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She is shaking and she cannot stop shaking and it is July.
The roof is the only place she could think of. She found the propped door in her first rotation and she has never told anyone about it because it is hers, or she has chosen to believe it is hers, which is close enough. She drops down against the far wall with her knees pulled to her chest and her back against the concrete and her arms wrapped around her own legs, holding herself together in the most literal sense she can manage.
She is not a graceful crier. She has known this since she was nine years old, at the chess table at medical summer camp, when she lost a game she should have won and cried in front of a boy twice her age and every adult in the room found something else to look at. Her face goes blotchy. The sounds don't stay in. She doesn't try to keep them in now because there is no one here and the July heat sits over everything like a hand pressed flat and she is so cold she cannot understand it.
She thinks about the board.
She keeps coming back to the board, specifically, not the labs and not the attending she couldn't find and not Whitaker's face when they pulled the crash cart. The board, and Mrs. Burns's name not on it, and the assumption she made that someone else had handled it. She has recited the sequence since it happened and the sequence always ends in the same place: the board, Mrs. Burns in a bed in her room with her nausea and her mild abdominal pain and her warm potato salad lunch, which was a straightforward GI complaint, which Victoria charted and—well, she assumed. She assumed the nurses had her on the board. She assumed the labs would go through. She moved to the next patient because she assumed the system was running without her in it, and Mrs. Burns was in that bed, and her sigmoid colon was—
She knows the sequence. She has recited it twelve times since the crash cart and she knows every step of it, exactly, in order, and knowing it does not help and reciting it does not help and she does it again anyway because there is something in her that believes if she recites it precisely enough, gets every detail exactly right, she will find the moment where she could have stopped it. The labs. No—before the labs. The board. No—before the board. The assumption. There. That's where she went wrong. She assumed. She moved on. She—
She presses her hands flat against her legs and her hands are shaking and she does not want to feel them shaking so she presses harder.
The board. She should have checked the board. She should have found an attending before she moved on, she has always known you find an attending before you move on, shes been taught that, she knows it, she has always known it, and she—what if she does it again?
That is the thing underneath the recitation, the question the recitation is trying to outrun: what if she does it again. What if this is not a mistake she made but a mistake she is—a feature of her, not an error in her, something about the way she is built that will keep surfacing no matter how many times she recites the protocol, because the protocol is not the problem, she is the problem, she has always been—
She sees Whitaker's face again. The specific quality of his going very still.
Then she sees her mother's hands.
That is the thing she has been routing around all afternoon, the thought she keeps meeting at the edge of every other thought and turning away from. Dr. Eileen Shamsi scrubbing in, getting the page, reviewing the chart, understanding in the way her mother understands things exactly what her daughter failed to do. Her mother's hands are steady. They are always steady. She will not show anything on her face while she works, and afterward, in the specific window between shift and dinner, Victoria's phone will ring. She knows the tone already. She has been on the receiving end of it since she was old enough to make mistakes worth discussing. It is not a cruel tone, and it would almost be better if it was. But instead it is measured and specific and it itemizes everything she did wrong in precise order and it sounds like patience but it is not patience.
She will pick up. She always picks up. She—She doesn’t know if she will this time.
The gravel bites through her scrubs and she doesn't move and somewhere below her feet Mrs. Burns is on a table and her mother's hands are—
She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathes and it doesn't help. She tries again. She is aware, distantly, of something stinging along her forearms, a thin bright line of sensation on each one, and she files it somewhere beneath everything else and keeps breathing.
She should have checked the board. She should have found an attending before moving on. She knows this. She has always known this. And what if—the thought again, she cannot stop it—what if that is just what she is. What if she is the kind of person who knows exactly what to do and does not do it, who studies harder than everyone and reviews her notes in the right order and still forgets a woman exists for twelve minutes, who has been performing competence so long that she has confused the performance for the thing itself. She thinks of her mother's colleagues shaking her hand at fourteen, saying remarkable, saying extraordinary, and her mother's hand at her back, and the specific warmth of being the story someone tells. She has been the story someone tells her entire life.
Maybe the story is wrong.
Maybe Garcia is—
She stops herself, presses her teeth together. The shaking in her hands has moved up into her jaw and she cannot tell anymore if she is cold or if this is just what falling apart feels like from the inside.
She is still crying, ugly and graceless, face against her knees, when she hears the door scrape open.
She hears footsteps on the gravel, slow, and then they stop.
The quality of the silence shifts. Someone is standing there, taking in what they are seeing, going still in response to it. She attempts to wipe the wetness off her face with the back of her wrist and it accomplishes nothing.
"Javadi?"
Amazing. It’s McKay's voice, low, the register it drops to when she is reading something she did not expect to find. Victoria tips her head back against the wall and looks up at her and says nothing, because there is nothing to say and also because her throat has closed.
McKay looks at her for a moment, her eyes moving across Victoria's face, present in the way she is present, the way that makes Victoria feel like the most important thing in whatever room they share, and then she crosses the gravel and crouches down in front of her.
"Someone almost died because of me," Victoria spills.
It comes out without context, the whole day in one sentence, and McKay's brows draw together, her chin dropping slightly.
"Hey." Her hand finds Victoria's knee. "What—tell me. What happened?"
"A patient." Victoria's voice catches on the first word and keeps going. "I forgot—she was in her bed and I didn't check the board, I assumed the nurses had her on it and I moved on and her labs never went through and nobody knew to follow up and she was just—she was in her bed and I—" The word she is reaching for goes somewhere she can't find it and she tries a different one. "By the time we found her she was unconscious. She coded. She's in surgery right now and my mother is—"
She can't finish it. McKay waits, her hand steady on Victoria's knee.
"My mother is the surgeon." Each word comes out separately, like she is still deciding whether to say them. "She got the page. She's the one fixing it. She's down there right now fixing my mistake and tonight my phone is going to—" The thought of it opens something in her chest she cannot close again. Her teeth are chattering. "She's going to be okay. The patient. She's going to be okay, I know that, I just—"
"Come here." McKay sits down on the gravel beside her, close, and her arm comes around Victoria's shoulders.
Victoria turns into it before she decides to. She presses her face into the side of McKay's neck and the warmth of it is the first warm thing she has felt in two hours and she cries into it in earnest, ugly and past caring about being ugly, and McKay holds her with one arm at her shoulder and one hand moving slow at her back and doesn't say anything for a while.
The crying runs out in waves. When it goes small enough Victoria pulls back a little, enough to breathe, and McKay's arm stays where it is.
"She's going to be okay," McKay says, close and even, the voice she uses when she means for something to land.
"I know." Victoria's voice is wrecked. "I know she is. But I—I still—" She shakes her head. She can feel the recitation starting again and she cannot stop it. "I should have checked the board. I should have found an attending before I moved on. I should have—"
"Hey." McKay's hand moves to her jaw, briefly, tilting her face up. "Take a breath."
"—and my mother is down there right now fixing it and she's going to—tonight she's going to—" The intrusive thought arrives again, fully formed, the exact tone of her mother's voice on the phone, and Victoria cannot stop hearing it. "She's going to say my name the way she says it when she's—and she's right. She's always—"
"Victoria." McKay's voice sharpens. "Look at me."
Victoria looks at her.
"You're hurting yourself."
Victoria blinks.
McKay's hand has moved from her shoulder to her forearm—not gripping, just covering, her palm flat over the skin. Victoria looks down at her own arm, at McKay's hand on it, and then at the other arm, and she sees the marks. Four thin lines, reddened, not bleeding, the kind of thing that happens when you drag a nail across skin repeatedly without knowing you're doing it. She does not remember doing it. Since when has she been doing it?
The shame is immediate and she wants to hide but her sleeves are so short and her sweater is nowhere to be seen and—
"I didn't—" She stops. "I wasn't—I didn't realize I was—"
"I know." McKay's voice is very gentle. Her hand doesn't move. "I know you didn't."
Victoria looks at her own forearms for a moment longer. She feels, underneath the shame, something else—that McKay saw it. That McKay was here for it. That she cannot put the fake version of herself back on now even if she wanted to, because McKay has already seen what's underneath it, and she is still sitting here, and her hand is still on Victoria's arm.
Victoria looks at her. "What if I do it again," she says. "What if that's just—what if that's what I am."
"That's not—"
"I don't know what I'm doing here." The words come out strange, flat, like she is reading them from somewhere. "I've never known. I was thirteen in college because my mother wanted—because it made a good story and I've been—I've been performing the story and I can't—I'm not good enough for this. I'm not strong enough. I forget patients exist and they almost—" Her voice breaks again and she keeps going. "I shouldn't be here. I don't deserve to be a doctor. I don't—"
"Baby." The word is quiet and specific and it stops her. McKay's thumb presses once at her shoulder. "That is not true."
"You don't—"
"It's not true."
"Maybe she's right." It comes out before she can stop it, smaller than everything else, dropped like something she didn't mean to put down.
McKay goes still. "Who's right?"
Victoria shakes her head.
"Who's right, Javadi?"
She looks at the gravel. McKay's hand on her arm is warm and her forearms are still stinging and she is so tired of holding things.
"G-Garcia." A pause, her throat working around the next part. She cannot make it smaller than it is. "She said not good enough and she called me a—" She stops. Swallows, because the word costs something to say out loud and the reason it costs something is that it landed. "A nepo baby." Her voice goes nearly inaudible. "And she looked at me like I was stupid. Like I was useless. And everyone was there, they were all looking, and she's right, that's all I—"
McKay's hand on her arm tightens, the grip moving through her fingers and up into her shoulders in a slow change that Victoria watches happen. Her jaw goes tight. Her free hand has closed into a fist on her own knee and she is looking at something past Victoria's ear, breathing with a deliberateness of someone holding something back and trying to stay calm.
"She said that," McKay says, barely above a sound.
"McKay—"
McKay stands up, already oriented toward the door, and Victoria scrambles to her feet with gravel pressing into her palms.
"McKay—" Her voice cracks. "Where are you—Cassie, hey—"
McKay doesn't answer. The door scrapes open on its brick and she is through it.
Victoria follows.
☆
She hears McKay's footsteps hit the first landing and she runs after her, one hand on the railing, her breathing already ragged from crying, and they go down fast—on, two, three floors, her sneakers loud and uneven against the steps, the stairwell hot and damp and smelling of concrete and recycled air. "Dr. McKay!" Her voice bounces back at her and she doesn't care. "Cassie. Hey—" McKay doesn't slow and Victoria's feet keep moving, half a flight behind the whole way down, her chest burning by the ground floor in a way that has nothing to do with the stairs.
What is she—
The door to the ED swings open and Victoria catches it before it closes and follows McKay into the hallway. She has to move fast to keep pace. McKay's jaw is set and her eyes are forward, and Victoria understands, with a feeling that settles cold somewhere around her sternum, that McKay has known exactly where she was going since she stood up on the roof.
"Wait—" She catches McKay's arm, two fingers on her elbow, and feels the muscle there, tense and already pulled toward the next move. "What are you—"
McKay turns and looks at her, just for a moment. Her jaw is tight and her eyes are bright and there is something in them that is both angry and pained at once, something that looks like it costs her, and Victoria feels it land in her chest. She lets go.
She follows.
McKay moves through the main floor without stopping, scanning through the windows of the trauma bays as she passes, checking the nursing station, the break room—empty, empty—and then she pushes through a set of double doors into the back corridor, narrower, the sound muffled here, the antiseptic smell stronger. Victoria is still two steps behind when McKay stops.
She glances over McKay’s shoulder and sees a supply cabinet, propped open. She hears the clatter of metal on metal from inside it—Whitaker with his hand in a drawer, looking for something. Two nurses are further down the wall mid-conversation, one of them mid-laugh. And oh—Garcia is there, turned away, chart tucked under one arm, reaching for something on the top shelf.
"There you are," McKay says.
Whitaker turns at the voice. His eyes go to McKay, then to Victoria's face—she is aware, with a specific hot shame, of what her face must look like right now, the redness, the dried tracks—and his gaze moves between the two of them with a question he doesn't put into words.
Garcia's chin comes up, just slightly, and her shoulders settle back into their usual width, the posture of someone arranging themselves for a conversation they have decided not to find threatening. She crosses her arms and says nothing.
Victoria hears a step close behind her. Trinity has appeared at her shoulder—she must have caught the tears on Victoria's face when they walked—ran—through the ED, because she is here now, a few feet back, arms folded. Victoria doesn't know when she arrived. She registers the warmth of her body close behind her and finds, with some surprise, that it helps a little.
The two nurses at the far end of the corridor are pretending very hard to be busy with something on the shelves. Whitaker closes the supply drawer, slowly.
"McKay," Garcia says.
"I heard what you said to her."
Garcia huffs, a short sound through her nose, and shifts her weight to one hip. She glances past McKay and sees Victoria. "So she ran and told you. That's cute."
"She didn’t—she didn’t tell. I found her." McKay's voice is very even despite the slight stutter in her speech. Victoria knows where she’s heard this evenness before, in clinical contexts, when something was going wrong and McKay was the one trying to hold the room steady. She knows, standing three feet to McKay's left, that this is the same mechanism doing different work, and she knows from the set of McKay's shoulders—slightly forward, the weight shifted onto the front foot—that the evenness is costing something. "What you said was out of line."
"What I said was accurate." Garcia tilts her head. "She forgot to put a patient on the board. If she can't handle being told—"
"That's not what you said."
"She needs to understand how this works—"
"Not by calling her a nepo baby," The words come out disbelieving and harsh and Victoria feels them land in her own body, a dull impact below the sternum, the same place they landed the first time. "What you said"—McKay takes a breath, measured, the kind that costs something—"was meant to hurt her. Those are different things. She's my student, and you had no right."
Garcia makes a sound, short and humorless. "Your student." She looks at McKay the way she looked at Victoria earlier, cold and slightly amused. "Right. Look, McKay, the girl made a mistake and got her feelings hurt. That's medicine. She needs to learn that."
"She knows it was a mistake. She doesn't need you to—"
"Oh, so nepo baby can't take criticism, and mommy is busy," Garcia glances at Victoria again. "So she called you to the rescue. Great."
The breath McKay takes this time is different. Victoria feels it from six feet away.
"Don't." McKay's voice drops. "Don't do that."
"Do what? Point out that you came charging up here because a twenty-year-old cried?"
McKay takes one step forward, weight transferring slowly, and Garcia holds her ground but her chin comes up a fraction and Victoria watches the space between them close by six inches and feels her own breath catch. "Don't tell me what you were teaching her. What you said had nothing to do with teaching her anything." The muscle in McKay's jaw moves. "You were just cruel."
Something shifts in Garcia's face—a small tightening around the eyes, the corners of her mouth pulling slightly inward, there and gone, the thing underneath the surface pushing up for a second before she puts it back.
"She's a big girl," Garcia says. "She can take it."
"She's twenty." McKay's voice is still controlled but the anger is rising now, Victoria can hear it rising with every exchange. "She is twenty years old and she is good and she is trying, and don't you remember what that felt like? How hard it was? Don't you want to—instead of grinding them down, don't you want to pass something better?" She stops. Something moves in her throat. She tries again. "I’ve spent nine fucking years trying not to repeat what was done to me. Don't stand there and tell me that's what you were doing."
Whitaker, by the shelving, has gone completely still. Victoria can see his hands at his sides, open, not moving.
"That's a very pretty speech," Garcia says, and then she goes quiet, and Victoria watches her face do something she has seen before—on attendings, on her mother, on anyone who has ever held something over someone and paused before using it. A particular stillness, like time itself was put on pause. The face of someone who has just decided they have a card and is deciding whether to play it. "Is that what this is about? Teaching?"
"What else would—"
"Or is it something else." Garcia's eyes move, briefly, to Victoria—just a flick of attention, barely two seconds yet entirely intentional—and back to McKay.
Victoria's stomach drops.
Oh. It hits her a beat late, the way things usually do—Garcia's eyes moving to her and back, and then the small lift of Garcia's eyebrows, the almost imperceptible tilt of her chin toward Victoria, like: see? Like the argument has already been made and Garcia is just pointing at the evidence: McKay standing in front of her, close, slightly angled, and Victoria realizes with a lurch that from where Garcia is standing that probably looks like exactly what Garcia is saying it is. Her face goes hot. She thinks, stupidly, about the tear-stained patch on McKay's shoulder where her face has been, visible from across a corridor, and she wants to disappear.
From behind her, Santos takes a shaky breath, like she knows what this is about too.
"Watch yourself," McKay says quietly, and the words land differently than Victoria expects—not defensive nor angry, just… careful. The carefulness of someone who knows exactly what is being said about them and is not denying it, but needs it to stop there, needs it to go any further. Victoria feels something cold move through her chest. She wonders, suddenly, how long everyone in this room has known something she is only now beginning to understand.
"I'm just saying what's in the room." Garcia spreads one hand, the gesture of someone being helpful. "She was crying and you came running. That's a lot of energy for a student."
"I was going to the roof. I found her—"
"Right." Garcia nods, slow. "Your student." She says it the way you set something down on a table—carefully, so everyone can see it. She knows exactly what she's doing, Victoria thinks. She has been doing it the whole time. "Very professional."
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything." The easiness in Garcia's voice has frayed now, something rawer coming through underneath it, something that sounds less like composure and more like a decision to stop pretending at it. She uncrosses her arms and takes a half-step forward, and now she and McKay are close enough that Victoria can see the slight rise and fall of both their chests. "You're not her mother. She has one of those. And you're not her—" She stops. Her eyes move to Victoria again, holding this time, long enough that the back of Victoria's neck goes hot. Then back to McKay. "Or maybe that's the whole problem."
Victoria wants to look away and can't. Watching this is making her stomach turn and her throat close and her forearms sting where the scratches are, and she cannot stop watching because she is the reason McKay's weight is forward on her feet, she is the reason Whitaker's hands have gone still at his sides, she is standing here with dried tracks on her face and McKay is defending her in a supply corridor because she cried on a roof and said a name. She started this. She couldn't hold herself together for one shift and now—
"That's rich," McKay says, very quietly. "Yolanda. That is genuinely rich, coming from you."
Something crosses Garcia's face—her jaw pulling, a tightening around the mouth, something she gets down before it becomes anything worse.
"At least I know what things are," Garcia counters.
"Do you?" McKay's voice has gone completely flat. "Is that what's happening right now?"
"I'm honest about what I want."
"Are you?"
McKay has taken another step forward, small, almost nothing, and Victoria registers it the way she registers everything McKay does—remembered and understood before she can stop herself. They are close now, McKay and Garcia, close enough that McKay's voice doesn't need to carry. Victoria can see the tendons in the back of McKay's hand, the one hanging at her side, the way the fingers are opening and closing to the rhythm of a heartbeat.
"You don't want her," Garcia mocks, "but the way you—"
"Stop."
"—the way you act, McKay, really, it's—"
"I said stop."
"You're not fucking her," Garcia says, and the words land wrong, land cheap, like something that was buried deep and unnamed being dragged to the surface made ugly. "But you wish—”
What—
The heat drains out of Victoria's face all at once. Her ears go strange, a high thin sound at the edges, and her throat closes around nothing, hurts the way it hurts when you are about to cry and you are trying not to. Her stomach turns over in a slow, awful way, because Garcia has just said out loud something Victoria has never said, not even to herself, not even in the dark, and now it exists in this corridor with its worst possible words on it, cheap and ugly and public, and Victoria didn't get to decide what it was first, she didn't get to decide anything, and—it is ruined now, it is just—ruined, and Victoria's ears are ringing and her throat is burning and she cannot look at McKay and she—
McKay moves.
She crosses the distance in just three steps, and Victoria sees McKay's hand close on Garcia's collar and the momentum carry her back into the shelving—there’s a crack, and brackets rattling, and something dropping—and McKay's forearm across her chest and the two of them against the shelving and Victoria's ears are still ringing and she thinks oh god oh god and her feet move before she decides.
Her feet take her forward and her arm comes up, reaching for McKay's shoulder, and she gets close enough to feel the heat radiating off McKay's back before she stops, her hand in the air six inches from contact. She doesn't know what she would do. She doesn't know which way she would pull. McKay is not looking at her and Garcia has her chin up and is not looking at her either and Victoria stands there with her arm half-raised and the smell of sweat and antiseptic and the particular stillness of a room where nobody is breathing.
This is all my fault, she thinks. This is all my fault.
The door hits the wall and Victoria jumps, spinning toward the sound, her whole body going still with it.
Dana. She’s already through it and moving, and Victoria has just enough time to register her face—brows pulled together, jaw clenched, nostrils flared, like she has walked into something she cannot quite believe she is looking at—before Dana is past her entirely.
"Jesus fucking Christ." Her voice fills the corridor and Victoria feels it land on her skin the way a reprimand does, even though it isn't directed at her, even though she is not the one against the shelving. "I could hear you people all the way from outside—what the fuck is this?" She crosses the remaining distance and gets between them, her hand on McKay's arm. "Let go. Cassie. Let go right now."
McKay lets go and steps back and says nothing. Her chest is moving too fast, and for a moment Victoria worries that she may be having a heart attack.
Dana looks around the room. Her eyes find Victoria last and linger a half-second before moving on. "Out," she points at the door. "Everyone out. You"—Santos, Whitaker, the two nurses—"out. You." Victoria. "Out.”
Then, to McKay and Garcia, dropping into something quiet and flat that makes the yelling sound friendly by comparison: "You two—stay the fuck here."
Victoria does as she’s told. She doesn't look at McKay. She can't.
☆
The hallway outside has a chair and she sits in it. The wall opposite is beige and has a scuff mark at knee height and she looks at that. Her face is still wet. She doesn't wipe it.
Santos comes out and takes the chair beside her. She doesn't say anything, which is so unlike Santos that Victoria almost looks at her. After a moment Santos puts her hand over Victoria's on the armrest. Victoria doesn't look at her. Santos doesn't seem to need her to. Whitaker stands a few feet away with his hands in his pockets, looking at nothing in particular, the way you stand when you are holding yourself together by not moving.
This is all my fault, Victoria thinks again, and it is not a new thought, it is the same thought, it has been the same thought since the roof, and she turns it over and over and it is still the same on every side.
Minutes pass. Ten, maybe fifteen.
The door opens. Garcia comes out first, jaw set, eyes forward, not looking at anyone, gone down the hall before the door has finished moving. Victoria watches the space where she was.
Then McKay.
She comes out a few seconds behind, and Victoria feels her before she sees her, the way you feel a change in the air of a room. McKay's eyes shine in a specific way—not crying, not quite, but the place just before it, the place you go when you have held something in for as long as it can be held. She lifts the back of her hand to her face once, a small contained gesture, and then she looks at Victoria.
Just a moment. Just long enough.
Victoria's chest does something she doesn't have a name for yet. She sits very still and receives the look and McKay goes.
She sits in the chair for another minute. The scuff mark is still there. Santos's hand is gone from the armrest. Whitaker, somewhere behind her, exhales slowly through his nose.
Then her pager goes off.
She looks at it. Robby.
Of course, she thinks. Of course.
☆
The family room is small and smells like old coffee and there are two chairs and a box of tissues on the table that nobody has touched. Robby is already there when she arrives, standing with his arms crossed, and he looks at her for a moment before he sits, which means he wants her to feel him looking, which means this is going to be that kind of conversation.
She sits across from him. She folds her hands in her lap. The knuckles are still slightly red where she pressed them against her mouth on the roof and she looks at those for a moment instead of at him.
"Walk me through it," Robby says.
Okay. She takes a breath. Okay.
She tells it in order and without decoration: the chief complaint, nausea and mild abdominal pain, warm potato salad at lunch, a presentation that looked straightforward. She ordered labs. She ordered an X-ray. She assumed the nurses were adding the patient to the board. She moved on.
She stutters on the next part. She makes herself say it anyway.
"My orders never made it to the lab," she says. "She wasn't on the board. No one followed up." A breath. "When I couldn't find an attending I went to Whitaker. We found her unconscious." Her voice is steady in the way voices are steady when you are spending everything you have to keep them that way. "She crashed. The X-ray showed sigmoid volvulus. She went to surgery." She stops. "She almost died."
Robby says nothing. He already knows this. He was there for most of it. It dawns on her suddenly that telling it again is the point, that this little meeting is about her, not for him.
"I could have killed her," Victoria says, and she says it the way she has been saying it to herself since the crash cart, which is plainly, because it is plain.
He lets it sit.
"You assumed," he says.
"Yes."
"Without confirming."
"Yes."
"On a patient you'd already ordered imaging for." He leans forward slightly and she resists the urge to make herself smaller, which is a thing she has been resisting her entire life and has not yet managed to stop doing. "That's not a clerical error. That's not a gap in the system. You made an assumption and you moved on. You understand the difference?"
She does. She has understood it since the moment she saw Mrs. Burns unconscious on that gurney. She has turned it over until it is smooth from handling and it still doesn't feel like enough to have understood it. It will never feel like enough, some part of her thinks, and she doesn't know yet if that is right or just self-punishment wearing the costume of accountability.
"Yes," she says.
"Do you know what a sigmoid volvulus looks like when it's caught late?"
"Yes."
"Tell me."
She tells him precisely, because she knows this, she has studied every complication in this building until she could recite them in the dark—and reciting them now, in this room, with Mrs. Burns in surgery down the hall and the surgeon being her mother, is its own specific punishment. Her voice doesn't waver. She almost wishes it would, because the not-wavering feels like the wrong kind of control.
Robby lets her finish.
"Surgery says it's clean," he says. A pause. "You got lucky." He holds her gaze and she doesn't look away. "Now tell me what you would do differently."
Everything, she thinks. She makes herself be specific. "Confirm orders before I move on. Find an attending, not a resident. Present earlier, even if the presentation feels premature." A breath. "Don't assume the system is doing the work I haven't done."
Robby is quiet for a moment. The quality of the silence shifts—not softer exactly, but different, the prosecutorial thing giving way to something else that is not forgiveness but is perhaps adjacent to it.
"You're going to make mistakes," he says. "If you stay in this field long enough you're going to make mistakes on patients who don't survive them. That's not a maybe." He says it with no particular inflection, but Victoria senses exhaustion and wonders if it belongs to him. "The question isn't whether you made one. The question is whether you understand it. Whether you do the work." He pauses. "Do you understand?"
"Yes," she says, and it’s the honest answer.
He nods. "Then the gap between knowing and doing… that's what you're going to have to close." He sits back. "You're going to have to learn to live in the other gap too. Between the mistake and what comes after. It doesn't close either. You just get better at standing in it." He looks at her. "That's not the same as getting over it. You understand the difference?"
She nods. She doesn't, entirely, not yet—she can feel the shape of what he's describing the way you feel a room in the dark, hands out, finding walls before you find the door. She thinks she will understand it later. She thinks there will be a version of herself, further along, who will know exactly what he means and will not find it comforting.
That version of you is going to cost something to become, some quieter part of her thinks.
"Drink some water," Robby sighs, standing. "You look terrible."
Her own laugh catches her off guard, small and involuntary, gone almost before it arrives. She stands. She goes.
☆
The afternoon passes the way afternoons pass when the worst has already happened and the shift still has hours left in it—which is to say, slowly, and with great commitment to continuing to exist. She checks on two patients. She does an intake. She stands at the board and reads every name on it twice, her finger hovering just short of the surface, and then she goes and does what she is supposed to do, because what else is there.
She catches McKay near the nurses' station, talking to Dana, and she almost doesn't let herself look—almost. McKay's hand is at the back of her own neck, rubbing slow circles at the nape, and her gaze is going somewhere past Dana's shoulder, not unfocused but elsewhere, like her body has agreed to be present in the conversation while her mind is doing something else entirely. She nods at something Dana says, and it’s not the nod of someone agreeing but rather the nod of someone receiving, carefully, the way you receive something fragile and heavy at once. Dana leans in slightly and says something quieter, and McKay looks at the floor, and her throat moves once as she swallows.
Victoria looks away before McKay can look up and find her. Which she tells herself is consideration, not cowardice, and almost believes.
Later, toward the end of the afternoon, she passes the break room window and sees McKay and Garcia inside—and she doesn't slow down, she doesn't, but she does look, just for a second. Garcia's arms have uncrossed. McKay is leaning against the counter with her weight settled rather than braced. They are talking, not comfortably exactly, but talking, which is more than this morning. Victoria keeps moving and thinks, that's something, and then thinks it again, quieter, like she is trying to convince herself, that's something.
☆
She finds Trinity between patients, in a side corridor where the ambient noise of the shift moves around them and someone's supply cart rattles distantly away. Trinity is coming from the opposite direction, and when she sees Victoria she slows in a way that suggests she has been expecting this conversation, or at least bracing for it. Something in her face arranges itself—carefully, the way faces arrange themselves when the conversation you've been rehearsing has finally shown up.
"Hey," Trinity mouthes.
"Hey." Victoria leans against the wall. Her feet hurt, the specific ache of hour ten that she has learned to stop noticing until she stops moving, at which point it insists on being noticed. "So—"
"About what happened." Trinity looks at her steadily, and there is something in it that is both cautious and decided—like she's already landed on what she wants to say, and is only checking now that the moment is right for it. "Look—She had no business. Garcia." Something tightens briefly in her jaw. "Like, genuinely. What she said to you wasn't teaching or whatever, it was just—" She shakes her head. "Fuck. It was just mean."
"But," Victoria says, because she can already feel the shape of what's coming, the thing that arrives after but, and she wants it out in the open before Trinity decides to keep it back.
Trinity tilts her head slightly and gives her a look that is long and a little sideways—measuring, the way you measure a situation when you're not sure how much is appropriate to reveal, choosing what information to disclose. Victoria watches her choose. Can actually see the choosing happening, the small shift of Trinity's eyes as she sorts through what belongs to this conversation and what belongs to her only. "She's not a bad person," Trinity says, finally. "When she's hurting she just—goes for the throat. Says the thing she knows will sting. It's kind of her whole thing. It's kind of exhausting, honestly." There is a pause, and something quieter and more personal moves briefly in her expression and is gone. "I told her in June I wasn't ready for something serious, so—yeah. That's the context."
"That's not your fault," Victoria counters.
"I know." Quick, certain, the words of someone who has already had this argument with herself. "I know that. But she doesn't have good places for it, when she's hurting. So it comes out the wrong way." She looks down the hallway for a moment. "You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Victoria nods. Her back is against the wall and the wall is cool through her scrubs, and she is aware—with the particular clarity of someone whose adrenaline has been slowly leaving the building since Robby's family room—of how exhausted she is. How long ago seven this morning was.
"What McKay did went too far." Trinity says it to the middle distance, plainly, like she is establishing a fact of record before she says anything else. "Getting physical—that's not okay. I’m not saying either of them were justified."
"I know," Victoria says. "I'm not—"
"I know you're not." Trinity glances at her, briefly and with certainty, and then goes quiet. Long enough for Victoria to hear the faint beeping of a monitor down the hall. Long enough to feel the quality of the silence shift into something that is about to become a different kind of conversation. "The thing is," Trinity starts, and stops, and starts again, like she's choosing her footing carefully.
"McKay doesn't do that," Trinity says. "Like, ever. She would've been pissed—anyone would've been pissed—but pissed and that?" She shakes her head. "She’s like, the most controlled person we know.." She turns and looks at Victoria directly then, and there is something in her eyes that is warm in a way that is entirely intentional, the warmth of someone who has decided to be kind on purpose. Victoria feels the weight of it land, somewhere behind her sternum. "You understand what I'm saying?"
Victoria looks at her.
I think so, she thinks, and then, more quietly: I think I've been trying not to.
"She wouldn't have done that for just anyone," Trinity decides to add anyway, and she takes her time with it, her voice gone quieter in the way voices go quieter when they are saying something true and want it to land correctly. "I'm not trying to make it weird. I just think it means something that it was you. Specifically you." Her eyes hold, patient, steady, not looking away. "You get what I'm saying, Victoria?"
Victoria. It's not a big deal. Victoria is aware that it is not a big deal—people use names, that's the whole point of names, this is basic—and yet.
Trinity has called her Crash since October. Victoria hated it for about a week, then forgot to hate it, then at some point realized she actually liked it—liked that Trinity had a word for her that nobody else used, liked the specific fondness it contained, the way Crash in Trinity's mouth meant I see you and I've decided to keep you around. She has answered to it without thinking for months.
Which is maybe why Victoria—said plainly, no irony, no nickname—registers the way it does. Like Trinity saying: I need you to actually hear this. Take it seriously.
"I get it," Victoria says. Steadily, somehow.
Trinity holds her gaze a moment longer, confirming something, and then looks away. "Garcia's not going to say anything to you again, by the way," she says, and the way she says it is less reassurance and more closed matter, the tone of someone who has already seen to it. "For what that's worth."
She goes, and Victoria stays.
The light at the far end of the corridor is late-afternoon light—long and yellow, crossing the linoleum in slow strips that shift almost imperceptibly as whatever is happening outside with the clouds continues to happen. Victoria looks at it. She thinks.
Now, here is the thing about Victoria, which she knows about herself and has never quite managed to fix: she romanticizes. She builds narratives. She takes accumulated detail—a look, a particular quality of silence, the way someone's hands move when they're saying something they mean—and she turns it into a story before she has confirmed whether the story is true. She can't always tell the difference between reading a situation and writing one herself, and she has caught herself in the act more times than she would prefer to count.
Think about it plainly, Victoria tells herself, and then immediately fails to think about it plainly. McKay held her while she cried. McKay called her my student in a voice that sounded like something heavier than supervision, something closer to—well. McKay went down seven flights of stairs and found Garcia and stood in front of Victoria, slightly angled, close enough to feel warm, and refused to let it go. That's what protection looks like, isn't it? What McKay did was take the thing Garcia said and decide that it was unacceptable—not because it was unprofessional, not because it broke some rule, but because it was Victoria, and that was enough of a reason. When was the last time Victoria was somebody's reason?
And then Garcia said those words out loud, and McKay's hand closed on her collar, and Victoria has been thinking about that too—the way everything went, the way McKay held herself so carefully all through the argument and then didn't, right at that moment, right when Garcia made it about want. You don't lose control over a lie. Or maybe you do, if the lie is cruel enough. There are two explanations in Victoria's mind, and one of them is that McKay was simply furious on her behalf, which is kind and good and more than enough, and the other one is—well. The other one is wishful thinking, but Victoria has been in enough hospitals, read enough faces, to know what it looks like when someone is trying to shut a door before anyone can see what's inside.
Here is what she lets herself think, just this once, in the late-afternoon light where nobody can see her doing it: what if it goes both ways?
What if the warmth Victoria feels when McKay is in a room—that specific awareness, the way her peripheral vision always seems to know exactly where McKay is standing—is not a one-sided thing. What if McKay notices her too, in all the small ways that are subtle enough to not be noticed: the way she always seems to appear when Victoria is struggling with something, not called, just there; the way she explains things to Victoria differently than she explains them to other students, more carefully, like she wants to make sure Victoria specifically understands. The coffee she brought Victoria once, unrequested, during a brutal overnight, set down without comment and walked away from before Victoria could say thank you. What if those things are chapters from a story Victoria is reading?
And the looks. Victoria has been trying not to think too hard about the looks, because thinking too hard about them is exactly the kind of thing she does that gets her into trouble—but here she is, so. The way McKay's eyes find her across a trauma bay sometimes, not searching, just arriving, the way eyes arrive somewhere they have gotten used to going. The way McKay held her gaze on the roof this morning, steady and unbothered, like looking at Victoria was not something that required effort or explanation. The half-seconds. The ones that go one beat longer than they need to, where McKay starts to look away and then doesn't, and Victoria's whole chest does something she pretends not to notice.
And the touches. McKay is not careless with touch—Victoria has watched her long enough to know that, the way she is precise and considered about everything, including where her hands go and when. Which means the hands on Victoria's shoulder, warm and steady and gone before Victoria can decide what to do with it, are not accidental. The way McKay held her on the roof—so, so close, her chin tucked and her arms settled like she had thought about where to put them—was not nothing. The way Victoria could feel her breathing. The specific warmth of someone who runs a little hotter than average, before any point of contact has been made, the warmth Victoria has been quietly mapping without meaning to.
What if my student is McKay's version of a door she keeps shut because she has decided she is not allowed what's behind it. What if all the careful things McKay does around Victoria are the shape of something she won't say out loud. It's probably not true, Victoria tells herself, and her face is very warm and her eyes still sting from crying and she is making up stories and she knows it, she knows it—but she is so tired, and her heart is doing something ridiculous, and she cannot quite bring herself to stop.
☆
She changes out of her scrubs when the shift ends, packs her bag, and is almost to the exit—the July evening pink and warm through the glass, the kind of evening that has no business being this pretty after a day like this one—when she hears footsteps behind her.
"Victoria."
She turns.
McKay is still in her scrubs. The ponytail is structurally compromised, the shorter pieces at her nape doing entirely whatever they want, and she looks—tired, is the word, in a way that sits in the eyes and the set of the shoulders rather than anywhere dramatic. She stops a few feet away and looks at Victoria in the direct way she has, not assessing, just—present, the full weight of her attention landing without announcement, and Victoria's chest does the thing it has been doing all afternoon, which she is choosing, actively and deliberately, to ignore.
"I'm sorry," McKay says.
Victoria opens her mouth.
"Let me," McKay says, quiet.
She closes it.
"What I did today was out of line." She says it without softening the edges, without the kind of hedging that turns an apology into a negotiation. "You shouldn't have had to see that. I made it about my own—" A pause. Her jaw moves. "I made it about me instead of being there for you, and that wasn't fair. What Garcia implied—about me, about—" Another pause, shorter and harder. "That's not something you should have been in the middle of. I'm sorry."
Victoria is very still.
Here is the thing: she knows what apologies sound like. She has received them procedurally, in the clipped, efficient way that closes a matter and moves on—the apology as administrative function, box ticked, everyone's time accounted for. She is, in fact, quite practiced at receiving those and filing them appropriately and continuing her day. This is not that. This is McKay saying you like it's the subject of the sentence, like Victoria's experience of today is the actual thing being addressed and not a footnote to someone else's. Like what she saw and felt and was put in the middle of is worth the words.
Victoria has been waiting, she realizes—has been waiting a long time, longer than today—to be the subject of the sentence. She files that away immediately, before it can become anything she has to deal with right now.
"It's okay," she says.
"It's not."
"Cassie."
McKay looks at her. Something in her expression shifts—small and involuntary, the way a face moves when something lands directly on it—and Victoria watches it happen and feels it in her sternum like a struck chord.
"It's okay," Victoria says again, softer. "I'm okay."
McKay holds her gaze. Then she nods, once, a nod that is less agreement and more permission granted, like she has decided to let Victoria have this even though she doesn't entirely believe it. She steps forward, and her hand finds Victoria's arm just below the shoulder—fingers curling around it, warm and unhurried, like they know exactly where they are going and have taken their time getting there — and stays.
"I talked to Dana," she says. "And Garcia. It's—" A breath. "It's handled." Her hand shifts slightly on Victoria's arm, the grip loosening from something that was anchoring into something that is simply, quietly, present. "She had a hard day. I'm not—I'm not excusing it. But she has… things going on, and she doesn't know what to do with any of it, and you were there." She looks at Victoria steadily. "It still wasn't okay."
"I know."
"I know you know." And there—the corner of McKay's mouth, almost a smile, not quite, the real one that Victoria has been learning by heart since October without ever meaning to. "I had a hard day too." She says it the way you say something you have been carrying all day and are only now setting down, the words needing the specific weight of her own voice before they could become real. "Roxie—the patient I've been with since this morning. She's not going to make it. Her kids were in the waiting room and I—" Her thumb has started moving on Victoria's arm, slow and absent, the kind of thing that is probably happening below the level of conscious decision. "And there was a patient this afternoon who suffered years of missed diagnosis—and I keep—" She stops. Looks at the middle distance. "Yeah. A lot of things I couldn't fix today."
"I know," Victoria says. "I saw you with Roxie. This morning, before everything." A beat. The evening light is doing something very unfair through the glass. "I'm sorry."
McKay looks at her. The look is brief and a little unguarded, there and gone, like Victoria has said something she did not prepare herself to receive. "Thanks." Her thumb is still moving, slow circles against Victoria's arm. "I'm sorry to be putting all that on you."
"You're not putting it on me." Victoria says it before she has fully decided to, and it comes out certain, more certain than most things she has said today, and she can feel it costing something—some careful self-containment she has been carrying all rotation, the habit of making herself small and undemanding and easy to overlook. She meets McKay's eyes and doesn't look away from them. "I want to hear it."
McKay is looking at her. The silence between them is not uncomfortable—it is the specific silence of two people who have had a very long day and have run out of the energy required to fill space unnecessarily. McKay's expression, in that silence, is open in a way it hasn't been all day: something grateful in it, and something softer than that, something that Victoria can’t quite grasp—partly because she is tired and wrung out and her brain is running on fumes, and partly because, she thinks, she has simply never been looked at like this before.
"I don't want to be alone tonight," Victoria cuts through the silence, and immediately wishes she could take back approximately half of that sentence—not because she doesn't mean it, she means it completely, but because she said it in the voice she gets when she has run out of resources to sound normal, the voice that is slightly too raw and slightly too honest and very much not what she intended. Great. Excellent. Very smooth.
McKay hasn't moved. Her expression is doing the careful thing, the precise thing, and Victoria's eyes are doing something embarrassing in response to being looked at like that—filling up, which is unfair, she has already cried today, there is a reasonable limit—and she blinks hard and it doesn't entirely work, and she says, slightly desperately: "Sorry, I'm not—I'm fine, I'm just—"
"Hey." McKay's hand tightens on her arm. "Hey, it's okay."
"I'm not crying," Victoria says, which is technically still true for approximately three more seconds.
One tear escapes, which is mortifying, and she makes a sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sob and puts her free hand over her face, and McKay says "oh, hey—" in a voice that is soft in a way that makes it considerably worse, and then Victoria does something she will think about later: she steps forward and puts her arms around McKay, her face against McKay's shoulder, and holds on.
McKay goes still for one breath—half a second, the length of a decision—and then her arms come up around Victoria and her hand finds the back of her head and she says, quietly, into Victoria's hair: "Fuck. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you cry again."
"You didn't," Victoria says, muffled. "This is—I'm fine. This is fine. I do this."
"Yeah?"
"Occasionally." A pause. "More than occasionally today."
She feels McKay's chest move—a small, quiet sound, barely a laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. Her arms stay where they are.
They stand there for a moment, in the corridor with the evening through the glass, and Victoria's breathing evens out slowly and McKay doesn't rush it and doesn't say anything, which is, it turns out, exactly right.
Eventually Victoria pulls back, not far, and looks up at McKay, who is looking at her with the expression that Victoria has been trying to not assign meanings to all afternoon and is, she fully admits, failing at not assigning meanings to. She wipes her face with the back of her hand, which she is aware is not elegant.
"Big day, huh?" McKay chuckles, and Victoria appreciates the attempt at lightening up the mood.
"Big day," she agrees, and laughs—a real one this time, short and a little wrecked—and McKay's mouth does the thing again, the real smile.
"You eat anything since this morning?"
Victoria thinks about it. "...define eat."
McKay's eyebrows go up.
"I had—there was a granola bar at some point—"
McKay looks at her. "I have food at mine. Not much, but—" She pauses, something in her expression shifting into the uncertain version, the shy one. "If you wanted. I was going to head home anyway, so it's—"
"Yes," Victoria says. Too fast. She knows it's too fast. "I mean—yeah. If that's—yes. That would be—" She stops herself before she can finish that sentence with incredible or something equally damning. "Yes."
McKay is looking at her with an expression that is trying not to be amused and mostly failing. "Okay."
"Okay," Victoria says, with considerably more composure than she actually feels.
McKay’s hand slides from Victoria's arm to her hand, slowly, fingers settling between Victoria's and staying there, and Victoria's heart does something she is choosing not to examine right now in the interest of continuing to function. They stand in the hallway for a moment with the July evening through the glass, pink going gold, the shift finally over, everyone else already gone.
Victoria thinks: she has been building this story for a year. Adding to it, revising it, cross-referencing the source material the way she does with everything she doesn't fully understand yet—and she is, she thinks, getting close to the part where it stops being a story she is writing and starts being one she is living. She doesn't know yet what the next chapter says.
She finds, standing here with McKay's hand warm in hers and the evening doing what it is doing through the glass, that she is very interested in finding out.
McKay squeezes her hand once, and they go.
☆
The Thai place is a ten-minute detour that McKay suggests without ceremony— actually, there's a place on Millvale, if you're okay with that—and Victoria says yes before the sentence is finished, which she is aware says something about her but is too tired to examine. They order at the counter, McKay knowing what she wants without looking at the menu, and Victoria spends forty-five seconds studying the board before ordering the same thing McKay ordered, which McKay notices and does not comment on, which Victoria appreciates more than she can say.
They eat in the car, containers balanced on knees, the July evening going dark and warm around them. Victoria is hungrier than she realized—the kind of hunger that only announces itself once food is actually present—and she eats without self-consciousness, which is also something she notices about herself and files away. Something about McKay makes the performance requirements drop. She doesn't know when that started. She suspects October.
"Good?" McKay asks.
"Very," Victoria says, around a mouthful, and McKay's mouth does the corner thing and she looks back out the windshield.
The city passes. The radio is on low. Victoria watches McKay's hands on the wheel—the square knuckles, the forearm tightening through a turn—and thinks about all the times she has watched those hands work, the way they know exactly where to go and how much force to use, and she stops thinking about it because that line of thought has a destination she is not ready for yet.
"Harrison's at Chad's?" she asks, because she needs to say something.
"Through the weekend." McKay glances at her briefly. The corner of her mouth moves. "So."
"So," Victoria agrees, which means nothing, and McKay looks back at the road.
They drive the rest of the way without talking, and it is not uncomfortable—it is the specific quiet of two people who have spent twelve hours in a building full of noise and are grateful, simultaneously and without discussing it, for the absence of it.
☆
McKay's apartment is on the third floor of a building that is aggressively normal—no doorman, carpet in the stairwell, a bicycle locked to the railing on the second landing—and Victoria follows her up in the warm dim light and thinks: this is where she lives. Not the hospital. Here, in this stairwell, with takeout containers in a paper bag by the door and her keys already out before they reach the door.
The apartment opens up amber—kitchen lamp on low, the guitar against the wall, Harrison's door with the nameplate she has seen before—and Victoria steps inside and takes her shoes off and is, for a moment, completely still.
It smells like McKay's apartment. She has been here before, twice, for Harrison-related things that were entirely professional, and she remembers noticing it then and choosing not to think about it and she is not choosing that now. It smells like coffee and something warm underneath and the specific quality of a place where someone lives without caring what it looks like to other people.
"Bathroom's down the hall," McKay says, from the kitchen, already moving. "Towels in the cabinet under the sink. You can shower first if you want."
Victoria looks at the back of her head. The ponytail is almost entirely dissolved now, the shorter pieces doing every possible thing at once, and McKay is wearing her scrubs and her gold chain and she is standing in her own kitchen in the amber light and she looks—Victoria does not have a word for it that isn't embarrassingly large. She goes to shower.
☆
The bathroom is small and clean and there is a row of things on the shelf above the sink—McKay's things, specifically McKay's, the brands Victoria now recognizes the way you recognize things you have been looking at without meaning to—and Victoria showers quickly because she is exhausted and because standing in McKay's bathroom for longer than necessary feels like a line she should not cross while still in possession of her faculties.
She borrows a t-shirt from the stack McKay has left on the counter with a help yourself said through the closed door, and a pair of sweatpants that are too long and have to be rolled twice at the ankle. She looks at herself in the mirror for a moment. Her eyes are still slightly puffy from crying. Her hair is damp. She is wearing McKay's clothes and standing in McKay's bathroom and the shift ended forty minutes ago and somewhere in the next few hours she is going to have to figure out what she is doing here.
You already know what you're doing here, the devil on her shoulder says.
She ignores that.
☆
McKay showers after, and Victoria sits on the couch with her feet tucked under her and tries not to think.
She fails, obviously.
Here is the problem with being alone in McKay's apartment while McKay is in the shower: there is nothing to look at that doesn't have information in it. The guitar she's never heard played. Harrison's drawings on the fridge, the ones she has seen before but is seeing differently now, the way a room looks different when you understand you are in something rather than adjacent to it. The book face-down on the coffee table, spine cracked, a habit Victoria finds privately unbearable in other people and is choosing, right now, not to find unbearable in McKay. The gold chain on the counter where McKay left it before getting in the shower.
She is running on two hours of sleep and the specific adrenaline of a day that contained, by her count, approximately six separate catastrophes, and she is wearing McKay's clothes and the shift is over and Garcia said what she said and McKay's hand closed on her collar and Victoria has been turning that over since three this afternoon and she is—she is so tired of not knowing. She is so tired of the careful management of what she knows and what she is allowed to say and what she is allowed to want.
Ask her, the tired devil on her shoulder says.
Don't, says the sensible angel.
The tired devil is winning.
☆
McKay comes back in a soft t-shirt and her own sweatpants, hair damp and loose around her shoulders—Victoria has never seen it fully down before, she realizes, and this is apparently the night for firsts because something about it lands directly in her sternum—and she stops in the kitchen doorway and looks at Victoria on the couch and says: "You're still awake."
"You were gone for only fifteen minutes."
"Thought you’d have been passed out by then."
"I’m not even tired," Victoria counters, which is not true, and McKay gives her a look that knows it's not true and doesn't push it.
She sits beside her on the couch, not the other end, the middle—close enough that Victoria is aware of the warmth of her, the specific warmth she filed away in the corridor that she has been trying to unfile ever since—and they sit for a moment in the quiet of the apartment.
"Let’s watch it," McKay says. She stands and holds out a hand and Victoria takes it, and McKay leads her to the window.
☆
It is past midnight. The Fourth of July officially started twenty minutes ago and Pittsburgh knows it—there are fireworks going off in at least three directions, the good kind and the illegal backyard kind both, the sky doing things above the river. They stand at the window, shoulders nearly touching, and watch.
Victoria watches the fireworks for approximately forty-five seconds before she stops watching the fireworks.
She watches McKay instead. The way each burst of light crosses her face—the jaw, the chain she's put back on, the particular quality of McKay when she is not performing anything for anyone. She looks tired, still, in the way that doesn't go away with a shower, the tiredness of a long day that contained Roxie's kids in a waiting room and a PCOS patient and a hallway and Dana's reprimand and all of it. But she also looks… settled. Like she has put something down. Like she is, standing here at this window with Victoria in her apartment and the city making its noise below, okay.
Victoria looks at her face in the light of a firework going red and gold and thinks: ask her. You are twenty years old and you have been waiting since October and you are so tired and there is no one here and ask her.
"About what Garcia said," she says.
McKay goes still. Not dramatically—she doesn't move, doesn't flinch, nothing that would read from the outside as anything other than continuing to look at the window. But Victoria is standing close enough to feel it. The quality of the air between them changes.
"Victoria—"
"I'm not—I'm not asking you to confirm it." Victoria's voice is coming out steadier than she feels, which she is grateful for. "I'm just—Garcia said something and you reacted the way you did, and I've been thinking about it all afternoon and I want to know if I'm—" She stops. Steadies. "I want to know if I've been making it up."
McKay is quiet. Outside, something large and gold goes off over the river.
"You haven't been making it up," McKay says.
Victoria's heart does something. She keeps her voice level. "Okay."
"But—" McKay turns from the window, and Victoria turns too, and they are facing each other now, close, the fireworks doing what they are doing behind McKay's shoulder. Her expression is careful. The professional version, the attending version, the one that means she has made a decision and is going to say something that closes a matter. "It doesn't—that doesn't mean anything can happen. You understand that. You're my student, Victoria. You're twenty years old. You're—" She stops. Something moves briefly in her face. "I care about you. I do. And that's exactly why—I think some of what you're feeling might be about the attention. The praise. I'm naturally—" She pauses, choosing the word. "I'm naturally a certain way with people I'm invested in, and I know your mother isn't—I know she doesn't—" She stops again, reorganizes. "I just think you might be mistaking what this is."
Victoria looks at her.
The thing is—and she knows this, she has known it since Santos said she had mommy issues and she choked on her drink and Whitaker patted her back—the thing is that McKay is not entirely wrong. There is a version of what she is saying that is true. Victoria is aware of the version. She has examined it thoroughly and at length, on night shifts, in the margins of charts, in the specific sleepless hours between two and four when everything feels like evidence of something. She has held the theory up to the light and looked at it from every angle.
It doesn't account for everything. It doesn't account for them, specifically, for the way McKay looked at her the first week, before there was any praise to mistake for something else. It doesn't account for the half-seconds. It doesn't account for the coffee left without comment, or my student, or any of the careful things McKay has been doing for months that a person only does when they are trying very hard not to do something else.
Victoria knows the difference between wanting a mentor and wanting a person.
"I see," she says. Her voice has gone flat, the specific flatness of someone who is hurt and is not going to show it, and she finds that she doesn’t care that she sounds unpleasant. "So you're saying I have issues."
"I'm not—that's not what I said."
"That's what you meant."
"Victoria—"
"No." She can hear the edge in her own voice, the thing under the flatness that is not flat at all. "You don't get to decide what I feel. You don't get to look at my mother and my age and my—whatever, my neediness—and tell me what's real. You've been doing that since forever. Deciding what's appropriate for me to feel, what I'm mature enough for, what I'm actually experiencing versus what I think I'm experiencing." She is aware that her voice is doing something it doesn't usually do, something that is either anger or something very close to it, and she doesn't stop it. "That's the same thing everyone does. That's exactly what everyone does to me. I thought you were different."
McKay is very still.
"You are doing what everyone does," Victoria says, quieter. "You're looking at my age and deciding the story. You're not even looking at me."
"I am looking at you," McKay says, and her voice has changed. "Victoria, I am—I look at you all the time." She stops, like she has said more than she meant to. Something in her jaw tightens. "That's the problem."
"Then why—"
"Because it's wrong." The word comes out with force, the first crack in the careful surface, and McKay's hand goes to the back of her own neck. "You’re my student. You’re twenty years old. I’m your resident and I’m forty-two and I have a twelve-year-old kid and I have been—" She stops. Her jaw is tight. Her eyes are very bright. "I have been trying so hard to be good. To not be the person who—" She breathes. "I know what I want, Victoria. That has never been the question. I've known what I want since—for a long time. And I am trying to not take it."
Victoria looks at her. At the jaw. At the hands. At McKay's eyes, which are not looking away from her, which have never been looking away from her.
"You have no idea how much I fucking want it," she says. "I'm just trying to be good and—"
Victoria kisses her.
It is not elegant. She closes the distance before she has fully decided to and McKay makes a sharp sound of surprise and their teeth knock together—ow—and Victoria makes a small mortified noise against her mouth and starts to pull back and McKay's hands come up immediately, both of them, finding Victoria's face and holding it there, and then McKay kisses her back.
Oh.
It is nothing like she has practiced in her head. The practiced version was smooth and certain and did not involve anyone's teeth. This is better than the practiced version by an order of magnitude she does not currently have the cognitive capacity to calculate. McKay's lips are warm and she tastes like the evening, like the shift finally being over, like ten months of Victoria memorizing the way she laughs and the way she holds a door and the way she says Victoria when she means something by it—and Victoria opens her mouth and McKay makes a low sound that goes directly into Victoria's bloodstream and she grabs the front of McKay's t-shirt with both fists because she needs something to hold onto or she is going to come apart before anything has actually happened.
McKay pulls back. Just barely—their mouths are still almost touching, both of them into each other.
"Victoria—" Her voice is rough. Wrecked, almost.
"Don't," Victoria says. "Don't apologize. Don't tell me this is wrong. Don't—"
McKay kisses her again. Deeper this time, her hands sliding from Victoria's face to tilt her head back, and Victoria goes with it entirely, follows wherever she is being led, and the part of her brain that will not stop romanticizing says—she's thought about this before. The specific way she is doing this means she has thought about this before—while the rest of her stops functioning.
McKay kisses the corner of her mouth. Then the center. Then the other corner, slow, like she is learning the shape of her. Her thumbs trace Victoria's jaw and her fingers are warm in Victoria's hair and Victoria makes a sound she would be embarrassed about in any other context, and McKay makes a low answering sound that Victoria feels everywhere.
She has read about kissing. She has, in fact, read quite a lot about kissing, in the specific research-adjacent way she approaches things she has not yet experienced. None of it prepared her for the specific wet warmth of McKay's mouth, for the way McKay's tongue traces her lips like asking a question and Victoria answers it without thinking, for the way the sound their mouths make is slightly obscene and she finds she does not mind at all. She tugs McKay closer by the t-shirt and McKay comes and they are pressed together now, breathing each other, and Victoria's heart is doing something she is not going to examine because if she examines it she will have to acknowledge that it has been doing it since the first day.
McKay nips at her lower lip, teeth catching gently—Victoria gasps, the sensation sharp and bright—and then soothes it with her tongue, and Victoria's hands go from the t-shirt to McKay's shoulders to McKay's neck because she cannot decide where to put them and everywhere she puts them is new information she is trying to process simultaneously. She is overwhelmed. She is completely, utterly overwhelmed, and she has never wanted to be overwhelmed so badly before.
When they finally break apart—really apart, both needing air—Victoria is panting. She can feel her own pulse in her lips. McKay's mouth is flushed and her eyes are dark and she is looking at Victoria with the fully unmanaged expression, nothing professional left in it, and something in that look makes Victoria's throat tight in a way that has nothing to do with the kiss and everything to do with the ten months before it.
"Okay," McKay says, quiet. Her thumb brushes Victoria's cheekbone.
"Okay," Victoria parrots.
McKay looks at her. Searching, specific, the way she looks at things she is being careful with. "Have you—" She stops. Starts again. "Is this—"
"Ffirst time," Victoria says. She has decided she is not going to be embarrassed about this. She is going to name it plainly, the way she names things she has decided to stop being afraid of. "All of it. First time."
Something moves through McKay's face—warm and complicated and something underneath both—and she takes Victoria's hand, brings it up, presses her lips to Victoria's knuckles. "Okay," she says, against her hand. "Okay, baby. Come here."
Baby. Victoria files it, does not say anything about it. Cassie leads her down the hall and Victoria follows, and when the bedroom door closes behind them the only light comes from outside—the moon, and the city doing its Fourth of July thing, the intermittent bloom of fireworks going off somewhere over the river painting the walls gold and then gone.
Cassie turns to her and does not hurry anything. That is the first thing Victoria notices—the absence of hurry, the way Cassie moves like they have all the time there is.
She reaches out and tucks a damp strand of hair behind Victoria's ear, slow, and just looks at her in the shifting light—the specific look, the one with nothing held back in it—and Victoria makes herself stay under it. A firework goes off somewhere over the river and for a moment Cassie's face is lit red, then dark again. Her heart is rioting. Her hands are not entirely steady. She is twenty years old and she is in Cassie McKay's bedroom and she said first time out loud and Cassie said baby and she is so far past the point of managing any of this that managing it is no longer a concept that applies.
"I'm nervous," she says. Because she said she was going to name things plainly. "I just—I've never done this before."
Cassie's mouth curves in a soft smile. "I know." Her thumb traces along Victoria's jaw, slow. "I've got you."
I've got you. The phrase lands somewhere so specific and so deep that Victoria's eyes sting with it, which she was not expecting. She blinks. Cassie's thumb keeps moving.
"Tell me if you want to stop," Cassie says. "Yeah?"
"I will."
"Promise me."
"I promise." Victoria holds her eyes. "I promise, Cass."
Something moves through Cassie's face at that—the name, Cass, the shortened version that Victoria has never used before—and she exhales slowly and reaches for the hem of Victoria's—her own—t-shirt, drawing it up and off, unhurried, and Victoria lifts her arms and lets herself be undressed and tries not to think too hard about the fact that she is being undressed by Cassie McKay in Cassie McKay's bedroom or she will short-circuit before anything else happens.
Cassie looks at her, and she’s looking the same way she has been looking at Victoria for months, except now there is nothing requiring it to be something else. The light from outside does something warm to everything and Victoria is aware, with excruciating specificity, of being seen. Of being looked at by someone whose looking has always mattered most.
"You're so pretty," Cassie says, quiet, almost to herself. Her voice has the quality of something said before she could stop it.
Victoria's face goes very warm. "I'm n—"
"Hey." Cassie tips her chin up with two fingers. "Look at me."
Victoria looks at her.
"You're so pretty," Cassie says again, holding her eyes, making sure Victoria receives it rather than deflects it. "I've thought so since I met you." The corner of her mouth does the thing. "You can be embarrassed about that later."
Victoria laughs—short and slightly wrecked—and reaches for the hem of Cassie's t-shirt, which gives her hands something to do. She works it up and Cassie lifts her arms and lets it go, and Victoria watches it happen and doesn't say anything about her own unsteadiness, which Cassie doesn't say anything about either, which Victoria appreciates more than she can express. She pulls the t-shirt the rest of the way off Cassie's shoulders and stops.
Cassie's chain catches the lamplight. Victoria reaches out and takes it between her fingers—the warm metal, the specific weight, the chain she has watched settle at Cassie's collar across a thousand corridors—and holds it for a moment. Cassie goes absolutely still.
"I think about this," Victoria says, before she can stop herself. "Kinda all the time.”
Cassie is quiet for a moment. The look in her face is the complicated warm one, the one that has something underneath it that Victoria is only now being allowed to name. She takes Victoria's wrist gently and turns her hand over and presses her lips to the inside of it and Victoria's breath goes short.
Then Cassie draws her in and kisses her again, slow, and Victoria closes her eyes.
Cassie's hands are warm and certain and she moves like she knows everything—where to put her mouth, how much pressure, when to slow down, what to do next—and Victoria, who has spent her whole life being good at things through the mechanism of paying close attention and being willing to revise, pays close attention. She files everything. Every place Cassie's mouth moves, every sound Cassie makes, every shift of weight and angle and intention. She stays in it completely.
Cassie's lips move to her jaw. Her neck. The particular spot below her ear that Victoria did not know about until approximately twelve seconds ago and is now aware she will think about for the rest of her life. Victoria's hands go into Cassie's hair—the loose dark red hair she has never been allowed to touch before, which is softer than she expected and she expected it to be very soft—and she grips it and Cassie makes a sound against her throat that reverberates through Victoria's whole body.
"Good?" Cassie says, against her pulse point.
"Yes," Victoria says. Her voice is not her voice. "Yes—Cassie, don't stop—"
"Not stopping." Cassie's mouth stays where it is. One hand moves along Victoria's side, her ribs, learning slowly, without hurry. "Tell me if anything's not—"
"Everything is," Victoria says. "Everything's good, I just—" She doesn't know how to ask. She has never had to ask for this specific thing before and she doesn't have the language yet. "More. I need—more."
Cassie pulls back just enough to look at her. The dark eyes, the flushed mouth, the chain falling at her collar. "Okay," she says, low. "Vadi. Slow down."
Victoria's chest does something complicated and warm. She conveys her feelings about slowing down by pulling Cassie back down, which makes Cassie laugh—a real one, low and warm and surprised, against Victoria's collarbone—and Victoria holds the laugh like something she has been given.
"Can I—" Cassie starts, her hand at the waistband of the sweatpants, and stops. Waits.
"Yes," Victoria says. "Yes, please."
Cassie's hands are gentle and unhurried and everywhere they go Victoria's skin lights up like she has never lived in her own body before, which is approximately how it feels. She is trying to commit all of it to memory—the specific warmth, the weight, the way Cassie's hands are larger than hers and cover more—but she is simultaneously completely unable to focus on anything because the sensation keeps overriding the narration and she has never experienced that before. She has always been able to narrate. The narration has always been there. It is not there right now. There is only this.
She is aware, also, of Cassie's body in the light. She has been thinking about it in the abstract and in the specific for long enough that seeing it is almost vertiginous—the freckles scattered across her chest and shoulders, the ones Victoria has caught glimpses of in the locker room and immediately looked away from, which she is not looking away from now. Strong arms, the definition of them; the soft weight of her hips and waist, so different from the precision with which her hands move. A small scar at the navel—circular, faded, the kind left by a piercing removed years ago—which Victoria looks at and thinks, involuntarily: there are entire years of her I don't know yet. She wants to know them. She wants to know all of it.
She is so hungry, she realizes. She has always been hungry—for understanding, for information, for the exact shape of things—and this is the same hunger and not the same hunger at all, arriving in her body as heat and intention, and she thinks: I could eat her alive. I think I actually could. I think I would not feel bad about it.
"You're so pretty," Cassie says, again, low—she keeps saying it, like it keeps escaping her—and her mouth moves lower, and Victoria's back arches.
"Cassie—"
"I've got you." Cassie's hand presses flat against Victoria's stomach, steadying. "I've got you, baby. Breathe."
Victoria breathes. The instruction helps more than it should.
Cassie's mouth finds her breast and stays there, licking and nipping and sucking, and something builds low in Victoria's body that she has no prior reference point for, a pressure that is not uncomfortable but is urgent and insistent and getting more so. Her hands are in Cassie's hair and she is gripping it harder than she intends to and Cassie makes the low sound again, the one that means something, and Victoria thinks distantly: I would have waited years for this. It would have been worth every one of them.
"You're doing so well," Cassie says, against her. "So well, Victoria."
The praise lands. Victoria knew it would—has known, in the abstract, that it would, has been aware of this specific vulnerability for longer than she has been willing to admit—but knowing and experiencing are different things, and the experiencing of it is that the words go somewhere so deep she feels them in her sternum, in her throat, behind her eyes. So well. You are doing so well.
She thinks, briefly: fuck. Cassie was right. Cassie sees this in her, has always seen this in her, and it is not a pathology to be managed around—it is just a thing that is true, a hunger that is real, and Cassie is not holding it over her or using it to keep her at distance. Cassie is just—feeding it.
She doesn't feel guilty about it. She feels it go all the way down, into the exact place it was always going to go, and she lets it.
"Cass—" Her voice breaks on it. "I need—please, I need—"
"I know." Cassie's mouth moves to her jaw, her cheek. "Tell me, baby."
"I don't—" She doesn't have the words. "I don't know how to ask."
"That's okay." Cassie pulls back to look at her and her hand moves, slow and meaningful, asking without asking, and Victoria's hips lift off the bed and she makes a sound she has never made before.
"Yes," Victoria says, before Cassie can check in. "Yes, that—yes."
Cassie's fingers move and Victoria's whole awareness collapses to a single point. She is aware, in the specific hyper-conscious way of someone experiencing something completely new, of how wet she is—embarrassingly, viscerally wet—and then Cassie makes a quiet sound, something low and a little undone, and says: "God, baby."
The embarrassment and the want collide somewhere in Victoria's chest and produce something she does not have a name for. She can’t help but whine a little. Cassie's hand moves and she whines more.
Cassie watches her face. Pays attention the way she pays attention to everything that matters and Victoria is aware of being studied, of being read, and she finds she does not mind being readable.
"Can I—" A pause, the hand shifting, asking. "Tell me if—"
"Yes," Victoria says. "Yes."
It is a stretch—new, significant, something she has to breathe through, and Cassie stills completely and waits, which is the exact right thing to do, and gradually the stretch becomes something else entirely. "You can move," she manages.
Cassie moves. Slowly at first, watching her face, learning what makes her grip the sheets and what makes her pull Cassie closer. She adjusts constantly—angle, pressure, pace—and Victoria thinks distantly that Cassie approaches this the same way she approaches everything: with full attention, with patience, with the specific certainty of someone who does not do things carelessly.
"There," Victoria says, and doesn't have to say it twice.
The pressure builds in waves, each one larger, and Victoria is dimly aware that she is saying Cassie and please and don't stop in various combinations, and Cassie says I've got you, I've got you in the voice she uses for things she means completely.
"You're doing so good," Cassie says, low, barely sound. "So good, baby."
Victoria comes apart. It is full-body and loud and she grips Cassie's shoulders hard enough to leave marks and says her name in a voice she has never heard herself use before—Cassie, Cassie—and Cassie stays with her through all of it, patient and entirely present, until the very last tremor.
She opens her eyes after an unknown amount of time and finds the ceiling. The sheets. The July night coming in through the window. Her own breathing, ragged and slowing. Cassie's hand, warm and still now, against her.
Victoria stares at the ceiling and thinks: oh.
After a moment Cassie comes up beside her, propped on one arm, and looks at her with the soft open expression and Victoria looks back at her and thinks about the chain and the hallway and my student like a promise and ten months of shy touches and stolen glances and arrives, finally, at the correct conclusion about what kind of story this has been all along.
"Good?" Cassie says.
"So good," Victoria says. And then, because she is herself and cannot help it: "Crazy good. I mean—it's not like I can compare but—yeah. Really good."
Cassie laughs—real and full, the one that changes her whole face—and Victoria watches it happen and feels warm from the inside out.
"Your turn?" Victoria asks.
Cassie's expression shifts. "You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to." Victoria sits up. "I want to. I've been wanting to." She meets Cassie's eyes and holds them. "Can you let me try?"
Something in Cassie's face does the complicated honest thing, the one she keeps so carefully managed everywhere else, and she settles back slowly. Victoria looks at her in the light—the strong arms and the soft waist and the chain still at her throat and the freckled shoulders and all of it—and the wanting moves through her again, different now. Purposeful. I want to know what undoes her. I want to understand this completely.
She works her way down, unhurried, because she has decided she is allowed to be unhurried, has decided that she is allowed to take up space in this, and because she has been hungry for a long time and she is not going to rush through a meal. She presses her mouth to Cassie's collarbone. The freckles scattered there, the specific ones—she has been memorizing them since the first day from a responsible professional distance and she is memorizing them now from no distance at all. She presses her mouth to several of them specifically, which she is aware is perhaps a lot, and finds she cannot bring herself to care. She files each one as conquered territory.
Cassie's chest rises and falls under her. Her breath is already uneven.
Victoria moves lower. She learns the soft weight of Cassie's waist, her hands settling there, holding it as a fact—the specific way Cassie is built, the difference between how precisely her hands move and how soft her hips actually are. She has been thinking about those hips in a vague and unexamined way since sometime in the fall and the reality of them, the actual warmth under her palms, is better and more grounding than anything she imagined. The small scar at the navel—she finds it with her mouth and pauses there, lips against the faded ridge of it, and Cassie's breath catches above her. I used to be like that, she imagines Cassie saying. I used to be young, used to have a piercing, used to be reckless, used to be twenty myself. The thought opens something complicated in Victoria's chest that she files for later. She presses her lips to the scar, brief and specific, and moves on.
Then her hands find Cassie's thighs. The inside of the left one—she bites there, teeth first, because she is hungry and this is allowed—and Cassie makes a sharp sound above her, not quite surprise, not quite reprimand, something that means oh, you're like that, and Victoria thinks: yes. I'm exactly like that.
She moves her mouth to where she is going.
Oh. It’s… warm, hot even. She is wet, slick and salt, heat against Victoria's mouth immediately, and the first thing Victoria thinks is that she does not find this strange at all—she had wondered, in the abstract, if she would—and the second thing she thinks is nothing coherent because there is a taste, salty and specific and utterly distinct, this is Cassie, this is what Cassie tastes like, and she does not want to file it away. She wants to stay in it until she has learned it completely.
She is aware that it is getting all over her face. She does not care at all.
She finds something that works by the mechanism of paying close attention and being willing to revise, the same way she finds out about everything that matters. Cassie's hips shift and she does it again, on purpose this time, and Cassie makes a sound that is low and broken and lodges in Victoria's chest like something taking up permanent residence. That, she thinks, with considerable ferocity. More of that.
She makes a sound of her own, involuntary and muffled, and does not manage it. She is hungry and this is a meal and she is staying in every bite of it.
"Vic—" Cassie says, breathless, and the shortened name does something to her chest that she is going to think about for a very long time.
She doesn't hurry. She is learning. She stays entirely focused—Cassie's breathing, the way her hands grip and release, every sound and what precedes it—and the rest of the world does not exist.
Cassie's hand tightens in Victoria's hair and her hips shift and she pulls Victoria up by the shoulders—come here, come here—and Victoria goes, and Cassie kisses her, deep and urgent, without any remaining pretense of composure, her hands gripping Victoria's face, kissing the taste of herself off Victoria's mouth without hesitation, and Victoria thinks: I knew it. I knew this is what it would be.
Cassie breaks the kiss. Her mouth moves to Victoria's shoulder—pressing there, warm and open—and then her nose, slow, dragging along the curve of it, and she says against the skin, rough and low, barely meant to be heard:
"You're so soft."
She pauses. The kind of pause that precedes something larger.
"God, you're so—"
She stops. Victoria can feel the exhale against her shoulder, warm and long. Cassie's hand presses flat against her ribs—steadying herself, grounding—and she doesn't finish it. Victoria knows what the sentence was. Feels the weight of it pressing behind her sternum.
Then she becomes aware, gradually, of Cassie shifting against her—a slow pressure, Cassie's hips against Victoria's thigh, not quite subtle, like she is trying to be subtle and isn't managing it. Victoria goes very still. Processes this.
"What do I—" she starts.
"Here." Cassie takes her hand, moves it, guides her fingers into position. "Inside, and fold them—just—" She stops. Her breath catches. "Yeah. Yeah. Like that."
Victoria does it again, more carefully, reading every signal the way she reads everything that matters. "Good?" she asks.
Cassie makes a sound that is not a word. Victoria takes this as a yes and gives more—more pressure, more intention—and Cassie's head tips back and she says, quiet and wrecked and almost to herself: "I used to be like that."
Victoria stills for one breath. "Like what?"
Cassie shakes her head. Something in her face is open and undefended and slightly helpless—someone briefly outside themselves, seeing something in another person that exceeds the moment, wonder and grief arriving together, the two indistinguishable at close range. Her hand moves, slow, along Victoria's side.
"Eager," she says. Rough and honest. "It's nice."
It is not a complete sentence, but it is the most honest thing Cassie has said all night and they both know it.
Victoria keeps going. Cassie's breathing gets shorter, her hand gripping the sheets, and then she comes with a sound that is barely sound at all—ah, ah, fuck—her whole body going taut and then loose, the long shudder of it moving through her from her shoulders down.
Victoria slows. Stills. Stays with her until she is completely finished.
Then she looks up.
Cassie's eyes are closed. Her mouth is open, curved into something that is not quite a smile but is close to one—the specific expression of someone who has thoroughly, completely let go. Her dark red hair is damp at the temples and stuck to her cheek and her face is flushed and she is the most unguarded Victoria has ever seen her, and Victoria reaches up and moves the hair away from her face, slow and careful.
Cassie exhales. Long and slow.
"Geez," she says, and her voice is still wrecked, still breathed-out and loose. "That was good."
Victoria looks at her. At the jaw, finally unclenched. At the chain catching the lamplight. At this specific version of Cassie Cassie that Victoria suspects very few people have been allowed to see.
"Yeah," Victoria says. "It was."
☆
She cries a little, after. She doesn't plan it. It arrives the way it arrived in the hallway—not from anything bad but from the release of something that has been held at very high pressure for a very long time. Ten months of wanting and carrying and holding herself together, given somewhere to go. She turns her face into Cassie's shoulder and cries quietly, and Cassie's arm tightens around her and her hand finds Victoria's hair.
"Not bad," Victoria clarifies, into her shoulder. "Just—a lot."
"I know," Cassie says. "I know." Her hand moves, slow and steady, in Victoria's hair. "You're okay."
Victoria wipes her face on Cassie's shoulder. "I'm getting you wet."
"It's fine."
"Sorry."
"Victoria." Cassie's voice is warm. "It's fine."
They lie in the warm dark, the city doing its late-night thing outside the open window, and Victoria listens to Cassie's heartbeat under her ear, steady and unhurried, and does not think about anything.
She is so tired. Her eyes hurt. The shift ended—she doesn't even know how long ago. Cassie's hand is warm and still in her hair.
She falls asleep without deciding to.
The last thing she registers is Cassie pressing her lips, brief and warm, to the top of her head, and saying something very quietly that Victoria is too far gone to fully hear.