Chapter Text
The first time that Mel realizes Frank Langdon is married, she’s watching his hands. They are large, dexterous hands, coated in nitrile and blood. Good with a scalpel. Mel doesn’t think about them in any other context, because she’s at work. Those would be after work thoughts.
She is still watching his hands when he removes the gloves and throws them in the hazard bin. He’s talking, too, and she’s mainly listening. Just also…looking. Pale skin, tendons, and on his left hand, ring finger, a wedding band.
Oh, Mel thinks.
And it’s not like there are other thoughts to think really. It was just that Langdon had been nice, to Mel specifically, and not just in general, because, in general, she’s not sure that he is particularly nice, and he is handsome in that sort of unavoidable way that doesn’t normally take notice of Mel, and she’d thought for a heartbeat only that maybe that meant something, and that had felt…
He’s still talking and he’s still moving and he’s still married, and Mel is still…Well, anyway, that’s the first time.
.
Two weeks after he gets out of rehab, they meet at Buchanan Park on her day off. He brings his dog, which is very cute and not very well-behaved, and he isn’t wearing scrubs, just jeans and a t-shirt and so is she. He looks terrible, wan and unhappy, but he smiles when he sees her walking towards him and she gives an embarrassing little hopskip to hurry to meet him that makes him laugh, which feels sort of kinda like a victory.
She tells him that she has missed him at work, though really they’d only worked together that one (terrible, endless) day and it’s been months now in the pit without him. It’s too earnest maybe, as his expression goes tilted. “Don’t miss me,” he says. “You’re in good hands.”
“Oh, I know,” Mel says. (She misses him anyway. She still finds that she wants to tell him things.) She’s petting his dog, and not looking at him because it’s easier to focus that way. “She’s cute,” she says for something to say. And besides, it's true. She’s always liked dogs.
“She’s a menace.”
Mel straightens from her crouch. “Are we walking?”
They were. They don’t talk about anything important as they walk. Not about the pills or his continued pending status at the hospital or his family. Instead, they talk a bit about medical school (grueling) and how Becca is liking the center (they’ve been amazing) and the Transformers franchise (stupid but fun) and whether Mel likes emergency medicine now that she’s had some experience under belt (yes). He makes her laugh hard enough that she snorts and a pleased look settles over him, smug in a pleasant way, and when they are crossing the crowded little bridge over the pond, he moves so he’s on the outside of her, his arm over her back, not touching her but intentionally shielding her, until they’ve reached the other side.
Feeling shoots through Mel at the act, a sharp pain behind her eyes like right before she starts crying, and she turns her head to the side to hide it from him.
“You okay?” His voice is soft.
“Yes,” she says, and then, “Yes,” again, brighter.
And she is, she is, it’s just that she wouldn’t have minded if he had touched her.
Which is a problem.
.
On the worst shift she’s had since PittFest, she calls him from the hospital parking lot. It’s two a.m. and six hours after she was meant to get off shift, and thus Becca is spending the night at the center, so there’s nowhere Mel is supposed to be and nobody to be with.
“Hi,” she says when he picks up.
“Mel?” His voice is sleepy, and she realizes all at once that she’s woken him up. Of course she has. It’s two a.m. and he’s not working. There are sounds from the other end, rustling and movement, and then muffled voices, unidentified words and then Langdon saying, “It’s work.” The door, and his voice again, less muffled, “Sorry. Is everything okay?”
Mel wants to say yes, yes sorry for bothering you at home with your wife and kids, but she’s just spent five hours at the bedside of an unidentified twelve-year-old burn victim, and when she’d gotten outside, far past the end of the day shift, she’d forgotten that her car was in the shop and she’d found herself standing in her parking spot, completely at loss for what to do.
“Can you come get me?” she asks instead.
Langdon is silent for a moment. “You’re at the hospital?”
She nods, before realizing he can’t see it. “Yes. South Deck”
“I’ll be there in ten.”
He is there in ten, and he’s brought tea in a thermos, which he puts in her hands, and a bran muffin, which she begins to eat ferociously.
When he asks her where she wants to go, she tells him that she just wants to drive around for a bit. She doesn’t mention her home or the time, and neither does he.
“Does your wife think you’re back at work?” she asks him when they’re at a stoplight.
He looks over at her, startled.
“I heard you tell her it was work and you’re not working, so…” She trails off. “Sorry.”
“No,” Langdon says. “I just—I was sick of the pestering. They’re going to reinstate me. I’m clean. I’ve got the fucking drug tests to prove it. And I’m just sick of being treated like I’m some kind of—” He huffs like there aren’t words to describe what kind of something he is.
Mel could list them anyway. “Sorry,” she says again.
“None of it is your fault.”
“No,” Mel agrees. “But I can still feel sorry. It isn’t your fault either.”
Langdon huffs. “I’m pretty sure that most everyone on planet earth would disagree with you on that.”
“Well,” Mel says. “Addiction is an illness.”
“Thank you for that insight, Dr. King.” His tone is snide.
“Sorry,” she says, quickly. “I’m—Sorry.”
He pulls the car over to the side of the road, and then sighs, reaching out and touching her left shoulder. It’s a careful touch, and Mel tenses right down to her toes.
He retracts the hand. “ I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s been a day. ” He runs his hand over his face while Mel watches him. He’s put on a jacket over his pajamas rather than real clothes, and it feels intimate to be looking at him like this, though there isn’t any skin uncovered. “Mel?”
“I’m okay,” Mel says. “I’m just like, really tired.”
“Okay.” He starts the engine. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”
By the time they make it to the parking lot and her empty apartment upstairs, however, Mel has started to cry. It isn’t really him. It’s the exhaustion, and the fact that they hadn’t found the parents of the burn victim, and a million other things. Also maybe him a bit.
“Can I do something?” Langdon says when the car is keyed off, but it sounds like he’s saying, Have I done something?
Mel shakes her head. “I cry a lot. This is normal.”
He doesn’t say anything to that, but he insists on walking her to the door, watching as she fumbles with her keys, still teary-eyed. “Do you need anything else?” he says, seriously. “Literally anything.”
She shakes her head. “No. Thank you, Dr. Langdon. For coming to get me.”
He smiles, sort of ruefully. “You can call me Frank, you know. It isn’t as if I’m practicing medicine right now.”
“Frank,” she says, and then smiles, still kind of watery.
“Go sleep, Mel,” he says.
In the morning, she washes out the thermos and places it carefully on the drying rack. It’s weird seeing it in there with her and Becca’s things, but even so, she leaves it for three days, moving the rest of the dishes around it so she doesn’t have to put it away, until Becca notices and asks about it, and Mel decides to call him to come get it. If only, she thinks, because he might be missing it.
.
When he finally does come over to get it, it’s ten a.m. on a Thursday. Mel has been up since four, and she’s working nights this week—not tonight but tomorrow and the next night—and therefore she’s supposed to be resting, but she doesn’t have the knack for it and is already anxious about the lack of sleep. She hates nights. And Becca is irritated because Mel had forgotten to tell her about the second shift, and she’s protesting by being bitchy, as if that would change any of it.
Still, when he calls, she comes out to the parking lot to meet him.
“Woah,” Frank says. He’s leaning against his car door, and it's sunny out, bright and clear and lovely, and for a moment, Mel wishes she could get in the car with him and just drive off. It plays like a movie montage: convertible, scarf, sunglasses. She doesn’t know who is playing her, but it's someone glamorous.
“Thank you for the thermos,” she says, shoving it out towards him. “Or the tea or whatever.”
He squints at her. “Are you all right, King?”
He’s always asking her that. “Not really,” she says, briskly. “But thank you for asking.”
She watches Frank recalibrate. It’s sort of charming. “Would pizza help?”
Mel decides that actually it would. “My sister is upstairs,” she says. “But there’s a place around the corner. If you don’t mind going to get it.”
He comes back with pizza (mushroom and olive, which isn’t her favorite but will do). Becca has boarded herself up in her room with her music blaring, and they eat in the living room on the sofa. Mel had been watching tv as she folded laundry (a frilly sort of period drama that should embarrass her, but somehow doesn’t), and it’s still pulled up. Frank sits down next to her, and without really discussing it, they watch four episodes in a row. Frank asks her questions as they watch (Is that the estranged brother? Why do they wear hats like that anyway?) and then grows quiet, at first because he’s actually watching and then because he’s fallen asleep. His head is smushed up against Becca’s embroidered pillow, and he sleeps messily, like suddenly he’s gained more limbs. He hasn’t. He’s the exact same size as always. Normal sized.
Mel watches another episode, and when he hasn’t woken, wraps up the pizza, discards the cardboard, and finishes cleaning the kitchen. She’s in the next room when he wakes up, and he comes in rubbing at his eyes. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ll sleep wherever. It’s a problem.” It’s deep into the afternoon now. He’s been there for hours. Becca will ask about him. Though she hasn’t emerged yet and seen him, she’s certainly heard him, and Mel will have to figure out what to say.
“It’s fine,” Mel says, clasping her hands together behind her back.
“I hate not working,” he says. Which is his way, she thinks, of admitting that he’s currently pretending to be working instead of fessing up to his family that they haven’t let him come back yet. Which is immoral and wrong. And she should tell him that.
“I know,” she says instead. “They’ll reinstate you.”
“My pee is clean and everything.”
“A joke.”
“A joke,” he agrees. “But it’s true.”
“The best jokes are,” she says, wisely.
And he’s laughing, and she’s walking him out to his car, and the sun has started to fade—the reflection of the sky in his car windows cast in shades of orange—and he opens the door and leans against it, still looking at her, still sort of smiling.
“What do you do? When you say you’re working?” she asks.
“Honestly?”
She nods.
“I just wander around.”
“That’s….”
“Depressing?”
Well, it was a bit. “Oh,” Mel says, remembering. “For the pizza.” She holds out a twenty to him.
“Mel, come on.”
“Well, you’re sort of unemployed, so.”
“I can afford a pizza still, I promise.”
“Okay,” she says, skeptically.
He gets in the car then, rolling down the window. “Let me know what happens with that spinster. What was her name? Tilly?”
“Tilda,” she corrects.
“Let me know what happens to Tilda. I kinda liked her.”
“Okay,” she says, and then watches as he drives off.
There’s nothing illicit about it, she thinks. Except the lying to his wife part, which really, has nothing to do with her. If he’s being illicit in other areas of his life, it’s hardly her concern. Still, there’s a sticky feeling in the pit of her stomach. It sits right there beside the joy.
.
Truthfully, Mel has never cared much about dating. She’s always been too busy—with school and with Becca—to make anything substantial work, and she learned in her college years that she doesn’t have the temperament for anything casual. But Samira has a friend from undergrad who is looking and she promises he is sane and STD negative, and Mel is single and she isn’t too proud to admit that’s sometimes rather lonely, so she agrees to go. “Just dinner?” she asks Samira. “Because I can only do dinner.”
Samira clasps her hands together. “I’ll text him.”
They meet at a hole in the wall Vietnamese place. He has brown eyes and shoulder length red hair and is very soft-spoken. He’s getting his doctorate in history at Pitt, specializing in medievalism, which Mel knows nothing about. They chat amicably and run out of things to say around the time the spring rolls arrive. Still, they muster through dinner and he walks her back to her car afterwards, keeping a polite distance, and it’s nice to have someone to walk in step with.
His name is Steven Paetz and he isn’t ugly and he isn’t unkind and he isn’t married and Mel could kiss him if she wanted.
But she doesn’t want to.
At her car, she tells him this as kindly as she’s able, and she doesn’t think he seems unduly disappointed. “It’s good to give it a try, right?” he says, and gives a little self-deprecating laugh.
“Yes,” she agrees. “It’s good to give it a try.”
When she gets home, she has a text from Frank. Pretending to be working a night shift, could bring by icecream. Becca likes moosetrack, right?
Mel should push him to stop the charade. But they’ll reinstate him soon, and why will it have mattered that he lied about a couple of weeks of work? It’s not harming anyone but him.
Rocky road, she texts back.
.
When he comes over, Frank smokes cigarettes on her balcony, which Mel doesn’t approve of. “You should try yoga,” she tells him. “It’s a more healthy stress reliever.”
“That sounds like a challenge,” he says, amused and still smoking.
“It wasn’t,” she says. But this is how he ends up coming with her to her Wednesday morning yoga class. It’s mainly old ladies and Frank causes a bit of a stir. He’s wearing workout shorts and a tight fit tank and he’s fitter than she was picturing him. She’d known about the hands and the arms, but the chest and the calves are new, and she tries not to stare, but thinks she’s sort of only a little bit succeeded.
“Do you think I’m healed now?” he asks her when they’re finished.
“No. You need to sign up for the eight class pass for full healing.”
He looks at her as if he’s not quite sure if she’s joking, but a smile peeks through, and he looks pleased at it. He’s all sweaty and he keeps brushing his hair back, which shows the line of his arm, and the old ladies are staring and Mel is clutching the strap to her gym bag and thinking, there isn’t anything wrong with this, I’m not doing anything wrong.
Still, it’s hard to remind herself that he is married when he’s not wearing the ring.
“I didn’t hate it,” he admits as they walk out. “Though I think I’d rather shoot myself than meditate every morning.”
“You might change your mind if you tried it. It’s…helpful.”
“You can only improve me so much, King,” he says, laughing. “There’s a limit.”
And Mel, Mel wants to ask him to clarify what exactly he means by that, but she’s already missed the moment by several seconds, and he doesn’t seem to have thought anything of it, because he’s still moving, taking her bag from her, too and loading the trunk and then rearranging the back seat so it all fits, talking all the while, and she’s just standing there, foolish, thinking he sort of every day takes her breath away. And it’s maybe kind of changing her life.
So there’s that.
.
When he gets the news he’s being reinstated he comes and finds her down in the pit. She’s on hour eleven of a night shift where she’s had to change her scrubs three times and he’s bright and shiny, freshly awake and showered and smiling too widely for it to be about anything else. “Yes?” she asks when she sees him coming down the hallway
“Yes,” he says, and then he’s embracing her, arms tight around her waist, and she doesn’t know what to do with hers, because he’s holding her, the full length of him tight and warm against her whole body, and there’s a sort of coiled energy to his grip like he wants to do more, lift her up maybe and spin her.
“When?” she asks when he releases her.
“First shift is next week,” he says, giddy like a child. “I still have to do NA and weekly check-ins and random drug tests, but who fucking cares?”
“Aw, Frank,” Mel says, rubbing his arms, excited with him. “I knew they’d reinstate you. You’re an amazing doctor.”
He turns sheepish suddenly, and when Mel looks away from him (fading smile, very blue eyes) she sees Robby and Santos are there, both watching them. Frank steps back from Mel so they’re no longer touching. “Robby,” he says, like there’s a lot more he wants to say.
“We’ll be happy to have you back, Langdon,” Robby says, and then he’s hurrying down the hallway and away as if someone were on his tail.
“Dr. King,” Frank says, dipping his head. “Dr. Santos.” And then he’s following quickly after Robby, shooting one last smile back at Mel, which feels like progress.
“So,” Santos said when he’s fully gone, drawing out the vowel.
Mel wrinkles her nose, and starts down the hallway.
Santos follows after. “You’ve kept in touch with Langdon?”
“Is that odd?” Though Mel mainly likes Santos, she knows that Santos doesn’t like Frank which makes things complicated.
“Um, yeah. He’s a drug addict.”
“We’re friends,” Mel says, stiffly.
“Friends?”
“Friends,” she repeats, firmly, and then ducks into South 9, and tries not to wonder if it sounded like she was lying.
(She isn’t lying. But just in case)
.
Frank’s first day back is a holiday weekend and it’s a shitshow. They were understaffed for the night shift, and from the very second the day shift walks in the door they’re playing a frantic catch up game. Mel doesn’t even see Frank until three hours into shift when she runs into him in the hallway. He looks strungout and elated in equal measure, and an elderly patient vomited on her shoes and she hasn’t had the chance to change them yet, and still, when they see each other they’re both grinning. “Mad, isn’t it?” he says.
She nods in agreement.
There’s a call for help from South 20, and he claps her on the shoulder and goes to answer it, turning around slightly to smile at her. And he’s missed it, she can tell.
She’s missed it, too. The pit with him in it.
.
It’s around noon when she gets the call to the nurses station. “Are you Dr. Melissa King?” a woman asks her.
She’s in her thirties, petite with a halo of curly dark hair and a button nose. Mel doesn’t know what patient she belongs to, maybe the pre-teen with the broken collarbone. That had been grisly.
“Yes,” she says, “Who—”
The punch catches Mel at the nose bridge and her nose buckles and her glasses snap. The plastic cuts into her face.
There’s chaos for a moment, the nurses making sounds of astonishment, and then someone—Jesse, she thinks—pulling the woman backwards and down the hallway. And Mel is pretty sure her nose is broken because blood has begun to stream down her face, fast and pungent. “Holy shit, holy shit,” Cassie is saying. “Mel, let me see.”
And Mel is letting her see, though she doesn’t think it’s good. There’s a sort of concerning pounding behind her eyes.
And then she can hear Frank’s voice saying, “What is she doing here?” and there he is, striding across the ER, and Princess and Perlah are talking rapidfire in Tagalog, and Santos is saying, “No, shit. Asshole,” and then looking over at Mel, something knowing and kind in her gaze, and Abbott is coming out of Trauma 2, pulling off his gown, coated in blood, saying, “What the fuck is the commotion out here?” and Frank is talking to the women, low and furious, and she’s saying something low and furious back, and Cassie is saying, “Mel? Mel? We’ve gotta get your head scanned.” and Mel’s broken glasses are lying on the counter in front of her, tipped with blood, hers or the women’s, she doesn’t know, and there’s a hand on her back, Cassie’s, which she wants her to remove but she doesn’t know how to say it.
Santos picks up the glasses. “What’s your prescription?”
“They’re just readers,” Mel says, her voice faint. “Plus one. I get headaches without them.”
Santos is off with the glasses, and Cassie is leading her to a gurney because all the rooms are full. “You need a nose brace,” she says. “Just give me one second.” She places Mel’s hands where she has been pressing. “One second.”
And there’s security, at last, and Abbott and Frank and the woman all talking, heatedly, and there, Abbott saying, loud enough for her to hear, “Well, you assaulted one of my fucking residents. So I’d be expecting some charges.” and then Frank is looking over at Mel, his expression something close to panic, and she feels like she shouldn’t be looking at him, but she is, and that’s his wife, she’d have to be stupid not to know it’s his wife.
Which, yeah .
Cassie is back with the brace, and she fusses over her, and takes her up to be scanned, and Mel says she’s fine multiple times over, though she feels slightly less than fine, and once her CT is clear, Abbott gives her a little pick-me-up speech in his brusque kind of way, and says that she’s all right to go, though she’s monitoring ten cases and there’s a packed waiting room, and there’s still seven hours left of her shift and they’re understaffed anyway. And then, as they’re talking, Matteo comes in and tells them there’s been a nasty fireworks explosion and they’re expecting at least fifty burn victims, so yeah, Mel isn’t leaving.
They give her some ibuprofen, and she gets to work.
.
Mel gets assigned one of the worse off burn patients: a little boy who is probably not going to make it, which is bad enough on its own, but it also reminds her of the burn patient from weeks ago, which makes it worse. And she sort of thinks, I’m not sure I have the strength to do this again today of all days. But then he’s coding, and she’s doing compressions to keep his heart going, and there’s Frank right at her elbow, asking all the right questions, and she answers them all the right way, and they do what they’re meant to do to save him, and the patient dies anyway. And she thinks actually, it was this that she didn’t have the strength to do today.
“Twenty minutes, do nothing,” Abbott says when it’s over. “Eat a granola bar, drink some water, whatever. Then come back.” And he ushers her towards the break room, closing it firmly behind her.
Mel takes a seat on the floor, and puts her head between her knees to try and calm her breathing.
The door opens and then closes and Mel doesn’t move because somehow she already knows, and then Frank is sitting down beside her and she feels sort of vindicated because she was right. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Mel just looks at his shoes until she’s brave enough to tilt her head upwards towards his face.
He’s looking at her in a very undefinable sort of way.
Santos had found her glasses from the lost and found and they’re humorously huge hot pink old lady glasses, but they were the closest to her prescription and that’s better than nothing. It’s a weird way to be having this conversation though. She almost wants to take them off, but that would make her feel vulnerably barefaced.
“Mel, I’m so fucking sorry,” he says.
“Yeah, I figured.” It was still nice to hear anyway.
“Abby, just…assumed some things.”
“Like what?”
He swallows, and then sort of looks at her neck, and then away. And Mel thinks, Oh. Like that hadn’t been obvious all along.
“She thinks we’re having an affair,” she says, sort of faintly.
Frank tenses. But, “Yeah,” he says. “She does.”
Mel leans back against the wall, tries to look at it objectively. She wonders if asking, Are we having an affair? is out of the question.
But then the door is opening, and it’s Samira, needing Frank. And Mel is meant to get back anyway, she has patients, and the twenty minute break was more of a suggestion, and she doesn’t ask, though she still wants to know. And she’s aware in a vague sort of way, that everyone will think it now anyway. Given what’s happened, she can’t even blame them for it.
He pats her on the knee, and then stands, and then he’s gone, Mel staring after him, and he’s still married and Mel is still… Well, does she have to say it?
.
It’s two hours later when she turns into South 13 and finds Abby Langdon sitting there with gauze on her left hand and a handcuff on her right. Mel thinks the cuff is probably overkill. In all likelihood Abby only weighs like a hundred pounds.
“Oh,” Mel says upon seeing her, and then turns back. “I thought this was…” Empty.
“Wait,” Abby says. “Just, can you…”
And because Mel is a sucker, she does, turning back around, arms folded across her chest, like she can keep her guts in.
“I got you good, huh? You’re definitely going to have a black eye.”
They need the bed so Mel isn’t sure why Abby is still taking up this one. And besides, looking at her is making Mel feel like crying. Which is annoying, because there are other more important things she could be crying about.
“I cut my wrist on the cuff,” Abby says. “Could you just…” She gestures.
Mel sighs, but she pulls the kit over so she can dress the wound. A nurse could do it, but they’re all busy and she’s here.
“I know this is a bad look,” Abby says when Mel is nearly finished. “I should’ve punched him. Not you. I know that. I majored in WGS.”
“I don’t think you should have punched anyone.”
“Yeah,” Abby says. “I grew up with brothers though. Punching was always the answer.”
“Well, that’s how people end up in here. You should find other avenues to vent your aggression.” Mel is finished, and she tosses the gloves. “I’ll talk to someone. There’s no reason for you to stay here as long as you’re cleared. And we’re very busy, so.”
“Look,” Abby says. “It’s just—Frank is a very difficult person to love.”
Mel’s nose wrinkles at that. The statement makes her feel defensive, which is not useful, but still compels her, like a persistent throb in her heart, like maybe she’d like to do some punching, too.
“I know this won’t make any sense to you, but we’ve been together a long time, and I just—I thought there weren’t any new ways that he could let me down. And I know that he’s not a bad man, no matter what bullshit he pulls, so I’m supposed to keep forgiving him, because he’s always trying. So fucking hard. But I’m tired of finding more of them. And I’m tired of forgiving him.”
“So don’t.”
Abby squints at her. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“No,” Mel says, honestly. “But what you’re describing, it just sounds very lonely. For both of you. So either decide you’re going to forgive him. Or stop.”
“I can’t stop.”
“Okay then,” Mel says. She thinks she should say, We’re not sleeping together , because they aren’t, but she doesn’t have the energy for this conversation anymore, so she just walks out.
Santos is heading past her, but she stops in the center of the hallway and comes over. “I can kill him,” she says. “I’ll even make it look like an accident.”
“No,” Mel says, shaking her head. “I don’t want anything to happen to him.”
“Okay,” Santos says, skeptically. “But just for the record, you’re way too good for him. By like a mile.”
Mel wipes at her eyes, though the nose brace is getting in the way. “We aren’t together.”
“No shit? Then why the fuck is his wife showing up and decking you?”
“I don’t know,” Mel says, looking at the ceiling. Florescence doesn’t help the strain or the tears, but it turns everything kinda blurry.
“You want me to deck her ? I could probably make that happen.”
“She’s restrained so it’d be easy,” Mel says. And then at Santos’s look, “ That was a joke.”
“It was funny,” Santos says, clapping her on the arm and then heading into South 13.
.
And somehow, despite it all (the whispers and the black eye and the endless horror of the day), working with Frank still feels like breathing. Mel likes talking to him—the way his brain works around a problem instead of straight through like hers does—but she loves the fact that in the most crucial moments there’s no need for either of them to speak. She likes her other coworkers. She and Cassie normally agree on the best approach to take with a patient, and Samira is easy, and Santos is…well, talented. She likes how steady Collins is and she admires Robby and she’s frankly a little frightened of Abbott. Dennis is teachable. But working with them doesn’t feel like working with Frank.
Working with Frank is like she’d always pictured medicine to be but it rarely ever is.
There are his hands, inside the chest cavity, scalpel, clamps, eyes, intent and focused, mouth, pulled to a straight line. “Yes?” he says.
“Yes,” she agrees.
And they watch the heart start to beat again.
There aren’t words for it. It’s pure feeling. But afterwards, he catches her eye and she sees the essence of it reflected back at her. She’d known she would.
“Good job,” he mouths.
And she smiles, and the day feels…
God, but the day feels—
.
At the end of shift, the two of them follow Abbott and Samira and the nurses out through the still crowded waiting room to the park, though neither of them has any plans on drinking. Mel isn’t sure what’s waiting for him at home. Something complicated. They sit on a bench aways back from the others. Frank, backwards, his hands crossed on the bench and his head resting on them, looking at her. He’s loopy from the adrenaline and he’s sort of smiling. There’s blood in Mel’s hair, and her nose brace is itching, and her feet are throbbing, and this job is one hundred percent as insanity inducing as ever, but Frank is sitting beside her, his thigh pressing against hers, and he’s warm and close and brilliant, and it’s hard to believe it, but she’s sort of smiling, too.
“Are you glad to be back?” she asks him.
“Fuck,” he says, and then laughs. “Yeah, I’m glad to be back.”
And his eyes sort of linger on her, and maybe hers do, too, on him, and there are worse crimes, Mel has seen evidence of twenty plus worse crimes just in tonight’s shift alone, but yeah, she thinks, they’re probably going to have an affair.