Robby is finishing up his charts when he hears footsteps behind him, a familiar gait that he recognizes immediately. A hand claps him on the shoulder.

“Had your fill yet, brother?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Robby says mildly, “a sixth patient with thermal burns might be just what I’m missing.”

He turns to see Jack looking at him quizzically. He sighs. “Gender reveal party. 22 pounds of dry ice in an enclosed space.”

Jack snorts. “Well, I certainly don’t envy you that.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Robby says. “Maybe your mind will change once your shift is over.”

“You better take that back now,” Jack warns as he glances up at the board. “Shit like that has a habit of coming true.”

Robby cracks a smile and starts to brief him on the cases he has to take over, which, barring the dry ice fiasco, thankfully isn’t that much.

He’s halfway through when Dana walks over and nods at Jack. “Hey, cowboy. Thanks for that rec on the oil for my sprained ankle. Worked wonders.”

“Anytime, Dana,” Jack says, smiling. “If you run out, just tell me. I buy it by the dozen anyway.”

Robby blinks and looks between them. “Wow, feeling pretty left out of this essential oil pact you’ve got going on.”

Jack shoots him a raised eyebrow. “You got a sprained ankle?”

“No, but it’ll be nice to feel included.”

Dana snorts and shakes her head, returning to her computer.

“Well, I got something that might be even better,” Jack says, before he shrugs off his backpack and starts rummaging in it. He takes out a paper bag that Robby recognises immediately.

“Oh, man,” he says, already starting to grin.

Jack hands him the paper bag, and when he peers into it his suspicions are confirmed. A warm almond croissant from the French bakery just a few blocks away. He’s wanted to try it for a while, but he’s never been able to make time, what with his shift schedule being either too early or too late. He’s kvetched about it to Jack before, but he didn’t think Jack would have remembered it.

“Thanks, man,” he says, clapping Jack on the shoulder and pulling him in close, too quickly to be considered a hug. “You just made my fucking day.”

Jack smirks. “So are you going to stop giving me all your crankiest patients?”

Robby chuckles. “Oh, not a chance, brother.”

Jack gestures to where he’s already taken a bite out of the croissant. “You accepted my bribe, so. Too late.” He starts heading to the lockers.

“That’s not how it works, man,” Robby protests to his retreating back. But considering that he’s saying that between several bites of the pastry, it’s not very convincing.

When he turns back to the counter, Dana’s staring at him with a scrutinizing gaze.

“What,” he says.

Dana stares at him longer. Robby starts to squirm.

“What?” he repeats agitatedly.

Dana shrugs coolly and turns away. “Nothing.”

Robby stares at her for a second before he pushes away from the counter. He makes it two steps before he turns back to her.

“Shut up.”

Dana doesn’t even look up from her computer. “I did not say a word.”

Two days later, Robby finds himself taking a different bus route when his shift ends. It’s instinctive, almost, because he doesn’t even register that he’s not walking to his usual bus stop until he’s standing under a different awning.

But it’s late, his shift had ended with a 10 year-old who came in with a ring avulsion and he had to spend an hour preparing the parents for the possibility of an amputation. It didn’t lead to that, in the end, but it was a close call. After that, he doesn’t think he can handle going back to a dark apartment and be greeted with silence.

So it’s really just because of that, Robby tells himself as he’s being buzzed in the apartment complex, that he’s here at all. Even though he’s been coming here every other week since Pittfest.

Jack opens the door, and Robby ignores the fact that he doesn’t look surprised at all.

He raises his eyebrows.

“Too late for a nightcap?”

They settle down in the living room, drinking beer while the TV plays some low-budget 1990s action flick that neither are interested in. Instead they talk. They steer cleanly away from the barren warzone that is their shifts, talking only about mundane stuff, workplace gossip.

Somehow, they start to reminisce about fifteen, twenty years ago. The good old days of being fresh-grad residents. They wonder briefly about the whereabouts of the other residents that they worked with, then start bringing up the stupid shit that they used to get up to when they could still afford to do so.

“You remember that time,” Jack says, a slow grin spreading across his face, “we broke into Adamson’s office after our shifts and stole his whiskey?”

Robby shakes his head and laughs. “Oh, man. Why did we do that?”

“It was somebody’s last day. Uh, Wilson or…” Jack waves a vague hand. “Somebody going off for a fellowship. Adamson had that Blue Label just sitting on his shelf for months and we were all eyeing it–”

“We? I think I remember that you were the one who got his keys in the first place.”

“Okay, maybe I did, but we were all thinking about it.”

“And he almost caught us. And you told him–” Robby laughs.

Jack laughs too. “Shit–”

“You said, you were going through a really rough breakup and you wanted to talk to him alone–”

“I didn’t know he was going to talk to me for an hour!”

“It worked, though, we got that whiskey passing around in the back stairwell while he was talking to you about safe sex–” Robby breaks into laughter at that mental image.

Jack shakes his head. “It was fuckin’ traumatic, man. He was trying to be nice, he was just fumbling to get the right words. And I still don’t know where he got the idea that I was some kind of Don Juan who needs to settle down…” He trails off at Robby’s expression. “What? What does that look mean?”

Robby grimaces. He takes a swig from his beer to stall. “Back then, when you first came in nobody knew what you were like. Just that you were some Joe with all that cowboy cockiness, and you know, your whole–” he gestures at him, “hotshot stud thing.” He shrugs. “Think maybe it was Lena or someone, one of the charge nurses, who said you got around pretty fast.”

Jack raises an eyebrow. “‘Hotshot stud’?”

“Shut up,” Robby mutters, reddening as he takes a sip from his beer.

Jack smirks. “Funny,” he says, all-casual-like as he glances at Robby. “Because I only slept with one person in the entire ED.”

Robby makes the mistake of meeting his gaze. Dark eyes searing, familiar. He swallows, suddenly feeling his pulse thud in his ears.

It’s so easy, then. There’s barely a foot between them, and his calf is pressed against the jut of Jack’s knee, something that didn’t even register in Robby’s mind but now becomes a white-hot point of contact. One of his hands rests in the space between them. If his fingers twitch, they would just slightly brush the hem of Jack’s worn t-shirt. The t-shirt that hangs soft and loose on him. Marked with dark spots, where the condensation from the beer bottle has dripped on, thin rivulets of water that tracks down the length of his forearm, startlingly silver in the dim room.

Robby tears his gaze away and sets down his beer bottle on the coffee table. He stands with a groan. “I’m gonna get more beer.”

He heads into the kitchen, willing the roar in his head to die down as he opens the fridge and peers around for longer than is necessary. He finally takes two bottles of beer and straightens up. When he turns, Jack is standing in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe.

Neither of them speaks. Jack is staring at him in that way– the way he looked that night, twenty fucking years ago, all unreserved heat and everything unspoken.

He pushes off the doorframe and moves forward.

One step, two. And he’s standing in front of him, gaze not breaking once, as he takes the beer bottles from Robby’s hands and puts them down on the counter beside him.

Robby swallows. If he moves– fuck, it’s so easy, he doesn’t even have to move more than an inch, he could just sway or shift in the right way, and that’ll be that; he’s not sure what would even meet first, hands or hips or lips, but it’ll happen so naturally, gravitational almost–

Jack leans forward and places his mouth against his ear.

Robby freezes.

He’s aware of his breaths, shallow in his lungs, but even clearer he can hear Jack’s slow, calm breathing, soft exhales on the plane of his cheek.

Then he feels it: lips brushing the soft skin below his ear.

Lower. A kiss on the line of his jaw. Robby shifts his face slightly, and the next one lands on the corner of his mouth. Soft, barely-there. His eyes fall shut.

When he finally feels lips pressing into his mouth, he doesn’t even think about it. His mouth parts under his without protest. Natural. Gravitational. Eventual.

Jack makes a low noise, and a hand comes up to cup the back of his neck, thumb brushing over his carotid. Robby’s hand grabs onto his wrist, holding him there as he kisses him back, no longer gentle, no longer chaste.

He feels hips pressing into him, a thigh slotting between his legs, and he anchors his other hand at Jack’s hip to urge him forward, pulling him into a slow grind.

Jack moans into his mouth, thigh pushing into where Robby’s already beginning to tent in his pants. It’s incendiary, the friction, and he’s riding the hard line of Jack’s thigh before he even knows what he’s doing, panting hotly as Jack’s mouth travels down the length of his neck.

Jack’s hand slips up the hem of his t-shirt, thick fingers brushing across his flank, before they trace almost absentmindedly down the sensitive trail of hair that leads into his waistband. Robby jerks instinctively, and Jack only smirks in reply; no, that was not an absentminded touch at all.

“Jack,” he breathes out, and he doesn’t know if he’s begging or warning him, but it doesn’t matter, does it? Because Jack just sucks a kiss at the hard line of his clavicle, without breaking eye contact, and when his fingers finally dip into his waistband and slides past the line of his hip Robby’s not thinking about anything at all.

He groans when Jack’s hand finally closes over his cock, head dropping onto his shoulder. Jack mouths at his cheek, almost sweetly, at odds with the way he’s stripping his cock, his hand all tight heat and everything that Robby needs.

“C’mon,” he whispers into Robby’s ear, hand twisting with just the right amount of pressure, making him buckle. His other hand slots up into the back of Robby’s head, carding into his hair, holding him while he moans against the crook of his neck.

Jack turns his head and seals his mouth over Robby’s in a kiss that’s more tongue than anything, as devouring and relentless as the hand that’s jerking him off. It’s graceless and dirty and Robby can’t do anything but rut into the tight circle of his hand, gasping as Jack bites at his jaw.

“Jack–” he pants, and Jack’s murmuring, “I got you, I got you,” pulling him into a bruising kiss as he pumps him once, twice, and Robby comes with a choked-off cry, body folding over as he feels his cock splatter the insides of his pants with come.

It takes a few seconds for him to come back to full awareness, and when he opens his eyes again he finds himself slumped against the fridge, one of Jack’s hands holding him up by the hip while the other is still cupping his nape, thumb brushing over his collarbone in absent repetition.

“Welcome back, Major Tom,” Jack says, his eyes twinkling like they do when he’s saying something that’s really only funny to him. Robby doesn’t rib him for once, maybe because he’s still coming down from his orgasm, or maybe because the sight of his face creased with that half-smile makes something warm and honeyed swell in his chest. Instead he just runs a hand over the length of Jack’s forearm and turns his face to plant a kiss on his hand.

They move to the bedroom, and Robby almost laughs when he suddenly thinks of how they used to fall into bed together, frantically pulling off each other’s clothes, slamming into walls and cabinets to make out like teenagers. Now, twenty years later, they’re going to bed together almost calmly, him peeling off his clothes and sinking into the mattress to relieve the tension on his back, while Jack goes to switch off the lights and anything that lights up before coming back.

It’s so starkly different from how they used to claw at each other; there’s nothing sexy or hurried about it, but it’s still good, still sends goosebumps down his skin when Jack closes the door and flits his eyes over him, barely-concealed heat in his gaze.

Robby watches as Jack takes off his sweatpants, leaving him in boxers that are doing nothing to hide how hard he is.

“Believe me, I didn’t plan this,” he says, still half-sedated from his orgasm.

“Huh, really,” Jack says, crawling onto the bed and kissing him deeply. He breaks away with a smirk. “So beer isn’t code for fucking?”

Robby huffs out a laugh. When they first did this twenty years ago it was under the guise of having a beer or two, until they stopped bothering to pretend that they were using alcohol as anything but foreplay.

He watches as Jack takes off his prosthetic, a measured motion he’s seen plenty of times before, and subconsciously realises that his hand is rubbing circles at Jack’s hip. When Jack finally has his prosthetic detached and propped up beside his bed, he trails that hand up the back of his t-shirt.

Jack turns back to him with an amused look. “Already raring to go?”

His mind is hazy, but Robby’s pretty sure that Jack’s cock is still standing at half-mast. He conveys as much to him with a look. Jack just shrugs. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Jack.” Call him selfless, but Robby will not forgive himself if he lets Jack go and jack off alone in the shower or something.

When Jack doesn’t move, Robby rolls his eyes and turns to slide open his bedside drawer. He doesn’t have to rummage around long before he takes out a bottle of lube and a condom.

Jack snorts. “Am I that predictable?”

“Be grateful,” is Robby’s only response.

Well, Jack isn’t the only one who’s grateful, because it’s not long before he has his fingers slicked up and sliding into Robby, making him moan softly.

It’s been a while since he’s done this, but Jack’s mouthing across the span of his bare chest while his fingers are pumping a steady rhythm inside him, and he feels all molten at the edges, ready to sink into the mattress.

“Hey,” Jack’s voice floats up to him from where he’s tracing his lips along the line of his hip, “don’t fall asleep on me, man.” Robby only hums in response, his limbs tired and mind still swimming. Jack’s fingers are pressing into him with such languid precision that he doesn’t do more than roll his hips slowly in lazy reciprocation.

He’s not expecting it when Jack leans down and licks a stripe up his cock, making him yelp and grab onto Jack’s shoulder.

Jack smirks at him. “You with me now?”

It takes a minute, though, for his dick to get on board fully. Neither of them are in their twenties anymore, even though it’s unbelievably ironic since they were dryhumping just ten minutes ago. But Jack makes up for it with his characteristic meticulousness, placing a pillow below Robby’s hips and smoothing broad hands over his thighs as he spreads him wider.

He moves to slot in between Robby’s legs, rolling on the condom while he stares blatantly at Robby. In daylight, Robby sometimes finds Jack’s stares too piercing and too knowing, but right now the room is dark and the intensity of his eyes only sends heat simmering under his skin, and Robby doesn’t think twice before sliding a hand up the flank of Jack’s thigh.

Jack lines himself up and bears a hand on the mattress beside Robby’s head. He feels fingers slide back inside him before they gently spread him open, and he doesn’t have time to shudder before Jack’s pushing inside him, the glide of his cock smooth and delicious and burning him just the right side of heat.

Jack lowers his face and presses their foreheads together, mouths panting into each other. A hand slides down the length of Robby’s thigh before it cups his shin and lifts it, and before Robby knows it, he’s hiking his thigh up to Jack’s hip, his calf pressing against Jack’s ass. With his weight leveraged onto the left side of his body, it doesn’t take much for Jack to thrust into Robby, his hand a searing hot grip on Robby’s thigh.

Robby groans as Jack pulls out and pushes back in, the pace of his thrusts torturously slow. Jack kisses him, deep and filthy, matching the rhythm of his hips rolling downwards. Robby’s not even aware of how quickly his arousal is building until he finds himself moaning every time Jack thrusts into him, the plane of his stomach dragging friction along his leaking cock. He grips at Jack’s hip, silently urging him to move faster, but Jack keeps up the measured pace, unrelenting as he bears down on Robby.

“Jack,” he pants out, canting his hips up to Jack’s impatiently. He’s surprised that he’s able to recover so quickly when he had just come, but that surprise is secondary to how urgently he needs to get off now. Jack doesn’t even glance down; he’s preoccupied in sucking bruising kisses down the column of his neck, the tight muscles of his biceps flexing every time he thrusts into Robby.

His mouth closes over his sternum, the scrape of his teeth just sharp enough on that sensitive stretch of skin, while his hand hitches up Robby’s thigh slightly just as he drives his cock inside him with more force than before. That’s all it takes: Robby gasps, clenching tight around him, cock spurting hot and fast against Jack’s stomach, squeezing his eyes shut as his orgasm rocks through him.

Jack fucks him through it, pinning his leg at his waist as Robby goes slack, and when Robby opens his eyes again Jack is staring at him, panting deeply as his torso flexes with every thrust. There’s something unreadable in his eyes, impossible light pooling around his pupils, making warmth curl low in Robby’s chest. He reaches up unthinkingly, his hand sliding up the curve of Jack’s shoulder before cupping his nape. He doesn’t even know what he does; maybe it’s the brush of his thumb or fingers digging into his curls, but Jack’s eyes go wide, his stomach tensing, and his knees buckle as he comes with a loud moan.

He crumples onto Robby, forehead pressed against his cheek as he breathes unevenly into the crook of his neck. Vaguely he’s aware of the sensation of their come cooling on their stomachs, but it seems so far away, and his mind is empty and sedated, limbs blessedly compressed by the weight of Jack’s body. He smooths his palm over the bare expanse of Jack’s back, feeling his every breath against his chest. It’s an easy rhythm, a familiar one, and Robby feels his eyes flutter shut.

Through the cloudy haze of his mind, he’s aware of the familiar weight leaving his body, before something cool wipes at his stomach. He reaches out blindly, and the last thing he feels before he sinks into sleep is a hand, gentle as it grazes against his chin, his cheek.

Robby sees him first thing when he walks into his shift: the clean familiar lines of his back as he leans over the counter to talk to Dana.

He slows down when he approaches, but Dana spots him and nods at him. Jack turns, and their eyes meet.

For a moment, something flickers through that gaze. Guilt? Hope? Robby doesn’t know, only that the look in Jack’s eyes is brittle, to him accusatory, and he thinks Jack might move forward and land a blow on his face or chest, or worse, the softness of his stomach where he has no choice but to yield.

But Jack only nods at him, and that moment breaks.

“You want me to tell you how many beds are still waiting for ICU, or do you want it to be a nice surprise?”

Robby swallows around the tightness in his chest and attempts a smile. “Wouldn’t want you to ruin the suspense.”

Usually Jack would counter with a one-liner, or offer one of his knowing smiles, but he just turns away, grabbing his tablet without even a twitch of the mouth.

Something sharp lances through Robby at that, and he’s about to pull him to the side and ask him what’s up. But Perlah comes up to him then and tells him that he needs to sign off on the paperwork for a patient he treated for infective endocarditis from his last shift. He does that, then gets caught in a conversation about whether it’s true that the board is cutting half of the nursing positions, joined in by Princess.

He tries his best to allay their fears, but by the side-eyes that they shoot his way, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t succeed. He excuses himself under the guise of doing rounds, but he’s really looking out of the corner of his eye for a familiar head of curls. He spots it in one of the observation rooms, and he heads in.

Jack’s charting on his tablet and doesn’t acknowledge him. Robby stares at the back of his head for a moment before he clears his throat and nods at the teenager sleeping in the bed. “What happened?”

Jack doesn’t look up. “Hypoxic respiratory arrest due to anaphylaxis. Was a close call.”

Robby sucks in a breath. Anaphylaxis is no joke, and he knows from years of working with him that Jack tends to downplay his saves, so the close call must have been pretty damn close.

“How old is he? Fifteen?” Robby asks. Jack shrugs, still not facing him. But he does pause and look up, and for a moment both of them just stare at the small body swathed in white sheets, listening to the faint sound of his breathing over the beeps of the patient monitor.

Eventually Jack finishes up and makes to go, but Robby steps in front of him.

“Are we good?”

“On what?” Jack barely glances at him before he turns back to his tablet. For him, refusing to make eye contact is never a good thing.

Robby’s about to say, What we did the other day. When you had me in your bed and your hands. But he knows Jack isn’t talking about that. It’s what he did after.

When he woke up hours later and heard the shower running in the bathroom. The early-morning light was streaming into the room, weak violet washing over the rumpled sheets on the bed. And Robby, moving in a dream, had stood up, put on his clothes, took his things and walked out of the door.

The words stick in his mouth. Because what would he say anyway? I was going to stay would be a lie; he knew, when he woke up, that he had to leave.

I wanted to stay– no. No. Because it’s not about what he wants, hasn’t been in a long time. He can’t afford to think like that. And it isn’t fair to say that to Jack of all people, the only person who’s ever given him more than he deserves.

Jack’s staring at him now, finally, his eyes brimming with something that Robby doesn’t know how to interpret. He looks like he’s waiting. He looks like he’s bracing against whatever Robby’s going to say.

“Nothing.” The word falls out of his mouth before he can stop it, and just as quickly, he sees Jack’s face shutter close, all of that unspoken anticipation falling away in a blink of an eye.

And Robby, God fucking strike him down, turns away, and it’s like he’s watching his body move on its own accord, already knowing what he’ll do and already hating himself as he hears his voice, disembodied and pitched strangely, say in the most obnoxiously casual tone ever, “I think someone bought bagels.”

A day later, Robby’s finishing up his charts when he glances up at the clock. He frowns.

“Hey, it’s almost 9,” Robby says, “you’ve seen Dr. Abbot come in yet?”

Dana looks up and shrugs. “No. Emma’s in already, though. You can ask her?”

Robby moves further down the hall, occasionally peeking into some of the rooms to make sure that none of his day shift’s crew is still lingering, which happens more often than one would expect. He catches sight of the night shift charge nurse and stops her. “Emma, hey. Is Abbot not coming in today?”

Emma peers at him over her glasses. “Oh, he’s in. Saw him loitering ‘round the ambulance bay when I walked in.”

That’s strange, but the look on Emma’s face suggests that she thinks it’s strictly Robby’s problem to deal with, so he refrains from asking further and thanks her before making his way down to the ambulance bay.

When he gets there, Jack is standing to the side, arms crossed and looking intently at the floor. A cigarette is clamped in his fingers, still smouldering.

“Thought you kicked that habit already, brother.”

Jack doesn’t respond for a moment. He takes a slow drag and shrugs. “Takes a lot for a habit to die out,” he says, voice rough.

Robby stares at him, unsure what to say. Finally he just scrubs a hand over his mouth and sighs. “Come in, man. It’s freezing.”

Jack doesn’t move, a frozen figure save for the grey smoke that’s streaming from his mouth.

Robby looks around and shoves his hands in his pockets, feeling unease prick at his skin. He leans in and says in a low voice, “Look, I’m sorry for that night. I shouldn’t have just walked out.”

Jack finally looks over at him. He smiles, something bitter twisting at the corner of his mouth. “Do you mean that? Or are you saying that because you think that’s what I want to hear?”

Robby opens his mouth, ready to shoot off a sharp retort, but he falters at the look that Jack gives him. It’s the same look when Robby’s trying to talk him off roofs. It means, don’t bullshit me. It means, twenty fucking years.

Robby sighs and looks away.

“Jack,” he says, already hating what he has to say. “You know how we’ve always worked. You know that you and I both aren’t like–” he cuts himself off because suddenly the memory of Jack’s hand cupping his chin in half-sleep slams into him, and he has to push the heel of his palm into his eyes to dispel that from his mind.

He tries again. “There’s no use thinking that–”

“What?” Jack turns to face him fully, voice sharp.

“I thought we–”

“You thought?” Jack says, moving forward. “Well, maybe I thought that this time, twenty years later, now that we’re both grown, we would be past doing all this ambiguous coward shit where we pretend that a fuck is just a fuck, and maybe I even thought that it would be easy, and I wouldn’t have to ask you to stay.”

He narrows his eyes. “Maybe I even thought–” he laughs humourlessly “– tall fucking order– that you’d be past pretending that what you want doesn’t matter. That you’re not above feeling emotions.”

Jack holds his gaze. When he speaks again his voice is hollow.

“That would be stupid, though, wouldn’t it.”

Robby doesn’t answer.

Jack nods slowly. He drops the cigarette in his hand and crushes it against the gravel with the heel of his shoe. He doesn’t look back up at Robby. “Yeah, I thought so.”

With that, he walks past him into the ED.

Robby doesn’t see him on his next shift. Or the next. He checks and rechecks the schedule and doesn’t see Jack’s name listed anywhere near his shifts. He doesn’t want to think too much on whether it’s just coincidental scheduling or deliberate avoidance. He doesn’t have time to think about it anyway, because the world keeps turning and his shifts are just as horrendous, patients just as innumerable. And if he throws himself into every single case with more viciousness than usual and starts pulling more thirty-six hour shifts, well, that’s neither here nor there.

Finally a day comes where his shift is lined up to Jack’s night shift. But Ellis comes in instead, clearly called in at the last minute but looking as brisk and unflappable as usual. After they hand-off, Robby asks in a throwaway comment whether she knows why Jack isn’t here. She just shrugs and gives him a stare that he would call ‘pitying’ if he’s being particularly self-loathing.

His shift ended just as badly as all the others he’s had recently, and he’s walking to the bus stop when he realizes he’s heading in the wrong direction. He looks up and sees that he’s standing in front of the bus stop that goes to Troy Hill instead of the 54 route that he takes back home every day.

He stops in his tracks, staring blankly at the maple leaves that’s strewn across the sidewalk, unnatural orange thrown into stark vividness whenever headlights pass over them. He finds himself rooted to the spot, eyes fixed uncontrollably to the leaves, until his legs can finally move again, turning sluggishly to lead him away.

Robby comes back to full awareness hours later, when he’s standing under his shower, the sluice of water coasting down his spine cold enough to shock him. It’s almost unwelcome when he can hear his thoughts again, replacing the static in his mind that he was beginning to find peaceful, so he opts for the next best option, which is cracking open a can of IPA while he stares blankly at the TV, the sound of laugh tracks muffled to his ears.

A can or two more later sees him slumped against the sofa, phone unlocked and open to a contact that he’s memorised the number to, and he stares at the name on his screen until the white letters begin to bleed together. He puts his hand down so when his thumb finally presses on the call button he doesn’t see it.

The ringing tone drones in his ear for too long, but Robby doesn’t have the heart to just hang up. It gets cut off by the automated voice telling him that his call can’t be connected, but he could leave his message after the beep. Robby sits and says nothing, aware that he’s breathing into the phone. He stays silent so long that eventually his phone beeps again, indicating that he’s run out of time to leave his voicemail.

Robby doesn’t even think about it when he takes his phone away from his ear and hits the redial button. It rings again and he gets sent to voicemail again. This time, when the beep sounds, Robby breathes in. And out.

“Hey,” he says, hoarse. “It’s me.” His own voice sounds grating on his ears. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“Jack.” And his chest cracks, because he’s so fucking tired and angry, and he can’t forget all the eyes that bored into him today, always accusatory, always haunting, adding to the perpetually growing ledger of midnight regrets and things to mull over on the edge of roofs. And beyond all that, despite the fact that he knows he won’t stop toeing over the railing in some form of fucked-up ineffectual repentance, he wants to feel like he can walk back from the ledge. That if he turns around, there’ll be a hand to pull him back. A hand that he’s known for twenty years.

He fucked it up, and a month or two ago that would’ve been that; that Robby would’ve cut his losses, passed it up as one addition to a long line of things that had inevitably broke before he let it break him.

But he’s tired now. He’s rocked to the bones with an aching emptiness. When he presses the cold grooves of his Star of David to his lips, a subconscious tic, he can only think about how Jack’s lips had brushed there just weeks ago. How gentle, how fleeting, like it was their first time ever touching. He had watched Jack’s eyelashes dip when he breathed out and he hadn’t been thinking about anything else at all.

“I’m a coward.” It falls out of his mouth like a confession. The rest of the words follow in a rush. “I should’ve stayed. Hell, twenty years ago– I should’ve stayed.”

He presses his palm into his eyes and it chokes out of his throat like an exhale. “I want you, Jack, of course I– fuck. Why wouldn’t I?”

He opens his mouth, but he doesn’t know what he’s going to say next, because then his phone emits the loud beep that tells him, time’s up.

The phone slips from his hand slowly and falls on his chest. He keeps his eyes closed.

Something startles him: a quaking weight by his side that’s somehow in tandem with a shrill, insistent noise.

He drifts back into his body slowly, and looks down to realize that his phone’s ringing from where it’s wedged between his side and the back of the couch. He fumbles for it and presses accept call, instinctively placing it to his ear before he can register what name had been flashing on his screen.

“Robby.”

He has to pull the phone away for a second, blinking rapidly up at the ceiling. He returns to his phone and finally trusts himself to speak, though his voice comes out hoarse and shaky all the same. “Yeah.”

“Robby–” Jack’s voice catches, then softens. “Mike.”

And Robby can see it, the shape of his mouth gentle as it forms his name. He has to close his eyes at the way his chest tightens at that.

Robby doesn’t know what to say or where to start. He opens his mouth, and what comes out is: “You weren’t there today.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “My sister called me. Finally moving out, and that dickbag took the pickup so she couldn’t use it. Had to drive to Washington back and forth three times just to get her stuff.”

He pauses before saying, “Don’t tell Gloria, though. Told her it was for my physical therapy.”

Robby huffs out a laugh. They lapse into silence. Robby breathes out, pulse thudding wildly, and he’s about to open his mouth and say the one fucking thing that he just can’t seem to say when Jack speaks again.

“Mike.” His voice is quiet. “Did you mean it?”

Robby closes his eyes. When he replies his voice is barely a whisper. “Yeah.”

Jack doesn’t respond for a while. Robby hears him breathing faintly, a flutter of noise pressed to his ear.

Finally he hears a soft chuckle. “I know you won’t, but I really want to make you say it again.”

Robby covers his eyes with his hand. His mouth is doing something weird, pulling up at the corners involuntarily. “Fuck you,” he says, but there’s no way to disguise the grin in his voice.

There’s only a sharp exhale of breath for a response, but Robby knows– don’t ask him how he knows– that Jack’s smiling on the other side, that knowing half-smirk that he could probably shape out with his eyes closed.

Then Jack’s voice came through, low and soft. “I missed you.”

And he says it so simply, so easily, that Robby feels warmth rushing from his chest to his throat in dizzying speed, knocking the breath out of him.

He swallows. Behind his eyelids, lights dance to the pulse of his heartbeat.

“Me too,” he says. *Always, *he doesn’t say. But it’s a near thing.

The next day, Robby’s standing at central at the end of his shift, debriefing the med students on a case that had barely pulled through at the last minute. It’s rough, needless to say, but he can’t help but feel slightly proud to see that these young– *kids, *really, had acted so efficiently and cleanly, starkly different to how they were when they first stumbled in with wide eyes.

He’s telling them that they did well, watching them try to hide their grins at that, when he spots a figure walking in behind them. Robby quickly finishes up and tells them to do their final rounds before excusing himself to make his way over to where Jack’s standing below the board.

Jack looks over to him and nods to the board. “This doesn’t look as horrific as usual.”

“Spoken like someone who’s asking for a terrible shift.”

“Might like the rush but I don’t have a death wish.”

Robby snorts. “So you just hang out on the roof for fun?”

Jack turns with mock-offense in his eyes. “That’s our spot, man. Don’t diss our spot like that.”

“Not sure how sacred it is, considering you let the DoorDash guy go up there,” Robby says.

“Marco,” Jack corrects him. Then he pats him on the shoulder and leans in, speaking in his ear in a low voice, “Don’t worry, man, he’s not half as pretty as you.”

He turns with a half-smirk and heads to the lockers, leaving Robby staring after him.

It strikes him, how easy it is. How he was so afraid of something that’s always been so simple. The one thing he’s always known with certainty. He looks at Jack’s back, the line of his neck that he’s traced two weeks ago, twenty years ago, and finds that the warmth that swells and fills his chest is a familiar one, and Robby can’t remember a time when it hasn’t resided there.

He follows Jack to the lockers, watching as he puts his bag and sweatshirt inside before shutting and locking it. He doesn’t look surprised when he turns to face Robby, but his brow slowly furrows in confusion when Robby just stares at him without speaking.

“Wha–”

Robby pulls him in a hug, pressing his face to Jack’s cheek, brief and fleeting.

He hooks his chin over Jack’s shoulder and feels the solid warmth of his back under his palm. “Missed you, man.”

“It’s been less than twelve hours,” Jack retorts, but his arm comes to wrap around his waist all the same, a steady and familiar touch.