Chapter Text
Samira’s always told herself there’s a quiet dignity to being overlooked.
Unseen.
A hem of a person, hidden under yards of fabric, holding the raw, thankless edges of things together.
She doesn’t need to be celebrated by a frothing audience in order to ‘do the right thing’. It’s her instinct, her own private righteousness, like recycling or voting in municipal elections. The satisfaction of being true to herself is all the validation she needs.
That said, fuck her mother.
“What if they’re in love?” McKay asks, eyes scanning her workstation screen, and Samira’s lip peels back.
“Lust is more like it.”
McKay smirks. “Even better.”
It’s not the response to ‘my mother’s spitting in the face of everything I’ve sacrificed to go sail the world with a Wells Fargo branch manager’ she’s hoping for.
Her fingers twitch against the keyboard, accidentally deleting a letter.
‘Wound is healing well with no signs of infection’ autocorrects to ‘wound is healing well with no signs of affection’.
“God, it’s really been a while,” McKay continues, all wistful lament, and Samira's jaw shifts as it turns into an overshare about needing to get laid.
Her eyelids lag with disinterest as she types.
Something indigestible twists in her stomach.
It’s not that she thinks she’s better than people who ‘need’ sex—she just finds everyone’s animal fixation on it exaggerated. It’s the most overhyped biological process. A kidney is more complex.
And even more than that, in her limited experience, it makes people stupid.
Hind-brained.
It makes them throw a shotgun wedding and trade in their house for a fucking Disney cruise.
A kidney doesn’t do any of that.
“You seem a little spicy today, Mohan.”
Samira bristles as she fills out a POLST for a transferring patient.
So she snapped at a few EMTs. People couldn’t just go around saying they gave someone 10mg of Ativan when they meant Versed. That was the difference between imminent intubation and a cozy little nap.
“Robby crawling up your ass again about your turnover time?”
Her jaw clicks. The truth was, Robby wasn’t noticing much of anything she was doing these days.
She deflects instead of answering. “You’ve really got a way with words, Santos.”
“I get that a lot.”
“Dr. Santos,” another voice calls, and Samira glances up as Langdon’s boyband hair sweeps out of a patient room. He’s shrugging off a sterile gown, hands gloved in betadine. “Any updates on that vertigo patient?”
Santos stares stoically forward, back to him. “I can staff it with Mohan.”
Langdon meets Samira’s eyes from above Santos’s head.
For a split-second, she sees it. The impulse to pull rank. To reject the idea that she’s the same level of seniority as him now, that she takes up an equal space, despite it being technically true. He’s only been back a week and it’s happened more than once.
“I already pre-charted on her,” he settles on, “so no need to waste Dr. Mohan’s time.”
“You mean waste your time, since you already read about her.”
Langdon’s mouth tics a little. His stare’s trained on the beetle-black crown of Santos’s head.
“How about we don’t waste anybody’s time.”
Santos’s eyes veer ceilingward. It’s a decent impression of cavalier rebellion, but her taut shoulders give her away.
“36-year-old female with no vascular risk factors presents with nausea, vomiting, and persistent room-spinning dizziness since waking up yesterday morning, worse when turning her head to the left. CT’s normal. She had a URI last week. Presentation’s consistent with vestibular neuritis.”
“Was her HINTS exam positive?”
“Non-diagnostic.”
“Then how do you know it’s not a cerebellar stroke?”
Santos’s lip curls in annoyance. “Because she’s 36.”
“36-year-olds can’t have strokes?” Langdon probes, peeling off his stained gloves. “APLS, paradoxical embolism, vasculitis?”
“She has no clinical history suggestive of any of those things.”
“Which is exactly how they present for the first time.”
Santos turns around with a combative look and he cuts her off.
“Look, I’m not saying it’s likely, but you’re describing an acute vestibular syndrome without any clear peripheral features. That buys her an obs admission for MRI any way you slice it.”
Santos stares at him for a long beat.
He stares back with a look that’s trying too hard not to be paternalistic.
“It’s vestibular neuritis,” she asserts, a final attempt.
His shoulder flicks up. “Prove it to me, then.”
She runs an acrid look over him before turning away. “Fine.” She grabs her stethoscope and loops it around her neck. “Should only cost the patient 10,000 dollars.”
She disappears down the corridor before he can say anything.
His eyes trail her like a residue.
Samira looks back down at her POLST, not interested in inviting any kind of debrief. She doesn’t have supportive in her today. Not for a waterlogged drama that’s been dragging on all week.
His shadow replaces the spot Santos was filling earlier. He starts drumming his fingers against the counter.
She makes it a point not to look up, lest he get the impression she’s open to hearing him bitch.
“You know,” he begins, and a muscle tics in her temple, “you’d think someone who’s made as many mistakes as she has would have a little more grace for mine.”
It’s said with a brittle wryness. Like he’s leaving room to take it back if needed. Keeping the door open to revert to his sad-eyed self-flagellating routine if she pushes back at all.
She checks a box for ‘Do Not Attempt Resuscitation’.
He interprets her silence as permissive, like most people do.
“I’ve apologized to everyone on this floor with no issues, but,” he slides into a chuckle, “somehow Trinity Santos is the hold out.”
She checks the box for ‘No escalation of care. Comfort-based measures only.’
“Trinity Santos is the arbiter of justice.”
She checks the box for no feeding tube and briefly imagines Langdon with one, except instead of calories, it’s feeding him constant, syrupy sympathy.
“Not exactly my first pick.”
She signs her name at the bottom of the page with a hasty ‘MD’ tacked to the end, a set of letters she used to take such gooey-eyed pride in, and stows the form in the chart.
“Right? I mean, what do you think of her?”
She gets to her feet and finally looks at him.
He still has plastic safety glasses on. The glare is almost enough to hide the entitlement in his eyes. To her time. To Santos's forgiveness. To an audience for his performance of victimhood.
“I think I’m the only person who really saw you scream at her last year,” she finds herself saying, without really having planned on it. It’s never come up before. She’s never had to reify her opinion. “So from that perspective, it’s a miracle she’s even talking to you.”
He blinks.
Something stutters in his jaw—a twitch, like something resetting.
Her phone buzzes and she glances down at it. It’s a list of realtors from her mom. Her teeth click. She shoots back a cold thumbs up and reaches for her stethoscope, heading to check on another patient.
“And for the record, you didn’t apologize to everyone on this floor.”
It’s not that she even wants an apology from Langdon.
They’ve never been close. Their opinions have never carried particular weight to each other. The most they've ever really had in common was Robby as a mentor figure, and even that had been quietly competitive and lopsided at best.
He’s just never been bold enough to ask her to pick a side before. So when he skulks up to her with his hands in his pockets a few hours later, haloed in pretty boy penitence, she bites back a groan.
“Got time for a chat?”
She glances back at the Diaz family huddled in room 12. They’re cloaked in stress, all bent spines and jittering legs. She told them she’d help social work look into insurance options for them, and that’s after she finishes an LP in room 14 and updates room 15 on their CT results.
“I can be quick,” he insists, sensing her rejection.
She forces a close-lipped smile. “Guess I could use a coffee.”
“Look, I don’t know how much you heard about what happened last year,” he says as they loiter by the coffee machine in the lounge, his body arranged into a wax figure of humility—rounded shoulders, hollowed-out ribs, body weight shifted onto his heels, “but I’m pretty sure you know I spent six months in rehab.”
She feels her phone buzz in her scrubs pocket and checks her texts.
Her mom chose a realtor without her.
Her jaw flares at the celebratory emojis.
“And I also had some pretty significant mental health stuff going on.”
She nods, half-listening as another text from the bedside RN says the Diaz family wants to leave.
She wills the sluggish coffee machine to go faster.
“And a lot of what you saw with Santos—well, it was a combination of both of those things.”
“Fuck,” she hisses at the word ‘AMA’, texting the nurse back to stall them until she can come by.
“Does that—” she feels him squinting at her, “does that make sense, what happened?”
“You were addicted to narcotics and stealing meds from patients and Trinity caught you.”
The machine sputters abruptly, spurting out coffee like a transected artery.
It takes her a beat to realize he’s staring at her.
She blinks at him, her bluntness incidental, a byproduct of her attention being bled out elsewhere.
“Right?”
“I—” his masseter muscle shifts. Hardens. “Not really what I said.”
“I thought you asked what happened.”
His mouth parts.
His waxy mask of contrition flickers for a beat, revealing something honed. Something with lived-in, offensive edges.
Their pagers go off with a trauma alert.
“Check out this one.”
McKay holds up a Tinder profile for a half-naked man with veiny biceps and an oily grin.
Samira blinks at it from above a mountain of byzantine Medicaid paperwork. Her hair’s in her eyes. There’s still blood on her scrubs from the trauma they resuscitated an hour ago. The beginnings of an ocular migraine are pulsating behind her right eye.
“Where’s his neck?”
McKay snorts. “I don’t need him to have a neck, Mohan. Just other parts.”
Samira’s nose twitches and she notices.
“What? You’re going to sit there and act like you’re above a post-shift booty call?”
“Not above it,” Samira lies, chasing it with a truth. “Just not really familiar with it.”
McKay collapses back in her seat, a parody of being aghast.
“Mohan.”
Samira fingers tauten at the tired reaction.
She draws an asterisk by a clause she wants to run by social work.
“You’re young, you’re hot—what do you mean you aren’t decompressing with a hot piece of ass on the regular?”
She thinks back to the last time she had sex—a dull, mechanical exchange after a stilted date her mother set her up on.
She thinks back to her tepid college relationship, soft and sweet and time-consuming.
“Not really my decompression of choice.”
“Then what is—Storage Wars?”
Samira’s fingers flex. She brought up that show once.
McKay watches her for a long beat, and she can feel something needling beneath the mirth. Something keen and disaggregating.
“Fine,” she concedes eventually, throwing her palms up. “But just between you and me, I’ve tried it all: alcohol, binge eating, sobbing alone in a bathroom—”
Samira’s stare flickers up at the last one.
Exposure curls up her neck, hot and slow. Offset by the memory of cold tile beneath her knees.
“And let me tell you: nothing’s come close to the restorative power of a truly exceptional orgasm.”
She searches McKay’s face for any sign that she saw her that night. Any canny glint of maternalism. All she finds is wry lechery.
She pushes to her feet more abruptly than needed. “Well, glad you found what works for you.”
McKay shrugs. “Could work for you, too.”
She ignores her, gathering her things.
“I’m talking selfish,” McKay insists as she scoops up the papers. “Indecent.” Her hands cup around her mouth as Samira walks away. “No give, all appetite!”
It’s loud enough for a few heads to tip up and look at them.
She ignores them all, including the one that was already watching her.
“So you’re saying there’s a chance it could all be covered?”
Samira nods, holding out the form to Ana Diaz to look over. “It’s not a guarantee, but if we can get our board behind it, the hospital can and has absorbed the cost of an admission before.”
Ana looks over at her dad, blooming with hope, and he shakes his head from his hospital bed. “Why us? What’s different from our family and the thousands of other people that can’t afford to stay here?”
“I—”
“Not a lot, truthfully,” Dylan, their social worker, interjects, making something irrational flare in Samira’s ribs. “But Dr. Mohan’s right, you do fall into a specific gap in healthcare coverage that the hospital recognizes as difficult and will occasionally cover out of goodwill.”
“How often is occasionally?”
Dylan’s stare softens at his weariness. The soundless drip of his insulin bag measures the silence behind him.
“Rarely.”
“But more often than you think,” Samira rushes to add, stretching her face into a reassuring smile. “Just last month, actually.”
Dylan meets her eyes. It’s a clear telegraph: ‘that was a different situation’.
Samira ignores it.
“And how long does it usually take to get an answer from the hospital?”
“A few weeks, most of the time.”
“But could be up to a year,” Dylan adds, and Mr. Diaz nods, staring down at his hands.
“A year of not knowing if I’ve bankrupted my entire family.”
“No hables así, papá,” Ana scolds, rubbing his shoulder. He reaches up and takes her hand.
Samira fixates on the gesture, lungs stalling for a second.
“Can we think about it a little more?” Ana asks, eyes a warm, determined brown, and Dylan nods.
“Of course, and we’ll keep looking for more options in the meantime.”
“Thank you.”
Dylan excuses herself. Samira lingers for a beat, suspended, mouth full of a list of all the horrific ways he could die if he left right now.
She swallows and follows Dylan out of the room.
“Well, well, well, what do you know,” Santos drawls, scrolling through imaging results in the resident workroom.
Samira squints at her own screen, evaluating a possible flow-void on a CTA.
“No acute infarct,” Santos says, reading aloud from a radiology report. “Subtle hyperintensity of the vestibular nerve on T2-weighted FLAIR sequence is consistent with vestibular neuritis. Correlate clinically.” Her jaw sets. “If only someone already had.”
“Nice catch,” Samira offers, a neutral comment designed to avoid an offloading, and Santos snorts.
“Yeah, from four hours ago.”
Samira doesn’t add anything, switching to a coronal view of the pulmonary arteries.
“Christ, he is such a dick.”
She leans back from the screen. The flow-void was artifact.
“He jerks off to cost-effectiveness and patient-centered care but makes me admit a perfectly healthy patient just to show me he can.”
She clicks open the formal radiology read to confirm it.
“Such a hypocrite.”
Flow-void noted on axial sequence in right pulmonary artery favored to be artifact.
“No wonder his wife left him.”
An abrupt rattle draws both their heads up. Javadi’s standing in the doorway, lumbar puncture kit in hand, eyes wide and cartoonish.
Her mouth opens then closes. “I didn’t hear anything.”
Santos squints.
“I heard a little.”
Santos smirks.
“Ignore the workplace gossip, Javadi,” Samira sighs, turning back to her computer, and Santos snorts.
“It’s not gossip, it’s a fact. You didn’t notice he’s not wearing his wedding band anymore?”
“I’ve been busy practicing medicine, actually.”
“I did.”
They turn to look at Javadi. Her fingers are drumming awkwardly on the kit.
“But only because a patient’s friends were gagging over him and kept talking about him being single because there was no ring on it.”
Santos pulls a face.
Samira forces a smile. “Did you need something, Javadi?”
“Yes. Sorry. Do you know where the atraumatic needles are?”
Santos snorts. “Why, so your LP can take fifty years?”
“So her patient can have a lower chance of developing CSF leak,” Samira chides, and Santos rolls her eyes.
“CSF drains like sap from those things.”
“Small price to pay for better outcomes.”
“That’s what Langdon said,” Javadi adds, then balks. “Dr. Langdon. Senior, uh—senior resident Langdon. He’s observing me for the LP.”
Samira blinks at her. “I keep a stash of atraumatic needles in the drawer by the printer.”
“Great!”
She flies across the room like a Tim Burton character, all lank and bug eyes and dark features, and Samira takes a second to note how different she is from her mother.
And then she thinks more about her mother.
And then she thinks more about her mother's role in the hospital.
She straightens. Her spine goes stiff. “Javadi, your mom’s on the hospital board, right?”
“Yeah,” Javadi says, pen in her mouth, digging through a drawer full of spare medical equipment. “Why?”
It’s not a yes.
It’s not a definitely.
But it’s a ‘probably’.
It’s a ‘there are explicit safeguards to ensure fairness in these decisions so I can’t give you formal approval, but I can tell you it won’t be rejected.’
Samira’s vibrating with adrenaline as she hangs up with Dr. Shamsi.
Her head’s all blood.
Her mouth’s acrid from having to autopsy her past to make her case, but she doesn’t regret it for a second.
“Less socializing and more medicine, Mohan,” Robby chirps as he brushes past her, Whitaker in toe, and it doesn’t even bother her, how dismissive it is.
The slew of unread texts from her mother doesn’t bother her either.
Nothing can bother her right now.
“Mr. Everett,” she greets, sliding the door open to a new patient room, and he cuts her off before she can continue.
“Why are you fucking smiling?”
She slows, stare flicking up from his chart.
A man with a drug-carved face scowls back at her, wiry and bloodshot. His hospital gown’s half off. He’s in wrist restraints. “I feel like fucking shit and they send in a smiley fuckin’ nurse?”
She blinks. Steels into a familiar armor.
“Mr. Everett, my name is Dr. Mohan—I’m here to try and help with your chest pain.”
He lapses into a mordant laugh. “Great. I’m having a fucking heart attack and I get some DEI bitch.”
The words slide off her easily, oily after years of overuse. “Dr. Whittaker told me the pain was in the center of your chest—is that right?”
She watches his eyes as he spits out an answer, blown and fluttering from side-to-side. She glances at his vitals and sees the last recorded temp of 101. She draws up to the bedside computer, pulling up his toxicology screen.
“Are you even fucking listening to me? I’m having a fucking heart attack.”
“I know it might feel that way,” she says, modulating her voice, “but your cardiac rhythm and blood tests are actually really reassuring—”
She jolts as he surges forward, restraints jerking the bed. “Don’t tell me what I’m feeling, you cunt. I know what a fucking heart attack looks like, even if you don’t.”
The words momentarily lodge in her ribs.
She takes a step back, refortifying.
Logic tells her to call for security. Call a code grey. The hospital has a zero tolerance policy and no one would expect her to tolerate this. But something deep-set in her, reckless from a day of getting walked all over and coming out on top anyway, resists giving him the satisfaction.
He’s in restraints. There’s a computer between them. He can’t get to her that easily.
“If you’d like, we can repeat the tests—”
“If I’d like?” he snorts, and she can see the track marks extending all the way down to his legs. “Aren’t you the doctor?” His gums are recessed, brown. “Or do they give you a degree now if you fuck enough of ‘em.”
PCP. Coke. Meth.
The hyper-aggression and horizontal nystagmus make her think PCP, but the track marks and teeth suggest polysubstance.
“Why don’t we repeat an ECG,” she offers mechanically, turning back to the computer, “and in the meantime I can order something to help calm you—”
She’s halfway through typing in ‘haloperidol’ when he lunges across the bed.
The restraints rip loose.
She crashes into a supply cart.
His hands clamp around her neck, shoving her backward, knocking her brain against her skull. “You think you can fucking tranquilize me?” he spits into her face, pupils vibrating and rabid. “You think I’m a fucking animal?”
He looks like a festering wound.
He looks like melting teeth.
It’s all she has time to think before a flood of hands rip him off of her.
“You have to get a CT, Mohan.”
“I already told you, there was no head strike—”
“Prep a scanner, please,” Robby aims over her head at the CT tech, and she tosses her hands up.
“Is anyone even listening to me?”
“Trauma-95 arriving now in Bay 2,” Matteo calls out from the sliding doors, and Robby nods back.
“Langdon, wheel her to CT, make sure she doesn’t blow it off.”
Samira sputters out a laugh. “Langdon has better things to do than babysit me.”
“Get it done,” Robby calls out as he disappears through the doors, throwing an undiplomatic thumbs-up over his shoulder.
She watches him with a mordant look.
Always handing her off to someone else.
She scoffs as a pair of hands grip the wheelchair.
“This is ridiculous, I can walk.”
Langdon’s silent as he pushes her forward.
“And I don’t need a CT scan—my head didn’t hit anything.”
“Coup-contrecoup injury,” he mutters in response, carving her down the hallway to the imaging rooms.
“Axonal injuries don’t show up on CT.”
“They can if you have contusions with them.”
“I think I’d know if I had fucking blood in my head, Langdon.”
He slows for a beat, the wheelchair stalling.
Something taut and unsaid hangs over her head.
“Look, I have an urgent update for a family, and I really don’t have time for a CT meant to treat everyone else’s anxiety.”
He starts pushing again.
“My neuro exam’s fine, I’m completely asymptomatic, at worst I have mild neck contusions—”
“Throw on a CTA neck to rule out dissection,” he tells the tech as he badges into the CT suite, handing her over to the transport team.
She turns to stare at him over her shoulder.
His eyes take a second to meet hers.
She sees it again, the hewn lines. The unflattering edges.
“Sorry to waste more of your time.”
Her CT comes back clean.
Everything comes back clean.
It takes half an hour to square everything away, another ten minutes to convince Robby and Dana to let her come back to work, and the whole thing would piss her off a lot more if she wasn’t chasing it with the best part of her day.
The only good part of her day.
She bites back a smile as she approaches room 12.
She feels giddy and unprofessional, and it makes her feel younger than she is.
She tries to compose her face as she pulls back the curtain.
“So, I have some news—”
Her voice cuts out.
She stills.
The bed’s empty, sheets folded politely at the end.
The IV pole’s pushed to the side, abandoned, an insulin drip to nothing.
There are half-filled forms on the bedside tray. A forgotten parking voucher.
She swallows.
The world veers a little around her.
‘They said I’m fine, Chellam. We can go.’
“Perlah.”
Her voice is clotted. A face emerges in her blurred out periphery.
“What’s up?”
“Did this patient get moved up to MedSurg?”
“Aw, no.”
Her ribs shift.
Disfigure.
“They AMA’d about thirty minutes ago.”
She feels a phantom pressure in her chest.
Her breathing thins.
‘They said we should repeat the test to be sure, Appā.’
“Bummer, really—his anion gap wasn’t even close to closed.”
Her lids flicker without blinking.
‘Hospitals are expensive, Kutty.’
“Can you—” her throat closes around the words, an alien peristalsis, “can you try and get them on the phone?”
Perlah frowns. “Sure, what for?”
“Now, please.”
Perlah disappears from her tunneled vision.
She doesn’t react, stare fixed on the bedsheets. The soft edges, nonclinical, folded by hands that meant well, that didn’t want to be a burden.
She blinks once, then in rapid succession.
She moves to the computer and opens up his latest labs. Something splits in her chest at his potassium.
She lists backward, unsteady.
She sees it all in fragments, in chronological shrapnel—the growing discomfort, the quiet hand to the sternum, the repolarization changes, the immigrant father instinct to call it nothing. He could be in the car when it happens, or cleaning the garage, or trimming the trees in the yard.
He could be sitting at the dinner table like her dad was.
“Sorry, boss.”
Her hands clench.
Her spine bows.
She feels the blow before she hears it.
“The number’s disconnected.”
She’s smarter this time.
She opts for the abandoned bathroom by the sonography suite that’s been under construction for months. She skips the caution-taped stalls, head knocked back against an open window, pulling in measured lungfuls of air.
She doesn’t need to cry.
She just needs a minute. A quiet, cornerless, uninterrupted minute.
Her phones buzzes in her pocket. She reaches up to turn it off but she keeps hitting the wrong volume button. Her jaw shifts as she pulls it out, intent on ignoring everything but a code, and it buzzes again before she can shut it off.
Answer kutty!!!
Another buzz.
You’ll never believe it!!!
Another buzz.
We’ve accepted an offer on the house!!!
She stares at the words in silence.
She stares until the notification banner disappears from the screen.
Her thumb twitches.
Something throbs in her neck.
And then suddenly, she gurgles out a laugh. It’s a violent sound. It’s raw and horrific, like a slashed jugular.
'We've sold the house.'
We've.
She laughs harder, feeling it rattle her ribs.
Jerry the Branch Manager sold the house where her dad’s painted handprints are still next to hers on a closet wall. Where the crooked deck always floods because her dad insisted on building it himself.
She gasps raggedly for air.
Her chest burns from how hard she’s laughing.
She imagines her patient’s scabbed hands around her throat, squeezing the laughter out of it, wringing it like something he could shove into a syringe and sell.
She slides down to the floor. The gasps become heaves. The heaves become empty sobs. She presses a frantic hand to her chest.
She can’t breathe.
She can’t cry.
She can't go home.
She can’t keep her patients safe.
She can’t be enough for her mom.
She drags her nails over her face, spiraling, desperate for a release. She thinks of McKay's advice and her hands lurch for her scrub bottoms, frantically untying them.
She’ll do anything. She’ll try anything.
Her fingers are frenzied between her legs, rubbery and dry.
She throws her head back, jaw gritted, pleading unintelligibly in broken Tamil.
She needs to feel something else.
She needs to feel anything else.
She needs to feel anything, she needs to feel, she needs—
“Oh.”
She stills.
Her body’s rigid, breaths shallow, stare aimed at the ceiling.
She places the voice a half-second before lowering her eyes.
Langdon’s staring back at her like a caught animal. He’s suspended mid-action, lighter in hand, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. His eyes are fixed and unblinking. Ringed in too much sclera.
It takes her a second to drag up her voice. “What are you doing here?”
She can feel the sweat on her forehead.
Feel her hair sticking to it.
He falters. “I—” his throat shifts. His eyes move down.
She realizes that her hand’s still buried in her underwear. That her scrubs are pooled around her ankles and her thighs are spread wide on a dirty bathroom floor.
She doesn’t move.
“I smoke in here sometimes.”
It’s a hoarse admission.
His stare keeps shifting between her face and her hand, involuntary, practically a nystagmus, and it strikes her for a dissociative second, how much realer this discomfort looks on him. How much rawer it is than the kind he was drenching himself in during his apology tour all week.
He’s all pulse and reflex and sympathetic nervous system.
He jerks, spitting out his cigarette. “I should—” he clears his throat, off-balance, turning toward the door, and she surprises herself by stopping him.
“Wait.”
He stills. Turns back to look at her.
She studies him with hostile determination.
Her chest rises and falls beneath her, framed in the sprawl of her legs.
She thinks of all the unnamed ways he’s been using her this week. All the one-sided conversations, the dogged attempts at validation, the entitlement to a labor she wasn’t offering.
She considers what it’d feel like to do it back to him.
Reduce him to someone to get something out of.
Reduce him to something.
All appetite, no give.
“Why’d you stop wearing your wedding ring?”
His whole body flickers at the question.
"I—” he swallows. His jaw shifts with restraint. “That’s a pretty personal question.”
“Well, I’d say we’ve gotten pretty fucking personal here, Frank.”
It’s a hollow taunt.
His stare shifts down to her hand again.
His tongue moves subtly in his mouth.
It takes him a minute to answer.
“Abby and I are getting divorced.”
She draws in a slow breath.
Runs an off-center gaze over him.
“And before all that,” she asks, eyes landing on his hands, reality blurring into something tenuous around her, something that doesn’t flinch, “how good were you at making her come?”
His eyes snap up to hers.
She watches him like she's watching a cardioversion.
Watches the lines of him go taut.
Watches his vessels dilate in real time.
His pulse is visible in his neck.
His jaw flares out.
He lists closer.
Her phone goes off before he can do anything else.
When Frank gets home to his bareboned apartment later that night, he tells himself it was nothing.
He eats a pre-measured portion of the Chinese food he ordered and tells himself it was nothing.
He cleans his skeletal kitchen, throws his scrubs in the wash, and repeats the words like a mantra, a prescription, a thirteenth step: it was nothing, it was nothing, it was nothing.
He’s stoic as he showers. He pats his sobriety calendar as he passes, a grounding ritual—nine months and six days.
But the midnight hours in his bed are the quietest, and the midnight thoughts in his head are the loudest, and as he stares unblinkingly at his vaulted ceiling, it opens along the spine.
It becomes a spread pair of legs.
He sees Samira Mohan looking up at him from that bathroom floor, slack and godless. Her eyes are hostile. Her skin's sheened in sweat. Her fingers are half-hidden inside a black, lacy mouth.
He twitches in his bed.
He thinks of the way she stiffened when her phone went off, an elastic snapping back into place. The way she hastened to her feet, tugging at hems and drawstrings, not meeting his eyes.
He thinks of the way she pushed him when he tried to reach out for her—to comfort her, to grab her, to push her back against the window, he doesn’t fucking know—and she used the hand that’d been buried in her underwear.
Grazed him in her cunt.
Left him standing in that bathroom blindsided, horrifically hard, swelling out of his skin after an entire day of making him feel small.
His throat shifts unevenly.
It wasn’t nothing.
It was flooded veins.
It was pinpoint pupils.
It was the first hit of something he’d felt in nine months and six days.
A/N: this was meant to be smutty fun and turned into a character study that I'm not even sure is in character 💀 rating and warnings mostly for the next chapter, which will unfortunately get much weirder. I'm also halfway through the next eating fic chapter don't kill me 😭 planning on two more chapters if there's interest but we'll see how the ADD goes! comments as always are super appreciated!