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Under no circumstances should they be doing this. Under no circumstances should they be doing this—he is the Emergency Medicine Residency Program’s Assistant Director. She is the Emergency Medicine Residency Program’s Chief Resident. It is a massive conflict of interest. If anyone ever finds out, it will decimate her reputation. Samira Mohan will forever be stained with the accusation that she slept her way to the top. He cannot do this to her, no matter how much he’s fallen in love with her. He cannot be the man who destroys her career before it ever gets to really start.
But Jack Abbot is helpless.
When Samira Mohan takes his hand at the end of Robby and Collins’ wedding, he’s helpless. They’ve been in each other’s orbit all day as best man and bridesmaid. Since last night, at the rehearsal, then the rehearsal dinner. This morning, passing notes and presents between the bride and groom since sunrise. This afternoon, even as the photographer and coordinator forcibly adhered them to a tight schedule, shuttling them through wedding party portraits, the first look, more pictures. This evening, looking at each other from across the aisle during the ceremony, his eyes stumbling into hers during his toast, the cake cutting, slow dances.
Jack Abbot is helpless. He was helpless when he saw her in the navy and gold lehenga she wore to the formal rehearsal dinner, he was helpless when he saw her in the orange-and-white-striped, monogrammed-on-the-pocket, one-size-too-large pajamas she had on this morning like the rest of the bridal party, and he is especially helpless to her now, gleaming like burnished copper in her bronze silk bridesmaid dress.
“Did you get a hotel room?” she asks.
The venue Heather Collins selected is ninety minutes outside of Pittsburgh, a historic resort with rambling grounds and an art deco ballroom that holds two hundred and twenty. Jack could easily make it home by 1 AM if he left now. But like the rest of the wedding party, he’s had a drink in his hand as soon as Collins gave them permission to get a little sloppy—which for him, at least, was as soon as he finished his short but sweet toast between the second and third courses of a four-course dinner. Absently, Jack tries to remember the last time he spotted a champagne flute pinched between Mohan’s fingers, counting backwards to calculate how intoxicated she still might be.
He nods, fighting to keep his posture loose and nonchalant. Snapping to military attention is what his nervous system is patterned to do when he’s nervous, but it’s not exactly how he wishes to portray himself to her. They are not in the trauma bay at work. “I did,” he says, clearing his throat. “You?”
There’s a post-wedding brunch tomorrow. Attendance isn’t mandatory, but there’s the expectation that they’ll be there. He knows she stayed in the bridal suite with Collins and the other bridesmaids last night. He also knows that tonight, Robby will be staying with Collins in the bridal suite, and that Samira and the rest of the bridesmaids have been told with no uncertain or complicated language that they were expected to find alternate accommodations.
“I was supposed to crash with Trinity, but I fear that when I get upstairs I’m going to find a sock hanging on the doorknob.” Her thumb brushes over the side of his hand. “I saw her disappear with Parker half an hour ago.”
It’s a bad idea. It’s a monumentally bad idea, but twenty minutes ago Mohan was in his arms and he learned what the heated silk covering her hips and waist felt like under his fingertips. Love on the Brain started playing and she plucked him out of his chair, slung her arms over his shoulders and walked backwards in her low, sensible heels until they were in the middle of at least a hundred other people who responded to the band’s declaration that this was the final song.
He’s helpless. He’s felt the bare skin of her lower back under the palms of his hands, and he’s helpless. He knows exactly what she’s asking, and Jack is helpless to summon up any reply except: “You could bunk with me.” There’s a knot at the back of his throat. “If you want.”
It’s a wedding. People drink alcohol and party until their systems are flooded with endorphins at weddings, and then they do things like sleep with people they regret. Jack isn’t certain if he can stand being something Mohan regrets, but he’s willing to be anything she wants him to be, damn the consequences.
“I do,” she says, threading their fingers together. “I’ve wanted to for much longer than I’ve let myself acknowledge. If that’s alright with you.”
He wants to tell her it’s an awful, terrible idea. He should tell her it’s an awful, terrible idea. He has a professional duty to advise that it’s an awful, terrible idea. But then she leans her head on his shoulder in this grand ballroom that has been slowly clearing out since Robby and Collins exited with a deep, swooping kiss inside a cloud of thousands of bubbles ten minutes ago. With a deep, lopsided exhale he turns his head, buries his nose the sleek waves that have slowly given way to frizzy curls as the evening as worn on. Inhales again, breathing in hairspray and perfume and salt. Presses a kiss to her crown.
“That’s more than alright with me,” he replies. “One could even say I know the feeling.”
They ride the elevator upstairs with some of Collins’ distant relations, shoulders pressed together as their eyes meet in furtive glances. Nobody has to know. They’re not on hospital property, they’re not at a hospital function. They can spend the night together and part ways in the morning, attend brunch and sit at separate tables, and drive home to Pittsburgh in separate vehicles. They can do this, and it can feel good and right and like everything they’ve hoped, and then it can be over. It’s just for one night. They’re both professionals. They both know the rules. She is a resident and he is her boss.
Safely ensconced his hotel room, they make it to the small seating area shunted off to the side of the bedroom—a forest green velvet couch, a heavy stone coffee table, one of those fancy frame TVs—and stall out there. In the half-light of the single lamp he left on when he left the room earlier, the moment feels stretched, dilated, almost dreamlike. Face tight, Samira rotates on a heel, the bed in her sights. Jack reaches for her, slowly pulling her closer until her back is pressed against his chest.
Forcing the tremor out of his hands, he unties the bow holding together the barely-there straps of her gown. Sighing with relief, Mohan shrugs it off, rust-colored silk pooling at her feet. Without the gown, she’s left in a soft seamless thong and silicone pasties covering her nipples. Without a single thought entering his brain, Jack’s hands smooth up and around to her front, cupping her breasts as he ducks his head, trailing open-mouthed kisses along her shoulder blade. “Off?” he asks, finger tips circling the edges of the silicone covers.
The resultant exhale is shaky. Mohan nods. “Yes. Off.”
He peels them off, tucking them safely away in the front pocket of his trousers. In the cool air of his hotel room, her nipples bud up between his fingers as he massages and cups and teases until he figures out what she likes. Making small noises of pleasure, Mohan toes off one shoe, and then the other. Kicks the dress and heels away from her so she can lean back against him. Carefully, she reaches one arm up and back, sinks her fingers into his curls to hold his face against her throat. As if waiting for her to tell him to stop, he leisurely trails one hand downwards, brushing the pads of his fingers over her ribs, her navel, down to the waist of her panties. Slides one fingernail under the elastic, waiting for her response. Tugging at his hair reflexively, she nods.
When he slips under the blush pink cotton, he finds the wiry thatch of curls at her center already damp. Breathing hard, he buries his face in the crook of her shoulder. She’s wet, so wet that he glides right through her folds. “Fuck, baby.”
Her hips jerk forward, seemingly of their own accord.
“Can you—” He finds her clit, and her hips jump again, a small cry escaping her throat. “Can you take the bobby pins out of my hair? They’re digging into my scalp.”
Jack licks a stripe up the side of her throat. “Mind if I multitask?” With a sound that he might classify as a whimper, she shakes her head. A moment later she gasps, knees shaking. “I’ve got you Mohan, lean back on me. I’m gonna take care of you.”
“Fuck, Abbot—”
“I really think you should call me Jack,” he says, circling her entrance with his middle finger, mindlessly rubbing the heel of his hand over her clit. The space between her legs is slick and pliant, and he spreads her open for him.
The only response she can give him is a vigorous nod. “Samira. Please. Samira.”
“Samira,” he agrees, dropping more kisses along her shoulder. Adjusting so that his feet are shoulder-width apart, he nudges her until she’s leaning back against him, his forearm banding from her waist to her pussy to keep her upright. His other hand leaves her breast, adjusting to the back of her head as he seeks out pins by feel. With deft fingers he finds them one by one, sliding them out of her hair and letting them drop to the floor. With each pin removed, more and more of her inky black hair spills down into his face. Roses, he thinks. Roses and jasmine. Floral, but not sweet. She must have sprayed perfume on her curls after the stylist finished with her.
“You’re so beautiful,” he murmurs, pressing his finger inside her to the hilt. Fucks into her gently, testing. He’s going to lay her down on the plush hotel duvet and unfurl her, bury his face between her thighs, smother himself in her scent and her taste. “So beautiful, Samira. Did you know that I think about you all the time? You drive me fuckin’ insane, sweetheart. So smart. So goddamn smart, stubborn, and brave. None of us deserve you. I don’t deserve you.”
With a cry, she bucks against him, muscles contracting in flutters around his finger. “But I want you,” she answers, voice breaking. “Abbot, I— Jack, I want you. You see me and you like me and—and you’re maddeningly kind and gentle and I hate your stupid little jokes that I can’t get out of my head and—oh fuck.”
In the back of his mind, Jack realizes that they’re both in so much fucking trouble. Knows that he’s not going to be able to part ways with her in the morning. Knows that he’s not going to be able to put himself at a separate table at brunch. Knows that he’s going to want to follow her home. Invite her to his own. Knows that he’s going to turn himself inside out and the lengths that he will go to so he can love her in secret, without destroying her, without compromising her—he’s going to let this destroy him before he lets it destroy her. He wants her anyway he can have her.
“Bed,” she says, the word punching out of her throat. Clumsy and desperate, she pushes her panties down to join the rest of her clothes on the floor. “Bed, put me on the bed, please.”
Pulling his hand away from her cunt he sucks the taste of her off his fingers, then brackets her hips with his hands, spins her to face him. With a slight bend to his knees he hoists her up against him. Without hesitation, her legs wrap around his waist. She’s not wearing a stitch of clothing, just a gold necklace around her neck and diamond studs in her ears, a simple bracelet gifted by Collins at the rehearsal dinner clasped around her wrist. His own suit jacket is abandoned by the door, his bowtie is open, hanging loose around his collar. One of his suspenders is venturing off his shoulder and he is so, so warm.
He drops her on the bed, throws her really, so that she bounces slightly when she lands in the middle. His bowtie is easily discarded, his suspenders shifted so they hang down from his pants. When he starts on the buttons at the top of his crisp white shirt, Samira sits up and starts working on the fly of his trousers, thumbing the button out of the hole before pulling the zipper, easing it down over his erection.
“Condom?” she asks, cinching her index finger and thumb around the base of his cock. “I have some in my room, but you know, the Santos and Ellis of it all—”
Jack nods vigorously. “Yeah, pretty sure they’re in all of the wedding party gift—gift baskets.” He can’t decide if he wants to look at her as she takes him into her mouth, lips wrapping around the head of him, half-hard and wanting. Because he desperately wants to watch. Also, he desperately does not want to embarrass himself. “I think it was Collins’ idea.” Her cheeks hollow out, her other hand coming up to join her movements. Wrapping it around his girth, she twists her hands in opposite directions on his dick as her head starts to bob. Choking out a moan, he cards his fingers through her hair, cups the nape of her neck. Minds his fucking manners. “She sure as hell wasn’t taking any chances on any of us. Doctors make the—the worst decisions. God complexes and all. Too much faith in the pullout method.”
A coy smile tugging at her lips, Samira pulls off him, but continues to stroke him with her hands. Her thumb traces the vein on the underside of his cock. “Too little follow through on the Plan B.”
“Not that I’m not enjoying myself—no feedback, no notes—but I do very much want to be inside you. If—if you’d like that.” He can feel all his thoughts circling the drain, emptying out down the occiput and into his spinal cord, down to his sacrum, where his body is already threatening to betray him by coming frighteningly fast. “I’d also like to eat your pussy, if you’re amenable.”
Samira looks up at him, giggling. A fond expression warms her face.
“If I’m amenable,” she scoffs, scooting backwards on the bed. Laying down again, she spreads her legs wide for him. For the first time, he gets a good look at her, glistening and flushing pink. “Take your clothes off, Jack. I wanna ogle.”
His face warms. He knows without looking in a mirror that his skin has turned ruddy all the way down to his chest.
He was in the military for the first half of his adult life. He knows he keeps his physique toned and muscular, that he’s one of the strongest people that works in the Pitt. Nudity has always felt largely objective to him, especially after multiple deployments shoved into tin-can barracks in the middle of the desert. People have bodies. He cuts people's clothes off multiple times a shift. His perspective on bodies is, at the age of forty-seven, largely clinical and pragmatic. Strength has always been a necessity of his job. Nudity and brutal vulnerability are inherent facets to emergency medicine. And when Samira leans herself up on her elbows, eyes raking over him greedily, he blushes anyway.
“Yes ma’am,” he replies, pulling his undershirt up and over his head. Balling it up, he throws it in the direction of his suitcase. “Do I pass muster?”
Her tongue darts out, wetting her bottom lip. “You’ll do.”
“Happy to hear it,” he says with a laugh.
He sits down on the edge of the mattress, internally conflicted. Or rather, logistically conflicted. Does he take the prosthesis off? He’s gonna have to take the shoe off regardless, he’s not putting pinchy dress shoes back on to drive home in the morning. It’s not necessarily difficult to go barefoot with the leg on, especially with the new dynamic-response model he’s finally upgraded to in an attempt to stave off further arthritis in his knee. The rubber foot shell has grips on the bottom that he can only liken to hospital grippy socks, but they do the job just fine.
This is the approximate moment that Samira decides to be a mind reader. “Whatever’s more comfortable for you. I really don’t care beyond that.”
“It all kinda depends on how we want to play this,” he replies, pulling open the laces on his shoe, drags down the wool dress sock down over the heel and sole to give him more leverage in pulling it away from the foot. From there, it’s easy to push his trousers and boxer briefs down and off his legs. Behind him, Samira hums thoughtfully, shifting her weight. He doesn’t expect it when her hand lands on his, fingers curling over top of his knuckles. “The leg is fairly lightweight, so I’m not nervous about accidentally pinning you or anything like that. It’s mostly carbon fiber and steel hydraulics. Would hurt like a bitch to accidentally smack up against. But taking it off would limit uh—some positions I have been thinking about to a degree of specificity.”
Specifically, he wants to watch her face as he fucks her into the mattress. He definitely does not have the practice to pull that off without two feet to brace against the bed with.
Samira makes a fond, albeit slightly exasperated noise. “But what about the positions I’ve been thinking about to a degree of specificity?” Unwarned, Jack feels a laugh crawling up his throat. She squeezes his hand and lays back down. He turns to watch her, his gaze tripping from her face, to her perfect tits, to the curve of her tummy and her hips. “We’ll figure it out as we go. Just—will you get on top of me already?”
A warm breath pushes through his parted lips. “Well, never let it be said that I can’t follow directions.”
Samira rolls her eyes in a way that seems to indicate that she can provide the names of several people who would argue otherwise. Opening her arms, she pulls him down to her until they’re chest to chest, pelvis to pelvis. The part of his brain that is demanding he cede control to instinct roars to life when the head of his cock slides through her folds, and for a long minute all they can manage to do is cling to each other, hips rutting together. Just barely, Jack stops himself from pushing inside of her. They shouldn’t. He can’t. He doesn’t trust himself to pull out, doesn’t trust himself to be rational enough to make the cogent decision to jerk his cum onto her thigh.
“Kiss me,” she breathes, and Jack realizes with a sudden bolt of clarity that he hasn’t yet.
A grievous oversight.
One that he rectifies immediately, dropping down to his forearms, slanting their mouths together. It’s a test. A prompt. A brief experiment of shared breaths and the barest hint of tongue, until Jack indulges a thought that’s passed through his head many times, often at the most inopportune moment during a shift, bites her lower lip between his teeth, and tugs. Samira whines, scratching her nails up the sides of his spine. Emboldened, Jack nips at her lip again before tonguing at the seam of her mouth. She opens for him, plush and wet and wanting. Moans as he examines angles and depth and pressure, responding to her different sounds, the ways she adjusts against him.
Then, finally, he starts kissing his way down her body.
She smells like a fucking dream. Tastes like a mess that he wants to keep making. When her legs thrash around him, muscle fibers of her rectus femoris, her adductors, her vastus lateralis twitching under his hands, he wraps his arms under and around her, pinning her to the bed. He pays attention (and ain’t that the fucking truth of it, he pays attention to Samira Mohan, always has) to the words he drags from her lips, to the way her limbs and abdomen contract, to the tides of wetness on his lips and face. She’s loud. Jack wonders if that’s because she feels more secure in this hotel they never have to return to again, or if he’ll be able to elicit these reactions from her back at home, too.
“I’m close,” she moans, holding onto his silver and charcoal curls with an intractable grip. “I’m so close, Jack, please. I’m so close.”
He pushes his face into her harder, slides his nose through her arousal to tongue inside her, collecting, drinking, feasting. Then back up again, to where he’s learned to find her clit by the way it feels against his top lip, swirling his tongue over her, fastening his mouth around the swollen tissues, and sucks hard. His own senses overwhelmed, he groans into her. Feels the vibrations carry through her pussy, opening his eyes just in time to watch her head tip back, back arching as climax washes over her.
She makes a high-pitched, tremulous sound that he wants to hear her make again and again.
“Yeah?” he asks, pulling back. Lightly, he traces the tip of his tongue around her clit. “That feel good, Samira?”
Opening her mouth to speak, she’s cut off by the aftershock he triggers with the flat of his tongue, but one, two, three fingers pushing inside her and curling upwards. “Ohhh,” she manages to get out, yanking on his hair. “You know it does. Get up here.”
“Condom first.”
“Heather will be so proud,” Samira quips, breathing hard.
“You wanna tell her that in the morning?” he asks, crawling up and back off the bed. He’s painfully hard, erection slapping up against his stomach when he stands. It takes almost everything in him not to wrap his hand around himself, give himself a few seconds of relief.
She snorts. “Do you?”
“Nah.”
The gift basket was already in his room when he checked in on Thursday. He hasn’t moved it from the dresser where a hotel employee placed it, along with a handwritten thank you note that he assumes Collins held Robby at gunpoint to write. Tucked discreetly in the back is a strip of Trojan condoms. Jack fishes out the whole pack, ripping them apart along the perforated lines. He drops two of them onto the nightstand, before tearing open the foil packet of the third with his teeth.
It has been a very long time since he’s had sex.
It’s an emotional hangover from being a widower, from having a marriage that ended with the fulfillment of the vow till death do us part. He fell in love with Samira. He stopped looking elsewhere. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was habit. It’s the way he knows how to love.
But it turns out that you never really forget how to put on a condom. Pinch the tip, roll down the sheath, try not to humiliate yourself. Avoid the way that the woman you’ve wanted for years is looking at you, like she has wanted this for just as long as you have. Don’t look. Stop looking. You don’t have time to reconcile that with your worldview. Focus. But he chances a look, finds her eyes heavily-lidded and wanting, her thighs spread for him to lay between. She reaches for him, and Jack Abbot is helpless.
“Any ground rules I should know before we begin?” he asks, voice thin.
Samira strokes her hands over his back, adjusting her hips against the mattress to accommodate him. He can tell she’s giving her response some thought, and it makes him feel warm from the roots of his hair down to his toes. “I don’t like my feelings getting hurt. But I like pain. I like biting. And hickeys. Just nowhere uh—I didn’t pack any turtlenecks with me. Since it’s April. I usually can’t orgasm from penetration alone. You?”
She does him the disservice of wrapping her legs around him, pushing her heels into his glutes to draw him closer, until he’s rolling his hips in testing thrusts against her. Jack takes a deep breath, centering himself, fixing her with what is probably the world’s least effective glare. “I like nails. Anywhere. I wanna know what’s working and what’s not. I wanna know what it’s like for you to come when I’m inside you. Typically I don’t really care if I orgasm, I’ll hold off until you tell me to. But I really, really wanna feel you come around me. That’s kind of… that’s kind of priority number one for me. Right now.”
“Single-handedly trying to close the orgasm gap, huh?” she asks, mirth gleaming in her eyes.
“What?”
Wrinkling her nose, Samira gestures vaguely with her hand, smiling in a way that is both awkward and endearing. Especially considering that she is in fact, both underneath him and naked. “Oh, uh, the phrase dates back to the original Kinsey Report, and then Masters and Johnson’s research in the sixties—but in a modern context it refers to the 1994 study by Laumann et al that seventy-five percent of men and twenty-nine percent of women surveyed always had orgasms with their spouse, while forty percent of men and eighty percent of women thought their spouse always orgasmed during sex. The statistics are slightly different for unmarried couples, short-term relationships, and you know since it only studied American couples that it’s not necessarily representative—”
His brain makes quick analysis of the math.
“Jesus Christ,” he exhales. “You said this is from the nineties? Not the fucking fifties.”
“The Kinsey Report was published in 1954.” Her hands anchor against his shoulders, tone varying between conversational and aroused. “And it suggested that unmarried American women had experienced two hundred orgasms versus their male peers’ average of fifteen hundred. It took until 2023 for anyone to study what actually makes someone with a vagina and clitoral structure feel good.”
“Care to elaborate?” he asks, dropping his head to tongue at a nipple.
Her immediate response is a shaky laugh, before reaching down between their bodies to angle him against her entrance. “Would love to,” she says, throwing her head back and crying out as he nods slightly, rolling her nipple between his teeth. “Just, god—inside me, please. Inside me now. Jack, I have wanted to jump you all day, since I saw you in a suit at ten in the goddamn morning, please just—”
He pushes in slowly, eyes fluttering shut at the sensation of her, hot and tight like a velvet glove around him.
Samira doesn’t want slow.
Digging her nails into his upper back, she tightens the grip of her legs around him. He’s not surprised by her strength, but he’s also not expecting it. The sound that bores out of his chest when he slides into the hilt is foreign to his ears. Scratching her nails along his scalp, Samira makes a happy noise, tentatively angling and rocking her hips up into him.
“Menace,” he gasps. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Warn a man.”
Nipping at his earlobe, she shudders. “I’d like it if you fucked me now. Or, I could roll us over and handle things. Your call.”
He stares down at her, nonplussed. Then, muttering under his breath, Jack rears up back onto his haunches, grabbing one of the pillows at the head of the impeccably-made bed. “Hips up,” he orders, shoving it under her. There’s a look of glee on her face that she’s barely trying to conceal, paired with a mien of anticipation that makes him shiver. Settling her ass onto the down-alternative pillow, she tilts her pelvis upwards, hooking her knees over the hinge of his hips. Huffing a small laugh, he grins with the right side of his mouth. “Brat. I’m a fucking gentleman, Mohan. I’m not gonna let you handle things.”
“I can do anything you can do, better, and backwards, and in heels,” she breezily replies, like she isn’t wriggling on his stiff cock. “Or whatever the hell the saying is.”
“Oh, I have no doubt,” he replies. Pumps into her once, testing the angle, watching her face. Repeats the motion, hears a satisfactory little moan, sees her face slacken with pleasure, and files it away as evidence-based practice. “The point is—” He starts fucking her in earnest, hands seizing her hips in order to bring her down to meet him. Thrusts harder, tightening his grip until the skin under his fingertips blanches pinky-white from the pressure.
“The point is?” she asks, arching her back, fisting her hands into the sheets.
“You feel amazing.” His voice is strangled to his own ears. “Jesus Christ.” The tension is immaculate, suspending every whirling thought in his brain in viscous lidocaine. He wants it to build, wants it to threaten to break him. Wants it to hurt, right up until it doesn't. Wants to fight it right up until the second he's given permission to bank himself in her lap, orgasm tearing through him like a bullet.
With every movement of his hips, every filthy slap of skin against skin, every obscene wet sound coming from where their bodies join, Samira makes a short sound of gratification. His brain pushes down the sharp edge of his own release, diverting all his attention to cataloging all the noises that she’s making. Shuttles his cock into her harder, faster, waiting for a sign from her that it’s too much. But it doesn’t come. All she does is continue to make her happy little moans, lifting her arms so that her hands can twist into the fabric above her head instead of at her sides. Lips parted, gorgeous tits bouncing, hair messy and loose—he commits the sight to memory. It doesn’t matter if he gets to do this hundreds or a thousand more times. He wants to remember this time.
Sweat breaks out over his neck and chest, dripping down from his hairline and between his shoulders. Without breaking his pace, he slides the hand on her right hip to the back of her knee, lifting her leg up and over his shoulder.
“Shit,” she whispers, eyes flying open to look at him. “Oh fuck. Okay, yeah.”
“Yeah?” he asks, grunting.
“I’m gonna touch myself,” she says, voice ragged and raw. “And then I’m gonna come. And I want you to come with me. Okay? Cause—cause I wanna see you come.” He nods, blinking hard, because what else can he say to that? She pauses, breathing hard, a fucked-out keening sound crawling up and out of her lungs. “God you are so fucking deep like this. I feel so full. What the fuck. I’m—fuck. Fuck.”
She reaches between her legs for her clit like an afterthought, brow furrowed in what looks like confusion. Her fingers rub fast strokes, unrelenting, and it’s a surprise to them both when her whole body contracts and seizes up, legs snapping to hold him in, to bring him closer. Like she’s grappling with the wild pleasure running through her, like she could make it last forever if she could just pin it down. With a sound that starts as a frantic hum escalates to a shriek, Samira’s hips chase, chase, chase as her orgasm doesn’t stop.
“What the fuck,” he hears himself echoing. Then as he continue fucks her through it, he hears himself start to babble. Words pour from him, and he's not entirely cognizant of what they are. They’re not thoughts—they don’t exist in his head before he says them. They spill forward from somewhere else, somewhere deeper in his brain, somewhere uninhibited. “So beautiful, honey. So beautiful, and just for me? Fuck, I’ve thought about this for a long fuckin’ time, thought about all the pretty sounds you’d make and it’s so much better in real life, my imagination could never—”
Something feral tears through her throat.
Her body clenches down on him hard. Gritting his teeth, he pushes back his own orgasm. It’s waiting, coiled at the base of his spine, almost painful. “You coming again, hon? That’s it, give it to me. I wanna see it. Let me watch you. Let me feel it. I can feel how hard you’re coming, your pretty pussy doing all that work. So good. So good for me.”
Her head snaps to the side, face burrowing into the comforter that she’s inadvertently pulled halfway down around her. “ Jack, please.” The words escape as a plaintive whimper. “Jack, come. Come inside me. Jack—”
The part of his brain that exists to make her happy embraces her plea immediately. Letting his restraint unspool, a process that starts slow but then turns rapid and raw, he turns to press a kiss to her delicate ankle where it rests on his shoulder. Breathing hard through his nose, his pace stutters until relief hits all at once in an overwhelming flood. He finds himself biting at her calf before he’s fully aware of it, jerking deep into her, filling the condom.
“Good boy,” Samira chokes out, throwing a hand downwards to clasp over his where it rests on her sweat-damp hip. “Just—fuck. So good. So fucking good. I didn’t know. I should have known. I didn’t know it could be like this. Contact. Skin. I need more skin. Can you—”
He knows exactly what she means.
His brain responds to the warmth of her body, the affection she gives freely, the fondness that diffuses through all her lines and angles—he responds like a starving man served a plate of food. Like a man who has been wandering a desert given water. Like a weary man given rest. Carefully lowering her leg, he lays down on top of her, nuzzling his face between her breasts. He wants to crawl inside her skin. He wants to live inside her bones. He will take whatever she wants to give him. He wants to protect her; he is unwilling to protect his heart.
He’s never been that good at it anyway, where Samira Mohan is concerned.
++
Even though Jack made a point of closing the blackout curtains and not setting an alarm, Samira’s body wakes her up a little after five. Extracting herself from the pair of strong arms tethering her to the king sized bed, she presses a kiss to his cheek, whispering that she’s going to rescue her luggage and will be back. He whines softly, a little pathetic, arguing that she can borrow whatever she wants from his suitcase to wear to brunch. Laughing quietly, she reminds him that he doesn’t mean that.
The seventh floor hallway of the Bedford Springs Resort and Spa is empty this time of morning, and Samira rides the elevator three floors down alone, two keycards in her hand—one that Trinity pressed into her hand last night, and one that she took out of Jack’s wallet on her way out the door.
Samira taps one card against room 405, pushing it open to reveal a darkened room with two queen beds, both still made and neither slept in. Flipping on the lights, she shuts the door silently behind her. She packed yesterday before she moved her bags out of Heather’s suite, so there’s not much for her to do. But out of an abundance of caution, she pulls her own pajamas out from where she tucked them into the front pocket of her duffle bag, if only because she doesn’t want to explain to anyone she might come across why she’s wearing an old faded Army sweatshirt and what are obviously a pair of men’s basketball shorts to creep barefoot through the hotel in the small hours of the morning. The odds of running into anyone else she knows are slim, but not zero.
A few minutes later, the electric lock clicks rapidly, and then buzzes. Samira pauses in the middle of pulling down the borrowed shorts, relaxing when she sees that it's only Trinity stepping inside, going through the same motions of silently shutting the heavy fireproof door that Samira just did minutes before.
Trinity sees Samira standing next to the bed, wearing clothes that aren’t hers, and a shit-eating grin splits her face. “So I see we were both successful in our endeavors. Bravo, well done.”
Samira feels her face heat, suddenly glad that it takes a serious amount of embarrassment to make her visibly blush. Turning away, she finishes kicking off the shorts, grabbing the hem of the sweatshirt. “I—yeah.” She bites her lip, smiling sheepishly. Taking a deep breath, she reminds herself that this is Trinity Santos. There’s no reason to be sheepish about this. “A couple times. He was very thorough.”
“I’m so proud.” Eyes falling closed as if wistful, Trinity rests a hand over her heart. “I’m like a proud momma.”
It was a simple plan. Trinity would tell Parker that Samira was going to take Jack back to their room. Samira would tell Jack that Trinity was taking Parker back to their room. If all went well, neither Samira nor Trinity would actually sleep in their room. There are many stark differences between who Trinity Santos and Samira Mohan are as people. But there are also many similarities, even if they’re not necessarily what people first observe about them. On the most basic level, they are two people who should not be compatible, let alone friends. But they are also both stubborn and tenacious, kind and loyal even if at times they forget to be nice, and are absolutely not above a well-placed lie when it suits their end goal.
And weddings, as Trinity argued during cocktail hour last night, make people impulsive. Less inhibited. More likely to throw caution to the wind in the name of love.
In companionable silence, they collect their things, changing out of borrowed clothes and into their own. The brunch later—much later, thankfully, at the thoughtful hour of noon—is casual. Requested attire is hangovers and athleisure.
Sharing furtive smiles, they part ways at the door. Trinity saunters deeper into the fourth floor, and Samira heads back to the elevator. Jack wakes when she drops her bags on the plush carpeted floor next to his with a quiet thud, opening his arms for her. Sliding back between the sheets, she lays her cheek over his heart. Samira steadies her breathing, closing her eyes. She’s never been good at falling back asleep once she’s up. But Jack is here, sturdy and solid, brushing a kiss against her forehead.
Inside Jack’s arms, she’s out again within minutes.
++
Brunch is well-attended, even if the bride and groom show up forty-five minutes late, arriving to raucous cheers and at least one remark from Dana that incites Robby to respond with a specific gesture. Nursing her third cup of coffee, Samira sits on a chiavari chair with her feet resting in Jack’s lap. She’s been picking at the plate of quiche and salad greens in front of her, waiting for her appetite to arrive.
They used another one of the condoms from the basket this morning.
Would have used a third, too, if they both didn’t desperately need to shower and wash up in a way that was decidedly not conducive to recreational activities.
Freed from the cast of hairspray and gel, Samira’s hair dries around her shoulders, soft and sweet smelling. She has on a pair of loose sweatpants and a cropped tank top. Not wanting to bother with her contacts, her silver-framed glasses perch on the bridge of her nose.
“So,” Samira asks, when Trinity, Shen, and Ellis get up for seconds. Watching them bicker congenially as they select from the wide variety of offerings on the buffet, she sinks against the back of her chair. Tracks her gaze over to Robby and Heather, deliriously happy as they lean against each other, talking to one of Robby’s many cousins. Takes another slow sip of her coffee. “Do you really think that Robby waited until Heather finished with her residency to start dating her again? Because that’s not what Heather told me yesterday. They got back together last year when she was still Chief Resident. Oh, and I think she’s pregnant. She and Robby keep switching out glasses of champagne, and she’s not nearly as sneaky about it as she thinks she is.”
Jack startles, face going helplessly blank.
Samira has to bite back a laugh, hiding a grin behind her mug. He’s so goddamn honorable.
“Wait, what?”