— he hopes— that's something else she can teach him.
It's only then that he realizes her hand is still on his, warm and grounding.
“Uh, do you have to run to get Becca?”
She shakes her head. “Her center is having a movie night, and she'll be mad if I show up before the movie marathon ends. I've got a couple hours.”
“After I call Mark, would you wanna grab food?” It's not a date, and he knows that, so he’s not sure why he feels like he's 16 again, asking Jenny Prezzo to Homecoming. (She said no, (actually, oh god, no) not that he's still holding onto that or anything.)
Mel, though. Mel says, “yeah, that sounds nice,” and it's absolutely the best he's felt all day.
“Someplace quiet, maybe?” He asks, not just because he's pretty sure that's her preference, but also because he likes the sound of her voice filling the silence.
She pauses for a second, glancing out at the view, and then nods. “I know a good place. Make your call, and then text me when you're done? Don't rush.”
He nods. He turns his hand over slowly, palm up, and squeezes her hand. Her eyes land there, and while she studies the way their hands fit together, he studies her.
He just got divorced, and he's losing his shit over simply holding someone's hand, and it's not because it's too much, but because it’s not enough.
It’s not enough, but when she squeezes back, it's actually perfect.
She stands slowly, but he doesn't drop her hand, like it's a lifeline connecting their bodies. He's fully aware he probably looks like some sad little puppy as he looks up at her as she turns to leave, but he can't bring himself to be embarrassed now.
He lets her hand go as she opens the door, her smile the last thing he sees before she pulls the door shut behind her.
Once she's gone, he reaches for his phone, dials, lets it ring, and takes a deep breath.
“Hey, Mark. It's Frank Langdon, man.”
All done, Frank texts her a while later, just as she's gathering the last item on her mental checklist. Went ahead and FaceTimed the kids too, sorry it took awhile.
She texts back a quick don't apologize, be right there, with the hand that's free, the one that still feels like it's on fire. She knows this is a really inaccurate metaphor for what's happening in her body, but his hand in hers felt like an ignition switch in the most innocent way.
And she's pretty sure her face is flushed pink, and she's glad she hasn't run into any of their coworkers down here. The cafeteria isn't known for its gourmet meals. But the pizza (one of the only things available this late) is pretty good, and she's seen Frank basically inhale multiple slices between traumas on busy nights, so she thinks this might be a good solution.
Ideally, they'd go somewhere with good food, someplace they don't spend 60 hours a week, but today, under the circumstances, she'll just be happy for a couple more hours with him.
She carefully makes her way back upstairs, past the ducks, down the hall, her heart racing the whole way.
It's just food, she tells herself. And logically, she knows that's true. They've eaten meals together, but only in that “oh, hey, you're in the lounge at the same time, nice,” or “if I don't inhale this protein bar right this second while you're consulting on a patient, I will need medical attention and will become your new patient,” kind of way. Never intentionally, really.
But they've also shared hours-long 2AM phone calls and found each other in tiny moments during busy shifts, so maybe, really, sharing food on the fire escape in the dark isn't anything to overthink.
Except, well. She pushes open the fire escape door with her shoulder, and Frank’s eyes are red, like maybe he's been crying, but he still smiles up at her, and oh, this is worth overthinking.
She hands off the pizza to him as she sits, and he watches her as she divvies up the drinks, setting a Red Bull and water by him and her own Dr. Pepper on the other side.
“I hope cafeteria pizza is okay. I know it's not exciting, but I figured you might not be up to anything more,” she says quietly, handing him a napkin.
He doesn't say anything for a few seconds, and Mel tries to read the expression on his face. It's one she hasn't seen before. She's the first to admit that she doesn't always read expressions well, but she’s perpetually working on it, and she knows how to read Frank Langdon better than most, like it was just something she was born to do.
He clears his throat finally and then smiles at her again. “It's perfect,” he says. “Exactly what I needed.”
“Good.” He hands her a slice of pizza. They each take a bite, and she lets him enjoy his for a couple of minutes before she asks, “So… everything's okay?”
And immediately, she feels silly because, well. “Sorry, I know a single phone call can't make everything okay.”
He shakes his head and watches her for a moment, almost like he's waiting for her to get a question about a patient right. She feels a little under the microscope, which usually, from anyone but him, makes her incredibly anxious.
“That's funny, ‘cause phone calls with you feel like they fix everything.”
“Yeah?” She asks quietly, mesmerized by how his mouth turns up in a smile on only one side and how he turns just slightly away to cover a quiet laugh.
“Yeah, Mel.” She feels a little on the spot again, but not in a bad way. She's just about to say something — maybe for me, too — when he wipes his hands and says, “But… yeah. Everything is okay. I know you won't know what this is like, because you're not in any way a fuckup, but sometimes talking to Mark is like having someone remind you of every way you've ever messed up, but… kind of in an affectionate, caring way?”
“You're not a fuckup,” she eases out adamantly. “But… that doesn't sound fun,” she says, watching his blue eyes shine as he laughs.
“It's really, really not,” he assures her, “but it's also oddly helpful. Not a big fan of admitting when I'm wrong, so it's sometimes nice when someone who cares calls me out on shit. It's part of the whole… rigorous honesty thing, which I'm not great at.”
“You seem pretty honest to me,” she whispers.
He doesn't say anything for a long moment, and normally, Mel would worry she had said the wrong thing, but not with him. He looks like he's battling with himself, but finally, he speaks.
“That's because you, Mel King,” he says, leaning over and nudging her knee with his, “make everyone around you better.”
She's positive she blushes, and she has to lace her fingers together for a moment to keep from… what, reaching out for him? Is that the buzzy feeling arching through her?
“I don't think that's true,” she says instead.
“It is,” he says, the quietest words she's ever heard from him, almost drowned out by the electric hum of the light above them.
He watches her so intently, for so long, that by the time the wail of an ambulance siren six floors down pulls his focus, she's pretty sure she believes him.
“What, uh, what'd you say Becca is doing tonight?” She's happy for a safer topic, honestly.
“Oh, it's a movie marathon at her center. They do it once a month or so, popcorn, snacks, the whole thing. They did a Will Ferrell marathon last year, and somehow that turned into me watching Elf fourteen Fridays in a row,” she says, almost shuddering at the memory.
“There are definitely worse movies, but that's rough,” he laughs.
She nods. “Yeah, by the second Friday, I was over it, but it made her happy, so…” she shrugs, because there's really not more to it than that.
She doesn't tell him that just a few weeks into her own Elf nightmare, she’d met him, and by the next time Becca pressed play, he’d been gone.
He's back now, and that's what matters.
He's watching her again, that inquisitive look that furrows his brow a little.
“What makes you happy?” He asks, and she stops, her drink halfway to her mouth.
Maybe it's because she hasn't given anyone the opportunity to in a long time, but she honestly can't remember the last time someone asked her that, much less cared about the answer.
She's pretty sure Frank cares.
She sets her drink down, wiping condensation onto her scrub pants. “Spending time with my sister, regardless of what movie we're watching,” she says. “Helping patients, a scalding hot shower after a long day, the first snowfall of the year.” It's a long list, now that she's giving it thought, but one item feels more important than the rest she could add, at the moment. “This,” she finishes, willing herself not to look away, even as she can feel her cheeks redden.
He's quiet for a moment, and then he smiles, and that, that exact smile, she wants to add, but doesn't.
“This?” he murmurs. “Cafeteria pizza on the fire escape?”
She's laughing before she can reel it in. “Yes, yeah. Exactly.”
“Yeah, me too,” he says.
Mel yawns a little while later, right in the middle of telling him about how Whitaker got puked on seven times in one shift a few months ago (“Robby said it was a record, but Dana said no, so now Dennis is worried it'll happen again, apparently,”) and when she finally opens her eyes, Frank is watching her.
She's caught him looking a lot tonight, and each time, it's looked like he has words on the tip of his tongue.
This time, all he says is, “Tired?” quietly.
She nods, tucking a strand of hair falling loose from her braid behind her ear. His eyes track the movement, and she watches his fingers flex where they're splayed between them.
“We should get you home,” he says, starting to gather their trash.
The we echoes between them, and spirals through her, and it isn't until he says her name that she realizes he's standing above her, waiting. She shakes herself out of it and stands as well, and at his questioning look, she smiles.
“More tired than I thought, I guess,” she says in explanation.
He nods as he holds the door open for her, a quizzical look on his face. It's how he looks when he's piecing together a complicated diagnosis.
She is tired, really. But honestly, for the first time in she can't count how long, she thinks she might just be sleepy because her body feels relaxed. She hasn't looked at her phone in an hour. She hasn't needed to worry about Becca… she hasn't looked at anything or anyone but Frank.
“Did you drive today?”
She nods. “Yeah, I'm in the garage,” she says, following him down the hallway and to the elevators. She reaches for the call button, but he ushers her past it with a hand low on her back. (His fingers are warm even through her jacket and t-shirt, and his touch lingers long after his hand falls away way past the elevator.)
“Come on,” he says, dumping their dinner trash in a nearby trash can. “If you take the freight elevator, it'll drop you just outside the hallway to the lockers, so you don't have to walk back through the whole ED.”
She wonders briefly if he knew that shortcut before he had reason to find the fire escape hideout, but she isn't going to ask.
They make their way downstairs, to their lockers, and out to the parking garage, and it just feels… easy. Domestic. Like a route they've traveled a thousand times together.
He follows her out to the second level and trails her to her car, an old blue Corolla with a Kamala 2024 sticker on the bumper that she can't bear to part with.
“This is me,” she says, turning back to face him.
“You sure you aren't too tired to drive?” He asks, watching her closely. She's really very sure she should be the one checking in on him after the day he's had, but it's so nice and new and… complex to have someone check in on her that she just smiles and lets him.
“Yeah, I honestly feel more relaxed than anything. I think… being around you? Relaxes me,” she finishes, and then the garage is echoing his laughter back to them.
He turns his head as he laughs, the long line of his neck taut, and she wants to trace the perfect line of his throat, the sharp cut of his jaw, simply to brush up on the anatomy.
“Oh, Mel,” he finally says, his voice a little breathless. “Not a single person has ever said that about me in my life.”
He reaches out then, slowly, his fingers catching on the end of her braid, his thumb smoothing over the strands.
“Thank you,” he says quietly, soft enough to never echo to anyone but her. The words are easy but loaded and encompass so much more than a response to her unintended compliment.
His fingers are still in her hair as she nods, and his eyes watch the movement. She thinks, maybe, she's so relaxed she could reach out and press her lips to his jaw, map his skin with a slow brush of her lips, and blame it on being a little sleep-drunk (and not even need an excuse, with the way he's still watching her) but a car door slams a level below them and they both startle.
He looks a little out of it, too, but she's going to blame that on the day he's had.
“I should… I should go get Becca before it gets too late,” she says, and he nods.
“You're on tomorrow, right?”
She nods, and he finally takes a full step back, letting his fingers fall from her hair.
“Good,” he whispers. “Get home safe. Talk later?”
It's the first time either of them has ever acknowledged or planned a middle-of-the-night conversation. There's never been a pretense to any of them, minus the legitimate first time she called him about work, but planning to stay up late and whisper quiet words to each other in the dark?
Well. It feels different now.
But still, all she says is, “yes, please,” as she unlocks her door. She settles in, returning his quiet wave, and watches him in her rearview as she reverses out of the spot and heads down toward the exit.
She knows it's silly, but she hears his quiet we should get you home for miles longer than the sound ever traveled.
Mark told him, well, a lot of shit, on the phone, a ton of it mildly infuriating (this is a hole you threw yourself in, kid, and even if someone jumps in to help you out, you still have to pull yourself out) and some of it surprisingly helpful (I've been divorced twice, Frank, and you know what I did both times I signed papers? I used, and I didn't call my sponsor, and I fucked myself over more than either wife ever did. You did the right thing,) but what he hasn't been able to stop thinking about is the question Mark asked him right before they hung up, the one that made the tears he'd been holding back finally fall:
If you look for a second too long, there are a million dark things you can lose yourself in. Why don't you try, right now, today, to find a tiny bit of light?
So he hung up and called his kids, even though he could barely hide that he was still crying. He let their warm-bath sleepy voices ramble and make him laugh, and god, he loved them so much.
And then Mel had shown up again, already always the brightest light in his orbit, gentle and warm like sunlight on a calm sea, and challenging in the best way, and fuck, he might love her too. He's not in love with her, which would be totally wild and psych-admit-worthy on the literal day of his divorce, but he might love her, in like.. a totally innocent friend way, where she's the only person he wants to talk to at the end of a long day. That's totally normal.
It's such an absurdly surreal thought to have that he laughs for a solid minute in the dim light of his living room, a bad 90s action movie casting shadows from the TV.
And then his phone rings, Mel’s name lighting up the dark, and instead of answering, he lets it go to voicemail. For a split second, he thinks about leaving it there, disregarding Mark’s advice, sinking into the darkness of a bad day, and blocking out the world.
But that would be stupid. And Frank is many, many things, most of them questionable on a good day, but he's not stupid.
So he picks up his phone a few moments later, and instead of returning her audio call, he FaceTimes her. Fuck it, he thinks. It's a video call, not a marriage proposal; he should not be as nervous as he is, waiting for her to accept.
Her face pops up on his screen, filling the room with light in more ways than one. She looks surprised, her “hi!” curious and alert.
“Hey,” he says, watching her fumble for her glasses. She's on the couch like he is, and something tugs at his gut, maybe a moment of disappointment at not catching her in bed. But this… this is good, too.
Her hair is down, wavy around her shoulders, and she looks relaxed in a way he's not sure he's ever seen.
I think being around you? Relaxes me, she'd told him earlier, and it's still such an unbelievable sentiment to him. He's pretty sure she relaxes him, too, and also does the exact opposite in perfect measure.
“This is new,” she says quietly. There's a sage green pillow on her lap, and he watches her wrap her free arm around it, cuddling it against her.
Lucky damn pillow, he thinks wildly.
“Yeah, y’know,” he says, “figured I should make this a whole day of firsts.” Aaaand he's an idiot, because why would he bring up his divorce after Mel spent hours today, and this last week, listening to him talk about it.
“Well, this is a nice one,” she says, and oh, okay. She really is too nice to him.
He laughs and watches her study the movement on the screen. “Good,” is all he says.
“I've always kind of pictured you in bed when we're on the phone,” she says, and then he gets the absolutely wild pleasure of watching her cheeks flush in real-time. “I mean, I haven't pictured you, but I've imagined it, I mean. Not like that, but—”
“Mel,” he laughs gently. “I get it.” (I've pictured you too, he doesn't say, because he's stressed her out enough today.)
“Oh, good,” she says, in that innocently relieved way she has that always makes him smile.
“You know, nothing changed today,” he tells her, watching her eyebrow quirk up in question. “I mean, nothing changed about this. I'm still the same guy who wants to spend his nights talking to you… I'm just… officially divorced now.”
He doesn't choke over divorced like he thinks he might have earlier in the day.
She nods slowly. He's seen her take enough histories from withholding patients to know she doesn't entirely believe him, which is good because he definitely doesn't believe himself, either.
“Right, yeah,” she nods, and okay, maybe he's just lying to both of them for no reason.
Because something did change today, and it wasn't just his marital status. There had been moments with Mel, like, more than one singular moment. And maybe he's a glutton for punishment (he is, he absolutely is, no one could ever deny it), but he wants those moments again — more of them, different versions of them, or something.
And he thinks, maybe, there's a part of her that feels the same. And he just needs to find out.
“So I think, you know, since this is a day of firsts, we should have dinner.”
Her eyes do this really adorable, comical thing, and it's clear that wasn't what she was expecting him to say. Good old unpredictable Frank Langdon is still in there somewhere; he's just sober now.
“We did have dinner today,” she says, a note of a challenge in her voice, and out of his league doesn't even begin to describe her.
“You are correct,” he confirms, waiting for her to give him that tiny smile of acceptance he's so used to from praising her at work. It comes, but it isn't quite enough. Suddenly, he's standing there asking Jenny Prezzo out again, her oh god, no, reverberating in his chest in anxious pangs. He pushes through it anyway, because that's what he does with pain these days.
“I think we should do it again. And, if it's okay, I'd love it if Becca came.”
Mel is quiet for so long that if they weren't on FaceTime, and he wasn't intensely watching the intricate things her face was doing — pretty, red-cheeked blush and a slightly confused head tilt — he'd think she'd hung up.
“Mel? It's okay if you don't want—” (it's not, it's not, but he'll make himself okay with it.)
“No one has ever invited Becca to join, before,” she says, so quietly it feels meant more for herself than him. “None of my boyfr— friends have ever asked specifically to meet her. They've, you know, gone along with it when I suggested it, and acted happy about it, but no one's…”
He's not going to linger on the almost boyfriends, at least not right this second, because…
“What?” He asks, and her eyes jump to the phone screen in response to the edge to his voice. “No one?”
She shakes her head. “My, uh, my last ex, David? He met her once, and then spent the rest of our very short relationship telling me that she should live at her old facility full time, so that I could have a life.”
“Dick,” he mutters, earning a tiny laugh from Mel. He's glad she doesn't jump to his defense because even though Mel can find the good in almost anyone, it doesn't mean she should.
She's watching him now, playing with a strand of hair that looks like spun gold, and he's pretty sure it's a nervous tell.
“I just want to… be a part of your life, Mel. And Becca’s a big part of that, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says. “The biggest.”
“But if that's not something you want or are ready for, it's okay.” And it is, really, even if the thought of her saying no might sting a little more than all those signatures he'd scrawled this morning.
“No,” she says quietly, and his heart sinks into his gut, but then she meets his eyes over a grainy phone screen, and continues. “No, I want that. As long as Becca is okay with it, of course.”
“Of course,” he echoes. Today has been such a weird, emotionally draining day, but somehow, when Mel smiles at those two simple words, he wouldn't care if this day lasted a hundred years.
“I'll talk to her about it tomorrow, and we can go from there,” she says.
“Cool, cool, cool,” he says, because it's 2AM, and a beautiful woman is staring at him like he just did something so fucking right, and that's just always going to be cool as hell.
“Thank you,” she says, bringing the sleeve of her sweatshirt — blue, looks impossibly soft and worn-in, like it's probably not the first time she's worn it during one of their late-night talks — up to her lips to cover what he's pretty sure is one of those huge smiles he doesn't see enough of.
“You don't have to thank me for being your friend, Mel. It's the easiest thing I do.”
Her hand shifts, and yeah, there's a corner of that smile he knew was there.
Fuck, he doesn't want to be just her friend.
He drags a hand through his hair and leaves it resting on the back of his head. He's too cocky not to know how his arms look when they're flexed like this, and now, judging by the pink blush to her cheeks, Mel does too.
“Tell me something,” he says, quiet and slow. If his voice is an octave lower than it usually is, well. It's probably because making her blush is his new favorite activity.
“What?” She asks, a little distracted, like when she's zoned out during a trauma for a quick second, and his voice brings her back.
“I don't want to hang up, and I like the sound of your voice,” he explains. “Just… say anything.”
She watches him for a moment, then smiles, her hand down, the stretch of her grin on full display.
FaceTiming her was the smartest decision he's ever made.
“Say anything,” she repeats. “That reminds me. Becca's movie marathon?”
“Oh, for your sake, I hope it hasn't brought Elf back.”
“No, thank god,” she whispers. “It was an 80s marathon; they watched The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, and Say Anything.”
He nods. “Any of those going to be on repeat in the King household for the next three months?”
She laughs. “I'm afraid so,” she says, and he zeroes in on her happy grin as she recounts Becca’s reviews of the movies.
To Mel’s absolute lack of surprise, Becca is completely on board with meeting Frank and spends the next two weeks alternating asking when they can get dinner (“soon, our schedules haven't aligned yet”), where they'll have dinner (“I dunno, but I bet Frank will let you choose”), and restarting Say Anything on a loop.
Mel, on the other hand, has spent those weeks alternating a run of days and a longer run of nights and working basically the opposite of whatever Frank is, and honestly, it's been a long two weeks. She's tired, in that way she really only gets when she's actually missing sleep, and not voluntarily.
Still, through all that, she and Frank have talked every night, even if it meant a quick check-in in the ambulance bay as he was heading out and she was coming in, or if he had the kids, or if she snuck out to the fire escape for a ten-minute break just to hear his voice. (Those nights on the fire escape are her favorite because it really feels like the rest of the world has fallen away, and all that's left is the rasp of his voice as he asks how many days until you're back on days with me where you belong.)
She loves working with everyone on nights— Dr. Abbot has an entirely different teaching style than Dr. Robby. Not better, not worse, but calmly challenging in a way that really helps motivate Mel to push through complicated procedures or think about a diagnosis in a new way. And Samira, who works a lot of nights now for reasons that Mel doesn't really know, is brilliant and collaborative, and most importantly, kind, and Mel has genuinely enjoyed their shifts together. Dr. Shen is maybe a little more… relaxed than Mel usually can learn from, but he knows exactly when to switch into teaching mode and when to let her do her own thing.
Really, overall, she likes nights. But she misses looping Frank in on cases or walking into a trauma bay to find him already assessing a situation, in a way that makes her feel a little giddy. It's nice to have someone (not that she has him, but maybe sometimes, she lets herself think she does) to miss, to look forward to talking to or seeing.
That's why, when he texts her at 7:45PM, as her last night shift is starting, to ask if they can have dinner with Becca the next night, she jumps at the chance, even if she knows she'll be tired.
That should work! Let me just make sure Becca is cool with it.
👍👍👍
She texts Becca, who is in the middle of a heated game of Pictionary with a group at her center, who just responds 👍!!!!, and it’s the first time she's wondered if Frank and Becca will end up in cahoots.
Mel’s about to step into the lounge for a minute to text Frank back, but then she gets pulled onto a trauma and then a missed dialysis renal patient (which historically the mention of sends shivers down even the tenured nurses’ spines), and then a second trauma and a fight bite incident that almost has Abbot walking into a brawl in chairs (not the first time she's witnessed this lately), and her regular patient load, and by the time she blinks again, it's nearly 2AM and she's dragging, and she needs fresh air.
It's slowed down enough that she can step fully off the floor for a fifteen, and when she goes to tell Samira she'll be right back, Mel finds her and Dr. Abbot standing close together in the lounge, her head leaned into him and his fingers absentmindedly working a knot out of Samira’s shoulder. Mel probably wouldn't even think anything of it; they're physicians, and they understand how stress can impact physical health. But they jump apart when Mel enters the room, and that's… interesting.
She just pushes through, though, because she likes them both, and who are they hurting? And besides, if she opens that can of worms now, she'll never get her break.
“I'm going to take fifteen, if that's okay. My patient in North 2 is a little call-button-happy, but he just needs reassurance he's not been forgotten. Other than that, everyone should be good for a few.”
Samira smiles at her, maybe gratefully, and lets her know they've got her covered. Neither of them, she notes, makes a move to leave the lounge when Mel does.
Mel makes her way up to the sixth floor, past the ducks, down the hall, and onto the fire escape before pulling her phone out.
Frank’s face appears on screen halfway through the first ring, his voice late-night gravelly as he says, “hey, stranger.” His hair needs to be cut; it's falling in his eyes more than usual, the collar of his Pitt shirt is faded and frayed, and she's struck by the sudden but not new desire to curl up against him and press her cheek to the soft fabric over his steady heart.
“Hi,” she says back, reaching up to tuck a wispy strand of hair back into her low ponytail.
“How's the night?”
“Busy,” she says, and then cringes. On principle, they don't say the Q word (except Shen, she's noticed, but he's stopped that when Abbot is remotely in earshot), but it's her own superstition that busy is almost as bad. But in her defense, she was distracted by new onset barely-even PG-rated impure thoughts. “But I was able to slip away for a few,” she adds, flipping the camera so he can see the familiar view.
Over the last couple of weeks, she's seen him on FaceTime on his couch, in his bed (his hair was still wet from a shower, and there were water droplets on his bare shoulders, and she almost had to hang up on him she was blushing so deeply), on his patio when he can't stop his nicotine craving, and memorably, last Tuesday, in front of his oven while he tried and failed to bake cupcakes for Tanner's school bake sale (“Baking is a science and I am literally a science god, how am I so bad at this?”)
They've all been welcome sights. But tonight, she can't take her eyes off him. Maybe it's that he's calm and cozy-looking on a night that feels filled with chaos. Maybe it's just that he's nice to look at in general. It doesn't have to be complicated, she tells herself.
And maybe he feels the same, because he says her name so, so softly (but gruff, too, which makes her stomach flip in a not-unconcerning way) and then asks her to flip the camera back around, so that they're face to face again.
“There she is,” he whispers. “Best view in the city.”
Her cheeks flare, a hot blush running across them, and he grins, slow and a little Cheshire-like. “Are you always going to blush when I flirt with you?” He asks, his voice a quiet challenge.
“Mhmm, yes, probably,” she gets out. “Are you always going to flirt?” It's a silly question, because it took her a while to even realize that's what he was doing. It wasn't the kind of sleazy flirting she associated with some guys, where it was blatantly obvious and kind of smarmy— which honestly was basically how she'd thought Frank would flirt, after seeing how he bantered with Garcia and Collins. It was sweet and genuine, and it felt like it was only meant for her.
“Oh, darlin’, absolutely,” he drawls, and her stomach flips in that same way again, but this time it's familiar enough that it feels welcome. The term of endearment isn't new; it's happened two other times in the last couple of weeks, always late in the night when she can tell he's a little looser-limbed and fighting off sleep more than usual.
It feels purposefully accidental, as much as that contradiction bugs her.
“What'd Becca say?” His voice brings her back, and she smiles.
“Oh! She said yes! Or actually, she sent a thumbs-up emoji and a bunch of exclamation points, but that feels pretty positive.”
“A bunch of exclamation points? That's a lot to live up to.”
She grins. “I'm sure you can manage.”
His grin matches her own. “I'm sorry, who's flirting now?”
She shrugs, but honestly? She didn't even think about it before it happened. He seems to like it, though, if the way he grins is any indication.
“Do the King sisters have a typical Friday night dinner place?”
She shakes her head. “Not really? I usually just let Becca choose. That's usually easiest.” She hasn't thought about where they'll have dinner, just that it's happening, which honestly feels a little weird. She likes plans, and looking at menus ahead of time, and alternate options in case Becca changes her mind. With Frank, though, it just feels easy not to worry.
“That's fine,” he says quietly. “Whatever she wants will work for me.”
“It's probably going to be Italian,” she says, yawning, because when left to her own devices, that will always be her sister's choice.
“You gonna make it, champ?”
She nods, even as she's finishing her yawn. “I'm just ready for these nights to be over for a while,” she says. “I think I could sleep for a week, which I know is hard to believe.”
“Even superhumans need sleep sometimes, Mel.” She can tell it's a joke, but he delivers it the same way he has those three terms of endearment: genuinely, and effortlessly, and like he really, really means it. “You sure dinner is okay? We can reschedule for a different time.”
“No,” she says quickly. “I mean, yes, dinner is good. I, uh…” She trails off, and for just a second, she wishes they weren't on FaceTime because he can clearly see she's not distracted; she's just silent.
“Mel?” He's laughing a little, but kindly.
“I miss you,” she finally says, and immediately, she can feel the heat rising in her body. It's not embarrassing to share how she's feeling, but it does make her feel incredibly vulnerable, which historically has been a difficult emotion for her.
It's never been difficult with Frank, though, she realizes.
She's not sure why she expects any different, but his simple, “I miss you, too,” makes her feel like she just blind-intubated a patient no one else could.
Buzzed, she thinks, maybe, is the word. She feels a little floaty and happy, and suddenly, she isn't remotely tired.
“Well, then,” she says, “guess it's good you'll see me later.”
“Guess so,” he whispers. And then he just watches her, like she's a puzzle he's trying to solve. It's not creepy, but it sends a chill down her spine for totally different reasons.
And then her phone dings two times in rapid succession: one text from Samira (Hi! Trauma rolling in in five if you're done with your break! If not, you can jump in when you're back!) and one from Dr. Abbot (MVI 5 mins). Frank must see her focus immediately shift because he perks up.
“Anything good?” It's never been her favorite phrase for checking on trauma details, but she's gotten used to it over her time in EM.
“MVI incoming,” she says, already turning to head back inside.
“Ooh, gonna take me with you? Need a telehealth consult?”
“I'm not sure about the legality of that. But I think we'll be good,” she says, grinning a little so he knows she's in on the joke.
“Go save the world, Mel King. Call me after you get some rest in the morning, and we'll finalize plans.”
“Mel!”
Becca’s laugh pulls her out of a daze later that night while they wait for Frank at Becca’s favorite Italian restaurant.
“Sorry! What?” Mel asks, turning her attention back to her sister.
“Do you think Frank will want pizza or spaghetti?”
“Um, I don't know. We should probably let him order what he wants, though, and we can just take home any leftovers from our regular order,” she says. They usually order two meals, split them, and take home leftovers for the next night. It'll be different fitting someone else into that routine, but as the bell above the door jingles and Mel watches Frank walk in, she knows it'll be okay.
Frank spots her like it's second nature, the same way they always find each other in the middle of a chaotic shift. He practically levitates over to them, he crosses the room so fast. Mel stands, a sudden burst of nervous energy propelling her up.
“Hey, King sisters,” he says, landing in front of them. He looks exactly like he does all the time, which means he looks kind of overwhelmingly attractive. And somehow, suddenly, unsure who initiates it, Mel is in his arms, his warm hug a surprise, if the way she can feel his heart racing against her ear is any indication.
His dark grey sweater is soft, and he smells warm and woodsy. It's only Becca’s slight giggle behind them that pulls her away from it.
Mel clears her throat. “Bec, this is Frank Langdon. He's my cowor— frien— we work together and we're friends,” she settles on finally, fully aware that her sister and Frank are laughing at her. “Frank, this is my sister, Becca.”
Introductions aside, she watches Becca hold her hand out in a fist, grinning as Frank immediately fist-bumps her.
“So if you work with Mel, that means you help people too,” Becca says, and Mel smiles.
Becca’s favorite thing to tell people, starting a solid year before it was ever even official when Mel was in med school, is, “my sister is a doctor. She helps people.” There's always pride in her words, and somehow, Mel always ends up blushing.
That's no exception now, as a smile tugs at Frank's lips. “I like to think so. But not nearly as good as your sister.”
Mel is pretty sure she could melt into the tacky linoleum floor when he looks at her again, not a hint of a joke or cockiness in his expression. He one thousand percent means what he says, and her chest constricts a little at Becca’s answering, “well, obviously.”
Frank's laugh is full and heady, and Mel absolutely doesn't let herself stare at the line of his throat as they all sit down.
Becca is exactly how Mel has described her: sweetly sassy and funny and inquisitive, and Frank is immediately obsessed with the shorthand she and Mel have, and the fond, entirely familiar way they interact.
Right after they sat down, Becca leaned close into Mel and whispered something that sounded like “floppy hair,” and Mel blushed furiously (adorable, cute, sexy, Frank had thought in a litany of increasing admiration) and then proceeded to not be able to look at him for a solid four minutes.
When the waiter had come to take their order, Mel had rattled off a clearly memorized list of what sounded like a ton of food, and then she and Becca had both said thank you so much! to the waiter in that perfect harmony that only close siblings can achieve.
And when Becca had started peppering him with questions (what's your favorite movie? Do you think aliens exist? Have you ever been skydiving? (Die Hard, absolutely, and once, before I went to med school)), Mel had just smiled like this was a totally normal thing Becca did. Despite being in the hot seat, Frank felt accepted in a way he hadn't in a long time.
Now that their food has arrived, the questions have slowed down some, and Frank watches Becca concentrate on her food in the same efficient, focused way Mel interacts with patients at work.
With Becca focused on her food, Mel turns her attention to him.
“Oh!” She says, setting down her fork and leaning in across the table. “I forgot to tell you. Last night, right before I called you, I walked in on a… moment? between Samira and Dr. Abbot.”
He raises an eyebrow and swallows the last bite of his pizza. “A moment? Like were they fighting or fuc— doing something?”
She shakes her head quickly. “No, it wasn't like… super physical. He was just rubbing her neck. Like a massage? But there was something super intense in the air.”
“Huh. Mohan and Abbot. I wouldn’t have guessed. She's very…” he trails off, because he actually doesn't know what won't sound dickish.
“Compassionate and beautiful,” Mel supplies, and sure, yeah.
He nods, and continues. “And he's very…”
“Handsome and intimidating,” Mel fills in, and well. Okay.
“Is he?” Frank asks, watching her expression very carefully.
“Intimidating? Not so much now, maybe, after my run of nights, but generally speaking? Yes. I watched him take on three guys in chairs the other night with only his stethoscope.”
“Handsome,” he clarifies, because, ridiculously, that's the part of the conversation he cares about most.
“Well, yes. You know, anatomically speaking,” she says, gesturing vaguely to her biceps and face.
That drags a laugh out of him, because of all the anatomy he's learned, none of it taught him how to determine if his attending was handsome.
“Good for them,” he shrugs. “You think she's working more nights because they're dating?”
“Who's dating?” Becca asks, her eyes twinkling like Mel’s do when she's about to make an exciting diagnosis.
“Oh, um, just some coworkers of ours, we think,” Mel tells her.
Becca turns to him, nodding. “Mel doesn't do that, not after bald David.”
Frank chokes on a sip of water, clears his throat, and then tries to sound as normal as humanly possible. “Oh, really?”
He remembers calling that guy a dick, but he doesn't remember that specific stipulation coming up.
Unaffected by what he's pretty sure might be an aneurysm happening inside his head, Becca elbows Mel. “Bathroom,” she says, and Mel stands to let her slide out of the booth.
“You remember where it is?” Mel asks, and then fondly rolls her eyes as Becca holds up a hand in acknowledgement as she walks back toward the bathrooms.
It's silent for a moment, and then Frank feels her foot nudge his under the table. It doesn't move, even as she starts talking.
“Hey,” she says quietly, waiting until he meets her eyes to continue. “You know that's not— I just told her I didn't want to date coworkers because I couldn't bear to tell her the real reason I ended things with David.”
Maybe not an aneurysm. Maybe he'll survive.
“Bald David,” he corrects, running a hand through his hair. It's not lost on him that she follows his movement, watching the two strands that he can never wrangle fall back over his forehead.
“Yes,” she laughs. “He was not as hirsutely blessed as you are.”
“Very few people can be, Mel.”
“Oh, I know,” she says, her smile teasing, and he's pretty sure, fond.
He wants to kiss her in the middle of this old Italian restaurant. In any place she'll let him. Over and over and over again. It's not like this is the first time he's thought it because, well, he's him, and she's her, and he's spent a lot of late nights recently watching her lips move, and even later nights thinking about her lips moving. But it's the first time he's seriously thought about doing it, just saying fuck it and leaning in to see if she kisses how her mind works, quick but methodical and so, so intensely beautiful.
Wildly, he thinks he might actually do it, but then Becca is jogging back over to them and calling Mel’s name excitedly.
“You okay, Bec?” Frank watches Mel switch from possibly flirting to caregiver sister in about .02 seconds, and not for the first time, he realizes there is so much he doesn't know about her, even though all he's tried to do these last few months is, well, know her.
“It's Friday, Mel.”
Mel nods. “Sure is.”
“It's Friday, Mel,” she says again. “It's movie night.”
Mel nods slowly, like she'd genuinely forgotten or maybe hoped that Becca would. Before she can say anything else, though, Becca charges ahead.
“Frank,” she says, turning her attention to him. “You came to Friday dinner, so now you have to come to movie night.”
“Oh, I don't want to intrude—” he says (even though every part of him wants to do just that) at the same time as Mel says, “Wait, we can't force him, Bec.”
And then Mel looks at him like she does when multiple people are speaking over each other in a trauma, but she's only listening for his voice.
“You wouldn't be intruding,” she says, watching him closely. “If you don't have plans, we'd love to have you.”
He smiles a little sheepishly. “Mel, my only plans tonight were this and talking to you.”
“Oh, you can't talk during the movie,” Becca says, and Mel nods seriously at him.
“Wouldn't dream of it,” he says earnestly.
The waiter comes over with to-go boxes then, and as Mel is boxing up their leftover pizza, Becca turns to him with the same familiar inquisitive look from earlier.
“This is our favorite Italian place. Was it the best meal you've ever had?” She asks, watching him pointedly.
“This was a great meal,” he tells her sincerely. “But the best meal I've ever had was pizza, on a fire escape.”
Becca wrinkles her nose as Mel fumbles the last slice into the box. Her head whips up to look at him immediately, a surprised, sweet smile tugging at her lips.
Her smile is… well, he wants to kiss her again. Her eyes flick to his lips, and maybe, he's pretty sure, she'd let him.
Mel and Becca’s apartment is exactly how he imagined it, from the small glimpses he's gotten during FaceTime. It's warm and cozy, and at least the common area is decorated in soothing sages and lilacs.
It's dark when they walk in, only a faint glow from a light in the kitchen illuminating the space, and he finds it peaceful that they leave it that way as they settle in. Becca goes off to her room to change, and Mel puts their leftovers away as he lingers in the entranceway to the kitchen, not so subtly looking at the framed photos on a nearby bookshelf.
“That's my med school graduation,” Mel says from behind him, her voice low, as he looks closer at a photo of Mel, full regalia, and Becca, arms around each other, their grins brighter than sunshine.
“Just the two of you?” He asks, looking around for other photos of the day.
“Yeah, uh, both our parents had passed by then, and we're not very close with our extended family,” she says, shrugging a little like she's made peace with something awful.
“Jesus, Mel,” he whispers.
“That's our mom,” she says, leaning into him to point out a photo on another shelf. Her hair brushes against his cheek as he moves to look closer at a picture of a woman who looks a lot like her daughters, arms wrapped around a younger Becca and Mel.
“She's beautiful,” he says sincerely, knowing that even if it's an odd compliment, Mel won't take it that way.
“Yeah,” she nods, reaching out to straighten the photo subtly, her fingers drifting over the image of her mom’s long hair. “Can you not mention her around Becca, though? Sometimes she can talk about her, but sometimes…” she trails off, and Frank nods quickly.
“Yeah, of course. I'm sorry, Mel, I shouldn't have asked.”
She shakes her head and gives him a shaky smile. “No, it's okay. I mean, we talk about personal stuff, right? Sometimes those are sad conversations.”
She's still standing so, so close to him, and he can't stop himself (he doesn't try, to be fair) from reaching out and running his fingers gently through her hair. It's down, and stayed down all through dinner, which surprised him, and she smiles faintly when he gently pulls at a strand.
“You should never be sad,” he whispers, as if wishing the words hard enough would make them true.
She nods, but doesn't say anything, and he studies her face in the silence of the room. He's always found her fascinating to watch at work: the way she is so vulnerable and open with her patients, the way she learned, at some point in the long months he was gone, to silently command attention in a room, the little smile she gives to anyone who needs it.
But this version of Mel, smiling up at him and vulnerable and commanding every ounce of his attention in her dim apartment?
He's pretty sure there's no other word to describe her than holy, which isn't a word his scientific mind is used to. But for Mel King, oh, he could learn.
“You're here,” she says quietly. “I'm not sad.”
It's way too generous a compliment, and one of those rare times Mel says something not entirely true, he knows, but he just smiles down at her and lets it be.
“Mel! Did you start the movie yet?” Becca's voice announces her down the hallway, and Mel (he swears, he can feel it in his bones) reluctantly pulls away.
“We wouldn't start it without you, silly,” she says, smiling over her shoulder at Frank as she heads toward the couch. She gestures to the right side of the couch, and he sits down, pulling the sage green pillow into his lap.
“That's Mel’s spot,” Becca says as she enters the room. It's not accusatory, just a fact.
He starts to move, but Mel shakes her head. “Tonight, it's his. That way, I can sit by both of you,” she says.
Becca shrugs, curling up against the left arm of the couch.
“What're we watching?” Frank asks finally, saying a silent prayer that it won't be Elf.
“The 80s classic The Breakfast Club,” Becca says, which apparently was already the agreed-upon choice in the King household because he's pretty sure if they discussed it in front of him, it was only telepathically.
“Nice,” he says, as Mel settles in between them.
“Mel’s favorite is Bender, but I like Andrew,” Becca says, and Frank laughs.
“Emilio Estevez is a god in my book,” he says. “Mighty Ducks was on repeat in my house growing up. Wouldn't have pegged you for a Bender fan, though, I gotta say,” he finishes, turning to Mel.
It's hard to tell in the dim light, but he thinks she might be blushing.
“I just think he was very complex in a compelling way,” she almost mumbles.
“Mel King has a thing for the bad boys,” he laughs. She nudges him with her foot, faking annoyance, but then leaves it, warm against his thigh.
If Becca cares that they're talking over the opening scene, she doesn't let on.
“Going out on a limb and assuming you were some combination of a jock and a rebel,” Mel says, and he immediately shakes his head.
“I mean, I see why you'd think that, given—” he gestures to himself, an unspoken, cocky “everything” — “but I was honestly a geek. I was 5’5 until my junior year; I knew I wanted to be pre-med already, so I spent a ton of time studying, and I played sports, but it was mostly just to try to tire myself out.”
Mel is watching him closely when he stops speaking, like she's seeing him in a new light. “Hmm,” she hums, like she's slowly turning over this new information.
She opens her mouth to say something, but Becca shushes her, and Mel just fondly shakes her head, like this isn't a new occurrence.
Frank doesn't dare say anything, and he doesn't dare move, because instead of speaking, Mel just burrows her socked-feet up against his thigh, angling her body so she's slightly facing him, her head turned toward the TV.
Mel doesn't even make it twenty minutes into the movie before her eyes are heavy, and the last 24 hours without real sleep catch up with her. The last thing she sees is Frank, in profile, laughing at the same scene Becca always does. Her feet are warm where she's tucked them against his thighs, and even though she'd rather keep watching him, she lets her eyes close.
She wakes up slowly to quiet voices, one so familiar it's written in the code of who she is, one newly familiar, she's pretty sure from her dreams.
She's warm and cozy, and when she finally opens her eyes, all she sees is gray, and a soft, spicy scent fills her senses.
Her face is buried against the left side of Frank’s chest, her body rhythmically moving with his heartbeat.
She doesn't want to move, for so many reasons.
“Should we wake her up?” Becca’s voice, which has never quite mastered a whisper, is the first thing she fully comprehends, and then there's a much quieter, “no, let her sleep,” and then she feels a shadow looming over her, and that's what finally makes her move.
“I'm up; I'm awake,” she says groggily, sitting up slightly, her adrenaline spiking a little like she's responding to a middle-of-the-night code.
“You missed the movie,” Becca says.
“Mhmm, yeah,” she nods. “Sorry, Bec.”
There's a warm, heavy weight on her knee, and it's not until he squeezes it that she realizes it's Frank's hand.
“Never got that post-shift nap, huh?” His voice is gentle, understanding from years of experience, and it rumbles through her body where they're still pressed together.
She shakes her head. On the TV, movie credits are rolling, and typically, this is when Becca would press replay, and Mel would zone out on her phone.
But, maybe mercifully, Becca stands, eying where she's still basically cocooned against Frank. Mel can tell what she's thinking without needing words, and she smiles up at her sister.
Becca hasn't seen her relax around a man, maybe ever. It's weird, probably, but that part of her life (however sporadic) has always been a little separate from her life with Becca, but Mel’s never been sure which one of them she was protecting.
This… this is different, though. Frank came willingly, happily, and it feels like he already fits into their small little bubble.
“I'm okay,” she tells her. “You can go to bed if you want.”
Becca watches her for a second longer but then nods before turning to Frank. “It was nice to meet you,” she says, and Mel smiles.
She can feel Frank’s smile where his head is resting against hers. “You too, Becca. Hopefully, we can do this again soon.”
It's something people say when they're trying to be polite, she knows. But she also knows Frank isn't one for fake niceties.
Becca nods, and then heads toward the hallway. “Love you most, Mel,” she calls, and just like every time she says it, Mel’s heart aches a little.
“Love you most, Bec.”
When the soft thud of Becca’s door closing reaches them, Mel finally moves slightly away, so she can fully see Frank's face. His hand is still on her knee, and he's smiling down at her.
“What?” She asks, trying not to look away.
“That's cute, the love you most,” he whispers.
“Oh,” she smiles. Honestly, she always forgets it might sound a little unusual to someone else. “When we were little, and we'd tell our mom I love you, she'd always say I love you most, and after she died, we both missed it, so we started saying it to each other.”
He smiles again, dragging his thumb slowly back and forth over her knee. “It's nice that you have each other,” he says finally. “I love my sisters, but it's a see you at Christmas, talk to you every couple months kind of love, not a… change your entire life for each other kind of love.”
Honestly, she's never really considered a sibling relationship to be anything else. But she's also never felt like she changed her life for Becca. Everything that happened since Becca came to live with her was just… supposed to happen.
“She's my best friend,” she shrugs, because it's just that easy. “I wouldn't be here, in Pittsburgh, if it wasn't for her.”
His thumb brushes lower, gently, just on the inside of her thigh, and she shivers. “Or, I don't know. Maybe I would be,” she says.
Maybe things happen how they're supposed to. She feels a little sleep-drunk, loose-limbed, and pliable, and she wonders how obvious that is to him.
“You've never talked about them,” she says, needing any kind of distraction from his hand on her. “Your sisters.”
He nods. “I've been so focused on, well, everything. I think we're all over the couple months mark at this point,” he says, shrugging slightly. It might bother him, she thinks, because usually he's a little more open, at least in the dark with her. “But Anna lives in Seattle. She's got this wild, artsy husband, and they're always exploring artistry in nature, whatever that means, and Jackie is this hot shot attorney in Boston, and she and her girlfriend just bought a brownstone in Beacon Hill.”
It sounds like he ripped it straight from a family newsletter, and she can't imagine not knowing the details of Becca’s daily life.
“Are they close?” She asks, yawning slowly and watching the steady strum of his fingers on her thigh. It's so light she can barely feel it, but she also can't feel anything else.
“They're about as different as identical twins can be, I think,” he says. “But they were super close growing up, and they still are in some ways, I guess. I was the annoying little brother who wouldn't leave them alone, so they really bonded over their shared hatred of my face.” He laughs a little, but she frowns.
“Who could hate this face?” She asks genuinely, reaching out to drag her fingers lightly over the stubble of his five o’clock shadow.
“I will make you a list,” he says, a wry laugh lacing the words. “They don't hate me now… I think. We're just all very different people.”
“Different is okay,” she whispers. Her fingers slip over the stubble on his chin and trip over the dimple she's stared at over so many FaceTime calls, and she thinks about stopping, but her sleepy-slowed brain doesn't stop her from dragging her thumb across his lower lip.
He’s been watching her silently, something she's pretty sure is mirth dancing in his eyes the whole time, but as her thumb traces the curve of his lip, it morphs into desire. It's impossible to think it's anything else.
“You could kiss me,” she says, slowly, like the words are thick on her tongue. She didn't really know she was going to say it, is the thing, which is a new feeling for her.
She really, really means it, though.
His eyes flash, still joyful, but so, so dangerous now.
Her thumb drags over his lip again, slower, and this time, she feels him press the tiniest bit of pressure against the pad of her thumb. She shivers again as he heaves a heavy sigh, his chest rising and falling deeply.
“Stand up, Mel,” he whispers, taking her hand. Her heart races a little, but she does it.
When he stands with her, he pulls her by the hand as he walks backward. They're not going toward her room, though, and she starts to tell him this, but he smiles.
He stops her a couple feet from her front door, and then leans in close.
“When I kiss you — when —” he whispers, his lips brushing the shell of her ear, “I need you to be fully awake.”
“Totally, totally awake right now,” she insists, and if anything, that gets his biggest smile of the night.
“No one will ever believe I was the one to take it slow,” he says, but it's more to himself than her. He drops her hand and pulls her in by the waist, and she goes willingly, his arms around her waist and her chest pressed fully against him.
He hugs her for a long, long minute, and she lets her cheek press against the steady drum of his heart. He's warm, and he smells amazing, and he willingly watched a movie with her sister while she slept, and maybe she is too tired to make rational choices right now, because she thinks maybe, it's likely, she might love him a little.
He doesn't go far when he pulls back, his hands lingering on her hips.
“Thank you,” he whispers, and she wants to ask for what, but his lips stop her.
He presses them softly along the curve of her neck, his voice a light caress — “Sweet,” — against the cut of her jaw — “sweet,” — on the flush of her cheek — “sweet,” — and to the very desperate corner of her lips — “heart.”
She might love him a lot.
“Lock the door after me?” He asks quietly; his voice sounds almost as shaky as her knees feel.
She nods. She honestly can't tell if it's to keep them safe or keep him from walking right back in.
“Tell me when you're home safe?” She asks, but it's mostly just to keep him close for another second, because she already knows he will.
He nods, and then the chill of November air invades her space, and her new favorite source of warmth leaves with it as the door closes behind him. True to her word, she locks it behind him, and then presses her back against the door, and waits for her pulse to return to normal before she moves.
Home safe. I'm stupid, but I'm safe.
You're not stupid.
I didn't kiss you.
I could have kissed you???
I could have kissed you and I didn't?
Yes, okay, that may have been stupid.
It was definitely stupid. Dumbest boy alive, over here.
Actually, I was kind of impressed with your restraint. Like once I got over the crushing disappointment.
Oh, absolutely the hardest thing I've ever done.
It was very sexy.
…
Say more about that.
You fell asleep, didn't you?
Extremely cute sleeper, btw
Well, I'll just be over here, alone and very, very stupid, when you wake up.
Also, tell Becca “nerds rule.” She'll know what I mean.
He doesn't hear from Mel the rest of the night, which is fine.
It’s fine. (It is actually fine. He knows she's sleep-deprived from too many nights in a row. But that doesn't mean he doesn't miss her voice in his bed.)
He finally falls asleep around 3AM, and he dreams about kissing her, and kissing her, and kissing her, and not even teenage Frank got hard from thinking about kissing someone, but apparently 32-year-old Frank does, which… whatever. There's nothing wrong with that, he tells himself as he jerks off in the shower the next morning, thinking about her sleepy voice giving him permission, and all the other things he could ask her for.
(She'd probably tell him it was a totally natural bodily reaction, an excellent indicator of sexual health, and somehow, her hypothetical, logical approval gets him off even faster.)
There's a message waiting from her when he's… done… in the shower, but he makes himself get dressed and comb his hair and brush his teeth before he can look at it, which feels completely reasonable.
I haven't slept that long in forever. And I am not a cute sleeper.
Also, Becca says, “jocks drool.” How do you already have an inside joke with my sister?
We bonded. You were sleeping (v v adorably.)
She let you talk during the movie?
I can be incredibly charming, Mel.
Some might say it's one of my sexiest qualities.
Some might say you're fishing for compliments.
Ouch.
But are they compliments if they're the truth?
I don't think that matters. But yes, you are incredibly charming.
You know what, I'll take that. What are the King sisters doing today?
I have about two weeks of laundry and grocery shopping to do. Bec wants to go to Barnes & Noble. You?
Very practical Saturday. I'm continuing my streak of being the dumbest boy alive (I could have kissed you???) because I accidentally promised the kids I'd take them to Sarris today, so it'll just be a whole day of sugar rush and sugar crash on repeat.
Oh… that actually is not your smartest move ever.
Sweetest way anyone has ever called me dumb. You're the best.
Thank you. Have a good day with the kids. Talk later?
Count on it, darlin’.
$30 of high fructose corn syrup and pure sugar (but no gluten, Dr. John) later, he finally wrangles Tanner and Millie into bed at 8. And then again at 8:11. And 9:07. And Tanner at 11:45, but that's more due to a criminally small bladder than anything else.
They've been nonstop all day, but it's been fun. He misses them ridiculously when they're apart, but he'd be lying if he said he didn't relish the quiet after a hectic day of monster trucks and Barbie dolls. Part of him still isn't used to solo parenting, and not having anyone there to turn to and tag out when needed. He's not sure he'll ever be used to it, honestly, but that's a feeling for another day or another therapy session.
He all but falls into bed just after midnight, his body tired and his back achey in that familiar way that comes with hauling a three-year-old around and wrestling with a bony-limbed five-year-old. But he's still wide awake, and when Mel’s name pops up on his screen a little while later, he answers happily.
“We're not doing enough as doctors to stop the sugar addiction epidemic,” he greets her.
“Oh, well, you should get on that,” she laughs. “Was it that bad?”
“It wasn't great, Mel. I questioned all of my past parenting choices.”
Something's missing, he realizes, shifting over onto his side to look at his phone. “Hey, no FaceTime?” He tries not to sound whinier than his three-year-old. He really does. Her laugh tells him he didn't succeed.
“I didn't think you'd want to watch me fold two loads of laundry,” she says.
“Maybe for the first time ever, you have thought wrong, my dear. Let’s see it.”
He hears her laugh lightly, and then a FaceTime request pops up, and her face lights up his room.
“Better?” She asks, and uh. He thinks he makes a noise that sounds like yep.
Yes, better. But also awful.
But also so much better.
Her hair is down again (has he told her he likes that? Has that been clear enough?), damp and wavy at the ends, and he wonders if the lingering peach scent he's been thinking about for the past day is even stronger now.
She's in a tank top, one of those spaghetti strap things, and the left strap is slipping off her shoulder, her glasses are a little crooked, and she looks so good he might combust.
True to her word, as always, there's a mountain of folded laundry behind her and an even bigger unfolded mountain to the side. He watches her hands work as she folds a t-shirt (that same sage green all over her living room, one he's seen on her at work a few times), nimble and quick like she sutures, lines straight and creases sharp.
“Are you just going to watch me fold laundry all night?” Her voice is low, just a tinge distracted, the same tone she takes on when she's concentrating and asks for an instrument for a delicate procedure.
“It's like a zen exercise,” he says, a little transfixed.
“Maybe for you,” she says, glancing up at him. “I don't mind laundry, but I do think we've evolved enough as humans that there should be a better way.”
“You should get on that,” he echoes her words back to her.
“Oh, for sure.”
He watches her fold for another thirty seconds, piles of basic tees and scrub pants and then more colorful tops and jeans, which he assumes are Becca's.
The strap of her top slips down again, and his fingers actually ache from not being able to fix it. Or make it worse, or or or. As she reaches to adjust it, a question comes to him he's never thought to ask her before.
“I don't think I've ever seen you in a scrub top,” he says. And he likes to think he pays attention, at least to her. “Not a fan?”
She pauses folding and turns her gaze on him, shaking her head. “No. The material, even in expensive brands, bugs me.” She places a hand against her neck, delicate fingers drifting lightly in illustration on either side of her collarbone. “My skin is super sensitive here,” she says.
Oh.
The part of him that is a doctor first is interested in a purely clinical way.
“Like, skin allergy sensitive, or…?”
The part of him that is still kicking himself for not kissing her last night, the part of him who hasn't had sex in a year, who can still feel the heat of her body pressed against his in the most innocent way… that part watches her bite at her lower lip and blush the palest petal pink.
“Just… super sensitive,” she repeats, quietly.
“Like… bad sensitive or good sensitive?” He has to know. It literally feels like his life depends on it.
The immediate way she averts her gaze and almost smirks (sexy) tells him everything he needs to know.
“Mellll.” It's a groan more than it's her name, and he has to turn away from the screen to keep from saying something ridiculous, like, can I try to get you off with just my lips there or I think I love you or something somehow worse. When he can finally look at her again, she's not even trying to hide her laughter.
Which, of course, makes her even hotter.
“You're being so, so mean to me,” he says.
She frowns, but there's still a hint of laughter in her voice, so he's not worried. “I am incredibly sweet to you.”
She's folding her laundry again like she hasn't just wrecked him, spaghetti strap hanging off her shoulder, so casually hot it actually hurts.
“Yeah,” he whispers. “No, you really are.”
“I think that we should talk.”
Mel has been practicing the words in her mind all day: between patients, while suturing, unfortunately timing the words to the rhythmic chest compressions of her last trauma patient (that one was how she knew she was obsessing and needed to stop.)
Every time she's seen Frank today, it hasn't been the right time. Either they were working over a sick patient, or Dr. Robby was hovering, or she got pulled away just as their eyes met.
It's been a week since their dinner with Becca, a week since she told him he could kiss her — her brain still isn't quite clear on how those words came tumbling out, but she knows she meant them— and every time he's come near her since, even, ridiculously, at work, she's thought about kissing him.
They're not bad thoughts to have, by any means, but they're distracting, and she's pretty sure she's made a mistake somewhere in the last week. Because instead of kissing, they've just talked about it more. It's fun, exhilarating in a way, to hear the octave change in his voice late at night that means he's about to say something flirtatious, and she can't always quite figure out how to respond, but he never seems to mind.
It's just… it feels like they're in a stalemate. She knows he wants to kiss her (she thinks he'd beg if she asked him to), and she knows she wants to kiss him, but neither of them is doing it.
(When I kiss you… when, he'd said, like it was a factual statement that it was going to happen.)
When she finds him at his locker after handoff, she thinks, finally.
“Hey,” he says quietly, glancing up from where he's zipping his jacket. It's consistently cold enough for jackets in the evenings now, and Mel saw snow in the forecast for next week. It probably won’t happen, but she can hope.
“Hi,” she says, bypassing her locker to stand closer to him. “Can we, um, talk?”
He stops fidgeting with the zipper and looks at her. “Everything okay?”
She nods quickly. “Oh, yeah.”
He squints at her a little, like he's not sure he believes her. “I'm actually late to meet Abby to get the kids, or I'd say we could go take a fire escape break.”
“I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were getting them tonight.”
He sighs. “I wasn't supposed to, but Abby's sick and doesn't want them to catch it, but realistically, they probably already have, and I'll end up sick too, but. Whatever. Anyway, that's where I'm headed.”
“Well, I won't keep you. We can talk later. Tonight?”
“Wouldn't miss it,” he says, leaning in close as he shoulders his backpack. “By the way, you smell absurdly good today,” he whispers, his breath just barely ghosting along the curve of her neck. She shivers, and she can't see it, but she's sure he's smiling as he straightens back up.
“The toddler in South 3 threw his apple juice at me earlier,” she says. “It's probably that.”
He chuckles. “Not the worst thing to have thrown at you in this place. I gotta run,” he says, watching her for a second. “You sure everything is okay?”
“Yeah, yes. Of course. We'll talk later.”
He nods slowly, keeping his eyes on her as he backs away, only turning once he's to the exit.
Mel is almost asleep when he calls, much later that night. She nearly rolls back over and lets herself fall asleep, but she can't bring herself to ignore his name on her screen.
When his face appears on her screen, he looks just as tired as she feels. He's on his side in bed, and the phone must be propped up, because both hands are cushioned under his head on his pillow. He looks cozy and warm and sleepy in the cutest way.
She mirrors his position, setting her phone up against the mushed-up fabric mountain of her comforter. She tucks her hair behind her ear as he watches quietly.
“Hi,” she says finally.
His smile is tired, but it still makes her grin, too. “Hey,” he whispers.
“Everyone okay over there?”
His whole body moves as he shrugs. “Debatable. Abby has strep, and when I was putting Millie down, she said, “daddy, thoat hut,” and then coughed directly in my mouth, so.”
She laughs quietly at his imitation of Millie’s missed r’s, but grimaces at the rest. “Yikes.”
He nods. “I could've been a dick and pushed Abby to keep them, but she was miserable.”
“You wouldn't do that,” she says. “It's good you two can help each other,” she says. “Not all co-parenting relationships are that healthy.”
“Healthy might be a stretch,” he hedges, but she's pretty sure she's close to right.
She watches him shift, his hair falling over his forehead. She wants to drag her fingers along the jut of his eyebrow and move the hair out of his face so she can pinpoint the exact shade of his eyes.
“Sooo,” he drawls out. “You asked if we could talk?”
Her heart races a little, but she nods. He doesn't say anything else, so she braces herself and plows ahead.
“I think that we should stop talking.”
His mouth opens slightly. It looks like he's buffering, like he can't quite get words out.
Oh, wait.
“Wait, sorry. I mean, I think we should stop just talking.”
He squints at her like he's trying to figure out what she means but can't. “Mel, I'm sorry, I'm not following.”
She takes a deep breath. She can do this.
“I'm not explaining it well,” she says. “I tried to plan out what I would say, but nothing sounded right, and sometimes you look at me, and I can't even remember my name, so—”
This isn't going well, and her face feels flushed in a frustrated way, which she isn't used to when it comes to him.
“Hey,” he says quietly. “It's just me. You can tell me anything. Break it down for me like you would a patient consult, if that helps. What's the problem?”
She sighs, calming herself down. She watches him over the phone, his chin squished against the back of his hand. The sleeve of his sweatshirt is frayed, like he's pulled at the threads too often.
“I don't know what we're doing,” she says. It comes out clear and strong, despite how unsure she feels.
Across from her in bed, but not, he nods. “Okay. That's fair,” he whispers. “Can I ask you a question?”
Off her nod, he asks, “when was the last time you didn't know what you were doing? Not at work. Just in general.”
She squints, and her face must scrunch up in that embarrassing way, because he smiles in a way she can only say is fond.
“Been a while, huh?”
She nods, not entirely sure where he's going.
“Mel, for most of the last year… fuck, for the last five years, I have never known what I was doing. Anywhere. About anything, or with anyone. I faked it really, really well, until I couldn't.”
That sounds awful and sad, and it makes her ache for a version of Frank she didn't even know.
His pillow rustles, and he goes out of focus for a second, but then he's back, watching her so intently she almost tries to reach out to touch him.
“But Mel… I know exactly what I'm doing with you.”
She nods, but none of it has answered her question. “Can you, um, fill me in?”
His laugh is long and fond, and she watches his eyes crinkle the whole time.
“I'm, you know… wooing you, or whatever, with my voice, in the dark. Like some fucked up version of Sleepless in Seattle.”
“I… I don't think that's the plot of the movie at all.” Becca would probably know, but the context surrounding the question would be ridiculous, and Mel wouldn't put her through that.
“I don't know, Mel. I'm not Tom Hanks.”
It makes her laugh, but still…
“That isn't a good enough answer, is it?” He asks, his voice, every feature on his face, serious. “I promise I'm not trying to be flippant or glib or anything.”
She nods. “No, I know.”
“I think,” he says slowly, more focused than she's heard him all night, “that you make me feel like I know what I'm doing, and that's no small thing.”
“You make me feel like I don't know what I'm doing,” she says. “That's a big deal to me.”
And it is. She's never had the luxury of not knowing.
When she was a kid, she had to know how to behave and respond in a measured way, because sometimes Becca couldn't, and her parents couldn't handle two tantrums.
She had to know how to keep the peace between her parents, so they'd fight less, because the fighting scared Becca. (It scared Mel, too.) These were skills her friends didn't have, skills her sister would never be expected to know.
She had to know how to be a good student in high school so she could be an even better student in college, and, impossibly, an even better one in med school. (Some might say— and some of her family did — that she didn't have to do this. But she did. She didn't know how not to.)
She had to know, at 22, how to grieve her parents, and how to help Becca grieve, and how to be a caregiver when she was just really learning how to care for herself.
And every day since, she's had to know… everything— finances and bills and meals and plans and backup plans and backup backup plans and hundreds of complex medical procedures and and and.
But Frank.
Frank makes her feel like it's okay not to know what she's doing. He makes her feel a little out of control, in a completely safe way— at work, outside of it, in the middle of the night when his voice is the only thing she wants to hear.
He feels like a safety net she didn't even know she needed.
“I thought being around me relaxed you,” he says, repeating her words from weeks ago. It's not accusatory, and he's laughing like he doesn't know what's going on either.
“You're very confusing for my central nervous system,” she says. It's a joke, but it's the truth.
“Is that scary?” He asks quietly.
“Yes… no. No, because it’s you.”
He bites his lip and just stares. She feels exposed, in a shivery-good way, like his eyes are seeing parts of her that no one else has ever found, that she didn't even know they should look for.
“I know you were probably looking for a more concrete answer,” he says.
“I was,” she admits. “But I mean… we're doing something, right? That's… something. We don't need a specific label right now.”
Really, Mel has never liked labels, which she knows might be surprising. But they've always felt confining, and in general, she thinks people can be more than one thing. This thing with Frank can be more than one thing, and they can figure it out as it goes.
(She's pretty sure she wants it to be everything, in the quiet moments of the night when she's unflinchingly honest with herself.)
“Yeah, Mel. We're doing something,” he says quietly. His voice is heavy and slow, and she wants to drift into it like a warm dream.
This… this is good, she thinks.
“Good,” she smiles.
He nods, his face squished a little bit more against his pillow. “Tell me a bedtime story, Mel King,” he says.
“Like a fairytale?”
“Whatever you want,” he says. “I just wanna listen to your voice.”
She tells him about the first thing she thinks of — the transvenous pacer Abbot walked her through floating the other week on nights (“badass, Dr. King,” Abbot had said, and Frank mumbles in sleepy agreement, “sexy and badass,” when she recounts it), and as her voice drifts off at the end, she watches his eyes close.
She falls asleep to the rhythmic sound of his breathing, the perfect cut of his jaw just barely in frame still.
Tanner officially catches Abby’s strep first.
Millie goes down next, adding an ear infection to the mix because she's her.
Frank holds out for a few days, which he attributes to the germs he's exposed to daily at work, but a strep-sick kid can only cough directly into your face so many times before it's unavoidable.
The kids are on the mend by the time Abby (fully healed and looking more rested than Frank has seen in years) shows up at his door to pick them up. Frank, on the other hand…
“Jesus,” she says, and he knows it's bad because she doesn't bother to mock him with Francis. “You look like shit.”
He rolls his eyes, leaning heavily against the door jamb. “Thanks, patient zero. You look well rested, and like you’ve had time and energy to shower in the last 48 hours.” He ends on a cough, craggy and painful, but doesn't let that stop him from glaring at her.
“I have a post-divorce glow,” she says, shrugging. “Seriously, though. You look rough, and I'm not just being a bitchy ex. You okay?”
He nods. “No worse than the time we both got COVID two days before Tanner’s first birthday. I'll be back to normal soon.”
She manages to look a little guilty, but it doesn't stop the casual, “you were never normal,” she tosses out. “Where are the kids? Why are they so quiet?”
He thinks he tries to look a little guilty, but doesn't really manage it, stepping out of the doorway and gesturing behind him to the living room. The TV is on its fourth (fifth?) Moana repeat of the last two days, and Tanner and Millie are engrossed in bowls of chocolate ice cream.
“It's like 10AM, Frank,” is all Abby says, and honestly, he was expecting worse.
“It gave me the first quiet five minutes I've had since this time yesterday,” he says.
Not that it was really quiet, because he will be hearing Moana songs in his head for the rest of his days, but… it was something. It had given him ten minutes early this morning to whisper a quiet conversation with Mel, her voice drowsy and sleepy after a 5 to 5 shift, laughing throatily as he'd told her, “I think this might be it, Mel, either the strep or five hundred viewings of Moana is gonna take me out.”
Abby gets the kids corralled, their faces wiped clean of ice cream, and twenty minutes later, he's turning Moana off for god-willing the last time ever. He all but falls onto the couch, pulling a Bluey throw blanket over himself and dragging one of Millie’s thousand Squishmallows under his head as a makeshift pillow.
He's out before he can think twice, and it's only the ding of his cell phone an indeterminate amount of time later that wakes him up.
The living room is dark, but he knows it isn't late, because sun is still filtering in through the cracks of the blinds.
Mel’s name is on his phone screen, and he swipes open a text.
Hi! 😊 Hope you're feeling okay. Can you send me your address when you get a chance, please? Nothing creepy, I promise.
Huh. He types out his address, adds you can do creepy things to me Mel King, but doesn't ask any other questions, the fog of sleep lulling him back down quickly.
The last thing he thinks about, his mind whirring in a million directions, all headed toward sleep, is Mel, inexplicably on a beach, the greatest hits of Moana looping through his head.
Someone is knocking on his door.
He has no clue what time it is, but he feels like he's coming out of a deep REM cycle, one of those heavy sleeps where you can't tell if a noise is real or dream-real.
Except it happens again, and it takes him a good 15 seconds to remember texting his address to Mel before passing back out.
He's up and to the door as quickly as he can force himself to move, his back aching from too many hours on the couch and just general shitty-back-syndrome (it's a real medical diagnosis, and he's the most impacted patient.)
Mel is standing on the other side of the door when he opens it, and it's possible that he's still dreaming.
“Oh, boy…” she says, her eyes trailing over his face quickly, clinically, and down to the Bluey blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a toddler-sized cape. She smirks a little, and he knows he's in deep, because he has no idea what time it is, he's reasonably sure it's still Monday, but he's 1000% sure her smirk is the sexiest thing he's seen ever, probably.
He tosses the blanket away and tries to run a hand through his hair subtly, but it's pointless when she's standing three feet away.
“I woke you up,” she says, a silent apology in the words.
“No,” he starts, his voice raspy, throat dry and raw. “Yeah,” he admits. He clears his throat, stepping away from the door. “Sorry, come in.”
She shakes her head. “No, I can't stay. I'm on at 5. I just wanted to bring you this.”
She holds out a Tupperware container, and it warms his hands as he takes it.
“Soup,” she says helpfully. “Chicken noodle, which I know sounds boring, but there's ginger and turmeric, so it’s naturally anti-inflammatory, and has a ton of vegetables, because I am fairly positive you were lying about having five servings last night, and—”
“Mel,” he says quietly, “did you make me soup?”
She nods slowly, gesturing to the container, like yes, see? and oh, fuck, okay, he's obsessed with her.
“You made me soup,” he says again because his brain is still coming back online, and she might be the sweetest person he's ever known.
She just nods again, her ponytail swaying behind her. Her shirt is pale blue today, calming and soft. And yeah, okay, he needs to stop staring.
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
“You're welcome,” she tells him, tilting her head as her eyes travel over his face. “How are you feeling?”
He shrugs. “I think I've slept more today than ever before. What time is it?”
She smiles. “Almost 4.”
He grimaces. “Can you fuck up an already fucked up sleep schedule?”
“I'd guess so, yeah,” she laughs.
“I'm gonna be up all night, and you're going to be busy working? Really doesn't seem fair. I need attention, Mel,” he says, letting a whine into the words so she knows he's joking. (He's serious. He needs attention from her in a way that makes him feel a little delirious, but she doesn't need to know that now.)
“Oh, poor boy,” she whispers, more sarcastic than he's ever heard her, but still, somehow, achingly sweet. Her hand comes up, and then the back of it brushes along his forehead and holds there for a moment. “You don't feel feverish,” she says, instantaneously the best doctor he's ever had.
He feels like he's on fire, but he's glad that isn't translating through his nervous system.
He shakes his head silently, and her palm moves down, fingers tracing his temple and palm turning to cup his cheek gently.
He leans into it easily, and maybe normally he'd be embarrassed for basically nuzzling her hand, but he's already accepted that if Mel King is touching him, he's going to let her, and he's going to ask for more.
Her fingers scratch against his days-old stubble, and he can't stop the noise that pulls from him, something deep and low and essentially primordial slipping from the back of his throat.
“Mel,” he says quietly, “I'm pretty sure if I don't kiss you soon, I'm going to die.”
She bites her lip, her thumb stroking along his cheek.
“Very dramatic today,” she whispers, leaning on her tiptoes to lightly brush her lips over his cheek. “Please don't die.”
The soup sloshes in the Tupperware as he tries to follow her lips back down, but she lowers her hand to his chest, keeping him at bay.
He might actually die.
“I have to go to work,” she says evenly, but her hand hasn't moved from his chest. “Yeah, no, I need to go to work,” she says again, like she's reminding herself. (He doesn't get a sick sense of pride out of that or anything.)
“Do you really need to go to work?” He asks, moving in and shifting his weight so he's closer to her space, leaning against the door jamb.
Her hand clenches in the fabric of his t-shirt.
He thinks he could easily gain the hypothetical upper hand here, lean a little closer, and make the something they're doing so much more.
Mel looks at him intensely, like she's memorizing him, which is nice and weird and overwhelming in turn. “If you get me sick, it'll be even longer before you can properly kiss me,” she says, logical and infuriatingly bright and painfully hot.
“Mel,” he says, reaching out to tug at her ponytail lightly. “Just so we're clear, there won't be anything proper about how I kiss you.”
“Well, that's… good information to have, thank you,” she says, and she sounds pleasantly distracted in a way that is going to keep his mind racing all day.
Her hand is still on his chest.
“Gorgeous?” He whispers, grinning when she meets his eyes, her bottom lip bitten red.
“Mhmm?” She sounds foggy like she does when she gets interrupted pouring over a complex patient chart, and if she's putting that much effort into just barely touching him… oh, she's gonna wreck him.
“Work?” He's never hated the word more, but he knows she hates being late.
She nods, like she's just remembered that's still a thing. “Oh, yeah. I should—”
“You should go before I kiss you,” he says, and he's joking, because he's not going to get her sick, but oh, he's so, so serious.
“You should go before I kiss you,” she says, and then shakes her head. “You live here.”
He laughs low and slow and then leans in to press a kiss to the crown of her head. She smells like peaches, clean soap, and that lingering hospital antiseptic that's so familiar to him that it smells like home.
“You're killing me, Mel King. I'm actively dying, and at this point, it's malpractice for you to be here and not kiss me.”
“I'm going, I'm going,” she says, as if saying it twice would make it happen faster.
But true to her word, she backs up, fingers flattening cotton against his chest again, and then she waves before she turns to head back down the hallway.
He watches her go until she's as far gone as he feels.
Soup's delicious. I feel very anti-inflamed 😘 How are you good at everything?
Yay, good! You should go to sleep, it's midnight. You need to rest.
But you like me best in the middle of the night.
I like you all of the time, and healthy. Sleep. Doctor's orders.
Boss me around more, Dr. King.
😚 Go to sleep.
Her short text exchange with Frank around midnight is the only highlight of her night shift.
Nothing truly horrific happens. They don't even lose a patient, shockingly. But by the time the third patient screams one of them out of an exam room, obscenities and legal action threats flying, Abbot looks like he'd rather be elbow-deep in a penetrating trauma. He says as much in a grumbled aside to her and Samira at central, which makes Samira frown slightly, but not nearly as deeply as she would on a good night.
Mel, who was on the receiving end of one of those tirades, and has been called “babydoll” and “bitch” on a rotating basis by more than one patient, and narrowly avoided being spit on, and was almost clothes-lined by a fleeing psych patient, is pretty sure she agrees with him, actually.
And it's not even a full moon.
To round out the night, they have three patients leave AMA, one person that intentionally makes such a vile mess of a patient bathroom that Whittaker is actually green when he discovers it, and a patient that comes in with both bed bugs and lice that will make Mel phantom-itch for days.
By the time 5AM rolls around, Abbot shoos them all out, demanding that they “go do whatever destresses you enough that you can come back tomorrow, cause I won't do this alone,” and Mel doesn't have to be told twice.
She schedules a good morning, miss you, pick you up later this afternoon 🩷” text to send to Becca at a more reasonable hour, because she loves her sister more than anything, but she's crabby if she gets woken up, and then she hops in a scalding hot shower to wash the gross night off literally and figuratively.
Her body still feels like it's buzzing, adrenaline coursing through her, as she settles into bed a while later, hair damp and her comfiest, most oversized t-shirt on. She feels wired, limbs heavy, and mind racing around one thought: Frank, his stubble prickling her hand, her cheek, as she'd leaned in to brush her lips against his skin.
She'd thought about it all night, but always from a safe distance: thinking about how his jaw had felt under her hand, the sandpaper scruff of his cheek against her lips, the way his lips had quirked in a dangerous smirk as he'd tried to lean in close multiple times. All of that was safe. Well… safe-adjacent. Not work appropriate, but nothing that, in practice, would get her in trouble, not really.
But now, alone with the curtains pulled tight to keep the night in, she thinks about de-stressing, and she finally lets her mind trail off into the darkness, down the path she's been studiously avoiding traveling all night: his quick, smart mouth on her neck, the rasp of his skin against her breasts, searing sensitive skin like flames on a hot grill, his stubble, his tongue, his teeth on her thighs, dragging heat up, up, up.
She drags a hand across her comforter, searching for traction, but instead lands on her phone, and she thinks, wildly, for a second, of calling him. He'd pick up quickly, the line, her voice, her needs, she knows he would.
But they haven't even kissed. Logic says the order is all wrong, and realistically, everything will be easier if she follows a predictable pattern: kiss the boy, fall for the boy, sleep with the boy.
But nothing about Frank Langdon is predictable, and every bit of that makes her want more.
And honestly, she's already fallen for the boy, so predictable patterns be damned.
Maybe, this once, she'll lean into the out-of-control feeling he levels her with, and she'll add an unconventional step to the predictable pattern.
Her fingers are swiping over his name, the phone ringing against her ear before she can stop herself.
He picks up on the third ring, his voice a gruff rasp as he says her name.
God, she hadn't even let herself think about his voice.
“Did I wake you up?” She knows she ordered him to rest, but she selfishly won't care right now.
“Mmm,” he mumbles, not remotely an answer until he continues. “I was having a good dream.”
“I'm sorry, go back to sleep,” she says quickly, turning on herself immediately.
“No, s’all good,” he whispers. He might be half asleep, his voice mumbly and low, but his next words cut through clear as day. “You were in it.”
“I was in your dream?” She clarifies, her heart rate picking up.
“You were the whole damn thing, sweetheart,” he says.
“Tell me about it,” she whispers, hoping he hears the edge to her voice.
“Mel.” He sounds a bit more awake now. “That's probably not a good idea.”
“You want to kiss me, right?” She asks, her hand flexing against her stomach from nerves— no, not nerves, she realizes— anticipation.
“God, Mel, you know I do.” He says it in a ragged whisper, like he's barely holding it together. Good, that's how she feels.
“I thought about you all night,” she admits. “And that's what I was doing when I called, thinking about your mouth and your hands, and… please, Frank, tonight was... I need…”
And it's like he springs into action. Frank, who always needs to be doing something, always needs to be needed. His voice is shaky, but from holding back, not from fear of letting go.
“What do you need, sweetheart? Tell me. Anything.”
“I need…” She can do this. She's a doctor. But there's nothing clinical about how she needs him right now. “I need to get off.”
His groan rumbles over the line, and she wants to feel it pressed against her skin. “God, Mel. Let me help. Want me to talk you through it, or tell you about my dream?” He's fully awake now, voice like he's amped up from a good save and eager to see where else he can do good.
“I get too in my head if it's clinical. Tell me what we were doing in your dream.”
“Fuck,” it's a barely audible whisper, and she imagines it pressed into the heat of her thighs, her hand dragging down her stomach in anticipation.
“We, uh, we were on the fire escape, and I don't know why because historically I'm not a public indecency guy, but…”
“Frank,” she groans. “Can we analyze the dream later?”
“Right, right. Sorry,” he clears his throat. It sounds wrecked, but not from sickness. “We were sitting out there, and you leaned in and kissed me like you'd done it a hundred times, and you were laughing, fuck, Mel, you were all I could hear.”
Maybe she should have expected it, because he's a talker, but she expected less story and more images, the way she's pretty sure most guys' minds work, but this… Mel thrives on details.
“I pulled you into my lap, and I was already so fucking hard just from kissing you, it was insane. And you were grinding against me and making this perfect little noise against my lips—”
Her hand slips down, circling her clit through her panties. “I like that,” she interrupts. “The friction? No one's ever given me the time, but I think I could come just like that.”
“Oh, god. Mel. I'll give you all the time you need. Please tell me this is working, are you…?”
“Mhmm,” she mumbles, her fingers circling faster. “It's working so well.”
“Fuck, babe. You were so wet in the dream I could feel you against my cock, and I swear to god I could smell you. It's like you were alive in all my senses.”
Usually, thinking about sex in terms like wet and various phallic euphemisms doesn't do much for her, but she can hear what it does to him, and that… that works. She circles her clit again, and a noise slips from her lips, high and breathy, and against her ear, Frank's voice is strangled.
“Mel, please, tell me it's okay, tell me I can touch myself listening to you.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she's surprised he's asking for permission, but she remembers his boss me around more, Dr. King, and the almost feral way he'd watched her as she touched his face yesterday, and actually, it makes sense.
“Yes,” she whispers. “Please, don't stop.”
He groans, and his voice is rougher now. “I let you grind against my cock until I swear I almost died, and then you took my hand and slipped it down under your scrubs, and you rode my hand while I slipped a finger inside you.”
She does that now, her palm a rough friction against her clit as she gasps out a moan. It's quiet, but it's pressed right against his ear.
“Yes,” he all but hisses. “Let me hear you, sweetheart. You were loud in my dream, and I just kept kissing you to keep you quiet.”
She slips a finger inside, and it's good, it's always good, but this is the first time in a long time that she knows nothing she does will feel like enough.
“More,” she manages. “I need more.”
“I can't stop thinking about how you said your skin is sensitive, and what it'll look like with stubble burn all over it. Swear I've thought about it every hour since you told me,” he says, sounding a little breathless, a little desperate in a way that feels almost like enough.
“That's what I was thinking about when I called,” she says, a second finger slipping inside, crooking up against her, and she wouldn't stop the moan it pulls from her even if she could. “Your mouth, your stubble, but on my thighs.”
“Jesus, Mel,” he says, grits out a moan that matches hers, and then it's just his ragged breathing in her ear, keeping pace with hers, until, “Fuck, I need to taste you.”
It's too much, suddenly, the thought of his mouth on her, his strong jaw and clever tongue.
“Please,” she says, a heady, buzzy feeling settling low in her body. “Frank, please,” she says, and she knows she's begging, she knows, but…
“Mel, god, I need to see you when you come, please, fuck,” he says, his voice more desperate than she's ever heard it, but honestly, she's not sure she'd remember it right now if she had. “Just your face, I swear, that's all I need,” and then there's a ringing noise in her ear, but it's different from the one that's been building the last couple of minutes.
FaceTime. He wants to see her when she…
She fumbles to accept the call, and maybe if this were two months ago, she'd care what she looked like and how he was seeing her.
But now, all she can focus on is that he's seeing her, talking her through it, watching her most vulnerable moments and sharing his own, and how she still needs more.
He looks as out of control as he makes her feel, his eyes heavy-lidded and impossibly blue, but still sharply focused on her.
“Jesus, look at you,” he says. “I wish you could feel what you're doing to me, Mel.”
She moans, breathy and low, and closes her eyes. Looking at him is too much when she's already imagining his mouth on her, dragging her closer and closer over the edge.
“Are you close, beautiful?”
This went so quickly from not enough to too much, his voice echoing in her room and his eyes so intent on her, she isn't sure which way is up. But she moans again, a disjointed yes falling from her lips—
“So good, Mel, fuck,” he says, and his voice sounds far away (why is he always so far away), “I promise the next time you come, it's gonna be with me between your legs, however you want it—”
And she thinks he rambles out more, more, more filthy promises, and she wants them all to come true, and she's sure they will. But she isn't paying enough attention to know, and her legs are shaking, and her heart is pounding, and she's coming on a quiet, broken moan that might be his name or might be a curse, or might be everything all at once.
From a distance, she hears him curse, and she's opening her eyes in time to watch his close, his bottom lip between his teeth and his breathing jagged, a heavy god, fuck, falling from his lips, and she can't see him come, but she watches the moment he relaxes into it, easily the most calm she's ever seen him.
It's beautiful, honestly.
He's laughing before his eyes even open, and oh, beautiful is right, his gaze finding hers immediately.
“We haven't even fucking kissed, Mel,” he says, something light and airy and honest in the way he says her name now.
“I know,” she laughs. “I did consider that for a minute, just so we're clear.”
Their laughter quiets down, and then he's just watching her. “Literal dream girl,” he whispers, and she thinks it might be the most contradictory phrase ever, but it still makes her skin heat with a blush she's sure is permanent now.
“I knew your cheeks would be pink, after,” he says. She lifts a hand to hold against her cheek, and he grins.
“How do you feel?” She asks, shifting to turn on her side and get more comfortable.
His laughter fills the room again. “I think the word is relaxed, but I'm not too familiar with it.”
She smiles. “Oh, good. But I actually meant… strep-wise.”
Maybe it's silly, asking about that now, but beyond the borderline obsession she'd had with thinking about his hands, his stubble, his mouth all night, she'd mostly just thought about him and how she needed to be physically near him again.
“Good. Better. Cured by a Mel King orgasm, and also soup.”
She rolls her eyes. “Oh,” she laughs, “is that your professional medical opinion?”
“Physician, heal thyself, sweetheart,” he says, his smile blissed out and sillier than she's ever seen.
It looks good on him.
It feels good to be a part of it.
When he returns to work a couple of days later, he tries to play it cool.
Which lasts for about three seconds before he spies a hint of honey-colored hair walking into the lounge as he leaves his locker, and he all but beelines there.
“You're back!” She grins like she didn't know he'd be there, even though he'd spent several borderline embarrassing minutes the night before almost whining about how much he missed her and how he hadn't intubated a patient in days, and would he still remember how. And then making sure she knew she could absolutely come find him if she got any crazy traumas or if she needed him wink wink (she'd only said “absolutely I will,” to one of those requests, not that he's keeping score.)
“I know, I know, you missed me,” he says, laying it on thick. (She'd told him as much last night, too, but she hadn't sounded the least bit embarrassed by it.)
Kindly, she doesn't roll her eyes, but that might only be because Cassie and Dana walk in right at that second.
“Hey, kid,” Dana says, glancing around the room before pulling open the fridge and reaching for the good creamer in the old Hershey’s bottle. She eyes them all in turn, a silent don't tell the nebby ones about my secret stash, and then, “you feeling better?”
“Oh yeah,” he says, grinning. “Feeling good. Had some soup and other home remedies.”
Mel looks like she wants to dig straight through the concrete to get out of this room. The tips of her ears are pink, and Frank, well… Frank finds it ridiculously adorable. (And hot. So endlessly hot. She's going to kill him.)
“Home remedies for strep?” Cassie asks, her expression matching Dana’s incredulous one.
“Plus Cephalexin,” Mel says, and then if possible, turns even more red. “I mean, I assume. That's what any provider would prescribe to someone with a penicillin allergy.”
It's his turn to shoot her an incredulous look because what is she doing, and why does he find it adorable and not concerning?
Dana just eyes them both for a second, a distracted, “yeah, hon, I guess so,” as her work phone rings.
Frank takes the couple of seconds Dana is on the phone to mouth, “Penicillin allergy?” to Mel, grinning at her returned “Home remedies?”
“Trauma on the way in, you guys want on?” Dana asks, surveying the room.
“Absolutely,” Cassie says, tossing an empty Dunkin’ cup in the recycling bin.
“Hell yeah,” Frank says, familiar adrenaline already rushing through him, but he hangs back as Dana and Cassie leave, letting Mel go ahead of him so he can lean down and whisper in her ear as she passes.
“What are you doing?” He asks, singsongy in a way he knows will make her laugh. “Plus Cephalexin,” he mocks, reaching over her head to hold the door open.
“Well, it's true, you have a Penicillin allergy!” She says, laughing up at him.
He can't remember the specific night he told her that, but these last couple of months have been filled with a lifetime of random facts shared in the dark. That she remembers it… well, he's lucky, he knows.
“So smooth, babe,” he whispers, following her out toward the sound of an ambulance siren.
Frank is pretty sure this might be one of the best shifts of his career, but it might just be recency bias and a truly worrying addiction to being in Mel’s personal space that makes him think that.
Right out of the gate, he heimlichs a little boy, not even a patient, who starts choking on a cough drop he stole from his grandmother's purse while she was having her vitals taken. It's not even a big deal, medicine-wise. Anyone off the street could've done the same thing (and everyone should know how, if you ask him), but it makes the grandmother smile, and Mohan and Donnie actually applaud him, so. It's nice, whatever.
Mel and Cassie pull him in on a trauma a little while later, and Mel hands him the ET tube and grins at him across the patient, and oh, right, he does remember how to do this. (He remembers just in time that Cassie is two feet away, too, because he almost says, “thanks, gorgeous” to Mel, and that would be more than slightly annoying to charm and distract his way out of, not that he's under any illusion of being able to charm Cassie.)
One of the Pens defensemen is brought in a while later with a suspected ACL tear, and after explaining to Whittaker who he is, Frank gets him to sign (the back of, he's not an idiot) an AMA form as a keepsake for Tanner (but mostly himself, since Tanner has no clue yet that in Pittsburgh, penguins are more than just animals.)
So anyway, it's a good shift. He's metaphorically kicking ass. And even though he hasn't had a second alone with her, every time Mel looks at him across a gurney or the whole damn department, some filthy part of their recent FaceTime home remedy replays in his mind, and he grins, and she blushes, and it's all really, really excellent.
And then, of course, because it's the job and because he's pretty sure a perfect shift can't exist, shit goes to hell.
He's walking out of North 2, trying to inconspicuously look for Mel, when he hears shouting from chairs and catches that familiar glimpse of blonde hair in the middle of a trio of loud, yelling men.
He's running without a second thought, not towards the action, but just towards Mel.
Donnie and Mateo are already there, and Mel thankfully ducks out and away from under the mess of limbs and shouts as he reaches them. Donnie and Mateo each have a guy calmed down, or at least restrained, so Frank goes for the last one (the biggest one, of fucking course), who looks like he was the instigator.
Frank manages to get a hold of his arm, his voice calm and level. “Hey, buddy, chill,” and it's probably demonstrably true now that the only person Frank has a calming effect on is Mel, because just the sound of his voice seems to set the guy off again. In a tangle of elbows and legs akimbo-slicing, the guy manages to catch Frank right in the cheek with a wicked right elbow, and fuck, ow.
In the highlight reel of the most embarrassing moments in Frank’s life, this will settle well below getting caught diverting drugs and hover pretty close to puking on the hot sorority girl five minutes into hooking up freshman year, so. It's not the worst thing that's ever happened, but it's painful nonetheless.
He stumbles back but doesn't fall, and then Mel’s hand is on his arm, steadying him.
Security is in on it now (fucking finally, he thinks but doesn't say), and Mel is (hotly, truly hotly, but he pushes that thought down too) manhandling him back through chairs and to central.
“Sit down,” she says, guiding him into a chair.
“I'm fine, I'm fine,” he says, a little brisk, but then her warm fingers are on his cheek (ow, fuck), and he takes a second to look at her. She's clinical and calm as she looks him over, but her cheeks are flushed, and her hands are shaking so slightly he's not sure he would notice if she weren't touching him.
“Mel,” he whispers, his fingers finding hers where she's touching him, “I'm okay, I promise.”
She meets his eye, but Robby’s voice cuts through the chaos before she can respond.
“What the hell happened out here?” He asks, stripping off his gloves on the way.
“Three idiots fighting in chairs,” Dana says, rushing by with two phones in her hand. “And I'm not talking about the patients.”
“To be clear, we did not start the fight,” Frank says, but Robby cuts him off.
“I don't wanna hear from you right this second,” he says, and well, not surprising, but it still ticks him off. “Mateo, Donahue, you good? No injuries?”
They both nod, busy corralling the three disruptive patients where they need to be.
Apparently satisfied with that, Robby turns to Mel. “Dr. King, what've we got?”
Mel smiles shakily, a nervous tell that makes Frank's heart sink a little. She hates fighting, and he hates that he's put her in the middle of it, even accidentally.
“Elbow to the left cheek. No open wound, no bleeding, no crepitus, but there's a little swelling and redness.”
“Yeah,” Robby says roughly, leaning down to take a closer look. His fingers aren’t gentle like Mel’s, just efficiently thorough. “That's gonna bruise. I think we're gonna need a CT.”
Frank groans. “I'm pale, I bruise. I don't think that warrants a CT.”
“Right, well, you're not the one who would have to fill out five thousand pages of a workman's comp claim, or worse, if you just walked yourself right into a brain bleed, so we're doing the CT,” Robby says. It's not unkindly, really, but jesus fucking christ.
“Whatever,” he says. “Fine. Radiate the shit outta me.”
Beside him, Mel sighs. She's been standing stock still, just watching him and Robby. “Mel, you okay?” He asks, in a tone of voice he hopes she knows is just for her and actually means, sweetheart, I'm so sorry.
“What? Mel, did you get hurt?” Robby asks, more concern in his voice than Frank has ever (or, maybe, just in the last year) had directed at him.
“No,” she says. “I'm fine. I have quick reflexes. I wasn't in the middle of it for long.”
“Good,” Robby sighs. “You could learn from Dr. King here,” he adds.
“Oh, Dr. King teaches me something every day,” he says, if mostly only because it makes Mel blush a little. It's true, of course, but Robby doesn't need to know how true. Not yet, anyway.
“Mel, you wanna get him set up for a CT? Langdon, come with me for a sec?” Robby asks, but the request to him is much less a question than a demand.
Mel shoots him a quick look, but nods to Robby and turns toward her tablet as Frank stands to follow.
He's pretty sure he knows where this is going, especially when Robby stops near a supply cart and turns to face him.
“Look,” Robby says, “I'm gonna need you to give a urine sample.” He looks as pained to say it as Frank is to hear it, which honestly feels kind of nice.
But still. It ticks him off. Right at this moment, though, he can't tell if he's pissed at Robby for having to facilitate this or himself for having caused it. In his periphery, he can see Mel watching them, and it's her concern that makes Frank even more upset at Robby. Can he really not see how much better Frank's life is now than when he was in active addiction? Is it not written all over his face?
“Robby, for fuck’s sake, I'm not high.”
“You willingly walked into the middle of an escalated, violent incident. Not the smartest thing I've ever seen you do.”
It's on the tip of his tongue to say he didn't impulsively do it. He instinctively did it — maybe partly because he's impulsive, sure, but mostly, honestly, because he saw Mel in danger, and some primitive instinct took over.
(Love, he tells himself. It was love.)
“I ran, actually,” he corrects instead, to twist the knife a little deeper into what was once a healthy mentor relationship. “And for what it's worth, so did Mateo and Donahue.”
“Mateo and Donahue don't warrant the same level of concern when they make impulsive choices.”
“Maybe that's part of the problem here,” he snaps, and fuck. “Fuck, Robby. I didn't— I don't know, maybe I did mean it.”
Robby glances off to the side for a long moment, and Frank feels antsy in a way he hasn't in a long time. Robby turns and digs into a couple of bins—
“They're on the top shelf now,” Frank says quietly. (He'll never admit to Robby that he only knows this because Mel told him late one night, since she actually gets specimen cups for her patients, to take a little stress off the nurses when she can.)
Robby finds the urine specimen cups and presses one not-so-gently into Frank's hand, shaking his head. “Just go piss in the damn cup, Frank.”
He nods. “Yeah, okay.”
Maybe his sponsor was right all those months ago: It's when the days start feeling normal that you have to be the most careful.
Mel tries to keep tabs on Frank after he leaves with Robby and she watches his face shift into something a little haunted and sad, but she loses track shortly after he walks off.
She's pulled back in with a patient, which takes longer than expected. When she finds her way back, he's not at central, so her first thought is that he's just stuck in CT. But a glance at her tablet tells her he must've charmed his way to the front of the line because test complete, results pending greets her when she taps open his chart.
She pulls out her phone to text him then, but Dr. Abbot claps his hands to get everyone's attention for handoff, and she stops. And then he doesn't show up at handoff to night shift either, and Robby pulls her aside after.
“Where's our most annoying patient, Dr. King?”
“Oh, uh,” she glances off toward North 3, where a middle-aged man has been telling her increasingly private details and absurdly implausible stories about the foreign object removal he came in for today. But she hasn't consulted Robby on him… “Oh, you mean Fr— Dr. Langdon,” she says.
Robby gives her a look. Mel has gotten better at reading facial expressions, but Robby still sometimes stumps her. It's… perplexed, maybe, but in a fond way. “Yeah, Mel. I took over his patients, but I figured he'd still lurk around here. Have you seen him?”
“Actually, no, not since you…” she wants to say dragged him off, but that doesn't sound quite right.
“Well, his CT just came back clear, which I'm sure he'll have some witty retort to. Thought the news might be better received coming from you.”
“Oh, good, yes. I can do that,” she says, smiling. The clinician in her wasn't concerned, but that doesn't mean she isn't relieved.
“Good. Also, you can tell him… everything else came back good too.”
She nods. “I knew it would,” she says. And maybe that's too telling; maybe she sounds too familiar with the situation, but she doesn't really care at the moment.
“Thank you, Dr. King,” he says, and it sounds like he means it and that it might be about more than delivering test results.
“Of course,” she says. She isn't going to elaborate— caring about Frank Langdon is the easiest thing she does.
Robby nods and walks away, and Mel glances around. She really hasn't seen Frank at all, which is weird. Even when they aren't on the same cases, he's a presence in the department, and they always seem to find each other across a room.
She reaches for her phone, planning to text him and check in, but there's already a text from him waiting. She must not have heard it during shift handoff because it hasn't been waiting long. It's simple, not even a word.
🦆🦆🦆
She grins, heads to her locker, grabs her bag, and then heads for the elevator. She says a quiet “hello, angry ducks” as she passes down the hallway, and then she pushes open the fire escape door.
Frank's sitting, knees bent, scrolling through his phone, but he smiles when she steps out.
“The ducks summoned me?” She asks, grinning back at him.
“Oh yeah,” he says, reaching up to interlace their fingers together before she's even sitting down. His grip is firm, and she steadies herself against it as she sits. “The ducks missed you.”
It's nice, having someone to share those tiny physical touches with. It's felt forced and unnecessary with others, but with Frank, it feels effortless. And when so many other things in her life take so much effort, it's a nice change of pace.
“Those ducks look like they yearn for human flesh,” she says. “I doubt they missed me.”
He laughs, head thrown back. “True. Maybe just me, then.”
She nods. It's cold out, and she rubs her hands together to warm them before reaching out to turn his cheek toward her more so she can check the swelling. It's swollen, but not as bad as it could be. Her fingers brush against his cheek. “Does it hurt?”
He shakes his head silently, watching her.
“Your CT came back clean, so no worries there,” she says. “And Robby said everything else was good, too.”
She emphasizes the same words that Robby had, and watches the way it makes Frank take a deep breath.
“Apparently,” he sighs, “my impulsivity is cause for concern still.”
She frowns. “I guess he just has to be… thorough,” she says carefully. She doesn't want it to seem like she’s taking Robby’s side, but she knows that deep down, Frank understands where Robby’s coming from. “And he did seem concerned, for what it's worth.”
Frank nods. “I'm just not sure if his concern is for me, or the liability that comes along with me,” he says. He sounds defeated, and she hates it. She's not sure what to say to fix that, so she focuses on what she knows is true.
“My concern is only for you, if that helps,” she says.
“Sweetheart, I don't think you know how much that helps,” he says quietly. He turns his head for a moment, looking out over the view, before meeting her eyes again. “You don't need to be concerned right now, for what it's worth. I'm doing the work.”
She nods. She knows he is.
They don't talk about it all the time, which she's always privately thought was an effort to make him feel as much like his old self as possible. She's not sure it works.
Still, there's always an undercurrent there— the Monday mornings, Thursday nights, Saturday mornings she doesn't hear from him, when she knows he's at NA meetings, the nine-month chip he’s fiddled with on FaceTime late at night over the last couple months that they've never really discussed, how it was quietly replaced with a sturdier, bronze one-year medallion a few weeks back.
“I know you are,” she says.
She really means, I know you.
“I can't say you won't need to be concerned in two days or six months or six years,” he says, but it doesn't sound ominous. The words just sound honest, like they're part of him, and that's okay.
She likes every part of him.
“Well, then I'll be concerned in two days or six months or six years, if I need to be.” She's not unaware of the reality of the situation. But she also knows that concern might be needed for any number of reasons, at any time, for either of them, regardless of what's happened in the past.
He's looking at her— at her lips, actually — in a way she’s familiar with, but she's never wanted the look from anyone more than she does him.
He's going to kiss her.
She'd seen the look from him before. In the dark on her couch, over FaceTime, in his doorway when she's pretty sure they were both desperate for it.
But he doesn't kiss her.
Instead, he says, “you know, the, uh, funny thing is? I didn't impulsively run into that fight. I'm not an idiot. Donnie is a big guy, and Mateo MMA fights for fun, so they didn't need me.”
(She makes a mental note to talk about that with Mateo, because that's concerning, both for how detrimental concussions can be, and for concern for his very nice smile.)
“Oh?” She asks, watching his face carefully. He's looking at her with that same desperate I need to kiss you look, but his eyes won't leave hers now.
“They didn't need me,” he repeats, and this time, his eyes fall on her lips again. “But I saw you in the middle... and I thought you might need me.”
Oh.
Oh, okay.
She bites at her bottom lip slowly. He's watching her so, so intently.
“I do need you,” she says simply, and then, like she's done it a hundred times before, she leans forward in the darkness and brushes her lips against his, softly, slowly, nothing tentative about it.
When she pulls back a few moments later, he doesn't let her go far, his hand coming up to cup her jaw.
“Finally, Mel King,” he murmurs. His thumb brushes along her jaw, his fingers graze her neck, and they're both laughing into another kiss.
It's a little desperate, and a lot perfect, and his tongue slips along hers as he laughs again. She thinks she always knew he'd be the type to laugh into a kiss, long before she knew she'd get to taste the sound of it.
When he finally pulls back — because they're both breathless, she's pretty sure — his thumb traces the corner of her smile. His eyes are closing to lean in again, but she stops him with a hand in the neck of his scrub top, knuckles slipping along his collarbone.
“Just so we're clear, you know the fire escape dream is never happening, right?”
He bites his lip. His mouth is so close to hers that she feels it. She expects the argument before it even leaves his lips.
“Not even open for a healthy, scientific debate about the possibility? I didn't even get to tell you the whole dream,” he whispers.
She raises an eyebrow. There was more of the dream?
“See? I've intrigued you with my scientific mind,” he says.
Her fingers clench in his scrub top again. “Maybe,” she concedes. “Maybe you've intrigued me. But It's important to me that you know it's not happening.” She's smiling, though.
He grins. “Don't worry, babe. I don't want anyone but me to see you like that anyway.”
“Thank you,” she says. “Okay, you can kiss me now.”
So he leans toward her in the darkness, and he does just that.
Everything with Mel is different after that. Frank’s grown kind of wary of different in the last year, but this…
This is good.
It turns out, really, that he doesn't have to tone down how good she makes him feel anymore because, apparently, he makes her feel the same damn way. (It's a wild, powerful feeling, and he might be addicted, which isn't a word he uses lightly anymore.)
He wanted to take her home about five seconds into their first kiss, mumbled out a raspy, I need you, Mel, between the second and third, and normally he'd be embarrassed at being so fucking transparent so soon, but it doesn't feel too soon at all.
(He didn't get to take her home, but he'd lobbied hard for it: brushed his lips along her neck before they'd finally left the fire escape, ran his hand along her hip in the freight elevator (his “wanna make out in the freight elevator?” had gotten a no, but he saw her think about it for a few seconds), and then pressed her up against her car, their bodies hidden by her open door, and dragged his teeth slooowly along her neck, his body flush against hers. It was dangerous— their coworkers could walk by at any time, but mostly just because the low, throaty noise Mel made when his teeth reached her collarbone made him want to die.)
The thing is, he needs her. Desperately. He feels like a man drowning when he isn't touching her, and like he's only breaching the surface when he is touching her. It's never, ever, enough.
But he's pretty sure it's been that way all along, even before anything physical or hypothetically physical had started.
Because it's more than just the press of her body against his and the breathy moans he's pulled from her. He needs her in a way that feels permanent, that makes him want to do crazy things, as evidenced by the conversation they're having now, where he's probably unwisely cornered her at her locker right after handoff.
“It's been weeks since I got to touch you, Mel,” he whispers, not even trying to keep the whine out of his voice.
“It's been four days,” she corrects him.
She's right, of course. They'd kissed, and then he'd had the kids for a couple of nights, and then she and Becca had plans, and really, he's never had to plan a sex life before. He kind of thought it would be more clandestine and hot and less torturous.
“Feels like four months,” he counters, sticking out his lower lip in a pout, which he knows is absolutely ridiculous. It's probably more dangerous to pout like a child in the workplace than it is to flirt like he is— he'd never hear the end of it if someone saw him.
“Poor baby,” she laughs, not incredibly unkindly, at him.
“Let me take you out, Mel,” he says quietly, the whine still licking the edges. He tugs at the strap of her backpack as she pulls it on. “And then bring you back home.”
“I would like both of those things,” she says. She glances away for a moment, like she's giving it thought. “How's tomorrow after shift?”
“Yes, perfect,” he says immediately.
She laughs. “You don't have the kids or a meeting or anything?”
“No. Nope, all yours.”
Her eyes light up a little. It's mesmerizing. “Good. Becca wants to stay late for game night anyway, she'll be happy.”
“Good,” he echos, and then he just stands there and stares at her like a starving man, because he is. But for the record, he needs it known that she stares right back.
“Five minutes on the fire escape, Mel,” he basically pleads. “That's all I need.” He's aware he's never sounded more desperate in his life, but oh fucking well.
She bites her lip. “I promised Becca we'd be home in time for Dancing With the Stars,” she says.
“Ten minutes in the parking garage,” he says, desperately.
“That's not how bargaining, or time, works,” she laughs. “Tomorrow, I promise.”
He nods, smiling so she knows they're good. He finally gives up the good fight and opens his locker, but stands still when he feels her presence at his shoulder.
She leans up on her tiptoes so she can whisper in his ear. “Of course, my apartment doesn't have a fire escape. But I do have a bed.” Her breath is warm against the back of his neck.
“Jesus, Mel,” he groans, his forehead hanging forward to lean against the cool metal of the locker bay. “You realize I'm about to die, right?”
“Mhm,” she acknowledges. “Please don't.”
He starts to say something, anything, to convince her to stay, but by the time he picks his head up, she's halfway down the hallway.
“What, not even gonna let me walk you to your car?” He calls, not even caring if anyone hears, because that's a totally platonic thing coworkers do when they're in love, or something.
She looks over her shoulder. “Oh, I'm not falling for that,” she laughs. “I'll call you later.”
He mock-salutes her and watches her leave before turning back to his locker. He jumps a little, realizing Dana is standing a few feet away, punching in her combination.
“Uh, about a patient,” he says, which really is the most likely, but unbelievable, explanation.
“Right,” she says, eying him closely. “Listen, kid. I try not to be nebby around here; I've got bigger things to worry about. But I like that one. I need you to be nice to her.”
He sputters a little, running a hand through his hair. Have they been that obvious? Has he been that obvious?
He must look stricken, because she laughs. It's not rude, but it's not as kind as Mel had laughed at him. “Langdon,” she says, leaning toward him a little, “I've got friends all over this hospital. Including on the sixth floor.”
He pales a little, he's pretty sure. But what does it matter? For all anyone knows, they're friends who hang out on a fire escape and talk, which is exactly all they've been doing, until four days ago. And Dana won't gossip, he knows.
“I am nice to her,” he says quietly. Honestly, he's not sure he's ever been nicer to anyone.
She nods. “Good.” She gathers her stuff as he watches and then turns to head out.
“If it matters, she's nice to me too,” he tells her back.
“That is actually less important to me, but I'm still glad to hear it.” She smiles over her shoulder at him, though, and pats him on the arm as she leaves.
“Tough crowd today,” he mutters, closing his locker and heading toward the parking garage.
There's a text from Mel waiting when he gets out of the shower a little while later.
I hate Dancing With the Stars.
I promise I hate it more.
But you're a good sister. I don't hate that.
Also. Not to freak you out. But Dana knows something is going on… with us. I didn't tell her, for the record. She just knows things, it's eerie.
This may be a conversation they should have in person, and there are definitely more details he'll share later. But this feels like broaching the subject in a safer way. For all he knows about Mel and how much he's thought about what this thing between them has turned into (love, he tells himself again, it's love), they haven't discussed how to handle the whole work aspect of it, which is really a pretty big deal.
Maybe it's too soon, who knows. For as much work drama as he's caused and worked through, none of it has ever been romantic. He feels very out of his depth, and entirely out of his league, with Mel.
Oh.
I don't think that freaks me out. Does that freak you out?
No. We’ll figure out what we're comfortable with everyone knowing eventually, right?
But she told me to be nice to you, like in a really scary way.
Right 🙂
She is the most intimidating person at work, actually. (Dr. Abbot is still the most handsome.)
Every woman I know is being so mean to me today.
Gonna go call the kids and say goodnight. Millie will probably be mean to me, too.
🩵 (I was lying about Dr. Abbot.)
I'm not convinced you were. But you're not wrong about Dana.
“Hey, Mel?” Dana’s voice brings her out of a daze. Officially, she'd been staring at the chart for her pneumonia patient in South 14, but really, she'd been thinking about whether or not she'd have time to shower, dry her hair, and change her sheets after work before going out with Frank. And then that had made her wonder if changing her sheets was presumptuous, but she'd quickly bypassed that. She doesn't usually let her mind wander so much at work, but she'll admit she's been distracted today.
“Oh! Yes? Sorry!” She says, turning to face Dana.
“I think Langdon is trying to get your attention,” she says, gesturing over to where Frank is leaning against a workstation, holding up a post-it that she can barely make out says “10”.
She shakes her head at him and laughs, watching him head toward a patient room. He'd started the morning, the world still dark outside, by texting her a simple 14 hours, and it had taken her sleepy-limbed body a long thirty seconds to realize he was counting down to their date. It's silly, and it's adorable, and, she imagines, born of a little desperation.
They've mostly kept their distance today, and she's not sure if they're playing it cool to keep any future rumors from spreading (if so, his hot pink Post-it is questionable at best) or because every time they're within ten feet of each other, it feels like a gravitational pull is trying to fuse them together. She knows that isn't how gravity works at all, so they can't blame anyone but themselves.
Dana watches her closely for a moment.
“What's that about?” She asks gently, in that way she has that makes difficult questions seem like they flow right off her tongue.
Mel smiles. “Oh, uh. Just some lab results for a patient.”
She feels bad lying, but is it really a lie if Dana clearly knows it's a lie? That feels more like a fib, which Mel can accept in small doses.
“Real antiquated charting method he's got going on,” she says, huffing out a laugh.
It's not mean or judgy or even really prying, which is what makes Mel quietly say, “he is very, very nice to me. I'm not sure I’m used to anyone being as nice as he is.”
Dana nods and perches on the desk next to her keyboard, leaning in a little so no one overhears, which Mel appreciates.
“You know, when he first started here, he was green. I mean, he was still cocky as hell, rushing around behind Robby, trying to get all the cool procedures. He was kinda like Santos, which, maybe that's why they— who knows, anyway, it was the height of COVID, and then Abby got pregnant, and then suddenly he was married and had a kid in the middle of a pandemic. It was such a mess here back then. It was like multiple MCIs every damn day. He never really seemed to get a minute to sit down and take a deep breath and take it all in; it just kinda happened around him, and I guess he dealt how he thought he had to.”
Mel nods. She knows this, or at least, the basic facts and timeline.
“Anyway,” she says, watching Mel carefully. “I'm not sure he even knew how to take a deep breath before you showed up.”
“Oh, um…” Mel knows she doesn't always have a perfect response ready in every social situation, but she's pretty sure she could sit for an hour and never think of the correct response to this.
“Thank you for looking out for him,” she settles on, because she's pretty sure that's what Dana’s been doing, and why she's telling Mel this.
“Yeah, you too, kid,” she says quietly, her hand firm on Mel's shoulder for a moment.
Mel stands as Dana walks away, completely giving up on attempting to read her patient’s chart. Frank is coming out of his patient’s room, and his eyes find her immediately. She's not sure what her face is doing, but his brow furrows a little, and when she heads toward the staff lounge, he follows her at a safe distance.
Luckily, the room is empty and dark when she walks in. She stops walking when she gets to the sink, turning back towards the door. Frank's footsteps are quiet, his voice even more so, as he closes the door softly behind him a few moments later.
“Hey, you okay?”
She nods, but her body feels electrified, and she can't stop turning Dana’s words over.
I'm not sure he even knew how to take a deep breath before you showed up.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yes,” and then she's stepping forward and standing on her tiptoes to press her lips against his, her hands coming up to cup his face. It's not rough, but it's not gentle. His fingers find her hips, palms warm through the fabric of her scrubs, and she deepens the kiss for just a moment, slowing it down and savoring it before stepping back.
“Just missed you,” she says simply, even though there's nothing simple about the feeling twisting in her gut as she looks at him.
“Uh, ditto,” he says, and she knows she sent him reeling a little, maybe in an unfair way, when there's still so much time left in their shift.
“Okay, good,” she says, nodding and striding confidently out of the room before she lets herself fall back into him.
(He holds up 9 fingers, probably not as stealthily as he thinks he does, a little while later, as he's gloving up beside her for a trauma.
They're both in a patient room a while later, and he smiles at her as he tells the patient “it probably won't be 8 hours for your lab results to come back, but Dr. King will keep you updated.” And he mouths 7 hours across central at her, and then texts her 6 hours!!!!!! (that's probably too many exclamation points to live up to) when he steps out for a cigarette.
5 comes in the form of a high five shortly after they get ROSC on a trauma patient, and if anyone notices how long he keeps her hand in his after, well, they worked really hard on the guy, so.
4 is whispered across a workstation as he consults on a patient (totally incidental timing, honestly), and 3 is a shared look as he counts down as they transfer a patient from an ambulance gurney.
2 is two fingers lightly tapping the back of her hand, lazy like he doesn't even realize he's doing it, as he stands next to her as they're writing discharge orders for a few patients.
1 comes in the form of playfully shushing her, a single finger to his lips, as she starts to say something just as Robby starts handoff.
“Hi, everything okay?” she greets him later that night, her voice echoing a little like he might be on speaker.
They'd said 8:15, but it's just now 8, and he's been sitting outside her apartment for a few minutes already. Sue him; he's excited.
“Perfect,” he says. “Come outside.”
“I'm still about five minutes away from being ready,” she says, and he can hear her moving around. For as many metaphorical nights as he's spent with her, he knows nothing about her getting-ready routine.
“It's okay,” he says. “We can come back in; just toss your jacket on and come outside. I need to show you something.”
“I feel like this is how some human trafficking cases start,” she says, but he listens to the rustle of her jacket as she zips it, and then, from where he's leaning against his passenger side door, he watches her front door open.
“You are incredibly trusting, Mel King,” he calls, ending the call and pocketing his phone as she steps out. “I could have horrible intentions, just standing outside your apartment like this.”
“I think I could handle you,” she says, flirty and funny and relaxed in that way he loves that she is over the phone at night. She finally steps out from under the covered walkway and immediately grins.
Oh, it's a fucking beautiful sight to see.
“Is it—” she starts, holding her hand out in quiet joy.
“Snowing,” he finishes. “It started on the way over. First snowfall of the year.”
“My favorite.” It's too light to stick, but from a few feet away, he can see snowflakes already settling in her hair.
“I know,” he says quietly, watching her take it all in.
“You know?” She asks, blinking against the onslaught of flakes.
“You told me. Things that make you happy: the first snowball, Becca, a hot shower— also one of my favorite things, just throwing that out there— helping patients, cafeteria pizza on a fire escape,” he rattles off, fading off at the end because he knew, even back then, she didn't mean the pizza. Couldn't forget if he tried.
“You,” she says, closing the distance between them, her smile the biggest he's ever seen. “You make me so happy, Frank.”
I think I felt comfortable around you the second we met, Frank.
I think being around you relaxes me.
I do need you.
You make me so happy, Frank.
He doesn't have words to match what she means to him, because he's afraid right now, if he opens his mouth, some insane tangled ramble of emotions will tumble out, like I love you how do you feel about stepkids wanna get married did you know you've changed my life remember that thing you said about six years from now, what about sixty, so instead, he just moves forward and cups her cheeks, hands cold on snow-dusted skin, and kisses her. And he doesn't say the words, not in any spoken language, but he swallows her quick moan like it's a response.
“You're shivering,” he says, when he finally pulls back, letting his hands fall to her arms to rub briskly, warming her up.
“So are you,” she says, but he knows it's not from the cold. She reaches up to brush snow out of his hair, her fingers so gentle. (He lets the flakes stay in her hair because it's adorable.) “Come on.”
Her apartment is warm, and he shrugs out of his jacket and lays it over the armchair in the corner, watching her step out of fuzzy, pink boots, smiling when he catches her eye.
“They're Becca’s,” she explains, which doesn't surprise him. “Thought you might be having some kind of emergency, and they were the easiest to slip on.”
She's teasing, but she's not wrong. “The emergency was I needed to see you,” he shrugs.
She just smiles and shakes her head, fond and exasperated— absolutely looks he recognizes.
“You can sit,” she says, gesturing to the couch. “I just have to put on my warmer jacket and find real shoes.”
“Can I snoop instead?” He asks, already leaning over to look at a framed photo of Mel and Becca, their faces lit with laughter.
“I don't think you're supposed to ask permission to snoop,” she laughs lightly. “But yes, you can.”
This time, instead of focusing on the photos on her bookshelves, he eyes the neat rows of books. There are a few old textbooks, and he wants to flip through the pages and see if Mel is a highlighter or margin-note jotter, but what catches his interest is the shelf full of brightly colored covers, with titles that sound much more romantic than educational.
He chuckles, thumbing one out and looking at the back cover. “Melissa King,” he says in mock-scandal, “is this book porn?”
The tips of her ears are pink as she turns to him. “They're contemporary romance. Sometimes a girl needs some escape,” she says. “Some are… educational in their own ways.”
He nods very seriously, sliding the book back where it goes. “Well, I'm all about the pursuit of education,” he starts, but any additional words fade out as he turns back to her.
She's unzipping her jacket slowly, and honestly, he hadn't paid attention to her outfit until now. With the jacket unzipped, he knows now it's a jumpsuit, black and basic and soft-looking. And probably impractical for the cold, honestly, because the top slips to a low v right between her breasts. Her hair is down and wavy like she'd just brushed out her braid from earlier in the day.
He clears his throat, and she meets his eyes. He swallows again before forcing words out. “Good lord, you look incredible.”
She blushes again, but this time, he gets to learn it extends down her neck and across her chest, and oh, there's no way she didn't plan the outfit with the intention to wreck him or, at the very least, drive him to complete distraction for the rest of his days.
“You know, um,” she whispers, but it's loud in the quiet room — or maybe that's just the basebeat of his heart — “the roads are at their most dangerous right when it starts to snow.”
He nods. “Historically a busy time for trauma centers,” he adds. He takes a step closer to her, watching her mirror him.
“I like our coworkers. I wouldn't want to make them even busier. Plus the whole… danger thing.” She sounds a little breathless, and yeah, same.
“Definitely not,” he confirms. “And I don't actually have my snow tires on yet.”
“Oh, that's actually dangerous. You should make an appoint—” Off what he's sure is his pleading look, she pauses. “We should just skip dinner.”
“Thank fucking god,” he mumbles, crossing the room toward her in two quick strides. He brushes her hair behind her ears when he reaches her, his thumbs caressing her jaw. He lifts her head so she’s looking up at him, and they've kissed before, obviously, but never with the certainty of what's coming next.
It feels like coming up for air when their lips meet now.
He bites at her bottom lip almost immediately, mumbling a sorry along with a slip of his tongue, and she's making a tiny noise of acknowledgment, maybe just a moan, deep in the base of her throat. And then her hands are on his chest, walking him back towards the couch.
When his shins hit the back of the couch, he tries to tumble back onto it gracefully, but they still end up laughing into each other's mouths as he pulls her in by the hips, her knees falling to either side of his thighs as she straddles him.
He watches her settling in, heavy-lidded and loose-limbed, dragging his hands from her hips and up her arms to push her jacket the rest of the way off. She moves slightly to throw it to the side, and then he's pulling her back in, fingers spanning her waist.
“Fucking perfect,” he mumbles, more just a thought slipping out than intentional words, as his lips find her cheek and her jaw and then trail along her neck. Her fingers drag up along his neck and into his hair, and he groans against the rhythmic beat of her pulse.
She tugs lightly, palm against his scalp and fingers dragging through the strands, and he bites lower, at the just-visible edge of her collarbone. The noise she lets out is half gasp, half cry, her blunt nails scratching against his scalp now.
She wasn't exaggerating that night on the phone, he realizes, when she'd fluttered her hand across her neck, fingers brushing her collarbone, and told him her skin was sensitive.
“There?” He rasps out, pressing his teeth against the same spot again and looking up at her. She nods, hair brushing his cheek as her head moves.
“Here?” He whispers, a couple of inches to the left, his mouth slicking over her skin. He feels the sway of her body as she nods again, one of her hands dropping to scratch along his shoulders. He's all but anchored to her, mouth suctioned to her skin, and he'll gladly drown in her if she'll let him.
He moves again, pressing the fabric out of the way and mouthing over her heartbeat, lips lingering as he meets her gaze.
“Here?” He asks, drawing his tongue in the tiniest shape of a heart over her skin, sucking gently when she nods.
There's a low v in the back of the jumpsuit, too, he discovers when his hand slips around in search of a zipper, palm brushing smooth bare skin.
He lets his palms drag along her sides, no catch of metal there either, and when he finally can't stand it a second longer, he drags his mouth from her skin and pulls back fractionally, his fingers slipping under the fabric of her sleeves. The disappointed little noise she makes is both adorable and unimaginably sexy.
“Babe?” He whispers, fingers playing along the seams.
“Mhmm?”
“Does the top just slide down?”
She nods. Oh, okay, he's gonna get to help her shimmy it down over her hips at some point, god. She untangles her hands out of his hair so he can slip the sleeves over her shoulders, shrugging out of them and letting the fabric pool at her waist. He wants her fully naked now, but there's something unbearably hot about a half-undone, not perfectly put-together Mel King in his lap, so he stays the course.
He takes a slow, deep breath. Her bra is nude, practical in all the best Mel ways, but overlayed with just enough lace to drive him even crazier than he fears she's already made him.
He looks up as her body moves, and he watches her take off her glasses, leaning to the left to slide them onto the side table. His hands bracket her waist as she moves and straightens back up, not letting her get too far away.
“So many new things, I don't know what to look at first,” he mumbles ridiculously, but honestly, he's more than a little overwhelmed.
“Oh, I think you'll manage,” she says, pressing forward to kiss him.
And then she moves, her breasts pressing against him, and he kisses her back insatiably, swallowing a moan as she shifts to get closer.
Her hips move as she does it, warm heat through the cottony-soft material of her jumpsuit, and he can't stop (he doesn't try) the small thrust he presses up against her.
Her mouth stutters against his, slipping across his cheek as she makes a breathy little noise. Her words from all those weeks come back to him, her voice needy over the phone line.
I think I could come just like that.
And god fucking damnit, her body already moving against him, he wants to find out.
He drags his hands up and down her waist, bare now, warm hands on her smooth skin, and pulls back so he can look at her.
He meets her eyes — she looks more dazed than he's ever seen her, and she's gorgeous — letting his hands fall to her hips. Slowly, he pulls her down against his already painfully hard cock, thrusting up as he does it, and he watches her face, how her mouth falls into a perfect little circle as she moans, how her eyes close for the briefest second.
He does it again, a little more pronounced this time, leaning forward to press his lips to her neck at the same time.
“Want you to come just like this,” he whispers, lips tasting her quickening pulse. “Think you can?” His breath ghosts along her skin, and her answering “mhmm” is more an exhale of breath than an actual noise.
He grinds her down again, watching her lips, her breasts, the flush of her neck as he does, her hands scrambling for purchase in the fabric of his sweater.
And suddenly, she's not close enough. He holds a hand to her hip as she grinds, so she won't stop as he moves, and reaches his other one back, pulling his sweater up and off by the back of the neck.
He leans back into her, pressing his hips up, up, up as she grinds down, and her fingers twist in the fabric of his black undershirt now. It already feels frantic in a way he's never felt fully clothed.
“This too, please,” she whispers, her fingers at the hem of the shirt.
“So polite, gorgeous,” he's pretty sure he slurs, her hands warm on his stomach as she pushes the material up. When it reaches his armpits, he drags it the rest of the way off, tossing it to the side. Her hands are immediately on him, nails dragging through his chest hair.
“Oh. You really are hirsutely blessed,” she whispers, and the laugh that comes out of him is probably the most joyful noise he’s let out in years.
He watches her lean down, and then her warm lips are moving against his chest, tongue against his collarbone, teeth to the flat of a nipple. She pauses between each action like she's cataloging his reactions, but her hips don't stop the whole time.
It’s fucking amazing torture.
“God, you're fucking perfect,” he tells her, leaning back to watch the blush spread across her skin. This time, he lets himself taste the heat of it, holding her steady as he drops his head to mouth over the lace of her bra, where the blush has seeped under.
When she moans, he pushes the cup down and presses his mouth to her nipple, fingers flexing hard into her hip as she moves against him.
He presses his palm against the band of her bra, fingers dragging over the hooks.
“Sweetheart, can I?” He's not sure if he needs to ask or if she can even intelligibly answer at this point, but she nods all the same. He flicks the hooks undone (he'd never say this aloud, but he's relieved it still feels effortless— his hands are a little unsteady from need, and it's been a while since he got to take a bra off, which is… embarrassing, but makes this even impossibly hotter.)
It falls down her arms, and as she pulls back to lose it, his mouth follows and finds her neck, tongue, and teeth dancing along her skin. Her hands are on his shoulders, in his hair, pressing him against the back of the couch and leaning in, nipples dragging against coarse hair.
He's not sure whose reaction is louder— her broken moan or his jumbled curse— but he knows that's when the air in the room changes, shifting into something more desperate than he's ever felt.
He thinks he could actually come like this, which shouldn't surprise him because it's Mel, and it’s been a long time, but he really started this thinking it would only work for her, driven by some insane need to watch her fall apart.
Her hands find the back of his head again, palms flat, fingers tugging, and she pulls his face into the heat of her chest, gasping out a moan when his lips find her neck again. His teeth find purchase, biting gently against the ridge of her collarbone, stubble shifting against her as she holds his head there.
Her hips are grinding erratically now, and he swears to god he can feel wet heat through denim and cotton. He wants to reach down and check, press his palm against her, and maybe undo his jeans, release a tiny bit of tension. But her fingers pull at his hair again (it fucking hurts, so, of course, he loves it), and instead of pressing down and grinding this time, she spreads her knees a little wider and drags heat along the thick line of his cock, sliding a little instead of grinding, and oh, fuck, okay.
She does it again, and he thrusts up against her. It takes them a second to get in sync, but every nerve ending in his body lights when they do. Every thrust feels like one millimeter closer to being inside her, the material of her jumpsuit so stretchy he can basically feel the outline of his cock pressing into her.
He licks a path up her neck, mouthing at her earlobe. He feels out of his mind. “You feel so fucking good; you're gonna make me come like this too,” he whispers, voice a little incredulous, speech a little rapid. And then her lips are on his, tongue finding his, and it's like the praise redoubles her efforts, her need, because there's no other way to describe what they're doing now other than clothed sex, their breathing shallow as she rides him.
She wrenches her mouth from his, and he misses her taste already. It's a ridiculous thought since he's never letting her more than a foot away from him for the rest of time. Her elbows rest on his shoulders, palms on the back of his head, and he hears her gasping breaths against his hair.
He wants to grab her hips, hold her down while he thrusts in, in, in, but he's not going to ruin the rhythm she's building. Instead, he presses his lips, open-mouthed and sloppy at this point, to any flushed skin he can reach. She makes a noise, low and keening, when he mouths along her jugular, so he does it again. And somehow, impossibly, her hips speed up, and he's biting probably too hard at her skin, but there's that noise again, louder like it's inside his body, too.
And then she's coming, oh, god, fuck, and he can feel it, he can feel a rush of heat and the way her thighs are shaking, and he doesn't mean to, but he can't stop himself from grabbing her hips and rutting in, in, in, once, twice, again, seeking out the heat he can feel.
She's whispering something— “please, Frank, please,” maybe— and then he's coming too, groaning out unintelligible words against her jaw.
“Jesus christ,” he mumbles, burying his face into the sweaty waves of her hair. It's so soft, and it smells so good (peaches and honey and hospital, he thinks fuzzily), and it's hiding what he knows are his very, very red cheeks.
She peppers kisses to his forehead, the crown of his head, the damp strands of his hair, and he smiles shakily into her neck.
“Did you just…” she trails off, and he's so, so grateful she can't bring herself to finish that sentence.
He nods, letting out a little whine. On the highlight reel of his embarrassing moments, this easily edges out the incident with the sorority girl (because he honestly doesn't remember her name, and he's never going to forget Mel’s), and barely edges out the elbow to the face, (because any fight is kinda cool-adjacent.)
It's definitely not the most embarrassing thing he's ever done, but it's so high up there.
“Oh…” she breathes, and all he can do is groan into her neck again. “Can you look at me?”
“I really don't think so,” he whispers, but she presses her lips to his temple and runs her fingers through his hair, so, so gently this time, and he can't not look at her.
When their eyes meet, she smiles so sweetly and leans in to press her lips to his. It's the simplest kiss they've shared, so natural it feels like a life-long habit.
She pulls back and runs her hands through his hair again, straightening what her hands have been messing with.
“I actually think that's very hot,” she says quietly.
He raises an eyebrow, because… really?
“It's kind of like a compliment,” she shrugs. “And to be fair, I did the same thing.”
“You really, really did not,” he tells her. “Or, at least, your version of it is insanely hot. Mine is just… embarrassingly messy.”
“Hey,” she says, pressing her fingers into his temples and rubbing small circles. It's relaxing, and he closes his eyes into it. “Let me decide what I find hot.”
He opens his eyes and watches her watch him. She looks like she's examining him, but not in a clinical way. It's like she just wants to know him, and he's not sure he's ever wanted anything more. He knows that if he asks, she'll never mention this embarrassing moment again, and something swells in his chest as he looks at her. It feels familiar, but new, words he hasn't spoken to her, but a feeling he's felt for a time longer than he can count.
He's thought it a hundred times these last few months, so often recently, but he knows now, like it's a scientific fact he'll never dismantle.
“Okay,” he sighs, dragging shaky fingers down her arms to pull the sleeves of her jumpsuit back up. “Okay,” he says again, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She leans into it, and he leans forward to brush his lips along her temple. Her face is blotchy, and her bottom lip is bitten red, and she looks beautiful in a way that's going to haunt every one of his dreams.
“I think I'm about to embarrass myself again,” he says, fingers still playing at the edges of her top.
“What?” She asks, wide-eyed for a second, glancing down between them, where she's still straddling him, and that's what does it. That's what breaks the damn holding the words in, and he's burying a laugh against her neck to reign himself in, taking a deep breath before pulling back to look into her eyes.
“I love you so fucking much,” he says, laughter still flirting at the edges of the words. “I'm in love with you,” he says again, quietly, doubling down because, like so many other things in his life, he can't stop himself.
Her head tilts a little, the corners of her lips turning into a small smile. “Why would that be embarrassing?” She asks, and he doesn't have a list, but he's preparing to rattle off any number of reasons, when she continues. “I'm in love with you, too.”
She says it like it's the most factual thing in the world, as automatic as her next breath. And fuck, he believes her, because that's how he feels too.
She's smiling, bright, and happy, and then he's tasting the shape of it against his lips, kissing her, kissing her, kissing her, to the point where he's afraid he's forgotten how to stop.
When he finally pulls back, she's still smiling, and his lips feel like he's memorized the shape of hers.
“I have a confession,” she says, quietly, but she's still smiling, so his heart doesn't sink like it typically would.
He quirks his fingers together, a universal come on, let's hear it, and it's not lost on him that she watches them move a little distractedly. He files that away for later as she starts to speak.
“You know how I told you Becca was staying late for her game night?”
He nods. Part of him had imagined some cute, loved-up, late-night walk with her to get Becca, honestly, pulling Mel into corners the streetlights don't reach and stealing time in the dark, with no phone line between them.
“She actually asked to stay the night. They're doing some midnight black light laser tag thing, and she painted a shirt with black light paint, and she's been talking about it all week— anyway… I don't have to go get her.”
“You lied,” he teases, hands flexing around her waist.
“I omitted,” she clarifies. “I didn't want to put any pressure on the night or make any assumptions that something might happen.”
He groans a little, knowing she'd thought about what a night like this might lead to. “I kinda wish I had known I could take my time making you fall apart,” he says quietly, teasing his fingers up and down her sides.
“Sorry,” she starts, and then pauses. “Wait, that wasn't you taking your time?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Babe, I've been here for less than half an hour,” he says, running a hand along her spine, catching her shiver. “What kind of inconsiderate rush-jobs did Bald David or whoever pull that makes you think that was anything other than part one of a very complex plan to never let you out of bed?”
She grins. “I like very complex plans.”
“Yes, I know. Don't worry, I thought about this one in depth, with just you in mind,” he smirks, leaning in to press a sloppy kiss just below her ear.
“I bet you did,” she laughs, wrapping her arms around his neck and just hugging him. It's adorable and sexy, and everything he knew this would be like with Mel. “I think you should tell me more about this detailed plan,” she says, “but first, uh, honestly? I'm kind of super hungry?”
“Oh, thank god,” he laughs. “I’d skip a hundred meals to get you off, but all I ate today was a protein bar I found shoved in the back of my locker and like four Altoids on my way over here.”
“You do taste minty,” she muses, leaning in to kiss him again before finally shifting off of him to kneel on the couch. She's ginger about it, and he thinks her legs might be a little shaky. Really, she did all the work, but he still gets a feral sense of pride from it.
His hand settles on her knee like it's magnetized there. “So if Becca is out for the night…”
She stares, waiting for him to continue.
He leans over, letting his head fall against her shoulder dramatically. “Are you gonna make me ask?”
He feels her nod and hears a tiny bubble of a laugh rise from her.
“Is it too soon to stay over?” He wasn't really sure how he was going to ask, except that just assuming was wrong.
“It kinda feels like you're in bed with me every night already,” she whispers, and he presses his lips to her shoulder, once, twice, gentle and as reverent as he's ever been.
He speaks his next words against her neck, his face turned into her body. “Pretty sure this'll feel different.”
“Pretty sure it already does.”
He presses one last kiss to the curve of her shoulder before leaning back against the couch.
“I think,” he says, pressing his palms to his knees and stretching a little, “I need to get up before things… dry more.”
She makes a face, her nose crinkling at the edges, and oh god, he loves her. (It never felt scary to think before, but now it just feels warm and true.)
“That sounds… unpleasant,” she says diplomatically.
“Felt extremely pleasant while it was happening, which is the important part,” he assures her. And maybe, that could sum up the entire last few years of his life: felt good, so he did it, consequences staring him in the face be damned.
He thinks, suddenly, that maybe he'd do it all again if it meant he found Mel. It's one of those wild, reckless thoughts he should probably bring up in a meeting, or with Mark, and he knows he wouldn't really willingly inflict the last few years on himself or Abby or the kids again.
He's just grateful Mel was at the end of the journey.
She smiles at him, and he corrects himself: the beginning of the journey.
She stands, holding out both hands, and he reaches for her, letting her help pull him up. When he's standing, she doesn't come any closer, which he thinks is probably smart from a we have to actually stop touching each other if we're ever going to get food, standpoint, but she doesn't drop his hand, either.
He reaches back with his free hand for his shirt, discarded over the back of the couch, and smiles when she frowns a little, letting his hand go so he can pull the shirt over his head.
“Is the shirt really necessary?” She asks, plucking at the sleeve.
“All you did was say please earlier, and I almost ripped it, taking it off, so I don't think I'll take much convincing to take it off again. But I just remembered I have my gym bag in the trunk, and I need… not these pants.”
She pauses, tilting her head like she's trying to puzzle something out. “When was the last time you went to the gym?”
“I… “ he honestly doesn't know the answer to that. A while, for sure. He briefly considers lying, but Mel knows his routine better than anyone, so it feels pointless. “Don’t make me admit it, sweetheart. I'm just barely over the last embarrassment. All I know is the bag has clean clothes.”
“Fair enough,” she laughs. “Go get that and I'll change too, and then maybe we can just order food? I'd honestly rather stay in.”
“Perfect,” he whispers, leaning in to press a kiss to her cheek, “because the dessert I had in mind doesn't actually involve food.”
It's cheesier than maybe anything he's ever said, and her kind of grossed out nose-crinkle confirms it. He kisses her nose, right on the edge of where it crinkles, just because he can.
“Let's just rewind ten seconds and pretend I said something way more cool,” he says, and she nods sweetly.
He doesn't remember being this cheesy and just borderline dumb in love before. He'd say he'd blocked it out due to pure, crippling embarrassment, but really, he's sure it’s because Mel has reminded him how easy it can be just to be happy.
They settle on pizza, because it's quickest and because the Greek place Mel really wants won't deliver in the snow. Even though Frank offers, she won't let him leave to get it.
“I'm worried between the meals we’ve shared now and the fact that you felt compelled to make me soup that you think the only food I consume is pizza,” he says a while later, lounging beside her on her bed, pizza crust remnants littering their plates.
“I'm not not concerned about it,” she laughs. “But I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong.”
“How many meals will it take to convince you? Fifty? A hundred, a thousand?" He gathers their plates as he asks, and she lets him, because being taken care of is still such a novel concept to her.
“A thousand? That's a lot of meals,” she says.
“Oh yeah, it'll be a big sacrifice for me. Like “oh no, my gorgeous genius girlfriend wants me to eat delicious food with her, ugh,” very unfortunate for me.”
She starts to laugh and then pauses. “Gorgeous genius girlfriend?”
Frank sets the plates on the bedside table and turns back to her. “The word you're stuck on in that sentence better not be gorgeous or genius,” he says.
“Girlfriend,” she clarifies, watching how it makes him smile.
“Yeah, I hoped you might just let that one skate on by, but I should have known better. Sorry. Did I freak you out?”
She shakes her head. “You just surprised me. We haven't discussed it or anything.”
He watches her closely for a second. Not in a bad way, but in a way she knows is causing her cheeks to flush a little. “Do you want to discuss it? Or do you want me to rewind on that one, too, and pretend I didn't say it?”
“No,” she says quickly. “No, no, I like it. It's just, no one's ever asked before, not since Chris Flugs in sixth grade, and I don't think that actually counted since he asked and I said yes, and then we never even held hands, and oh, I just realized we never actually broke up, are we still dating techni—”
“Mel, I love you, but breathe.”
She stops immediately. I love you. It's still brand new and feels like white noise flowing through her — calming and invigorating all at once, and she thinks maybe one day she'll record him saying it so she can listen to it on repeat when she needs a serotonin boost.
He takes her hand, intertwining their fingers together. “First, whoever Chris Flugs is, he sounds like an idiot. You have had some really awful boyfriends.”
“Yes, well, you're not wrong,” she laughs. “But I guess I have a new boyfriend now, so I don't have to worry about that anymore.”
She watches his face as he takes in the words, his smile stretching into something a little more heated, his eyes falling to her lips.
“What's the second thing?” She asks.
“Hmm?”
“You said first and then not incorrectly insulted my past relationships, which implies there's a second.” She says, watching him curiously. He looks a little dazed, which makes her heart race a little.
“Oh, yeah,” he says quietly, and then he's leaning in and kissing her, his body weight shifting as he moves to hover over her.
When he pulls back, she smiles. “Oh, that’s a good second thing,” she says, a little wistfully.
“Actually forgot what the second thing was as soon as you said boyfriend,” he laughs, breath ghosting along her lips as he kisses her again. They're still holding hands, which feels so cute it makes her smile into the kiss a little, his tongue slipping in against hers as she does.
And then it's less cute and more shivery-good when he shifts again, his body weight lowering, so they're pressed flush together.
He raises his arm, their fingers still intertwined, so he pins her arm above her head. Oh, that's new and different, and still, his hand isn't leaving hers.
“I actually thought of a new second thing,” he whispers, lips slicking across hers to brush the words along her cheek. His free hand slides along her side and up under the hem of her shirt, fingers sparking heat where they press.
“Second things are good,” she says, and it feels a little nonsensical, but his lips are trailing down her neck now, and his thumb is dragging along her sternum, rough and warm, and it's the last near-coherent thought she has for awhile.
(He calls her baby when he lifts her shirt off, his tongue finding her nipple, and his groan turns into a gentle bite when she tangles her fingers into his hair.
He calls her sexy when she helps him slide his gym shorts off, and beautiful when he pulls her leggings off, but the word comes out garbled in a laugh.
“Are those ducks?” His hand is gentle, tracing along the silly mallard print on her underwear.
“I thought about telling you I had panties with ducks on them a hundred times, but I thought that might've been too much info.”
“Absolutely would've killed me, yes.”
He pulls them off reverently, slower and gentler than their bodies, her racing heart warrants, but then his tongue is pressed against her, and his hands are on her hips, and everything is the perfect speed.
He calls her sweetheart when he presses inside her long minutes later, body flush against her, and then everything is beautiful, perfect, silent, in the darkness except for the beat of his heart keeping time with hers.)
“I don't know what to call you,” she says later that night, Frank's body warm against her side, his fingers drawing nonsense along her thigh.
“Hmm?” He mummers a moment later, eyelids heavy, and he looks so comfy she has to scoot an impossible inch closer. He's enveloped around her, her head resting on his arm, their legs a mess of restful angles. She's not usually a cuddler, but he'd curled into her so seamlessly that she hadn't felt a single ounce of hesitance about it.
“You call me baby and sweetheart and darling—”
“Darlin’,” he clarifies, dropping the g. “It's more charming and less old man-ish that way.”
“Okay, darlin’, and a handful of other things, and I call you… Frank. Nothing else I've tried feels right.”
“Mel, that's my name,” he laughs, and it tickles her cheek. “And it took you a while to say that, so I think we're making good progress.”
“It just might be nice to have a term of endearment,” she says. “Yours always make me feel all…” She shivers a little, feeling swirly like she can't quite name the emotion.
He hums out a noise against her skin, like he's contemplating. “I’ll answer to anything you wanna call me, Mel.”
“Can we consult?” She asks, and his laugh spills across her skin in the darkness.
“If that helps, sure. Not sure my brain is totally in doctor mode at the moment, though.”
“I don't need Dr. Langdon for this. Just boyfriend Langdon.”
He presses a kiss to her shoulder, the barest hint of teeth. “You got him, sweetheart.”
“Honey?” She asks, but it makes her cringe a little, and she shakes her head. A strand of hair falls across his face, and he pulls it between his fingers, seemingly absentmindedly.
“Babe?” He suggests. “Since I'm, y'know, a babe?”
“You are,” she says assuredly. “But that's not it, either.”
“McGolfsAlot?” She asks a couple of moments later. “I know that one's already taken, and it's not really a term of endearment, but if it wasn't for him, I don't know if I'd have ever called you.”
“Oh, I'm sure I would've left some other disaster of a note you needed to follow up on,” he says, pressing his lips to her clavicle. We still would have ended up on the phone somehow.”
“Yeah?” She asks quietly. Her voice sounds a little awed, even to her own ears.
“Yes, 1000%.”
She smiles and then runs through a short list of contenders: sugar (“we're supposed to be doing something to stop the sugar epidemic,” he reminds her); love (“makes you sound like a southern grandma, which I don't hate, but I also don't find sexy,” he tells her, honestly; sweetie (“it's what my mom calls my dad, so…. no,” he begs.)
When she's listed off a couple of others, undecided, he presses his chin to her shoulder and looks up at her.
“Can I be honest?”
She nods, running her hand through his hair. He's so different like this: pliable and gentle and vulnerable. It's how she's always gotten him over the phone at night and in quiet conversations when he's just Frank, just the two of them at work. It’s so different from how he carries himself as Dr. Langdon, cocky and loud and unendingly energetic.
She loves both versions and if forced, she's not sure she could choose. She gets both, she wants both, and she's pretty sure no one else ever has.
“I think I like it best when you call me Frank,” he admits. He's quiet for a moment, and she thinks that's it, but his fingers drift along her knee, and he continues. “No one else really does. It makes me feel like you really know me.”
That's it. That's the feeling she couldn't place earlier, the one that makes her shivery and swirly and so, so happy with each sweetheart or baby or darlin' he levels her with.
Because she's always been Mel, she's been Mel since Becca was four and couldn't pronounce her s sounds, and it’s always been fine. It's how she happily introduces herself. She's rarely Melissa. She's not even Dr. King all that often.
But she's always been just Mel.
She's Mel to everyone, which has never left room for her to be anything else to someone. There's never been any special nickname from a friend or an ex, nothing that felt like just theirs.
She's never been sweetheart or baby or darlin’ to anyone but Frank, and each time he whispers an endearment into her skin, she gets that same feeling their middle-of-the-night conversations have always given her.
She feels calm in a way she's always strived for, cared for like she's always needed.
She feels known.
She'll tell him all this one day, maybe as daylight breaks and he's next to her, where she's positive he's always supposed to be.
“I do know you, Frank,” she says quietly in the dark of her bedroom.
She turns to face him, his arm slipping along her side to pull her in close against him.
They're face to face, no phone screen blocking her from reaching out to press her lips to his, slow, steady, letting it drag out even as his lips press into a smile.
It's not like they're going to sleep anytime soon.
***
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