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There’s a pale spot on his already pale finger, a ring of almost perfect white skin, the kind of colouring which would get you prioritised in chairs. On the inside of the pale area was a small mole, perfectly hidden away and non cancerous, by Mel’s estimation and the smooth edges, and she cannot stop staring at it. Her whole world is reduced to the circumference of his finger.
She stares blankly at his fingers as he keys in his locker combination. He had changed it recently from 02/07/95 (Abby’s birthday) to 12/04/21 (Tanner’s birthday) five weeks, three days and approximately eight hours ago and she hadn’t asked, but he had given it to her, for future reference, he’d said. She had just watched his fingers stumble over the new combination, as he rambled through it after she had asked to borrow his safety goggles, he had the good bougie ones and the communal ones were so scratched they were impossible to see through.
Initially he had told her, ‘Tanner’s birthday, not Abby’s anymore’, and he must have seen her look blankly back at him before remembering she had never met Tanner, let alone have any idea when he was born and gave her the date along with a demonstration. Not that she had known the old combination was Abby’s birthday either. Mel wasn’t sure she should know something like that.
She looks for the pale circle and half expects to see it through the nitrile gloves he wears as he examines a patient’s broken leg, half expecting to see it bulge like the golden bulk of the wedding band, stretching the blue material and managing to shine dully through.
He’s on the phone to psych about a patient’s medication and she sees something on his hand catch the light under the harsh fluorescents and she whips her head around, thinking he must have only been without it for cleaning or resizing or lost it for a few days when she sees it’s just a gold pen he’s balancing in the same hand as the phone - a ‘gift’ from a pharma rep, trying to associate some new diabetes medication with the high life.
She stares at his bare, unadorned hand on the wheel as he drives her home until he parks the car a couple streets too early and he looks at her until she looks away and says something offhand about zoning out and being tired and doesn’t he know the human eye is highly reactive to movement and how she’s always liked his fingers and she can feel she’s laying it on too thick he pretends not to notice and starts driving again she she bites the inside of her lip to stop herself from asking why he’s not wearing his ring.
His marriage had never been her business.
An hour later she borrows his car to go pick up Becca and leaves him elbow deep in Uber Eats trying to figure out something which fit everyone’s dietary needs while The Bronx played just loudly enough Mel was happy she was vacating the premises before her crotchety neighbour could get worked up enough to trundle over. She paused at the door, spent a beat watching him drink his coffee - strong, cream, no sugar - and looks at the way his fingers grip his mug with a hand with no ring. He looks up and she can see he’s about to ask her why she looks squirrely as hell and she flees, scooping up his keys and flinging herself into the car and she switches off the radio reflexively and melts down low into the driver's seat.
She stuffs the keys in the ignition and nearly has a heart attack.
He hadn’t lost it.
His ring was hanging off his keychain. Suspended between a weird clay blob on a keychain from Tanner’s kindergarten class Father’s Day craft session and Taylor Swift inspired alphabet bead string from Louise, spelling ‘Dad <3’ and a rubber blue and white Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre promotional keychain from the Christmas party and it looked both like it belonged there, banging around with the most important parts of his life, sandwiched between his car keys and house keys and PTMC job and her spare set she’s given him last month and also like it was so far from home, leaving the length of his ring finger exposed and free to tan or at least become normal skin coloured alongside his other fingers.
Mel was late to pick up Becca.
Three days later, they have a mutual day off and after dropping Becca off at the center Mel runs home and changes and panics over her outfit and ends up wearing the low effort outfit she dropped Becca off in, though with a hint of makeup and all three pieces of jewelry she owns.
They meet at their favourite cafe, she likes that they have a dog menu and dog friendly courtyard because it usually means she can interface with a dog even if it does make her wonder whether Langdon still has a dog.
The sun is brighter and warmer than she’s used to after a week of dawn to dusk shifts and Langdon is wearing short sleeves and sunglasses and looking like he should be on a surfboard or at least a beach and she can’t help but think that if he keeps forgetting to wear his ring his skin will tone evenly the length of his finger but she holds her peace and sips her coffee and deliberately doesn’t look at his hand as it casually lifts his coffee to his mouth - flat white, oat, extra hot - as if his fourth finger wasn’t the center of her universe.
She smiles and tries to remember to act like herself.
That night they’re curled up on the couch watching Die Hard because it’s Becca’s day center crush’s favourite movie and she wants to impress on him how deeply similar and in tune they are. Langdon slings an arm casually around Mel’s shoulders, like he’s done a thousand times before and she can’t feel the hard metal spanning his finger and she is more aware of that than any of the explosions in the movie and she leans her head on his shoulder and breathes in the aftershave and light sweat combination which smells as familiar to her as her own home and she closes her eyes and drifts.
Becca kicks her legs and asks Langdon whether he would save Mel from crazy Germans and Mel wants to die but settles for throwing popcorn at her sister.
Later when she’s brushing her teeth, shoulder to shoulder with Becca, her sister turns her terrible lucidity on Mel and asks her if Mel wants to bring her boyfriend Frank to family night at the center and Mel spits out her toothpaste abruptly one minute and thirty four seconds before she’s supposed to and wipes her mouth as Becca chastises her.
Her boyfriend Frank.
Mel had never thought of having a boyfriend named Frank. Never once conceived of it. Never been brave enough.
They had never really talked about what they were to one another. Significantly more than colleagues, somewhat less than that picturesque couple Langdon painted with his nuclear family.
The ring had always scared her out of asking. Made her feel transient, tenuous, temporary.
Not just because of the looming specter of Abby, Mel had suspected for a while that Langdon’s marriage was dead on arrival. There was no way he could sleep over as often as he did without serious repercussions otherwise.
He had kids and a wife and maybe even a dog and a house and she has a sister and she feels like she’s fifteen and in love with her teacher, aching for something she’s not supposed to have and she loves him but would honestly rather die than ever tell him.
He’s not hers to have. Mel knows he’ll figure things out with Abby and win father of the year and maybe she’ll finally let Becca get a cat so she’ll have somewhere to put all the love in her heart.
She’s his to touch and his to fuck quietly in the on call room, one of his hands over her mouth, the other between her legs, teasing her where she’s stretched around his cock, wet and wanting as he fucks her slow and whispers in her ear that she was made for this, made for him and she breaks under his clever fingers, comes to the feeling of the ring brushing her clit as he works a finger in next to his cock. Her hips bucking into his slow, steady thrusts as she moans into the hand over her mouth as he rocks her through it, rhythm stuttering as he follows her over the edge and his hand falls from her mouth to her waist as he pulls her close, and kisses her neck and breathes her scent in so deeply she’s sure he can smell every perfume she’s ever worn.
He’ll tuck his softening cock back in, satiated and loose, and pull up her pants and hold her for a few stolen moments before they inevitably stagger their exits and flee to the scrub dispenser.
Langdon comes home with her when they work together, but usually returns home after dinner. His days off are spent with his kids, he only mentions Abby in perfunctory tones. Abby’s taking the kids to her parents this weekend. Abby’s got the car today, hers is in the shop. Abby asked me to come to parent teacher conferences for Tanner. Perfunctory, the kind of inane life things you might recite to a colleague who asked how your week was but gave absolutely nothing away as to the status of the relationship.
She knows they still live together but sometimes when they’re lying together in her bed, his arm loose on her waist and his face buried in her neck, the tickle of his hair on her nape of her neck feels like the nag of does he still share his marital bed or is he banished to the couch?
Does he kiss her goodbye and wish her a good day at work like he does for Mel, sleep soft and cute enough she forgives his morning breath almost before she tastes it. Does he drive with one hand on her thigh, stroking idly in that ADHD way of his? Does he press a quick kiss to her shoulder as he twists around to look out the rear window to reverse. Does he still bring her favourite snacks home from the supermarket, some of Becca’s too, not because she asked, just in case she wanted them?
Does he still remember his wedding vows? Does he think of Mel as he pushes into Abby, or worse, does he think about Abby when he fucks Mel? She knows that if she lets herself linger here she’ll panic about just being proximate, willing, easy.
“Mel, sweetheart, what’s up?”
His voice is soft. She can’t quite see him in the half light, not with her glasses folded neatly on her bedside table, next to her purple drink bottle and the weird monkey lamp Becca had initially wanted for her room but later scorned and all the spare hair ties she hung off its tail and the six books she started in the last couple months, none finishes but all with fucked up pages because she always fell asleep reading and dropped the book and inevitably rolled on top of it at some point and would wake to an ache in the proximate body part and the pages in some unspeakable state.
Oh yeah, and his keys. His keys with his ring hanging nonchalantly off the keychain. His ring and his keys on her bedside table and the last time his ring was in her room it had been on a finger that was inside her and she had felt herself stretch just a little more around the hard metal, felt it tease her rim as he eased his fingers in and out, rhythm tied perfectly to the ocean wave of pleasure of his tongue on her clit as he eased her closer and closer to orgasm and if she had come focusing on the in and out pressure of the gold band teasing in and out of her, what of it?
“Mel?”
He doesn’t say her name like someone who has a wife to go home to.
He says her name like he might love her.
Mel wants to curl up and cry.
Becca is out tonight, a movie night at her center, and they’re meant to be enjoying a night with her apartment to themselves and she’s ruining it.
It had been going great, she had set the mood, suggestive but not obvious and gross playlist, candle on the dresser, lights out save for the bedside monkey lamp, matching lacy bra and underwear, purple and a little old, some of the lace was pulling, she hoped it was hidden by the half light.
Unbidden, Mel thinks Abby would probably only have pristine white silk and lace lingerie. She would probably laugh if she ever saw Mel’s selection.
They’d shared a nice, if simple dinner.
They had talked in the living room, ignoring the TV until he leaned in and kissed her and she melted into him and snuck her hands under his shirt and pulled him closer and felt him laugh gently against her and the rumble of his voice, pitched low with arousal, as he asked her if she would like to take this to the bedroom.
And now she’s naked but for her panties and he’s hard against her thigh, he’s been kissing her, easing her into the night and her nakedness, enjoying the rare luxury of time to themselves and she had gone and turned her head and now her mind was full of thoughts of gold bands and vows and the body she shouldn’t be touching.
And he was looking at her, all worried and kind and she panicked a little.
She hid her face in his arms and kissed his chest and asked, voice small;
“Can’t we just keep going?”
She couldn’t say it.
She couldn’t ask.
She might cry.
“Well, no.” His voice is resolved, like he’s resigning himself to the conversation. “Call me kinky, but those don’t look like the right kind of tears.”
His voice is intentionally light. The voice he uses on the patients who could at any moment have a mental break. The kid gloves he’s using on her chafe just a little.
“I’m okay. It’s nothing.”
Mel can hear her voice tremble, knows Langdon won’t ignore it.
“Sweetheart.”
And she’s crying. Just a little. Just enough. And he’s folding her in his arms, holding her tight to him.
“What’s up?” he murmurs into her hair, “Please, Mel, you’re worrying me.”
And she can’t, not yet.
And he lets her cry.
And she gives in. lets out all her anxiety and he holds her and kisses her and whispers sweet nothings, she can feel his lips moving against her hair more than she can hear the words. Slowly, she starts to try and put herself back together.
And, eventually, she pulls back and he looks at her like whats up and she asks him to go sit outside because she needs to put on a shirt and make a list and can he make coffee.
And he goes.
And she reaches into the top drawer of her bedside table and searches for her notebook, and starts to write.
She’s three pages in when he knocks softly on the door,
“Coffee?”
And she looks up, deer in the headlights like she had forgotten he was there.
“Ah, thanks.”
As she reaches up to take the coffee and realises she’s still mostly naked and pulls the blanket up before accepting the mug.
He smiles down at her as he hand delivers her coffee in her favourite mug and kisses her head as she takes a sip.
“I’ll be out here when you’re ready.”
She loves him.
Mel wants to cry, just a little.
She pulls on his shirt from where it was discarded earlier on the floor and feels like she’s drowning in it and keeps writing like it’s her only way out.
An hour and half a cup of coffee later, she emerges.
“I have questions.”
Langdon looks up, blinks, smiles.
“You look so cute in my shirt, all business baby.”
She sits opposite across the table, a little unsteady in the face of what she’s about to do. She needs to be far away enough he can’t touch her easily, she’s not sure how this will go.
She sits with her coffee and her slippered feet curled under her and her knees tucked up and opens her notebook, pen ready. She places her coffee mug between them like a barrier.
He must have set up the bluetooth speaker and the kindness in his eyes belied by the hardcore vocals quietly yelling from the speaker, the main tell of his nerves.
“I have questions I need you to answer.”
She repeats herself, voice steadier.
“Quite a few, I can see.”
And his voice is bemused and he looks at her with all the patience in the world and for the first time she thinks he might love her too.
“Do you still have a dog?”
He’s surprised, she can see, like whatever he expected it wasn’t this. He laughs a little as he answers.
“Kind of. Floppy is staying with my brother while things get sorted.”
He sees her grimace at the name.
“The kids got to pick.”
She breathes in deeply. Releases it.
“Why did you stop wearing your ring?”
Her heart stops and she’s never been so cold and small as she was in the space between the question passing her lips and his opening in answer.
“I thought you would never ask.”
And they talk so long and as much as she drinks in every answer she never thought she would ever get she doesn’t remember much beyond his first answer.
“Because I don’t love her anymore. Not like I used to. Not like I should.”
He sighs and cards his hand through his hair, fringe flopping immediately back into place.
“She could never trust me again, not really. She let me stay through all the rehab and work reintegration but after she knew I had been high around the kids, that was it. She was done with me. That was the fracture. We never quite figured out how to get around it, never managed to build a bridge. We’re sorting it out, the separation, working through it. But she won’t let me see the kids if she’s not there, so I’ve been sleeping in the guest room.”
He smiles like a man who has lost all his pride and Mel wants to cross her own picket line.
“Really, she’s been more than decent. Not like I held up my end of the bargain.”
Mel makes a noise in protest, and Langdon holds up a hand.
“She took a lot on faith, having two kids with me before thirty. She put her career on hold and committed to being a stay at home mum. I was meant to keep us afloat until the kids were older and it all got easier and she could have a life again. I started getting high before Louise was even conceived.”
He stares hard at the table, but presses on.
“She had every right to throw me out on my ass.”
“Why,” Mel breathes, not wanting to push but needing so desperately to know, “Why still wear the ring?”
“It’s easier,” he wets his lips, “was easier.”
She must look like she had questions. Her professors always said it was obvious when she had questions.
“But I took it off for you.”
He holds her gaze.
Forces her to sit under the weight of it.
She wants him to say it. She needs him to say it.
She can’t bear to hear it.
“You made me want to take it off.”
He looks at her and she feels like she might drown in everything she finds in his eyes.
Mel wakes to Langdon’s arm slung over her and she stares at his ringless finger, his skin tone almost even after two weeks without the shelter of the ring.
Half way through her list they had moved to the couch, where they eventually passed out. Langdon looks young and pale and tired and she hates to wake him but the angle of his neck is awful so she holds his ringless hand and kisses his forehead and pulls him up and towards her bedroom and for once doesn’t wonder whether he’s missed at home.
The first time they have sex without the ring she notices it’s gone.
The second time she misses it.
The third time she asks for it.
Langdon’s eyes go wide and he holds perfectly still, a little spooked.
Mel bites her lip and tries to look doe eyed like an old roommate had tried to teach her.
She’s so far over the line it’s a distant memory and she honestly thinks she might have brought on the breakup that at least three nurses were betting on when he laughs a little and kisses her and says,
“Sure, baby, whatever gets you off.”
He retreats to go fish it off his keys, naked and perfect and muttering something about watching out for the quiet ones.
He comes back to bed and slides back in beside her, ring nestled exactly where she had first seen it, and tells her to watch as he sucks his fingers into his mouth, cheeks hollowing like hers do as she sucks deep and hard around the head of his cock, just the way he likes. Mel breathes in sharp, eyes glued to his finger as he traces it down her body, cupping her breast, tracing her nipple, dipping into her belly button, dragging the rim of the ring hard against her clit and it's all she’s ever wanted. He fucks her shallowly, artlessly, with his thumb, dragging her hole wide open as he rubs the ring hard on her clit and she chews her lip and sees stars and the look on his face says this must be worth what must be a truly painful angle for his hand.
He’s rough and bites her hip but she comes anyway with her eyes fixed on the ring as it pushes punishingly on her clit.
In the end, the ring ends up in the second drawer of her bedside table, next to her vibrator, lube, condoms, and a couple of hand towels which hid several toys she had yet to broach with Langdon.
It was perverse.
It was what she got off to.
Even on nights when Langdon went home to his kids, Mel kept herself warm to the glint of the metal on his finger.
He doesn’t live with her, not officially. He stays over enough that Abby barely bugs him and he always sneaks some of his laundry in the pile he helps Mel lug down to the coin laundromat two streets away and watches her sit on the machine and do crosswords or crochet or whatever other adorable grandmother hobby she’s on that day and his heart feels so full and he has to do something with this feeling but the papers haven’t been signed yet, he doesn’t have his own place and he can’t tell her yet, not until he can walk up to her door, free and clear and hers and take her on a date and back to his place.
Unless
Fuck it, he thinks, he's never been a patient man.
And he leans up on the dryer next to the washing machine she’s perched on.
Taps her on the knee.
Nearly died happy as the automatic, genuine smile she turns on him, clearly having forgotten he was there.
And he tugs her down
Kisses her sweetly, just the way he knows she likes
Feels her smile into it
“Mel, sweetheart, I love you.”