Chapter Text
“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart…You can count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.” — A. Bartlett Giamatti
“Everything is about sex. Except for sex of course, which is about baseball.” — clancyycat, Tumblr.com, July 8th, 2025
Las Vegas, Nevada, 2015
If Mel could unravel one single thematic thread from her tapestry of childhood highlights, she would pick sports.
Vegas was notoriously unpredictable. Tourists constantly flew in and departed from all over the world; casinos opened and closed, changed names and rebranded and exchanged ownership; every attraction chased new trends, relayed on new acts, fads, and hashtags to determine viability. Everyone desperately tried to stay ahead of the pack. But right around elementary school—right after Brazil hoisted the World Cup when she was eight—Mel recognized a hack for making sense of the city’s circadian rhythm. A way to give her world structure, the ultimate cheat code.
Keeping a detailed mental log of all the major championship dates.
The NFL playoffs and the Superbowl; March Madness; NBA Finals; every MMA and heavyweight title match; The World Series—all of them catalogued and Rolodexed in her brain alongside all the major holidays.
The actual events of the matches were unimportant to Mel. What was: how every single one’s succeeded by Kelly King coming home in the early-hours of the morning, the paper envelope inside her purse bulged at the seams with cash tips. A body covered in brown-sugar glitter lotion; the smell rubbed off on the motel pillows and bedspreads. She’d toss her clear Pleasers into a neglected corner of their rented room, content to walk around in her pair of ratty bunny slippers until her next shift.
“You want to count out with me?” Her mom always offered, even if Mel needed to be standing at the school bus stop in fewer hours than she usually slept. It didn’t matter. She’d say yes: organized and accounted for all the ones, fives, tens, twenties, and hundreds by hand—clients always tipped better on game days, especially when their team won. They squealed in unison at the final total, because for the next month, the King Girls were going to live like royalty.
Every high-earning night made up for the hundreds where her mom returned from her shift with a measly fifteen dollars in her pocket, complaining about splitting tips with the floor manager and the DJ. Or, worse, the shifts where she wouldn’t come home until mid-morning the next day, nausea rolling in Mel’s stomach because she knew how the system worked—didn’t want both her and Becca to end up mere numbers in the Nevada foster care system, a state that would have them split up hours away from each other; she couldn’t let that happen, whether it was losing Becca or their mom. There was no world that Mel wanted to live in where she couldn’t flip though the smiley-faced stamped CD case, helping her mom pick out different songs for her work routines. Where she couldn’t hug her tight or count crinkled dollar bills on top of the motel corner table while Becca slept through it all.
“Would you consider yourself a team player, Ms. King?”
Was she athletic? Nope.
Would she consider herself outgoing? You betcha.
She loved being surrounded by people. Thrived working in community with others. Absolutely reveled in the solidarity of collaboration. Would describe herself as supremely goal-oriented. At least, that’s the answer she gave Mr. Bowman during her interview inside his cramped office in the basement of Treasure Island Hotel & Casino. She thoroughly prepared over and over again on loop in the bathroom mirror beforehand (thankful she did, because under the flickering fluorescents of Mr. Bowman’s office, all her focus dialed to the singular fear that her purple bra was entirely visible underneath her white button down). Her responses and eager corresponding smile must’ve worked: the Food Experience manager offered her the temporary food runner position at the Treasure Island sports bar on the spot.
“It’s fast-paced, high stress work that you’ll need to be on your feet and prepared for. You up for it, kid?”
All Mel could do was enthusiastically nod.
There were many rules attached to her new job. Serve ladies at the table first, always from the right using her right hand. Deliver the condiments before the food’s brought to the table. Maintain an upbeat, cheery attitude, no matter how the customer treats you. They were always right.
Mel could stomach doing pretty much anything that summer if she made money and could easily swap her schedule—flexing between day and evening shifts to sync with her mom’s at Tropicana Palms. Made sure Becca was always covered.
“One of the girls at the club moonlights as a cocktail waitress at Breeze. Put her down as a reference, honey. Always use any connections you have,” her mom advised through a hazy cloud of Parliament's smoke. Milky lip gloss stained the white paper. “People work the system all the time. You just gotta know when.” A fresh set of press-ons—cheetah French tips—tapped the cigarette’s end; ash trickling down into the crystal ashtray. Goodwill. $2.50. Green sticker special. “There’s a reason they say cheaters prosper.”
So, she put down her mom’s coworker on her online application, as well as embellished her resume. Just a little. Widened the amount of time she worked at the Cold Stone inside the Meadowood Mall from six months to a year, listed her middle school babysitting gig as childcare provider, and made a fake alias—attached to her mom’s cell phone—as her third required reference. Mel needed this job; it was the only way she’d be able to stay dual-enrolled in both UNLV’s Foundations of Neuroscience summer term course and get her volunteer hours logged for medical school applications. If she fudged a few details, well, that just served the greater good. Made sure her family was supported. If they were on the line, she would’ve found a way to make it work—that was the King Girls way.
A sing-song cadence rang through Mel’s ears every time she clocked into her Treasure Island shift: “Remember three things honey—keep your chin up, smile, and never let them see you cry.”
Tonight was packed. Draft nights always were, remembering her tip-out from the NHL and NBA drafts early that summer. Those shifts brought out sports fans and the gamblers alike, desperately hoping to turn their bets into profit. She served everything—plates of buffalo wings, burgers, fried pickles, truffle fries with sriracha aioli. Pitchers of beer that precariously sloshed too close to the rim. Long Island Iced Teas the size of her forearm. Maneuvered full trays of food through tight, cramped spaces in between customers, all huddled in front of ten mounted flatscreens praying that their teams selected the right guy.
“Pick #24…Who you drafting?” one of her tables yelled from a barstool, his Bud Light pitcher almost empty. Remnants of his enjoyment stained his salmon-colored polo and khaki shorts.
“For Pittsburgh?” another customer bellowed in response, whose close-cropped hair highlighted how red both his ears and neck were getting, all thanks to his four mojitos. Men loved those, always making the same “I’m a fiend for mojitos” joke from Miami Vice every time they placed their drink order with her. The first five times it happened, Mel didn’t laugh, just thought it meant they really liked mint and white rum. She was never the best at picking up on pop culture references that weren’t centered around the shows and movies she caught on motel cable—whether it was her sister or college classmates or middle-aged men visiting Vegas.
“They’re probably pickin’ a short stop like they do every fuckin’ year. Just like the Bears, always drafting a tight end for no good reason.”
“So, you're saying put money on Cole Tucker? The odds?”
“DraftKings says plus 300.”
“Damn. Who’s the best player available?”
“Uh, let me…that first baseman from UT. Can’t remember his last name…L-something? I caught his game against Oklahoma on ESPN-U; hit a three-run homer clean into the rafters. Flipped his bat like a real asshole.”
Mel cleared her throat and motioned to the empty pitcher, “Would you like another, sir?”
She purposely tacked the honorific onto the end, hyper aware of the expectation tourists had for their time in Vegas, reiterated time and again by Mr. Bowman during her new employee orientation training: People save up for their whole lives to visit a city that we are lucky enough to call home. It’s the least we, as staff, can do to treat every customer that comes through our hotel, casino, and restaurants like they’re all mayors for the day.
(Mel’s head spun a little at that—she wouldn’t trust any of the customers she served with the responsibility of public office.)
“Yeah, Doll, why don’t you add another to my tab,” he waved her off, shoveling a handful of mixed nuts into his mouth. His silver wedding band flashed in the light, reflected like a coin tossed into the bottom of the Bellagio fountains. There was an unofficial fourth tip that her mom shared. One that twisted right behind her belly button: “Always look out for a wedding ring. Married men tip best.”
“No problem…” and she pressed her palms into her skinny jeans, right at the thighs, preparing herself to get every last penny out of this customer because Becca desperately wanted the new Urban Decay eyeshadow palette for their birthday. She excitedly showed Mel a YouTube video where a beauty vlogger displayed all the individual swatches on her forearm—each shade with names like Dirtysweet. High. Smolder. Password. “It’s the only gift on my list this year.” Those eight words repeated in a makeshift mantra as she powered through the embarrassment of the upsell. “By chance, would you also like to he…hear about our Dr-Draft Day appetizer specia—”
“I’m fine.” Blankly, he peeked around her shoulder, over to the screen with a, “Fuck, the Pirates pick is in.” When he figured out that she, indeed, made him miss the draft selection, he flashed her an annoyed look that made Mel’s chest clench and hold tight.
Rule number three: there was no crying at her part-time job.
Guess she could kiss her tip goodbye…maybe she’d pull a double on Tuesday to try and make up the money she was sure to lose from Salmon Polo Man.
“I’m so, so deeply sorry about that. I’ll put your order in with the bartender right away.”
But, in her already frazzled state, she refused to clock two things at once: the remnants of a spilled Vodka Cherry Coke splattered against the polished concrete and the newly placed CAUTION: WET FLOOR sign, yellow and glaring and bright underneath the low-lit bar lights. The perfect combination of things for Mel’s nonslip, restaurant-safe sneakers to meet their maker. She slid on the edge of the puddle, twisted around at the last second before she completely lost her balance, and mid-fall, caught a passing glimpse up at the TV screens before she tumbled down.
Almost eleven years later—when she lays sprawled out with her helmet knocked clean off and mouth full of home plate dirt, the crowd stunned silent—it will make complete sense that the first time Mel King sees Frank Langdon, Broadcasted Live from MLB Network headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey, she’s falling flat on her face.
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Major League Baseball > AA Affiliates > Altoona Curve > Altoona Curve Roster 2016
ALTOONA CURVE 2016 SEASON ROSTER [ARCHIVED]
Frank Langdon #18
B/T: S/R | HT: 6’ 1” | DOB: 04/13/1992
BIRTHPLACE: Alpine, Texas | COLLEGE: University of Texas, Austin, TX
DRAFT: 2015, Pittsburgh Pirates; Round: 1, Overall Pick: 24
POSITION: First Baseman | MLB 40-MAN: Yes | STATUS: Injured - Full Season
2016 SEASON STATS
AVG .312 | OBP .403 | SLG .489 | OPS .893
SCOUTING GRADES - Hit: 70 | Power: 65 | Run: 50 | Arm: 50 | Field: 50 | Overall: 60
Viewed as a potential best position talent in the 2015 draft class, the Pittsburgh Pirates officially selected Frank Langdon as the 24th pick in the 1st round, signing him for $1.7 million. He is currently one of the most elite power-hitters currently playing in the double-A market.
Scouts saw Langdon as a high-potential MLB prospect as early as high school. He led the Alpine High School Bucks to two back-to-back 3A Texas state titles with an MVP appearance at the National High School Invitational, where he recorded a new personal best for hardest hit doubles (118.6 mph). He would have generated additional draft interest in 2011 if not for his decision to attend the University of Texas.
After his freshman year start, Langdon was an integral staple to the Longhorns roster. As a senior, Langdon was named team captain, starting and playing in all 52 regular season games. Led the team with ten stolen bases, 21 homers, and 61 RBIs, an achievement that officially vaulted him into the top three all-time University of Texas RBI leaders following a grand slam against Texas Tech University (5/3/2015). He was voted to both the 2015 All-Big 12, First Team and the 2015 D1Baseball All-American, First Team, alongside being selected as a 2015 Golden Spikes Award finalist.
Langdon proved his advanced ballswing IQ in his first season with the Low-A West Virginia Black Bears and now with the Altoona Curve. He’s expertly learned to use his 6-foot-1 frame to generate massive amounts of power on the uptake. With 35 regular season games played, the switch-hitter averaged .312, earning a top 5 placement in both homers and slugging in the Eastern League alongside a top 3 OPS. Combined with effectiveness on basepaths thanks to a lightning fast first step, Pittsburgh Pirates fans will be pleased to know that Langdon has the talent and drive to become a reliable, .300-plus heavy hitter on their future roster.
UPDATE: In a 9/7/16 game against the Erie SeaWolves, Frank Langdon sustained a spinal disc herniation injury. He is currently listed as inactive.
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FRANK LANGDON (MAY 1st)
It’s that time of year—the annual PTMC Summer League baseball season is in our midst. I know there wasn’t an emergency department team last year, so let’s try to revive the long standing tradition of The Pitt dominance.
As always, linked below is the Google form to fill out with your information, availability, experience, etc. Tryouts are mandatory on May 8th from 1pm-3pm at Three Rivers Field in Greenfield. Too many new faces entering the fray, so cuts will be made. I can bring my extra bats, helmets, and gloves if you do not have your own.
Final team selection will be announced mid-May, with the league starting up June 6th and lasting until August 15th. We WILL be making the finals, so please plan your schedules accordingly.
If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a text: 555-109-1115.
Let’s go out and win this damn thing.
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“How do you think we’ll do?” Samira asks, a cracked and worn baseball glove already snug on her left hand.
“Well,” Mel sighs, thankful for her transitional lenses against the sun. “I can only speak for myself, but I’m optimistic these will be better than my seventh grade volleyball tryouts.”
During her redux round of 7th grade tryouts, Mel had high hopes. Across both middle and high school, Mel wanted to try out for them all: softball, basketball, tennis. Track & field, field hockey, cross country (even though that was technically individual but they scored like a team, so it counted), swimming, and volleyball (again, because if at first you don’t succeed…).
That attempt felt different. For once, they weren’t after school, which meant Mel could actually participate, and she stood in her scratchy gym shirt with KING iron-on vinyl letters halfway peeled off the back—not even two weeks into the school year!—and her gym shorts. Even after her mom picked out the smallest size, she still frustratingly worked every day to tighten and flip the waistband twice over so they wouldn’t slide down off her hips. She lived in perpetual fear of accidentally pantsing herself during the Beep Test.
Mel’s sights were set on libero: a defensive specialist who only played in the back court, got to have a cool position name and a uniquely colored jersey. They were different from anyone else; special in a way that would have Mel standing out from the rest of the pack. Especially, in her overactive pre-teen imagination, when she’d heroically dive down to the polished pine floors, saving a near missed volleyball, passing it right up to the setter, and effectively becoming the catalyst to the subsequent game winning spike. This was an attainable daydream to her, so close to finally seeing her name inked on a team roster…right until Samantha Phelmens spiked the ball in her direction, hitting her smack dab in the right eye. The force knocked her glasses off, crashing down to the floors with a plasticy crack.
With a hastily written hall pass to the nurse’s office, Mel proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon freezing—hands numb from holding a wrapped-in-paper-towels ice pack smooshed to her face. She was left with an entire half-school day to accept the stark truth that she was never going to make the cut.
When Mel’s older, she’ll fully understand the logic—where she wouldn’t be able to join a team anyways even if she made it that year. Her dad was away for the majority of the year, an over-the-road trucker who traveled across the country; her mom jumped around to different clubs between Las Vegas and Reno, moving from motel to sub-leased apartment and back again every couple of months to years. All the extra funds went to covering the out-of-pocket costs of Becca’s seizure treatments, medications, and sensory therapy sessions. Sports required planning, a vehicle to take her to and from practice, and hours that the King family didn’t have the credit to burn.
“As long as no flying projectiles hit my face, this will easily be in my top three try-out experiences,” she recalls with a stiff wince.
Because in all her pathetic attempts, she couldn’t even manage to get selected for the B Team. She garnered a couple of offers for team manager, watergirl, and one time, to wear the giant grizzly bear mascot suit during the JV games (not even varsity!), but it wasn’t the same. She wanted to be in the action, amongst the people, not receive a pity consolation prize or a second place trophy.
She needed to be all in.
So, when Langdon’s department-wide email hit her phone, Mel knew what she had to do. Sure, she had never played baseball and would have to carefully read the Wikipedia page to understand all the little rules she’d overlook otherwise. Perhaps search up compilation videos on Internet Archive. Maybe even recruit Becca in the evenings to venture out to the neighborhood park near their Polish Hill apartment to casually throw a ball around. She went ahead and ordered a glove online, but held off on a personal bat and helmet, figuring that she could use one of the ones Langdon brought with him.
The Pitt tryouts were held promptly at 3:00 PM on a Saturday, when over half of the potential team had their day off—Langdon had, according to Samira, made an exception for Mateo, Cassie, and Dana, who all were scheduled to work during the tryout window, pretty much guaranteeing a spot unless a “generational talent” shows up. Everyone else filed onto the field in various states of dress: Robby in an old pair of sweats and Donnie in baseball pants; Samira, Trinity, Dennis, and Mel in shorts. Trinity in a sports bra and a cropped t-shirt. Joy and James both in sleek pairs of gray joggers.
Langdon stands directly on the pitcher’s mound, there before anyone else, which doesn't surprise her. Since his first shift back, he always arrived ten minutes early—already meeting with the night shift residents and attendings—transferring over their ongoing patient cases by the time Mel clocked in. He holds a clipboard with his right hand; fiddles with the mechanical pencil clipped to his collar with the left. The sides of his University of Texas baseball shirt are completely cut out in long ovals.
Mel fears if she peered too close, she’d surely see his ribs. Maybe a hint of hip bone. A flash of a pectoral.
If this is a traditional interview and not a try-out, she would emphasize that one of her best skills is pattern recognition—a lightning quick ability to assess and base her decisions on a mentally gathered data set. For example: she knew that when she wore her hair up in a high ponytail—slicked back with gel to hold stray hairs in place— Langdon glanced over at her two times more often than if she wore a low bun. Additionally, applying the Langdon eye contact variable to her hypothesis, the simple braid down her back garnered the most explicit attention per shift.
This is especially potent when combined with the additional “t-shirt” variable. If the braid was equally combined with a green shirt (no correlation to shade, but Mel had only recently been mentally tabbing that, so results were inconclusive) either under a scrub top or on its own, it increased the standard braid glances by nearly 50%. While the data was a little flimsy, it didn’t stop Mel from choosing a deep emerald t-shirt from the bottom of her dresser drawer and carefully French braiding her strands firmly in place for try-outs. You know, for scientific research methods. What better place to track her findings than a summer rec league?
Keyword: recreation, the difference between low- and high-stakes that empowered her to sign-up, give it a shot, because that’s what Mel needed. An escape. A way to bond with her co-workers outside of the hospital. The fact that Langdon coached and played on the team? Well, that was just an added bonus. Sprinkles. Not the whole gallon of ice cream.
But Mel failed to realize that her personal definition of recreation—fun, a little silly, social, more embarrassing than good—and The Pitt’s definition were maybe two completely different things.
“Are we…” Mel prompts Samira, who keeps awkwardly tossing her brought-from-home baseball back and forth, hitting her glove with a smack. smack. smack. “…good?”
“We’ve won the summer league three times in a row during Langdon’s residency. Would’ve been four last year, but,” her mouth turns into a slight frown. Mel can mentally fill in the dots.
“Yeah, everyone is super talented. Mateo and Cassie are the team’s pitcher and catcher—Mateo won state with St. Michael’s seven years ago, and Cassie co-coached Harrison’s tee ball team with her dad. They absolutely stumped opposing teams during Cassie's intern year. Let’s see…Dana cut her teeth playing back-alley ball with her brothers on the Northside; she’s the leading scorer alongside Father Darijo in St. Cyril’s Orthodox league. Donnie goes to those fancy batting cage bars in The Strip sometimes. We lost Ellis to internal medicine, but she was a collegiate all-American softball shortstop. Robby’s just Robby. It’s like he was born to be an okay baseball player at the bare minimum.”
“And Langdon?” Mel asks, actively trying schooling her features to what she pictures nonchalance looking like.
“Oh, probably the best player in the summer league. You know he was in the majors, right? Before he went to med school. Collins told me the whole department freaked out when they discovered he was a Pirate; it was apparently one of the lone bright spots during COVID.”
Leaning in, Samira drops her voice low, telling a secret. Mel loves it when that happens, getting giddy in anticipation that one of her co-workers trusted her enough with gossip—not really caring what or who it was about. She just likes being in cahoots.
“When he pulled Robby’s name for Secret Santa his first year, Langdon gifted him with a vintage signed Willie Stargell card. Preserved inside a little glass case and everything. The only time I’ve ever seen that man close to tears.”
Mel doesn’t have the heart to tell Samira the whispered rumors of Robby after Leah’s death during PittFest, of the breakdown in the pediatrics room and how that led to its subsequent foreclosure, now a dedicated bereavement space with a shiny memorial plaque where the room number once was. No more cartoon forest creatures on the walls. Only a calming sage.
“I…did. Know that, about Langdon.” She bites her lip, digging the toe of her tennis shoe into the dirt, focusing her attention on drawing a figure eight. He never played a single minute inside PNC Park, she wants to add, but that would be too strange. He didn't tell her that, just something she read online via his Wikipedia page (again, very weird to have read your co-worker’s Wiki, but Mel was past shame at this point). “Do you think we’ll make the cut?”
Samira looks fondly off into the outfield. “Hard to say. Our only real competition is Joy, James, and Dennis for a spot.”
“Not Trinity?”
“Mel, she was like a gymnastics pro or something. If you're naturally that athletic, you can pretty much handle anything. She’s in, which means there are technically three spots for the five of us.”
“What are our odds?” Mel asked.
“Well, considering I tried out in both 2023 and 2024 and my name wasn’t on the roster either time, it’s not looking good…”
“Hey, don’t think like that. We are both going to do great! I have a feeling this summer is going to be one to remember.”
Almost forty minutes later, Mel wishes that statement still holds true.
But everything mentally crumbled after she absolutely whiffed a Donnie-thrown ball at home plate, almost stumbling completely over from the velocity of the bat. Immediately, from the moment she stepped up to hit, her arms were as loose as spaghetti and the side of the base she chose to hit from didn’t feel right. But, she was already committed to it, and didn't have enough time to actually change it.
“You okay Mel?” Donnie called out, wiping the sweat from his brow, readjusting his White Sox jersey.
“Fine! Sorry, just got a little turned around. Must be rusty.” Or just never actually taken an at bat in her life. No one needs to know that.
Not after watching both Joy and James each hit absolute heaters into the outfield off Donnie’s pitches. Or—surprisingly, to everyone on the field—Dennis, who tentatively walked up to the plate only to completely hammer a home run over and past the fences like it was the easiest thing in the entire world. He only sheepishly shrugged his shoulders: “I haven’t really even played that much baseball, but my brothers forced me to umpire so many games on our family’s corn farm, I must’ve just learned through osmosis.” She isn’t too certain, not from her warm-up spot on deck, but Mel thinks she sees Langdon’s eye twitch at Dennis’ explanation, his mechanical pencil furiously gripped as he writes something down on his clipboard.
Nearly a year after his first shift back, she and Langdon finally found a tentative, unspoken truce again. Still not tag-teaming with her on as many cases as they had her first shift together (11! Not that she kept count, or anything), much to her disappointment. It was the most she worked with a singular person in one shift; she still thought back to the number of compliments and reassurances with a comforting warmth. Like she was worth it, that he saw something in her he’d never seen before professionally.
(And…selfishly…maybe a little personally. Hey, you could move the girl all the way out to Pittsburgh, but try as she might, Mel couldn’t escape the adrenaline of spotting the wedding ring shining bright on Langdon’s finger. She knew she was headed directly for trouble. This was a game she’s going to lose, that he was always destined to leave.)
Mel was so sure—clocking out after PittFest, the measles spinal tap en route to the lab—that she and Langdon were going to be partners. A team. A coach that could look at her when she was down, give her a rousing speech to Get back out there! so they could proverbially go to state or win the big game and after, easily find her amongst the crowd to hoist the trophy together. Leave the field hand in hand, because she was the one he wanted.
Now, he simply called her Mel, or Dr. King when they were with patients, while she only ever called him Dr. Langdon, feeling invasive to even think about dropping the Doctor in the beginning, akin to thoughts about calling your teacher by their first name. It felt wholly bizarre, until she mentally practiced over and over. Every time he passed her over for a case or avoided her when she was on chairs or ignored her in the emergency surgery bays; that was when he became Langdon in her mind, like it was the ultimate exposure therapy. If she thought about him a little less formally, his rejections would hurt less.
Especially when Langdon kept bringing up his wife and kids every time they worked together:
Perlah, asking for recommendations for local play places in the area for her kids—Abby took Tanner and Wyatt to this awesome one in Shadyside last week. It had a ballpit, slide, playmats, trampolines…Of course I made sure they didn’t actually jump on them. Perlah, do you think I’m both a bad dad and terrible doctor?
Dana congratulating him on his seven year wedding anniversary—Don’t worry! Flowers were ordered, a card in my bag, babysitter booked, the private table reservation at Dish. Yeah, I surprised myself too.
Samira, noting the bags under his eyes back in January—Stomach flu ran through our house. Tanner, Wyatt, and Abby were all down…Pretty much spent my days off force feeding all three of them Pedialyte and chicken broth, but I always made sure they had a healthy amount of straight-from-the-dryer blankets and dad snuggles. Doctor’s orders.
Mel knew why the last one smarted so much—she’d also been sick with the stomach flu that same weekend. She deliriously hobbled around her apartment, trying her best to stay upright and not hunch over as she struggled to care for herself. For two days, her entire body was clammy and shaky, couldn’t keep anything down, and she barely mustered up the energy to drive to and from Becca’s center for pick-up, desperately hoping she didn’t also get her sister sick. At its worst, she’d been so enraptured by fever, she laid down on the cold tile in her bathroom sobbing, wishing someone could be there simply to help and hold her. Just this once. I don’t think I can do this anymore, she thought as her lip quivered and chest heaved, staring into a popcorn ceiling worth of nothingness. Everything is too hard.
“Hope your long weekend was better than mine, Mel,” Langdon greeted on Tuesday, and all she could do was give him a wary smile in response, quickly ducking out of the conversation to check in on her pulmonary embolism patient in Central 10.
There had been highlights, sure. Like when a patient decided to graffiti DENY DEFEND DEPOSE in thick Sharpie across the bathroom stall tile, prompting PTMC Human Resources to send out—in Mel’s honest opinion—an entirely unnecessary all-staff email encouraging medical personnel to not further agitate or incite patient discourse regarding health care insurance providers at this time. The janitorial staff had the message cleaned up by that afternoon, but not before Langdon snuck in through the hastily blocked off restroom and snapped a picture. His phone’s lock screen ever since.
“Probably the second coolest thing I’ve seen in the ED,” he said, leaning against the nurses station, taking another swig of the Red Bull that he’d always forget about two seconds after setting it down. Mel tried to keep on top of it, snagging the empty cans after his departure, carefully cleaning them up because it made her brain happy to subtly do something for him, even if he didn’t notice.
“I’m afraid to ask what’s number one.”
“Easy—last month, when you politely threatened to report that MS-4 under HIPAA for using ChatGPT to write his patient charts.” And then he bounded away toward the ambulance bay, leaving her to internalize that sentence because what? She didn’t think he’d even been around when that happened, even if she did conduct the light call-in right in front of one of the computer stations.
Or last September, when Mel requested Labor Day off because Becca wanted to go to the Knoebels in Columbia County. She was talking with Kim and Jesse about all the prep work beforehand, about everything she had to pack in advance: Becca’s medications, spare pairs of glasses, the specific brands of sunscreens they used for their sensitive skin, fluffer-butter sandwiches tucked into a portable cooler for the drive, swimsuits (even though both of them weren’t the best swimmers and disliked the smell of chlorine…gave Mel too many bad flashbacks to the one week at Treasure Island when she ran food to the pool cabanas. Never again.), an umbrella because it was forecasted—
“Dr. King,” Langdon clumsily interpreted, suddenly appearing like a phantom outside the periphery of their little semi-circle. “Want me to AirDrop you my itinerary from two summers ago? I know you’ve probably thought through everything, but just in case you wanted to cover all your bases.”
“Oh, yes! That would be great, actually. Any additional information is always helpful.”
When she unlocked her phone and pointed it directly in front of his own, Mel couldn't help herself from feeling giddy when they buzzed in tandem as his Note came through.
That was a good day. She’d fallen asleep that night with her phone pressed to her chest after reading the overly detailed plan he’d messaged her; later, after their trip, she wrote him a simple thank you card carefully slipped into his open staff cubbie, telling him how her and Becca followed his itinerary step-by-step. We had an absolutely incredible time, in large part because of you. Both King sisters signed their names at the bottom, with Becca using her favorite purple gel pen to cover the complete left side of the card with a collection of small, cartoon doodles of their trip. She hoped he appreciated it.
“Give King one more pitch, Donnie. Maybe try a cutter this time,” Langdon yells out, nodding to Mell at home, bat dangling at her side. One of his from home: a two-toned black and dark brown wood stain. “Maple,” he mentioned when handing it over to her, like it meant something.
Her palms sweat when she holds the bat over her shoulder, mirroring Geena Davis in A League of Their Own (torrented two weeks ago) with the casual, brass confidence of Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham (torrented one week ago) and with her eye on the pitching mound just like the Altoona Curve’s starting first baseman, 2016, Frank Langdon (archived gametape watched late at night, three months into his ten month departure from PTMC).
The windup.
The pitch narrows across space, beelining in Mel’s direction and suddenly—perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation or her natural reflex—she closes her eyes. Let the bat swing on basic instinct, praying beyond anything else that she would make contact, hear the resounding crack of the bat and watch the ball fly up and away into the outfield like a comet. Look up, see Langdon’s proud smile stretch across his face.
Instead, all Mel’s met with is a swoosh of dead air and the set, impassive line of Langdon’s mouth as she exits into the dugout to gather her small crossbody bag and dented Owala water bottle.
All to head home empty handed, standing dejected in the Three River parking lot.
“There’s always next year, Mel,” Samira reassures, the memory of her own whiffed ball and dropped catches reflected in her solemn tone. “Maybe we can team up, practice together. Langdon couldn’t possibly say no to both of us.”
Mel sighs, blinking rapidly behind her glasses, trying not to cry and make everything awkward in front of her friend. “I don’t even know if I’ll be at PTMC next year. The internal PEM fellowship is so competitive and Heather said she has a connection with the head of pediatric medicine at OSHU in Portland…Sorry, this just felt like my only shot to actually make it.”
“Yeah, I know—that’s what it felt like last year, with Langdon gone. My dad…I’m from Hoboken, New Jersey and growing up, we would take the ferry into the city to watch the Mets play. He would carry me into the stadium on his shoulders; buy me that giant plastic bag of popcorn which was way too much for a seven-year-old. We were at the 40th anniversary game where Mike Piazza hit a two-run homer and my dad cheered so hard his voice was hoarse for days after. It may sound silly, but being out there, on the field, makes me feel closer to him than anywhere else, even if I’m slightly terrible."
She understands that—not about baseball. Lyle King wasn’t that kind of dad, but whenever Mel and Becca take a long drive out into the hills of Western Pennsylvania in their hatchback, she swears she can hear the lyrical refrains of “Highwayman” and smell the Little Trees air freshener that swung from the rearview mirror of his rig.
“I think I’m worse. At least you don’t close your eyes anytime the ball comes towards you.”
Samira lets out a watery laugh and gives Mel a small wave of appreciation. “You never know. Maybe Langdon wants the additional entertainment of watching not-great baseball this summer. Heard from Princess that his wife and sons are spending the whole summer down near Austin. Some fancy lake house thing…maybe he’ll get bored, want to hang out with us rather than Joy and James. We’re way cooler anyways.”
“Totally,” Mel coughs out because her brain is mentally stuck on wife and whole summer and Austin lake house to properly function. “I think…I left something inside the field. I’ll see you on shift tomorrow!”
“Text me if you hear anything about the roster,” Samira calls out, but Mel’s already fast walking back to the gate, thankfully still open. Easy to pass through.
The sun is still high in the late-afternoon cloudless sky, but a subtle breeze ruffles the deep evergreen leaves, making the hair on Mel’s arm stand up. Like the weather itself is preparing her for this conversation, making sure she’s alert and on edge before she even gets there.
Cutting through the bleachers and around the diamond, she sees Langdon’s stuff: a water bottle that’s seen better days, car keys, sunglasses, a floppy long black bag with several bats inside, a brightly colored neon backpack with an outrageous amount of compartments, and his clipboard—casually laid out along the dugout bench.
She doesn’t want to peek at his clipboard notes, but it's right there—with his easy-to-read slanted italic handwriting that stands in contrast to her sprawling, loopy chicken scratch. Mel can’t make out most of what he’s written; she figures it’s mainly technical baseball terms and statistics. She catches the 1st? next to Trinity’s name; a hastily-drawn star next to Dennis (which makes complete sense because he was so good. She can’t wait to see McKay’s face tomorrow when she tells her that); the switch to PH/RP combo? by Donnie; and finally, next to her name on the printed, bullet point list—Langdon owned a printer? In 2026? Why did that make Mel’s cheeks flush?—were two words, so small she could barely make them out…something with four letters that starts with an M and Bra—
“Mel? You’re still here?” He’s standing right outside the dugout, leaning over the railing to stare down at her. A hard bag of ice is saran wrapped tight around his torso against his lower back, with the front pieces of his hair neatly parted and combed back.
“I was talking to Samira in the parking lot and thought I left my ConnectCard out here. Couldn’t find it in my wallet, y’know?”
He doesn’t respond, just stares at her in a slightly perplexed way, like he does when he’s working through his crossword puzzle book in the break room, absentmindedly clicking his pen every time he struggles figuring out a clue.
“That’s important to have.”
“Yeah.”
Familiar silence; the same it’s been for over the past year. So unbearable that it makes Mel grit her teeth together, rub her hands against the border of her workout running shorts and the skin of her thighs. Up and down.
“Actually, I also wanted to let you know that if it’s between Samira and I for a spot, you should give it to her.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Mel?”
“Um…it means a lot to her personally. It would just feel wrong if I’m out here and she’s not. But, I know that Joy played travel softball in high school and James talked about hitting a grand slam while at LSU, so they’re probably higher up on your list than both of us.”
“First,” Landon says, wincing slightly to run his right hand through his hair. “James redshirted his freshman year and dropped baseball when he pledged into his frat. That grand slam was during Greek Week and I’m pretty sure my elderly Grandma Ethel could’ve grounded at least a double up against drunk college bros. Two: I haven’t made up my mind about the roster yet, so until that’s final—”
“I know, just, give her a chance.”
“What about you, Mel?”
“Well, you saw firsthand that I’m not a natural like Dennis,” she starts and she swears she hears Langdon’s low murmur of fuckin’ Whitaker which makes her brows knot together.
“And I’ve never made a team before and I don’t know if I’m even going to be able to try-out next year with fellowships and everything, so this may be my only chance. I wasn’t really in a sports family growing up,” well…at least not like that—getting up early on Thanksgiving morning to run a charity 5K or making buffalo chicken dip in the crock pot for the fancy halftime show—but Mel isn’t going to explain her childhood family dynamic to her almost-superior. “After your mass email went out, I rented a bunch of baseball movies to help, which was quite naive of me, I think. Like those patients who think they know how to intubate and perform emergency cricothyrotomies because they’ve watched fifteen seasons of Grey's Anatomy,” and she tries to laugh at her own joke, but it just comes out in a slightly emotional tenor. Quite sad, really.
“Which ones did you rent?”
“A League of Their Own. Angels in the Outfield. Bad News Bears. Damn Yankees. Bull Durham.”
“Damn Yankees is a good one.” He looks at her, puzzling again. “That's why I never made the majors, Mel...one long ball hitter, that's all they needed, would even sell their soul for one.”
“What?”
“Um, well, uh…not really. For the record, I can totally hit a long ball. Let’s make that clear. I was trying to make a reference. Remember when Joe Boyd, in the movie—.” But before he can finish his explanation, Mel interrupts.
“You didn’t get called up to the majors because you had a spinal cord injury. Team doctors thought it was a routine disc herniation, but…” and Mel’s hands snap up to cover her mouth, because Langdon’s never directly told her that.
Actually, he’s never spoken to her about his life pre-medicine or even pre-PTMC. Her stupid, ill-advised source for all of this was a thread on r/buccos—the Pittsburgh Pirates subreddit— posted in late 2016. Accessed six months into his absence. Little digital details of his life Mel searched up and hoarded, desperately trying to color in the faint sketch of the mentor she knew for fifteen hours. Even if the archived commentary like what a waste and giving the 2015 draft a grade of F for “we’re fucked” and same thing every goddamn year with this goddamn team uncomfortably pricked at her.
“I—I’m so sorry. I’ve lost track of the time, Becca’s waiting for me at Hickorytree—that’s her care center—and it's Sandwich Saturday, so big night for us, and yeah…hope you have a good night tonight doing…whatever you do.”
Before she can even clock the stunned shock on Langdon’s face, Mel’s turning on her heel, exiting out and weaving through the bleachers to the open gate. Doesn’t stop until she’s inside her car. Even if she thinks she hears the faint sound of Langdon calling her name.
🏟️✨⚾️
FRANK LANGDON (MAY 17th)
Hey team,
First off, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who took the time to come out and try-out for The Pitt. Competition was steep this year, so if you don’t see your name on the list, please consider trying out next May.
If you do see your name, remember that the first game of the season is June 6th. I just got off a coaches-only league Zoom call and the finalized match-up schedule is below—I went ahead and starred the teams we need to keep an eye out for. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.
Best,
Langdon
The Pitt Roster (PTMC Summer League 2026)
Frank Langdon, Coach and Second Base
Trinity Santos, First Base
Dana Evans, Third Base
Mateo Diaz, Pitcher
Cassie McKay, Catcher
Robby, Left Fielder
Dennis Whitaker, Short Stop
Donnie Donaghue, Pinch Hitter and Relief Pitcher
Samira Mohan, Right Fielder
Mel King, Center Fielder and Pinch Runner
The Pitt (PTMC Summer League Schedule 2026)
June 6th: Pediatrics
June 13th: Neurology*
June 20th: Radiology*
June 27th: Psychiatry
July 11th: Internal Medicine
July 18th: Cardiology *
July 25th: Dermatology
August 1st: Oncology*
August 8th: OB/GYN*
August 15th: Championship Game
🏟️✨⚾️
Mel’s never been a heavy sleeper. A byproduct of her upbringing, sure—memories of staying up past her bedtime, waiting for their mom to come home from her shift, eyes fretting and hands wringing every time she was a little late. Always fearing the worst: she wouldn’t come home, the sun would bleed through the vertical blinds of their rented out room and Mel and Becca would be on their own, surviving off of their left-over peanut butter sandwiches, Cheez-Its, and crumpled seven dollars and thirty-eight cents inside her beaded coin purse. Found and saved by her and Becca from the dropped change of motel guests in the parking lot, in case of an emergency.
Mel doesn’t sleep the night before June 16th, nervous she’s going to oversleep her alarm; snoozing all the way through the scheduled 1:00 PM pre-warm-up time. So she erratically twists and turns in bed, struggling to even get comfortable enough to catch quick bursts of thirty to forty minutes of shut eye. Is wide awake when she sips a mug of her green tea blend, wrapped up in a throw blanket, knees to chest on a rickety lawn chair found on the side of the road near Carnegie Mellon. Watching the summer sun crest over the eastern horizon against a painting of sherbert orange and cotton candy pink clouds.
A beautiful day for a baseball game when the morning sun morphs into a mid-day cornflower blue with only a couple of light clouds. Not too hot, not cold.
“The weather is perfect,” Becca says, adjusting the brim of her floppy bucket hat, a speck of white sunscreen shining bright from her cheekbone. Mel gave her the option of spending her Saturday at Hickorytree or coming with her to the game. Her sister—calculating, adventurous, and spontaneous—wanted to accurately weigh her options. “Saturdays are Lego Club and I’m getting so close to finishing my Trevi Fountain. 21062. Is your baseball game better than that?”
Mel didn’t know how to answer, just that—from what she saw from Langdon’s college and minor league games—there was a lot of sitting around, waiting for things to happen, long stretches of inaction. So, she made sure to pack a bag for Becca with snacks, a fully charged Switch and iPad, her current crochet project (a granny square blanket in midnight blues and bright yellows) lovingly bagged in a Ziploc.
“Are you going to hit a home run?” Becca asked, settling herself down on top of a thrifted quilt draped over the metal bleachers so her legs wouldn’t stick.
“Probably not, Becs. But, maybe, I’ll just get a base hit and make it onto first. Second if I get really crazy.”
“Dr. King?” someone says, and Mel turns around to see Abbot standing at the bottom of the bleachers with two canvas folding chair bags over either one of his shoulders. He’s wearing a Boston RedSox cap with aviator sunglasses, like he’s an actor who desperately does not want to be recognized in public. “Is this the famous sister I’ve heard so much about?”
“Yep, the one and only. Becca, this is Dr. Abbot. He’s one of my bosses.”
“You have a lot of bosses.”
“I do. Working in medicine is a very boss-heavy profession.”
“So Robby, Abbot, Heather, Shen…Ellis was but now works with other doctors…” Becca counts off of her fingers, one by one. “Is Mr. Langdon your boss?”
“Technically no, but he will be starting in July. He’s graduating from his residency to attending.”
There were constant rumors around the hospital for the past year about whether Langdon was actually going to stay at PTMC after his PGY-4 year. Mel tried to stay out of it, keep her head down and doing her job, but she couldn’t help but listen when the night shift nursing intern mentioned the words “Dr. Langdon” and “disaster-relief fellowship” and “Los Angeles” in the same sentence. Or when Abbot clapped him on the back during a morning hand-over with a gruff, Submitted the rec letter to both Chapel Hill and Asheville yesterday.
I hope you made sure to really talk me up. Abby’s already got a Pinterest board of home decor and Zillow listings ready to go. I can’t let all that good work go to waste. Already have let her down plenty.
Don’t worry, son, you don’t need to be talked up. Your commitment and dedication speak for itself.
When Mel went home that Friday night to another rewatch of Elf on the King sisters’ couch, her chest tightened and eyes watered when—right before “Pennies from Heaven” started playing over the New York montage—Buddy looked so scared and alone emerging from the woods or pressing his body against the subway tunnel wall, trying not to get hit by the oncoming train as it breezed past. Because that’s how her life felt her entire PGY-2 and PGY-3 year, like she was all alone and searching for a way out, navigating everything with a frightened hesitancy she stifled every time she scanned in her badge.
One day they did work together, about three months ago, was a doozy. Half of the staff was out sick with RSV and both Langdon and Mel were assigned to chairs, working through the overflow of cases from the winter weather that uncharacteristically lasted until March. So many sore throats, runny noses, weepy eyes. He kept every interaction between them strictly professional, telling very few jokes that weren’t related to the patient. Fingers tightly gripped around his stethoscope, his hands in the sanitary safe blue gloves that prodded and poked at broken nose fractures; not even lightly brushing up against her own.
He was looking at his phone, a confused expression tensing his brows in the center as he read the screen. Mel wasn’t a gossip, or nosy with anyone except him, but she tried to keep her cool to avoid glancing over to look at the screen. Shaking his head so slightly: “Um…sorry Mel. Just got an email about this Trauma Fellowship in Asheville I applied for.”
“And…”
“Yeah, they want to interview me in the final rounds.”
“That’s…wow. Cool? I guess.” Mel wrung her hands together, over and over in a big figure eight, a nervous habit when she doesn’t want to say what she’s thinking. Please don’t leave. I know that our one shift feels like a lifetime ago, but you felt it too, right? I’m not crazy. What is there for you in North Carolina or California that you wouldn’t have here?
“It’s exciting for sure. Abby’s going to—”
Mel’s worked on not interrupting people when they are talking. Letting the conversation flow naturally and recognizing when would be a good time to interject. She struggled with that during her PGY-1 term, where residents, attendings, and nurses would look at her funny and whisper behind their backs about how she was weird or unsettling or too much. She thought she had found a safe place to land at PTMC, a family, but maybe what she found were simply just co-workers.
“I’m going to miss you,” and before she completely lost her nerve, she barreled forward. “Working with you on my first day is the best shift I’ve had at this job. I am well aware it means something completely different to you for very valid reasons, but I just want you to know that.”
Because the reality was this: the day Langdon’s life fell apart was the day she thought her life was beginning. Two poles, opposite on the other side of the world. Never destined to connect.
Feeling like she revealed too much already, she scampered out of the staff locker corridor. Her face was so hot, mouth dry because she really just said that to someone who probably never thought about that shift like she did—and why would he? Why would he feel the same way that she did about those fifteen-hours that were the catalyst for his ten-month absence?
(Over the next two months, the rumors changed. Something about a private meeting with Robby in an empty conference room; reaching out to a recruiter; coming in on his days off in business attire, a printed copy of his CV in his hand. So much paperwork. An additional meeting with a Drug Diversion Officer. HR. Then, the official announcement, emailed out to the entire department. Frank Langdon was staying in Pittsburgh, at the medical center, in the emergency room, and Mel could finally breathe again.)
“You’re right, Becca,” Abbot says, pulling Mel back to the current conversation. “We’re lucky to have Dr. Langdon joining our attending team in July…Are you a baseball fan?”
Becca shrugs, tilting her head to the side. “I don’t know. Is it better than Legos?”
Abbot chuckles. “Not sure about that, but do you like math?” To which Becca furiously nods because yes, her sister loves math in any form: Sudoku puzzles, dominos, chess, went through a card counting phase because all you need to know is which cards have already been played. It’s not cheating if it just makes sense.
“Well, lucky for you, baseball is the ultimate numbers game. How about you move down here, take a seat, and I’ll teach you all about sabermetrics.”
“Mel,” Becca whispers, already in the process of gathering her things to join Abbot. “He’s so much cooler than your old jerk-boss.”
The old jerk-boss referring to Dr. Kellan Grant at Reno Trauma Hospital, who had once yelled—spittle flying, red-faced, neck veins bulging, et. al—so badly at her for crying over a pediatric burn victim that she had to take two days off work to emotionally recover. It hadn’t happened to that extent again during her PGY-1 term, an isolated incident, but Becca had never forgotten. Considers it her sisterly duty to hold a lifelong grudge; still fantasizes about sneaking out to the Nevada desert in the middle of the night to slash his tires.
“Guess I got lucky. Have fun Becs, message me if you need anything. I’ll have my phone alerts on.”
Waving at both Becca and Abbot, Mel walks over to set her stuff down in the designated home team dugout. She pulls out her cheap glove, biting her lip at the uncomfortable tightness of the lining when she slides her hand inside. Still not fully broken in—frankly, Mel hadn’t even worn it again since try-outs, trying to compartmentalize the fear that she was going to mess up. Langdon would take one look at her at bat, swinging around and missing, and would send her home; call up James or Joy, permanently taking her place.
(Joy hadn’t cared too much about being cut—said she could finally book her backpacking through Eastern Europe trip now that her summer was free—while James confronted Langdon about it during morning rounds: “So, looks like favoritism is alive and well in the ED, huh?” to which Langdon scoffed, rolling his head from side to side like he was gearing for a fight. “James, do you hate seeing women succeed in sports? Are you—for the record, just asking questions—disagreeing with Title IX? I would hate to hear your thoughts about all the strong and capable women in STEM,” which shut the intern up for the rest of the morning.
After reading the PTMC Summer League rules handbook cover to cover, none of what was said made any sense. The league did not receive federal funding. From all of Mel’s observations, it seemed like The Pitt—maybe even the whole league?—was personally bankrolled by Langdon, who denied her Venmo for jersey money and personally booked the field for all their games. They did not have to comply with the stipulations of Title IX.)
“Ready for your first game, Mel?” Cassie asks, plopping her giant bag of catcher gear on the opposite side of the bench with an enormous thud. Harrison came with her, already running up to the pressbox to set up: “Langdon pays him $50 a game to run the scoreboard and play walk-up songs off his laptop for him. Keeps the kid out of trouble, plus he spent the spring negotiating his contract with Langdon to include two slices of pepperoni pizza, a can of orange Fanta, and a championship bonus. If we win it all, Harrison gets a $75 Fortnite giftcard.”
“I think. Don’t really know what to expect, so I guess I’m ready for anything.”
“We’ll—not that I’m biased on anything—but you are on one of the best teams in the league. Definitely the most intensely coached…speak of the devil,” she says, eyes locked on a figure slyly crossing the field.
With his backpack strapped tight over his shoulders, Langdon came carrying a sturdy looking cardboard box, attempting—quite sadly—to cover up the wince spreading across his face when he set it down at his feet. Calls the entire team over from the outfield and dugout.
“Jerseys officially arrived yesterday. All the sizes should match what was submitted on your Google form, but if you need to swap, let me know. I must say, Javadi really did a nice job on the designs this year.”
One by one, he hands them out—each person getting a custom THE PITT jersey—the nickname of their department swirled in a vintage font diagonally across their chest. Deep navy with bright yellow trim-work. The same shade, if Mel remembered correctly, as the Roberto Clemente bridge that loomed over Pittsburgh’s PNC Park.
“I think it’s a nice touch,” Javadi blushed in the middle of finishing up her charting, lightly bragging about finding the exact HEX code of the paint used by the city, manipulating it to contrast with the dark base.
“I’ve already talked to Langdon about flipping the colors, yellow jerseys with navy lettering, to sell to family and friends at the end of the season. We could use the sale money to offset the cost of a DeLonghi espresso machine in the breakroom. Creates a sense of all-staff buy in, makes everyone feel like they have a stake of equity in The Pitt doing well. That equals more attendance at games, more money, better staff amenities. Just basic supply and demand economics.”
Seeing KING, #53 emblazoned across the back of the jersey filled her with a sense of pride she couldn’t put into words and she immediately put on the corresponding baseball hat. A bright, singular P embroidered in front of the thin, yellow outline of Pennsylvania. Langdon was right—Victoria really did knock it out of the park.
The front dipped just the slightest into a V, hitting below the collarbone. Not enough Mel needed to wear an undershirt with it; only a sports bra. When she examined a little closer, however, she noticed a slight mar in the fabric, right inside the jersey. Exactly where the fabric tag should be.
Holding it up closer to her glasses, instead of the usual jagged cut out—something she would’ve to go in and manually fix herself—this is neat. Removed with an almost surgical precision, as if someone painstakingly took a tiny seam ripper to the fabric, extracting any remnant of the tag or subsequent stitching.
“Hey,” Langdon says, coming over and drawing attention back up to his line of sight. “You good?”
“Oh, yes! I’m very excited about the game. And the jersey. You should have accepted my Venmo. This is too much for you to cover.”
Langdon accepted all his other transactions. $25 from Mateo for ⚾⚾⚾; $40 from Dana with “Pizza for the kiddos on me tonight. Congrats on the job!”; $60 sent via Nikki Langdon (his younger sister with a very public Facebook profile that Mel may or may not have bookmarked): parental units anniversary gift xoxo 🖕; and over thirty individual transactions sent back and forth with his wife, Abby. Most via Langdon over the past year: everything from boba teas to nail sets for someone’s bridal shower; money for their sons' back-to-school shoes and fancy take-out lunches from Sweetgreen Just because. Thinking about you ❤️
“Don’t worry about it. Consider it a rookie gift,” he shrugs, tossing her something else from behind his back. A worn glove that looks well loved, softened from wear and countless hours out in the sun. Much more comfortable than her own.
“My college one,” he gestures. “I don’t know if it will be a better fit than the one you have. Your hands are smaller than mine.”
It felt deeply intimate, handling the professional steerhide material, sliding her hand into the space where his skin had also touched. Where his sweat bled and absorbed into the soft, woolen lining. How many times his fingers traced the loopy, flowing Rawlings typography stitched into the fabric label? If she brought the glove up to her nose and inhaled, would she somehow smell the faint remnants of his scent? Would tracing ridges of the X lacing feel as if running a finger down his spine? Across his fingers? Over the bones of his ankles?
“Than—Thanks,” she stammers, thankful she was even able to get any words out at all. “I didn’t know I bought the wrong glove.”
“You didn’t,” he assures. “They just take time to break in. This one’s already been through the ringer of several seasons.”
“Do you have another glove? I don’t want to steal the only one you have.”
“No worries, Mel, I usually use my pro one anyways. I’ll get you your own if The Pitt wins the season, deal?”
“I guess?” Mel scrunches her face. “I have no clue what I’m actually agreeing to. You don’t have to buy anything for me.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” He motions over to the dugout and they walk over to set his backpack down. Or, Mel didn’t have a better way of putting it at the moment, a clown backpack. A truly interesting mismatch of bright colors that makes Mel squint, thankful in that moment for her transitional lenses. Langdon must notice how her attention locks on the bag.
“My rookie year in the minors, I carried a ball pen bag with Hello Kitty print all over it. Some light hazing, wasn’t serious, but this is much better than that. Not by much, Abby’s brother-in-law drew my name in the family gift exchange. His tastes leave a lot to be desired.”
“What’s in it?”
“Let’s see.” He starts listing off each item from memory. “First aid kit. Over-the-counter pain relievers. IcyHot patches. Granola bars, fruit snacks. A baggy of the pre-workout Cassie likes that she can mix in her water bottle. It’s Kirkland brand and she doesn’t have a Costco membership so…” He trails off, and she’s glad, because right now, she can’t comprehend how slightly overstimulated she’s getting from imagining Langdon outside a Costco, loading an entire case of Gatorade or a family pack of Sunchips or a giant 50-count box of trail mix into the back of his car.
Lost in her elicit big box store fantasies, Langdon unzips the front pouch of the bag, handing her over a pair of adjustable glasses straps. A three pack, completely unopened. “I didn’t know if you had any of these at home, so I bought some while on my last restock run, just in case you needed them for practice and games. No one wants your glasses falling off mid-play.”
“Did you get rookie gifts for Samira, Dennis, and Trinity too?”
“Theirs are still in the post. Five to seven business days means nothing in this economy anymore,” he blows off. “Are you ready?”
“Kind of…I’m just excited to be here. Still a little surprised my name actually made the roster. That never happens.”
“Like you said at try-outs, this may be the last chance you get to play in the league. Besides, I like both you and Samira. Good people. Show up on time. Get along with most, and the ones y’all don’t fuck with probably deserve it.” He leans against the dugout wall, chewing on his bottom lip. From their first shift together, Mel noticed that he not only had a severe eye contact problem, but a leaning one—door frames, walls, the break room counter. Ridiculously distracting and somewhat fascinating how effortlessly cool he looked doing it—two dark strands of hair slashing across his forehead; arms crossed against his chest; the veins of his forearms so pronounced against his skin, rivers flowing across a topographical map.
“I still don’t really know Joy even if she’s cool, and James is annoying. Who I think would mesh well on a team means more than pure ball knowledge. We’ll be spending every Saturday afternoon together this summer. I want to make the most of it.” A small smile spreads across his face, considering her. “Just have fun today.” Gestures over to the stands, to Becca and Abbot sitting in his matching canvas chairs. “Give your sister something to cheer about.”
⚾️⚾️⚾️
The one adjective that Mel would use to describe Pediatrics’ summer league team was enthusiastic. Which, according to her teammates, was a very generous assessment of the assembled squad. The most common were as followed:
“Annoying.” — Cassie, which must be the adjective of the day.
“Like if Rainbow Bright drank too many Tequila Sunrises and threw up everywhere.” — Dana
“Disney adults.” — Langdon
“People who probably unironically clap when the plane lands.” — Trinity, who five minutes later followed up with, “No! I have a better one—they’re the people who call their children up to the front of the plane when you're stuck on the runway and convince the flight attendants that they can sing. So now you’re trapped in a middle seat listening to a ten-year-old badly belt Defying Gravity over the intercom against your will, for what? A drink coupon? A broken Biscoff cookie?”
“Why are they all dressed like Langdon’s backpack?” — Dennis. This comment nets the biggest reaction, with Trinity snorting into her glacier ice Gatorade and Samira trying to cover her laugh with a demure cough.
All of them assured Mel (the only resident currently employed in their department with specific interest in pediatrics, who always got first dibs on peds intubations when they rolled in from the ambulance bay and completed rotations in both the PICU and NICU) that none of these descriptions applied to her.
They’d played half of the first inning so far, with Peds up to bat to start off. Per summer league rules, since Three Rivers was a neutral field, no one had home field advantage. So Langdon and the Pediatrics team captain—Dr. Fitzpatrick, an attending who observed and signed off on Mel’s treatment plans during her PGY-2 PICU rotations, who emphasized how excited she was to finally garner enough sign-ups to have a team, who hosted a BYOB jersey-making night the week before—flipped a coin to determine Home and Away standings.
Langdon seemed quite pleased they secured Home: “I like seeing what we’re working with. Helps me with a game plan.” He probably had a lot of time to strategize too, considering she spent most of the top of the first standing out in center field, watching the first three batters comically swing and miss, over and over, in their rainbow tie-dye t-shirts with puffy paint swirls and jersey numbers. They even wore corresponding tie-dye knee socks and bright shutter shades that Mel thought hadn’t been in style since 2012. Every walkout song— “Celebration”; “Walking on Sunshine”; “Shake If Off”—was positive! Fun! Each batter did a little dance on the way up to home plate! High-fived a stunned Cassie at catcher before getting into their batters’ stances.
The whole team cheered when Mateo recorded his third strike out in a row. Against them.
“They’re just excited,” Dana says to Langdon, adjusting her batter’s gloves as she prepares to lead off. He conducts a quick huddle with the first three people in the batting order—Dana, Trinity, Mateo. “Let them enjoy it while they still can.”
“You mean for the next five minutes?” Langdon quips.
Dana retaliates, landing a soft punch to his shoulder and he comically pretends to fall back, feigning injury. “You’re brutal.”
“Hey—it’s not my fault that Gloria keeps ignoring my suggestions to implement a run rule.”
“That wouldn’t make it baseball then would it, Mr. Designated Hitters are an absolute abomination of biblical proportions.”
“What’s so controversial about wanting pitchers to actually step into the batter’s box.” He taps lightly against the top of Dana’s helmet, ignoring her loud snort at his dismissal. “Carve them up, slugger. Hit ‘em right where it hurts.”
Mel loved working in emergency medicine. Constantly bouncing around from patient to patient alongside her coworkers; calling and consulting and learning from and with different departments. Making tough calls, asking for help when she needed it, gaining the confidence to have others seek her out, consult her. There was also the flip side—the numbness that blanketed the bereavement room every time she had to tell a family or friend or partner that their loved one wasn’t going to make it. The silence of an exam room when the test results came back skewed in a bad way; the stillness of the silent trauma bay when all the machines were turned off. Very few could understand that specific feeling outside the medical center.
When hope is completely vacuumed out of a space. Nothing but a hollowness left in its place.
But as she hears the opening guitar chords to Rage Against the Machine’s “Bombtrack” while Dana swaggers up to home plate, pausing only to bless herself with the sign of the cross, lifting her golden crucifix pendant to her lips, giving it a kiss—she can see the light and joy from the top of the first inning, slowly evaporate away from behind each member of team Pediatrics’ eyes.
When Dana gets a clean hit, right over the head of the pitcher into the seam between 2nd base and the shortstop, she expects her to keep rounding the bases, yet Dana freezes at first base, choosing not to advance forward. Mel feels like she’s witnessing a joke that she has no idea what the punchline is.
Trinity bunts. Pediatrics scrambles to field the ball, all the infielders collapsing forward like confused ants on a log; Mateo hits a line drive right past third base, giving all runners an opportunity to advance one base forward. Three runners on.
Langdon’s up at bat. Gloves and helmet on. His bat, an exact twin to the one he’s letting her borrow for the season.
There were things she’d discovered about herself in the two years since she’d moved to Pittsburgh. City driving stressed her out, still not fully understanding what a Pittsburgh Left was. Didn’t know the difference between Wawa vs. Sheetz, even though Langdon always interjected to argue that Buc-ee's was better than both, which just confused her more.
She learned that she wasn’t in the best mindset to date. Always wanted to get serious too fast.
Had bumbled her way through a Cidercade meet-up with Cole, an EMT who worked with Presby. They played air hockey for two hours, shared a plate of loaded nachos, and then he proceeded to ghost her. Then there was Liza—the Muay Thai instructor at Ellis’ boxing gym who Parker thought would be a good fit for Mel. “She’s very direct, no-nonsense, but with a heart of gold underneath that hard shell.” Liza’s mom had also passed from a Stage IV cancerous tumor and she liked doing 1,000 piece puzzles after work to unwind. They casually slept together for the four months leading up to her advancement to PGY-3. Mostly on weekdays, when Mel was off work and Becca was at Hickorytree. Where they would spend hours lazily naked on the couch, Mel’s fingers’ tracing out every single hope and dream onto the smooth plains of Liza’s stomach, the inside of her thighs.
Mel still remembered the look of confusion on Liza’s face, immediately clamming up when asked to define what exactly they were doing. “Look, Mel, you’re nice, but I just don’t think I’m ready for a relationship right now.” After her door clicked shut that night with an empty promise of still remaining friends, she’d bundled herself inside her comforter and scrolled through Langdon’s Instagram like she’d done hundreds of times before.
He started back at PTMC two weeks later.
And, during her first game on The Pitt roster, she learns—right when Langdon strides up to home plate, the ominous string guitar, articulating Johnny Cash’s raspy vocal declaring how sooner or later, God’ll cut you down—that she was really into spit. His, specifically. Maybe only? She’s lost in the way he bends his torso over, the movement of his mouth, the rolling of his jaw muscles. How she wishes she’d taken better care to get her prescription reviewed at the optometrist just to see the remnants wetting his lips as he takes his rightful place to the left of home plate.
The moment the ball leaves the pitcher's hand, Mel knows what’s going to happen. She’s on her feet, leaning out and over the dugout railing to get a better view.
Before, if you were to ask her what she thought a home run swing looked like, she would tell you that it was one, continuous motion; a powerful cut-across articulated by the twist of a back foot, rotation at the hips, the fast whip of the bat. Now–on closer inspection—it’s really a series of tight, controlled angles: the grip of his hands, knuckles tight and pallid. Wrists locked. Legs rooted wide to keep his body focused. Eyes never leaving the pitcher’s mound. Focused, until the barrel of the bat connects with a single, thunderous crack. His entire torso leaning so far back it's in line with his back heel. Langdon makes it look as easy and natural as breathing, but Mel knows that nothing comes without cost.
How much time and sweat and money and blood did it take for him to get here?
For the hit ball—a grand slam straight out and over right-center field, the half-filled spectators in the stands clapping—to go so far, she hears the distant blaring of a car alarm from the playground’s parking lot.
For him to toss his bat down into the dirt and immediately look over toward her, a smile on his face that slightly dips into a wince at the edges.
For the after: when Mel watches Langdon walk over, rapidly tap three times on the concession stand EMPLOYEE ONLY door where a scrawny arm hands him two gallon-sized baggies of ice. Before heading off, he fishes the wallet out of his baseball pants with one hand and drops a crisp $20 inside the tip jar sitting on the front counter. Strides off over to the locker rooms.
He takes his time rounding the bases like he’s savoring every step, every clap, every tap of his foot against the bag. When he comes around third, where Dr. Fitzpatrick stands—eyes wide, her pigtails lopsided and drooping in their rainbow scrunchie hold, no match for the humid heat of June—he turns around, switching to run backwards. Flicks his fingers to his temple in a two-finger salute.
“Welcome to the league,” he smirks, before turning back and following the basepath all the way home.
Robby whistles low from the end of the dugout, aviator sunglasses on and a toothpick dangled from the corner of his mouth. “So much for interdepartmental bonding and solidarity this year.”
The Pitt wins 16-0.
It isn’t until later that night when Mel realizes Langdon wasn’t wearing his wedding ring.
🏟️✨⚾️
Langdon Hey Mel 👋 Sorry if this is out of the blue, but if you want any additional practice, lmk. My summer schedule is kinda free outside of work and SMART recovery meetings, so whatever times are best for you with Becca should work. I think it would be good for both of us.
🏟️✨⚾️
A batting tee is already set up by the time Mel walks up to Mazeroski Memorial Park at a chipper eight in the morning. She’s not scheduled, while Langdon pulls the short straw and is working the swing for the next two weeks, freeing up his mornings but making everything else slightly off-kilter. Specifically his texting, sending and responding to texts exclusively between two and four in the morning. Not that Mel is complaining. It’s nice to wake up to message notifications from him, even if they are mostly cordial.
Langdon They have an open gate policy from 8AM-10AM if you're free. It’s where I usually go if I'm feeling rusty…good atmosphere to get out of your head.
Langdon What are your goals you’d like to accomplish this season?
Mel Um
Mel Is everything a bad answer?
Langdon Everything is too broad. Be a little more specific. I need a baseline to work with.
Mel Maybe getting more comfortable with my hitting? I keep closing my eyes every time I’m up at the plate. I know that’s not what I’m supposed to do.
Langdon Perfect 👍
Despite the early morning, people are already at the field: a group of college-aged kids far-out into the weeded outfield, hitting pop flies to catch; and a dad acting as makeshift catcher while his son throws dubious pitches, the ball wobbling as it travels.
Langdon’s already settled into a grassy spot near first base. He’s wearing another one of his cut-out shirts, the ovals dipping further, cutting directly into the KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD lettering—now reading EE UST EIR. There is still no wedding ring.
“No matter what, before we start anything, we always stretch first.” His tone leaves little room for argument. “You can do your own if there’s already set stretches you like or you can follow along with mine. It’s SCI-recovery focused.” Quirks an eyebrow up at her. “Helps to prevent soreness due to your batswing.”
“I can follow along.” She flashes a big smile, not wanting Langdon to think she’s merely falling in line. Mel likes that he has a set routine he wants to share instead of privately rolling out a yoga mat in his living room. She imagines him: working through all of his stretches to end in Shavasana. Laying on his back, eyes closed, stomach expanding and decompressing through deep breaths. Content in the fleeting stillness of his own body until the end. Reopening his eyes to the artfully exposed ductwork and red brick walls of his condo. A 19th-century converted commercial warehouse downtown, right where the Ohio River forks off into the Allegheny and Monongahela. Heather lightly ribbed him about the marble countertops and custom cabinets, imported from Italy.
“Do you stretch a lot?” Mel tried to make a play on Do you come here often? but it sounded so much smoother in her head.
“Probably not as much as I should. It’s…nice to have something to do in the mornings since running’s fallen to the wayside.”
They start standing. Touching their fingers to toes, slowly working their way down to the ground. Mel follows his lead with the sciatic mobilizer, back extension, through both cat and cow yoga poses, before laying on his back stretching out his quads and hamstrings. She’s still transitioning out of cow pose when Langdon motions for her to get on her back.
“I always end with a Piriformis stretch. You can totally do it on your own if you want, but it’s easier to demonstrate to a partner your first go around. Only if you want to.” Mel appreciates the tacked-on ability to decline if she chooses; she doesn’t know if she ever will. Laying on her back, she gives herself over to him.
“You want to keep your knee up and stable on the ground,” he instructs. Keeps one hand flat on her bent knee, the other stabilizing her hip. Slowly, he turns the knee inward. Holds the stretch for two-breath cycles, returning it back to its upright position before tilting it the other way. Going inch by inch to mold her leg into a bent number four.
“Let me know when you feel pressure or if I need to let up,” Langdon says, but she feels physically fine. Well, only a little mentally unstable with how malleable her body is under his guiding hands. Langdon keeps moving her leg towards the ground, going and going and going. It isn't until the side of her thigh is flush with the ground that Mel looks at his face.
“Sorry,” she flushes, directly in eyesight with the slight slope of his nose. “I should’ve warned you sooner about my hypermobility.”
Langdon’s fingers grip tight at her hips. “Is that normally a thing for you?”
“Not really. I didn’t know I had HSD until I interned at a physical therapy clinic in med school. They made us do the Beighton Score diagnostic test we had patients do during intake. A bunch of different stretches, like if I could touch my thumb to my forearm or bend completely over to the ground without stretching beforehand. I thought all this was perfectly normal for my body until I scored within the HSD range. Interestingly enough, I don’t believe I have a connective tissue disorder like Ehlers-Danos or even a higher production of collagen, just genetics. My mom was a dancer, so—”
“That’s cool, Mel.” Langdon sounds like he’s speaking from inside a cave hollowly echoing across the field to fade into the void. He’s intently staring at the space right in the middle of her Mel-made four, exactly where her leggings pull taunt. For a beat, she’s back in the Treasure Island basement, thinking Mr. Bowman could see her bra. But now, that archived worry is a new heat.
What if Langdon could see everything? The softness of her stomach where her T-shirt rode up? The bottom band of her sports bra? How turned on she was? If the wetness of her underwear seeped through two-layers of fabric? If he was close enough to smell her?
“Remember to breathe.” He brings her knee slowly back to center only to fold, stretching her leg against her chest. Hovering over her. From her prone position on the ground, she sees how dynamically blue his eyes really are—light cerulean with a ring of dark navy around the iris. The pulse of his neck; the few and far between silver hairs that thread through the brown.
Hyper aware of how openly vulnerable she is to him at this angle. How easy it would be for him to slide down the waistband of his athletic shorts and thrust his hips forward. Grind into her. Pin her down with his full body weight. Make her take it…except there would be no actual making because she wants it so badly that Mel doesn’t even know how she’s still functioning.
The spell is broken when Langdon lowers her leg back with a deep sigh. “All good.” Bare, left handed fingers tap twice against her kneecap.
He must take his ring off whenever he plays baseball, although Robby slips his onto a sturdy chain around his neck; the only necklace Langdon wears is his St. Luke medallion. He must leave it at home. Mel doesn’t know if she could do that if she was a wife, if she got married.
Langdon and her are over at the hitting tee now. Bat held high and helmet on as she prepares herself to knock the ball off the stand.
“Keep your eye on the ball,” Langdon coaches. “You should always watch it from the second it’s in the pitcher's hand to the moment it makes contact with the barrel. Baseball isn’t a fast and high scoring game; it’s a series of conscious choices. Choosing to watch the ball is a very important one.”
“I just tense up when the ball is coming toward me. It’s easier now.” She motions to the tee. “One less variable to worry about.”
“I struggled with that too when I started. Could hit, but I’d lose focus at the last second. Don’t go up there trying to hit a homerun. Easy way to get in your head. Focus on base hits, gaps, or just pure hitting. When you start to add in everything else—mechanics, timing, reps in the cages…it sometimes becomes overly complicated, makes things worse. Focus on the basics, like your legs.” She shifts her eyes off the ball and over to Langdon across from her, pantomiming a batter’s stance with his Louisville Slugger. “We call it your load. You want to counter rotate to generate your power, then release. Think of it like the cock of a gun that sets up the bullet for firing.” Her mind is not focused on baseball after hearing the words cock and load come out of his mouth. “You swing with your core and hips and legs. Maximize your power through the rotation.”
She tries her best to mirror Langdon’s form—how he squats his legs slightly down toward the ground, twisting his back foot like he’s squishing a bug when he swings. She sucks her stomach in to activate her core muscles and swings her bat as hard as she can.
Mel barely knocks the ball from its perch, sadly watching it bounce in the dirt only a yard from her tennis shoes.
“Your grip is off.” On his own bat, he shows her his hand placement. “Instead of lining up your metacarpophalangeal joints, line up your PIPs. Coaches teach the kids in little league to ‘align your knocking knuckles.’ It’s going to feel weird and off at first, but you’ll get used to it. Once you’ve got that down, then you can feel it out. The body naturally adjusts to a good comfort level. I hold my bat in a box grip, for example. You can even experiment with sliding your hands away from the knob, up the handle, into a chokers grip if you like being in control.”
Now Mel fixates on choke and grip and control, to the point where everything around her—the field, new people filing through the gate, the hitting stand, Langdon’s maple bat in her hands—overstimulates.
“I’m going to watch you hit again. Don’t worry about anything else besides lining up your PIPs and keeping your eye on the ball. Okay, Champ?” he asks. The new nickname settles over Mel’s skin like a balm.
“What if I want tips for my stance? I like having set rules for each part of my body. Eyes, hands, legs…If I don’t have anything, then I freeze. Overthink.”
Langdon leans down, right next to her ear. His bat is in the dirt, hands balanced on his thighs. “Make sure to bend your knees, rotate your hips, and…remember to keep those legs spread wide.” His voice cracks like radio static or maybe Mel’s brain is so scattered and unfocused, she’s blinking out.
When she hits the baseball into the ditch between second and third base, she can’t help but immediately turn back to him. “You’re a good teacher,” Mel praises. The handle of his bat burns in her grip and she wonders how long her hurt palms will keep.
Langdon’s smile tilts up at the corners, making no move to run out and field the ball. “It helps that you’re an even better student.”
She’d eternally been a good little student with front row seats for Mr. O’Brien’s 11th grade AP American Literature class. A man who wore khakis and a blue button down, cuffs always rolled up to his elbows. He would lean against his fake oak desk while going over ways to properly annotate, using their two summer reading assigned books as examples—The Great Gastby and Red Badge of Courage. Specifically, he pointed out Mel with her beat-up editions from the annual Friends of the Library used book sale and all the flimsy sticky notes sticking out. They were all color-coded with a corresponding sticky note key taped over the copyright page.
“Mel, can I borrow your Great Gatsby for a second?” Mr. O’Brien swiped it from on top of her desk, fanned it out to a random page for everyone to see.
“This is exactly what I mean when I say close textual reading. Do you see how Mel’s made notes here? Underlined and highlighted? She’s not just reading what’s on the page—she’s engaging with it. In such deep conversation with Nick, Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby. Reacting to their motives, the motifs and thematic throughlines. Notice how organized this is? The different colors of highlighters and sticky tabs? I want to see everyone take note. This is how you do it.”
He wasn’t the only teacher she was close to. There was Ms. Vasquez, the Robotics Club sponsor who let Mel fiddle around with DIY robot kits and Raspberry Pi’s during homeroom. Or, Mrs. Gilda in the cafeteria, who set aside an extra sugar cookie just for her, even if her lunch money account sat at a stark zero. Sometimes she spent those same lunch periods eating with Mrs. Kilroy, the sixty-seven-year-old biology teacher who loved Murder, She Wrote as much as she did. They would talk about their favorite cases and which one of Jessica’s outfits was their favorite—obviously, her bar outfit from season five, episode ten, “Weave a Tangled Web,” duh?!—and Mrs. Kilroy would show off pictures of her four rescue cats, giving Mel a light pat of the hand. “I’m not supposed to pick favorites with my students, but hon, you are just such a gem!” Mrs. Kilroy even let her grade student quizzes sometimes and she secretly relished in it—marking up the pages with red pen, knowing that they got the answers wrong while she got every answer right.
With Mrs. Kilroy, however, it felt like family. The replacement for the grandmother who died of a septic-kidney infection before Mel and Becca were born. Only memorialized by a retro high school portrait carried inside her mom’s wallet and through Mel’s middle name. Rosemary, like the twangy Jessica Andrew’s country song her mom loved, singing along with the melody as they drove down the congested Beltway to Becca’s epileptologist appointments.
Mr. O’Brien was different. She always lingered a tad bit longer than she needed to after his class. Not saying anything at all, just staring as he filed away his daily lesson plans and adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, running his fingers through thick brown hair. So one summer night, when he stopped by her seasonal job at Pineapple Palace, the local pineapple whip and other frozen treats stand, in his cycling kit—leaning his bike up outside next to a big dogwood tree rooted to a grassy patch—Mel didn’t hesitate as he moved to pay.
“Don’t worry. It’s on the house.” She tried twisting her face into a sly, secretive smile that she hoped made his toes curl; that he noticed the way she played into the huskiness in her voice. Maneuvered her usual type-A boundless enthusiasm into something much more sensual, like she was a bartender at a local dive with a lip ring. Or like the time she watched Coyote Ugly on MTV and imagined herself moving to a new town, being specially picked out from the crowd to dance on top of a sticky wooden bar top. Immediately having a group of coworkers who felt like family, wearing low-rise jeans and ribbed tank tops that showed the top cups of her push-up bra. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to kiss these women or be them, but Mel knew one thing: they were cool.
“Wow, that’s quite the generous offer. I hope you don’t get in any trouble for giving away the goods for free.”
“It’s not a problem, Mr. O’Brien. The owners are so nice. They do things like this all the time.”
“Well now, who am I to turn down a free pineapple whip?”
And this was it—the moment that she and Mr. O’Brien would remember for the rest of their lives. She was going to pass over his strawberry whip, swirled to perfection, and their hands would brush, and the next time she saw him, the ring would be off his finger. In a year's time, they would be strolling out of the Little White Chapel at midnight, hand in hand. Happy and whole.
But what Mel failed to notice was his wife’s bicycle with a baby seat attachment. The way Mr. O’Brien turned and brightened as they approached. How he kissed the crown of his infant daughter’s head. “Babe, you wouldn’t believe who works at Pineapple Paradise. Remember me telling you about my annotating superstar Mel King?”
“Yes! Oh my goodness, aren’t you cute!”
All Mel could do was look down at the counter when his wife ordered a cherry kiwi snow cone. She tried her best to keep from bursting into tears at the realization that her fantasy life would never transpire. Her reality: she would finish the sale. Hand over their ice cream. Watch his family from afar as they nestled down at one of the outdoor tables. His wife would feed a spoonful of snow cone into his mouth.
Her senior year, she asked Mr. O’Brien for a college recommendation letter and he wrote her a great one—not only for admissions, but for scholarships specific to the pre-med program at UNLV. When she got accepted, she wrote him a card with a $10 Pineapple Paradise paper voucher inside. Gave him a stunted side hug on graduation day while his wife took a picture with her phone. She would never see him again.
The night of her high school graduation, Mel torrented a copy of Coyote Ugly on her busted laptop:
“I’m Cammie, the Russian Tease,” the actress says on film.
“Violet. The Jersey Nun.”
“That was Rachel, the New York Bitch.”
“We all play our little parts.”
And what part did Mel have?
“I’m Mel. An absolute pleasure to have in class.”
Looking at Langdon now, she feels sixteen again, watching Mr. O’Brien from the doorframe of her English classroom. “You’ll do great at the game tomorrow, Champ,” Langdon assures. “Trust me.”
🏟️✨⚾️
Mel doesn’t really recall the first time she gets a hit off her bat in a baseball game—it goes foul anyways, nothing to truly write home about—even if she’s secretly so excited to tell Becca all about it: “Remember what I told you about the two kinds of knuckles…well, I really focused on lining up my pips today.” If she lied, she would say it doesn’t stick because her teammates eclipse any of her moments: Trinity’s stretch catch on first base, dropping down completely into the splits, beating the neurology runner to the bag; Dana thwarting a third-base stealing attempt. Samira getting her first base hit and Mel cheering so loud from the dugout, Robby covered his ears.
No, she knows this as the day she secretly stumbles upon Frank Langdon shirtless in the Three Rivers locker room after the game.
She doesn’t plan on it, seriously, just wants to attempt to dab away the residual grass stains on her arm after attempting (and failing) to make an outfield catch; it ended up not being that big of a deal, because Langdon was right there to quickly field the ball and throw it over to Dennis, who was covering 2nd, getting the batter out. “Thank goodness for Dennis,” Mel told Langdon at the end of the inning, “without him, the runner would’ve definitely made it all the way to third…maybe even home! That could’ve changed the entire momentum of the game.” He stood silent at that, hands on his hips as his foot rapidly tapped the dugout floor, possibly in irritation? She wasn’t sure, didn’t know how to classify his maneurisms—had only ever seen something similar on cartoon-character Elmer Fudd, when he was once again bested by Bugs Bunny.
Opening the locker room door, she hears Langdon’s music playing off his phone, a slightly filtered static that distorts the lyrical acoustic guitar. It’s a folk song from the 70s that Dana always teased him about (“Okay Mr. Laurel Canyon, you’re not doing a very good job of convincing me that you’re not just a senior citizen in a mid-thirties skin suit. Combined with your love of public access radio and going to bed before 9 pm, I should be asking you about my future AARP benefits.” To which Langdon replied: “What? I’m supposed to apologize for having a healthy sleep hygiene routine and being informed? I would like one day where I could just catch a break”). Silently inching closer, walking on the balls of her feet to muffle her footsteps, until she’s certain Langdon can’t see her from her hiding spot around the cinder block privacy wall.
She feels as if she’s hiding in the bushes with a pair of binoculars or she’s voyeuristically looking into a neighbor's apartment a la Rear Window—Turner Classic Movies, channel 41 on the laminated Vegas motel channel guide. The St. Luke's chain is nearly camouflage amongst his chest hair—it travels all the way down past his belly button and into his shorts. His backpack lies unzipped like the open mouth of a shark. One hard Ziploc ice bag crowds the locker room sink, a makeshift ice cap; a torn-open IcyHot package is crumpled on the counter next to a fresh roll of medical-grade plastic wrap—which he’s already put to use securing the first ice bag over his right shoulder, just like when she came to the dugouts after tryouts.
He’s so different like this—vulnerable, nodding along to Neil Young while he moves around the locker room, getting ready to secure the second bag to his back. Mel thinks it might be awkward for him, trying to get the position of the ice in the right place on his body while maneuvering the roll of sticky plastic—so prone to sticking together, making a wasteful mess—tightly around his torso. Mel doesn’t think he’ll get it, but she technically doesn’t know Frank Langdon. He’s done this so many times by himself, he’s learned how to adapt.
Mel wishes he didn’t have to.
When the music from his phone stops—ringtone blaring, grating against the concrete floors and metal lockers—she nearly jumps out of her skin.
“Fuck me,” Langdon spits. He secures the plastic and rips the end from the roll before he answers the call:
“Hey, what’s up, honey? Oh, yeah, just finishing up at the field now. We won 4-2, but it wasn’t as close as the score may seem. Everyone played great together like a well-oiled machine. I think the team is starting to gel…I know, it happens every year, I freak out for the first couple of weeks and then everything ends up working. Santos and Whitaker are regrettably great, Samira’s really catching on–no pun intended…You know, because she’s an outfielder, so catching on…I know it’s not my best work Abs, but a mere chuckle would be greatly appreciated. I can hear the eyeroll all the way from Travis County. Y’all still set on the trip to New Braunfels for the Fourth? Honey…listen, I tried, trust me. I got Saturday off, but asking for the full weekend, that was never going to happen. That’s not how emergency medicine works. I just can’t fly out to Austin whenever I want. After everything last year, it’s not like I have an unlimited amount of time in my bucket. Trust me, there’s nothing I want more than to fly down via your dad’s vouchers, go out on the boat with you and the boys, and watch the sunset over the lake, but that’s just not in the cards, Abs…”
Mel doesn’t hear the rest of the one-sided conversation between Langdon and his wife, just unsticks her firmly planted shoes and slowly makes her way out the door—doing her best not to make any noise, hoping the knob doesn’t rattle and the hinges don’t creak when she leaves. She lets her new qualitative data point settle over her skin like an uncomfortable wool sweater: for the entirety of Langdon’s call, he never mentioned her once.
⚾️⚾️⚾️
Langdon Congrats on your first contact at the game today!! A foul ball is still a hit in my books—I’ve never been a big stat guy (bunch of nerds anyways). If you want to celebrate, I know the best batting cages in town. Hit me up if you're free this week.
Mel I don’t think that’s a good idea. DELETE. Does your wife even know I’m on the team? DELETE. Was I not worthy of a mention? A shout out? DELETE. Do you need help after the game sometime? I did a sports medicine elective course in undergrad, so I could totally lend a knowledgeable hand if needed! DELETE. Do you need help after the game sometime? I did a sports medicine elective course in undergrad, so I could assist! DELETE Why does it always feel like one step forward, two steps back with you? DELETE. Yes! I would love to 😊 SENT.
🏟️✨⚾️
Allegheny North Batting Cages, est. 1956, were the only open air batting ranges in Pittsburgh where you could actually see where you hit the ball, with pitching machine speeds ranging from 30 mph all the way up to 85 mph. You needed to purchase the batting cage, bumper/go-kart car, and mini-golf combo ticket to access them, but Langdon assured her that the family-owned complex was the best in the city.
“I don’t trust any cages where I don’t pass billboards for Free Fireworks, XXX Adult Videos, or (888) 98-TWINS. Every other place is a scam.”
Allegheny North is cash-only and Mel watches as Langdon smoothes out a $20 to feed into the token vending machine, generating eight tokens. “Each one equals ten pitches. I don’t know if we’ll use them all today, but I can always save them for when we come back.” The acknowledgement that there may be a next time pulls a little smile up at the corners of her mouth, trying hard to not jump the gun, imagining Langdon squeezing his long legs into the tiny bumper car seat or cursing the hole nine technicolor windmill for messing with his scorecard.
“If nothing else, I should be paying you personal coaching fees.”
“Where’s the fun in that? Rookies never pay.”
“You make everyone else cover their costs all the time.” Even the $3.00 Coke Zero from the concession stand, which Langdon passive-aggressively reminded Dennis of for weeks every time they were scheduled on the same shift until Trinity threw a plastic baggy full of dirty spare change into his lap mid break room crossword. “How’s this for $3.00?”
The floodlights flicker on over the complex, the closest Mel will ever get to feeling like she was an actor, blinded by stagelights. Langdon leads the way over to the cage at the farthest edge from the entrance. He takes great care to bring her both a helmet and her trusted Victus bat (his, technically still, even if it pains her to think of giving it back), but he neglects to grab his own helmet, swearing he doesn’t need one when he was coaching. “A pitching machine from the Eisenhower administration isn’t going to take me out.”
“Well, I guess I don’t have to wear one if you don’t…” which causes him to grumble, stomping back out to the Subaru, knowing he listens to her about his own safety. Even if he then completely ignores the boldly laminated WordArt signs zip tied to every single cage that practically screams out how only one batter is permitted inside while machines are running.
“One batter, which I am not. I’m a coach. Semantics.” Saddling up behind her, she can already feel his body heat. A distinctive warmth from his front against the backs of her bare thighs that causes her to shiver like the nightly autumn chill’s settled over months early. “We’re not going to crank up the speed tonight, keep it around 40 miles-per-hour.”
“Is that how fast pitchers throw in our league?”
“Depends from team to team. Skill level, age, commitment. In summer league, you see anything from 65 all the way up to the low 80s. Mateo throws around an 82-heater.” She hears a flipped switch, the clunk of a coin inserted into a machine, and the triple click click click of a dial as she pulls on her helmet and readies her feet. Her PIPs align on the handle, only a few inches off from the knob. Just some light choking. She hopes Langdon notices the subtle innuendo.
“What speed do pitchers throw in the majors?”
“95 on average. Speed is not the most important thing though…A good pitcher has to be able to read the batter, accurately locate and change up their speed—know if they are pitching a fastball, junk ball, or change-up. Having an arsenal of pitches to toggle through depending on the batter, throwing strikes, not allowing batters to walk. All more important than how fast the ball goes.”
Looking behind her shoulder, Mel sees how his finger hovers over the START button. “I’m going to watch you hit these first ten pitches, Champ, then we’ll go over fundamentals and light mechanics. Sounds good?”
She nods, turning her head back around to face the ominous pitching machine looming far off into the distance like an eldritch, science fiction oddity. The first pitch shoots out with a slight bang like a roman candle. Maybe they wound up accidentally taking the wrong exit and ended up at a standalone fireworks emporium instead of here and now. Mel doesn’t expect how sudden and fast the ball comes, flinches away as it flies over the DO NOT CROSS yellow safety lines and the home plate, rattling the entire enclosed stand when the ball collides with the metal. The next pitch comes ten seconds later, absolutely not enough time for her to regain her nerve, so she lets the baseball cruise past. Wants to focus on the third one, maybe only the odd numbered pitches in the line-up. Give herself more time to actually recalibrate; get used to the pace.
Swinging on pitch #5, #7, and #9, she misses the first two and barely connects on the last. Watches in disappointment as her hit doesn’t even travel a full yard, sadly bouncing inches beyond the cage, barely even rolling into the grass. She can’t even turn around to fully look at him—definitely finding a way to refund his twenty dollars…maybe slipping it into one of the superfluous backpack compartments or underneath his car’s windshield wipers.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“Bad.”
“You did good. Smart of you to not go after every ball. Picked your battles, only swung when you thought you had a fighting chance.” Langdon comes up behind her again and she leans the slightest distance back into him. “You’re learning what feels right for your body. That’s nothing wrong or bad about that.”
“I just don’t want to get hit by a pitch,” she says.
He wedges his foot between her planted feet, knocking them apart to widen her legs. “Batters anxiety is normal. It’s not your fault if you get hit, that’s why they let you automatically advance to first if it occurs. Unless you play dirty and lean in to intentionally draw the walk or piss off the pitcher bad enough that they clock you with a fastball—which I think would never happen with you, Champ…just focus on the fundamentals. The rest will come.” She’s gripping the handle so tight, her palms sweat against the maple—suddenly worried she’s going to accidentally trigger cramped hand stim—when he wraps his arms around her, placing his hands over hers. Rubs the calloused pads of his fingers over her knuckles, back and forth.
“Remember to keep these inline.” His voice matches his touch; featherlight and careful. And maybe she wants to sink back into him so fully she hallucinates the moment she thinks he’s breathing into her hair. A deep inhale as if he’s smelling her shampoo.
Mel doesn’t want to unpack how much she shivers when he backs away to turn on the pitching machine.
⚾️⚾️⚾️
They do three more rounds of ten pitches and on the last set, Mel convinces him to bat so she can watch: “I want to see you hit up close.” (Langdon is the ultimate hypocrite, however, ordering her to stand outside the cage while he swings for her personal safety). Only, she’s not keeping track of any of the swing mechanics or the way his body is able to generate velocity on his load or whatever…focused solely on watching his forearms flex while he grips the handle, the ripple of back muscles under his shirt, the beads of sweat on the back of his neck that she wants to lick off, right at his hairline, and the lazy smile on his face when the hit ball sails far into the direction of the Allegheny North go-karts.
They pack up after that, heading out to their parked cars, alone in the parking lot.
“I like your stickers,” he says, talking about the menagerie of bumper stickers she and Becca have collected over the past ten years: their little decal of the WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS sign on the back mirror; the 90.5 WESA sticker for donating $20 during their annual giving drive; the custom Hickorytree logo that Becca designed for her center-wide contest, chosen by the community-at-large based on which entry got the most likes on Facebook. Mel had her doubts about the voting integrity, especially when her sister stayed up late on her computer, murmuring to herself about bots and sock puppet profiles, but her entry was the best.
“Thanks. We’ve put so many miles on this old thing that I’m surprised it’s still functioning. I don’t think she’s gotten used to the Pittsburgh hills quite yet.”
“She’s Nevada born-and-raised?” he asks, motioning to her car.
Mel nods, playing with the frayed ends of her braid like she is searching for split ends. “We bounced around a lot growing up between Las Vegas and Reno. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we just went where our mom could find work.” The motel right outside of the strip, where Kelly King paid a weekly allowance for a two queen-sized bedroom which became their home for those six years in Vegas. She and Becca sharing one while their mother took the other. Even now, Mel hated sleeping alone, wanted someone beside her to whom she could regulate her breathing, calm her down enough to go to sleep. Melatonin gummies could only get you so far.
“After our dad died, money was really tight.”
Doesn’t bring up the fact that it got so much worse after her mom’s cancer and passing.
“What did he do?”
“Truck driver. He wasn’t around a lot. Gone eight months out of the year, but he made good money. Whenever he did come home, it was like every day was Becca and I’s birthday.” He would take them to Chuck-E-Cheese, the mall, buy the tickets to the indoor rollercoaster that their mom said were too expensive. He would let Mel ride the Monorail for as long as she wanted, taking loop after loop, marveling out the window at the bustling crowds of people and the luminescent, light-up drink containers that made the inside of the car smell a little like nail polish remover.
“Sounds familiar,” Langdon responds, almost to himself with a little shake of the head. “Spent so much time at the hospital my first three years, felt like the only way I could show up for my kids was through buying them things.” He motions over to the hood of his Subaru, a curious glint in his eyes. “You wanna stay for a little while?”
Mel knows she doesn’t want to make the drive back to Polish Hill quite yet. Would much prefer living in the liminal space of the near-empty parking lot and campy, pastel paint colors decorating all the lampposts.
They both sit on his Subaru hood and lean back against the windshield, looking up at the hazy glow emitting from the parking lot street lamps. Down the way, a 24/7 Discount Tire and a strip club are both open for business. The only lights they can see from far away are the twinkling glow of airplanes travelling to and from the airport and a rogue helicopter spinning through the air.
“It’s about as clear tonight as we’re going to get in the city. Good spot to watch the planes take off and land,” Langdon says, the features of his face relaxing into what Mel imagines he looks like when he’s asleep.
“Do you do this often?” she asks.
“Come to Allegheny North or loiter in parking lots?”
“Both?”
“Not enough on the former and too much on the latter. The boys aren’t really old enough to hold their own at mini golf. Abby wants to go to Bullpen Downtown near our place, where they have axe throwing and augmented reality batting cages, but…it’s not really my scene.”
“Don’t pass any billboards on the way, do you?”
Langdon huffs out a laugh. “Can’t say I do. Don’t get to see many planes out there either, unless you're the one looking down from the sky while passing over.”
“I wouldn’t know—I’ve never been on a plane.”
“Not even when you moved?”
“We drove the whole way over three days. I hitched a U-Haul to the back of my car and I liked driving. Even with the cost of gas and hotels, it was still cheaper than two one-way plane tickets. Crowded places with a lot of people and variables aren’t the best for Becca.”
“Like emergency rooms?”
“Exactly.”
Mel likes the idea of traveling though, telling Langdon how excited she is for the new airport terminal to open. She recalls the coverage she’s heard, via both WTAE and 90.9, of how architects used 90% of locally raw materials. How the ceiling of the new terminal is built out of wood to reflect the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania; how each structural column, thirty-six to be exact, is molded to look like forest trees—each one with a unique base, color, and thickness.
Langdon turns his head towards her then, examining more closely like he had her pinned under a microscope. “On your first flight, which seat are you choosing: window or aisle?”
“I haven’t really thought about it too much. Probably aisle? Seems the most practical, don’t have to worry about interrupting your seatmate when you need to get up.” She tilts her head back and forth, further digesting the question. “I would feel like I had enough space and wouldn’t be boxed in.”
Mel thinks back to a post on Langdon’s Instagram grid, dated March 2014. It’s a close-up shot from outside a plane window looking out over the Gulf of Mexico. He’s en route from Austin to Florida for spring training practice with UT. Year Three, the caption read. She loves that heavily sepia-tinted photo. Whenever she scrolls to it, she tends to get lost in the pale blue sky and early morning sunlight beaming through stratocumulus clouds. Mel wants to experience that someday. Softly, as if she’s telling a secret, she tacks on: “Maybe if I was traveling with someone I knew, I would pick the window.”
“Lucky for you, I’m an aisle guy, so that works for me.”
“Where would we go?”
“Someplace warm.”
“I like the heat.”
🏟️✨⚾️
MEL KING’S NOTES APP
(Updated 6/28)
The Pitt: Favorite Major League Baseball Team
Trinity (Dennis by association) - Baltimore Orioles
— “Fuck the Yankees and double-fuck the Angelos” (look up who the “Angelos” are)
— The team owner owns a copy of the Magna Carta? (fact check?)
— Does Trinity know that there are over 24-different variations of the Orioles bird-type? (Message her the infographic!)
Dana, Cassie, Robby, Mateo - Pittsburgh Pirates
— Don’t ask
Donnie - Chicago White Sox
“Mel, I’ve been a diehard Chicago White Sox fan for nearly twenty-eight years. I say that with the very expressed intent of sharing my deep and undying love for this team…and my answer, to your question, is rooted in heartbreak…”
— Southside = Best Side? Wrigleyville = Seventh Circle of Hell?
— Jerry Reinsdorf is evil and should sell the team? (Follow up - do any baseball fans approve of their ownership? Need more data for accurate conclusion.)
— “They are 29 games under .500. You could literally run me over with your hatchback and that would hurt less.”
Samira- New York Mets
— Do ask!
Langdon - Houston Astros
— Google Astros + Trashcan (???)
— Refuses to call the stadium anything other than “Minute Maid” even though, upon investigation, the stadium was renamed to Daikin Park in 2025.
— Jose Altuve = GOAT
— Googled Astros + Trashcan. Brought up 2017 cheating scandal in front of The Pitt.
Langdon, to Trinity: “Well…have you thought about the fact that maybe the other teams should have worked harder? And why is it a problem when the Astros get a little creative, but totally fine when the Dodgers go into the luxury tax every year to build the baseball Avengers? The game I love is now just a billionaire boys club, so sue me for rooting for the team that gave the city hope in the weeks following Hurricane Harvey. Do you not care about the sweet people of Houston, Santos? Who are you, Joel Osteen?”
🏟️✨⚾️
Ten minutes is all it takes for each of them to shed their shirts during morning practice. Both exhale in relief when the layer comes off. He pulls out a bottle of Elta MD face sunscreen, as well as a 60 SPF bottle of Banana Boat for the entire body from his ballbag.
“Wow, we use the same brands.” After growing up in the desert and with Becca’s sensitive skin, Mel became a sunscreen expert. Both were dermatologically approved and absolutely did not irritate or smell in the same way normal sunscreens and lotions did.
“What a crazy coincidence.” Langdon breezes right past the observation to get to his question. “Listen, you can say no,” he starts, already approaching her with caution. “It’s just I always get gnarly sunburns across my back and I’m not as flexible as you, so if you want—”
It’s embarrassing how quickly Mel rushes out an answer and she has to fight the urge to cover her mouth. “I don’t mind. It’s what rookies are for, right?”
Langdon uncomfortably flinches at that. “You know that’s not what this is, right? Me asking is not part of some elaborate pulling rank bullshit. No hard feelings if it makes you uncomfortable."
“It absolutely does not, but I appreciate your…hypervigilance?”
“Something like that.” He passes the Banana Boat over to her, turns around, and she’s suddenly greeted with an expanse of skin, muscle, and the vertebrae of his spine. There’s a straight scar jaggedly carved down his lower back like the short zipper on a pullover sweater, mottled with dark pink scar tissue. Mel thinks she may be staring a little too long, doesn’t uncap the bottle of sunscreen quick enough because Langdon clears his throat: “Spinal fusion. Eight years ago.”
His voice snaps Mel into focus like a photographer's lens. She squeezes a healthy amount of sunscreen into her palm. “I’m warning you now, it might be a little cold.” She hopes her words come out carefully practiced, in the same way she prepares her patients for the chill of the coupling gel during an ultrasound.
“I do polar plunges for fun. Do your worst.”
Another Langdon qualitative data point to file away—right next to what sunscreen he likes and how he’s always at the field before Mel so he can focus entirely on her when she arrives. She stands on her tip-toes to make sure she reaches up to the back of his neck and shoulders. “An SCI is a tough injury,” she replies. Mel is cautious about prodding him for new information beyond what is on publicly accessible webpages, but she can’t help but to be curious.
“September game,” he bluntly states. “The Pirates planned on calling me up, right after spring training, to The Show; both the coaches and clubhouse scouts liked the progress I’d been making in Double A…said I could skip Triple A and go straight to the majors.”
“Is that rare?”
“A little bit, but even when I was drafted, analysis said I had a high ceiling. The front office banked on me to be good.” She can feel his muscles tense beneath her palm. “Guess their investment didn’t pay off, huh?”
“It’s not your fault you got injured.”
Her hands rub against his back—from the skin of his neck to behind his ears. Between his shoulders, back and forth like a painter's brushstrokes.
“Yes it is, Mel. You don’t have to soften it. The first time it happened, team doctors said my PT would only be a month long and minimally invasive with the right pain management plans, therapy appointments, and a positive mindset. What a pipe dream that was.” Even from behind, Mel can tell he’s staring long and hard into the empty floodlights across the field, unneeded this early in the morning. “Six months in and one invasive surgery later…fucking unbearable. Pirates ATs and doctors did everything they could: administered Cortisone injections, painkiller shots. They monitored how many physical pills I was being given…maybe 20mGs of Percocet at a time? Ibuprofen on my own when things acted up. Being on Percs is disorienting—would make my vision blurry for long periods of time. Nauseous beyond belief, but it was still better than being in constant pain. Could get out of bed, play baseball if I stretched beforehand, make things happen. One 20mG per day spiraled. I needed more…went looking for places I could find it.
”The second time…I didn’t pay for movers even though Nikki, my sister, said she’d go half with me, but I could just fly down for the weekend, get cheap tickets on American from Pittsburgh to DFW into Midland. I wanted her to save her money, take her girlfriend somewhere nice in Houston instead. I had this. They were only moving 25 minutes away from Alpine to Marfa. How bad could it really be? But then I threw my back out when loading a dining room sideboard into my dad’s truck. This time around, I couldn’t pick up my kids or make it through a shift without having to lay down in an on-call room—that just made it worse. I tried to get by solely off of caffeine and adrenaline because that’s what everyone else in the ED does. Why couldn’t I? I thought going into Dr. Hagan’s office would help from going completely sideways. He wrote me a script for Oxy. Thought it would help. Fool’s errand, all of it.” Maybe Langdon can feel her motions stutter in disagreement. “It’s okay for me to say, Mel. Better than keeping it all inside.”
“Your PCP should’ve never prescribed you opioids with your patient history.” Her voice is tight. She’s already planning on getting a name out of Langdon so she can file an anonymous complaint with the Pennsylvanian state board on his behalf.
“It wasn’t anywhere on my chart,” he cuts in. “I didn’t tell him. No one knew besides Abby about what happened in 2016.”
He has some freckles, a mole or two—not as many as Mel has, but still enough that she mentally connects the dots between each one in a corresponding constellation, keeping her focus. “She helped me flush away all my Percs the first time, stayed with me through the Hell that was withdrawal. When I came to, I promised her I wouldn’t fall off the wagon again.”
“Flushing all your pills without medical detox is so stupid,” she mumbles, not fully thinking her words through because quitting cold like he did was dangerous. Too many things could have gone wrong.
Langdon twists to look down at her. His eyebrows quirk in surprise. “Abby thought it was romantic.”
“Well, you could’ve died.”
Mel can’t help that her own petulance is bleeding through, that’s she’s not more empathetic to Langdon’s wife. But she and Abby are different. Comparison is the thief of joy, but that didn’t stop her from digitally investigating every corner of his wife’s life, internalizing the fact that they were two distinctly different people. Red-headed and tall, always posting pictures of their two sons with emojis over their faces and inspirational Pinterest quotes. Mel scrolled all the way to the bottom of her grid to the snapshots from high school drill team and homecoming court—with a neat, braces adorned smile with a big ribboned monstrosity called a mum secured to her chest that Mel’s quick to write-off as some hyperspecific Texas thing, like Blue Bell ice cream or Shiner Bock or any of the other references Langdon makes. Then in college: sorority rush week; selfies with friends watching Langdon’s games with a glittery, face painted #18 on her cheek that foreshadows all the ones of her at his minor league matches in Granville, West Virginia and Altoona, Pennyslvania. Her senior pictures—sitting in an open field of wild bluebonnets with Langdon’s arms wrapped around her from behind—where she’s adorned in her UT graduation regalia. She’d reposted that one in 2018, tagging it as #ThrowbackThursday, reading ‘Cause I love the light I’ve found in you 🌞You’re my golden hour ❤️
The thing with Mel and Abby is that their individual circles would never cross over on the Venn Diagram chart. But, late at night—when the intense light of her phone burned but she couldn’t go to sleep–she scared herself with how much she’d give up to trade places with Abby: to have his ring on her finger; his last name; carry his children. Make sure he’s okay after a hard day.
“She should know that.”
“Both of us are at fault for that one. I thought I was being so smart, managing my own MAT the second time around, not seeking out prescription painkillers again, focusing instead on benzodiazepines. Look how much good that did.”
Mel's aware of the fact that when her hands move lower and lower down, Langdon’s breathing twitches. Her touch stays above his waistband, but that doesn’t stop her mind from thinking what it would be like to rub all over his skin.
“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit, Langdon. You recognized that you needed help after you were sent home, made it happen, and continue to do that. The most important thing is that you show up every time you're scheduled to work, putting one foot in front of the other. They wouldn’t have offered you the attending position otherwise.”
The sunscreen is fully soaked into his skin, free of cast. Won’t stick to the back of his shirt when he tugs it back on.
“I know, my therapist Lorenzo said the same thing. Recovery isn’t linear. It’s common to have complicated feelings about the self and others. I just wish it didn’t hurt sometimes how my wife and kids walk on eggshells around me, like they’re waiting for me to fuck it all up again. One day, they come home to me telling them I need to go back to inpatient or something, effectively putting them through everything again. I thought…this summer, Abby wanted me to take some time off, go out with her and the boys to her parent’s lake house on Lake Travis. They bought it while both of us were in college. Would fly down from Dallas on football game days in the fall—they’re the kind of people who throw a ritzy tailgate just to leave right after halftime.”
She can tell he’s pulling away a little, wanting to deflect, so she follows him down the breadcrumbed path: “That must’ve been convenient for your games.”
Langdon snorts, his entire torso rumbling like a staccato boom thunder. “Would have required them to have actually wanted to watch me play. They don’t like me very much. I’ve never been the greatest conversation partner over pumpkin pie at the Adler family holidays.”
Her hands splay against his lower back, right above his scar, successfully completing the sunscreen task with flying colors. A-plus across the report card; a shiny gold star in her file. She wonders if she could be the one to always do this for him, like helping him wrap the ice after the game.
“Their loss.” She says it so affirmatively that her teeth clench right at her molars. “Maybe the time apart will be good for everyone.”
⚾️⚾️⚾️
“Okay, you’re going to work around the cones, using both your glove and free hand to field the ball, run and shuffle your way through some long catches, and then try to make the throw back to me up front.”
After sunscreen and warm-up stretches, he spends five minutes laying neon orange discs (not cones…she has no clue why he keeps calling them that) in the outfield. He describes to her the main objective today: train her for running and making both short catches and long pop fly fields, fine-tuning her hand-eye coordination through repetition.
Mel’s slow the first time she tries. Langdon tosses the ball just out of her reach, making her fall forward onto her front if she wanted to successfully make the play. Tries her best to not land too hard on her knees, instead leading with her pelvis. She ends up spread flat on her bare belly, tickled by the thick grass, trying to complete the catch but her placement was off. The ball lands a few inches short of her glove. Tauntingly mocks her as it rolls towards Langdon’s feet.
“Sorry, I missed the—”
“Don’t apologize. We’ll just run it again.” He helps her up, picking a stray piece of grass out of her ponytail. “This is only the first step; the goal is to connect all three parts of the drill together. So you’ll reach for the catch, then dart out diagonally to the furthest cone to field a long ball. Drop it. Then cross forward for a mid-range catch that you’ll throw back to me. Got it?”
No. Absolutely not. “Yep!”
The drill starts: Mel sprawls out over and over again when Langdon tosses the short ball, desperately hoping on every attempt that this would be the one where she actually succeeds. Instead, she ends every try face down, getting spiky lawn burweed attached to her shorts. She realizes soon enough her initial strategy of immediately belly flopping over isn’t actually conducive to getting up quickly after making the catch. Along the way she's going to have to correct her form for the second step in the route.
“You’ll get it,” Langdon promises as she drops another fielding attempt straight out of her glove. So close. “It takes some time to get the rhythm down, but you have the right instincts and drive.”
“What if I don’t?”
Langdon pauses, tosses the baseball up and back into the absentmindedly. “Realistically, that doesn’t really matter. As long as you have fun. This is a recreational league, Champ. Not professional,” he pauses for a brief moment, pondering something until he starts again.
“Actually, no, even professionally. Baseball is a deeply unserious sport: the only hope for The Athletics is a player nicknamed ‘Big Amish’ who pantomimes churning butter every time he gets a second base hit; closing pitchers take to the field like professional wrestlers, complete with special effects on the jumbotron; in the 80s, the Pirates’ mascot Pirate Parrot bought and sold cocaine to members of the team; a group of Milwaukee Brewers fans brought a taxidermied emu into a game versus The Padres. I know that it may seem like an old school game full of unnecessary pomp and circumstance, but at the end of the day, it’s just that—a game. Everyone’s progress looks different. We can’t measure success on day one metrics.”
“What about two month analytics?”
He squints up at her as if in the sun’s direct line of sight.“You don’t like being bad at things.”
“No one does,” she shrugs. Mel’s never met anyone who likes to fail. “Just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
“That’s right, Champ.”
When she imagines a coach in her mind, it isn’t Langdon. Someone more like Robby. Hard. Grizzled. Rough-around-the-edges but always fair. A smoker, probably, or maybe someone who keeps a dip container in the back pocket of their baseball pants, spit cup always at the ready. Their words mostly critique, with her having to wade through all the things she was doing wrong to get to the gruff, subtle encouragement—but only if she is perfect, survives through the hard work and training and beat down.
That isn’t Langdon’s style. He’s encouraging, every round—whether she succeeds or fails—always finding the positive within anything she did:
“Great footwork.”
“Your timing’s near perfect.”
“Each rep, you’re getting faster and faster.”
“Mel, you’re going to be running circles around everyone soon.”
After she finally fields the short-thrown ball, Langon’s smile nearly splits the seams of his face in two.
They rapidly move to building on the initial step one into two and three.
Mel doesn’t know when the drill transforms into something else entirely. When her body aches, fatigue and tiredness morph into a desperate need and a suffocating internal drive to get it right. Maybe it’s the first time Langdon tells her good job, Champ after she finally catches the long ball right inside his glove, relishing in the satisfying thud of the leather.
Or: when beads of sweat drip down her collarbone into the crevices between her breasts, dampening her sports bra; her hairline; around the waistband of her shorts. The strain on her leg muscles as she cuts and runs and lunges and jumps for the ball. Euphoric pride, like she can run this route a hundred more times just to bask in the warmth of Langdon telling her how great she is doing.
“See? Why were you so worried you wouldn’t catch on? You’re a natural.”
Each compliment kindles a desire to try that much harder on the next attempt, digging into her reserves past the point of tiredness, because no matter if she got it right or wrong, she was rewarded. All she needs to do is get back up on her feet and run it again and again and again.
Langdon doesn’t care if what she is doing is bad, or if she fails. He still finds something special about what she did, every time, even if she drops the ball or trips over her tennis shoes, stumbles to the ground or if the sun gets into her eyes, even with her transitional lenses. She just desperately hopes he keeps watching her, noticing the rapid changes of her body, and how hard she’s working for him. Mel knew she wasn’t the only one putting in reps; she lost count of how many balls Langdon tossed and threw out to her. His entire body focused on her, and even if by design they were alone on the field with no one else around them, it was still a good feeling to know that she was his focal point, that everyone else was simply a background actor. Both sweaty, panting, wanting to stay suspended in the moment of repetition; him, slowly pushing and pushing her to go further. Her trusting him to stop when time was over. Always making her feel like all her work was worth it, that showing up was all she had to do.
“One more round. I want you to give it your all. Don’t hold back, even if you drop a ball or mess up a throw. I believe in you, Mel.”
When he nods at the end of his instructions, it’s like every particle from the atmosphere absorbs into a charged neutron cloud up in space. Something so volatile it could rapture at any moment, creating its own Big Bang into an entirely different galaxy. She doesn’t want this to be over, wants to keep going and going and going because she doesn’t want to live in a world where Langdon isn’t openly giving her praise—shouting it from across the outfield, murmuring it low when she fails to ground a short ball, laying prone at his feet.
Her mind is a whirlpool, lazily circling around, dazed with every motion, a continuous feeling that feels so, so good and safe in spite of her body's tiredness and exhaustion. She’s heard about this euphoric, internal feeling before. It runs rampant in the ED during marathon training season, when admitted runners—with everything from dehydration to muscle cramps to heart arrhythmias—shyly explain why they took their training a little too far. “When you’re in the zone, knowing you're close to the finish line, just needing that extra push to get yourself there, the adrenaline takes over. You feel like floating, like you could do anything…there’s nothing else like it.”
“I’m ready.”
“Go.”
Langdon tosses the ball out front, and she easily fields it, and everything else starts going blank because they’ve run this cone drill so many times that morning and she feels a little tipsy with how natural yet out-of-control it is to just let her body take over. A little dangerous. Thrilling, like she’s shoplifted a little bottle of nail polish from the drugstore shelf, successfully making it out of the pharmacy without anyone noticing, giddy off a singular secret of never getting caught.
Because he throws to her two more times in the route and she fields them inside the glove that he gave her and when the thump of a fair catch connects with the steerhide, she’s throwing the ball as hard as she can back to him and watching as it travels all the way to his own glove.
Everything ends. The drill is over.
Suddenly—Langdon easily runs over to her frozen form with an excited smile on his face. “God, that was amazing. You did all of that in just an hour's worth of practice. Absolutely incredible, Champ.”
And the whirlpool, steadily circling around the whole drill…the drain plug is finally pulled, and everything comes rapidly crashing to the ground.
How tired she is, how hard she’s really pushed through, how sweaty she is, how desperate she became for Langdon’s approval because sheneededitsheneededit more than anything, the fact she didn’t eat breakfast this morning because she couldn’t be late to the field and she made sure Becca was ready to be dropped off at Hickorytree. It’s Tie-Dye Tuesday, and Becca wanted to dye her new White Whale tote bag and—
“Mel?”
“I--I…think I need to sit down for a second.”
She lowers herself into the grass, needing the centering steadiness of the Pennsylvanian dirt to fully regain her breathing. In hindsight, it’s such a feeble attempt to stop the shaking in her legs and the wooziness of her brain.
“Oh, fuck…Mel, I—hold on. I’ll be right back, don’t worry. Fuck.”
Sometime between standing and falling, his glove slipped off her hand, flopping down at her feet. That should count for something, right? He wouldn’t have given it to her if it didn’t. Driven all the way out to Three Rivers just to coach her? He’s just being nice to you. Don’t get your hopes up. He doesn’t have a crush on you. He’s married and will always be married. Stop being delusional. She’s not crying at least, but her heart is beating out of her chest and she just wants Langdon to come back soon because she doesn’t think she could handle him leaving her again. Ever.
There’s movement in her periphery; Mel hears the solid thump of his ballbag next to her. The rapid unzipping and rezipping of a plethora of main compartments, side compartment, and hidden pockets.
His water bottle is forcibly shoved in her direction. One of those foamy, non-insolated types that looks like it's seen better days—most of the brand lettering and bright green colors worn off. The water inside is lukewarm. Teeth marks dent into the mouth piece, rough and chewed from what Mel thinks is repeated biting. She stops herself from embarrassingly moaning out in relief as she sucks at the destroyed nozzle.
“Drink, now,” and gosh, Langdon—he hasn’t used that voice with her since their first shift together, where he lightly ordered her to take a break after that nasty fight bite. The realization just makes her more anxious and hot. Water dribbles down from the corners of her mouth as she gulps every last drop down, just like he told her too.
“Good, Mel. Take it all. It’ll help, I promise.” Gone is the brief flicker of a command, now soft against the light summer breeze. She doesn’t know which one she likes more–she wants to learn them all.
“I’m so sorry. Fuck, I should’ve never let it get to that point, pushing you so hard and fast like that—”
She pops the water bottle from her mouth, uncaring if her chin and chest are damp or if her face’s red or if her hair’s come completely undone from her ponytail.
“Not your fault. I…I liked it. I needed to run those reps again, I promise. Felt so’good.”
The words slur together—still a little disoriented and that must concern Langdon—prompting a partially unwrapped chewy granola bar to be suddenly shoved into her hand in an unspoken offering.
“Eat. Don’t worry, it's safe, Mel.”
Marshmallow and peanut butter, her favorite. A reminder of the fluffer-butter sandwiches her mom packed in her lunches growing up—none of the ingredients needed to be refrigerated, could easily be put together on top of the small corner table in their motel room and wrapped in plastic to stay cool. The corners were always cut off, like a makeshift smuckers sandwich, but she always thought Kelly King’s tasted better. Mel hadn’t had one since Becca and her summer trip to the waterpark.
They both sit in silence as she chews the granola bar; after the first bite, she breaks the rest into small crumbly pieces, uncaring if the sticky marshmallow makes her fingers tacky. She likes the way the side of her thigh brushes up against his—not overwhelmed by a complete touch by just enough that she’s aware that he’s there and not leaving her to work through this alone.
“We can’t let it go that far again, okay? You and I need to figure out our limits. I don’t ever want to push you to a place you can’t come back from.”
All Mel can do is nod. Her mind’s spent and body languid. From where they are, she can see the wide expanse of sky seemingly going on forever over the outfield fences. The athletic strap holding her glasses to her face is nice against her scalp, like it’s Langdon’s hand cradling her head, keeping her upright.
She turns and takes in the full picture of him. The slight frown lines at his mouth, his forehead wrinkles, the way he leans forward with his elbows on his knees as if stability is the only thing holding him together.
“You won’t,” she reassures. “I trust you.”
Langdon keeps his distance when he walks her out to his car, vehemently declining her offer to help pick up the reminders of their drill practice.
“Please don’t get up. I’ll be quick.”
So she just watches him: carefully, going step by step as efficiently as he possibly can. First with the discs and then with the balls that remain in the field. He comes back over to gather up her granola wrapper trash, sticking it in the side backpack pocket to dispose of later. There’s a calm pacing inherent in his actions, like one of those ASMR carpet cleaning videos, where she’d watch a person shampoo and powerwash rugs over and over, until it looked as good as new. That’s how she feels, watching Langdon clear the field, somehow content in the monotony and distance. Far yet close. Intimate, yet separate. Just another contradiction.
It doesn’t surprise her when he asks to drive her home; he doesn’t seem shocked when she turns him down.
She can’t read what emotion falls across his face, but it’s similar enough to last July, when Robby would stonewall him out of any critical case, regulating him to chairs. “You haven’t earned that trust yet,” Robby said as he flinched away from Langdon’s stuttered rebuttal and strode forth into the ambulance bay.
The look—a collage of understanding, resentment, and self-flagellation that manifests in rigid stillness, arms out to his side, and a blankness across his face, like he was anticipating the hit, so it didn’t stun and completely knock him over when the punch landed.
🏟️✨⚾️
The Psychiatry department’s jerseys are the same muted, primary-colored tones of the Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions diagnostic tool they always carried with them into their ED patient consults. Mel knew the center, six piece circle by heart—Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sad, Happy, Surprise—from Becca’s childhood trips to sensory integration therapy and then Mel’s own one-off session at the UNLV Student Mental Health Services after her mom died. She remembered asking if she could pick Fear, Anger, and Sad, and then followed her eyes around the wheel to land on a pseudo, three-word description of what she felt—Overwhelmed, Insecure, and Powerless. Pale purple, orange, and turquoise.
“You okay?” The fine hairs at Samira’s temple curl in the heat, but her smile is jubilant and wide, just coming off a second base hit in the top of the third. Mel doesn’t really know how to answer that, because it’s the top of the ninth, Langdon’s up at bat, game four of the season, and she still hasn’t made it to first base.
During work, she asked Samira in the breakroom how she improved so quickly, thinking back to tryouts, when she was probably just as bad as Mel. Samira just smiled and shook her head as she picked out all of the M&Ms from her trail mix to eat one by one. “Remember when I worked that double earlier this month? It was right before the first game and I was so frustrated with myself, so I started rambling to Abbot about how it felt like there were too many things I needed to fix but didn’t know exactly what and he offered to help me out. He doesn’t play, but he tracks everyone’s stats during the game.” She popped a green M&M into her mouth, moved on from her initial sorting by type onto color variables.
“Instead of focusing on everything I’m doing, he gives me data for one specific thing during the game–my on base percentage, my slugging, the amount of errors made in game–and I make adjustments to try and improve on it. It helps me learn my strengths, building my confidence to acknowledge and figure out my weaknesses.” She eats red, then blue, brown, and yellow. “You’ll find your strength, Mel. Just give it time.”
She loves watching Langdon hit. He's completely in control, focus so narrowed in on the baseball that she feels like she shouldn’t be intruding, breaking his intense concentration. After multiple batting practices, she’s able to key in on the exact intent behind each of his combined movements. His bent knees, his eyes never leaving the ball. The way he leans his body all the way back to watch his homerun clear the fences. So, Mel knows when something is up: when he doesn’t sit as low towards the ground, or swing towards the parking lot.
Instead he gets a clean hit between second and third—the same exact spot she hit during their first practice together—and easily runs out to first base before the baseplayer makes the catch. He almost never makes single hits, always hits a clear double to second at the least, and she watches in confusion as he calls the umpire over to home, gesturing smoothly with his hands, and then jogs off from first base into the dugout.
“Wow, he’s really doing it, huh?” Dana loudly whispers to Robby, bumping him in the shoulder to get his attention. “Never thought I would see the day where he willingly takes himself out of the game.”
Robby merely cracks a lopsided smile. “Old dog, new tricks, etc.”
“Mel,” Langdon shouts, calling her forward. “Grab your helmet. You’re on first base now, Pinch Runner,” he says and she perks up.
At the start of the season, Mel didn’t know why she was listed as Pinch Runner in the line-up, especially since technically, according to Major League Baseball rule 5.10 (e), players who were already listed as a part of the batting order were not allowed to be substituted in to run the bases for the original batter. Additionally, this would require her to remain switched until the end of the game, meaning if she went in for Langdon, then she would be playing second-base and Donnie (presumably, since he was the only player who didn’t have a defensive position) would come in at the bottom of the ninth to cover center field.
She hadn’t mentioned it then, thinking it was merely an error on Langdon’s part, until right now: “Isn’t this against the rules?”
“Well, yes, but in this case no, because summer league caps the amount of people you have on the team, so they can’t really implement every rule from the majors. Pinch hitters can’t play defense and be in the batting order, but pinch runners can.” He takes his helmet off, hair slightly matted and damp. “Don’t ask me to make sense of it, Champ. I didn’t write the rule book. Before my time.” He taps the top of her helmet, just like he did with Dana against Pediatrics. “Get out there and watch for my signal. You got this Mel, don’t forget that.”
She can feel his eyes rest right at the base of her spine like a steady guiding hand as she makes her way to first base.
Mel knows her strong points: she’s a great sister and doctor, even though both had taken an active commitment to get right and establish a stable foundation to build on. She’s skilled at figuring out connections between seemingly unrelated items. Observations. Taking note of mannerisms and behaviors to mirror back, match a person’s energy to make them stay a little bit longer with her. She’s apt at noticing things others wouldn’t—is the patient uncomfortable, irritated, wanting the lights off, thirsty? Cold? In need of extra reassurance that everything is going to be okay because Yikes, hospitals are scary, huh?
Mel’s always been good at code, too. In undergrad, she regularly volunteered her time leading Girls Who Code workshops at a 6th grade center in Summerlin—connected by Ms. Vasquez—teaching pre-teens all about algorithms and sequences and variables and functions inside the school’s library. At first, it was simply a requirement to check off for her medical school applications, finding a site-placement that fit her work and family schedule. But watching as her students eagerly huddled around their laptops, puzzling through Scratch coding games, excitedly waving her over when they figured out a bug or troubleshooted a problem by themselves…it all felt a little bit like looking into a mirror. She dropped her volunteer hours when her mom died. It was one of the things she missed the most.
She knows HTML, CSS, Java, Python. Baseball signs are just a natural extension of that. Everything has rules, order, a code to figure out. Just like the pattern instructions to Becca’s crochet projects that informed her R1 DC; R2 HDC Ch1 for 56 rows; her mental data on what hairstyle or shirt color or pair of earrings garnered the most attention from Langdon; her mom, tracking in a spiral bound notebook how much money she made each night in direct correlation with what specific song she danced to, knowing what her high earning routines were.
The pitcher-catcher sign system—something she noticed from her first game, yet didn’t really have the vocabulary to describe what she was seeing—is a human-operated binary coding system consisting of combinations of one, two, and three finger flashes, an open palm or a closed fist. Mel memorized a couple through observing Mateo and Cassie practicing during pregame warm-ups; crouching in her catcher’s stance, Cassie would show a closed fist followed by a lightning quick flash of two ones between her legs. Fastball. If she tacked on a quick three to the end of the combination—closed fist, one, one, three—it communicated to Mateo that he should throw that fastball inside of the plate.
“There are four main pitches that Mateo usually throws—a fastball, curveball, slider, or change-up. If there is a batter on base, we’ll throw in an indicator. That’s like an additional motion—for me, I’ll yank on my face guard—that lets Mateo know I’m getting ready to flash a sign. If I don’t do that, every sign I do show, even if it’s five or six different numbers or hand signals in a row, is irrelevant. White noise. It helps to throw the other team off their game. They think he’ll throw a slider and then freak them out when he throws a change-up, that type of thing. Super fun.”
Cassie always did a good job of hiding her signs from the other team while signaling to Mateo. Flashing them so discreetly, obscured by her catchers mitt. The catcher for Psychiatry, however, fails to really hide what they’re doing—even from her limited vantage point, standing on first base and squinting against the sun, Mel can spot it. The sequence is much longer than she’s ever seen and she watches the catcher slash his fingers through the dirt, kicking up a small cloud of dust into the air.
One One Two Three Two.
When Psychiatry’s pitcher flashes the ball outwards, shaking it from side to side. Cutter. Up and down? Sinker. Both are fastball variations. Both are also the same signs that Mateo would signal to Cassie. Mel is well practiced in reading those.
Third-base coaches have indicators too: Neurology’s captain tugged on her ear; Radiology’s tapped the brim of their cap twice. Quick and efficient. For Langdon, he purposely touches the hodge-podge beaded bracelet lovingly made by his eldest then his right elbow. So subtle, anyone would think he’s fidgeting, shaking it off. Instead, it’s intentional. When her teammates look towards third-base and he gives his signal, it’s like they’re a ship docking on shore and Langdon’s the beaming lighthouse guiding them to port. Some team members listened to him, like Dana and Cassie. Others, re: Trinity, did not. She stole bases with reckless abandon, mostly first to second, completely ignoring Langdon’s calls while making her own, which worked about half the time. The other saw her silently cursing herself as she walked back to the bench, ego bruised, which always caused her to bite back just a little harder at Langdon’s jabs:
“See Santos, everyone wants to pretend they’re just like Elly De La Cruz until they actually have to make the play.”
“Oh you're one to talk, washed up draft bust.”
Robby and Dennis didn’t read Langdon’s signs either, but he never indicated to them he wanted them to steal.
But with her? Their signals? Even from their first day working together, she knew they were beyond that. She didn’t need any body language indicators or signs or code to figure out what he wants her to do, to make him proud. It feels right to play by the rules of his game.
All Mel needs is a simple nod.
Steal.
She’s off running like she’s pushed straight into a swimming pool’s deep end, sprinting forward as fast as she can to second base, focusing on the straight, invisible basepath in front of her. All the residual noise–the crowd, the flock of city birds circling overhead, the gaggle of children dangling from monkey bars and swinging from the playground a block outside the field–is drowned out except for her heart beat pounding in her ears as every resounding thump brings her closer to her target, successfully completing the objective at hand and she’s so close, too close, almost there…
When Mel’s officially called Safe! it’s like her ears finally pop back to life, the world suddenly feeling a little too loud with the cheers from the spectator stands. She makes sure to memorize this moment as best she can—the soft wind on her face, the cloudy sky that’s intensifying the heat into a humid pressure cooker, the frustrated look painted across the pitcher’s face when he realizes that she’s duped him, the way the applause is the full circle moment to 7th grade volleyball try-outs, where she’s finally the special player on the team—for when she picks up Becca for Lego Club, retelling it to her like a scene in an underdog sports movie. She dusts the infield dirt off her legs, knowing that she’s going to have stains to wash out when she gets home, but it’s simply proof of her hard work; that her private training with Langdon is paying off.
It’s not lost on her that amongst the roar of the crowd, she heard him screaming and cheering the loudest. She can’t look over to him directly, not yet, because if she does she’ll lose all of her resolve and forward momentum before she makes it over to third base. Mel still keeps a look out from the corner of her eye, but Langdon’s still. He never calls her directly over to steal, so they let Dennis keep batting, waiting to see how he does, and when he hits a clean line drive deep into right field with a resounding crack of his bat, she quickly runs over to third base to Langdon, finally getting to take him all in.
His hair is still a little damp from his batting helmet, the sweaty edges sticking out from underneath his baseball cap. The top two buttons of his jersey are undone, revealing the smallest amount of chest hair and a silver chain that makes chills spread all through her body, even in the muggy heat. She doesn’t know why he never wears shorts, even though most of the team has chosen to—even Donnie and Mateo, who also wore baseball pants to start the season. There’s a dirt stain over his right thigh; a grass stain on right underneath his belt on his left hip. With her fully facing home plate, Langdon leans into her right ride, whispering a secret that only she can hear.
“Okay, Champ, how would you like to steal home? Can you do that for me?”
Mel hopes he knows how handsome he looks when his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles.
“Yes.” Because what else is she supposed to say?
She loves that he has a special name, just for her. She’d been given nicknames before. When she was younger, Becca would call her “Melly Bear,” “Melly Belly,” “Melly Bean,” all in equal measures. Trinity would always try different combinations of her name like it was a running comedic bit: “Melatonin”; “Melter Skelter”; “Mel-ky Way,” for example. One time, Trinity even proclaimed “Mel is Real” across the ED after an emergency c-section, referencing a hyper specific Evangelical billboard located on the highway between Indiana and Illinois that Mel looked up later to fully understand. Sorry you don’t pick up on regional Midwest humor…Maybe you need to hang out with Dennis more.
All of the monikers are fun and playful. Mel didn’t put much weight behind them, except she likes that she meant something special to both of them to exist in the first place. But with Langdon…when he calls her Champ…it feels personal, like she’s being seen for the first time, getting to share this secret together. A name he never calls her around anyone else, just like their own form of indicators and signs. Champ’s a placeholder for more—a cipher, a symbol, a promise like the captain of the team giving her a letterman jacket.
She wants to give him something back for all the time he’s taken with her: for booking the batting cages, giving her his glove, showing up in the early morning to practice with her. Mel starts to stand on her tip-toes, inching just the slightest into the air, anticipating the moment she can move off the bag, fully pushing forward.
Cassie always takes her time at the plate between pitches, backing away and doing a couple practice swings into the air before returning to her batter’s position. It flusters both the pitcher and the catcher every time, making them always miss signals or disconnect, forcing errors to happen. That’s why he’s holding her back, waiting for the right moment, and Mel sees the catcher obviously throw down two ones without obscuring his signs, so lets out an excited squeal that she immediately tampers down out of built-in habit. Which, she knows she should stop doing, because quieting herself just makes her more anxious. It’s exhausting to hide her emotions all the time.
“Fastball,” she mumbles, then tacks on “outside,” remembering the closed fist tacked onto the end.
“What the Hell, Champ. Are you stealing signs now?” When she gazes up at him, rather than accuse her of trying to cheat at the game, he regards her with a crooked smile, half of his teeth showing, and she can see the slightest chip in his right front tooth like something almost knocked it out and the thin white scar hidden in his thick eyebrows and she wants him to tell her the stories behind them all.
“It’s not against the rules to pay attention.”
“And it’s not cheating if you’re smart about it,” he quips. Absolutely refusing to never take his eyes off her as she readies herself for what is about to happen. “If he fucks up the next pitch…don’t think about it, just run. You’re smart. You know what you’re doing—you got this.” She didn’t know if she completely believed in his sentiment, but she has a strong belief in him, so that’s enough.
Cassie’s at-bat edging frazzles both Psychiatry’s pitcher and catcher. I thought they would be used to mind games, she’ll say with a shrug at work on Monday with a satisfied smirk on her face before checking the diagnostic results on a blood panel.
The outside fast ball is thrown and the pitch wobbles in mid-air, dinging off from the inside of the catcher’s mitt. Rolling away from home plate and toward the Psychiatry dugout. Mel does what she’s told and runs as fast as she can. She thinks, in her singular experience thus far, that there’s a simplicity to pinch running…she doesn’t have to worry about all the different parts of her body, or how her hands are positioned on the bat, or if her glove is a little too big for her hand to really make effective fielding plays. All that’s needed is the run, the awareness, and a slide, which she starts to do because while terrible at concealing their signs, Psych’s catcher is fast and the pitchers move off the mound to cover home. At the last second—when she thinks she’s almost touching home plate, but the ball coasts in the air and she needs to beat it if she wants to extend the score for up one to up two—Mel decides to slide, feet first, dropping down to her hip to generate the most momentum into the bag. Even if she can physically feel the slight skid burn against her thigh, where her shorts ride up. The pitcher catches the throw yet it’s okay. She beat them on the slide, you know it, and can almost feel the sole of her shoe make contact with home plate. All the pain will be worth it when she’s…
You’re out! The umpire shouts, pumping his fist back in a reverse punch, and Mel finally registers the pitcher’s glove tagging her out at her calf, inches away from making the play. So close.
“So sorry about that,” the pitcher,#25, says. Shaggy blond hair that curls around his shoulders in a makeshift mullet, complete with a mustache. Mel’s never seen him around the emergency department, so he must be one of the departmental psychiatrists that stays on the floor. He’s not Mel’s type—although he does look like one of baseball players from the 1970s, very much could be an extra in Bad News Bears or a boyfriend at a Boy Genius concert—apologizes, offering his hand to lift her off from the dirt. “You really made me work for that one.”
When she makes it to her feet, #25 looks at the angry red mark on her thigh, already throbbing with a little bit of blood beading where the skin peels, and winces in sympathy.
“Damn, that sucks. If you need a first aid kit, we have one in the dugout, it’s not much, but if you want…”
“Champ,” Langdon yells, halfway between third base and home. He’s looking between her and #25 intensely, nose scrunched against his face like he smells something bad which causes Mel to subtly sniff into the air—she doesn’t catch anything different, just the general scent of her sunscreen, baseball gloves, sweat, and the freshly cut outfield grass.
“Thanks, but Dr. Langdon, our coach, has his own bag of supplies. I appreciate the offer though!” Because it’s nice and sportsman-like. “Interdepartmental solidarity in action!” She gives a shy, impartial wave back and starts to jog her way over to switch out her helmet for her ball cap and glove to finish out the bottom-of-the-ninth playing second base when Langdon tugs on her elbow. The touch is light, testing, but she doesn’t flinch away because why would she? It’s him. She knows him; she wants him to touch her everywhere; she understands she doesn’t have the right to ask him for that.
“Come on. I’ll help get you cleaned up.”
“What? Why? I still have to play second base to finish out the game.”
“Mel, you’re bleeding.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Okay, well, Rule #37 in the PTMC Summer League Rule Book states that if there are not enough players to cover the field, the team at fault forfeits. I can put a quick bandage on it for the next fifteen minutes. Mateo’s pitching a near perfect game and my inability to score should not be the reason that goes to waste.” Or the team breaks its win streak. From his initial call-out email—we WILL be making the finals—his unwavering faith in the skill and talent of the team set everyone else up with expectations for the season. Mel didn’t want to be the reason why they didn’t make those goals. “I can just treat it myself at home anyways.”
“What time do you pick up Becca from Lego Club?” He rolls his jaw in annoyance and Mel can’t help but trace the way his facial muscle flexes under his skin.
“7 pm. She stays for dinner, it gives her more time to work on her builds.”
“Sandwich Saturday.”
“You remember?”
“Give me ten minutes after the game, that’s all I’m asking for. I’ll get you patched up in the locker room and you can go home. I…I need to do this, Mel. It was my call for you to steal home. I can’t…Please…”
The plea makes her sit in the silence between his ask and her answer, because she doesn’t want to rush into her response, matching his same level of desperation. Because it’s too much, too fast, and she doesn’t even know if she’s allowed to want this yet. How easy, she thinks, would it be for her to decline. Say no, just like in the parking lot after the cone drills. She could simply walk away, drive back to her apartment alone, sterilize and bandage and bury herself under her comforter until the sun dips into golden hour, signaling that it was time to make the drive over to Hickorytree. But watching Langdon nervously play with the strung-together plastic beads at his wrist like it’s the only thing keeping him present, she knows exactly what her answer will always be.
“Okay.” Nodding, Mel can see the precise moment when Langdon’s entire body unlocks—like the reverberating ripples of a stone tossed into smooth water—all the way from his crown to his neck to the set of his shoulders to the stillness of his fingers. “Let’s finish the game first.”
⚾️⚾️⚾️
In elementary school, Mel was a permanent fixture in the nurse’s office—always a little too clumsy and in her head, running into the sharp edges of classroom desks or a minor allergic reaction to a cafeteria-traded juice box (she should have just stuck with her Cheez-Its) or tumbling face first from the slide into the playground mulch. That one was a doozy: a piercing cut from a small, jagged woodchip shallowly impaled at her hairline. Or, in 4th grade, when she quickly spun a made-up tale to Mrs. Leavitt, explaining away why the knuckles on her right hand were swollen (and why a 5th grader came in with a corresponding mark on his cheek or the parent teacher write-up describing a gym class altercation and comments were made to and regarding Mel’s twin sister. It didn’t end up mattering when Kelly King came to pick her daughters up, listening as her youngest told her the truth behind her hurt hand and both King girls were treated to ice cream before heading home. “You did the right thing, honey, standing up for Becca like that. I’m so proud of you”). More often than not, she would spend more time than she actually needed with Mrs. Leavitt, because while the other students were allowed one Hershey kiss from the candy box, she got to have as many Hershey kisses as she wanted.
“Climb up on the counter,” Langdon lightly orders inside the locker room at Three Rivers, pulling his own first aid kit out of his backpack, the supplies neatly packed and organized in a black hardshell case. They’d won the game 1-0, with Mateo throwing three strike-outs back-to-back to end the game while Mel stood at second base trying to not look at Langdon sitting out on the dugout bench.
Her legs dangle off the pale pink laminate countertop as she tilts her weight to the side, making sure her injuries are still elevated.
“Do I need to take off my shorts?” Her stealing home attempt still burned up her thigh, but it isn’t until she’s looking in the mirror she notices the residual skid where her shorts rode up, right where her hip meets her ass.
Langdon shrugs, pulling on a pair of packaged blue latex gloves from his kit. “It would help and keep your clothes clean, but you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
The secret positive of their job is Mel’s ability to view bodies—of others and herself—in a state of neutrality. Everyone’s made of flesh and bone and interconnected systems. Almost every day, one of her patients clams up, gets self-conscious about not shaving their legs or forgetting to brush their teeth that morning or about a weird birthmark or mole or embarrassing tattoo they got their freshman year in PCB that they always forgot about, but Mel never notices. None of those things matter when making an accurate diagnosis and giving compassionate treatment. If they were, she reckons she probably wouldn't be the best doctor to begin with. So, when she slides off her shorts, it’s strictly professional. One of thousands of bodies Langdon’s seen. It also doesn’t negate how pride swells when she remembers how she put on her comfortable, cute boyshorts—pale purple with specklings of white and grey daisies across the cotton—that morning out of pure practicality. They aren’t as flashy or seductive like her fancier underwear; she saves those pairs specifically for green t-shirt and braid days at work.
Rucking up the side of her boyshorts to the top of the waistband, Mel positions herself on the pale pink laminate countertop, legs dangling off the edge.
“Do all The Pitt rookies get individual athletic training appointments?” she casually asks, keeping her eyeline directed at the cinder block wall in front of her. Decidedly not toward the sounds of him rustling through his first aid kit or the other way, meeting her own reflection through the long horizontal mirror, counting out the dried discolored speckles along the edges.
“Nope. Coach Langdon doesn’t make house calls unless it’s for his star player.”
Her mouth twists up at that in confusion, because if you compare all of their stats together—from batting average to RBIs to OBPs to amount of stolen bases—there’s only one person he could be talking about analytically. Becca does the math every other game she attends; her analytics never lie.
“Dennis?”
“What? No. Absolutely not. What the hell, Mel?” Langdon reaches up with the intent of pinching the bridge of his nose before remembering his recently gloved hands, needing to keep sterile contact. “I can guarantee you, Whitaker is the last person I’m thinking about right now.” He drags over one of the benches to the foot of the counter to act as a makeshift stool to treat her injury.
The first step is a saline solution: carefully used to irrigate the wound over the sink. He only examines her leg with gentle and strategic maneuvers of his gloved hands, cleaning away any dirt or tiny rock particles in her cut. When everything is clear, he squeezes out a healthy dob of Polysporin onto the affected skin. Spreads it into a singular, thin layer with his pointer finger; incredibly mindful of the hitches in Mel’s breathing pattern or when she hisses at the sting, always pausing if she needs a short break. After, he unwraps a surgical pad, placing it over. Securing it in place with paper tape.
“I don’t want any adhesive sticking to your skin,” he tells her as if she’s his actual patient, pretending she’s not done this same exact wound care hundreds of times.
“I’ll be sure to give you a ten out of ten on your patient satisfaction survey.”
“First time for everything.” He shakes his head, still staring at her exposed hip. “All good, Champ.” Langdon stands up from the bench, taking his ointment-sticky gloves off, disposing them in the trash as she hops down. Going to grab her shorts from the end of the counter, she stops short. He gets to them first, sits back down on the bench, and leans over to stretch out the waistband—wide enough for her feet to step through the leg holes—right at her calves. She doesn’t ask if she can use him to steady herself, just goes ahead and places her hands on his shoulders like they’re about ready to slow dance. His skin’s hot through his #18 jersey—a much better number than #25. Mel prefers evens to odds; she likes when things come in pairs.
He pulls her bottoms past her knees, skating up her thighs and the new bandage and over her ass until the waistband is just underneath her bellybutton. When Langdon lets go, the elastic snaps against skin. Her shorts back in place. She imagines that somewhere in a different timeline, he’d pull up her jersey, place a kiss against her stomach or press his face between her ribs.
“You’re a good doctor.”
“So are you. Unlike you, I was never the best student though.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Had a permanent seat in my grade school principal’s office, was called in for everything from disrupting class to not sitting still. The school counselor told my parents I needed guidance with handling my self-control. Okay grades, C’s get degrees and all that. The only thing that made sense to my brain was baseball.”
“How old were you when you started playing?”
“Six, but within two weeks of little league, the league coaches moved me to the 9U team. The next year, I was with the 11-year-olds…I wanted so badly to get drafted out of high school, start early, but my ma insisted I couldn’t leave a full-ride scholarship to UTA on the table, even if I did a bullshit sports medicine major. Just go pro, I thought. Be done with it.”
He’s staring down at her sneakers, knee bouncing as he talks. Always moving. “When I fully left the league, I was so dumb. I truly thought, how hard could the whole medical school thing be? I signed up to take the first test I could. You know how the MCAT limits you to taking it three times per year? Found out most schools won’t even look at your application if you’re not near-perfect on the first try after I’d maxed out my luck.” Unprompted, he rattles off his scores as instinctively as if they’re the digits of his phone number: “487. 486. When I got the 504…felt like I won a gold medal.”
“MCAT scores don’t really have a correlation to if you're a good doctor or not, you know. There’s great doctors with high scores, sure, but also bad ones. Same with lower scores. It’s only one metric. You made it through into medical school and matched with PTM—” but he cuts her off with a shake of his head and she stops talking.
“I SOAP’d, Mel. Thought I would get to tell my pregnant wife that her husband wasn’t a giant fuck up after all on the Monday of Match Week, when that first email came through. Could finally see the relieved look on her face that we were going somewhere, whether it was back to the DFW Metroplex or Nashville like she wanted. Instead, it said I was unmatched. I never knew how much it sucked to be cut from a roster before. I didn't eat for days when I started the SOAP process, so out of it I just picked random programs off the unfilled positions list to send my application materials off too. I stayed inside our apartment in the same clothes from when I opened that email, just haphazardly throwing on a blazer for Zoom interviews. Got an offer during round 2, wasn’t even a first choice candidate with this teaching hospital, a tier-1 trauma medical center in Pittsburgh. Bet you matched with your #1 easy, huh?”
All she can do is shyly nod. She didn’t go to the official Friday UNLV Match Day event either, content that she matched somewhere on her ranked list of Nevada programs. Her and Becca spent the morning working a 1,500 piece puzzle of New York City at Christmas time (just like Elf) while they waited on her program director to call with her official residency location. Mel doesn’t want to tell Langdon that one of her proudest moments was hearing Becca’s excited squeals when she hung up the phone. “Now we have to finish the puzzle and frame it,” she’d said. “For our new place in Reno!”
Langdon gets up from the bench. She can tell he’s full of energy, needs an outlet as he wades into all of this, so she watches as he starts to put all of his first aid kit supplies methodically back into his case, akin to the discs in the outfield.
“Everything I’ve ever achieved in my professional life comes back to sports, Mel. The CEO of Langsworth…not only is he on the board of Penn State Health, but his company is an official sponsor of SportsNet Pittsburgh. That helped the medical school admissions counselors overlook some things. With PTMC, I thought I got in based on my own merit, even if by rejection, just to find out that one of the Pirates board of trustees members was golf buddies with a healthcare executive who’s never set foot in the hospital. I always thought it was weird I didn’t even have to interview with PTMC. All of them…I think that’s all they see when they look at me. Some personified, ESPN 30-for-30 special. From Infield to ED, like a giant novelty.”
Mel doesn’t say anything until Langdon finishes putting everything back into the first aid kit and they’re walking shoulder to shoulder out of the locker room and into the parking lot towards their cars. She should just bid him farewell and wish him a safe drive back downtown. But she fidgets with her hands, twisting them around and around with the urge to say something, even if this isn’t the right time or may not be the perfect thing to say, but she wants him to know.
“The first time I took the MCAT, I got a 492. It was the year after my mom passed away, when I just felt like I was spinning out 24/7. I signed up for a couple of practice courses before she got sick, but nothing really stuck. How could it, y’know? Back then, I could barely keep myself upright. When my test results came back, I think I cried for three days straight, couldn’t keep anything down…started researching phlebotomist and biology teacher training programs—not that there’s anything wrong with either of those professions—but I knew I wanted to be a doctor.”
When she met with PTMC’s talent recruiter after one month of working her temporary job at the Pittsburgh VA, the woman asked her why she chose a career in medicine. The answer, unlike all the interviews at malls and casinos, came straight from the heart: she wanted to be the doctor, just like Mrs. Leavitt’s, who always gave the hurt kids two pieces of candy instead of one; or her mom’s endocrinologist, who denoted in her chart that Kelly King loved blankets straight from the warmer cabinet, so she would never be cold; now, in the present, she adds Dr. Frank Langdon to that list, who got down on the floor with her in the staff breakroom to tell her that the emergency room needed sensitive people like her.
“Even with the Fee Assistance Program, I only had enough money to take the MCAT once, but—Becca and I had this thing we used to do as kids, where we would collect the spare change and dropped dollars found around the places we lived in Nevada. I didn’t know she was still doing it, saving up for something, until she brought out a paper envelope full of cash.” When they counted it out together, it totaled $193. All in ones, fives, tens, and twenties. “After the test, we had $53 dollars to spare from Becca’s fund. You said you were only a doctor because of baseball? Well, I’m only a doctor because of scavenging in motel parking lots.”
“Mel.” And when he says her name, it’s as if he’s calling her honey or baby or sweetheart.
“I took it again. The score was passable enough for admission to UNLV’s School of Medicine. Now, I’m here.”
She turns toward her hatchback, unlocking it to stare at Becca’s designed sticker on the glass, and maybe Langdon’s eyes lock on the back of her jersey, with her chosen number on the back. Maybe they’re on the back of her head or on the wispy clouds or on the narrow road beyond the lot. Mel doesn’t look back at him until she’s climbing into the driver’s seat, leaning halfway outside her car.
“504. When I got my test score, it felt like I hit the jackpot.”
He’s still standing by his car when Mel turns out of Three Rivers and heads home.
🏟️✨⚾️
the pitt gc (2026)
Mateo Diaz hey everyone–a bunch of us who were brave enough to work the 4th of july hell shift are going out to vipers on e. carson tonight. free cherry and blue raspberry jello shots every hour until 2 am hmu if you need a ride there
🏟️✨⚾️
It’s only going to be a celebratory tequila shot. One Trinity-purchased round in celebration of surviving the 12-hour torture nexus known as July Fourth weekend. A quick offer to go across town to a dive right off Carson, with technicolor Christmas lights strung across the bar all year long and $3 domestic drafts on Saturdays. A change from her work clothes into a tank top and an old pair of jeans with a fraying back pocket and a ripped hole at the knee. Lime wedges and salt on the house. Thirty minutes and a cramped car ride later, they–Samira, Trinity, Dennis, Mateo, her, Donnie, a finally of legal age to drink Javadi–all huddle around their makeshift semi-circle in front of the bar, counting down from five before tossing back the shot glass, downing Patron, and Mel tries not to take it personally when everyone is in shock she doesn’t wince.
Tequila’s one of the few alcohols she actually enjoys, alongside dessert liquors like Baileys and Kahlua. Wine makes her sleepy. Beer tastes too much like a soggy piece of bread for her mind to completely distinguish between the two. She didn’t drink enough anyways to develop a tolerance to it. If Mel’s options are choosing between purchasing alcohol from her neighborhood Fine Wine & Good Spirits or renting a movie that both Becca and her wanted to see in theaters, but never made the time to actually go—i.e: every new movie—then she would always choose the latter.
But, it never truly stops after only one shot, because Donnie then opens a tab for another round of Lemon Drops, and Dennis—hating to be in Trinity’s debt in any way—orders everyone Shamrock Shooters, which takes Mel two long sips to finish the whole thing. Javadi offers to go all-in on Jägerbombs and that’s when she starts to feel it, swaying a little like she’s riding The T through Downtown, not unyielding or nausea inducing, but a steady, forward velocity.
Tonight’s different, Mel thinks. Becca’s on a weekend-long nature experience trip in Allegheny National Forest, coinciding with The Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, and Mel spent her break time staring in wonder at snapped photos of Photinus carolinus mobbing above Tionesta Creek like the knock-off, Dollar General Lite Brite they fiddled with as kids. Next year, Becca typed out, you can come with us! She made a mental note to ask for the next Fourth of July off; she earned it.
Both Samira and Mateo jostle to pay for Mel’s next two Shamrock Shooters. Mateo, the first, because his mom raised him to never make a nice lady pay for anything if he had the money. Samira, the second, because she enjoys having friends for whom she can purchase drinks. It’s on me, she enthusiastically offers, and her smile’s so bright it could compete with any of the beer-branded neon signs mounting the walls. They take the shot together, looping and hooking their arms at the elbows, and Mel’s stomach feels heady when she lowers the empty glass. Her face must be red hot or she’s slurring her words or moving in a way that signals she’s close to turning from fun to not fun, because Samira’s unlocking her phone.
“You need us to call you an Uber?” she yells against the cacophony of bar noise, looking at stand-by times and prices for an UberX. “They’re supercharging pricing right now because it’s the weekend,” to which Trinity starts boo-ing in the background, “but we can have a ride here in five minutes for $30 before tip.”
“Thanks, but I can take the bus and then walk the rest of the way! My place isn’t that far…and it’s so, so nice out. Did you see how pretty the moon looks tonight? It’s way better than the strawberry moon last month. Becca and I bought a telescope off Facebook Marketplace to scope it out and everything just for it to rain the entire time. We ended up donating the whole thing to the Boys & Girls Club because I read the dimensions wrong on the listing and it’s too big to store under our couch and Becca thought having a telescope in our dining room was a total eyesore.” To accurately articulate her past-sadness, Mel pouts her lip, making Trinity bark out a laugh.
“Yeah, there’s no way you're taking yourself home.” Refreshing the Uber app, Samira sighs when the page updates with even higher estimated pricing, now $35 for a car to take Mel home.
“No, I’ll be fine!” Mel tries to demonstrate by hopping off the barstool at the group’s table, and walking in a pretty straight line (she veers a little over to the left, once, but she does that sober, so at least she’s remaining consistent!). “I can share my location with you and everything.”
“Is it a money thing? We can all split it if you want.” Trinity pauses for a second before another big laugh comes out, harmonizing perfectly with the Yacht Rock song blasting through the bar speakers.
“Are you laughing at me? Am I funny?”
The remnants of Irish whiskey and melon liqueur seep into her tastebuds; she doesn’t know if she wants another shot or if she needs to immediately wash her mouth out with soap.
“I would never laugh at you. I was just—Damn, didn’t think I’d ever say this—but I wish Langdon was here. He would—figuratively and maybe a little literally depending on the day—fight all of us to pay for your Uber Black or something stupid like that.”
Incredulously, she scrunches up her face at Trinity’s hypothesis. “No, he wouldn’t…He barely works with me during our shifts together, actively avoids me if we’re in the same room before this season, and has rejected my Venmo request several times over. When he does buy me things, it’s directly related to my sports performance and the team’s overall success. He’s only helping me with baseball because he’s nice and it gives him something to do for the summer.” She doesn’t add the additional tidbit about Langdon omitting her name from his wife during their phone call, because the memory pricks against Mel’s brain like a needle whenever she thinks about it.
“Mel, I consider myself one of your friends, so what I’m about to say comes from a place of love and care and community, but…are you being serious right now?”
“Uh. Yes?”
Why wouldn’t she be serious? She is certainly giving off serious vibes—her lips in a thin line and eyes narrow behind her glasses. Certainly, she could try furrowing her eyebrows together or evening out her tone even more. Maybe she should’ve brought her “librarian cardigan” from home, the same one she sometimes pulled on in the break room when the A/C blasted. Everyone, according to Dana, “dressed like they were in a community theatre production of Les Mis” with shawls and blanket scarves draped over shoulders for warmth, even in the height of summer. That would help them take her seriously.
Looking around the bar table at her coworkers, everyone’s expressions mirror Trinity’s perplexing and slightly shocked visage. The same looks that Mel’s seen hundreds of times before: when someone makes a joke, everyone else is in on the punchline, and she’s left out as the only person not laughing, feeling like the ultimate freak when she finally finds the courage to pipe up and ask, What’s so funny? I don’t get it?
“Langdon literally promised to buy you a $500 custom Rawlings glove if we won the season. I had to pay him back—with interest, mind you—after he covered the cost of a weighted baseball for pitching practice,” Mateo says, shaking his head as he downs a swig of Yuengling.
“Or,” Trinity starts. “After you placed the Blakemore tube on that guy bleeding out from his gastric varices? He would not shut up talking about it for a whole week. He even texted Garcia all the way out in New York City just to brag about you.”
“That’s a good one,” Javadi chimes in, talking a mile-per-minute. “My favorite is last month, when Kim brought in red velvet cupcakes for Whitaker's birthday and Langdon spent his thirty-minute lunch break biking over to Sal’s in Deutstown. He barely made it back in time with that vanilla cupcake because Red Dye 40 makes Mel break out in hives. I don’t want to make her feel left out if she doesn’t have something special.” Mel doesn’t miss the way Javadi comically drops her voice and attempts to smolder her gaze in a not-so-terrible-if-you’re-a-little-tipsy-after-a-stressful-shift Langdon impersonation.
Yet, she’s entirely confused because she never once told him about her food allergy. The only time it ever came up in a professional capacity is when she spent almost an hour patiently talking down a young father—who was convinced that the FDA was secretly poisoning his child’s food with additives and dyes and fluorides—with a combination of PubMed articles and personal anecdotes: “as someone with a Red Dye 40 allergy myself, the most likely explanation is genetics more than any environmental factors and my condition is well managed with over-the-counter antihistamines. Even with more serious variants, the accessibility of EpiPens and accurate food labeling have worked to prevent serious reactions.”
Langdon wasn’t even on shift that day.
Trinity scopes out her confused expression, investigating the same way she did during game night’s at her and Dennis’ Shadyside townhouse, when she tried to determine if Ms. Scarlet had committed the murder in the billiard's room with the candlestick.
“All I’m saying is if you were to call him right now and ask for a Uber, it wouldn’t even be a question if he said yes. Everyone is well aware you’re his favorite.”
Sober Mel would have just taken everything Santos said at face value, burying any residual feelings six feet under, because she knows her own personal data points. Every word out of her friends’ mouths starkly contradicts any observations of the past year. There is no way any of this is true. Sober Mel is acutely aware. But…Drunk Mel? Who maybe drank one too many free shots, who is slightly wobbly on her feet? Who, now, is empowered by every new sentence? Whose secret delusions are being fed to the point that she’s already taking out her phone from the backpocket of her jeans.
“Okay, let's test your theory, because there is no way at,” she looks down at her phone and 12:13 AM swirls into her vision, “this hour he’s still going to be up.”
It takes her much longer than she is comfortable with admitting to locate his saved contact in her phone and—before she loses her nerve completely—she taps the call icon.
Listens to the receiver ring, and ring, and ring, and ring…and then voicemail.
Hello. The person you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the ton—
“See! He didn’t even pick up the phone. You know, like a completely normal attending when a PGY-4 calls them late on a Saturday night.”
Samira takes such a long sip out of the vodka cranberry that Mel can hear the crackling air of nothingness when she reaches the bottom cluster of ice in her glass.
Trinity looks at her for a long time, eyes tracing her from across her face and down the bridge of her nose. “Whatever you say Mel. Your Uber will be here in three minutes, by the way. Don’t even think about sending me money. Your company is payment enough.”
⚾️⚾️⚾️
The passenger window is cold as she presses her cheek against the glass. She watches the crowded bars and row-houses of East Carson roll past, the car hitting every red light while she tries not to think about the word favorite until she’s safely inside her apartment and can send the customary “Made it home safe!” text to both Trinity and Samira.
She feels a bit like she’s in a music video soundtracked to the faint rhythms of 107.3 streaming through the driver’s stereo, making her body loose as her hands knead against her soft thighs, counting backwards, hoping that Becca is having fun inside Hickorytree’s rented cabin. That she and her bunkmates are staying up past her current bedtime, playing M.A.S.H inside her locked journal or challenging each other to chess. Mel didn’t even know how to categorize her night…that she had a good time? That she’d finally made enough progress in her work friendships that people bought her drinks? That her almost-boss apparently took notice of her in a way that was obvious to everyone else, even if she herself had never picked up on the signs?
She must really be feeling the residual effects of the alcohol, because she notices a light vibration against her thigh. Once, twice, and on the third, she looks down to where her phone is precariously perched halfway off the seat.
The name LANGDON beams up from her screen. Calling her back.
In her haste to actually answer her phone, it slides off the seat and lands with a thud somewhere on the dark floor. Chaotically, Mel wiggles herself around within her seatbelt, contorting her body to reach and search out the continuous ringing vibrations as if Langdon’s somewhere redialing her number. Over and over. So now she’s like Chuckles the River Dolphin of Pittsburgh legend, trying to find her phone in the dark via echolocation when her driver hits yet another stop. The red neon reflects into the car, bouncing off her lilac shatterproof case from Target like a laser. Still buzzing by the time she actually unlocks her screen.
“Hi?”
“Mel? Are you okay? I saw your missed call after I got out of the shower.”
Shower and Langdon cause an astral projection into her own apartment shower, imagining him caging his body around hers as she’s pressed hard against the tile wall. And she needs to stop these word association games, because now, figment-of-her-imagination Langdon’s lovingly ordering her to not move a muscle because Dadd—
“Mel? You still there?”
“Yep,” she squeaks. “It's hard to really go anywhere when you’re inside a moving vehicle.”
“Are you driving?” There’s an edge to his voice when he asks and Mel answers back quickly to soften his tone.
“I’m in an Uber. Trinity ordered it for me. We were out at Vipers, right off of Carson? I think…I’m not really the best with street names that aren’t in my neighborhood or around the med center.” She pauses for a second, her memory finally catching up to her mouth. “You know that though, because Mateo added you to the team’s group text? He sent out an invite right after today’s shift. Trinity said she wishes you were there, by the way.”
“I personally find it hard to believe that anyone wanted me there tonight, especially Santos.”
“She said you’d be fighting everyone to pay for my Uber Black, but I don’t know how that is different from Uber X or a regular Uber or Uberpool? There’s way too many Ubers. It's really hard to keep track of like the medial, intermediate, and lateral cuneiform bones. I always get those mixed up, especially medial and intermediate which I shouldn’t be admitting to my new attending, by the way, so promise you won’t tell anyone.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Tip…tipsy,” she says with a tiny hiccup. “I’m on my way home.”
“All alone?”
“Trinity’s tracking my location on the app. I wanted to walk because it’s sooo nice out but I was overruled…Is your day off going well?” Mel wasn’t surprised when the monthly staff schedules were released and Langdon was noticeably absent from the line-up. If anything, she’d been happy he decided to take the day off, even if it meant having to overhear about his almost-plans to visit his wife and sons on a boat on Lake Tyler (no…that wasn’t it…Tanner? No, that’s Langdon’s son’s name but it was something like that, a T-starting boy name that was going to keep Mel up at night) in Texas.
“Fine,” he says dismissively, as if he wants to get back to her current logistics. “Met with my sponsor after SMART, picked up my Buspirone refill at Walgreens. Caught the tail-end of the Phillies vs. Astros game. Facetimed my kids.”
“Are they doing okay?”
“They’re great, went with Abby’s parents to Schlitterbaun—Mel, are you sure you’re good?”
“Yep! I think I’m almost home. What’s Schlitt…Schlitter…I’m sorry…?”
“You think? Do you have an idea of where you might—”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Mel. It’s not important, just a waterpark in the Texas hill country. Can you just tell me where you could maybe be?” She imagines Langdon holding his palm up when he says this, the exact gesture he makes when Dennis frustrates him with his natural baseball aptitude.
“Well, I don’t have access to the app and we’re having to drive down Carson on the Saturday on a holiday weekend so the streets are all crowded. People are crossing in front of cars to get to the bars and a lot of them are much drunker than I…I can tell you that much so don’t worry…I’m not walking in front of moving vehicles intox—intoxi—intoxicated.”
There’s a harsh sigh on the other end of the line. “Stay on the phone with me until you get to your apartment, okay?”
“Well…I was already planning on doing that, but since you don’t talk to me at work, I thought I would be begging you not to leave….you like doing that.”
Silence greets her at the end of her statement and she feels her chest tighten, knowing she can’t take her words back because she’s gone too far. Too open and real about the small storm of heartbreak she’s nursed since Langdon’s come back. It’s definitely not the right time to bring it up, but her foot-in-mouth is unfiltered, and all she wants is to hang up the phone. The same flighty tendency she felt after try-outs in the dugouts, the look of shock on his face when she repeated his own history back to him and—
“Mel, I’m so sorry.” His apology is sure, no hesitation once he gets going. “You should’ve never suffered the collateral damage of all my bullshit. When I returned to work…there were certain people I was nervous about working with again—Robby, obviously. Santos. Dana, because the last time she saw me, I was so deep in denial about everything, doing whatever I could to not lose my job, go home to my family with a clear conscience. You. So much about you, for a bucket full of reasons that I didn’t make you privy to. I thought I knew what was best until the day of the Asheville fellowship and then it cracked. My hope, this summer, is to rebuild some of that. Hopefully. That shift meant a lot to me too. I’m sorry you didn’t know that.”
“Tha–Thank you,” she mumbles. “I thought at first you didn’t even remember me.” The Uber finally catches a green light, smoothly maneuvering the snake of the Monongahela, passing the signs for a GetGo and Aldi and the turn for a soup dumpling restaurant she’s heard good things about.
She’s looking out toward the river following underneath the Birmingham Bridge when he answers her back.
“I could never forget about you, Mel. That was the problem.”
“Do you want to?” She imagines the question wafting up into the night sky like a trail of cigarette smoke. Fleeting, but the effects—the Niccotine, the smell, the tobacco aftertaste—linger.
It takes Langdon some time to answer, enough that when he does give one, her Uber pulls up in front of her complex, shifting into park.
“Not anymore.”
Her own car is still inside the hourly parking garage behind Vipers. A terrible oversight she’s going to be kicking herself about later. $50 parking wasn’t on her July monthly expenses; with Becca’s Medicaid influx and her center being a consistent out-of-pocket expense, they couldn’t really afford any miscellaneous line items on their budgeting sheet. That anxiety combines with Mel’s current intimidating view of her three-story apartment walk-up, so daunting that it’s like the final Herculean task and she starts to frantically hiccup over the line. Once it starts, embarrassing little guppy sounds that become much worse after she tries telling herself to stop, you’re making this worse, you’re being messy. Quit it. She doesn’t have herself as under control as she thought and suddenly, she’s back in Reno all over again inside patient bay 17 and Dr. Grant’s eyes are bludging out at her emotional incompetence: “If you can’t make it through one dead kid, how the Hell are you going to get through four years?” And now…she can’t even think about simply making it up her stairs, so she’s for sure going to one day mess everything up: lose her medical license and wouldn’t be able to afford Hickorytree and suddenly, they’d be back in Nevada, sleeping out of that old Lincoln and—
Caught up in the category five anxiety spiral, she doesn’t realize that this tangential, absurd train of thought is being spoken aloud until she hears a determined huff over the phone.
“I’m going to need you to listen to me.” His coaching voice immediately makes her stand up straight, setting her shoulders back and firmly planting her feet into the concrete; body in one singular line. “Don’t worry about paying for your car. By the end of this conversation, I’ll have $150 sent to you and don’t even think about contesting it. I just need you to focus on taking each step one at a time, all right, with as many breaks as you need. Lean on the railing, sit down, use your hands and fuckin’ crawl if you can’t stand, but Mel, you’re going to make it up those stairs.”
“What if I don’t?”
“I’ll be there, Champ. My back might give out in the process, but I’d carry you if it gets you home safe.”
The whole thing’s a little silly, but after Langdon gives her permission to—when her right foot taps the first concrete step—every movement is a little bit easier. One turns into two which turn into five, then ten. Each step is a star that stickers itself to her brain and in what could be minutes or hours or mere seconds, she completes the first flight of steps.
Mel pretends they’re on FaceTime when she smiles through the phone, wishing Langdon was here to see how good she’s doing at following his exact instructions.
“One-third of the way there.”
“Attagirl. How are you feeling?”
“Good. I like when you tell me what to do and give me instructions to follow. That helps a lot, especially when my mind gets busy, like when we were doing the cone ‘even though they are totally discs’ drills.” She pauses at the landing, gazing upon the two additional sets ahead of her. “How would you like me to climb this time?”
“Take it slow, don’t want you to get too tired. I want you to save all your energy for the last set.”
“How slow?”
“I can count for you.”
It’s the explicitness of giving up control. Allowing him to take over her action, to let him set the pace and conditions for how she's going to move forward feels more potent than several shots of Patron.
“Step.”
She puts one Converse sneaker foot forward and pulls the other up behind.
“Done.”
“Pause for three long breaths. I want to hear you inhale and exhale over the line. You’ll make me nervous if I can’t still make sure you’re there. When you're finished, you can move to the next one, but only on my count.”
“I’m ready.”
“Step.” This one is more of a step-hop, because she’s feeling so settled and good, before she takes a big breath in through her nose, holds it for three counts, and then releases in a big sigh.
“Done.”
Again and again. The same pattern of a step, a resounding done, three breaths in a row (always slow because she doesn’t want Langdon to think she’s speeding up on purpose to get to the very top, even if a little thought of what if she didn’t follow the extract instructions, if she went against his set rules, simmers in her head.)
“Last one!”
“Step.”
She feels so completely steady from the lingering mental anxiety at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the last set like she could accomplish anything.
“Are you done Mel?”
“Yes!”
“This last set is up to you. Whatever you want…dealer's choice, Vegas.”
That’s a new nickname he hasn’t called her before, and she likes it a lot, even if it doesn’t get the job done in the same way as Champ. When Mel thinks about the last set of stairs, she wants to push her limits, move beyond this giant game of red light, green light. It’s not because of the alcohol, but because she feels so sure of herself, centered and confident, and she’s calculating the exact words to distill his earlier instructions so that when the idea comes to her, she doesn’t stop the words as they tumble out.
“I want you to tell me to crawl up the stairs.”
Langdon makes a distinctive choking sound, the real first break from him over the phone, and she’s about to ask if he’s okay when his throat clears. “Mel, you’re sure that’s what you—”
“Absolutely.” She scrunches her face up at his hesitation. Perhaps he was thinking back to their spring human resources training about boundaries and consent and workplace harassment, and worries she’s only suggesting this because she did those three Shamrock Shots so close together, but this wasn’t it at all. This needy thing inside of her? If you chopped Mel in half like a forested tree, you would probably witness the engrained rings of want, circling around and around. This is who she is. What she wholly wants and she thinks he’s the person who could give it to her. “I consent to this one hundred percent. Enthusiastically. So much.”
Unlike before, Langdon’s voice is ragged, as if he’s sprinted around the bases and stolen home plate. “Are there any gaps in the stairs or railing where you might fall down or over?”
“No. Everything is fully enclosed on the sides and there are no floating gaps in between each step. It’s one of the reasons I liked this apartment so much, because even though it’s a walk-up, it’s a pretty safe complex for Becca to maneuver.”
He doesn’t answer for so long that Mel starts to get antsy, shifting from one foot to the other, standing on the tip toes, watching the canvas crinkle near the rubber toe in between the laces. Even in the dark, she can see the purple glitter pen star Becca drew that’s refused to fade, no matter how many times she’s cleaned her sneakers.
“You stand if you hear someone coming.” Langdon’s voice caresses her ear. “I don’t want anyone to ever see you like this. Keep your eyes and ears open. Focus.” For her to still be on the phone, talking with him, she presses the speaker icon and grips her device tight in her right hand. Then, time stops:
“Get on your hands and knees. Crawl for me, baby.”
She presses her knees a little harder than necessary into the rough concrete, trying to make every forward movement count. To transcribe this evening—his command, her follow-through—onto her skin, even when she knows the marks will fade before next week’s game. She tries hard anyway, knowing that it will be the shared secret between them, of what he had her do and how she did it, no questions asked. The ground scrapes against the meat of her left palm, while her right forearm carries the brunt of her weight. A little lopsided to balance her clasped phone. Each step she crawls up makes her want to moan out because everything feels so right, exactly where she needs to be: on all fours, feeling so strong and capable and loved as she pushes herself to the final step.
When she’s there, one singular question rings out: “Do you want me to keep crawling to my door? Because I would like to do that.”
“Jesus, Mel, fuck—yes. Don’t get up. Keep going, just like that. You’re so close, right?”
“Just eight units down,” she says, then places her phone on the ground so she can get really close to the speaker. Her body in an almost child’s pose, breath nearly fogging up the screen as she stage-whispers: “We’re going to have to be really quiet…the walls here are very thin. You can hear everything.”
There are moments in Mel’s sexual history that bubble to the surface: when her college lab partner, Felicia, bound Mel’s wrists together with a flimsy hair-tie above her head, warning her not to move a muscle because good girls don’t squirm. Every time a teacher complimented her work. Daddy, slipping out while laying down on top of her pillow mountain, nails digging into her fellow PGY-1, Simon’s, back, before moving to Pittsburgh. After, she curled up on her side while he skimmed through his unread texts on his phone. “I mean…it’s kind of weird, Em. I don’t want you thinking about your dead dad every time we have sex.” Right as she tensed, pulling back from underneath his arm in the slightest, Simon added, “But whatever gets you off, right?”
It wasn’t Mel’s fault that her mom always gave her unfiltered access to the internet on the hand-me-down laptop growing up. That certain Tumblr porn .gifs—women on their knees, eyes wide, hair pulled, spanks and slaps and strong hands gathering wrists above their heads, holding them down—looped in her head whenever she thought about what she wanted her future relationship to look like. Or, at fifteen, when she checked out mass market historical romances (with names like MARKED AT MIDNIGHT and RAVISHED BY THE ROGUE) from the Reno Public Library, dutifully logging each one for their annual reading challenge. The same summer that someone uploaded Secretary in all its fuzzy, 360p resolution glory to MediaFire. When she watched Mr. Grey order Lee to place her hands flat on top of his mahogany desk, something akin to a slide puzzle clicked into place within Mel’s chest, warming her up inside.
In the present, when she re-rights herself with her phone in hand, she can’t help but conjure the images from Secretary, but her as the lead. Her in a-little-too-tight office clothes, carrying a freshly transcribed typewriter memo in her mouth, crawling seductively back to her boss's office. Trying her best to physically shape her body just like she does during batting practice but, instead of the strength of her legs and core, she focuses on the sensual sway of her hips and the long seductive crawl of her arms and legs.
Imagine what would hypothetically happen if Langdon actually were to be waiting right outside her apartment door—ready and able to take care of her. Would he slide her glasses off her face? Detangle her hair from its current plait? Let it fall down her back? Make her kneel in front of him on the floor—facing away between his legs from his position on the couch behind her—as he runs a hair brush from her crown all the way to the ends. She knows he would take his time, wouldn’t tug on roughly snagging on any tangles, just going slow until her body slumped against his shins, completely lost to the sensation. After he finished his brushing, he would strip her bare to simply cuddle her against his chest. A night well spent.
When Mel finally reaches her apartment, she presses her knees and palm hard onto the prickly entryway doormat. She holds in her wince, not wanting to startle Langdon, who's doing so good at keeping quiet. Mel doesn’t want to fail by example.
Sitting with her back against the front door, the wood cools against the exposed skin of her shoulder where her tank top doesn’t cover. Everything feels heady in the summertime air: the cars threading past outside, the distant booms of set off firecrackers somewhere in her neighborhood. No one came in or out of any of the other units, so she never needed to get up off the ground and that fact alone makes Mel feel better than if she hit a grand slam.
“I did it!” Her laugh turns into a giggle when Langdon’s harsh breathing couples with the sound.
“Yeah? You're safe?”
“Yes, at my door. All thanks to you for helping me get back.”
“Call me before you leave the bar next time…I’m serious. I’ll get you an Uber-whatever-you-want, it doesn’t even matter.” A pause. Then: “Do you have a plan for when you get inside?”
“Shower. My hands are a little dirty from…y’know…the thing.” She likes that they have another secret; she wonders how many they’ll have by the end of the summer. “I don’t think I need to take any over-the-counter medication, probably just need some water…”
“No, Champ, here’s what you’re going to do—text whoever you need to tell them you made it back; take two Ibuprofen if you have it, something similar if you don’t. Same with the water—two full glasses. I don’t want you to leave any drops behind, okay? Drink one pre-shower and one after, right before you brush your teeth. Floss. Wear something to bed that makes you comfortable…I know you have an early shift tomorrow, so don’t forget to set an alarm before you go to sleep. Make sure you do every single step. I’ll know if you don’t.”
“I will. Don’t worry, I am very good at following instructions down to the letter. Ask any of my high school teachers.” That statement just prompts a new fantasy of Langdon wearing the light blue button down, khaki pants, and wired-rimmed classes of Mr. O’Brien, quizzing her on the motifs and symbols of The Scarlet Letter with a ruler gripped tightly, ready to give the backs of her thighs a good slap if she gets his question wrong.
“I know you are, Mel. That’s why you’re so special.”
Maybe, now, instead of the Shamrock Shooters and Patron, it’s the adrenaline of being told what to do and how to do it. Of Langdon’s voice in her ear giving her the precise instructions on how she can take care of herself, even if he’s miles away. How he said he would come immediately and carry her if she simply called. So, it’s no wonder when, under the amber light cast over her apartment doorstep, everything between them over the past year—since the anniversary of his first day back—gets distilled down to a single title.
“So are you, Daddy.”
She smacks a quick air kiss over the line and hangs up before she can hear his response. So happy and bubbly and right within her body, she stays seated in the safety of her doorstop until she hears fireworks fizzle and pop up in the sky.
When Mel finally crosses over into her living room, she follows Daddy’s little rules down to the dot: she texts both Trinity and Samira, with Trinity responding almost immediately with thank god…i’ve been watching ur damn location dot for the past thirty minutes. wtf were u moving at a snail’s pace or something ?? i was this close to forcing dennis to rent an e-scooter and zoom over there to make sure u were still breathing lol get some sleep see u tomorrow bestie while Samira’s comes in the morning, a simple Loved reaction to her message. She doesn’t have Ibuprofen, but she does have Advil, and she pretends that he’s the one placing the capsule in the center of her tongue, tilting the water glass to her mouth to help her wash it down. In the shower, she deviates from his roadmap the tiniest bit, fingering herself to completion as the steam coats the bathroom mirrors. She brushes her teeth, double flosses, getting all the hard to reach spots.
I could never forget about you, Mel. That was the problem. Is he thinking about her right now? Did he do the same thing she did, touch himself to the thought of her crawling? Is this the first time he’s crossed the line? Or the hundredth? So many questions, no answers, but when Mel climbs into bed in a sports bra and pair of plaid pajama shorts, she sets her alarm with such purpose that she can’t wait to wake up tomorrow to shut it off.
The residual giddiness carries her into her Sunday shift, fiddling her hands in front of her as her gaze keeps glancing back at the front ED staff doors, eagerly waiting for Langdon to walk through. But then five, ten, almost twenty minutes pass until Robby puts her out of her misery during the morning change-over meeting:
“Just a quick FYI about scheduling today. Langdon called out sick early this morning. He should be back tomorrow, but prepare yourself to pick up some of the slack in the meantime.”
⚾️⚾️⚾️
After accepting her residency placement at PTMC, Mel knew that she absolutely couldn’t replicate what happened back in Reno. While it would be easy to place the entirety of the blame onto Dr. Grant, she feared that minimized her own agency and lack of personal responsibility. She knew her professional weaknesses—took cases and feedback and sudden changes to set routines hard. Was quick to tears in the way where when she realized she was about to cry, it only made her throat close tighter.
This time in Pittsburgh, she needed to advocate for herself in the workplace. Make it a habit right off the back: wore her Loop headphones, streaming ambient white noise sounds, while chatting; downloaded a plethora of free mindfulness apps onto her phone; collected a slew of spoken-word mantras, memorized from her handwritten ones from the dozens of handwritten sticky notes framing her bedroom mirror. Everything from female-fronted rap lyrics (current stuff like Megan Thee Stallion and Leikeli47 and Rico Nasty, but also artist burned onto her mom’s CDs from work—either by the other dancers or curated herself) to positive patient interactions to general niceties of traits she liked about herself (you are a good sister! one read, you are observant! your kindness is not weakness!).
After returning home from her Sunday shift—after finishing charting on a pediatrics forearm fracture she ended up splinting and casting without an additional orthopedic referral, much to her liking—she strips out of her scrubs, showers work away, watches as the soap and body wash disappear down the drain, and now she’s here. Gazing at herself in the same mirror, reading through every single note before letting her eyes take in her body.
Maybe it’s the ultimate cliché, looking at your reflection after a seminal sexual experience. Mel lost her virginity on a Wednesday, in the middle of the afternoon. She didn’t tell Max—the line cook at Treasure Island who dipped from his own apartment ten minutes after it was over—it was her first time, but she was pretty sure it wouldn’t have made a difference. When she examined herself in the bathroom like a forensic pathologist—trying to find any hint or difference or chemical transformation between pre- and post- virginity—the disappointment hit that she remained the same as before, just a little bit more lonely.
In the present, the irritated marks on her palms faded overnight, but Mel can still perfectly see the boldly tender and slightly bruised patches of her knees. Desperately, she doesn’t want them to fade, wants to run down to the walk-in street shop and get Langdon’s marks permanently inked. She never wants to forget how beautiful she feels right now. That’s the dangerous thing about desire and her brain: how much she wishes this could be her life; how what happened over the phone is what she wishes to come home to after every shift, him ready and willing to take the lead so she could fall into a brainless warmth of being cared for.
He should know, her brain decides and one thing about Mel? If she puts her mind to something, decides that it’s the thing she wants to do, it’s over. No going back, and she’s reaching for her phone tossed onto her quilted comforter because there is no way her and Langdon are going back to before the summer. All she needs to do is show him how much he means—.
She stops short when she sees the shining message notification on her lock screen, because she wasn’t the one to contact him first. Three sentences, short and to the point:
Langdon Three Rivers Stadium. Monday, 8 AM. I think we need to talk.