Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

X. Late Summer, 2025

Most days, the shift doesn’t really begin until he sees Jack. Everything before that feels something like a held breath, a necessary preamble before Robby can properly exhale. Before he finds him, Robby’s morning routine consists of a series of small, unremarkable acts: a jacket thrown into a locker, a phone silenced and tucked away, the last dregs of coffee swallowed down to shake loose whatever drowsiness he hadn’t yet shed after his brisk walk to work. And when he steps onto the floor of the ED, his gaze goes where it always goes, almost without aim, without any conscious intention, as natural as breathing, as instinctive as listening for his own name — his eyes wander, scanning the floor until they find the familiar shape of Jack’s body.

When he does find him, Jack is never alone. Instead, he’s laughing with Parker beneath the hub, or standing shoulder to shoulder with Dana as he finishes his notes, or chatting with Lena while she tidies her station, their voices tired and low. Robby doesn’t linger on any one moment for very long; he doesn’t have to. Just knowing Jack is there, moving through the morning, is enough — only then does something in him settle, click into place, ready to start, the hours ahead arranging themselves into something workable, something Robby knows how to move through.

He doesn’t know when it began, or how it became so embroidered into the fabric of his morning routine, but that brief and golden seam of time — Jack easing out of his shift, while Robby eases into his own — feels like an anchor, a small patch of dry land before the day’s litany of turning tides: one emergency crashing in after another, one wound to mend before the next, and the inexhaustible frustration of their patients all the while, most of whom wait too long and hurt too badly to meet Robby in good spirits when he finds them.

It’s ridiculous, maybe, how much that narrow sliver of time steadies him. Fifteen minutes, often less. Jack reporting the night shift’s unfinished business in a low voice, rasped from twelve long hours of talking, and Robby listening faithfully, enjoying its roughened edges.

Some mornings, Jack is his usual self: bright and easy, his charm effortless. Others, he is more reticent, something aching around his eyes, and Robby knows that the night has wrung something out of him that he’ll have to recover privately and in his own time.

And then there is another kind of quiet — Robby’s favorite, though he’d never say it outright — where Jack is prickly and short-tempered and well overdue for sleep. It’s a harmless, peeved sort of quiet, the kind that only shows up after a night shift has gone sideways in a way Jack will laugh about later, but only once he’s had rest and distance and a hot meal.

It’s endearing maybe because it’s so rare, so entirely unlike him, to see him so out of sorts.

Jack doesn’t talk much about his service, but there are tells: his near-infinite patience, the way he comes alive in a crisis, the way he can stand in the middle of chaos and think his way right out of it. The way that, when everything is going brutally wrong, he might shrug, might laugh, might mutter to nobody in particular that well, this beats being shot at, as if that alone is enough to put the whole world back into perspective. And perhaps, for him, it is.

So when Jack is bitchy, when he bristles at the minor irritations of the day, Robby can’t help but feel almost tender about it because — because, well, it’s a wonder. It’s a wonder to know, as Robby knows, that Jack’s capacity to complain and stew and be a curmudgeon also belongs to the same man who has survived things most people can’t even imagine — that this side of him, too, is one half of an unbelievable whole.

On such mornings, Robby might smile and offer a joke at Jack’s expense; he might even reach out to touch him, squeeze Jack’s shoulders the way a coach might do to steady a half-beaten boxer who’s won a slow and punishing fight. A brief, grounding press of his hands, a treat for Robby just as much as it is for Jack, whose muscles feel warm and solid beneath the kneading pressure of Robby’s thumbs.

That, then, is Robby’s routine: the walk in from the cold, then stowing his stuff in his locker, a brief check-in with Dana, and finally the search for Jack, after which the day can, at last, begin. Perhaps a touch, too, if he can be so lucky.

So when he steps onto the floor and Jack isn’t there when he ought to be, the morning stutters a little, goes briefly slack in the middle, as if Robby’s skipped a stitch.

At first, he thinks little of it. Jack is always getting pulled aside by a nurse, or a resident, or a case he refuses to leave nearly-finished. To kill time, Robby logs onto a computer, keeps a mental tally of who is coming in today, lets his hands move through the motions he knows by heart. The night shift hands off to the day shift, and Robby’s gaggle of students and residents begin to file in one by one. Parker is already gone, Lena’s station is empty, and still, Jack is nowhere to be found. Between tasks and even some patients, he waits, and he waits, and he waits, for Jack’s voice to surface somewhere behind him, for the warmth of his hand to land on Robby’s shoulder and squeeze.

It doesn’t come.

After a while, his eyes sweep the floor again, with slower, more careful deliberation. Dana stands at the desk now, shoulders tight, jaw set in a way Robby recognizes with some unease. That’s not routine, either, he thinks. It’s not like Dana to start the day this tense.

“Hey,” Robby says, stepping closer to her. “You seen Abbot?”

Dana doesn’t answer right away. “I have.”

Robby waits. The space between them fills with the low hum of the ED.

“You wanna tell me where he is?” he asks, baiting.

Almost imperceptively, Dana braces. “He’s upstairs.”

Upstairs. The word lands, but doesn’t make sense right away. Upstairs is Walsh and her team. Further upstairs than that are the empty wings of the hospital. Jack Abbot does not end a night shift upstairs.

“What’s he doing up in surgery?” Robby asks.

Dana hesitates again. “He’s not in surgery,” she says. “He’s . . . well, he’s on the roof.”

“The roof?” he repeats. The word sounds pitched, wrong in his mouth, like a bad joke. He almost laughs. “What do you mean he’s on the roof?”

Dana’s mouth tightens in a thin line. “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she says, lowering her voice. “I told him you’d find out eventually, but you know him. He said you’d just go ballistic and —”

“Holy shit. You’re serious,” Robby cuts in, his tone suspended somewhere between a statement and a question. “You’re telling me you had a conversation about this?” He runs a hand over his face, fingers pressing into his eyes. “Dana, are you telling me this is a thing?”

“I’ve known about it for a while now,” she admits. “It’s not frequent. And it’s never this long.”

“Okay,” he says, dumbly, when what he’s hearing now is anything but. “Okay. So, you’re saying he just — what? He just stands up there? Does some lunges, practicing for the big one?”

“I don’t know what he does. If I had to guess, he goes up, gets some air, comes back down before anyone’s the wiser.” She hesitates, then adds, with a faint, apologetic curve to her tone, “The only reason I even know is because — well, I know everything.”

The attempt at humor barely lifts the air, but she doesn’t seem to expect it to. Her voice gentles when she goes on. “It’s only ever a few minutes, Robby. Five. Maybe ten.”

“And today?” Robby asks.

Dana glances at the clock mounted up on the wall. “It’s been . . . a while.”

Something cold slides through Robby’s chest. He swallows around it, the panic catching in his throat.

“Hey,” Dana says gently, reading his face. “He told me I had nothing to worry about, and I believe him. I wouldn’t have kept this from you if I really thought he was in a bad way.” 

“But you’re telling me now,” Robby says.

Dana meets his eyes. She doesn’t stop him when he straightens, already glancing around to see what it'll take to get his bases covered while he goes upstairs. She seems to read his mind, motioning him to go, clearing the narrow space between them so he can pass.

“I still don’t think it’s serious,” she says, evenly. “But, yeah. I’m telling you now.”

The stairwell smells like concrete and stale air. Robby takes the elevator as high as he can, and then the stairs the rest of the way — two steps at a time, his badge knocking against his chest, the sound too loud in the narrow space and the darkness. With every floor he climbs, the hospital sheds another layer of noise until all that’s left is the sound of his own breathing and the heavy thud of his steps.

By the time he reaches the top, his pulse is in his ears.

The door to the roof is heavy. The handle is cold beneath his palm. For a moment, just a moment, Robby hesitates. He thinks of Jack’s patience, his steadiness, the way nothing ever seems to knock him off balance. He thinks of the way Jack has always had a support system in place for when the weight of his past would press too hard. And then he thinks of that quiet admission, offered months ago and set aside at the time: that Jack wasn’t meeting with his support group anymore.

The thought lands and won’t shake. What if the whatever new thing Jack was trying hadn’t held? What if whatever had been keeping Jack level had slipped, little by little, without Robby noticing?

He pushes the door open. Cold air rushes to meet him, sharp and clean, and Jack is —

Jack is there. Solid. Breathing. Alive. There. Alive. Alive.

Robby’s heart slams so hard against his ribs he thinks, briefly, absurdly, that it might just give him away before he ever so much as says a word. Jack is standing on the wrong side of the railing, too close to the edge, much too close; the distance between him and that steep fall downwards feels enormous and vanishing all at once, and Robby has to stop himself from closing the space between them in a few quick strides and grabbing him outright.

He clears his throat instead, forcing his voice to behave.

“Enjoying the view?” Robby asks, evenly.

Jack startles, just a little — a hitch in his shoulders, a sharp inhale that makes his chest rise before it falls and he turns to look at him. Robby sees the words Jesus fucking Christ more than he hears them, Jack’s mouth shaping them as he drags both hands over his face and schools his expression into something even, guarded, harder to read.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Jack tells him.

“That makes two of us,” Robby answers.

He watches Jack inhale, an irritated edge to the downturn of his mouth. “Who did it? Who ratted me out?

Robby feels something in himself bristle in response. Who ratted you out? As if that’s the problem. As if this is some harmless little habit everyone’s been politely tolerating. As if half the hospital hasn’t apparently known about this while Robby’s been walking around blissfully unaware.

But Robby keeps his expression even, his tone light. Reminds himself that Jack never reacts well to being fussed over too loudly, that they can have a proper argument about how batshit this is when they’re both within a healthy distance of the ledge.

“Does it matter?” he asks.

“It wouldn’t have been Ellis. Was it Shen? Evans?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. Snitches get stitches.”

“Yeah, well, apparently you’re the only one who still knows that.” His gaze flicks past Robby, to the open door behind and then, unthinking, toward the edge again. “Look, you can relax, I’m not going to — I was just —” He stops himself, jaw working. “I was getting some air.”

Robby nods, like that explains anything at all. “Last I checked, there’s plenty of air on the ground floor.”

Jack shoots him a look. “Don’t start.”

“I’m not,” Robby says, and he means it. He keeps his voice even, keeps his hands loose at his sides, resists the urge to step closer. What he knows he must ask feels so insufficient it’s almost laughable, but he asks it anyway: “You okay, Jack?”

“I’m fine,” he replies, clipped.

That bad then, Robby thinks, but does not say. “Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“If something went sideways last night,” he says, trying again, aiming for casual and not quite landing it, “there are better ways to cope, yeah?”

Jack lets out a short, humorless laugh. “Yeah? And you’re suddenly the authority on healthy coping mechanisms now, are you?”

Robby winces. “Jesus Christ,” he says, pressing a hand briefly to his chest, as if struck. He means it as a joke, a way to shrug off the sting, but some trace of how he really feels must show all the same.

Then, Robby says something he does not think through. “Big talk for someone standing that close to a ledge.”

Jack blinks. Whatever response he’d been bracing for, it wasn’t that.

“If threatening to push me off a building is your idea of suicide intervention,” he says, “you should go back downstairs.”

“I didn’t say anything about pushing,” Robby replies. “Maybe you slip. Maybe there’s a strong gust of wind and then —” He makes a soft, whistling sound, the kind you’d hear after a delayed fall in an old cartoon. "Keep making jokes and see." 

It’s a wicked joke — sick, maybe, to play around like this when the thought of losing Jack has Robby’s pulse actively skidding right now — but it works.

Jack snorts, sharp and surprised, the sound breaking loose into a laugh. “Nobody would ever suspect the good doctor.”

“Much less your best friend,” Robby says.

Jack shakes his head, still smiling. “Guess I better watch my step.”

And with that, at last, he does. He steps back, ducks through the railing, puts himself firmly on the right side of it. He leans there with his arms crossed, the metal undoubtedly cold beneath his forearms, facing the city instead of the drop.

It’s enough to help Robby’s lungs remember how to work — his first proper, deep breath since he spoke to Dana. He moves closer and joins Jack at the railing, close enough that their arms brush as they stand shoulder to shoulder, both of them looking out at gray skies. The wind worries lightly against Robby’s cheeks.

“Wanna tell me what’s on your mind?” Robby asks.

“Not really.”

“Tell me anyway?”

Jack inhales slowly. He keeps his gaze out ahead of them. “We had a domestic,” he says, eventually. “She came in with facial bruising. Broken wrist. Old injuries, too. Her story didn’t line up.” He exhales. “We got imaging done, set her to rights, then looped in social work.”

A pause.

“Then the husband shows up in the waiting room,” Jack continues. “You know how it goes: he wants to know where she is, why he can’t see her. And I thought —” He stops for a moment, then starts again, exhausted with himself. “I don’t know what I thought. He started banging on the glass, talking shit to the front desk. I figured if I made it clear we weren’t playing around, he’d back off, but I fucked it up, pushed too hard. Next thing I know, the cops get involved, and suddenly the whole thing flips.” His voice dulls. “Now she’s defending him and she’s — she’s tiny, man. 120 pounds soaking wet with a swollen eye the size of a baseball and she’s getting in between us. Says we’re overreacting, says I put words in her mouth, that she’s fine.”

The wind cuts between them, cold and metallic with the taste of impending autumn.

“They left together,” Jack concludes. He rubs a hand over his mouth, frustration bleeding through. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me, why I can’t shake it off. That girl’s not my first and I know damn well she won’t be my last, but I keep going over it in my head. I keep playing how it might’ve gone if I slowed it down, done less. Instead, I made it worse.”

Something twists in Robby’s chest. “You don’t know that.”

Jack turns his head just enough to glance at him. “Come on, brother. I’ve been doing this long enough to know when I’ve blown it.”

“You don’t know that,” Robby says again. “She wasn’t ready to leave last night, but she almost was. That’s not nothing.”

Jack scoffs. “C’mon, man, save it for the kids.”

“No, I’m serious. She came in. She told her story to strangers. She let you document it, let you put resources in her hand that she didn’t have when she walked in. Now she knows where to go if she needs help. Did she speak to Dylan?”

Jack nods.

“Good,” Robby continues. “So, she knows she has options. Maybe that doesn’t look like going to us — maybe she goes to the next hospital, the one he won’t think to check. Either way, it’s progress. And none of that disappears just because she walked out with him.”

Jack’s jaw tightens. He looks away again and out towards the city.

Somewhere beneath the churn of Robby’s nerves — the sight of Jack alone up here still fresh on his mind, too close to the edge for comfort — something else makes itself felt. He looks out at the expanse of buildings below them. It’s almost peaceful here — here where the city is muted, here where they can watch the ambulances go to and fro, but cannot hear their sirens. At this height, the world is a blur of motion and light, anonymous and undemanding, and nothing below can quite reach up to touch them.

Still, he cannot imagine standing on the wrong side of the railing the way Jack had — cannot imagine being that close to the prospect of death without intention, without it meaning something he could not take back.

“How long have you been doing this?” Robby asks, his voice quieted by a feeling he doesn’t yet have a name for.

Jack hesitates, then shrugs. “I don’t do this every shift, if that’s what you’re asking. Just every now and then, when I really need it.” He frowns. “Really, Robby, I’m fine. I just didn’t tell you because I knew you’d lose your shit.”

“Oh, sure,” Robby says dryly. “Anyone else would see you hovering over the edge of a twenty-story building and take it in stride. My bad.”

“Smart ass,” Jack snorts. “Believe me, if I wanted to go out, I wouldn’t do it like this. I’d have to be a real piece-of-shit bastard to leave that mess to sanitation.”

Robby frowns at that visual. “Why come up here, then?”

Jack shrugs again, smaller this time. “I like the quiet,” he says, as if that answers everything. “It’s a good place to be alone.”

Robby nods, taking that in. The funny thing is . . . he believes him. If Jack were lying, he’d seen it. He’d know. He watches the set of Jack’s shoulders, the way his hands brace against the railing. The skin between his fingers looks rawer than usual, chapped from the cold, from constant washing, the mundane hazards of their job. It must sting, he thinks. He imagines the feel of it without meaning to: the roughness, the chill, the way Jack’s fingers would warm slowly if only Robby could hold them, if he laced his fingers through Jack’s own.

It would take so little effort to do it. Nothing more than the smallest lifting and falling of his hand, already so close to Jack’s own they might as well be touching — it would be so easy. Or, at least, it used to be.

He shakes the thought away.

“You know you don’t have to be,” he says instead.

Jack looks at him.

“When shit goes south like that,” Robby continues. “You don’t have to sit with it alone.”

He lets out a breath, long and slow. “I know,” he says, “but that feels like too much to put on anyone when I’m all —” he gestures mildly at himself. “All fucked up, and mean, and bitching at you for checking up on me.”

“Like you did just now,” Robby says, only teasing.

“Like I did just now,” Jack agrees. “Sometimes, I need a minute before I can ask anybody else to tolerate me. Even if it’s you.”

Robby studies him for a second longer, then lets the moment ease. “I get needing a minute,” he says, lighter. “But if you had any concern for my blood pressure, you would’ve picked literally any other quiet place in the building.”

Jack nods dutifully. “Noted.”

“I’m just saying,” Robby continues. “The call room. A supply closet. The janitor’s lounge, even. I’m pretty sure Esme would let you in for a couple bucks.”

Jack gives him a level look, mouth tilting. “You done?”

“Almost,” Robby says. “The third floor’s been pretty empty since COVID. But if I had to pick a place to have an existential crisis —”

“Enough,” Jack cuts in, rolling his eyes. “I get it. Message received.”

The wind worries at them again, sharp enough to cut through the thin morning. Robby feels the cold settling in his bones now that the adrenaline’s worn off and Jack braces, too, sharing in his discomfort.

“Alright,” he says to Jack, motioning towards the stairwell door, “let’s get you downstairs before Dana sends somebody to perform a wellness check on the both of us.”

“Ah, so it was Evans who told you.”

“I never said that.”

“You might as well have,” Jack says, teasing and a little put out. “So much for keeping my confidence.”

“She was worried.”

Jack snorts. “Yeah, well. That tells me everything I need to know about whose secrets she keeps and whose she doesn’t.” He cuts a glance Robby’s way. “Must be nice being everyone’s favorite, Robinavitch.”

The door thuds shut behind them, sealing off the roof, the city, the ledge. The stairwell is dim and narrow and concrete, and as they go down together, they do not touch, but the sounds of their footsteps do, echoing together in near-harmony, a rhythm in the otherwise perfect silence.

At the first landing, Jack slows.

“You alright, brother?” Jack asks, his voice and his gaze pitched forward, towards the stairs, instead of the man beside him.

Robby does not need to ask precisely what he means by the question. He knows it. He knows Jack is not asking about the climb down, but instead the climb up, and what Robby saw there, and what he thought he might’ve been walking into. There’s still too much in his chest — fear, yes, but also a relief so big it's dizzying, and something so achingly tender beneath it that it unsteadies him — but he keeps his voice even.

“Yeah,” Robby says. “Yeah, I’m alright.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you, man.”

“I know,” Robby tells him, surprised by how quiet his own voice sounds in the echoing stillness of the stairwell.

“I wouldn’t. Least of all here, at work. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“I know.”

They keep going. Shoulder to shoulder, not touching, then almost. At one turn, Jack stumbles just slightly on the edge of a step. Nothing dramatic, barely enough of a misstep to register, but Robby’s hand comes out on instinct all the same, catching his wrist.

For a second, they are drawn close together in that narrow stairwell. And then the rest happens on its own — Jack backed to the wall, Robby close enough to feel the thud of it, and the answer of Jack’s pulse beneath his thumb. The concrete holds the cold, but between them there is none, none at all.

Neither of them speaks. Neither of them pulls away.

Jack’s breath leaves him in a long, unguarded spill, something eased loose from its careful keeping. Robby feels it against his chest, feels the way Jack settles into the hold, not asking for it, not resisting it either.

“See?” Robby asks him. “Hazardous. This is why you gotta stick to the ground floor.”

Jack’s reply is a soft huff, more air than sound. “Shut up.”

Who moves first? Who is it, between the two of them, that decides to close the distance?

In the end, Robby never quite figures it out; he only knows that one moment there is space between them, and the next moment there is not.

His arms wrap around Jack, as if through their own volition, and Jack folds into the embrace wordlessly and easily, his forehead slotting naturally against Robby’s shoulder, his hands coming up along Robby’s back. They hold each other in the dim stairwell, the cold walls, the echoing quiet, and neither of them says a word. To speak would be, somehow, to break it.

So, Robby thinks of all he cannot say. He thinks of words he did not speak aloud years ago, when they were still sleeping together and such words should have perhaps come more easier, but did not; now, there are things he could say to Jack that he can only say in jest, framed by humor or friendship so as to not give himself away; and right now, if he were to speak those words, he would give himself away he would not be able to take back.

They stay like that until the holding has done its work. Until Jack straightens first, breath steadier now. Only then do they separate, lingering, and turn back toward the stairs side by side, carrying the rest of it with them, intact and unspoken.

The next time they’re alone together, a few days later, it’s Dana who brings it up.

They’re not at work, which is perhaps why she feels emboldened to go there with Robby; instead, they’re standing in her kitchen together, her daughter’s footsteps thumping duly along the ceiling overhead. She’s mentioned, offhand, how quickly the costs of sending her youngest to state university were stacking up, and Robby had offered to drop off a mini-fridge he’d been meaning to get rid of — a squat, humming thing that’s been taking up space in his basement since his last move. Easy as anything, they drove it over after work, where he wrestled it out of Dana’s trunk himself, waving off her protestations that she could carry it herself.

Now it sits slotted against the wall, beside everything else Dana’s daughter will take with her to her new dorm.

Dana pours them both coffee, invites him to stay for a while, and, for a few minutes, they stand at opposite sides of her kitchen counter, talking absently about nothing in particular, laughing about some little, nonsensical thing that happened between Langdon and one of their regulars at work. It’s only when they sit down, and Dana cups her mug between her palms and turns it slowly to and fro, to and fro, that Robby realizes she’s been buying time.

“I feel like I owe you an apology,” she says, her voice casual in a way that doesn’t quite match up to the tired line between her brows, “for not tellin’ you about Jack.”

Robby lifts his cup, buys himself a second. “You told me when it mattered.”

Dana hums, unconvinced. “No, I told you when I had to. That’s not the same thing.”

“He asked you not to.”

She sucks her teeth. “He could ask me for the moon, too. Doesn’t mean I have to give it to ‘em.”

Robby smiles into his coffee. “You know, this is why he thinks you play favorites.”

Her brow arches. “Oh, really?”

“Apparently,” he tells her, “I’m your favorite.”

She purses her lips. “That’s a textbook case of projection if I’ve ever heard one.”

Robby smiles at that. “All the same.”

The look she gives him in return is fond, edged with fatigue. Then her hand drifts up, and she hooks the chain at her throat with her fingers, drawing it free from her collar. She worries the small gold cross between her fingers, thumb running along at its edges like she’s sanding it down to make it smooth.

“Y’know, I really did feel awful,” she says, quieter now. “Watching you look for him. Realizing you didn’t know where he was. And then when I figured out how long he’d been up there . . . I kept thinking, if I stayed quiet and wasted time and something terrible happened to him —”

“It didn’t,” Robby says gently.

“I know.” She nods, then takes a steadying breath. “I know. And, for the record, it’s not like he came up to me one day and volunteered that he’s been going up there, either. I heard something about it from the night-crew. I figured if Lena wasn’t nervous, then I didn’t have to be, either. But . . . I don’t know, Robby.”

Robby waits.

“There’s never any daylight between the two of you,” Dana continues. “You have your occasional disagreements, sure, but with the way you two act . . .” She trails off, searching. “I figured if he hadn’t told you yet, it was only a matter of time, so I kept my mouth shut until I didn’t.”

Robby looks at her. “What do you mean, the way we act?”

She blinks, surprised by the question. She pauses, runs it over in her head, like she’s been asked to describe the taste of air. “You know. You’re a package deal. Always have been — it’s the freakiest thing, you two act like you’ve known each other all your lives.”

“I mean, sure. He’s been with us for how long now? Of course we know each other.”

Dana shakes her head. “Yeah, but you were like that from the start. That’s what always got me. In all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you take to someone like that. Never that fast.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.” She pauses, her face softening around a fond thought. “Y’know, Adamson used to have this joke about you two — back when Jack first started and he kept picking up all those shifts with us, do you remember that? Monty used to say the only time we ever saw one of you alone was when you were out looking for the other.”

“Adamson said that?” he asks.

“All the time,” Dana says, smiling.

The ache of missing his old mentor arrives the way it sometimes does, like opening a drawer he’s rummaged a hundred times before and finding something unexpected at the back.

Dana chuckles at another though. “Y’know, Emery had this crazy pet theory about it, that you two had history before Jack ever showed up. Used to say that’s how he landed the job.”

“That’s a fucked thing to say. Does Jack know she went around saying that?”

“Yeah, but you know her. She probably didn't mean a word of it, she just likes to get under his skin.”

Robby rolls his eyes. It’s nearly reflex now, whenever Walsh’s name comes up in connection with Jack, easy enough to dismiss, but then he notices Dana still working the gold cross between her fingers. Her nervous habit, slowed but lingering. His thoughts slip, unbidden, back to the rooftop. Jack standing too close to the edge. He thinks of the shape Jack’s absence in the morning and how loud it had briefly been, during that narrow, terrible stretch of time between fearing the worst and being spared it.

Maybe that’s why he tells her the truth now, after all this time.

“She’s only half right,” he says at last. “I mean, I had nothing to do with him getting hired. That part he did all on his own.” He clears his throat, the words catching just slightly as he goes on. “But, yeah, the, uh — we first met before my residency.”

Dana’s brows lift in genuine surprise. “No kidding? Why didn't you tell me?”

“We didn’t tell anyone. Not even Adamson.”

Dana’s expression shifts, a small crease forming between her brows. “But I thought . . .” She pauses, sorting through a perceived discrepancy. “Didn’t Jack come up through Texas? You two didn’t go to school together.”

Robby shakes his head. “We didn’t meet in school.” He hesitates, then sits up a little. “Do you remember Charlie Walkiewicz? You met him once, at that networking thing we went to in Philly last year.”

Dana squints, reaching for the memory. “Was he the tall one? The one you knew from UPenn?”

“That’s him,” Robby says. “There was this bar he’d go to because it was one of the only ones around where he and his husband could dance together; where Rhonda — you met her, too — could be with her girlfriend at the time.” He clears his throat. “That’s, uh — that’s where Jack and I met.”

Dana furrows her brows, just slightly. It’s a familiar expression, the one she always makes when she’s setting something down carefully in her mind. He knows she knows what it means that they met there; he can see her working it out in her head, putting the pieces together.

“That’s why we say anything,” Robby adds.

Dana blinks, a little incredulous until she recovers. She shifts her weight, glances once over her shoulder before leaning in, voice hushed. “So, you two —” She pauses, recalibrates. “How long were you two together?”

“We weren’t together. Not really.” He hesitates, then clears his throat. “It, uh — it wasn’t very long. Just a couple of —”

“Weeks?”

“Days.”

Dana’s brows lift. Then a grin tugs at her mouth. “Alright, tiger. I didn’t know that’s how you move.”

“It isn’t,” Robby says immediately.

“It used to be,” she counters. “I always had a hunch you must’ve been trouble back then.”

He scrubs a hand over his face as it warms. “Dana, don’t make me regret this. Please.”

“I’m only playing.” Dana reaches across the counter and rests her hand over his, steady and warm. She lets it stay there. “Y’know, now that I think about it, it tracks. I mean, it explains a lot; I just — I can’t believe you never told me.”

“Well, I don’t really talk about it. It’s a lot to explain,” he says, which feels like a lie, so he offers something else, something honest: “I didn’t want it to change things.”

Dana watches him for a moment, and there’s that furrow in her brows again, like she’s been presented with yet another equation to solve. “I understand that, it’s just — I mean, you know about my brother. And Alana — well. I’ve had a hunch for a while now and with her heading off to college, I figure she’ll tell me any day now.” She lets that go, gives Robby’s hand a small squeeze. “I love you, Robby. This wouldn’t have changed anything. You know that, right?”

“I know,” he says, and he does. “But it wasn’t only my story to tell.”

Dana’s brows knit, just slightly. “Jack didn’t want anyone to know?”

Robby shakes his head. “No. I don’t think it was that.” He searches for the right phrasing. “He doesn’t advertise that he’s also into men, but I don’t think he hides it either. I think Ellis knows. I’m pretty sure they joke about it.”

Dana hums, absorbing that.

“I mostly only ever see women,” Robby goes on. “And at the time, we both thought it was over. No reason to make something out of it if it wasn’t going to happen again.”

She looks at him, careful. “And did it?”

He nods.

“Longer than a few days that time around?”

He nods again. “Almost a year,” he says, and watches the surprise on her face. “It was after Janie and I ended things. A little while after.”

Dana leans back against the counter, thinking. “I wondered,” she admits. “I remember that stretch. You were . . . I don’t know, lighter than I’d seen you in a while. Happier. I guessed you must’ve met someone.”

Robby nods, stares into his cup, the dark surface gone still. “I didn’t let it last,” he says, after a while. “I think I said something like I didn’t want anything serious, and I mostly believed it, so that’s how it went. Then COVID happened. Adamson happened. It all kinda fell apart.”

Dana doesn’t say anything. It’s as if she knows there’s more coming, senses it before he does. Her hand stays where it is, solid and warm.

And maybe because she’s right, or maybe because the silence itself seems to expect it, Robby goes on. “After that, Jack wanted to give me some time to find my footing again.” He swallows, the words coming a little slower now. “He was open to us trying again, but I kept waiting it out, kept thinking, if I rushed and tried again too soon, I’d just hurt him again.” He lifts his shoulders, a small, helpless motion. “Anyways, I figured it might’ve been better for him if we just moved on.”

Dana’s thumb shifts once, a subtle pressure, and she looks like she’s about to say something and thinks better of it. “And Heather,” she says instead, carefully neutral. “Is that when you started seeing her?”

Robby nods.

Dana tilts her head, considering him again, that same quiet steadiness in her gaze. “Does she know about any of this?”

He nods, throat working. “Some of it, but I never told her it was Jack,” he says. “When she ended things, she told me she felt like I never really showed up all the way. And I’ve heard that before. From Janie, from others.” He gives a faint, humorless breath. “Apparently I’m hard to reach.”

Dana watches him carefully.

“She made this comment,” he goes on, gesturing vaguely before he commits to the words. “She said it felt like there was always a third person in the relationship. And that it felt like she had to compete.”

Dana doesn’t respond right away. She watches him, the quiet stretching without strain. And then, what she says next is not about Heather at all. “Do you think you ever really gave him a shot?” she asks.

He frowns. “What do you mean? Of course I did.”

“Mmm,” she hums, nodding, like she’s just been told something that doesn’t quite add up.

Robby gives her a look. “What’s that mean?”

“Nothing,” Dana says, offering him an unassuming look. “It’s just — well, if you’re askin’ me, it sounds to me like you decided how it was gonna end before you even got there.”

It’s a gift of hers, that tone. Every now and then, it makes him want to speak. Robby lets out a breath that might almost be a laugh. “How long have you known me, Dana? When does it ever end any other way?”

“Maybe it could’ve,” she tells him. “Maybe he never really got the chance to prove you wrong.”

Robby doesn’t answer right away. He slips his hand out from beneath her own, resting it instead over his mouth, as if to seal a response that might come up from his throat.

“It’s been a few months since Heather,” Dana adds, undeterred. “Do you think it’s worth trying again? Doing it right, this time?”

He shakes his head, the motion small but firm. “I can’t do that to him again,” he says. “And even if I tried, I don’t think he’d want it anymore. I think that ship’s sailed.”

Dana exhales — a quiet, affectionate sound, something between laughter and a sigh. “Oh, Robby, what I wouldn’t give to spend a day inside that head of yours,” she says. Then, as if settling in for a longer conversation ahead, she rises and pours herself another cup of coffee.

September, 2025

What is all too easy to forget after the fact, what feels almost impossible to hold onto by the time Robby drags himself home after the worst fucking shift of his life, is that, right before everything went wrong, the day had nearly been a success.

Before Leah and Jake, before Heather and Langdon, and before Robby’s episode on the floor in pedes, he and the team had met the largest mass-casualty event their city had ever seen and held the goddamn line. Even the newbies, the interns and the med students, saw a crisis unfold in real time and they jumped into action.

And then, just before the work teetered on the wrong side of challenging, Jack appeared. As if attuned to the sound of his footsteps, Robby sensed him, somehow, before he saw him. He didn’t even have to think about — he just turned around, crossed the floor to meet him, and wrapped him in his arms before they got to work.

But even before that, before the sirens and the bloodshed that came crashing down on them like a wave they could neither outrun nor brace against, there had almost been for Robby another, smaller victory — because that day, for the first time in five years, he had worked straight through the anniversary of Adamson’s death. He did not opt for a sick day. He did not quietly take himself off schedule for yet another consecutive year. He felt the weight of the date somewhere deep and reflexive, because he could not help it, and he set it aside, deliberately, where it could not reach him and make demands. He made room. He put distance between himself and that biting grief, and its hold on him loosened just enough for him to think he’d conquered it.

That, too, is what gets lost in the telling: that there was a good stretch of the day where Robby really believed that he was going to walk out of that shift unscathed.

Now he is home, and alone, and his body knows better.

The walk from the front door to the bedroom is brief, but he feels every step, the ache in his knees settling deeper the closer he gets to the bed. Once there, Robby strips down without ceremony, letting his clothes fall where they land. He doesn’t even look down to them; there isn’t the energy.

After he’s changed, he sits on the edge of the mattress and stays there, head down and hands loose between his knees. The room is cool and dark and faintly disordered; this morning, he thought he might come home and clean. Now, like the clothing left on the floor, the mess belongs to tomorrow’s work.

Eventually, he lies down, pulls the covers up over his body, and sinks into the familiar hollow of the bed. He stares at the ceiling. He closes his eyes. He counts down from a hundred — he tries to, at least. His mind, unhelpful, keeps playing the day back over and over again, in useless and punishing circles. He breathes through it, starts counting again, bids sleep any way he can.

It doesn’t come.

He does not know how long he waits, only that it is enough to frustrate him, so Robby reaches over to his nightstand, gropes in the dark for his phone, and squints at the bright glow of the blue-white screen when it comes to life beneath his thumb.

Jack picks up the call on the second ring.

“How are you not sleeping yet?” he asks, instead of hello. His tone is scolding, or at least it’s supposed to be, but Robby can hear the smile in it all the same.

“It’s not for lack of trying,” he replies. “I can’t turn my brain off.”

“That’s adrenaline for you. Stop thinking about it so much and you’ll be out like a light.”

“Easier said than done,” Robby says. He closes his eyes. He can hear the distant hush of passing cars, the low rush of wind, footsteps hitting pavement. “You still walking home?”

“Mm,” Jack hums. “Got roped into a second round of beers with Princess and Donnie. You know how it goes.” He exhales. “I’m close, though. Ten minutes, maybe less.”

Robby shifts under the covers, turns onto his side. “Wanna stay on the phone with me till then?”

There’s a brief sound of movement as Jack adjusts his grip; the noise crunches softly over the receiver. “I can do that,” Jack says finally, easy as anything. “But no shop talk. We can talk about anything you want in the morning, but not tonight; I don’t have it in me, after the day we’ve had.”

Robby knows that’s a lie or, at least, not the whole truth. If he had to guess, Jack is probably drawing that line more for Robby’s sake than his own. He’s always been good at that: anticipating where Robby might get stuck, then steering them both around that tripping stone without making a show of it. The least Robby can do in turn is pretend not to notice.

“Tell me what you did today after your shift this morning, then,” he says.

“Nothing exciting,” Jack replies. “Went home. Slept for a bit. Hit the gym.”

Robby hums, noncommittal. “What’d you do there?”

A hint of amusement creeps into Jack’s voice. “I picked heavy things up, then I put ’em back down.”

“I could’ve guessed that, smartass.” Robby all but rolls his eyes. “Use some describing words. Paint me a picture.”

Jack’s smile comes through the line. “If you want a picture, all you have to do is ask.”

“I figured I should warm you up a bit first.”

“I’m warmed up plenty.”

“I’m sure you are,” Robby says, leaning into it because that’s always been the easiest way past Jack’s teasing. “So —” he drawls, deliberately overdoing it, “how heavy are we talking here, tough guy?”

Jack laughs. “You don’t give a shit about that.”

No, but you do, Robby thinks, but Jack might not see how much that matters. “Tell me anyway.”

The sound of footsteps changes over the line, as if he’s walking more slowly. “It’s nothing impressive. I’m trying not to wreck my shoulder again after the last time I PT’d,” Jack says. “One of the younger guys at my gym put me onto this app: you pick a coach, get sorted into a team, and they send you a new plan every week. I usually program my own training, but it’s nice not having to think about it, and anyways there’s a free trial —”

Robby yawns, wide and unguarded.

“See?” Jack says. “I told you. You don’t give a shit.”

“I’m just soothed by the sound of your voice.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s it,” Jack says, voice dripping with disbelief.

They lapse into quiet without either of them meaning to: Jack still walking, Robby still listening. Neither of them rushes to fill it, and Robby realizes how different this silence feels to the one they shared on the rooftop only an hour or two before — how Jack, never particularly unnerved by silence, filled up the quiet with talk of purpose, and war, and, of all things, bees.

Now, neither of them is particularly rushing to speak, despite how useless it is to be on the phone with one another and not speak; but the silence between them feels easy and intimate at once, measured in blocks and breaths and the call connecting them.

“I’ve switched to taking creatine,” Jack says, out of nowhere, like he’s circling back to finish a thought. “It’s a little over-hyped right now, but it works.”

“Oh yeah?” Robby says, already smiling.

“Yeah. You know me, I hate those protein shakes they’re always peddling at my gym, so I wasn’t too sure about it at first, but —”

Robby feels it coming a second too late — a yawn tugging at his jaw. He turns his face into the pillow, tries to smother it.

There’s a brief pause on the line.

“I’m hanging up on you,” Jack says.

“Not yet.”

“You’re falling asleep.”

“I’m awake,” Robby says, despite the fact that even he can hear that his voice has gone heavier, the effort slipping out of it as the sharp edge of adrenaline finally dulls. “Tell me more about your thrilling supplement regimen first.”

“Why? So I can listen to you snore the rest of the way home?”

“I don’t snore.”

The sound on the line changes: the open air falling away, the gentle, rippling clatter of keys. He must be home now. When he speaks, Jack’s voice sounds closer now that he’s indoors. “Oh? Did you finally get a CPAP machine?”

“Fuck you,” Robby says, smiling. “I never heard any complaints before.”

“What? From me?”

“Yes, from you, Jack. Who else?.”

Jack hums, something warm tucked into the sound, and maybe half-distracted, he says: “Yeah, alright. But, in my defense, I was just happy to be there.”

The line lands softly, almost carelessly, and Robby is surprised by how little it hurts. There was a time when mentioning things like this would’ve felt like pressing a hand to an old bruise, something tender they both instinctively guarded against. Now it feels different, somehow. Not so much an ache, more like a pull, a door that might open if he were only to test it.

Maybe it’s the knowledge that Jack is home now. Maybe it’s the distant realization that they’d only meant to stay on the phone until this point and the fact that Jack doesn’t mention it, so neither does he. Whatever it is, it gives Robby just enough courage to lean forward, just enough.

“I know we said no talking about work tonight,” Robby says, lightly, ready for pushback.

“Uh-oh,” Jack says, amused.

“You mentioned a therapist,” Robby goes on. He keeps his tone loose, casual. “I didn’t know you were going to therapy.”

Jack doesn’t answer at first. Instead, there’s a faint rustle of movement on the other end of the line. Without meaning to, Robby finds himself matching each sound with its probable cause, assembling the mental picture piece by piece: the soft shift of fabric as Jack shrugs out of his jacket, the dull thud of shoes as he takes them off at the front door. He can picture him so clearly — phone to his ear, peeling off layers and choosing his words, deciding how much to give away.

“I’ve been going for a while now,” Jack says at last. “On and off at first. More regularly lately.”

“How long is a while?”

Jack exhales. “Over a year.”

The number lands heavier than Robby expects: a year. Long enough that it should’ve come up, long enough that it feels strange it never did, given how much else they know about each other. There’s a pause between them over the phone then, like Jack knows this, too.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Robby asks eventually, unsure if such a thing is his to ask.

“It wasn’t because I didn’t trust you,” he says, seeing — as always – right into the heart of what Robby’s really asking. “I just got in my own head about it. And then I got embarrassed about being embarrassed, but it’d been a long time since I needed that kind of help myself. That support group I’d go to really used to be enough.”

Robby shifts against the pillow. He listens to more shuffling movements over the phone. He knows when Jack starts to take off the prosthetic only because of the hum that slips out of him; a low, absent sound Robby remembers from years ago. It’s an old habit, that hum. It means he’s in some pain.

“I wondered why you stopped going,” Robby admits. “It always meant so much to you.”

There’s a faint change on the line then – space opening up, the sound thinning, and Robby imagines Jack setting the phone down somewhere nearby after setting it on speaker.

“It was good for what it was,” Jack says, voice carrying from farther off. “I still drop in now and then, but there were some things I had to work on that didn’t feel right to bring there.” When he speaks again, he sounds closer to the phone, lighter on purpose. “Anyway, if you’re interested, I could always ask my guy for a referral.”

“What about me tonight is screaming in need of urgent mental health intervention?”

“I wouldn’t say urgent. You’ve probably got till Monday.”

“You’re funny,” Robby says, flatly. “I don’t think I’m built for lying on a couch talking about my feelings.”

“I’ve got good news for you: no couches. That’s more of a TV thing. And nobody makes you talk about anything you don’t want to.”

Robby stares up at the ceiling. The sharp edge of tension inside him has eased away over the course of their conversation, but he can still feel how wrung thin the day has left him, everything scraped out of him except this dull, floating fatigue. The idea of digging around inside himself, of finding something to hang over to a stranger, feels not just unappealing, but faintly impossible, like bleeding from a place that’s already dry.

“That’s the problem,” Robby says. “I don’t know how much I’d say, if it were up to me. I think I’d just sit there and waste everyone’s time.”

“I’ve done that. I’ve sat there and stonewalled. Turns out, that can still count towards the work.”

Robby shifts against the pillow, listening. “Sometimes you don’t talk,” Jack goes on. “Sometimes you talk around whatever it is you can’t touch until you can. And when you do, it — well, sometimes it hurts like a bitch and you walk out thinking you just paid good money to feel worse. But that’s usually how you know you hit something worth digging into.”

There’s a moment of quiet then, the line open between them and neither of them filling it. What Robby thinks, but does not say, is that he does not know how he’s found himself on the receiving end of this conversation. He knows how to name pain when it belongs to someone else, how to tend to a wound that isn’t his to feel, how to talk to patients about therapy, and trauma, and the dangers of suffering in silence. He’s always been good at that. He’s never been quite as good turning any of that inward.

But then again, today has already upended so much of what he thought he was good at, and here they are anyway, talking to one another at the other end of a nightmare.

“You can ask about that referral,” Robby says at last. “I just can’t promise anything yet.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Jack answers, like that’s enough.

There’s a faint sound on the other end of the line; nothing he can place other than a shift in movement or perhaps weight, as if Jack has settled somewhere. In the ambient hum of that brief silence, Robby feels the night press back in around the edges of his fatigue. It would be easy to let the conversation end here, to say goodnight, to leave the rest untouched — but then he remembers something.

“Speaking of promises,” Robby tells him, “I got your note to the vet’s family.”

“They showed, huh?”

“His sister did,” Robby says. “She came in the morning. She couldn’t get through it on her own, so she asked me to read it for her.”

The memory rises unbidden: Jack’s handwriting, careful and unmistakable; the deliberate way he folded the paper afterward and handed it back to that crying stranger, watched her press it to her chest like something that might hold her back. “It was good, Jack. I didn’t know you wrote like that.”

“I don’t know that I write like anything,” Jack replies. “It’s just something I picked up in the army. All those long stretches of nothing, all the shit you see when you're out there – lotta time to pick up a hobby. ”

“So you started writing about it?”

“Yeah, I mean, I had nowhere else to put any of it down.” He yawns, then adds, dry as ever, “You want to learn a thing or two about stonewalling? Enlist. Get shipped halfway across the world with a bunch of twenty-something-year-old guys. That’ll teach you what to do with your feelings.”

Robby lets that sit. He thinks of Jack in those years between when they separated and when they found each other again — younger, greener, learning the habit of deciding, over and over, what was safe to say aloud and what was not.

“Did it help at all?” Robby asks. “Writing to people, I mean. Having someone to talk to about it.”

“Not really,” Jack says. “I wrote more letters than I ever sent, and the ones I did – well, it wasn’t really about keeping people in the loop.”

There’s a faint sound on the other end of the line — movement, a shift, a mental image of him in bed, perhaps, just like Robby.

“The only letters I actually sent were to my family,” Jack continues. “My sisters. My mom. A girl I dated for a bit, before I enlisted. I wasn’t gonna tell any of them the shit I was seeing, it’d just scare ‘em. Why do that if I didn’t have to, right?”

Robby pictures it without meaning to: a pretty girl at a kitchen table, maybe, paper unfolded between her hands. He sees the creases, the carefulness of it, the same carefulness with which he’d unfolded a letter earlier that day, addressed to someone else entirely. It’s a stupid thing to feel — a sharp, misplaced lurch in his chest — but he feels it all the same.

In the meantime, the line goes quiet again. For a second, Robby wonders if Jack has finally drifted off, the day catching up with him at last.

And then Jack says: “You know, I sent you a letter once.”

That catches Robby off-guard entirely. “You did?” he asks, because he needs to hear it again.

He hums. “Yeah, when I was in Iraq. I sent it to your old apartment.”

Robby’s mind stutters. He recalls the narrow hallway of the apartment complex he lived in through most of his early twenties, the line of mailboxes on the ground floor, the way he’d filed a forwarding address before leaving for residency — and still, how little ever seemed to follow him from that apartment onto the next.

“I never got it,” Robby says. The words land heavier than he expects, a small, belated ache blooming in his chest over something he only just learned he’d lost. “I filed an address change before I got to New Orleans, but I hardly ever got my mail.”

“Yeah, I figured you hadn’t, or else you probably would’ve brought it up.”

“Yeah, no,” Robby confirms, still a little taken aback. “I can’t believe you even remembered my address.”

“I used to have it memorized, if you’ll believe it,” Jack tells him. “I walked back there a few days after we split; I knocked on your door, but you weren’t there, so I wrote it down on a receipt or something.” There’s a brief muffling sound over the phone, like he’s suddenly a little restless, despite the tiredness in his voice. “Anyways, I figured if it got to you, it got to you. And if it didn’t . . . well, trying was the point.”

“If I’d known you’d do that, I would’ve —” He stops himself, breath catching for just a second. “I don’t know why I never gave you my number.”

”Probably for the same reason I didn’t give you mine,” Jack tells him. “We were young.”

And that admission, simple as it is, rings true in the brief quiet that follows. They were young, Robby thinks. That is the beginning and the end of it: they were young, and stupid, and careless in the way young people always are when they don’t yet understand what can be lost by pretending not to want anything too badly. They could not yet imagine a future where they would hear one another’s voices again, or the old club where they first met would shutter its doors; they had not yet learned that time does not keep what isn’t taken when it’s offered.

And now, to think that Jack had gone back to his empty apartment, had thought of him years later, across distance and war and the long middle stretch of life Robby had believed belonged to forgetting —

Robby inhales, lets it out slowly, silently. The moment feels thin as glass — just as breakable, perhaps, if he presses too hard. “Your letter, Jack,” he says at last. “Do you remember what it said?”

“Not really,” Jack says and with a reluctance that’s a little unconvincing and, more importantly, unlike him. “Only bits and pieces.”

Robby swallows. He keeps his voice even, though the wanting in him has sharpened to something bright and insistent, a feeling that doesn’t ease just because he refuses to name it. “What do you remember?”

Robby waits for more. His heart ticks in his chest, steady and unmistakable, already bracing for the familiar deflections — a joke, a half-turn, the gentle dodge that would let them both pretend this wasn’t asked in earnest.

“Robby,” Jack says instead, and exhales. “What I wrote — I mean, it was from twenty years ago, man.”

His hesitation is confusing until it isn’t, until Robby remembers how long they’ve been practicing this other way of speaking — nearly four years now of circling, of keeping certain things safely out of reach.

Of course, whatever Jack wrote back then wasn’t written from the place they stand now. It came from earlier: after they’d hooked up in their twenties and before they tried, and failed, to make something of it again. It came from before the careful repair that followed, before they learned how to keep what they’d once wanted folded neatly into jokes and half-mentions, always in the past tense.

Robby knows what it would mean to ask anyway, to try and open the door they’ve agreed, without ever saying so, to keep closed but never locked. “I don’t care how long it’s been,” he says. “Tell me what you remember. Please.”

Robby can hear Jack take a deep breath on the other end of the line and then, slowly, let it go.

“I really don’t remember a lot,” he begins. “I know I was in a bad way when I wrote it. I never told you this — I haven’t told anyone — but before the medical discharge, I had something going on with a guy in my unit.”

That alone raises more questions than Robby anticipated, but Jack seems to anticipate it.

“It wasn’t serious,” Jack says, quick, almost reflexive. “I don’t think we even liked each other that much, but any port in a storm, right?” The line lands with the faintest lift, meant to pass for levity, perhaps, though neither of them laugh. “I don’t know what tipped anyone off to the fact that he was fucking around with guys — if he got caught doing something stupid, or just got sloppy and let it slip. I just know that when people started asking questions, he needed to get eyes off of him.”

Jack doesn’t say where that attention finally settled. Robby doesn’t need him to.

“By the time anything could really come of it, the IED happened,” Jack says. “Turns out that buys you a lot of grace.”

“Jesus, Jack,” Robby says, around the mess he feels in his chest. There’s sympathy there, yes, but threaded through it is something sharper, a frustration for him that has nowhere useful to land. “I’m sorry. That’s — I had no idea. That’s fucking awful.”

“Ah, it’s fine. That was all a long time ago, anyway,” Jack says, and the words barely seem to carry any weight at all — like Robby’s just apologized for bumping into him in a hallway, a clumsy elbow that didn’t even bruise. “When I wrote to you, I remember trying to make sense of how I’d ended up where I was. I kept thinking about what it would’ve taken to end up somewhere else. And that made me think of you.”

The line goes quiet for a moment under the weight of that admission.

“You sure you still wanna hear this, big guy?” Jack asks.

Robby smiles, despite himself. “What, that I made an impression? And after the day I’ve had? Yeah. Go on. I can take it.”

Jack hums, a low sound of acknowledgment. “Yeah, I don’t know what it was about you. You weren’t the first guy I slept with. You weren’t the last. But I thought about you for such a long time after.” He pauses, like he’s not sure he meant to say this much, then adds: “In that letter I wrote to you, I wondered what would’ve happened if we’d met sooner. If we’d had more time. If you’d stayed in Pittsburgh, or I’d been able to afford school and met you there, like your friends had.”

Robby listens, the possibilities stacking one by one, each offered gently and then set aside.

“You know, half the reason I enlisted was because I wanted out of my house,” Jack goes on. “I think I wrote something like I might’ve done just as well in New Orleans.”

“With me?” Robby says, incredulous despite himself. “You’re telling me you’d have run off with me after a weekend together?”

“Maybe not,” Jack huffs, the sound halfway to a laugh — soft, fond, a little worn around the edges. “For what it’s worth, I was probably still a little doped up from surgery when I wrote that letter. But . . . I don’t know, Robby. I thought I could’ve loved you. That’s what I wrote to tell you. That if things had been different, I would’ve wanted the chance to find out.”

Robby’s breath catches before he can stop it. Then, without sharpness or judgment, only the last thinning dregs of disbelief, he says, “You hardly knew me.”

“Yeah, but I know you now, ” Jack says. “And, in the end, I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

“No,” Robby says, the word coming out steadier than everything he feels. “I guess you weren’t.”

In the listening quiet that follows, Jack does not speak, so neither does Robby. He closes his eyes instead, and pictures Jack easing toward sleep the same way he is: heavy-limbed, worn down, curved onto his left side in the dark — the way he always used to do when they’d share a bed. He turns over what Jack has just told him in his head. Through the haze of his exhaustion, Robby feels something like hope, like courage or recklessness, or all three. Tonight has taken nearly everything from him, pared him down to something spare and aching. What remains is this: Jack’s voice in his ear, the remembered heat of his body beneath the covers, the almost unbearable wanting to feel him again.

He would go to him now, just to look him in the face and ask. He would drag himself out of bed and crawl across the city tonight to find him, if only Jack and his knees would let him.

Could you love me still? he would ask, if only he could see the look in Jack’s eyes as he asked it. If I asked you for another chance, would you give it to me?

For now, he makes do with this: breathing together on the phone, unguarded and slow, the quiet between them swelling and easing like water against a shore, all easy rhythm.

“Are you still going in tonight?” Robby asks, apropos to nothing.

“Hmm?” Jack murmurs and does not answer, so Robby has to repeat the question. “I think I said I’d go back to work at two if they needed me. I’m waiting on word from . . . Ellis. Or John, I think.”

“And if they don’t call you?”

There’s a muffle sound over the phone, like Jack has moved the phone away so that he’s not yawning right into Robby’s ear. “Then I’ll stay home. I‘m on for Saturday anyway.”

That leaves Robby a narrow margin of morning. He could wake early, dress quickly, stop by his apartment — it would add only fifteen minutes to his walk to work. Fifteen minutes, and he could see him. Fifteen minutes, and everything might tilt.

“Don’t go if you don’t have to,” Robby says, careful not to press. “You hear me, Jack?”

There’s no answer. Somewhere on the other end of the line, Jack must’ve slipped fully into sleep. Robby thinks of hanging up the way he might think of turning off a light he’s already too tired to reach — maybe in a minute, but not yet.

When Robby wakes, his phone lies on the pillow beside him, black and unresponsive.

He plugs it in on the nightstand and lies back, staring at the ceiling, wondering how long Jack stayed with him after he himself drifted off and the phone finally gave up.

He throws an arm over his eyes to block the thin, pale morning light. In the darkness it makes, his thoughts sharpen, crowding in: want and exhaustion and hope, all tangled together. And then, when he’s done thinking, when there’s nothing left to turn over except what he wants to say, he gets up and gets dressed.

Robby knocks twice, then lets his hand fall. He waits, heart climbing too fast in his chest, counting the seconds by breath alone. He already knows Jack is home; he checked before he left — typed out You end up calling Jack back in? as he pulled on his shoes, thumb hovering over the screen before he finally pressed send. Negative, Shen replied. Didn’t need him after all.

Whether Jack is awake is another question entirely. But before Robby has time to doubt, he hears him—footsteps, uneven and familiar, drawing closer before the door opens.

Jack blinks at him. It’s immediately clear he wasn’t expecting Robby—probably wasn’t expecting anyone. He’s still in the clothes he slept in: loose pants, an old t-shirt, one sleeve caught awkwardly between his arm and the crutch tucked beneath it. The fabric pulls tight across his chest, rides up just enough to bare a narrow strip of stomach.

“Robby, what —” Jack starts, then stops. “Don’t you work today?”

“I have time,” Robby says. He hears how fast it comes out, how close to breathless. “I told Gloria I’d be late. Figured it was the least I could get after yesterday.” He hesitates, then adds, “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Got it,” Jack says, brows knitting, his tone suggesting he very much does not. He shifts his weight; the crutch sounds lightly against the floor. “Didn’t get your fill of talking to me last night, big guy?”

“This is about last night, actually —” Robby starts, then stops short. “I figured we should talk about this in person. We won’t have enough time to at work and we won’t be alone —”

“Is this the kinda conversation we need to have alone?” Jack asks, a little wary.

Robby looks at him and swallows. The answer must show on his face because Jack ushers him into the apartment, guiding him in only so far that they’re standing together in the kitchen.

There’s a beat where neither of them moves or speaks, because to do either would necessitate figuring out how, and where, to start. It’s awkward — so awkward it almost tips into something ridiculous. Robby lets out a breath that sounds too much like a laugh to be accidental.

“Yesterday was the worst fucking day of my life,” Robby says, because the truth is as good a place to begin as any. “I didn’t think that was possible. But every time I thought I’d hit rock bottom, it somehow got worse. I wasn’t there when Dana got hurt. Then there was this issue with Frank, and it’s a long story, but he’s not coming back — not for a long time, at least. And then I couldn’t help Leah, and Jake —” His voice catches. “I lost Jake”

Jack’s brow furrows. “Hey, c’mon, you didn’t —”

“I had an episode at work,” Robby says, cutting in, not unkindly. “Whittaker saw it. Apparently a nurse did too, so there’s that.” He exhales, rough and humorless. “And I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with my life now, except that everything keeps changing and you don’t. You’re the only constant. You’ve always been.”

Jack studies him more carefully now, gaze tracking over his face like he’s looking for something specific in his expression — a tell, maybe, or some sign of reluctance, an inevitable but. He doesn’t rush to fill the silence between them all the while; he never does. It’s part of what makes this harder.

“Last night, you said you weren’t wrong about what you wrote in that old letter,” Robby says. There’s nothing left to lose now, he thinks, except maybe everything. “I know that was twenty years ago. And I know I fucked things up when we tried the first time —”

“Hold on,” Jack says, cutting in. “We split during COVID. Everything was upside down then. What happened to us wasn’t only on you.”

Robby shakes his head. “But I fucked it up earlier than that.”

“You didn’t —”

“I did,” Robby says, a little sharper than he intends. “I set us up to fail, and I regret that, and I regret all the things I never told you —”

“Like what?” Jack cuts in.

Robby blinks. “What?”

“If this is just leading up to an apology, you know I don’t need one. And if you’re serious about wishing you’d said something to me, then there’s one way to fix it,” Jack explains. His tone of his voice isn’t biting, it isn’t cruel, but it makes Robby feel like he’s being tested somehow. Like Jack is waiting for him to offer something that’ll let him relax the tension in his shoulders. “What is it you should’ve said?”

How to say it? How to start? Robby has been circling these regrets for years, worrying them like a loose thread. It feels strange, somehow, to finally speak them. But Jack is waiting for them, asking for them, and that is no small thing.

“I didn’t like us seeing other people,” he begins. “I hated sharing you. I hated that it was my idea when the truth is I didn't need anyone except you.”

Jack nods, watching him carefully. The light through the windows has shifted while they’ve been talking — brighter now, catching the flecks of green in his eyes, the depth of all that hazel.

“What else?” he asks, pressing just a little further, asking more from him.

“I hate that I didn’t let us become anything serious.”

Jack makes a face at that and Robby can see it – he can see the impulse in him to dismiss this, too, before he swallows it down and chooses instead to keep listening. “You’re gonna have to give me a little more than that, man. I don’t know what that means.”

Robby swallows, hard. How did Dana put it, all those weeks ago? He drags a hand over his mouth, buys a second to measure his words. “I told myself it wasn’t going to last, so I didn’t let it . . . matter that much.” He exhales, frustrated. “Or I pretended it didn’t.”

Jack’s eyes don’t leave him.

“I kept waiting for the part where I screwed it up,” Robby goes on. “Where you’d see something you didn’t like, something I hadn’t managed to fix yet, and that’s it — it’s over. I figured if I didn’t give you too much — if I kept a little distance and I never showed you anything too ugly — then when it fell apart, at least I’d still have you. As a friend. I thought that was the safer bet.”

Jack’s brows furrow. “You talk like I was expecting you to be perfect.”

“I know. The problem wasn’t you.” Robby drags a hand over his mouth, looking away from Jack for a moment and then back again. “Look, I — I don’t know what it is about me. The longest relationship I ever had only lasted because there was a kid between us.”

His voice falters; he swallows it down.

“I’m the common denominator in all my relationships, Jack,” he continues. “I don’t know what it is — I get restless, I spook, I always cut bait before it gets real. And you were real. I didn’t know what to do with that.”

Jack nods. Robby can watch the work in his neck as he swallows. “I get it,” he says slowly, “If you tell yourself it’s doomed, you don’t have to really fight for it, do the hard stuff. You don’t have to be the one who wants it more.”

His brow creases; something tightens there, in Jack’s expression, before it softens.

“But you knew I wasn’t going anywhere, didn’t you?” Jack asks. “Not unless you asked me to. And even then —” He breaks off with a soft, incredulous laugh, one hand lifting in a loose, helpless gesture. “You can’t scare me off, man. I mean, after all we’ve been through — how we found each other — I hate to tell you this, but at this point, I think you’re stuck with me, whether you like it or not.”

Robby exhales, and this time it shakes a little. “I didn’t know that.”

“Didn’t I make it obvious?”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Robby concedes and that — that feels more true. “But I get it now.”

Jack steps closer before he can say more. He reaches out, fingers brushing Robby’s wrist, a gentle stop. “Alright,” he says, careful, like you’re alright, slow down, like he’s talking to something skittish he doesn’t want to scare off. “Alright, so you fucked up. I did, too. I knew what I wanted and I didn’t fight for it. I didn’t push you enough, didn’t talk to you half as much as I should’ve.” He pauses. “What about now? What are you trying to ask me, Mike?”

Somehow, it’s his name in Jack’s mouth that does it. It makes the leap of faith he’s considering feel survivable, like what waits for him at the bottom isn’t stone, but water he can tread, clear and blue and gentle. Robby swallows against the knot in his throat the way he might take one last gulp of air before a dive.

“Last night, you said you weren’t wrong — about loving me, I mean. And the way you said it, it sounded like you still mean it,” Robby says. “And I’m asking if that’s true. If you still mean it.”

Jack just looks at him. For a beat, he looks genuinely stunned. “Of course I mean it,” he says, “Robby, of course I fucking do. I love you.” He lets out a short, disbelieving laugh. “I never stopped. Are you insane?”

The word yes nearly comes out of Robby’s mouth, but Jack doesn’t wait for Robby to voice it. One moment he’s watching him. The next he’s close enough that Robby barely registers what’s happening before Jack’s mouth is on his.

There’s a brief, breathless moment of surprise between them. Then, Robby’s hands come up instinctively, finding Jack’s jaw, sliding back until he’s cradling his face in both palms. His thumb settles just in front of Jack’s ear, warm against his skin, holding him there as one kiss rolls into another.

“Hey — hang on,” Robby says, pulling back only enough to speak, though he doesn’t let go. His thumb stays where it is, brushing once against Jack’s temple. He’s half-laughing, still dazed. “Am I insane? It was a fair question.”

“And I answered your question,” Jack says, leaning back in, lips catching the corner of Robby’s mouth. “And right now I’m trying to show my work.”

Robby studies him up close like this — the crease between his brows, the way his breath stutters when he’s trying to stay controlled. His hands tighten slightly at Jack’s jaw.

“You want this?” Robby asks. “Me? Like this? Because if the last twenty-four hours proved anything, it’s that I’m not exactly operating at full capacity.”

Jack stills under his hands, eyes steady. "Do you want this?”

Robby doesn’t look away. “I do.”

“Yeah?” Jack’s mouth curves faintly. Cause, if that’s true, that means I’m pushing you. I’m talking to you. You’re talking to me. No more Mister Nice Guy, you hear me?

“I hear you,” Robby says.

“Alright,” Jack says, and there’s something settled in it now. “Then, I’m not waiting on a psych eval to do this, Robby. I want this with you now. I’ve wanted this for years.”

Robby squints at him, still incredulous, but smiling despite himself. “Okay, but a couple months ago, you were seeing that guy you met through your sister. Whatever his name was. And you hooked up with Walsh, and —”

Jack frowns. “You knew about Walsh?”

“Yeah, because she told me,” Robby says. “Not you.”

“Well, that’s because you hate her,” Jack corrects. “Not because I love her.”

Maybe it’s his tone, or the look on his face, but it sounds unfinished to Robby — not because I love her, not the way I love you — and he might’ve liked to wait and hear that unspoken half, but he kisses Jack instead.

The shock that this is happening, even as it is happening, is almost dizzying, a clean rush of disbelief that nearly knocks the air from Robby’s lungs, except it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Jack kisses back, kisses him eagerly, with such a force and such a hunger that there can be no room left for doubt. He must know, Robby thinks, as he brings both hands over the back of Jack’s neck and pulls him just a little closer so that he can slip his tongue into his mouth and deepen the contact — Jack must know that is all Robby wants, all he’s ever wanted in the five years since he’s last had it.

He hums softly into Jack’s mouth for want of saying so, and lets himself be guided until they meet the nearest wall — Jack pressing him there, kiss deepening, licking into his mouth and catching his lip with his teeth however he pleases. And Robby, for his part, gives as good as he gets; kissing Jack the way he likes to be kissing, earning little noises from him, the sensation of Jack smiling against his lips — it’s familiar in a way that feels impossible after all this time, like something the body remembers long before the mind can catch up.

Inevitably, Jack pulls back just enough to breathe, their foreheads touching. “Jesus,” he murmurs, soft and stunned, a little breathless. “There you are.”

Robby laughs weakly, fingers tightening in the worn fabric of Jack’s t-shirt. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”

Jack thumbs over the corner of Robby’s mouth, catching the moisture there gently. “You did,” he says. “But you came back.”

The knot in Robby’s throat aches too much for words, so he kisses him instead — slides a hand up to cup Jack’s stubble-rough jaw and drinks him in again. And the sound Jack makes — God, that sound, it could kill him. It could raise him from the dead.

“How long do you have before work?” Jack asks in the rare space between kisses.

“I told ‘em I’d come in at nine.”

He hums, doing the mental math. “So, what’s that, two hours?”

“Probably an hour forty-five now,” Robby confirms. “Thought I’d account for the chance that this conversation wouldn’t be over in five minutes.”

“So, what you’re saying is you were counting on getting lucky. Is that right?” Jack asks.

His hands slip beneath the hem of Robby’s hoodie, palms warm over the fabric of his scrubs and moving south, and Robby realizes he’s smiling into the kiss, laughing too — having counted on nothing at all except Jack himself.

It takes a few attempts to get off the wall. One of them shifts, ready this time or the next, and then the other reaches back out — grabbing fabric, a handful of hair, a wrist — and then they end up pressed together again, breathless and distracted. At some point Robby shrugs out of his hoodie, loses the top of his scrubs somewhere on the floor without either of them paying much mind.

Jack’s bed, when they finally fall into it, carries none of the heat of when he was sleeping in it, but it smells like him. In different circumstances — had he but world enough, and time – Robby might stop to breathe in the scent of the sheets, the fleeting traces of Jack’s laundry detergent and sweat, and delight in the small thrill of knowing that this is something they can share again.

It is strange, perhaps only because it doesn’t feel strange at all, how easy it is to fall back into rhythm together. It’s a process of rediscovery, almost; It’s a matter of Robby tugging on Jack’s hair, of slotting his leg against the heat between Jack’s own, and testing to see if these things still produce that same eager hum Robby remembers. And the thrill of learning yes, in fact they do, even after all this time.

Jack’s weight on him feels perfect, but Robby wants him beneath him. He wants to watch him while he touches him, wants to study him carefully, memorize everything about him all over again, the way one might hold a piece of amber up to the sun. So Robby rolls them, reverses their positions so Jack is the one on his back now. He goes easily, spreading out beneath Robby without hesitation. He’s still as toned as Robby remembers, which is frankly a little absurd, and Robby has never forgotten the wash of freckles scattered across his skin, but it’s a different thing entirely to see them up close again. To touch the expanse of the warm, freckled skin of his stomach and feel Jack shudder beneath his hand.

This is so easy, Robby thinks, as his hands drift over Jack’s ribcage, fingers splayed, pushing his t-shirt up until it bunches at his collarbone and leaves his chest bare. Easy, he thinks, both warning and wonder, a reminder to slow down, to be patient despite the thrill. Easy as Jack’s hand finding purchase on Robby’s bicep, bare now that he’s wearing only an undershirt. Easy as the sigh that leaves Jack at the pass of Robby’s thumb along his left oblique, all the way up to the quick flutter of his heart beneath Robby’s palm, rabbiting there because of him. Easy as Robby letting his hand wander with more intention now, the pad of his thumb sweeping once over Jack’s nipple and back again until it pebbles under the attention.

This is so easy, Robby thinks. It’s a wonder I ever did anything to make this hard.

He leans forward, following the teasing his fingers have already done with the flat of his tongue, a slow drag that leaves a faint sheen of moisture on Jack’s chest. It earns a promising reaction from the man beneath him — a sigh, a subtle arch of his back — so Robby closes his hand around Jack’s other nipple, worrying it gently between his thumb and index finger. Jack shifts under the attention, hips lifting in response when Robby returns to saliva-dampened skin again, mouth lingering, a shallow pull of the mouth that ends with teeth grazing over sensitive flesh

Robby pulls back after that, meaning only to shed his undershirt, but the sight Jack makes stops him short. “God,” he says, before he can stop himself. “Look at you.”

The words come out raw, a little awed, and for a moment he wishes he’d held them back — wishes he hadn’t given himself away so completely before they’ve really gotten started — until Jack reaches up, curls a hand into the back of his neck, and pulls him down.

“Don’t just look at me,” he says, mouth brushing clumsily at the corner of Robby’s own, breath uneven.

His hand slides over Robby’s side, over the thin black cotton of his undershirt, and closes over Robby’s own, lifting it from his chest and guiding it lower, slipped beneath the waistband of his pajama pants and into the narrow space between them.

“Feel me,” Jack tells him. “Feel what you do to me.”

Robby does. He goes where Jack guides him, almost groans at the first touch of Jack’s cock in his hand, already hard in its wanting for him, an impossible thing to hide, or deny, or doubt.

Jack shifts beneath him, a small urgent movement, hips lifting just enough for Robby to help him tug his pants down and then kick them aside. Freed of that restriction, Robby licks his own palm, wetting it generously, and takes proper hold of him this time, stroking Jack once, slowly, slowly, if only so that he can pass his thumb over the head of his cock and spread the bead of moisture he finds there as far as he can. It makes the next stroke smoother, easier, so he does it again, which lends itself more easily to the third pass, the fourth, the fifth.

The sounds that spill from Jack’s mouth are broken, gasping things — breathless hums that rattle like something wounded, almost whining. His hips jut forward as he rocks into the wet circle of Robby’s fist, chasing a pace that Robby won’t give him.

It would be easier if they separated for just a minute, Robby thinks, distantly. He still has his clothes on, after all. It would be easier if Robby would stop touching him, if only for a few seconds, so that he might at least kick off his bottoms, and then peel off his socks as well, because he’s running hot now — sweating, in fact. He can feel it when Jack touches him, his hands on the damp skin of his waist, the dimples of his lower back. It would only take a minute. But Robby can’t manage it. He can’t find the discipline or strength of mind to do anything that might interrupt what’s started.

When Robby finally pauses, it’s only because Jack makes him.

With clumsy hands, he finds the hem of Robby’s pants and tugs them off, then shoves the waistband of his underwear as far down as he can manage before Robby helps him, shimmying so the clothes pool at his knees. Then, Jack moves beneath him with sudden intent, widening his legs to accommodate Robby’s breadth, beckoning him closer. Robby almost can’t look at the picture that makes, can’t spend more than a few, stunned seconds on the sight before him: the muscle of Jack’s thighs, the smattering of body hair across them, light until it darkens at the juncture of his thighs, his cock flushed and wet and canting slightly to one side.

He’d put his mouth on him if he could, if Jack would let him. But Jack’s hands lace over the back of his neck before he can try for it, guiding him where he wants him. Robby kicks the last remnants of his clothing off from his legs and then goes willing, settling over him, forearms braced on either side of Jack’s shoulders; it brings them close enough that their chests meet, close enough that the length of Robby’s cock rests flush and heavy against Jack’s own. Jack tilts up into the contact. Robby rocks down instinctively with him, finding the rhythm Jack is asking for without either of them having to say it aloud. Robby thrusts hard, and sometimes gracelessly, keeping a steady, quickening pace as best he can while Jack gasps in his ear, kissing the slick skin of Robby’s temple, saying his name.

“Robby,” Jack gasps, voice rough from panting. “Fuck, baby, come on, c’mon.”

God, even that — even just Jack’s voice, simple as that is, the warm huff of his breath against the shell of his ear — feels like it might undo him.

In lieu of a response, Robby goes to kiss him. But they’re moving against each other, chasing friction, and he misses his mouth. He settles for the cords of Jack’s neck instead, bared for him when he throws his head back into the mattress — so Robby kisses him there, licks him, tasting the faint salt of his skin. Then, he mouths his way upward, along the rough line of Jack’s jaw, over his stubbled cheek, bumping noses once, twice, before finally finding his mouth.

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss — rutting against each other all the while, fucking into the slick mess of sweat and precome between them, a compromise to the kind of fucking they would be doing if they’d only had enough foresight, and prep, and time. Jack drags his hands down from Robby’s lower back, down to the meat of his glutes, finding purchase there, pulling him forward, hurrying him along.

“I missed this,” Robby tells him between kisses, his voice gone thin and almost tender with it. “I missed — God, Jack, I’ve missed you so much.”

Jack pulls back just enough to look at him, searching his face as if the truth might flicker there. “Yeah?”

There’s something in his expression Robby can’t quite place — something searching, like he’s looking for some kind of tell that’ll give Robby away — and it makes him want to press his mouth to the furrow in his brow, to smooth it away. He reaches down into the scant space between their bodies instead and takes Jack in hand again.

“Oh, god, Mike —” Jack breathes, and the name fractures when Robby answers that touch with movement of his own. He lifts his head just enough to look down at where their bodies meet and groans, undone by the sight of it.

“Did you ever think of me?” Robby asks him, though he already knows the answer. He can feel it in the way Jack’s body moves, in the frantic, helpless nod he gives. Still, he wants to hear it. “Did you ever do this and imagine me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I — fuck, Robby, all the time.” The words tumble over each other. “I even dream about you. I couldn’t get you out of my head if I tried.”

Everything feels like it’s already giving way, too fast, too easily. It’s because of him, Robby thinks, because of both of us — both of them so turned on that the work of jerking Jack off now is so slick it's audible and punching out so much noise from him Robby worries he might ruin his voice for later. He knows it's over when Jack goes rigid beneath him, a sharp intake of breath, the dull line of his fingernails biting into Robby’s ass, and then he’s done, done — silent, eyes squeezed shut, and spilling all over Robby’s fingers. It takes Jack a few seconds to find himself again. It takes Robby nearly just as much time, momentarily breathless just at the sight of him, the heat of him, the feel of his come between their bellies. But Jack moves out from beneath him eventually, slowly and carefully, and the movement — which creates a dull friction, a slick drag of Robby’s neglected length against all that mess — makes Robby shudder.

He closes his eyes, like it hurts him, because it almost does. That’s why he doesn’t quite track what Jack is doing until it’s already happened. One moment he’s still, breath loud and uneven, the wanting in him so sharp it drowns everything else; the next, he’s on his back. He lets Jack move him, position him without thinking what for, trusting the safety of his hands. He would let Jack do anything he wanted to him now, he thinks dimly, the thought drifting through him without resistance.

Robby’s eyes open on a shaky breath. He looks down just in time to see Jack between his legs, head bowed, mouth following the dark trail of hair along his stomach, then trailing lower, until it closes around the head of his swollen cock. He swallows him down with unhurried intent, inch by inch, pausing, briefly, to lick messily up the tender underside of his length. He pulls back just as slowly, teasing and mean. Robby is trembling by the time Jack swallows him down in earnest, his hands clammy and shaking as he cards his fingers through the salt-and-pepper of Jack’s hair.

He does not mean to push up into his mouth; at least, not consciously. But before he can even think to apologize, Jack moans around him, using his free hand, the one that is not wrapped around the base of his member, to squeeze Robby's thigh. He could pin him down if he wanted to, Robby knows. He’s strong enough for it. He could anchor Robby down, keeping him firmly planted against the bed so that he doesn’t push into his mouth like that again. But Jack doesn’t do that — he looks up at Robby instead with expectant eyes, like he’s waiting.

Robby decides to test this, just a little. He cups the back of Jack’s head first, watching Jack carefully for some kind of tell, some flash of resistance or disinterest. He sees none. Jack pulls back a little instead, just far enough that Robby’s cock is resting on his parted lips, his mouth open and waiting. So, Robby presses up against the hold in his hip and it gives — Jack lets him push up into his mouth easily, closing his lips around him again, but not tightly enough that Robby can’t push deeper into him the way he wants to. Robby tests this again: withdrawing out of Jack’s mouth until he almost slips out entirely, pushing deeply back in. The answering hum Jack makes, the way his eyes shut not in discomfort but in something like bliss, tells Robby everything: he likes this, wants this, might even want more.

So, he gives it to him: with slow intention at first, then a little more frenzied, a little sloppier. He can’t last this way, fucking his mouth like this and at this pace. Robby wishes he could — would give anything for a few more minutes of this, or to be a few years younger if only so that finishing now wouldn’t require so much time to recover before going at it again. But it’s just too much, hot and dizzying all at once — not just the feeling of Jack’s mouth, but the way he gives himself over to it, the hungry sounds he makes, the way his hips roll faintly against the mattress as they fall into a new rhythm.

Robby’s grip tightens at the back of his head. “Jack,” he manages, voice gone rough, meant as a warning. Jack only hums in response, unbothered and unyielding, pushing forward to swallow him down, almost impossibly, even deeper.

“Jack — oh, god, please — please,” he says again, over and over, reciting his name like a prayer until he can’t speak at all — until Robby breaks with a shuddering gasp, giving in to it, to him, to the sensation of Jack swallowing down around him as he comes down his throat.

Jack pulls off after, mouth wet, and wipes it once with the back of his hand, almost absently. He looks unreal, Robby thinks, taking stock of him: lips pink from use, the light stubble around his lips visibly damp, his face flushed like he’s just run a marathon.

He might be as tired as he looks, because he slumps a little, resting his head against the muscle of Robby’s thigh, cheek pressed to warm skin. Who knows if it’s comfortable, what with the slight tremble that’s still running through Robby’s body and beneath Jack’s cheek, but Jack closes his eyes, clears his throat a little, and sighs.

They stay like that for a while. Robby’s fingers find Jack’s hair without thinking, nails tracing slow, soothing lines along his scalp, the back of his neck. Every now and then, Jack makes a small sound at the attention, something contented and tired, and shifts closer into the touch.

“You alright?” Robby asks, when his breath is finally steady enough for him to speak again.

Jack huffs a laugh, muffled against his leg. He tilts his head just enough to look up at him. “Alright?” he repeats, incredulous. “Alright might just be the understatement of the century.”

“That wasn’t too rough?”

Jack scoffs and rolls his eyes. “I hate to break it to you, partner, but this ain’t my first rodeo.”

Robby gives him a look. “What kind of rodeos are you running, exactly?”

“Let’s just say they don’t call me an ER Cowboy for nothing.”

Robby tries, and fails, not to laugh. “You’re really pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

Jack lifts a brow. “Aren’t you?”

“Understatement of the century,” Robby answers.

Jack smiles up at him before dropping his head again, resting his cheek back against Robby’s thigh.

In the quiet that follows, Robby keeps his hand at the nape of Jack’s neck, scratching thoughtlessly, as if he might anchor this moment between them by continuous touch alone. He closes his eyes, for a moment, long enough to feel how easy it would be to sleep and stay.

He can’t, though. There’s still work, which means he’ll have to drag himself out of Jack’s bed eventually, gather himself and his clothes. He’ll have to step into Jack’s shower, too, and let the hot water wash the evidence of what they’ve done from his skin. It’s a thought that, though practical, lands entirely unwelcome.

Still, he doesn’t move. Neither of them do.

Robby thinks about the shower again. He wonders, idly, if Jack could be persuaded to join him. He weighs the idea against the narrow margin of time he has left — knows they’d likely have room for nothing more than actually showering together. He thinks of steam, and soap, and water. He thinks of Jack’s flushed, freckled skin. It’s a simple enough pleasure, he thinks. But the thought of it, the tangible possibility of it now, feels like plenty.

Nobody talks much about the weariness in the air at work, the collective fatigue they’re all carrying, but it drifts through the ED like fog, tangible in the air they breathe, lingering on everything. It isn’t just the newbies that are tired, either. Mohan works a little quieter, her resistance and her compassion both still intact, but rationed. Robby sees a similar exhaustion in Perlah and Princess, the shadows beneath their eyes deepened, and even in Jesse, who steals away for a breather after someone from labs comes down to complain about mislabeled blood draws.

Robby feels it, too, of course. He’s exhausted, sore in ways that are both physical and not, still carrying the weight of yesterday in his body. But, the work moves along so he goes along with it. Much of the day is spent tending to the delayed fallout of PittFest, the cases that were on the whole neither as lethal nor as immediate as the cases they saw yesterday — twisted ankles, thrumming migraines, blown-out ears.

There’s not much time to breathe between patients. There never is. But there’s just enough room for Robby’s thoughts to wander, and wander they do, however briefly. He thinks of Dana and Heather. Frank and Adamson. Jake and Leah. Occasionally, he thinks of Jack: the taste of him, the muscles of his thighs, the sound of Robby’s name in his mouth. Afterward, too, in the shower: Jack tilting his head back beneath the spray of the water, eyes closed as he washed his face, so Robby could stare all he wanted, without the welcome distraction of Jack’s gaze.

He regrets, in a faint and ridiculous way, the act of washing the evidence away, of rinsing clean the mess they made of one another. It might’ve been nice, Robby thinks, if there was something left behind to show for it. A mark, a tell, even a bruise if it meant he could catch sight of it later in the mirror and carry the evidence of their morning together on his skin.

Janey texts him once to let him know that Jake, given the circumstances, is holding up alright. She promises to let him know when she hears back from Leah’s parents about funeral arrangements and relays what she says is their thanks. It’s the closest thing to a word from Jake he gets all day.

By late afternoon, Robby peels off his gloves for the last time and scrubs his hands, watching the water bead and run, thinking, unhelpfully, of Jack again. Shift change arrives the way it always does, in a low tide of movement and noise, and the thought of him is rewarded almost immediately with the real thing: Jack coming in through the doors, the strap of his backpack slung over one shoulder, looking bright-eyed and ready to step into the fray.

Their eyes meet, just briefly. It’s nothing anyone else would notice: a flicker, a recognition, the barest lift at the corner of Jack’s mouth. But Robby feels it all the same, the echo of the morning humming back to life under his skin.

“Howdy, partner,” Jack says by way of greeting, voice easy and even.

Robby feels himself smile, before he schools it into something less telling. “Howdy.”

Jack sees it anyway. His own smile answers back, warmer this time. “How’d it go today? Anything I should know?”

“Today was manageable. We saw some of the fallout from yesterday. We’ve got a guy in five on a CIWA protocol who’s been climbing all afternoon, and a woman in ten we’re still ruling out for a small bowel obstruction — surgery’s aware. Other than that, no news fit to print.”

Jack nods, eyes lifting to the board above the hub, already mapping the work in his head. “You on first thing tomorrow?”

“Nope,” Robby says lightly. He knows why Jack’s asking. He watches him instead — how one hand braces against the edge of the circular desk, how his eyes catch the blue glow of the screen he’s still pretending to read. Robby sets his own hands down beside Jack’s, close enough that the space between them feels deliberate without being obvious.

Jack makes a noncommittal sound. “Mm. Lucky you. I’m back here tomorrow night.”

“Not so lucky,” Robby says dryly.

“Well, you know, Dana helps with the scheduling and I’m not the favorite, so —”

“Sucks to suck,” Robby says, smiling. Then, casually, he lets his gaze drift. Perlah is mid-conversation with Javadi some yards ahead, back turned to them, distant enough that she can’t hear them, either. Princess already ducked out for the lockers two minutes ago.

“You got a lot to do when you get home tomorrow morning?”

Jack shakes his head; Robby catches the motion in his periphery. “Negative. I’ll eat, do some laundry, get some sleep before my shift. Be a responsible adult.”

“All day?”

Jack finally looks at him then, mouth curving just a fraction. “All day.”

Jack’s pinky shifts, the movement so slight it could pass for accident, brushing against Robby’s own. Robby leans into it without looking, closing the scant distance between them with a barely perceptible adjustment of his hand on the desk — just enough to feel the side of Jack’s finger against his. It’s a brief touch, a small, non-incriminating thing kept secret by the distracted churn of the room. And while it ends almost as soon as it begins, it leaves something fixed between them, like a promise made without words, like the knowledge that something is already waiting for them on the far side of their goodbye.

The next time Jack reaches for his hand, he laces their fingers together.

He’s lying on his side, back flush against Robby’s chest, and the faint smell of his soap lingers between them. It’s a habit they both share, cemented to the point of compulsion ever since the pandemic: taking a shower as soon as they get back from work. When Robby unlocked his front door and padded across the apartment to Jack’s bedroom, Jack was still in a towel.

It's a shame, almost, to smear the clean warmth of his skin with sweat again.

Still, Robby lets himself be guided as Jack steers his hand past his cock — already half-full between his thighs — and leads him farther down, past his balls, past the tender skin behind them, to the tight ring of muscle just there.

There’s so much lube on Robby’s fingers that it’s dripping, making a mess of Jack’s skin and, surely, the sheets beneath them, but it eases the way, takes the edge off of what might otherwise hurt. Jack’s breath shifts when Robby presses the pad of his index finger to his entrance, so Robby takes his time. He indulges in working him through it. He eases forward only a little, then pulls back slow, letting Jack settle into the sensation at his own pace.

So it goes — unhurried, almost self-serving for all that it turns Robby on to stretch this out as far as he can take it. Jack wants him to fuck him, and Robby will, but getting him prepared for it is its own pleasure; He moves as Jack allows it, down to one knuckle before drawing back out, then pressing in again with two fingers this time, and starting all over again — slowly at first and shallow, then a little deeper with every subsequent press inside him. It’s a wonder how easily Jack yields to it, how good he is for it — the sounds he makes, his sighs and hums. By the time Robby’s quickened the pace, Jack is shaking, breath turning uneven as he rolls his hips, pushing back into Robby’s palm.

“Think you’re ready for another?” Robby asks him.

“I don’t need it,” Jack answers.

Robby’s brows lift, just a fraction. “You sure about that?”

“I’m sure,” Jack insists, though his voice fractures when Robby presses in again, crooking his fingers just enough to brush that soft, hyper-responsive spot inside him. “Oh — Jesus fucking Christ, Robby — I’m good. You can fuck me already, I’m good. It’s just been a while, that’s all.”

Robby might’ve guessed as much, both from the tension threaded through Jack’s body and his usual preference for how they used to do this. Still, the confirmation kicks up a little thrum of pleasure in his chest. It’s not that he’s under any illusions that Jack was abstaining from sex all-together, waiting for Robby to return some day. He knows there have been others. Of course there have. But there’s something in knowing that Jack hasn’t let anyone have him this way in a long time; that whatever else he has done recently, he hasn’t done this. And now here he is, pliant and breathless against Robby’s chest, melting into his touch, yielding completely.

“If I fuck you now, like this, you’ll be sore later,” Robby tells him.

“Good,” Jack replies. “I wanna feel it tomorrow.”

Robby huffs a quiet laugh against his neck. “Or,” he offers, “we take our time and go slow now, and I fuck you tomorrow, too.”

Jack laughs properly at that, the sound bright and a little breathless. “Yeah? After my shift again? And when exactly do you think I’m getting any sleep?”

“You don’t want sleep,” Robby says, brushing his mouth along the back of Jack’s shoulder. He withdraws his fingers from inside of Jack, pulling almost completely out of it, just to see what would happen; he reacts instantly, a sharp hiss leaving him as he pushes back into Robby’s hand, chasing the contact.

“You’re right. I want you to fuck me,” Jack tells him. “And if you’re not going to do that, then go faster, or harder, or gimmie another — just do something.”

Robby does pull away from him then and, despite the glaring look Jack throws his way because of it, he isn’t doing it to tease him. He sits up a little, changing the angle so that he can be more precise with what he does next. If Jack wants him to fuck him, he thinks, better to do this way, where he can see what he’s doing instead of going mostly by feel alone. And the view this gives him, of course, is an added plus. He looks at Jack, drinking him in: the flush spreading across his chest and climbing up his throat, the damp curl of silver hair at his temple, the way his mouth falls open on uneven breaths.

He doesn’t need to coat his fingers in lube again, but he does it anyway; it can’t hurt, after all. When he presses his index and middle finger inside him, Jack takes him easily, smoothly, all in one go. He fucks him like that, for a little after, picking up pace and force, just a little, before giving him more. He knows the size of his hands, the breadth of his fingers; He presses a third digit in slowly, slowly, listening to the way Jack’s breath catches and then breaks. He answers it with movement, finding the rhythm and the position Jack is asking for without having to say it — building, quickening, hitting that perfect spot inside of him until Jack’s whole body tightens and reacts and he’s squirming, a little, away from Robby’s reach.

“Lemme get on top of you,” Jack manages after a moment, voice gone rough and low. “C’mon, Mike. I can’t keep going like this.”

Robby’s mouth curves, warmth threading through the tease. “You don’t think so?”

“Fuck no,” Jack breathes. He must be serious, Robby thinks, because he doesn’t push back into his palm this time, doesn’t arch in protest when Robby begins to pull out of him. “C’mon. It’s now or never, baby.”

“God, you’re bossy. Whatever happened to please?” Robby asks, because he can’t quite help himself.

It’s one push too far. Jack gives him a half-hearted slap on the thigh. “Man, fuck you.”

It’s easy work to get into position: Robby eases to lie down on his back and then Jack climbs on top of him, straddling him so both knees are braced on either side of his hips, one hand flat on Robby’s chest so that he can steady himself while the other takes Robby’s cock and lines him up against his rim. He inhales, his chest rising and then falling in one slow, steady breath as Robby enters him, and he’s beautiful, so beautiful, as his eyes flutter shut at the sensation.

For all his impatience, the preparation serves them well; it’s pleasure that overtakes his expression, not pain, as Jack sinks deeper, pulling off and then pressing back down on him incrementally, until Robby is finally, fully buried inside him, their bodies drawn flush, the otherwise silence of the room breaking around a shared, stunned exhale.

Robby keeps still, even though every instinct inside him tells him to move, aches for it after the growing heat of his own arousal that started the moment he started opening Jack up with his fingers. Those same hands find their anchor now at Jack’s hips, fingers digging in just enough to ground himself, to keep from chasing the rhythm before Jack is ready to set it.

“Okay,” Jack murmurs, more to himself than to Robby. He braces his hands against Robby’s chest, draws himself up in a single, trembling motion, and then sinks back down again, deeper this time. Again, but softer: “Okay.”

The first full roll of his hips is tentative, experimental — but the next gathers fluidity, and the one after that more so. It’s slow and coaxing, and Jack seems to luxuriate in it, despite — or perhaps because of — the effect it has on Robby. When he looks down at him, Jack must know exactly what he’s doing — taking him deep, but not fast enough to grant Robby enough relief, stretching the pleasure out until Robby’s patience fractures and he tightens his grip on Jack’s hips, thrusting up into him once, almost by accident.

Mercifully, Jack takes the hint. He straightens slightly, pushing up from his sitting position in a small, balanced movement that works because, despite the slight challenge of his right leg, he plants both hands firmly on Robby’s chest for leverage. He draws up, pulling nearly all the way off of Robby’s cock in a move that makes his breath hitch — and then he sinks down again. It punches a noise out of Robby. The next time he does it, Robby answers by driving up into him on the descent, matching his movements, coaxing a soft, startled sound from Jack’s mouth.

After that, they fall into a perfect rhythm: Jack controlling the drop, Robby driving upward in answer — each meeting matched by the sound of skin against skin, and their labored breaths, and the mattress shifting beneath them as the careful edge between them finally gives way.

At this angle, Robby doesn’t just get to feel him, he gets to watch him. Looking up at Jack, he drinks in every detail: the heat blooming across Jack’s cheeks, the taut flex of muscle in his arms, the way his body shudders when one particular thrust hits exactly where he needs it to. It’s almost enough that Robby thinks he could come on this alone — not just the sensation of Jack riding him, but the sight of him, the moans Jack can’t swallow back anymore, low and repeating.

Then, something about the angle they hit must land right on the mark, because Jack breath pitches into a deep gasp, and then he shudders out his exhale, and then tries at that exact angle again. “Harder,” he tells him.

Robby obeys without thinking, thrusting up into him hard enough. He tries for the same angle he stumbled upon, and it works. The impact draws a sharp breath out from them both.

Jack’s mouth curves, pleased. “Yeah, just like that, c’mon — I wanna feel what you’re doin’ to me later. Wanna walk around and think of you all day.”

The possessive edge of it hits Robby somewhere low and electric. “Jesus,” he breathes, tightening his hold on Jack’s hips. “You can’t talk like that.”

Jack only smiles wider at that, flushed and bright-eyed, his hair damp at the temples, his chest rising and falling hard as he keeps moving over him with slow, deliberate intent.

“If we do this —” he says, voice roughening when Robby meets the next roll of his hips with a firm upward thrust inside of him, “if we do this again, we do it for real this time. You hear me?”

Robby’s hands tighten, fingers digging in before he can stop himself. “Yeah,” he manages, unsteady. He shifts beneath him, driving up just enough to prove it. “Yeah, Jack. I hear you.”

“Yeah?” Jack pants, leaning down now, his mouth brushing along Robby’s jaw before pressing a brief, open kiss there. He drops his forehead against Robby’s own, breath hot against his skin. “You’re not — oh fuck — you’re not gonna go running off on me?”

“No,” Robby says, and means it. He reaches up and slides his hands to the back of Jack’s neck, holding him there, fingers splaying into the damp curls of his hair. His voice wavers despite himself. “I can’t. No, Jack, I — I think it’d kill me.”

Jack makes a soft, affirming sound, a little hum of pleasure, but whether that’s in response to Robby’s words or the way he’s fucking him, Robby can’t tell. “I’m not sharing you this time, Mike,” he says, the words rough, almost fragile beneath the insistence. “If we do this, I won’t — I can’t do it again.”

“No, no,” Robby cuts in, shaking his head, pulling him down with him on the next hard meeting of their bodies. “I don’t want anybody but you.” His voice fractures on the truth of it. “I’m yours. I’m all yours.”

Jack makes a sound at that — half laugh, half wounded exhale — and Robby draws him into a kiss, slow at first, anchoring him there, and then deeper when Jack answers with equal hunger.

After that, it becomes harder to stay measured. Harder not to chase it. Harder not to let instinct take over and pull them both into something wilder, stripped of patience and rhythm and finesse.

Jack is saying his name when Robby reaches down to fist his cock — thinking, a little hazily, that he probably doesn’t even have to, that Jack could probably come just like this, and wouldn’t it be nice to watch that happen? — but when he does touch him, Jack’s cock is so slick with pre-come there’s no friction at all, only slip, and then he realizes all at once that he can’t stop this now for anything in the world.

“Don’t stop,” Jack pants, voice breaking as his movements grow erratic, falls of rhythm, stutters. He strains closer, closer still, a hiss of pleasure escaping him with each breath.

Robby knows it’s over when Jack’s hands dig into the flesh of his chest, when his mouth falls open on Robby’s name again and again until the word dissolves into nothing but breath. He tightens around Robby’s cock in quick, involuntary pulses as he comes, striping Robby’s stomach and chest with his release. He shudders through it, panting roughly against Robby’s ear, and Robby holds him there, steady, feeling the heat of his release between their bellies, feeling the aftershocks ripple through him.

It’s almost too much — almost unfair, to feel that good and that desperate to chase his own pleasure and know he shouldn’t fuck Jack yet, not while he’s still so sensitive and still trembling around him. He stays where he is, breathing slowly through his nose, willing himself to slow down.

Jack senses it, somehow.

He shifts again almost immediately, trying to roll his hips, and Robby’s hands firm on his waist to still him. Jack shakes his head, still too breathless to speak, so when he tells Robby to fuck him, he’s mostly just mouthing it, lips shaping the words almost without sound.

It’s rougher this time, less careful. Jack rocks down into him, breath still unsteady from before, and Robby answers with a steady lift of his hips, meeting him halfway. Robby knows Jack’s tired when he feels a tremor in his thighs — a hitch in the roll of his hips, the way his weight shifts unevenly as he tries to keep the pace, one leg bracing harder than the other, the muscles of his thighs working overtime to compensate. Jack doesn’t say anything about it. He never does. He probably doesn’t even really mind it, knowing him.

“Hey,” Robby murmurs, one hand sliding from Jack’s hip up along his sweat-slick back. “Slow down.”

Jack shakes his head. “I’m fine.”

“You’re working too hard,” Robby tells him. “Lemme just —”

Robby readjusts them slightly, planting his feet more firmly against the mattress, takes more of the motion into his own hips so that he has all the leverage he needs to drive up into him, as hard and as fast as he’d like. Like this, it’s Robby who does the bulk of the work, and all Jack has to do is take it, and somehow even that is hot — the way he just follows along, holding Robby tightly, a little string of noises spilling out of him from the overstimulation of the work.

I missed you, Robby thinks, for what feels like the millionth time. I missed you, I need you, I love you, I fucking love you, he thinks, and thinks, and can think of so little else that he does not even realize he’s saying it until Jack kisses him.

Robby is coming before he has even fully realized it’s going to happen, and then it does — he surges up into him one, final time, and finishes inside of him, ruining their kissing with an involuntary, shaking gasp into Jack’s mouth.

They don’t separate immediately after.

They stay together instead, if only for a few more moments. When they move, it’s only slightly: minor adjustments so that they’re both more comfortable in the loose embrace. Robby shifts one leg out a little to ease a small tinge of discomfort. Jack lets himself rest, just about flopping down over Robby so that he’s a comfortable weight on top of him. When he wraps his arms loosely around Jack’s waist, he can feel the cool dampness of his sweat.

Their breathing slows, then steadies, into a shared rhythm.

It’s the breathing, in fact, the slight movements of their bodies that come from it, that finally makes the fact that Robby is still inside him almost unbearable when they’re both so sensitive, in different ways. Robby exhales and eases back, careful, hands steady at Jack’s hips as he pulls out of him and Jack makes a small sound at it — like it’s a loss, somehow, something to lament perhaps just as much as it surely must relieve him.

For a while, Robby thinks Jack might fall asleep on him like this, and Robby, too. He could take the dead weight of Jack’s sleeping body, he thinks. If not, what a way to go. But before that happens, Jack rolls off of Robby and lies down on his side, eyes closed.

For a moment, Robby just looks at him — at the flush cooling across his chest, no longer red but a faint tinge of pink, and the smear of white on Jack’s stomach, flaking now at the edges. And he’s tired, Robby can tell. For all their joking about it, Robby probably should’ve turned down Jack’s invitation to meet him at his place after he finished his night shift — but then they’d both have to wait longer for this to have happened, and they’d both already wasted so much time, waiting.

“I’ll be right back,” Robby murmurs, though he isn’t sure Jack hears him.

He slips from the bed on awkward legs, his knees duly aching, and pads into the bathroom, turning on the faucet and letting the water run warm over a washcloth until it steams faintly in his hands. He wrings it out, casting a spare glance at the sight he makes in the mirror, duly stunned by the wild mess of his hair — god, how did Jack get off to him looking like this? — and the flush on his face, the splotch of pink on his collarbone where Jack must’ve sucked on his skin between kisses.

When he comes back to the bedroom, Jack hasn’t moved much: he’s stretched out across the mattress now, one leg slightly bent, the other resting straight, the sheets wrinkled beneath his foot. His arm is tossed over his eyes, his triceps relaxed, but shapely at this angle. Bitable, Robby thinks. It might be nice to put his teeth to those cords of muscle, if only just to feel how little the flesh would give beneath his mouth — though he suspects Jack wouldn’t very much like that right now.

When Robby touches the warm cloth to his stomach, Jack exhales softly but doesn’t stir much beyond a groggy hum, a delayed shudder in his abdomen.

“Hey,” Robby says quietly. “Turn over for me a little.”

There’s no answer.

Robby’s mouth curves despite himself. He cleans what he can, wiping away the last traces of their release on their bodies. When he’s finished, he goes to rinse the washcloth in the bathroom sink, washes his hands, and does not lay back down before he sets the alarm on his phone for the hour Jack usually likes to wake before his next shift.

Then, finally, Robby slides back into bed beside him. He is sore, and tired, and happier than he has felt in a long, long time — but he is also awake. At least for now. So, he lies there watching the slow rise and fall of Jack’s chest, listening to the soft drag of his breathing the way one listens to an old song — one he might have sworn he’d forgotten, until he realizes, only through the act of listening, that he still knows every beat of it by heart.

Jack does not withhold anything from Robby in the months that follow, not in some demonstrative way that leaves him nervous or wanting, but Robby feels a difference when Jack finally, truly eases into the relationship. It doesn’t happen all at once, and not dramatically, but it is more like Jack slowly begins to exhale, as if he’d been holding his breath in some small way until he realizes he doesn’t have to.

Robby understands why.

After PittFest, after the way Robby came undone and didn’t know what to do with the pieces of his life once they’d splintered, there had been a stretch of time when even he wouldn’t have trusted himself. Robby tried therapy the way he approaches most things he doesn’t want to need — defensively, stubbornly, half-convinced it won’t warrant the effort. He went through three different therapists in as many months. It wasn't until he found someone whose worked with medical workers and first responders that he finds his match — a man who takes very little shit from him, who knows how to call Robby out and in without mistaking him for some kind of noble hero or some pity-project, broken beyond repair. Robby appreciates that. Occasionally, and only fleetingly, he finds it exhausting.

He and Jack have their grievances from time to time — small ones, sometimes sharp, but always manageable. Age-old habits resurface on occasion: Robby retreating when pressed, Jack bristling when he feels shut out. But they’re more honest in this second go at being together, less willing to feign disinterest, or hurt, or the things they want from each other. And what they want, stripped down to its barest bones, is simple. They want everything — the highs, the lows, and the unremarkable plateau in-between, where their life together is neither crisis nor endlessly victory, but just . . . life, banal and beautiful.

And then one day, after nothing particularly special except perhaps the meal they share together on the couch, it’s as if something between them relaxes. Like Jack has finally given himself permission to breathe out and take his next heady lungful of air. It’s subtle at first: the way he leaves spare clothes in Robby’s dresser again, the way he starts referring to the apartment as home without catching or correcting himself, the way he reaches for Robby in his sleep.

In the years between when they found one another again, Robby often thought of Jack.

In the years between when they broke up decades later, Robby often dreamed of him.

He dreams of him now, and more frequently. He dreams of moving a new couch into their apartment only to learn that they cannot maneuver it through the front door without disassembling it first. He dreams of a surreal dinner at his late grandmother’s table where Jack fits so seamlessly into the scene it feels as though he had always belonged there. He dreams of kissing him, of tasting him, of being fucked by him, of the familiar weight of his body in the dark.

When such dreams come, he wakes to find Jack beside him. Or he stirs briefly, shaken from sleep only briefly, when Jack bends to press a kiss to his temple before a shift, or after one. Waking beside one another became as unremarkable as sharing coffee, or splitting a grocery list, or Dana rolling their eyes at them when they think they’re being casual at work.

The cost of movers — and the quieter, accumulating costs of making their new place livable for both of them, but especially for Jack — means that Robby dips into the little pool of money he once kept for a motorcycle: some sleek, black thing he used to picture himself riding down along interstate highways, back when he was still working his residency as a young man. It surprises him how little it stings to let that fantasy go — how little distance, and isolation, and traversing to some far corner of the continent appeals to him anymore if Jack is not there beside him.

The invitation to Rhonda’s wedding arrives a year and a half later, in late spring.

Their trip to this Colorado wedding becomes the first time they request more than a long weekend off at the same time— a gamble that feels absurd until Dana suggests, with a look that implies she’s sure of what she’s saying, that they speak to Gloria. She’s right. By the time they sit down in her office, Gloria is already outlining the coverage: a temporary attending stepping in for the week — a trial run, really, a chance to see how she fits before offering her a more substantial daytime position now that the budget finally allows for another hire. In the meantime, Shen and Parker will rotate nights, Parker newly minted as an attending in her own right, the department adjusting easily between them.

The work, in other words, will go on without them — steady, humming, self-sufficient in their absence.

They split the twenty-hour drive across three days — stopping in Chicago to visit one of Jack’s sisters, then west again, through Missouri and into the long, unbroken flatlands of Kansas. They drive with the windows down, the vast plains rolling outward on either side of the interstate. Wind turbines turn lazily in the distance, white arms cutting circling arcs against a sky too large to hold in a single glance.

The ceremony is small, and fun, and unassuming in a way that suits Rhonda perfectly. She is less wiry now than she was in her twenties and thirties. Time has rounded her out a little — in the hips, in the face — in a way that sits beautifully on her frame, as though she has grown more fully into herself than when Robby last saw her. When her bride leans in and murmurs something that catches her off guard, Rhonda still laughs the same way she always has — loud, and contagious, and unabashed. It’s a smile that warms her face brilliantly, and shows off every tooth. At the reception, Robby and Jack find themselves at a table with Charlie and Henry Pratt, who look softer, and older, the way Robby knows they must look, too. Their daughter sits to Jack’s left, cheeks flushed pink from the altitude and champagne, listening with bright, undivided attention as Jack slips easily into another one of his night-shift stories upon her request — the crowdpleasers, the crazy stories people outside of medicine always ask about, the kind of chaos her fathers never quite see, working in a dermatology office and a Planned Parenthood.

When the music changes — something slower now, something old enough to please most of the adults in the room if not quite their children — and Rhonda invites people up to join them, chairs scrape back from tables. Guests begin to drift toward the dance floor in twos and threes, as though tugged there by an easy, unseen current.

Robby notices Jack watching.

His chin rests in his hand, elbow braced against the table. There is a softness to his expression — something unguarded, almost boyish, with the soft ambient light of the room catching in the brightness of his eyes. He watches the couples find one another, palms settling at waists, bodies softly swaying, smiling in the way he does when he doesn’t know anyone’s watching; all his happiness gathered, there, right in his eyes, the faint wrinkles that frame them.

His left hand lies open against the white linen.

Jack had stopped wearing his old wedding band a few months ago, without announcement or remark. Much like the way he had relaxed into their relationship, Robby registered the change the way one notices a slight shift in temperature — not because what came before had been uncomfortable at all, but because the adjustment was a subtle improvement, almost imperceptible except for the fact that it made something good feel, almost impossibly, better.

It happened sometime after they had a conversation about Heather — about the pregnancy, about what it had and had not meant to Robby, who had loved her, who had felt a real, complicated sadness when she announced she was moving back to Portland at the end of her residency — and who had also felt an unmistakable relief when she admitted she hadn’t wanted a child with him.

He and Jack had been walking home from dinner one night, streetlights throwing long, uneven shadows ahead of them, when Robby told him the news that Dana had relayed to him at work: Heather had gotten through her first trimester and everything was progressing perfectly, at last.

“Do you think you’ll ever regret not having kids?” Jack had asked him then, casual on the surface, but careful underneath, like this was not the first time he’d had this question.

Robby shook his head easily. “Nah. I don’t think I’m the fathering type.” Then, after a pause, he added: “Why, do you think you will?”

Jack huffed out a small laugh. “Absolutely not. Sof and I decided pretty early on we wouldn’t try for kids. Believe me, I’m good.”

“Why do you ask then?”

“Well, because of Heather,” Jack said. Then, after a beat: “And because you have Jake.”

“Sure,” Robby smiled faintly at that. After Leah, he and Jake found their way back to each other eventually, but slowly — they’d made amends, rebuilt something steadier, if quieter now that Jake was off at college and living his own life. “But I think the only reason we work is because I’m not his father.”

They kept walking. Their shoulders brushed once, twice, before drifting apart again.

“Honestly,” Robby said, “I never pictured myself as the kind of guy who gets married, has two and a half kids, the whole white-picket-fence situation.” He let out a quiet laugh. “Then again, I also never pictured myself making it to fifty.”

Jack cast a look his way. “Has any of that changed?”

“Well, I made it to fifty,” Robby said, smiling. “I know it doesn’t show.”

“Brother, if you have to say it —”

“Shut up,” Robby cut in, bumping him lightly with his shoulder. They drifted closer again, and this time Robby let his hand slip into Jack’s. It wasn't exactly like them to do this, neither of them particularly fond of public displays of affection or perhaps just too used to being wary of it, but - well, it felt right to do it, so he did.

“I don’t know,” Robby admitted, after working through another thought. “I can see it for us. Maybe. Exchanging rings, at least. One day.”

“Really?” There was no teasing in Jack’s voice now, just something faintly surprised.

Robby shrugged, suddenly a little embarrassed at his own earnestness. “Yeah, why not? It doesn’t have to be some big production. Doesn’t even have to be official. And only if you wanted to.”

Jack hadn’t said much after that. Just nodded once, and smiled a little, and squeezed Robby’s hand.

A few days later, the ring was gone. His wedding band lives now in the top drawer of Jack’s bedside table. Robby has seen it there, resting on a small jewelry plate beside a tub of lotion, a journal he writes in on occasion, a half-empty bottle of pain-killers he keeps close in case the occasional ache in his knee works up to a biting pain Robby might try, at least, to soothe away with medicine, and heat presses, and the massaging press of his fingers.

There is still a faint ribbon of paler skin circling his wedding finger. It lingers there, that paleness, as though that strip of skin has not yet learned to color — as though, out of long habit, it refuses to bronze and freckle the way the rest of Jack’s skin does after those first blazing days of early summer. The rest of him warms almost too easily, pink before turning to gold. But that narrow band remains lighter, deliberate in its reluctance, as if something about Jack’s hand is not complete without the shape of a ring. And maybe, Robby thinks sometimes, it isn’t.

The air through the open reception hall doors is cool and thin and satisfyingly clean in Robby’s lungs. He has had just enough to drink that the hesitation he might otherwise feel about dancing in public dissolves before it can fully form. There is no one here who will see them again. No one whose memory of this night will matter beyond it, except perhaps for his old friends, who’d seen Jack and Robby do something like this once before, so many years ago.

He watches Jack watching the dancers. Robby feels something loosen in his chest at the sight of it, and then reaches across the table, his hand folding over Jack’s own and gently squeezing.

“C’mon,” he says.

Jack looks up, blinking once as though surfacing from somewhere far away. “What?”

Robby tilts his head toward the dance floor, toward the slow swaying bodies and the low amber light. “Dance with me,” he says, and after a beat, softer: “For old time’s sake.”

Jack studies him for a breath — that old, reflexive caution flickering and fading — and then it gives way completely. His mouth curves, slow and certain, into a bright, long-familiar smile.