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Mel doesn’t touch people without asking first. It’s become automatic at this point, part of her daily life. Ever since she was a child, she knew that not every kid on the playground wanted hugs or to hold hands or surprise pokes in the ribs. A side effect of her sister. One of Becca’s triggers is unexpected physical touch, even from her closest family. (Mel remembers a horrible second aunt who kept trying to pinch Becca’s cheeks during Easter Sunday, when they were ten and twelve. She just would not stop until Becca was a mess of tears and rage and screams and the whole holiday was ruined). She needs to be carefully warned for the slightest touch.
So Mel asks. Mel asks patients if she can hear their hearts with her stethoscope, nurses if she can squeeze by them in Trauma One, Santos if she can give her a high five after a particularly dramatic save.
Frank does not.
Not in a malicious way, or a thoughtless way, or even an asshole way. Just in a “hello, it’s me,” kind of way.
And he only does it with Mel.
…
Mel startles the first few times his big, warm hand finds itself on her shoulder, morphing into a reassuring squeeze — this typically happens when a patient is getting aggravated. It’ll usually be accompanied by a hard, firm:
“Is there a problem here?”
Two weeks after Langdon’s much-scrutinized return from rehab, there’s definitely a problem here. A man with two penetrating wounds to the leg and lower torso who keeps trying to insist he needs to leave—even though surgery wants to observe overnight for risk of hemorrhage. The police haven’t arrived on the scene just yet, which makes things a whole lot worse (the EMTs are convinced that he was the aggressor in a road rage situation; McKay and Collins are handling the other participant in South 15). Try as she might, Mel just can’t get him to stop yelling at her, flinching and growing smaller and smaller with every bitch and stupid and idiot flung her way, overstimulated by the wailing monitor reporting his low blood pressure, the screechiness of his voice.
And then suddenly there’s Langdon, gently pulling her by the bicep behind his tall, lean frame, moving her without thought, his fingers hooked under her arm securely. And Mel immediately relaxes, because she is not alone, she is safe, and Langdon is here.
“What did you just say? To your doctor? Who is trying to keep you alive?”
When faced with a larger, pissed-off man rather than Mel, who is shorter and female, the patient goes quiet.
“Yeah, I thought so,” Frank says scathingly. “Leave my resident alone or I’ll happily assist with the AMA form. You’ll end up bleeding out on the street, but it won’t be my problem. You hear me?”
He takes her into the hall, hand still warm and loose around her bicep, asks her in a low voice if she’s sure she’s okay, if he’d like him to take over care for the “asshole,” he spits, vibrating with fury.
Mel shakes her head. “Thanks for the help in there,” she says. “But I want to see this one through.”
The smile she’s gifted is loose and proud and makes her shiver all the way down to her toes. “I’ll be outside if you need me to yell at him again.”
She doesn’t. The patient quietly lets Mel do her blood draws and cultures after that.
(“Okay,” says Santos begrudgingly when the dust settles and the story is recounted by Whitaker in awe in the doctor’s lounge. “Maybe he’s not all bad. Still hate his guts though.”)
…
Two months later, there’s a schizophrenic running through the ED—he’s a college student with steroids abuse induced psychosis, and a linebacker for UPitt. Mohan’s patient who came to the ER for heart palpitations, no one noticed his dive into a mental health crisis until it was too late. Fast and big. Not the greatest combination for security to catch. He keeps screaming that the nurses are the government coming to take him for his “parts”.
“Code Gray, Code Gray. All employees please be advised, Code Gray in the ED.”
Mel is walking from North 2, not paying attention, intent on getting some charting done, when suddenly she’s flying through the air. Shoulder-checked by a 200-pound man onto the ground, her tailbone lighting up with a nasty bruise, she’s too stunned to move. She’s sitting there, catching her breath and stinging with humiliation, when Langdon finds her, Princess fretting at her shoulder.
“I’m fine,” she keeps saying, though she doesn’t move to stand. Mel definitely doesn’t expect Langdon to bend down and put his hands firmly on her waist. Flames shoot up her spine when he picks her up without even a huff of effort, as if she’s weightless. He sets her down gently, carefully on her feet, thoughtfully pulling her scrub top down from where it rucked up during the scuffle.
“You sure you’re good, Mel?” he asks, bright eyes moving up and down her body, similar to how he looks at his patients, but with more tenderness. It’s an expression Mel is familiar with.
She nods vigorously, flushed and grateful, when he hands her the glasses that flung off her nose in the fray. They’re thankfully in one piece. “You, um. You shouldn’t be doing that. With your back.”
Langdon smirks a little. A douchebag smirk, as Santos would say. “Got a physical therapist referral two months ago from my primary. I’m a real boy now, Mel.”
Princess has gone silent, watching them with big eyes. Before she can say anything, the patient storms past once again, barely missing Langdon’s leg in the chaos. Mel can’t help but flinch when he starts screaming.
“Perlah, where the fuck is security?” Langdon says in his most exasperated voice. Mel can tell he’s angry—his jaw is flexing, a vein popping out near his cheekbone—when he tells her to take a break.
She does, but her lava lamp simulator can’t calm the pounding of her heart when she thinks of his hard thumb skimming against the skin of her waist, a line of heat like a brand in the quiet of the stairwell.
…
Somehow, during the same shift, they end up doing an ultrasound on a pregnant woman together. Mel’s not exactly sure why he’s here — the emergency department has a trained ultrasound tech for cases like these (“Abha is on break,” says Langdon casually when she looks at him askance. Lucky, thinks Mel. She wishes absentmindedly that residents got breaks).
It’s not a particularly concerning case. Ellie Luper fell, she explains with exasperation, while walking down the stairs. No signs of domestic abuse or symptoms of fetal distress.
“It was really stupid,” Ellie admits and she has that air of embarrassment that Mel had earlier and a bruise on her hip that corroborates her story.
“No worries, these things happen,” says Langdon, whose sobriety has apparently helped him get better at bedside manner. “I see you have an appointment with Dr. Warren in OB today. A short initial exam, we’ll see what we’re looking at, and we’ll send you right up.”
And the exam should be short, except Mel just cannot find the right angle to measure the femur length (baby is all curled up into himself, hiding his cute tiny fetus feet). Langdon is patiently instructing her when his big hand envelopes both hers and the wand firmly. “Sometimes we need to press a bit harder, there ya go,” he is saying, but it’s all Mel can do to swallow. She freezes at first and then relaxes when he flicks his and her wrists underneath the belly and the image becomes more visible. She likes his hands, she thinks idly as he circles the wand once more to get the crown-rump length (twenty five weeks and two days), his thumb pressed against hers like a secret kiss.
Ellie glances between them very slowly, before sharing an indecipherable look with Naomi, one of the nicer RNs on call that afternoon.
“Nothing to be worried about. Great movement,” says Mel, realizing with a sizzle of nerves that they’re both staring at where her and Langdon’s hands are touching, how close they’re sitting together, his shoulder bumped up against hers. She had to tell herself they’re not doing anything wrong, Langdon is just teaching her. Like normal. Like he would with Whitaker or Javadi (definitely not Santos, though). “He looks perfect, Miss Luper.”
“Yeah,” says Langdon lowly. He’s close enough that she feels his breath, cool and minty, against her ear. “Perfect.”
Mel has to splash her face with cold water after that, but otherwise the rest of the shift is relatively boring.
And then the bachelorette disaster happens about three months after that.
…
It’s in the small hours of their shift, when the sun has just barely graced the sky with her presence, when a party bus full of intoxicated women veers into the ambulance bay. They pile out, ignoring the very loud complaints and the desperate pleas of “No, ma’am, you can’t park here, this is for emergency rigs ONLY!” from security because the bride collapsed and can’t be woken up and they need help now.
They’re all packed into one exam room, which is a very bad idea and she honestly thinks that Dana must hate her a little for pushing her to handle a crowd of very noisy, very upset people who can’t follow directions for the life of them.
(“Face your fears, Dr. King,” Dana had said cheerily when Mel sadly nodded and picked up the chart).
It is an obvious case of alcohol poisoning (rapid labs confirm, BAC .32), so gastric lavage it is. She and Mateo manage to herd the group of distraught women out into the hall—they need to move too quickly to push them into the waiting room, so the others will just have to deal with barefooted women in slinky dresses and great amounts of distress. She doesn’t have time to think much as Mateo sets up the syringe and Whitaker handles the intubation, laying the patient on her side to decrease risk of aspirating on her vomit. This would be so much easier if she were conscious, Mel thinks begrudgingly, trying not to judge when she sees the contents of the stomach.
“Nice,” Mel hears once the procedure is complete and she’s snapping off her gloves. Langdon is leaning against the doorway with his arms crossed—he likes to lean on things, Mel notices, on tables, on the hub station, on door frames. “Donahue and Javadi hooked up the sorority brigade with IV fluids. Or tried to. They’re not the most cooperative bunch. Ahmad swept the rest of them into the waiting room.”
“Good,” says Mel with some guilty relief. She noticed slurring speech and sour breath before fleeing to perform the stomach pump. “Sorry, uh, but I’m glad they handled that. I’m not the greatest with upset drunk people.”
“Who is?” His head is tilted down at her. His cheeks hollow and she knows he’s sucking on a mint. Always peppermint. A habit picked up post-rehab, he told her once over a rushed lunch of protein bars and baby carrots. (Gloria apparently once told him the mints were unprofessional in front of Samira; according to her, Langdon responded, “So is relapsing on benzos. We pick our battles,”). “What’s the prognosis here?”
“Intravenous fluids, monitoring after extubation, re-exam upon regaining consciousness,” recites Whitaker. Langdon starts, as if just noticing he’s also there, throwing the used medical equipment into a hazard box. “So far her vitals are good. I’ll extubate shortly and re-check her blood panels. She might be constipated from the activated charcoal when waking.”
“Great work,” says Langdon, but he has a thread of irritation underlying his words that Mel doesn’t understand. Dennis is a very competent doctor.
Mel pushes up her glasses. “She’ll be fine. At least she’ll have something exciting to talk about at the wedding.”
“Ha!” Langdon’s laugh is sharp. He moves aside a little so she can pass, leaving Whitaker to the room. “It’s cute you think she’ll be able to spin this into a fun storytime.”
“I’m not cute, I’m optimistic,” says Mel.
“You can be both,” says Langdon, making Mel’s brain spin like a merry-go-round.
“Well, thank you,” she says, like an idiot, because what is there to say to something like that? Unfortunately Langdon has a habit of saying things that make her heart feel strange and her tongue clumsy.
“Anytime, Mel,” and then Langdon is off, headed for a nasty sounding traumatic amputation that’s two minutes out by ambulance according to a passing Perlah. Mel leaves him to it. She sees the party girls lined up in beds in the hall, hooked to IVs and bored to tears. She has to stifle a laugh when a few of them look up from their phones and sit up straighter upon seeing Langdon walking past. (Typical. She once witnessed an older woman blatantly try and bribe Dana for his number during a slow shift). That’s all the breather she gets before she’s pulled back into the rough ebb and flow of chairs.
There’s a fussy baby developing salmonella from a bath in a contaminated kitchen sink—admitted for overnight observation. A flustered runner who sprained her ankle on a jog, solved with a splint and mild painkillers. An elderly lady with chronic emphysema Mel puts on oxygen therapy and corticosteroids (and calls in a respiratory therapist for good measure). And then, as she steps into North 3:
“Hello, I’m Dr. King, everyone calls me Mel—oh, wow.”
A panicked young father holding his son by the scruff of his shirt: a five-year-old absolutely covered in glitter.
“He got into my mom’s crafts shed,” says the father miserably (Daniel Henbrooke, according to the chart). “I’m so stupid.”
“O-okay. Don’t worry, sir, I’m here to help,” says Mel. She sits so she and the boy are eye-level. “Hey, Billy. I hear you were having some messy playtime?”
Billy nods his head in a sulk. The glitter, Mel sees, is gold and pink and stuck in clumps in his hair (which she cannot tell the color of). His hands and shirt are thoroughly covered. She’s both bewildered and impressed. And delighted. Kids are so cute.
“It’s glitter paint,” says Daniel miserably. “My ex is going to kill me. I called poison control and they told me to come here right away.”
“Okay, Billy, did you eat any of this paint?” There’s the normal questions for a scenario like this. No glitter she can see in the mouth or nasal cavities or ear canals, thankfully. Mel is writing in her chart the type of paint (thankfully non toxic acrylic, what the heck poison control) when it happens. The boy reaches out and touches her face.
Wet, slippery little hands. Grabbing at her cheeks and swinging braid.
“Billy, no!” Daniel yanks him back by the collar and the boy wails in child wrath at not getting to do whatever he wants. “We don’t touch the nice doctor, okay? Billy, please!”
Mel sits there, blinking. Undoubtedly smeared with glitter. “Um, it’s okay. Billy, you shouldn’t be touching people without permission. I don’t think you’d like it if I ticked you without asking first.”
She spends the rest of the visit reassuring Daniel that it's really okay, glitter is tough to get off, but since there’s no evidence of ingestion and Billy has no symptoms of discomfort, they’re free to be discharged. Just a bath, watch him at home, and make sure he has normal bowel movements. She explains that the person on the other end of poison control must’ve gotten the brand of paint confused for a similarly labeled one that was recalled last month.
Daniel apologizes profusely at least twelve times (“Truly, I’m so sorry about this, can I get you, um, like a tissue or something?”), but Mel really is fine. She’ll find some time to wash up.
Or, she’s planning too, until Santos jumpscares her in the hall.
“Hey, Robby got the nurses lunch in the—oh, my god. Did you get mugged by a stripper?”
Mel, after much experience, recognizes the expression Santos makes when she’s trying not to laugh. She really never tries that hard, though. “Is it bad?”
“Sunshine, you look like you just survived a drowning by Lush glitter bath bomb.”
Mel has no point of reference for that. (Later, she looks up what Lush is and thinks it’s a noble attempt at a joke). “Child versus grandma’s glitter paint. The child won.” She tries rubbing her face with her palms, but she feels like she just spread it around even worse than before.
”Oh, that is hilarious,” says Santos. She’s not truly a malicious person, Mel has come to learn, despite her penchant for bullying and her inability to understand the appropriate parameters of patient care. But after two mandated meetings with HR after an ugly case that demanded CPS services and a rape kit, she’s mellowed out—or maybe she’s just better at picking her battles. And Mel has to admire her strong sense of values and her generosity in letting Whitaker live with her. “It’s honestly a good look for you.”
”Thanks,” says Mel, because she still has a hard time determining when Santos is being genuine or sarcastic or picking on her. She starts for the bathroom to see how bad it is but then Dana is paging her, telling her the bachelorette party (she uses the impolite term “drunk flock of birds”) is asking about the status of their friend.
“Asking, more like hounding,” Dana says and then hangs up the call.
The party is all located in the North hall so security can keep a close eye on them and nurses can see if they try to yank out their IVs (common in intoxicated patients). They’re a cluster of pink satiny dresses of various lengths—brides like their bridal party to have a theme color, which Mel knows because Becca has an attachment to TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress. Surrounding one girl on a gurney, they all look up when Mel stops in front of them. Their insistent eye contact makes her stomach twist in on itself, but she takes a deep breath and squeezes her hands behind her back to self-soothe.
“Please excuse my appearance, there was a small accident I haven’t had the time to clean up from. I’m Dr. King, Lucia Capresi’s physician, but please call me Mel…”
“Is she alright?” The woman on the gurney couldn’t be more than Mel’s age, but all of the bridal party are looking at her like she’s their de facto leader. She’s very pretty, with short dark hair and long legs crossed over each other. “I’m Emma, her maid of honor.”
“Yes, she’s responding well to treatment. She’s still sedated from the procedure, however. We expect her to be ready for discharge within the next six hours.”
”Six hours?” Emma is frowning. She has an IV in, but appears very sober. “You’ve got to be kidding me. We can’t wait that long. She has about a million different appointments to get to today. The wedding is this Sunday.”
Mel has the same uncomfortable feeling now that she did when approaching cliques in her middle school cafeteria. Specifically the type that would alternately be nice to her and Becca, and then call them “special” behind their backs. “I’m so sorry, but we do have to monitor her for any signs of withdrawal.”
Emma scoffs. She looks her up and down dismissively, eyes shooting to her practical scrubs back to her face, smudged with glitter. “What was your name again? ‘Mel’? Lucia isn’t an alcoholic. She just had a rough night. She should be fine to leave.”
“No, no, I understand,” Mel is saying, even though she doesn’t, Lucia nearly died, and they’re talking about appointments. She’s no good at this, navigating social relationships she doesn’t understand, trying to figure out how best to explain the situation. And then all of the women’s eyes all go very wide and their mouths open a little and she feels a warm tall presence behind her. She knows who it is before she turns, but she’s still gratified to see his open, handsome face. He has that air of bright smugness and satisfaction that means the amputation victim survived. “Hello, Dr. Langdon. Good news, I hope?”
“Straight up to surgery with perfect vitals and the leg on ice,” says Langdon and she knows this is his version of bragging. He’s a tight coil of energy, rolling back on his heels, and she almost goes a little breathless with how beautiful he becomes when he is genuinely happy. “Garcia couldn’t even say any sly shit like she normally does. A tight ten minutes and it was all over.”
”That’s great,” she says, thrilled for him. “But please excuse me. I’m letting Lucia’s friends know—”
“Oh shit, Mel.” Her breath stops in her chest when she feels his fingers, warm and gentle, on her chin. His smile is smaller, his eyes are closer. He takes a step solidly into her space and her skin begins to vibrate. “What the hell happened?”
Mel has gotten used to his random touches, full of affection sometimes and practicality in others. The press of his leg against hers under the table during a quick lunch. A guiding hand on her lower back when she takes a wrong turn in the parking lot looking for his car. A playful bump of his shoulder against hers after a successful resuscitation. She quietly, guiltily enjoys them all. They’re friends now, hanging outside of work in his sad little apartment to watch movies, or eating at her favorite deli across from Becca’s care center. It’s not every day—after the divorce, Abby lets him have partial custody of the children, thank God, so that takes up a good chunk of his time—but it’s often enough that she’s not averse to his physicality any longer. In fact, she looks forward to it most days.
But he’s never touched her face before.
“Five-year-old got into grandmother’s arts and crafts paint,” she says without thinking. Her brain keeps rerouting like a confused GPS because his fingers are tenderly tilting her head left and right so he can see the damage. “He was, um, kind of handsy. No time to clean up.”
Langdon laughs. His cool breath brushes over her skin and she can’t help but blush. “Wow. He got you good. You could file an incident report.”
His thumb skims over the soft part of her cheek, smudging the gritty paint left behind by Billy. She can’t look away from his eyes—electric, yet soft, half-lidded with thick dark lashes. Anyone else, she’d flinch away, run for safety. She can’t with him. He is safety.
“You’re all… shiny.” His voice is low, a soft richness there she can’t understand.
And then he seems to remember himself, where he is. His hand drops and he steps back and she can breathe again, but she almost doesn’t want to if it means he would breach the distance between them once more.
“Ah, sorry,” he says and his normal confidence seems impossibly shaken. “I, uh, shouldn’t have touched you like that. Without asking. Anyways. Chinese later? Or you can pick—” He finally acknowledges the bridal party absolutely staring at them both and winces. “Best of luck, ladies, you’re in amazing hands.” And just like that, he’s gone, disappearing into the vortex of nurses and EMTs and aides that make up the ED.
Mel stands there staring after him with her tablet against her chest, the words echoing through her skull.
Without asking. Without asking.
Langdon never asks if he can touch her. She doesn’t consider it presumptive—maybe she should, maybe if she were a better feminist, or a more assertive person, she would be interrogating her urge to allow his intrusions upon her body. But she doesn’t regard him as intrusive or entitled. There are very few people in the world Mel would allow to touch her like he does. And Becca doesn’t count. And she doesn’t want him to stop, she realizes. She wants him as he is: jittery, cocky, sarcastic, wry, and his hands on her, grounding and warm. Is he worried about giving her the wrong idea? Her stomach sinks and swoops simultaneously.
”Who was that?”
Mel is jerked back into her body by one of Lucia’s friends, a tall waifish redhead with very impractical looking stilettos. “Oh, um, that was Dr. Langdon, one of our senior residents at PTMC.”
”Girl,” says another of the bridal party, a short Asian woman with brightly dyed pink hair. “Are you guys dating?” She says this in a comically loud whisper.
”Definitely not,” says a third bachelorette. Black, beautiful, rolling her eyes. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have freaked out like that. Keep up, Ashley.”
”We’re not dating,” says Mel weakly. It hurts to get the words out. “Just good friends. He, um. He doesn’t see me like that.”
“He’s taking you to dinner,” says the redhead.
“Friends can get dinner,” Mel argues and why is she even entertaining this? “We get dinner sometimes. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Who pays for the dinners?” is thrown at her with crossed arms and a look of pity.
“Um,” and she can’t possibly get into their berth of finances or Langdon’s stubborn streak; or that in med school, he was an early investor in a popular travel app whose dividends he uses for fun stuff and she is decidedly not. “He does…”
There is a collective hum of judgment that Mel doesn’t like.
Ashley giggles. “No offense, ‘Mel’, but if you don’t hop on that soon, someone else will. He is fine.”
“And tall,” adds the redhead.
“With a full head of hair,” says another, snickering.
“Don’t be stupid,” says Emma. Her tone is no longer scathingly skeptical. In fact, she’s looking at Mel in a way she can’t decipher. “That man doesn’t have eyes for anyone else other than her. Obviously.”
There’s a ripple of approval through the crowd of girls and they stare at Mel with some alien form of respect that she’s never been afforded before. Suddenly, it becomes easy for her to explain that while yes, Lucia will ultimately be fine, she does need some time to come out of sedation and be observed for a few hours. No one fights her or protests this time, though Emma does whip out a bejeweled pink phone and starts making calls like she’s running a navy. Mel manages to scuttle away, mildly resenting that a man’s alleged interest has garnered her enough social capital to be taken seriously. But she is also freaking out that maybe Langdon does like her in a romantic sense, like the party girls said.
It’s a thought she’s never entertained before. It’s a dangerous thought, actually.
Because what if he doesn’t?
Hope fills her up like a helium balloon pressing uncomfortably against her ribcage. She floats through the rest of the shift, discharging who she can and charting like hell, but even with all the distractions provided by the Pitt, she can’t get Langdon out of her mind. The hangdog way he looked at her, as if he had trespassed by caressing her chin. The shameful way he slunk away from her, as if his touch was offensive rather than welcome.
He’s never done that before, she thinks. (What could have changed in 12 hours?)
She’s not the best communicator, she knows this. An ex-boyfriend once commented dryly that he didn’t need to know every single thought that passed through her head. It stung at the time, but it’s stuck with her through the years: not every worry and insecurity and deeply felt thought needs to be said to her loved ones. But she knows she needs to talk to Langdon about all this.
That doesn’t mean she has to look forward to it.
She’s standing in front of her locker, staring at it blankly — as if by force of will, she can make it click open without having to do the work of turning the dial.
“Hey, Dr. King, are you alright?”
She turns her head slightly. “Oh. Jesse. Hi.” She’s given up trying to get him to call her Mel.
Jesse smiles, bemused. His nose ring catches the light. “Uh, not sure if anyone’s told you, but you have some stuff—” He gestures to his own face, five-o-clock shadow and tired eyes and all.
“Oh!” Mel says. “The glitter!” She’s completely forgotten about that, what with the weirdness of Langdon and the bachelorette kerfuffle.
“Yeah,” says Jesse. “Need me to get you some antiseptic wipes from the nurse’s station?”
Mel sighs. “Alcohol based?”
”Yeah, pretty sure.”
“I have pretty sensitive skin—UV rays, harsh chemicals, they don’t like me much. Don’t want to be all blotchy for my shift tomorrow. I’ll just wait til I get home, thanks.” Mel smiles weakly, feeling like she’s overshared without realizing.
But Jesse only nods. “Cool. Good luck,” and then he shoulders his backpack and heads out.
Mel breathes out through her teeth and she’s finally getting her locker door open when she feels him at her side.
“Hey,” says Frank. Mel turns her head to look up at him and his eyes pierce into hers. (Garcia once sniped over an MVC vic that Frank should close his eyes to spare them from his “blue eyes of evil”).
“Hey,” she says.
“What did Jesse want?” Langdon asks, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He’s already changed out of his scrubs. It’s always a little uncanny, seeing him in street clothes. He looks really nice, which shouldn’t be allowed after such a grueling day—light jeans and a white Henley and no jacket, which Mel thinks is suspect because Pittsburgh weather is evil and unpredictable.
“To help get the glitter off my face,” sighs Mel. She shakes her head. “Santos is never going to let me live this down.”
Langdon huffs a short, slightly-mean laugh. “She most definitely won’t.”
Langdon and Santos have mostly patched up their differences into a civil, clipped working relationship (apparently there was a letter of apology passed from Langdon to Trinity, and then from Trinity into a paper shredder). She also knows Langdon will never really truly like Santos. And Santos will definitely never like Langdon. They’re too similar, too bull-headed, too rubbing-each-other-all-the-wrong-ways. Mel understands.
“She called me a stripper earlier.”
Langdon makes a choking sound, which turns into a cough. Mel hopes he’s not getting sick. “You… A stripper? God, she’s a piece of work.”
“Mm, maybe that’s an exaggeration. She said I looked like I got mugged by a stripper. Not that I am one.”
Langdon’s doing that thing that unnerves her a little — speed walking backwards so he can look at her while she talks and walks. She always thinks he’s going to trip or fall or collide with a nurse, but somehow he has enough luck not to. “You could still probably get HR to slap her wrist or something. Please. For me?”
She looks into his face—that boyish grin that makes her heart warm, the slightly imperfect nose that makes him all the more charming, the dimpled chin. There’s a glowing heat in her lower belly that she doesn’t feel very often. And as they’re headed out, they pass by Emma and her bridal brigade, who waggle their fingers at her in good-bye, a burst of giggles spreading through their ranks. A surge of courage moves through Mel. “No, Langdon, Santos definitely doesn’t need my help getting into trouble with HR.”
“Fucking right.” Langdon tilts his head at her. “Let me drive you home after dinner?” He says it like it’s an adequate peace offering.
It honestly is, Mel thinks, considering how far apart they live and the cursed bus schedule she has to half-guess, half-triangulate most of the time. And her feet scream at the thought of standing at the bus station for an indeterminate amount of time with a full stomach. So she graciously nods and follows him into the cavernous parking garage without protest.
Mel likes his car—a practical black sedan with two booster seats in the back and a ridiculous amount of Bluey themed toys and blankets. It smells comfortingly of coffee and Langdon’s deodorant, a clean pine scent that puts her at ease. She’s juggling her backpack and her water bottle between hands when Langdon opens the passenger side door for her. “Oh! Thanks!”
”Anything for my favorite,” says Langdon, and Mel expects him to follow it up with resident or coworker, but she looks up and he’s still holding the door with that fond tilt of his head, staring at her and nothing comes after.
My favorite. My favorite.
“You’re being too nice,” Mel half-complains as she finally sits, her heart three sizes too big for her chest cavity.
“You just watch me.” He slides into the driver’s seat. He waits until she has her seatbelt on before reversing deftly out of the parking spot with one lazy hand on the wheel. “I can get a whole lot nicer. That’s a threat.”
“Not a very compelling one.” Mel, even with all the churning nerves inside her, can’t help but be glad that Langdon is here at her side. “Are you okay?”
Normally it’s him asking her this question—when she’s overstimulated and the world is too bright and she’s fidgeting and the ER noises thud like elephant feet in her skull. It’s him who sits across from her in the breakroom, who flicks off the lights, who takes her for an ice cream after work and tells her she did as good a job as anyone could.
“Yeah, yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” His eyes are on the lot, edging forward through the ticket gate, but Mel sees his mouth tense at the edges.
“You were being really weird after your trauma amputation,” Mel says slowly. Now’s the time to broach the topic. If he gets angry at her or things get awkward, he can turn the car around and drop her off at her apartment instead of being cornered at a table in a restaurant.
Langdon sighs, a big gusty sigh. A strand of hair is in his face. Mel’s fingers itch to brush it away (don’t do that, don’t do that). “I, uh. I guess I was. Look, I wanted to apologize over dinner, but if you want to talk about it now, we can.”
Mel blinks. “Why would you need to apologize?”
“Um, maybe because that was super unprofessional? And I did that in front of your patients?” His grip on the wheel tightens. “I’m sorry. I crossed a line back there and I’m not sure why I felt like I could do that—touch your face like that—without asking. That’s all.”
“Well, I forgive you, but the touching-my-face part wasn’t what I was talking about.” Mel bluntly admits, “I like it when you touch me, Langdon.”
Langdon breaks a little too hard at a red light. It makes her sway forward in the passenger seat, but there’s his arm, braced against her chest protectively. For a moment, her whole body lights up with a pleasant hot sensation and she looks down at his arm—strong, notably vascular where the sleeve of his shirt has rolled up. Steady. Her breasts, suddenly, feel very tight. They stay there for a moment just staring at each other before the light flickers green and he snatches his arm away.
“Jesus, Mel.” He’s breathing hard. “Don’t say things like that, I could’ve crashed the fucking car.”
“I mean it,” she says and she’s very calm. This is Langdon, her friend. Her best friend, the person who picks her up when she falls down and puts himself between her and danger, and holds her hand through hard things. “And you’ve never felt bad about touching me before. Is something wrong?”
There is a tense moment of silence. Mel doesn’t push, just lets him drive. “I… overheard something today.”
“... about me?” Mel has a horrible thought that she’d read this situation all wrong. The bachelorette party was actually just making fun of her, that Langdon had overheard a nurse talking about how Mel had a massive crush on him, that he didn’t want to lead her on.
“No, about me.” The car slows to a crawl and then an eventual stop in front of a darkened strip mall. He parks and unhooks his seatbelt and turns fully to look at her. He’s rubbing his face harshly. “Okay, I was walking past the break room before the amputation came in and I heard… I heard Santos say something that got under my skin. And I’ve been trying to ignore it, because it’s Santos, she wouldn’t know the meaning of ‘hostile work environment’ if it bit her in the ass, but it did bother me. And I don’t want it to be something that others think when they think about me—”
“Frank,” she says, and it feels right, the shape his name makes in her mouth, the way he snaps to attention and stares at her in surprise. “What did she say?”
Frank (Frank, Frank, Frank) swallows. “She said… she said that I manhandle you like I think I own you.”
Mel didn’t expect that.
“And then she called me Doctor Grabby Hands McGee, which isn’t even funny.”
Mel swallows the bubble of laughter creeping up in her throat. “It’s a little funny.”
Frank shoots her a look.
“Okay, okay. But why did that make you feel so bad? She’s definitely called you worse things.”
“I don’t care what Santos thinks of me. But I do care what you think of me, Mel.”
Her heart makes a strange lurch when he says her name.
“You matter. A lot. And I don’t want you to think I’m a creep,” he says, a ribbon of vulnerability showing through his normal bravado. “I’m bad at these kinds of things. Talking about feelings. My sponsor says it’s like pulling teeth. But you’re my best friend, Mel.” Best friend, best friend. “To think that I made you uncomfortable in any way… that would be a total nightmare. The worst thing I could do. And yeah, in the back of my head, I’ve always known you have sensory issues—” she feels a tiny static shock. They’ve never talked about this before, “—you fucking hate jeans and sticky tables and that one time Dr. Rosenthal tried to give you a hug, you nearly bit his head off. Which was awesome, by the way.”
“That’s different,” Mel says simply. She’s his best friend. The words ring, like a wind-chime whirling outside the window. “Rosenthal isn’t you. Also, that would’ve been very unprofessional behavior in front of the patient, I’m not sure what he was thinking.”
“You found the tiniest intracranial bleed I’ve ever seen in his frequent flyer,” says Frank with deep exasperation. “And he’s a hugger, Mel.”
“He didn’t ask first.”
“There! There it is. I never fucking ask.” Frank lays his forehead dejectedly on the steering wheel. Mel worries about him accidentally bumping the horn. His hands start gesticulating. “I’m sorry that I never ask, okay? That’s all I wanted to say. And also if I manhandle you too much. That’s not okay, either.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re a creep, Frank,” says Mel. “And if I was bothered, I would have told you. You have my permission.”
Frank slowly turns his head, cheek pressed against the wheel. “Permission?”
“Permission to touch me,” she says plainly. “Since you’re my best friend. I think that comes with certain privileges.”
Frank immediately sits up. “Mel, you can’t just go and say things like that.” He sounds like his throat is full of gravel. He has that intense look on his face when he takes a deep fast breath in.
“I don’t see why not.” She really doesn’t.
“Because you are killing me.” At her expression of alarm and hurt, he softens. “In a good way. Jesus. Okay. Well. Just promise me, if I do something you don’t like, tell me?”
“Alright,” Mel agrees, amused by his deep trepidation, confused by his strange reactions. “I promise.”
He seems relieved by this. His shoulders fall, tension melting. “Thanks. Uh. So. Since I have permission, I have something I think you’d appreciate.”
He reaches over and fumbles around in the glove box in front of Mel. Close enough that his shoulder pokes a little into her ribcage, and even though the pressure is uncomfortable, she can’t bring herself to mind. It’s funny seeing his glove box, all the stuff he shoves in there, a new side of him she hasn’t seen before. It’s a mess. Miscellaneous scribbled-on papers and half-used containers of hand sanitizer and peeling chapstick tubes and about five tins of peppermint Altoids, but what he fishes out is a pack of baby wipes. Organic and hypoallergenic promises the packaging in swoopy green cursive.
“Oh, the paint,” says Mel. She keeps forgetting.
He snorts. “Yeah. Head up, Picasso.”
“Picasso did not use non-toxic acrylic glitter,” Mel tells him, but her protest dies away as he gently removes her glasses from her nose and hooks them on the collar of his own shirt for safekeeping. His face goes blurry, because truly her eyesight is “abysmal,” as her optometrist once told her. He’s close enough that she sees the pinch of his thick eyebrows, the gleam of concentration as he softly, gently begins to clean her cheek. The wipe is wet and cold against her skin. Mel bites her bottom lip, but she’s not anxious. Even though this feels even more intimate than him touching her chin in the ER. Because he’s cupping her cheek with his palm, his long warm fingers sliding under her earlobe, and she squirms, sensitive, because it feels good.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, tongue between his lips like he’s putting in a chest tube. “Is this okay?”
“Y-yeah.”
She has the unbidden thought, rising in front of her eyes as clear as a memory, of reaching out, hooking her hand in his shirt, and pulling him in for a kiss. She blinks and the image is gone, but it buzzes through her. It’s not the first time she’s thought of kissing him. But it’s the first time she’s thought it might be welcomed.
She licks her lips.
His eyes flicker down to her mouth and then up to her eyes and then he swallows. “All… all done.” His voice is hoarse, but he still doesn’t stop holding her face. His palm pleasantly burns against her cheek and she sees in real time the black of his eyes subsume the bright blue, leaving only a ring of his iris. She knows dilation of the eye with no change of light has many medical reasons. She thinks of the least obvious one: arousal.
“Am I clean?” Mel tilts her face gently, firmly, into his hand. She reaches up, tentatively brushing the tips of her fingers against his wrist. The wet wipe falls away, dropped in the void of the car.
”Yeah.” His head dips down, bumping their foreheads lightly together. A dark, warm space exists between them, full of their breathing. She knows his stomach is shoved into the center console, that he’s stooped over her and his back can’t be comfortable, but she can’t bring herself to protest. His other hand comes up, sliding up her neck, cradling her jaw.
“Can we… can we stay like this, just for a sec?” A desperate plea.
She nods a tiny nod, unable to stop herself from sighing contentedly and closing her eyes as his big hands bracket her face, a grounding touch, warm thumbs smoothing over her cheeks. She’s never been touched like this before (and yes, there have been others). His forehead gently slides against hers, their noses brushing.
His breath is cool peppermint. There’s the dark woody scent of his cologne. An edge of sweat, from the long shift. He smells really good. She’s grateful, distantly, out of her body, that she managed to change her hospital shirt for the clean spare she keeps in her locker.
“Mel. Mel.” A whisper. “Look at me? Please?”
She opens her eyes slowly, as if she’s in a dream. His dark eyes hold hers. She could stare at him for an eternity.
“Can I kiss you?”
This is one of those moments, she thinks, where being asked is very nice.
“Yes, please,” she says and then he’s kissing her. His lips are soft, she thinks—the chapsticks in the glovebox—but then she can’t think anymore because she’s gasping into his mouth and he is groaning into her and she doesn’t know where to put her hands. He does. He knows to drag his fingers underneath her braid, where the weight of a 12 hour shift resides in her skull, to gently massage until she melts. She settles for curling her hands against his chest, feeling the pounding of his heartbeat.
“Sweetheart, sweetheart,” he says against her lips like a raw, helpless prayer. And then he’s silently kissing her again and she opens up her mouth to taste him and it’s clumsy and cramped and very good. A wet insistent heat lights between her thighs, which she squeezes helplessly together, like a secret. Finally, his mouth drags from hers, and she can breathe, but then he’s placing fervent kisses all over her cheeks, her nose, down to her throat, and she trembles hotly, a need clawing deep inside her.
She knows this could get big and complicated and messy. Becca. His kids. Their jobs. (“329 days sober, Mel,” he told her proudly last weekend, shining like the sun. “Let’s celebrate.”)
But right now, everything feels very simple.
His mouth against her neck. The hot touch of his tongue to her skin. She sighs, fisting his hair (very soft) in her fingers, feels him make a shuddery thick sound against her. His hands are on her waist, but their grip is tentative, almost teasing. She wants him to touch her breasts, she thinks idly, to flick his tongue against her nipple.
But they have to come back to the real world sometime.
“Frank,” she says, and it’s all she has to say before he’s gently pulling away from her, eyes misty and black, breathing hard like he’s run a marathon. She watches his chest move heavily, arousal flickering through her, swelling up and in, and she matches his breathing. They exhale at the same time.
“Fuck,” he says. “Was that too much? Did I—?”
“No,” she says dreamily. Her hair is loose, falling around her like a curtain. Her scalp feels good, tingly. “I just don’t want to push you too far.”
He looks at her, mouth open slightly. “You’re so fucking beautiful.”
The blush rolls through her up to ears, and she smiles, elated. “You too.”
“I don’t want to fuck this up.” And his voice is suddenly hesitant.
She reaches for him, finds his hand in the dark, holds it with both of hers. “You won’t. Or maybe you will. Maybe I will. I want to try anyway.”
“This is… the opposite of casual for me. I don’t want to freak you out, but you should know. I’ve been thinking of doing that… basically since the first day we met.”
Mel takes in that information, holds it next to her. “I felt the same, I think,” she says in a halting sentence. “It was just. So much, at the time. A really weird day, and there you were.”
“It was the same for me.” She knows he’s thinking about Santos and the drugs, about his rapid spiral the next day. She’s heard bits and pieces of it over the months—the fight with Robby, coming back for the MCI, Langdon going home and methodically burning every single photo he could find of himself in a trashcan in the backyard. His kids and ex coming home from her parents’ to find him silently standing in front of a smoking heap of paper. “But you made it a little brighter. And I don’t want to lose you. If we do this. And I do want to do this. Really badly.”
Mel understands. She really does. “I don’t want to lose you either.”
”So…” He swallows, his expression full of fragile hope. “You don’t mind if we try?”
“Things are a lot right now. They are for me too. We can go slow,” she offers and he laughs. When he sees her expression, he lifts up her hand, brushes his lips over her knuckles in a kiss that makes her bones go liquid.
“You know, I thought it would be me having to tell you that,” he says. “But you’re too quick for me, Mel. Like always.”
She smiles softly at him. “My life is better with you in it, Frank. I don’t mind waiting.”
He clears his throat, works his jaw. “Thanks,” he says roughly. “We’ll, um. We’ll work our way there. Together, like always.” He unhooks her glasses from his shirt and hands them to her carefully. She puts them on and the world becomes clearer. His hair is all mussed from her hands, his smile bright and clear, and she wonders if it matches hers.
“Chinese food?” she asks after a beat. “Would that be okay? For a first date?”
They could leave it for another day. Leave the kissing behind in the car and crawl into their respective beds and pick the conversation back up another day, try another day. They’re both exhausted, she knows, and in need of showers, and there’s always a shift the next day, Becca to be picked up from the center the next morning, children to be called before bed—but he nods. Definitively. With certainty.
“That sounds perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
Relief coats her like a warm blanket as they readjust themselves and fix their clothes—he hadn’t given her any hickeys, she thinks, though maybe she wouldn’t mind if he did, even if it would make her the star of the rumor mill for the day. Jeez, she feels like a sneaky teen, that same giddy feeling flaring in her chest.
“And just so you know…” He starts up the car again without looking at her, but if she squints, she thinks she can see the slightest tinge of pink on the shell of his ear. “It goes both ways.”
“Hmm?”
Before pulling away, he meets her gaze, eyes crinkling with a half-smile. “You can touch me too, you know. No permission slip needed.”
It takes her a second to absorb this information. The concept of reaching out to him, putting her hand somewhere on his body (chest, shoulder, hand) suddenly a potential reality. “Oh. Okay.” And then: “Permission slip. That was a joke.”
“Yes,” he agrees mildly.
“Could use some work.”
In the low lit Sichuan restaurant, their waiter looks askance when seating them. Because as Mel sits down, she pauses, looks at Frank, and switches to sit next to him in the booth rather than across from him. And his smile is blinding white, his thigh pressed insistently against hers, like I’m here. And with swollen lips from kisses, she gently brushes a wayward slip of hair away from his eyes and he shivers at her touch.