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The thing about having keys to Jack’s apartment was that Robby had never really questioned it. They had exchanged them sometime between Covid and Adamson’s passing. A quiet, practical thing, a way to give them both a much needed escape from loneliness. Jack pressing his into Robby’s palm with a look that said use them and Robby pocketing it with a single nod. Then Robby silently attaching a copy of his key’s to Jack’s keychain after his wife passed away, when Jack was too grief-stricken and too tired to go back to his old apartment.
So when Robby woke up at five A.M. on his day off, mind already rushing towards the ER, body refusing to cooperate with the very reasonable request to shut up and go back to sleep, it seemed perfectly logical to pull on clothes and head over. Jack didn’t have a shift last night, so he was probably up, reading on the sofa with the police scanner buzzing in the background.
Robby knocked, a habit more than a question, and let himself in.
“Jack.”
Nothing. The apartment sat quietly around him, sun-warmed and welcoming, the windows in the main room thrown open to let in the early morning. Light poured through in long, gold columns, dust motes drifting in the stillness.
Robby set his keys on his hook—the green one, the black one was Jack’s—by the door and rounded the corner into the living room.
And stopped.
Or rather his entire upper body stopped while his feet hadn’t. His knee made an unfortunate sound. He was fairly certain he’d twisted it on the abrupt halt, the joint giving a small, offended twinge, but the information failed to reach any part of his brain currently capable of processing it.
Because Jack was on his yoga mat in the middle of the living room floor.
In the sunlight.
Wearing absolutely nothing.
BICEPS, Robby’s brain announced, with the crisp authority of an ER attending running triage for the Magic Mike hospital of humanly beauty. QUADRICEPS. TRAPEZIUS. PECTORALS MAJOR!
Jack had folded himself into something that should not have been physically possible— balanced on his hands, body parallel to the floor, legs extended behind him in a perfect horizontal line, his weight distributed between both palms and the toes of his prosthetic, every muscle in his back and shoulders standing in sharp, defined relief as he held himself there with the absolute serenity of a man who was deeply, profoundly comfortable in his own skin. The morning light caught the freckles scattered across his shoulders, the curve of his spine, the two small dimples at its base.
ERECTOR SPINAE, offered what remained of Robby’s medical education, and then the last working part of his brain gave up entirely.
Jack turned his head.
He had a smirk on his face. It was the smirk of a man who had heard the door, heard his name, heard the skid of rubber soles on hardwood, and had thoroughly enjoyed all of them.
“Enjoying the view?”
Robby’s mouth opened.
He tried to speak.
His brain produced: FRECKLES.
His mouth produced something that could generously be described as a sound, and less generously described as a man aspirating his own tongue. He dissolved into a violent coughing fit, one fist pressed to his sternum, trying and failing to calm his racing heart.
Jack lowered himself out of the pose with infuriating slowness, and sat back on his heels. “Do I need to perform CPR on you?”
Robby thought about CPR.
He thought about Jack leaning over him, strong hands on his chest, those strong, scrumptious shoulders inches close, the press of lips against his, breathing sweet, sultry air into his lungs. The image slotted into his brain fully formed and entirely uninvited and Robby choked again, the coughing fit renewed, his face burning so thoroughly he could feel it in his ears.
“I’m—M fine,” he finally managed.
“You sound great,” Jack agreed pleasantly.
He pushed himself up, arms and shoulders flexing. Then he rose to a stand—smoothly, unhurriedly, leveraging himself up with the easy grace of someone who had made peace with his body in every configuration—and faced Robby without a shred of self-consciousness, because Jack Abbot had apparently decided this morning that modesty was for other people. Lesser people. People who had not had the fortune to be descended from Greek Gods with the kind of physique that got rendered in marble and displayed in museums.
Sweat gleamed on his skin, dusting him a gold. A bead glistened just below his hairline, dropped and got caught by his collar bone. It shimmered in the morning light, tracing a slow path down the planes of Jack’s chest, to the cut of his abdomen—
Heat pooled in Robby’s belly. His pants felt suddenly too tight, too constricting. He felt hot all over. He was certain that he was a tomato by now. He could feel his own pulse roar in his ears.
“You’re up early,” Jack observed, like this was a normal conversation between two normal people, rather than between a very naked human and an overripe tomato.
“I—I was in the neighborhood,” Robby said, which was technically true and completely insane given that he had come here with specific intent.
Jack nodded solemnly but his eyes were dancing. He knew. He absolutely knew. And he also knew exactly what he was doing to Robby right now. He reached for the water bottle nearby, but instead of taking one step over, he stretched—wantonly, lasciviously, from toe to fingertips—and grabbed the water bottle with what can only be described as a slow caress.
Robby watched Jack put the bottle to his lips, tilt his head back, muscles rippling with each gulp, and thought, distantly, that he might need to sit down. Something—his face or chest or his pants—was close to bursting.
“Do you want to join me?” Jack asked, his face the picture of innocent.
Robby’s brain made the calculation in under a second. Join. As in —together. As in Jack, and a shower, and—yes. Yes, he did want that. He wanted that very much. He nodded. He was nodding. When had he started nodding?
“Take your clothes off, then,” Jack said lightly.
Robby had his shirt over his head before the sentence was finished.
He could not have recounted, even under oath, the exact sequence of events that followed, only that it was fast in a way he hadn’t achieved since his intern year, when he’d learned to sleep in fifteen-minute increments and change in a supply closet. Shoes, pants, socks, everything—gone. Reduced to a messy heap on the floor. He stood in Jack’s sunlit living room in his birthday suit and felt, for approximately two seconds, a flicker of satisfaction at the direction this morning had taken.
He turned toward the hallway in the direction of the bathroom.
“Wait.” Jack’s called behind him. “Where are you going?”
“Shower,” he answered, confused. And as he turned back, realized that something had begun to go wrong.
Jack blinked at him, guilelesly, beautifully, damnably straight-faced. “I meant join me in yoga.” He gestured at the mat. “Go grab the spare from the closet. Come on.”
Silence.
“…yoga,” Robby repeated.
“Yoga,” Jack confirmed.
Robby stood in Jack’s living room, naked, and stared at him.
Jack waited.
This was hell. A hell constructed specifically, personally, for him. And Robby had walked into it on his own two feet.
He retrieved the mat from the closet with the mechanical obedience of a man whose higher brain functions had vacated the cranium, rolled it out beside Jack’s, and stood on it.
Jack gave him an intense once over that would have absolutely excited him had he not been standing on the bane of his existence—yoga mats. Jack, having realized exactly where Robby’s mind had gone, grinned at him with great satisfaction. “Alright. Chair pose to start. Feet hip-width, arms up, sit back into it.”
Jack did not go easy on him. Because easy was not a word in Jack’s dictionary.
Later, Robby would reflect on this importune yoga lesson—the precision of it, the diabolical intelligence applied to what was technically a wellness activity—and feel a grudging, furious admiration. Because Jack knew exactly what he was doing. He always did.
But now, all he could feel was regret, a bone-deep tiredness, and every one of his fifty-four years on this earth.
They moved through a warrior sequence that left Robby’s thighs shaking. Then long and punishing plank holds, made worse by the fact that his shoulders and back were trembling while Jack held his own with infuriating steadiness, commanding him to keep his hips level, voice even, not even slightly out of breath. Then side plank. Followed by downward dog, Jack walking behind him to press his hips back, a position so erotic that Robby could feel his brain shutdown between trying and failing to balance exhaustion and arousal. Jack’s warm, slightly moist hand touched him where he was the most sensitive, which was either legitimate instruction or psychological warfare and Robby genuinely couldn’t tell any more.
Then Locust pose with both legs lifted, which promptly squashed every trace of Robby’s arousal and made his lower back remind him of his exact age. Boat pose, which made every abdominal muscle he owned and didn’t know he owned issue a formal complaint. A pigeon variation that wrenched a noise out of his throat that had him blush crimson and Jack give a low, deep chuckle.
“Breathe,” Jack said helpfully, from somewhere behind him.
“I am breathing,” Robby gritted out through clenched teeth.
“You’re holding it.”
“I’m trying.”
By the time the sun had climbed past the windows, losing its low morning angle, Robby was on his back on the mat, arms out, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling. Every muscle in his body was crying for his attention. His hip flexors had probably abandoned him for good.
He shook, fine tremors from head to toe. It was not the kind of shaking he had envisioned for this morning. Or for any mornings for that matter.
“Oh, would you look at the time,” Jack said, from his own mat, where he was seated in a comfortable cross-legged position looking approximately as tired as a man who had taken a short, pleasant walk. He glanced at his watch with an expression of genuine surprise that convinced absolutely nobody. “Your shift starts in twenty.”
Robby stared at the ceiling.
“You did this on purpose,” he said.
“Yoga is a meditative practice,” Jack said serenely.
“You did this on purpose.”
“It’s good for your flexibility. Core strength.” A pause. “Mental fortitude.”
Robby peeled himself off the mat with what remained of his dignity, which was in single digits, and trudged toward the bathroom. Jack’s unrepentant snicker followed him down the hallway, and Robby pulled the door shut behind him without quite slamming it because he didn’t quite have the strength left for slamming.
The shower helped. A little bit. The shower was, sadly enough, the best thing that had happened to him since he had arrived, and he stood under the hot water for longer than he had time for and felt the muscles in his back begin to unknot themselves one by one.
He dressed in the clothes he kept at Jack’s place, stealing one of Jack’s favorite undershirts, because he was feeling very, very spiteful, and his own scrubs and pants. He checked himself quickly in the mirror, and saw a man who looked thoroughly fucked out. Too bad it wasn’t the right way of “fucked”.
When he came out, Jack was sprawled out on the couch with an air around him that could only be described as a smug cat who had knocked a vase off a shelf and found it amusing. He had not, apparently, moved with any urgency toward his own shower. One eye cracked open as Robby came through.
“Coffee’s on the counter.”
Robby got the coffee. It was perfect, disgustingly and unreasonably perfect. Because apparently the universe was in love with Jack, making everything he did perfect.
Robby stood in the kitchen for a moment, cup in hand, looked back at Jack—gilded and drowsy in the morning light, insufferable, magnificent—and flipped him off.
Jack smiled his satisfied and perfect smile, then closed his eye again.
Jack was on the sofa in clean clothes, pleasantly horizontal, when the first message came in.
what did you do to robby
It was Shen. Robby had apparently rushed into the ER looking like a man who had been put through a double shift.
Before Jack had finished formulating a response that would give him plausible deniability, his phone dinged again. Parker’s text this time:
ok so i’m not saying you two need to have A Talk about pacing yourselves but you ARE both in your 50s. asking for the department’s sake, not mine. do I need to give you guys The Talk? (sigh)
Jack was chuckling before he’d finished reading it.
He texted back something appropriately unimpressed, earning a side-eye emoji from Parker. Then he set out to clear away the yoga mats and get started on food.
An hour later, a third name appeared—Dana.
Hey. You know I don’t make a habit of getting in the middle of whatever you two have going on, and I’m not starting now. But Robby legitimately couldn’t lift a patient today and had to call for a second set of hands. Just… maybe keep the personal life from affecting patient care? That’s all I’m saying.
Jack read it twice. Then he set his phone face-down on his chest, looked up at the ceiling, and started laughing.
It was a great morning.