Chapter Text
As Mel stared listlessly at Maria von Trapp, she started to wonder if an escape would have been better than a lukewarm goodbye.
An escape would have laid the blame of disappointment entirely at her feet, a symptom of her immaturity, her predisposition to fantasy, her inability to ever feel satisfied with the real thing, rather than on the unchangeable fact of circumstance: things hadn’t been normal between them for a while.
In the last two months, they’d played their part well. ‘Mel and Langdon,’ ‘Langdon and Mel,’ work besties. Nothing could have shaken the inexplicable rhythm they found working on a patient together. He still tagged along on occasion to one of her biweekly visits to Becca at Middle Hill, a cadence Mel finally settled into after an overbearing daily visit schedule prompted an outburst from Becca. (After some reflection, she could see where that had been a bit much).
But their out of work extracurriculars, like the occasional coffee run before a shift, or a walk in the park so Frank could give his dog the chance to run freely (his house had only a tiny, city backyard), stopped completely after Dana’s birthday party. After Abby threw cold water on whatever had been kindling between them.
It took some reflection, wading through low self-esteem and self-doubt, to see that what she was suffering was not entirely unreciprocated. Even Abbot had implied Frank had feelings for her—and he was not the kind of man to tell someone a white lie to spare their feelings.
That night had been the first crack in a widening fissure, and as Frank slowly drifted away from her on fractured rock, she saw the same restrained, desperate look in her eye reflected in his.
His departure from PTMC was of course, to her, the most significant, but he was sharing it with Samira. Mel had always hoped she and Samira could be friends, she had been Mel’s second closest coworker, but they never did seem to get over the rigid conventions of the job to form a real friendship. Even that goodbye was more sincere, a kind parting relayed by Samira through a tight hug: “Mel, I’ll miss you! Please call if you ever need anything!”
Her eyes kept finding him all day, embraced in hugs with Princess, Dr. McKay, Dr. Henderson. Misty-eyed in a near death grip by Dana, as she lowly whispered to him. Every time Mel tried to approach him to take her turn, he dodged her and avoided her eye.
She finally caught up to him at the lockers. He had on a black Steelers hoodie, jeans, sneakers. Civilian Frank, a person she hardly knew anymore, if she ever did.
From the moment she said, “Dr. Langdon?”, she knew she had made a mistake. She should have bided her time, maybe even stalked him to catch him walking to his car, found a more private moment than the lockers at shift change, with others milling about around them under the harsh, unforgiving fluorescents.
He had a blank expression on his face. “Mel.”
Retreat, retreat, retreat, everything within her screamed. “I just—I wanted to say goodbye. And good luck, with… everything.”
He shut his locker and turned to her, slinging his backpack more firmly onto one shoulder. “Thank you, Mel.”
“Becca’s really going to miss you,” she tried.
“Hah,” he said. “Her goodbye card has a prime seat in the moving boxes.”
Mel smiled tightly, the image of moving boxes momentarily constricting her throat. “She’ll love to hear that.”
He grinned sadly, but said nothing.
“Well, goodbye!” Mel exclaimed, charging at him and pulling him into a light, awkward hug, frankly, no more than a back-pat, so brief she pulled away before he could even wrap his arms around her.
The unexpected movement caused his backpack to fall off his shoulder into the crook of his elbow. “Shoot, sorry.”
He chuckled, securing it back on his shoulder. “Happens.”
She backed away. The awkwardness was nearly suffocating, she didn’t even relish her final glance at him. With an awkward wave of the hand, she said, “‘Bye, Frank.”
“‘Bye, Mel,” he said, but she’d already turned her back.
That was it. The only great love she’d ever had, and might ever have again, sent off with a back pat.
Enviously she eyed Maria von Trapp, with her straw hat and rigid grey dress, guitar in hand, as she tiptoed back to the abbey, slamming the door on a house full of memories. Memories of kinship, longing, love, protected from the corrosive rot of a goodbye.
The beautiful Julie Andrews didn’t need a spread of Chinese food, for the second night in a row, to cure her heartbreak. She only needed to slip away into the night, back to a life of cloistered devotion in the Austrian countryside.
It was a far cry from Mel’s cloister: in-window air conditioner churning noisily, attempting to fend off the oppressive July heat and humidity, wet laundry hanging on any free piece of furniture, since her apartment complex’s shared dryer finally went kaput, Mel herself lying prone on the couch, so crazed with loneliness and pain, she was hurling grumbled insults at a children’s movie on the TV and felt about ready to wind up her arm and throw an egg roll at it.
At least a flash summer storm had hit and rain pattered loudly against the window, the living room dark with only an incandescent lamp in the corner lighting the room. A dazzling summer sunset would have just been insulting.
As the movie’s intermission began to roll and Mel reached for the remote to fast-forward, there was a knock at the door. She nearly jumped out of her skin, dropping the remote. She sat up and grabbed it from under the coffee table, hand to her heart to calm its wild pounding, and paused the movie so she could listen.
Once never alone, never alone to the point of suffocation, the eerie silence of her apartment and the algorithm’s insistence on showing her all of the horrible things that could happen to her without a soul ever knowing or caring had turned her weak and paranoid. Despite all the statistics in the world shelved in her brain, the understanding that it was very rare for a stranger to come to her door for the purpose of dragging her out of it, somehow she figured herself the one exception and bound for an abandoned trunk.
On instinct she grabbed her full Owala water bottle, prepared to knock the presumed killer clean in the head, and tiptoed to the front door.
She braced herself, looked out the peephole, took a step back for a moment, then looked again.
No, she had not imagined it. That was definitely Frank Langdon, soaking wet from the rain and standing at her door.
She faltered back a step, too shocked to feel the usual embarrassment for thinking the only person who could possibly want to come to her door had to be a murderer.
Frank? What on Earth was he doing there?
She stood in front of the door for only a moment before he loudly knocked again. She jolted at the sound and dropped the Owala in shock. It noisily rolled away towards the living room and she pulled the door open. “Frank?”
“Can I come in?” He asked, but he was already brushing past her before she could respond.
“Uh, sure,” she said, tiptoeing around the trail of water he’d left as he entered, so she didn’t get her socks wet. “What’s going—“
“Abby’s cheating on me.”
His hair and clothes were sopping wet. He was nearly panting as he stood in the empty space between her living room and kitchen, dripping a small puddle onto the floor from his soaked brown cargo shorts. His eyes were hysterical and tired, deep bags below them, like he hadn’t slept since she saw him last.
“I know.”
“Her fucking yoga instructor. I mean, how creative. And I thought he was gay. I should have known, though, he was always sniffing arou—…” he trailed off. “What did you just say? You know?”
“She told me.”
“She told you,” he said with a wry, disbelieving laugh. “What, you two having fucking sleepovers, braiding each other’s hair? Sharing your deepest darkest secrets?”
“At Dana’s birthday. When we were out on the porch. She kind of… cornered me. And that… came up.”
“It came up,” he repeated. “And you didn’t stop to think that you should maybe share that little nugget of information with me?”
Of course she’d thought about it. Agonized over it.
She hadn’t been able to make sense of why Abby had told her that in the first place. Was it just drunken vulnerability, a secret weighing on her, so desperate to come out, it could have been anyone in Mel’s seat she’d have spilled it to? Or had it been more strategic, some kind of mutually assured destruction? Let Mel in on the secret, arm her with the fatal blow to the marriage, make her lose herself by wielding it to secure Frank and kill the marriage stone dead? Had Abby known Mel would be too cowardly to use it?
It was all too… Machiavellian for her. She’d spent weeks and weeks poring it over, looking at it from every direction, and still she couldn’t come up with a plausible explanation, let alone any kind of action plan for telling him.
Any time she even attempted to humor the thought of telling him, all she could see was the photo Abby had shown Mel on her phone. Tanner and Penny, so little, so much joy in their faces. His children had gotten their father back. Mel didn’t think she could live with herself if she was the reason they lost him again.
“It didn’t feel like my place. You two were working things out.”
“Yeah, we fucking were, until I found out she was screwing Gay Josh!” he exclaimed.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He sighed, “I just wish you’d have said something.”
“Well, you know now,” Mel said. She was acutely aware of her state of undress, no bra under her oversized t-shirt, only a thin pair of sleep shorts on.
“Yeah, but maybe if I’d known earlier…”
She held a breath and waited for him to continue.
Softly, he said, “Mel…”
“Don’t, Frank.”
“Maybe things would have gone differently.”
“But they didn’t.”
“Yeah, because you didn’t trust me!”
“I’m not some pawn in your and Abby’s sick little games, alright!” Mel exclaimed. She hated it, God, it killed her how quick to tears she was. They welled up in her eyes, voice wavering, as she quietly said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he said, walking towards her. “Of course it does, Mel. It matters.”
She faltered back a step, lower back hitting the kitchen counter, as he approached her. “You’re leaving, Frank.”
“I know,” he said. He took another step closer, his soaking wet chest nearly brushing against her own.
“What about Abby?”
“Abby?” he breathed, like it was the first time he’d ever heard the name before. “I don’t know.”
His hands came up and cupped her face and she shivered at the contact. She leaned her head down into his touch and closed her eyes, too ashamed to look at him. A stray tear fell down her cheek.
One of his hands dropped to her shoulder, thumb softly rubbing against her neck. He leaned his head down, stubble brushing against her cheek, and whispered, “Tell me to leave and I’ll go. We can pretend I never came here.”
We. Still a collusion. Still something only theirs, shielded from the world’s view. A permanent tether for life.
“Just say the word and you’ll never have to see me again.”
In his proximity, the smell of his cologne, mingled with that tangy outside smell from the rain, wafted towards her. It should have disgusted her. If it were anyone else, it would have, but it was Frank. An intimate smell, its natural musk startling, so him. Something she thought she’d never get to experience for herself. She sucked in a quiet inhale.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked hoarsely.
Time stretched before her.
She hurdled to the end, when she’d be sitting on the porch of some state-funded nursing home, rocking in a chair with nothing else to do but reminisce.
She could see herself, with a haughty nose upturned, staring at the young people breezing past her on that porch, hurrying towards life’s next adventure. Too busy to think that they’d one day be stuck like she was, in the company of other little old ladies burdened by regret.
Could she watch these young people, knowing they’d all indulged moments of selfishness, driven by some youthful compulsion to want, to take, to have, consequences be damned, and not feel regret she’d never done the same?
Could she climb back through a mountain of memories and access this one: Frank Langdon, panting against her neck, driven to near madness with lust, begging for one chance to show her how much he loved her, and feel content at having turned away? Turned away from the one chance to want, to take, to have, out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to a wife who didn’t share the sentiment, a woman she’d likely never see again, let alone remember by the time her flabby ass hit the wicker chair.
Could goodness and integrity be enough to fuel the tank? Never a toe out of line, never an indulgence of a darker impulse because a woman like her, simple and plain, did not have the capacity for such things?
Could it carry her to the end of her life, and when she arrived, would she be content to know she had not lived it?
“No.”
She tiptoed out of the bedroom and quietly shut the door.
It was a few minutes past dawn, her living room was awash with gold beams of a brilliant sunrise.
She’d tried to ignore the reverberating clink it made when he’d ripped it off and slammed it down the night before, but his wedding ring dazzled on the counter, the reflection striking right through her glasses into her eye.
There weren’t many pairs of shoes by the door, her shoe rack was in her closet, but she mindlessly slipped on a pair of flip flops that sat in a dusty pile in the corner. They must have been an old pair of Becca’s, the imprinted ridges of the toe and foot arch weren’t melding to her own quite right.
She opened the front door and walked outside, the cool dryness of the air surprising her; the rain must have washed away the humidity.
The sameness of it all struck her. Her street was still her street. The distinctly Pennsylvanian townhomes were still brick and stalwart in their survival from a different age, the stiff, dry blades of grass on the sidewalk, reserved for sheltered city dogs to pee, didn’t budge despite the breeze, the morning birds chirped happily.
She always thought something would feel different, that once she’d been invited to the big club of womanhood, invitation delayed in the cosmic reshuffling of death and caretaking, that something about her would fundamentally change.
Mel was still Mel. She only knew then what it felt like to have Frank Langdon, at her embarrassed admittance of total inexperience, lowly whisper, “You have nothing to worry about. I’m going to take such good care of you.”
It was that time of morning when disciplined, health-nut joggers went out on their morning run. One was running towards her, tanned, shirtless, pecs jostling on his chest with each impact of his feet on the ground.
Now that she knew, would she let this man do what Frank had done to her?
“I want to eat you out,” Frank had said, pulling his head away from the juncture of her jaw and throat to look at her. “Is that alright?”
He knew exactly how to broach the subject. Not “I can eat you out,” or “Can I?”, phrasings that would have immediately sent her into a panic with self-doubt: did he really want to, or was he just being polite?
“Yeah, if you—if you want to,” she said, flushing.
“I do,” he said urgently, resuming his kisses at her throat, before trailing his lips slowly down her neck and chest.
He started suckling at her left breast, palming the other with his hand. It was tender and sensitive, sending a wave of arousal to the center of her. She sighed and sunk her head back further into the pillow.
“That’s it, baby,” he said, moving his mouth over to the other breast. “Just relax.”
After a few moments he started trailing kisses down her stomach, but she was ticklish at the spot just below her bellybutton; her stomach seized and a laugh bubbled out of her throat. “Sorry—sorry.”
He smiled fondly and resumed his path, spreading her legs when he reached his destination.
He paused for a moment and just looked at her center, still covered by her underwear. She started to feel shy. She knew she was embarrassingly wet, the spot surely visible through her light blue underwear where she’d already ground against his stiff erection as they’d kissed. “Frank?”
“I think I’m dreaming,” he said with a dazed voice, eyes not leaving her crotch. Then he parted her legs a little further, and started kissing the inside of her right thigh.
Her head fell back again. She hadn’t realized how… sensitive these parts of her were. She only touched herself on rare occasions, when the biological thrum that seared her veins and urged her to procreate by any means necessary became too overwhelming and strong that someone had to do something.
That was only ever her small middle finger, rubbing dispassionately at her clit to satisfy the urge through a muted orgasm.
It wasn’t the soft tongue of a lover licking her core over her underwear. “God,” she gasped, but he didn’t look up.
He pulled her underwear down and off her legs.
“All for me,” he murmured, before finally putting his mouth on her. She grunted at the contact. She felt sensitive from all the rubbing and rutting and grinding they’d already done, having his mouth licking her folds was sweet relief.
He bumped his nose around for a few moments, giving her small exploratory licks, before finding her clit.
She was certain the noise that left her mouth had never left it before. It was a deep groan, like someone had just kicked her in the stomach.
He seemed pleased by that and he groaned too. He kept licking it in small circles, little crests of pleasure exploding from the spot. “Oh my god, oh my god,” she panted.
He moved his mouth to the side to take a heaving breath. “You like that?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding frantically.
“I’m going to put my fingers inside of you, okay? If it’s too much, or it hurts, tell me.”
He was speaking to her like they were across the operating table. You could take the doctor out of the ER…
“Okay,” she breathed.
He resumed licking circles on her clit, before she felt the prodding intrusion of a finger inside her.
It burned as it went, but not painfully. She… she liked the burn, she thought.
It was putting all the right amount of pressure where she needed it. The smaller crests of pleasure were becoming larger and larger with every pump of his hand and lick of his tongue, and she felt herself approaching that perfect, elusive place, harder and faster than she ever had before.
She moaned, “Please don’t stop, Frank. Please.”
Her legs had started to shake, but there was nothing within her that could stop it. His left hand came up to her stomach and pressed her down on the bed as she writhed. She glanced down at his large hand and saw a distinct tan line where his ring should have been. She screwed her eyes shut.
It all felt unthinkably good, and it was Frank doing it to her.
Suddenly her thighs slammed shut and she came with a whine. She kept his head pinned between her legs as she rode out the aftershocks before going limp.
When she opened her legs and he pulled back, she felt like she could come again right then and there.
He looked obscene. His hair was ruffled, sweat on his forehead, a flush across his cheeks, and her come smeared on his mouth, nose, and chin. He sucked in rapid, shallow breaths like a drowning man coming up for air.
“So?” he said expectantly, chest rising and falling.
Mutely she sat up, endorphins coursing through her, and held up a hand for a high five.
He looked at her, she looked at him, and they both burst out laughing. Sheepishly, she moved to drop her hand, but he returned the high five before she could. Then he pounced on her, sending her back lying on the bed as he attacked her neck with kisses.
She let out a peal of laughter as she felt the stickiness of her come coating her throat. “Frank!”
“God, you’re so sexy,” he groaned against her neck.
Could she do that with this jogger?
He was an objectively attractive person, like Frank was. Frank had shown her everything. Technically, there was no longer anything holding her back.
But when she imagined Frank’s hands replaced with this man’s, his mouth, his… she went cold with dread.
He wasn’t Frank. He didn’t know that she hated egg salad and tuna salad, but that somehow chicken salad was the exception. That she’d managed to avoid becoming a coffee drinker through med school and residency, because her grandma had told her when she was eight that it’d turn her teeth black. He’d never heard the noise she couldn’t help making every time loving lips grazed below her left earlobe.
No, there was only one man she wanted.
She meandered down familiar blocks to the reception desk at Middle Hill Independent Living Center.
She didn’t think she’d ever come that early on a Saturday, and worried the automatic doors of the entrance might not even open. But they did, and Becca’s favorite nurse, Mel’s too, Jeanine, was sitting at the desk with a steaming mug of coffee in her hand.
Jeanine was in her mid-fifties, a fixture at Middle Hill since the late nineties. She reminded Mel a lot of Dana, carrying that same balance of tenderness and take-no-prisoners attitude a nursing job required.
“Morning!” Jeanine called when she saw Mel walking through the door. “Didn’t expect to see you here so early.”
“Yeah—yeah,” Mel said distractedly as she slowly approached the desk. “Something came up.”
“Yesterday was a scorcher, wasn’t it? I nearly got sunburnt walking from the back door to my car!”
Mel didn’t hear that, and didn’t respond, just stared at the abstract painting behind Jeanine’s head. A confused swirl of pastel yellows, reds, greens, and oranges, she supposed it was intended to evoke a comforting feeling in the viewer but was instead strangely melancholic.
“Sweetie, what’s gotten into you?”
“Are you ready?” he’d breathed against her mouth, rubbing his erection across her folds, the smooth plastic of the condom making a slick, wet sound.
“Yes,” she whispered.
She was sprinting before she walked, she knew. She’d always assumed that when she ever had sex, it would take weeks to months with her chosen partner of exploration and hand stuff before she felt ready to go all the way. They were cramming those weeks into one night, two powerful orgasms, one by his mouth, the other by his hand, satisfying her into boneless mush and driving a need for him so bone-deep it frightened her.
He looked into her eyes, mouth slack, and pressed his tip into her.
She didn’t have a reference point for what “big” was, she’d only ever seen penises in the context of work, sick with boils or medicinally inflated, never under the assumption they’d be going inside of her. But judging by the arrogant look on his face when he’d first taken his boxers off, she supposed that he, already a winner in the generic lottery on most fronts, was one of the lucky few well-endowed.
Inch by inch he filled her up. He hissed, then murmured against her lips, “Almost there.”
“There’s more?”
He grumbled out a breathy chuckle.
Finally he stopped, the burning feeling from earlier multiplied tenfold, and along with a low pinching sensation. The feel of him seated inside her nearly knocked the wind out of her.
“Breathe, Mel.”
A gentle hand caressed her face, and he sucked in a deep breath, which she mimicked. It calmed her down from the overwhelming sensation of him all around her, inside of her, the closest two people could ever be, pulling her away from that familiar sense of panic.
“Are you okay? We can stop—“
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to stop.”
He let out a relieved sigh. He was still inside of her, and seemed almost entirely like himself, like they were just across from each other over lunch, discussing the weather, if it weren’t for the bead of sweat dripping down his forehead and the muscles of his neck straining. “How do you feel?”
Their hips were notched together, chests pressed against each other, lips centimeters away from a hot kiss. She’d never been that close to anyone before, it hurt a little, but it was dulled by the overwhelming feeling of fondness. They were doing it together. They were doing what lovers in all of human history had done before, but somehow it felt entirely their own. She couldn’t imagine that anyone else had felt like this before.
The words to describe it were escaping her, however, so the best she could do was, “I feel… I feel really, uhm, full.”
He groaned and involuntarily thrusted into her. “Fuck. Sorry,” he said, stilling again.
It didn’t hurt, quite the opposite. It seemed to take the pinch away with the movement. “I—I liked that. You can keep going.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, pressing his mouth against hers as he very slowly started to thrust into her.
With each thrust any painful sensation abated, replaced with a growing ache of pleasure that felt almost like a cramp.
He was vocal, groaning as he rocked into her. “Fucking Christ, you feel insane, Mel. So tight, like you were made for me.”
She flushed under the praise, and realized she liked it very much. He started palming her breasts, “I’ll never get sick of these. Perfect.”
It didn’t feel the same as it did when he ate her out, but she didn’t mind it. She could feel herself going slick with arousal just to hear his grumbling moans, to dazedly watch his strong arms strain as he felt around her body.
She didn’t even feel like a virgin then. It felt like he was only unlocking something, a memory, an instinct, that had been inside of her all along. The only thing that hinted towards her inexperience was the continued feeling that she didn’t quite know where to put her hands.
He started kissing her neck and reached down towards her clit. With one swipe, she felt a sharp, overwhelming feeling of pleasure, the nub tender from the attention he’d shown it all night.
“Frank,” she gasped, “I don’t know if I—“
“You can,” he insisted.
The pleasure started to ratchet up again with his attention, and she threw her head back and screwed her eyes shut with a low moan.
“God, look at you, you’re so fucking beautiful,” he started babbling, thrusts growing faster and sloppier. “I’m never letting you go. I’m going to lock that door and fuck you for a week.”
You won’t be here in a week, she wanted to say, but figured it would ruin the moment. It was prettier to imagine that version of things in her feverish delirium of pleasure. To imagine themselves cut off from the world, both helpless to their shared lust and instinct.
She felt herself nearing that place again. “Frank, I think I’m almost—“
“Yes,” he groaned in relief. “Come on, Mel, let me feel it. Please.”
She put her hands on his face and pulled him down into a sloppy kiss, before her lips disconnected as she came. He pounded into her as he came too, groaning, “Fuck.”
Mel suddenly felt all the traces of Frank she hadn’t thought about when she left her apartment in a fog. Skin marked with sweat, saliva, come, peppered with love bites on her neck and between her thighs, lips tender from kisses. Traces no one had ever bothered to leave before, making her clueless to the likely obvious smell and look of sex all over her. Gross, and a little rude, it was a novice’s misunderstanding.
Jeanine was looking at her expectantly, concern growing on her face with each passing second of silence. “Hon’, are you—“
“Yes,” Mel tried to breathe lightheartedly as she scratched her arm. “Just a little tired, didn’t get enough sleep last night.”
“You work too much. But pot and kettle,” Jeanine said kindly. “Your sister should be in there. Enter at your own risk waking her up this early.”
“Mel,” Becca said in surprise when she opened the door. “You’re early.”
Their reversal of fortune couldn’t have been more stark than in that moment. Becca was just so… adult. She was bleary-eyed in a fluffy bath robe, a little harassed by the imposition. A version of her sister Mel never thought she’d see during hours-long freak-outs, where dinner was flung from plate to wall, or prolonged periods of catatonia when she wondered if Becca would ever speak again.
“I know, I’m sorry.” Mel said. Becca hadn’t moved to let her inside. “Can I come in?”
“Well, Adam and I have to go to sunrise yoga at eight.”
Sunrise yoga. Her cosmopolitan sister.
“I’ll make it quick, I promise,” Mel said with desperation.
“Okay,” Becca said, stepping aside.
The apartment was quaint, clean, and modern. Little touches of Becca were everywhere, like the Sonny Angels figurines that lined below the TV, the extra large avocado Squishmallow on the couch, the Neon Genesis Evangelion poster on the wall.
Mel could hear someone rustling in the kitchen. “Good morning, Adam.”
Adam was mid-chew of an Eggo waffle, apparently naked except for a red flannel robe. If it wasn’t her most desperate hour, Mel would have fled in disgust. Apparently she wasn’t the only one fresh off of a night of passionate lovemaking.
Fortunately, Adam didn’t say anything, always tight-lipped. He just raised a hand in salutation and turned back to the toaster to transfer the second waffle to a plate.
“Can we talk for a second, in private?” Mel said in a hushed tone.
“I guess,” Becca said, and walked them out to the porch.
Mel had full view of the Middle Hill courtyard, with its large oak tree, gazebo, and stone benches supporting older residents, used to the early morning hour and milling about, enjoying the abnormally cool morning.
As Becca shut the sliding door, Mel stared out at the courtyard, tears pooling in her eyes and falling down her cheeks.
“Mel, what’s wrong?” Becca asked.
“I’m really going to miss Frank.”
“Didn’t you guys already say goodbye?”
“We did but he… forgot something, so I’m going to see him again today.”
“Well, that’s great! You can say goodbye again.”
Somehow, despite knowing her sister was more wise to the ways of the world than she’d ever anticipated, Mel still couldn’t fight the instinct to protect her from it. That was them, the outside world, not the King sisters. Not Mel.
Because Mel didn’t feel guilty. She’d done a bad thing, a selfish thing, and was glad she did it.
She settled on an abridged version of the story. “Becca, I’m in love with him.”
“Well, duh,” Becca said. “He loves you, too.”
“He’s married,” she whispered.
“Sure, but he does love you. He told me.”
“He told you, when?”
“Last month. He came by to fix the shower drain.”
He hadn’t told her that. He did have a secret handy side to him, stubborn Appalachian individualism, which made the story plausible. But he’d come over to help Becca? Despite the millions of responsibilities pulling him in all different directions?
As if she couldn’t have loved him any more. This was just cruel.
“What did he say?”
“That he loved you.”
“He probably just meant like a friend, Becca.”
“No, that’s not how he said it,” Becca said.
He’d first told Mel he loved her in a murmured sigh against her ear, accompanying it with a deep thrust to emphasize just how much he meant it.
The room was dark, and had that stillness reserved for the three o’clock hour. Before the construction workers and late-night bartenders crossed each other on the road, the city sleepy and almost unreal in its calmness.
They’d been spooning in their sleep, flush against each other, his left arm around the divot of her hip.
He’d woken her up with kisses all down her arm, fingers caressing the trail. She didn’t think he’d been trying to get anything going, but instead knew their time together was waning. He was tracking, memorizing.
Blearily, she’d pushed back against him and sighed.
He didn’t stop his tracing. He moved her arm to the side to drag his fingers over her hips, up to her arm pit.
The urgency had struck Mel, too. “Frank,” she whispered, pushing back against him again. “Please.”
He understood. She could hear him fiddling at the nightstand for another condom, then he hiked her right leg over his and sunk into her.
She was sore from their first time. It should have made her uncomfortable, she should have wanted to stop, but she ached for the feeling.
The ache was a mark of his presence. By tomorrow he’d be gone for good.
He grunted beside her ear as he thrusted deeply inside of her. “I love you.”
She shut her eyes and sighed.
She could still turn back. She could try to salvage this, to shield them from the horrible reality that had laid itself bare in the early morning emptiness: they loved each other and couldn’t be together. Fate gone screwy. They were both helpless to things beyond their control and it didn’t matter whether they loved each other or not.
But it mattered to her then. They still had time, a few dwindling moments, to lie in that room and love each other. “I love you, Frank.”
He rocked into her with a deep groan, and though the angle was awkward, pulled her lips into a desperate kiss. Now that the words had left her mouth, she couldn’t stop them from coming out again and again, barely audible against his lips. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
She was glad of the darkness, and the angle of his head, because she hoped it would shield her tears from him.
He repeated, “I love you, Mel. I love you.”
Even if he’d meant to conceal the true meaning from Becca, if he’d said it with even a fraction of the passion and desperation in that repeated chant, she wasn’t surprised Becca had caught on.
“I don’t know if I can see him.”
“Why?” Becca cried.
“Because… I don’t want him to leave. I’ve been feeling really sad, I’m scared of how I’m going to feel knowing I’ll never see him again.”
“Won’t you feel sadder to not say goodbye?”
“C’mon, M’Lady, your chariot awaits,” Frank had said, climbing out of the bed a few minutes after they had sex the first time.
“Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head and rolling onto her stomach, digging her head further into the pillow.
“We already had one King sister in the Pitt for a UTI, we can’t make it two,” he said. “Come on.”
“Ugh, fine,” she said, rolling around to find him holding out her glasses for her.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, righting them on her face before grabbing his outstretched hands, pulling her out of the bed.
He kept his left hand in her right to guide her to the bathroom, like he was leading her to the center of the ballroom for a quadrille.
He walked her all the way to the toilet seat and guided her down, before stepping back to lean against the doorframe.
As her pee trickled, she started to softly giggle. It was just so… intimate.
His naked body was in full view: his broad, hairy chest, tuft of pubic hair at the base of his flaccid penis. He didn’t wilt under her stare, just grinned and stared back at her.
She didn’t feel shy being naked either. It just felt right, like there’d be many more nights and mornings between them just like that one.
“Has anyone ever told you you look like Magnum P.I.?”
“What?” he laughed. “Like Tom Selleck?”
“Yeah. My mom was like a super-fan, she bought every single one of those trashy grocery store tabloids if he was on the cover. Posters, autographs. Apparently she saw him once at the airport in the nineties, before she had us. Happiest memory of her life.”
“Happiest memory of her life?”
“It was Tom Selleck,” Mel said, shrugging.
“Fair enough. But no, I’ve never gotten that one before. Must be the untamed jungle,” he rubbed his hands against his chest. “When I was in high school, my buddies on the football team used to call me ‘Handsome Squidward.’”
She laughed, walking to the sink to wash her hands. “Aw, jeez, kids are so mean.”
“It’s fine,” he shrugged. “The joke was on them. I broke the state record for receiving yards in my junior and senior year.”
“I have literally no idea what that means. But I’m sure it’s very impressive,” Mel said, fondly rubbing her thumb on the corner of his mouth as she passed him in the doorway, walking back to the bedroom.
“I was a wide receiver, so the quarterback would pass me the ball,” Frank explained, falling in step with her.
“Like Travis Kelce?”
“No, he’s a tight end. Wait, how do you know who Travis Kelce is?”
“He’s dating Taylor Swift.”
Frank barked out a laugh. “Of course he is. Christ, I live under a rock.”
What the hell was she thinking? What had she done?
She shouldn’t have left him, not even for a second.
Sure, the lovemaking had been great—she flushed to remember each lick and caress—but what they’d shared was more than that.
Frank was her friend. Her only friend. No one had ever bothered to understand her, to see her, until he came along. He’d listened, and cared, and loved her without asking her to change a thing.
Frank. The sudden longing to hold him in her arms, his physical body, solid and strong around her, made her head spin.
“Becca, I’m sorry, I have to see if I can still catch him.” Mel ran to the sliding glass door, before turning on her heel and giving Becca a hug. “I love you. Thank you!”
Adrenaline propelled her down the hallway back out towards the front automatic doors.
“‘Bye, Jeanine, see you Wednesday!”
“Oh! Uh—see you, hon’!” Jeanine called to her retreating back.
She didn’t stop running. She wished she’d had the sense to bring her phone. To call him and tell him to stay put, she’d come to her senses, she was sorry she left.
She’d already eavesdropped when he’d laid out his travel plans to Dana over the charge desk last week, and knew that if he left for Savannah as planned at 10 pm that night, by 3:30 am he’d be crossing the city limits of Bland, West Virginia. But that was hours away. She could still catch him!
She didn’t know what she’d say to him. Get down on her hands and knees and beg him not to go, that she’d take as little as he could offer.
Rail and scream and hit him, admonish him for showing her what love really felt like, opening her eyes to something most would never have the privilege to see, then leaving her alone with it.
Thank him. Hug him. Bid him farewell, shake hands at the end of the ball game.
It didn’t work out, but God, wasn’t it great?
She pounded up the outdoor stairs to her unit and flung her front door open. She didn’t bother shutting it and ran straight to the bedroom.
It was empty. Dirty, crusted sheets laid limply on the bed.
She glanced down the hallway at the bathroom, door ajar and empty too.
There was only a puddle of water on her bedroom floor near the door to mark his former presence, where his wet clothes had hit the ground with a loud smack as he’d eagerly ripped them off. Her wood floors were coated with a cheap protective sheen, which had begun to bubble and discolor from the extended exposure to moisture.
She walked out to the kitchen. On the counter was a small white paper bag, a cold bacon and egg croissant inside, her favorite. Her cellphone was next to it. She tapped the screen to see three missed calls from him, before he must have realized she’d left it there.
His wedding ring was gone.
The apartment had that silence of complete emptiness, anticipatory, like you were waiting for some noise, any noise, to remind you that you weren’t entirely alone in the world.
A loud gust of cold wind whistled outside, rusting trees and rattling her old windows, and slammed her front door shut.
She trudged into work on Monday. Trudged to the bus, trudged to the lockers, trudged behind the night shift as they handed over patients.
Since Saturday, she’d felt a constriction in her throat, a low-grade asphyxiation on her lower windpipe, that had been slowing her down.
“Melancholia,” Santos called while Mel put in an order at her desk, “our fearless leader would like a word.”
Robby wants to see me, Mel translated from Santos-speak. “With me?”
“No, with everyone. Come on.”
Both the day and night shift were standing by the board. Mel must have been one of the last to get the memo, and had to stand in the back of the huddled circle.
She could not believe who she saw in the center of it.
Dr. Frank Langdon, in full regalia, scrubs, HOKA sneakers, and stethoscope, was standing right there in the middle of the room. He remained there even when she’d blinked twice in an attempt to banish the apparition.
“Due to some unforeseen staffing changes, Dr. Langdon will be our day shift attending moving forward. Congratulations to him,” Robby said, sounding about as enthused as Frank looked.
Despite this being what he’d vainly hoped for, that some cosmic force would tip the scales in his favor, wash the whole drug diversion and rehab thing out of the minds of the deciding administrative body of PTMC, the attending position his, he had the expression of a man damned to swing.
Robby handed Frank his badge and the group gave scattered applause. Frank held it up in acknowledgement, giving Mel a clear view of his glittering gold wedding ring.
His tired, bloodshot eyes met hers. On instinct, he fidgeted with the ring, rolling it around on his finger.
With each twist, he conjured his golden doodle. Tanner and Penny. Abby Langdon, a figure Mel had resigned to the past, a face soon to fade from memory, in stark, perfect detail.
Fuck.