Chapter Text
Prologue
"the only bluff you couldn't fake"
Still The Same, Bob Seger
—
It’s 7:30 pm on the last day of August, and Frank Langdon walks to the bus stop on unsteady feet. His scrubs provide a stifling insulation which sticks the humid breeze of a waning Summer to his skin. He’s shivering nonetheless. He tells his coworkers that his car’s at the mechanic, and he’ll keep telling them that until Abby trusts him to drive again. At least he’s still got the wedding band to prove that she eventually will.
Almost a year ago, he left the PTMC, or got kicked out, if you were going to be honest about it. He’s rarely compelled to be, these days, pushing the memory as far down as it’ll go. Since his blowout with Robby, his sense of self has been shaky at best. The consistent hits to his confidence from his coworkers, despite his stint in rehab and following apology (read: humiliation) tour, made sure he wouldn’t be certain of anything anytime soon, least of all his place within the dynamics of the Emergency Department.
He is, however, pretty sure that Mel King has feelings for him.
It’s kind of obvious, really. He thinks about the way she lights up when he invites himself along to one of her cases, and how could he fail to notice the way her smile crinkles her eyes when he remembers something she once told him offhandedly, like she can’t believe he remembered something that wasn’t important - as if it’s not all important? It’s also evident in the way she lets him pick through her snacks when he swings by the break room to chat when she’s eating lunch. Not to mention the never-ending supply of patience she has for him when he teases her with jokes she doesn’t quite get on their way out of work, stalling because he doesn’t want to face going home so soon after a tough shift.
In fact, if Frank were a little more sure, he’d be obligated by the vows he made six years ago to tell her that she can’t have feelings for him, that after rehab, it took a lot of effort to get back to the point of being happily married, and he can’t risk rocking the boat again. He imagines doing it, looking into her eyes, pushing down the lump in his throat, and telling her, grounded by the gold band around the finger on his left hand, that this can’t happen. He feels sick as he boards the bus.
* * *
It’s 7:30 pm on the last day of September, a year on the dot since Frank went to rehab, and he’s the rockiest he’s been since then. It wasn’t just the anniversary, he’d rationalised on the way to the bus stop, he’d also had his ass handed to him by the toughest shift since his return. Anyway, no one probably cared, or even remembered, that the day marked one year of his sobriety, except for Mel. Abby, too, although she hadn’t called it what it was, just vaguely asked if he was feeling okay about today.
“What’s today?” He’d asked, absently.
He was always good at playing dumb. Abby had drawn her lips into a line and nodded, returning to the assembly line of half-finished sandwiches she’d set out to pack the kids’ lunches with. She always made sure they had something homemade to take to school, sometimes even extra to give to their friends. He would never think to do something like that.
Mel had been handling him with kid gloves all day. He’d felt himself get frustrated with her for it, and then subsequently disgusted with himself. He couldn’t tell you which of the two emotions compelled him to snap at her over a particularly stubborn intubation that she took a little too long with.
“I’m sorry, Dr Langdon, it won’t happen again,” she’d said, earnestly.
She did everything earnestly. It made him feel like a fraud by comparison. The softness of her response threw him off, and he felt like he had no choice but to overcompensate with anger. He stormed out of Trauma 2 without another word. He was about to stuff his PPE into the bin when he realised he’d ripped his wedding ring off along with his gloves. He really should be more careful.
He’d tried to make it up to her later, when he found her in the stairwell with her fingertips wedged behind the lenses of her glasses, pressing into her closed eyes.
He knew he should be more sensitive towards her feelings; the last thing he wanted was to see her retreat back into her shell. He privately took a lot of pride in being the one to draw her out of it all that time ago, on her first shift.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.” Frank lowered himself onto the step beside her, not quite looking at her as he apologised.
She let out a heavy sigh. She wasn’t going to make this easy on him. His limbs were starting to feel heavy, and he didn’t quite know where to look, the all-too-familiar weight of guilt settling into his aching muscles.
“It wasn’t anything you did. I let the pressure get to me, and I took it out on you, and that wasn’t fair. You’re a brilliant doctor, Mel. I’ll always want you by my side.” He thought indulging her with a compliment would help ease his guilt, but it only made it worse.
It wasn’t that he didn’t mean what he was saying; he just probably shouldn’t have been saying it while checking over his shoulder for any passing coworkers. That was the part that felt wrong.
He wondered for a second if it would be an overstep to touch her. Just rest his hand on her back, in apology for his actions and as an act of harmless affection; two birds alongside some plausible deniability for the low, low price of one stone. Lost in thought, he’s startled when she lowers her hands suddenly, and looks searchingly at his face with red-rimmed eyes. What was she looking for? Did she find it?
She gets up and straightens up her scrubs. Frank looks at her dumbly, mouth held ajar by phantom words of comfort he can’t quite push out in time.
“We, um, lost those two little girls. The twins with carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s like they just went to sleep and never woke up.” She gave a perfunctory nod as if she were presenting a case, though even the best doctors couldn’t do anything about it now.
Then she left. Later, he found a note squeezed into the gap between his locker door and its jamb.
Congratulations on one year. You should be proud of yourself, I am.
He tore it up impulsively. It was too blatant, almost a confession, cruelly cloaked under the guise of acknowledgement of today’s date. He boards the bus with paper scraps burning a hole in his pocket. She never brought it up. Neither did he.
* * *
It’s 7:30 pm on the last day of October, and Frank’s standing on steadier and steadier ground with each passing day. When he grabs his phone from his locker, he sees that Abby sent him a photo of the kids in their Halloween costumes, their gap-toothed grins tugging at his heartstrings. He knows he should run home through the streets of Pittsburgh like Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life to lessen the burden on Abby, the martyr singularly responsible for making sure the kids have pleasant childhood memories, even though there’s a Frank-shaped hole in most of them.
But he doesn’t. He puts his phone back and grabs his lighter, jogging over to where Mel stands, talking Dr Shen through the night shift handover. What’s one more memory without him? Abby understands that he sometimes has to work late.
Besides, he must unwind properly before facing his family. In the last month, he finally feels like he's got his sea legs back in regards to the chaos of life in the medical field - he’s settled into a good rhythm with his work, with his sobriety, his kids, his wife, and with Mel.
He tells her as much when she asks how he’s doing, joining him outside during his post-shift ambulance bay cigarette. It’s a habit he never quite fully kicked, albeit now rekindled fully by his peers at Narcotics Anonymous. Once you’re an addict, you’re an addict for life; you just have to find less destructive things to be addicted to. As a doctor, he should know better than to try to justify his smoking, but as someone who used to turn to things a lot worse for relief, he let it slide. Furthermore, it’s easy to feel like you can outrun consequences when they’re as slow-acting and distant as emphysema at age seventy-five – cognitive dissonance and all that.
They stand side by side, facing the back street behind the hospital. She likes to follow the clouds of smoke that float out and up into the sky with her eyes. He makes sure they never get too close to her.
“What do you mean, you’ve gotten into a good rhythm with me?” she asks, tentatively, as if she caught a mistake in something he said.
“Y’know, the way we are at work. You’re like a mind reader, Mel.”
“Right.” She nods, carefully considering his answer. He feels the need to clarify.
“I just mean having someone I gel with and can rely on here helps with stuff at home too. With Abby and stuff,” he says casually, bringing the cigarette to his lips for a drag, momentarily distracted by the flicker of light from a nearby streetlamp reflected in his ring.
She appears puzzled, but only for a moment. He watches her features settle back into her usual thoughtful poker face as he ignores the gnaw of unease in his guts. Did he say the wrong thing? Upset her by mentioning his wife? Is it time to tell her? Mel, we can’t. Three words, and his bases would be covered. He swallows them down.
Instead, he hastily asks, “Hey, are you free tonight?”
He doesn’t think that’s what he meant to say. It was too suggestive, as though he was offering something. As if a married man and his coworker, nearly ten years his junior, could do something together outside of work hours, innocently. He had meant it platonically, in his defence, but it came out weird because he was tired, probably. He’s considering the repercussions of his question, and all the ways she could answer it, when he gets breathless and lightheaded - a side effect of the nicotine, surely.
She turns red, and he feels like an ass. From where he’s standing, he understands that anyone would think he’s leading her on. He’s not trying to; he’s grateful to still have a functional marriage. He knows the stats about divorce rates, especially after something as emotionally taxing as rehab. Abby’s a saint for staying; everyone makes sure to say so when he’s within earshot. After all, it’s not like he was the one who was in a position to leave when everything blew up last year, certainly not from rock bottom looking up.
He takes another drag. He’s about to say something else - those three simple words, perhaps, Mel, we can’t, but what she says next stops him.
“I have a date, actually.”
The smoke turns sour in his mouth, eliciting a wave of nausea that goes as quickly as it comes. It unmoors him regardless. He must have inhaled oddly.
Oh.
“Jesus, that’s not what I thought you’d say, even if you gave me a hundred tries to guess the next sentence out of your mouth.” He chuckles.
His knee-jerk ability to tease was one of the first things to return as he’d been settling back into his old ways. He had said it, expecting to hear the musical lilt of her laugh, but she just made a face.
It reads to Frank as pity, but he can’t imagine why it would be. Mel’s never been good with faces; she probably just put on the wrong one. It’s definitely not displeasure- she’s never gotten upset with him. It’s just a barely perceptible furrow of her brow, aimed at her shoes, as if she’s scared she’d get in trouble if he caught it. What, or who, is she so afraid of? Frank’s never been great at controlling his anger, especially not when the hot feeling of it in his veins takes him by surprise, as it does in response to her reaction.
“Jeez, I’m just trying to lighten the mood.” It comes out clipped, a defensive edge to his voice.
The mood shouldn’t need lightening. Nothing used to be heavy between them. She doesn’t reply. He’s lost interest in the rest of his cigarette, throwing it down and watching it roll away from his feet; the embers leaving a streak of orange in their wake through the blur of his vision. He clears his throat and turns back towards the door. His eyes skate over the top of her head. He can’t look at her. Why can’t he look at her?
You know, I kind of thought you had a crush on me.
In another life, he says it. Just to test the waters. Because he’s tired of being unsure. Because every cell in his body wants to know.
His chest starts to tighten. He wonders what it would be like if they were handling a case together right now. An all-hands-on-deck trauma. Maybe he’d quiz the med students: “What could be causing the metastasisation of this discomfort between Mel and me into what feels like a tumour that’s swallowing my heart whole?”
They’ve been standing out here so long that the early-Winter chill of the evening has well and truly soaked through to his bones. He wishes she would say something. He’s never been good with the quiet. No one would be if they had ten straight months of it not even that long ago. He repeatedly flicks his thumbnail against his ring finger, filling the empty air with a rhythmic metallic tapping. He can’t help himself. This is stupid.
He rolls his eyes. “Well, enjoy your date, Mel. I’m gonna go see if they need me to stay back tonight.” He doesn’t wait for a reply, taking the first leaden step back towards the hospital.
He’s almost fully inside when she turns to look at him with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
“You should get back home to your wife,” she says carefully, slowly, like it’s a reprimand she doesn’t trust him to register as one unless she draws attention to it.
He pretends he didn’t hear her.
It’s only later, at the bus stop, that a firm sense of certainty washes over Frank for the first time in a very long time. He’d gotten it all wrong. Mel clearly has someone else to preoccupy herself with. It was embarrassing, really, to assume she would want a fuck up like him. At that moment, like the punctuation to some cosmic joke, the wedding ring he’s been fingering absentmindedly slips off his finger and skitters around in a circle between his feet. He crouches down to pick it back up as the last bus home flies past. He half wishes it had hit him; it probably would have hurt less than the realisation that he has feelings for Mel King, and she doesn’t feel the same way.