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It's an unfortunate truth that Samira Mohan is well-practiced in schooling her features.

Between the girls in middle school and their sneers at the thick hair growing on her arms and not theirs, the aunties and their comments about her marriageability, and the patients of a certain ilk who look right through her before asking for a "real doctor," she is good, expert even, at keeping her face deliberately blank.

Robby has always broken molds and set himself apart from the pack, though, so it's no wonder that he is able to wheedle reactions out of her like no other. His condescension, his hypocrisy, his withheld praise: they nearly always result in a gaze glinting with challenge, her mouth in a moue.

Nearly always, because sometimes she gets this look instead, a little like a kicked puppy.

The first time she turns to him with tears in her eyes — full of contempt but lanced through with hurt, too, her bottom lip quivering — he almost chokes at the sight, neurons instantly firing to conjure up an image of her with similar tears pricking her eyes as she gags on his cock.

His need in that moment is so acutely physical that it may well be a hand around his throat, and though he has every intention to carry on with the rest of his shift as if nothing is out of the ordinary, as if the game hasn't been changed forever, he ultimately only lasts a matter of minutes before fleeing to a restroom to run his wrists under cold water, then to get himself off when his half-hearted attempt at regulation fails.

In another world, he might be decent enough to feel some shame that this — a sudden tightness in his scrub pants; his teeth digging hard into his fist in order to keep his curse of fuck, Mohan at bay — is his gut reaction. In this world, though, he lives to see her tears again, more definition for his dreams where, now, they fuck until she cries and then some, once-bouncy curls plastered to her cheeks.

Who hasn't thought about hate sex from time to time anyway, he'd say dismissively, gun to his head. She's the bane of his existence, everything he once was and could have been, so why not work her up the way she works him up, damp evidence from cornea to cunt that he affects her as much as she affects him? Why not wring pleasure from her like water from a stone, see her spit epithets at him even as her body betrays their well-worn animosity by coming again and again?

But Jack's recommendation be damned, he's always been a little too self-aware for talk therapy to do him any good, and so he knows that the real reason he wants to make Samira Mohan cry is because it's more enjoyable to pick her apart than to do the same to himself. Easier to peel back the skin she's carefully grown over deep loss and pain and feelings of inadequacy and find the bleeding heart, the fissure. The festering wound, twin to his own, still weeping.

That night, he dreams again.

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"Come on, Mira. You can give her one more, can't you?"

By all metrics, the answer is no. She's barely even holding herself up anymore. If Jack were to let go, removing the hand braced at her hip and the other fisted in her hair, she would crumple, dead weight on Emery's nose and mouth. Though from the way the other woman keeps digging her fingers harder into the meat of her thighs, relentless in dragging her forward and further onto her tongue, she hardly thinks Emery would mind.

Still, she whines. The pressure Emery's been stoking is exquisite, but it's stalling — deliberately; Emery likes playing with her food — and Samira can't fathom it peaking again. "I can't."

"Of course you can. I know you can. You're Samira Mohan," Jack says simply. "You're unstoppable." His voice is a low rumble, barely audible over the sounds of Emery humming into her; lewd suction; her blood whooshing hotly in her ears. Samira feels more than hears him sweeten the deal. "I'll fuck you if you do," he says, teeth grazing her neck. "Don't you want that?"

Yeah. Yeah, she does.

She wants him to lift her off of Emery's face and onto his cock like she's just a doll. Wants to feel the heat of Emery's scowl as her cunt stretches around him. She's been chasing the high of being their battleground since PittFest, and their current contest of arousal is the closest she's gotten yet.

She nods, eyes glassy.

"Attagirl."

Oh, how Samira beams at his praise. It creates something of a feedback loop; at her deep flush, the hand in her hair disappears and she tracks it to where he grips himself through his boxers for a split second of precious relief before he chimes back in with, "Walsh, she needs a little —"

Emery barks out a laugh, cutting him short. Samira jolts at the vibrations. "I know you're not telling me how to eat a woman out."

"Of course not." A beat, then he grins. "I'm telling you how to eat this particular woman out."

He does know what she likes, after all. Knows when to be firm and when to be feather-light, when she needs friction or finesse, when to leave her teetering on the edge and how to tip versus throw her over. Samira is one discipline he's never minded practicing.

But Emery Walsh is a fast learner in and out of the OR. She responds with a slow, retaliatory stripe directly along the live wire of Samira's clit — Samira, who keens, gasps in a breath that burns when it fills her lungs. She's shocked to discover she's close again, the static in her head suddenly ratcheting up to a roar.

"I didn't need any instructions for the last two orgasms I gave her, did I?" Emery is saying now, meeting Jack's irreverence with her own. "And anyway, what have you been doing this entire time besides enjoying the show?"

She punctuates the question by bringing her hands up to Samira's chest, rolling tight brown nipples between her middle and pointer fingers as he watches. A Cheshire Cat smile splits her slick mouth when Samira, for all her overstimulation, arches eagerly into her touch, her hands grabbing at Emery's.

"I mean, Jesus, Jack. I have half a mind to strap her after this just to make you wait even longer." Her voice drops, silky and sweet. "How about it, Dr. Mohan? Hm? What'll it be, my cock or Jack's?"

Both, Samira's hypothalamus supplies instantly, but she knows that isn't in the cards, not when she's this far gone. Looking back and forth between them, what she sees may as well be pulled straight from her memory of the pigtail catheter procedure: Emery's challenge, Jack's promise. Their glares, heavy and ripe.

Then — the same sure nod he'd leveled her with in Trauma One.

Emery sees Samira's answer before she can say it out loud and groans.

"God, the two of you make me sick. Next time, then," she resolves, before diving back in.

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Samira doesn't know when she first started noticing his hands, but if she had to drop a pin in a timeline, it would probably be around the time he started touching her.

At first, she was sure it was an accident — fingers barely brushing when handing over a laryngoscope or a #10 blade, elbows grazing at the benches across the street — but there's nothing accidental about the way Jack places his palm to the small of her back for a fraction of a second as he slips past her, or the way he reaches out and gives her elbow a squeeze when she does something particularly spectacular (often, always).

It is no surprise, then, that when she gets herself off after a shift, she's started imagining that her questing touch is his.

In her fantasies, he's still double-gloved, blue nitrile digits manipulating her the same way she's seen him manipulate a hundred cricothyroid membranes. I can do these with my eyes closed, but they're open in her fantasies, his pupils wide and needy as he looks at her, through her, past layers of skin and fascia and muscle tissue right to the essence of her, which he finds just as easily with his fingers, too — two first, already a tight slide, but he coaxes a third into her, patient as ever. Peels her apart, petting and stroking and curling until she sees white.

Only then does he remove his hand and press his fingers past her parted lips, leaving the combined tang of rubber and musk on her waiting tongue.

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Having spent most of his life around men with quick tempers and short fuses — from Jonathan Abbot Sr., to his brothers in arms, to those who cycle through the ED in search of absolution, patient and physician alike — Jack prides himself on his meticulous control of his emotions. He is well-versed in de-escalation, knows when letting his fear show on his face serves a purpose or doesn't, can walk the knife's edge of lust with steady feet.

It's a deliberate choice then, he'd insist, to ignore Walsh's low mutter of "don't even think about it" when he gets a very specific look in his eye at Dana's party. He's like a dog who's been a little naughty: Bad boy. Open. Drop it. Only instead of picked-at rodent bones or whatever other prize a lucky canine might find mid-walk, the treasure he is being commanded to relinquish is Samira.

The thing is, he's already relinquished her once, and of his own volition at that. He's the one who cuts the furtive thing of theirs off at the knees, right as she begins applying to fellowships in earnest, PTMC's included. Hardest thing he's ever done, and that's counting the amputation, but he would never forgive himself if they were found out and it caused undue scrutiny of her application.

It's a choice to break his heart by breaking hers. A choice to go to her now, follow her through Dana's guest room and into the en-suite bathroom. A choice to wind a hand through her curls and mouth at her neck, against which he says:

"So. You and Jesse, huh?"

Samira laughs, too loud for their proximity to the crowd. So what if she had felt Jack's eyes on her as Jesse flirted? So what if she had bantered back in performance, leaning in closer than was necessary? "I think you forfeited the right to that answer a bit ago, Jack."

"Are you gonna fuck him?" he asks anyway, turning her so that she's facing the mirror above the sink. His hand at the dip of her waist is radiating heat. His cock, too, curved between her legs.

"Should I?" she counters, grin too sharp.

She eases herself onto him: slowly at first, sentimental, then a quick snap back for his last few inches. Yes, every part of him hums at the breach; "No," he says to her question.

"Why not?"

"Because you're mine."

It comes out too immediately to be choice. Impulsive, without screening or peer review.

And maybe it isn't about choice anymore. Maybe it never was. Maybe Samira is the exception to his every rule and he is bound to be reckless around her, rucking up her dress higher as he drives into her so he can see the very join of them, unobstructed. Jack Abbot is measured and cool and even-keeled — but to what end? What is the point of discipline without instinct? Without Samira?

"Funny," she says flatly, staring at their reflections, "I seem to recall you telling me the opposite."

"Samira, you know why I did it—"

"—and I also seem to recall telling you you didn't get to make that decision for me." He's a little wilder now, rhythm faltering; it makes her bold. "Maybe I should do the opposite of what you want this time. Maybe I will fuck Jesse. You know," and there's that grin again, "between his hair, eyes, and age, if I squint—" It earns her a particularly hard thrust, perfect, her mouth falling open in a silent O before adding, "You don't have the earring, though."

(Close, so close. It can't mean anything anymore, so why not crack jokes through it, why not lean on levity when he's splitting every part of her in two, sanity included.)

"Should I go out and get one?"

(A joke, a joke, and she gasps at the touch of two rough finger pads to her clit. Reaches behind her blindly, her head thrown back against his shoulder now.)

"I like your jewelry better."

She grips his dog tags so tightly as she comes that she can see his name like a tattoo on her skin after, still there as he makes to clean her and she shrugs off the offer.

Mine, she can’t stop hearing him say, even as she slips out of the bathroom before him.

Mine. 

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She's listening for the reprimand the moment he grips her waist.

Sure enough: "Hands, Langdon."

It's Pavlovian, the way they both react to Robby's voice. Samira can see the plea in Frank's eyes, the way he looks to her like she might intercede on his behalf — deference, finally — yet he dutifully tears his hand from where it landed at her side in desperation, placing it palm down on the bed. She sits a little taller on his waist in turn, deepens the arch of her back the way she knows Robby likes. The result is a change in the angle of Frank's cock inside her, drawing a whine out of both of them.

Robby likes that, too.

When Robby tells her he has a treat planned for her after the shithole of a shift they've had, Samira thinks it'll probably be something along the lines of a bath to get her loose and pliant, then him fucking her into his mattress until she cries. It is an effective and agreed-upon remedy for the usual ills of the ED; it should be just as effective in wiping her mind of every near-confrontation with her fellow R4, his pride and insecurity and self-loathing frothing together like some science fair contraption about to burst.

She is not expecting her education to continue into the evening.

She is not expecting to be greeted at the door by Frank's hangdog expression, or by Robby saying simply, "Doctor Langdon owes you an apology for his behavior today."

Frank, she knows, has been in Robby's bed before. Robby told her as much before this arrangement of theirs began — Abby had even green-lit it, anything that meant her husband didn't bring the biohazardous waste of his work baggage home — and she'd swallowed down her jealousy that even when it came to this, he'd picked Frank first. Frank, who always received his favor by default, while Samira received it secondhand.

Their dynamic is different now, though. This Robby reminds them both as he works her open on his fingers, murmuring the praise that Frank covets to Samira instead. It's a matter of contrition.

To his credit, Frank is plenty contrite. He has to keep his hands to himself, but Robby has stipulated nothing about staying silent, and Samira is glad. It takes her a moment to find her stride — it's not every day she's instructed to use a colleague for her pleasure — but when she does, it's to an array of pretty noises from the colleague in question, gritted out curses to cracked moans when she clenches around him just because she can, culminating in I'm sorry, Mohan, I'm sorry as she chases her release, finds it beautifully. A little unconventional as far as Step Nine goes, but should he challenge her authority again, she knows they'll both be thinking of this.

"Well, Doctor Mohan?" Robby's voice is a roll of thunder as he rises from the chair he's been watching from and crosses over to them. His hands are hot as he helps her off of Frank; hot as he reaches between her legs for a swipe of the mess there and brings it up to his lips for a taste. "Does Doctor Langdon get to come?"

And, oh, she could say no.

She could say no and it would be warranted, further consequence of his insubordination.

But god, those hangdog eyes again. Frank is resigned, so sure he knows her answer, and it's his certainty more than her pity or grace or forgiveness that has Samira subverting his expectation.

"Yes," she says, and at Robby's touch — tender, gentle, another subversion — Frank lets go.