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“I’m calling it,” Blue declares, standing up from his seat in front of the couch. He makes a show of setting his controller down on the coffee table— a symbolic “bowing out” of sorts, making it clear that the last two hours of competing have come to an end.
Jules sets her controller down too, and breathes a small sigh of relief. As nice as it is to compete and fight and bicker with him, the length of their 12-hour shift had quickly begun to weigh on her, and she wasn’t sure how much longer her eyes would be able to focus on the screen in front of them.
Blue turns to her, reaching in his pocket for his phone. “Want me to call you an Uber?” he asks, and Jules freezes.
“I…” Jules trails off, her eyes darting to Mika. She’d been sitting on the opposite side of the couch while Blue and Jules had played, stealing a turn here and there and backseat driving Jules’ performance whenever she didn’t have a controller in her hands. It was nice, honestly. Jules was mildly shit at the game, and she knew it infuriated Mika to no end, but it was nice to work as a team. To laugh with her and cheer with her. Even if this hadn’t been how they had planned to spend their night, Jules thinks it ended up going pretty okay.
And now Blue was trying to get her to go home. To his credit, he was offering to pay for her Uber— but she really didn’t want to take him up on his offer— not tonight.
Frankly, Jules hadn’t planned to leave— Mika had invited her over with the expressed intention of her staying the night, but Blue had unknowingly hijacked their evening and she didn’t want to suggest staying over in front of him lest he get the wrong (or right) impression. Jules and Mika had both agreed that this wasn’t the night to tell him. In their defense, there wasn’t much to tell, really. They hadn’t labeled their… thing, which had consisted mostly of hanging out between shifts and kissing. A lot.
Regardless, how were they supposed to explain that to Blue? So they decided tonight wasn’t the night.
Jules looks desperately at Mika, subtly begging her to bail her out. Mika blinks, before turning to Blue.
“Uh— nah, don’t worry— save your money. She can stay in mine,” Mika offers, turning back to meet her eyes. Jules lets out a breath.
“Alright,” Blue shrugs, unphased and looking about as exhausted as Jules feels. If he notices the small smile the two share, he doesn’t mention it. “Night.”
“Night,” Mika repeats back, making a small salute as her and Jules watch their coworker retire up the stairs.
Once she hears the soft thud of Blue’s bedroom door shutting, Mika wastes no time in climbing across the couch and into Jules’ space. She throws her arms over Jules’ shoulders and around her neck, and laughs when Jules pulls her off of the cushions and into her lap.
“Hi,” Mika says softly, letting her forehead fall against Jules’. It’s such a common habit for them that it’s starting to become something like their natural state.
Jules stifles a laugh at the absurdity. Hiding their closeness from their friends, sharing looks when no one’s paying attention, the constant need to be in each others’ personal space. It all makes her feel like she’s seventeen again, and for the first time in a long time, she’s letting herself enjoy it.
“Hi,” Jules replies, wrapping her arms around Mika’s waist and giving her a light squeeze.
Mika lets her eyes fall closed with a sigh, and it sounds as though it had been a breath held in for hours.
Jules chuckles and brushes a hand against Mika’s cheek. “What was that for?”
“We’ve been a foot away from each other for basically the entire night, and I wasn’t even allowed to hold your hand,” she complains, tracing nonsense shapes into Jules’ shoulder. “I felt like I was going crazy.”
Jules pulls back, nearly melting at how softly Mika is gazing at her. Like she’s the only thing in the world worth looking at. She smiles, sure the fondness is being reflected in her own eyes.
“Hey, come on— did you want Blue to see us like this? After the day he had?” she whispers, daring to pull her eyes away from the girl in her lap just long enough to peer up the stairs to make sure they weren’t being overheard.
Mika concedes, laughing. “No!” she insists. “I just missed you.”
“Missed me? Yasuda, we were sitting on the same sofa,” Jules teases. “You’ve been lecturing me on video game controls for the last two hours.”
Mika rolls her eyes as she leans in, kissing Jules so gently that she’s suddenly convinced Mika might think she’s breakable. And maybe she is, because the kiss is so soft and so sweet that it makes her stomach flip and her heart ache.
“Okay, maybe I just missed doing that,” she concedes as she pulls away. A smile lights up her face and Jules tries her hardest to commit it to memory so she can replay it in her head long after the night is over. “And it’s not my fault you’re shit at the game.”
“Am not!” Jules insists, pulling a face. “I won a few rounds.”
“With my help,” Mika corrects her.
Jules hums agreement and lets her head fall forward to rest against Mika’s chest. “Teamwork,” she murmurs, letting her eyes flutter closed as she hones in on the sound of Mika’s heartbeat in her chest.
She thinks she could stay here forever, suspended in time. No shifts to wake up for, no patients stealing their attention, no nosy coworkers. Just them, together, in their little impenetrable bubble. The soft rhythm of Mika’s heartbeat grounds her, tethers her to the present moment. In this space, it feels as though they’re the only two people in the world.
Jules feels Mika’s fingers begin to run absentmindedly through her hair and she sighs into the touch. She can’t remember the last time she felt this safe with someone, and some part of her starts to think she may never have. There’s something about Mika that makes her so easy to be drawn into— her warmth, her smile, her touch. It’s magnetic. She’s magnetic. Jules never stood a chance.
“Hey,” Mika murmurs, lightly tapping Jules on the shoulder. “Don’t fall asleep on me, Millin.”
Jules lets out a muffled whine of protest and squeezes Mika tighter to herself.
“Jules, hey— not down here,” Mika whispers into her hair. “Blue and Simone would find us in the morning, and, not to brag, but my bed is much comfier than the couch.”
Jules’ lips quirk into a small smile at the mention of a bed and she reluctantly lifts her head. She can’t help but give Mika an overdramatic pout when she meets her gaze, waiting for her to kiss it away. Naturally, she does. Mika’s lips taste like cheap beer and the pizza Blue had ordered for himself but Jules loves it, and finally lets herself give in to Mika’s request for them to relocate.
Jules is starting to think she’d do anything Mika asked of her, as long as she got a kiss in return.
“Fine,” Jules concedes as they break apart. She feels Mika’s arms fall from her shoulders and the weight of her body shift out of her lap and she immediately misses the contact.
Mika offers her hand and Jules grabs it eagerly, letting herself be pulled off the couch and led upstairs.
As they enter Mika’s room, Jules realizes it’s her first time inside since they had gone from friends to— well, whatever they are now. Friends that kiss.
She reluctantly drops Mika’s hand so she can explore, trying her hardest to memorize every detail. As she roams, she starts to notice things she hadn’t before— first, it’s the photo on Mika’s dresser of her and her siblings around Christmastime. Jules lets her fingers ghost across the corner of the small wooden frame. The photograph must be over ten years old, but she spots a pre-teen Mika immediately— she still smiles the same.
Next is the record player sitting atop a small side table with a crate of twenty or so vinyl records nearby. Jules doesn’t sift through them, but she assumes she’d recongize very few. The player itself looks like it was bought second-hand, clearly well-loved by both Mika and it’s previous owner.
Then it’s the guitar case tucked away in a corner, dust lightly coating its surfaces. She turns to see Mika watching her from the edge of the bed with a smile.
“You play?” Jules asks, pointing to the case.
“Not well,” Mika admits. “Couldn’t be consistent enough to build the callouses, so my fingers just hurt every time I went to play. But I know a little bit. Better at piano, though.”
Jules lets out a shocked laugh. “Of course you play piano.”
“I’m the second oldest daughter— it was either that or ballet,” Mika sighs.
Jules gasps dramatically as she joins Mika on the edge of the bed, lightly knocking their shoulders together. “You should’ve picked ballet!”
Mika makes a face of mock disgust. “Why, so I could be forced into a pink tutu? Not really my style, even as a kid.”
Jules laces their fingers together and lets her head fall against Mika’s shoulder. She begins to imagine the young Mika from the photograph in a ballerina’s outfit and stifles a laugh.
“Nah, you would’ve rocked it,” Jules declares. She feels Mika sigh in defeat and she lightly squeezes her hand in response.
She’s about to let her eyes fall closed when she spots something small and orange in her peripheral vision.
She turns to Mika’s bedside table and can’t help the small gasp she lets out when she recognizes the small orange cat Mika chose when Jules bought stuffed animals for their intern class during the first month of their residency at Grey-Sloan.
Jules reaches out with her free hand and pulls the stuffed animal onto her lap, giving it a small pat on the head before turning back to Mika.
“I can’t believe you kept this,” she murmurs, immediately remembering the horrible day that spawned the gift. She had nearly botched an amputation, and she was pretty sure one of the attendings told Simone to look after her, but she didn’t really mind. The stuffed animals for the other interns were an afterthought— a result of the surprisingly robust hospital gift shop and a newfound understanding that working as surgical intern might end up being more emotionally taxing than she had originally thought.
Jules chased everyone else down for the $12 cost of the toys, but she didn’t chase Mika. Maybe it was the fault of her sharp judgement of Jules’ request to be paid back, or maybe it was because some part of her knew Mika was stretching every dollar to simply show up at Grey-Sloan every morning. Either way, her small orange cat was the only stuffed animal that remained an actual gift.
Mika blinks, tilting her head slightly in confusion. “Of course I did,” she replies, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You got them for us— of course I kept it.”
Mika’s hand reaches over to pat the stuffed animal in the same way Jules had a moment prior. “Plus, it means more to me now. It was a gift from you.”
Jules can see Mika’s cheeks flush pink and she’s sure hers are too.
“You’re sweet,” Jules murmurs, bringing her free hand to Mika’s chin to pull her closer so she can kiss her as she smiles.
Jules thinks she could get used to kissing Mika like this— soft and sweet and for no reason other than simply wanting to.
When they break away, it takes a few moments for Jules to open her eyes— a result of her slowed reaction time and increasingly heavy eyelids.
“Oh, you really are tired,” Mika laughs, prompting Jules to force her eyes open and scowl.
“We are literal surgeons, I’m always tired,” she complains, letting herself fall back against Mika’s mattress.
Jules feels a comforting hand on her knee and smiles to herself.
“I’ll get you something to wear,” she hears Mika whisper, and then the hand is gone.
She watches as Mika stands and moves to her dresser, pulling out a pair of shorts and a tank top for herself before tossing Jules the same.
Jules sits back up on the bed and makes a point of averting her eyes as Mika begins to change. She doesn’t know why, really— they’ve seen each other half-naked dozens (if not hundreds) of times as a result of sharing a locker room for nearly eight months. But something about it feels… different now that they’ve crossed the line of work friends to something more. It feels intimate and charged and the last thing she wants is to make Mika uncomfortable, so she keeps her eyes trained firmly on the floor.
Jules only dares to look up when her thoughts are interrupted by a small chuckle from Mika’s direction.
“Jules, you can look.”
So she does. Mika’s already changed into her shorts, but her tank top is still in her hands, leaving her in a sports bra Jules recognizes from the locker room— its one she wears under her scrubs while on shift. Jules is staring, but she can’t help it. She’s perfect. Mika Yasuda is perfect.
“You’re beautiful,” Jules manages to breathe out. She knows she must look silly, gawking like this, but Mika is smiling and her cheeks are flushed again so Jules can’t bring herself to care. She watches as Mika lets the tank top she had picked for herself fall to the floor.
Mika walks back to the bed and rests her hands on Jules’ shoulders before placing a long kiss to her forehead. Jules’ eyes flutter closed with a sigh.
“So are you, you dork,” Mika replies when she pulls away. Jules rolls her eyes fondly and hesitates, before moving to rid herself of her own shirt. She feels Mika’s hands move from her shoulders to the hem of her top, helping her lift it over her head and promptly discard it to the floor.
Heat rushes to her face when she notices Mika staring in the same way she herself had been only moments prior. Oddly, when it’s Mika, Jules doesn’t think of it as gawking. It’s more like… reverence. Maybe Mika thought the same about her.
“Now who’s the dork?” Jules teases, poking Mika in the ribs and craning her neck up to kiss her when she laughs.
Mika takes Jules’ face into her hands, tucking stray hair behind her ears and running her thumbs over her cheekbones. The kiss is slow and soft and almost sleepy as Jules feels exhaustion continue to pull at her.
Jules breaks away to yawn and it makes them both laugh.
“Movie?” she suggests, eyeing Mika’s laptop from across the room.
“Psh— like you’ll manage to stay awake for that.”
“I will!” Jules insists, her claim made ultimately unconvincing by the second yawn that punctuates her words.
Jules knows it’s a lie, and judging by the look on Mika’s face, she knows it too. But she caves anyways, moving to grab her laptop and pull up some old movie Jules has never heard of.
Jules uses the opportunity to change into her shorts and lay her necklace on the bedside table, but follows Mika’s example and tosses the tank top in the direction of where she had abandoned hers earlier.
Once Mika is settled against her headboard, laptop on her legs, she lifts her arm and gestures for Jules to join her.
And Jules does. She tucks herself into Mika’s side and lets her head fall against her shoulder, revelling in the warmth of Mika’s skin against hers. Jules sighs, a smile finding its way to her lips without her realizing it.
“Comfy?” Mika asks, pressing the spacebar on her laptop to start the movie.
“Mhm,” Jules hums, placing a short kiss to Mika’s shoulder. She laces their fingers together lazily and starts to play with Mika’s rings without thinking.
Jules doesn’t know the title of the movie, but she doesn’t mind. She isn’t watching much of it anyways. It’s just an excuse to be close— an excuse to stay awake slightly longer and enjoy the simple act of existing in each other’s space. An excuse for Jules to nestle into Mika’s chest and melt into her body heat as her eyes eventually flutter closed for the final time that night.
Jules won’t remember falling asleep in Mika’s arms, or anything that followed— not Mika’s soft smile when her breathing evened out, not the kiss to the top of her head— not even Mika shifting them from half-sitting to laying down, despite her sleepy murmurings of protest. She won’t remember the second half of the movie, or Mika quietly shutting the laptop and moving it to her bedside table. She won’t remember Mika wrapping them in her comforter and tangling their limbs before finally letting herself drift off, too. She won’t remember her dreams.
But she’ll remember feeling safe and warm and cared for in Mika’s embrace. She’ll remember Mika playing with her hair as her eyes fell closed, and the feeling of her heartbeat against her cheek.
And when she wakes with the sun the next morning, still in Mika’s arms, she’ll call it the best sleep she’s ever had.