Work Text:
Samira Mohan did not do country festivals.
She had explicitly stated this multiple times in the last week. In the group chat, in the break room at work, and directly to Dennis Whitaker’s face while he was eating a granola bar like a squirrel.
“You don’t do anything, Samira,” Whitaker said, “that’s the problem. You work a double, you go home, you watch three episodes of some British murder show, you sleep four hours, you come back to work and do it again. This is an intervention—a well needed one, Samira. Besides, it’s not country country.”
“An intervention would involve fewer cowboy hats.”
“Wrong. The Pennsylvania Boots ‘n Barrels Festival has more cowboy hats than at any intervention you’ve ever heard of, and that’s exactly why you’re coming with us.”
She had not asked for any of this. She had been perfectly content on her couch that morning, coffee in hand, half-watching a rerun of some medical drama she liked to criticise for its inaccuracies, when Whitaker had shown up at her door in a plaid shirt so garish it physically pained Samira to look at him, holding three tickets to the Boots ‘n Barrels Festival like they were the Ark of the Covenant.
“Trinity’s driving,” he’d said, “we already decided. You’re coming.”
“I didn’t agree to anything.”
“If you’re not wearing shoes within forty-five seconds I’m carrying you out in your pyjamas.”
Samira had learned, over two years of residency and then her fellowship with these two attached to her like burrs, that there was no version of this conversation where she won.
So, she’d worn shoes. She’d also put a little more effort into her outfit than she’d ever admit to for a day of being peer-pressured into line dancing—denim shorts, a bandana knotted in a triangle across her chest because if she was going to melt by the end of the day she refused to add more layers than strictly necessary, and her hair loose down her back—her emergency claw clip clung to the hem of her shorts for later in the day. Her outfit was a practical choice, and she told herself this was a nice, normal day off with friends and nothing more complicated than that.
She should have known better. Nothing involving Emery Walsh, even by six-degrees-of-separation coincidence, was ever nothing more complicated than that.
--
The festival grounds were already loud when they got there, people milling around with cowboy boots and hats—some authentic true blue country folk, and others in brand-spankin’ new outfits clearly only in attendance for social media content—with a low country-rock rumble drifting off a main stage somewhere past a sea of food trucks. Samira exhaled through her nose and adjusted her sunglasses against a sun that, at barely 9am, was already prickling her skin in a way she knew would end with Whitaker looking like a lobster by the late afternoon. She had planned for a lazy Saturday of doing absolutely nothing and her friends had decided to punish her for the audacity. Samira took in the atmosphere around her. Ninety-four degrees. A guitar twanging somewhere in the middle distance, warming up for soundcheck. The smell of fried dough and sunscreen and warm hay.
“I don’t do country festivals,” she said again, for the nth time, as Whitaker frog-marched her across a gravel parking lot the size of a small county, the summer sun doing its absolute worst on the back of her neck.
“I’m ignoring you,” Whitaker stated from her left, his boots scuffing against the dirt leaving tiny dust storms in his wake.
“Funnel cake first,” Trinity fell into step on Samira’s other side, sunglasses shoved into her hair, crossbody bum bag bouncing across her chest, “then the main stage. Then Whitaker’s going to try to convince us both to do the mechanical bull, and we’re both going to say no, and then he’s going to do it alone and fall off, and that’ll be the highlight of my month.”
“You’re rude, but you’re accurate,” Whitaker replied, wounded, hand clasped across his chest as if he’d just been shot.
They’d made it maybe 20 meters toward the food trucks when a voice cut clean through the din of the crows, low and amused, and shockingly familiar.
“Well. Would you look at that.”
Yolanda? What’s she doing here. Does that mean—
Is Emery here?
--
Samira turned, following Yolanda’s voice, and every plan she’d had for the rest of the day—food, mechanical bull heckling, being back at the motel by six to ice her feet—evaporated on the spot.
Emery Walsh was leaning against a fence post like she’d been carved there, arms crossed, one boot hooked over the bottom rail, basking in the heat of the sun.
Samira had seen Emery in scrubs. She had seen Emery in the sharp, impeachable pantsuits she wore to M&M conferences that made her look like she was about to strip someone of their right to practice medicine while still looking effortlessly sexy. She had even seen Emery in a single unfair instance of gym clothes, sweat-damp and irritated about a code that had pulled her out of a workout, biceps flexing under fluorescent hospital lighting in a way that Samira had to actively not think about for the remainder of her shift.
For all the different ways she had seen Emery Walsh, she had never seen her in a cowboy hat.
It shouldn’t have worked. It should’ve looked costume-party absurd on a woman who was such a professional in clinical settings. Instead, the cream-coloured hat sat low over her dark brows, throwing a shadow across cheekbones that were already peach-tinged in the low morning sun, and below it Emery was wearing a fitted button-up, sleeves rolled to her forearms, tucked into jeans that had clearly seen real use once upon a time. Her shirt was open at the collar and low enough that Samira could see a tanned constellation of freckles run across collarbones and down her sternum, disappearing under the faintest hint of a black lace bra. Samira’s brain helpfully supplied an anatomically detailed rendering of what else was under said shirt. Then there were the boots. Actual, broken-in, scuffed-at-the-toe boots, not festival costume boots. A belt with a buckle Samira was absolutely not going to think about the size or shape of, and a gold chain. Thin and loose around her neck, sparkling against the sun and dipping into the hollow of her collarbone just so. Samira wanted nothing more in this instance than to take that gold chain between her teeth.
“She’s not dressed as a cowboy,” Samira said faintly, “She’s dressed like she grew up one.”
“Because she did,” said a voice directly to Samira’s left, and Samira nearly came out of her own skin.
Yolanda Garcia was standing there, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed up into dark curls, looking like she’d been enjoying an external observation of Samira’s inner turmoil for a solid thirty seconds before revealing herself.
“Yolanda,” Samira managed, “Hi. Hello. I was just—we were just—admiring the festival.”
“Uh huh.” Yolanda’s mouth twitched. “She dragged me here. Something about ‘reconnecting with her roots’ before I reminded her she has an on-call shift Monday and this is a two-hour drive each way.”
“Wait, she dragged you?” Trinity said. “I thought—Whitaker said this was a Yolanda thing.”
“It is very much not a Yolanda thing,” Yolanda said with the conviction of someone who had spent the last two hours being subjected to a truck full of a radio station that only played songs about trucks. “I am a city creature. I drink oat milk lattes. I have never in my life wanted to throw a horseshoe. But Dr. Walsh over there gets homesick every 12 months like clockwork and it seems I’m contractually obliged as her best friend to suffer through it with her.”
Across the way, as if she’d felt the weight of four pairs of eyes on her, Emery Walsh turned her head.
The look she gave Samira lasted maybe two seconds. It felt like two millennia.
Emery’s mouth curved, slow and sly. The same expression she wore in the trauma bay before she said something that made Samira want to either throw a scalpel at her or climb her like a tree—sometimes, mortifyingly, both at once—she pushed off the fence post and started her walk towards them, tipping her hat back slightly as if she couldn’t wear it any way but exactly right.
Samira’s brain, which had spent four years of residency and half a fellowship learning to stay calm while someone’s aorta tried to leave their body, short-circuited completely.
“Dr. Mohan,” Emery said, stopping close. Closer than trauma-bay distance. Close enough that Samira had to tip her chin up to a degree to hold eye contact under that stupid, devastating hat, “didn’t peg you for a boots-and-denim girl.”
“I didn’t peg myself as one either. This was a kidnapping.” Samira gestured vaguely at Whitaker, who had congregated slightly off to the side with Trinity and Yolanda. The trio deeply engaged in a passionate debate about whether the mechanical bull counted as “workplace hazard exposure” if he tried it before his next shift on Monday. “I’m—I.” Samira let out a chuckled huff and tried again, brows scrunching together slightly. “I didn’t peg you for the cowboy type, Dr. Walsh. I almost didn’t recognise you.”
“Careful now, Dr. Mohan,” Emery said, her voice dropping an octave, “or I’ll go put a dress on and confuse you even further.”
“I don’t think ‘confused’ is the word I’d use,” Samira said, and then heard herself, and felt the heat crawl up her throat.
It was an old rhythm between them, one that had been there for months now, ever since a shift where they’d argued for ten minutes straight about a chest tube placement and somehow it ended with both of them grinning and a little breathless, both very aware that the argument hadn’t been entirely about the chest tube. Flirty and combative in a perfect ratio that made every attending on shift roll their eyes, and every resident start taking bets. There’d been near-misses. A hallway last month that felt three feet narrower than it should have when Emery rounded the corner a bit too wide and ended up colliding with Samira, her hand reaching out to Emery’s waist to steady her. A comment about Emery’s hands that Samira still thought about on slow nights.
Samira was stuck three sentences back, still running the math on what she was looking at. Emery Walsh, in a cowboy hat, looking like she’d stepped fully formed out of a country music video, looking at Samira like she already knew exactly what that was doing to her.
She was doing the math on other things too. Things that had no business being the math in question. Things like what would her hands look like on a set of reigns? and what would it feel like to be the thing Emery was leading somewhere? and worst best of all, what would that hat look like from below, tipped down, the only thing left on when—
“What’s happening up there, Mohan?” Emery asked, an amused glint in her eye as she stepped closer.
“Nothing!” Samira could feel the heat crawling up her neck, made worse by the fact she could feel it showing, warm and obvious under brown skin that had never once in her life managed to hide a blush the way she wished it would. She’d spent her adolescence being told brown girls didn’t blush visibly, and every single time it had turned out to be a lie invented by someone who had ever actually looked at her. God, would her body please stop doing that. “It’s just hot.”
“Mm.” Emery’s eyes tracked down slowly, from Samira’s flushed face to the bandana, to the shorts, and back up again, settling on Samira’s face. There was something in her expression that let Samira knew she had no shame in being caught, and no interest in pretending to do anything other than blatantly check Samira out.
Samira was suddenly hyper-aware that she was wearing denim shorts and a bandana and absolutely nothing else above the waist that could be considered substantial, and that Emery’s eyes had made a blatant pass down her body and back up, before settling on her face.
“You grew up around this?” Samira asked, mostly to have something to say that wasn’t please don’t take that hat off, even when you’re inside me, which was not a thought she was equipped to be having in public, at a festival, at barely nine in the morning. “The whole—” she gestured at the boots, the hat, the general aura of rode in on a horse.
“West Virginia,” Emery said, “little town you’ve never heard of, about forty minutes from anywhere that had a movie theatre. Grew up on a farm. My dad runs cattle; my mom taught third grade.” She said it easily, no self-consciousness in it at all, as if she wasn’t sharing a sacred aspect of her life with Samira for the first time.
“I did not expect that,” Samira admitted, “I had you pegged as, I don’t know. Boarding school. A house with a name.”
“Because I’m intimidating and precise and use big words in a trauma bay?”
“Because you teach my residents and your own with the emotional affect of someone reciting a grocery list.”
Emery laughed, short and surprised out of her. The kind of laugh Samira had started to collect like currency because they didn’t come easy and were worth so much when they did. “No boarding school. No house with a name. Just a girl who could bale hay by the time she was ten and knew every back road in three counties by fifteen, and who left the second she got the chance because everyone around her voted for people who wanted her dead for being gay, and she was not interested in sticking around to find out how serious they were.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s fine. It’s—it was a long time ago.” Emery shrugged, but there was a hollow look in her eyes that told Samira this wasn’t a wound so much as a scar Emery had made peace with. “I love where I’m from. I don’t love who runs it. Both things are true. I go back for my dad, for the mountains, because nothing in Pennsylvania smells like a West Virginia holler at six in the morning. I don’t go back for the politics. Or the family reunions, some years.”
“So, you’re a—what, a leftist cowgirl.”
“I’m exactly that, yeah.” Emery tipped her head, and the hat shifted with it, and Samira had to physically stop herself from making a noise. “That bother you?”
“Greatly,” Samira said, and meant the opposite of what the word usually meant, and from the way Emery’s smile made her eyes crease, she understood exactly which meaning she’d used.
“When I need to connect with my roots—the parts that deeply strengthen my spirit—I come here once a year, in disguise.” She tugged the brim of her hat. “This is the disguise.”
“It’s not working,” Samira said, before she could stop herself, “you look—you’re—that’s—you’re a hazard.”
Surprise flickered across Emery’s face before it smoothed into a smirk. “Is that so, Dr. Mohan.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Samira said, too fast.
“You said plenty.” Emery’s gaze flicked down to the top of the bandana across Samira’s chest, and back up. “For the record. Hazard goes both ways today.”
Somewhere behind Samira, she heard Trinity make a small, delighted, strangled noise, that was immediately smothered by Yolanda’s hand covering her mouth.
“Okay,” Yolanda said loudly, clapping her hands together with the energy of someone actively trying to dispel a mood before it became something she’d have to hear about later in gruesome detail, “on that note, Whitaker. Trinity. There’s a funnel cake stand and a mechanical bull situation I would very much like backup for, because I refuse to be the only person filming Whitaker falling off it.
“I’m not falling off anything,” Whitaker said, with the confidence of a man who was definitely going to fall off it.
“There’s a beer garden with a fiddle player,” Trinity added, tugging at Yolanda’s sleeve, eyes darting meaningfully between Emery and Samira with all the subtlety of a foghorn. “We should go. Now. Immediately.”
“Subtle,” Yolanda muttered, but she was already turning, already steering Whitaker and Trinity off down a dusty path, and within thirty seconds the three of them had vanished into the crowd like they’d never existed at all, leaving Samira alone with Emery Walsh in the middle of a country music festival with the hot sun on her shoulders and her heart working double time in her chest.
“Well,” Emery said, hooking her thumbs into her belt loops and tipping her head so her hat threw a longer shadow across her jaw, “looks like it’s just us.”
“Looks like it,” Samira replied.
“I could use a drink,” Emery said, “and you look like a woman whose never actually had a proper honky-tonk experience in her life.”
“You would be correct, Dr. Walsh.”
“C’mon, Dr. Mohan.” Emery held out a hand, palm up. “Let me show you how it’s done.”
Samira looked at her hand and thought about every single time those hands had burned in her memory. Steady over a chest tube, deft with a suture, once—the memory Samira most frequently visited—braced on the trauma bay counter an inch from Samira’s hip while Emery leaned in to argue a point directly into her ear. She thought about the hat, and what exactly it would take to get Emery to keep the hat on and lose everything else, and felt her face burn hot enough that she was fairly sure it was visible even through her complexion, a flush she could feel blooming under her jaw like she’d stepped too close to a fire pit.
“You’re blushing,” Emery said, delighted, before Samira had even taken her hand. “I’m not,” Samira replied,
“It’s ninety-two degrees.”
“It’s ninety-two degrees and you’re blushing,” Emery agreed, entirely too pleased with herself, and closed her fingers around Samira’s when Samira finally, finally put her hand in Emery’s, “Come on, I’m buying.”
“Does that make this a date, Dr. Walsh?”
“Do you want it to be?”
It was, Samira thought, the first time in eighteen months of increasingly charged bickering that either of them had actually said the quiet part threaded beneath.
“Yes,” Samira said, before she could talk herself out of it, “Obviously yes.”
Emery’s smile made Samira’s chest flutter, and not for the first time that day. “Obviously,” she agreed, “let’s go be reckless somewhere that isn’t a trauma bay for once.”
--
The honky-tonk tent was dim and a blessedly cool reprieve from the sun outside. Emery got the door. Actually got it—held it open with one hand, the other resting briefly at the small of Samira’s back to guide her through, and Samira felt the warmth of her touch travel up her spine like it was communicating directly with her nervous system. Inside, string lights zigzagged overhead, a band in the corner played something with a two-step rhythm that half the crowd seemed to know instinctively, and Samira did not know at all, and sawdust coating the floor for reasons Samira did not ask.
“You’re doing a bit,” Samira said, as they walked in.
“I’m not doing a bit.”
“You held the door.”
“I hold doors for everyone.”
“You didn’t hold the door for Whitaker last month. You let it hit him.”
“Whitaker deserved that door.”
Emery found them a table near the edge of the dance floor, and then—before Samira had even registered the motion—pulled out Samira’s chair.
“Sit.”
Samira stared at it.
“It’s a chair,” Emery continued, “It won’t bite. Unlike me, given the right encouragement.”
“Oh my god,” Samira said, sitting down fast to hide how thoroughly that hit her, “you can’t just say things like that.”
“I absolutely can, look how well it worked,” Emery said, as she settled into the chair across from her, hat tipped back now that they were out of direct sun, dark hair falling loose around her face. Samira’s fingers itched at the urge to reach out and tangle her fingers in it. Emery stared at her with an attention that felt like she was the only person in the room. Which, functionally, she was, as far as Emery seemed concerned.
“You started it. Trauma Two. About a year and a half ago. Something about my hands.”
“I don’t remember that,” Samira lied.
“You absolutely do,” Emery said, “because I think about it more than is professionally advisable,” and then, before Samira could formulate any kind of response to that, a server appeared and Emery ordered for both of them—a pitcher of something local, a plate of loaded fries, a basket of fried pickles Samira hadn’t asked for and was absolutely going to eat all of—with the confidence of a woman used to taking care of things without needing permission or approval. It should have annoyed her, on principle, the presumption of it—except Emery ordered exactly what Samira wanted.
“You didn’t ask what I wanted,” Samira said, once the server had gone.
“I ask you what you like every time you complain about hospital cafeteria food,” Emery said. “You’ve mentioned fried pickles four separate times in the last year. You don’t eat meat. Minimal dairy but you make an exception for cheese and sour cream. I pay attention, Dr. Mohan.”
So, it wasn’t presumption like Samira had initially thought. It was attention. Emery had been paying attention this whole time, cataloguing what she liked, filing it away for a moment exactly like this one. Fried Pickles finding a home in Emery’s brain next to airway management algorithms. All this time Emery had been discovering her.
“You’ve done this before. The ordering-for-someone thing.”
“I like taking care of people. Sue me.” Emery leaned back, arm slung across her chair. “I also happen to know what’s good here and what isn’t, and you strike me as someone who’d order the salad out of spite just to prove you didn’t need my help.”
“I would absolutely do that.”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t give you the chance.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “You can be mad about it. I’ll live.”
“I’m not mad.” Samira picked at the edge of a paper coaster, her face still warm—from the heat outside or from Emery’s relentless flirting, she wasn’t quite sure. “It’s—it’s nice. Having someone else decide, for once. I spend all day deciding things. Life or death things. It’s nice to just—” she gestured, helpless, “—get told what I’m eating for once.”
“You like to be told what to do, huh?” Emery smirked.
“Don’t push it, Dr. Walsh.” Samira narrowed her eyes with a gleam.
Emery’s expression shifted into something soft and gentle. “Rough week?”
“Rough month. You’d know. You were there for half of it.”
“I was there for all of it,” Emery said, “I just wasn’t always in the room.”
--
A waitress delivered their pitcher and the conversation shifted after that. Emery clinked her glass against Samira’s and toasted.
“To days off,” and Samira thought, not for the first time, that she could very easily fall in love with this woman if she wasn’t careful, except it was already three months too late for if she wasn’t careful because careful left the building somewhere between the quirk of an eyebrow across a patient’s gurney and a graze of fingers mid-procedure.
Food arrived shortly after, and it was, infuriatingly, exactly what Samira wanted. The pickles were fried but not greasy, crunchy yet juicy in a way that made Samira make an actual sound of appreciation that had Emery raising an eyebrow across the table with a look Samira chose to ignore, because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging the very obvious thought behind it, which was: I want to hear that sound again, under very different circumstances.
Their conversation stayed easy and loose in a way it never quite got to at work, interrupted as they always were by trauma and pages and the self-preserving armour both of them wore around the hospital. Here, with a beer sweating on the table and a band playing something slow behind then, Emery talked—really talked, about a childhood Samira had never once pictured for her. A single stoplight town. A dad who’d taught her to drive a truck before she could see over the dashboard properly. A mother who calls every Sunday, utterly bewildered by the daughter she’d raised who’d left for the city and never quite come back the same. Emery talked about being the only girl in her graduating class who left for college further than the state line, about coming out to a mother who cried—not from anger, but from fear, from the aching grief of watching your child choose a harder road—and how it had taken years, and a lot of Sunday phone calls, to get to where they were now, which was: fine. Better than fine. Her mom asked about Samira, actually, had asked pointed questions about the coworker Emery mentioned a little too often.
“She knows about me?” Samira asked, absurdly touched.
“She knows there’s a someone,” Emery had said. Her voice went quiet, more careful than the flirting had been. “I haven’t—I don’t usually bring people up. To her. So, yeah. She knows. About you.”
Samira didn’t have anything clever to say to that, so she reached for a fried pickle instead, and Emery watched her do it with an expression Samira didn’t have time to name before it was gone.
Halfway through, a smear of barbeque sauce landed at the corner of Samira’s mouth. She didn’t notice—too busy laughing at something Emery had said about a farrier she’d known growing up, a man who apparently distrusted doctors on philosophical grounds and had once tried to set his own broken arm with a fence post as a splint.
“Hold still,” Emery said, and reached across the table.
Her fingers came to rest against Samira’s jaw as her thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, deliberately more contact that the sauce necessarily required. Samira went still, aware of nothing in the bar except the pad of Emery’s thumb against her lower lip and the way Emery’s eyes had gone dark and focused, tracking her own movement.
Then, Emery pulled her hand back, and sucked the sauce off her own thumb, holding eye contact the entire time like it was the most natural thing in the world. Samira could swear Emery knew exactly what she was doing to her nervous system by doing it.
“Sweet,” Emery said, mild as anything. “That’s some good sauce.”
Samira took a long drink of her beer.
“You did that on purpose,” she managed.
“What?” Emery asked, innocently.
“That.” Samira gestured vaguely, encompassing the thumb, the eye contact, the entire—everything. “The whole—you know exactly what you’re doing.”
“I genuinely don’t know what you mean,” Emery said, deadpan, and casually reached over to steal some fried off Samira’s plate. “This is just how I eat lunch.”
“Liar.”
“Occasionally,” Emery agreed, and smiled at her, “but not this part. I like you, Mohan. I’ve liked you for a while. I’m allowed to enjoy myself a little, aren’t I?”
Samira didn’t have a comeback for that. She just sat there, flushed, grinning like an idiot, while the band in the corner played something slow that blended into the background, and Samira thought that she could, very happily, sit at this table for the rest of her natural life.
Samira, who had spent years building up a reputation as someone unflappable in a crisis, found she had absolutely no defences against Emery Walsh looking at her like she personally hung every individual star amongst the cosmos, low and warm under the brim of a cowboy hat, with fried pickle grease on her fingers and West Virginia still faint at the edges of her vowels.
--
They traded stories after that. Samira’s own, messier immigration story, the vertigo of being seven and suddenly American—the only Indian kid in her New Jersey elementary school, her mother still not fully understanding why she’d chosen a career that made her come home smelling like antiseptic and grief, having run from it herself for the past eighteen-odd years. Emery listened the way she did everything—fully and completely invested—like Samira’s answer to a question was the only thing in the room worth attending to, and by the time their second pitcher arrived Samira had entirely forgotten how to be nervous. She’d forgotten this was supposed to be a flirtation and not whatever this deep comfort was. This was meant to be a date. This was, unambiguously, a date, and it was the best one Samira had ever been on, and she’d figured that out somewhere between the fried pickles and Emery’s hand finding hers on the table, thumb tracing absent, distracted circles against her knuckles like she wasn’t even aware she was doing it.
Emery told her about growing up an hour from the nearest grocery store, about her dad’s cattle and being able to ride a horse before she was able to walk, and the occasional long weekend where she still rode fences.
--
The band shifted into something more upbeat with a fiddle component, and a few couples drifted towards the dance floor.
“Dance with me,” Emery said, not quite a question.
“I don’t know how to two-step.”
“I’ll lead,” Emery stood, holding her hand out again—that same patient, palm-up offer—and this time Samira didn’t hesitate at all.
She was a terrible dancer. She stepped on Emery’s boots twice, laughed so hard at the second one that she nearly walked them both into another couple, and Emery just laughed with her, low and grounding and yet dizzying all the same. Her hands were sure and steady at Samira’s waist, fingers guiding her through the missteps with casual corrections—missteps usually caused by the inadvertent flex of said fingers into her skin. They spun slow under string lights, Emery’s hat brim nearly knocking her in the forehead, both of them laughing too hard to actually dance properly, and Samira thought with sudden, dizzy clarity, oh, I am completely done for.
--
Emery paid. Of course Emery paid—she had waved off Samira’s card before it had even fully left her bag and told the waitress to keep the change.
“I asked you here, Dr. Mohan. There’s no way I’d let you pay.” Emery rebutted against Samira’s protests.
“You dragged me by proximity, technically Whitaker asked me here—”
“All the more reason for me to pay.” Emery stood, offered a hand up out of the low chair with the same courtly patience she’d shown all day.
“You’re really going for it,” Samira said, letting herself be pulled up, closer to Emery than strictly necessary, close enough to smell cedar and sunscreen and a hint of shampoo.
“Going for what?”
“The whole—” Samira gestured vaguely, “gentleman thing.”
Emery’s eyes went dark. “Would you rather I didn’t?” Her hand loosening slightly against Samira’s own.
“I would rather,” Samira said, fingers tightening around Emery’s, “that you kept it up, indefinitely.”
“Noted,” Emery said, breath catching slightly in her throat, “Come on. Let’s go find our sad, sunburned coworkers before Whitaker actually breaks his neck on that bull.”
--
They should have gone straight to the truck when the sun started to set. That had, in fact, been the plan, after wandering for a couple of hours, bouncing between smaller stages and enjoying the free entertainment from various intoxicated festivalgoers they encountered. Emery’s hand found the small of Samira’s back at every crowded pinch-point, guiding her through with ease. Samira wondered if Emery simply didn’t want to stop touching her, which, fair, Samira thought, because she felt exactly the same.
Yolanda had text in the late afternoon.
Meet you at the truck at 6?
Emery’s hand was warm around Samira’s, the parking field visible just past the last row of vendor tents, a very clear and very promising trajectory towards alone, finally—except that the trajectory ran directly past a second bar, this one with a little raised stage out front and a hand-lettered sign that said KARAOKE 6-9PM, and the trajectory was derailed entirely by the sound of Whitaker’s voice cracking spectacularly on a high note.
“Oh, we have to,” Samira said, already changing course.
“We really don’t.”
“Emery. Listen to that. That man is suffering in real time. I will not be denied this.”
Who was Emery Walsh to deny Samira Mohan anything she wanted.
The crowd around the little stage was maybe thirty people deep, half of them filming, and there, under a string of patio lights, was Dennis Whitaker—hat askew, flannel loosened, absolutely butchering a duet with none other than Trinity Santos, who was, against all odds and several octaves of evidence to the contrary from her partner, actually good. Really good. The kind of good that made people stop mid-conversation to listen, her voice warm and clean and effortless over Whitaker’s enthusiastic, tone-deaf shouting beside her.
Garcia was at a table near the front, beer in hand, recording the entire thing on her phone with the glee of someone who intended to bring this up at every future shift handoff for the rest of Whitaker’s career.
“He cannot sing,” Emery said, delighted, as they pushed closer.
“He cannot,” Samira agreed, “and she’s incredible. How did I not know Santos could sing like that?”
“She did musical theatre in college. She brings it up constantly. You’ve clearly never let her finish a sentence.”
The song ended in a ragged, off-key flourish from Whitaker and a note held long and clean and gorgeous from Trinity, and the crowd actually cheered—for her, mostly, though Whitaker took a bow like it was entirely his doing, sweeping his hat off with such a lack of spatial awareness he nearly took out the microphone stand.
“Walsh!” Trinity spotted them the second she stepped off the stage, cheeks flushed, grinning. “Perfect timing. Get up here.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’re doing a song with me.”
“I am not.”
“Emery.” Trinity had already crossed the distance and grabbed her wrist, tugging, and Yolanda had appeared from somewhere with a fresh drink as if it was a bucket of popcorn. “Yolanda told me you used to do this at every county fair from age six to eighteen. Don’t you dare lie to me now.”
“That was privileged information.”
“It was bragging, is what it was. Get up there.”
Samira watched, delighted, as Emery—Dr. Emery Walsh, who did not lose arguments, who reduced med students and attendings alike to stunned silence on the regular—visibly weighed her options and found every single one of them led to the stage.
“Fine,” Emery said, “One song.”
“One song,” Trinity agreed, already flagging down the DJ, and the two of them put their heads together for a moment whilst Samira found a spot at the front, right in the loose semi-circle the crowd had formed, Yolanda at her shoulder practically vibrating with anticipation.
“You have no idea what you’re about to witness,” Yolanda said.
“You’ve seen this before?”
“Once. At a wedding. I haven’t been the same since.”
The opening bars came up—guitar first, then a driving little drum line—and Samira recognised it almost instantly, because it was, infuriatingly, one of the only country songs she actually knew: Kaylee Bell’s “Boots ‘n All,” all swagger and invitation, the kind of song built exactly for the outfit Emery was still wearing, hat and all.
And then Emery opened her mouth to sing, and Samira understood, in a single visceral rush, that she had made a terrible miscalculation in thinking she’d already reached her limit for the evening.
Emery could sing. Actually sing—naturally easy and completely unstrained, sliding into the melody like she’d been singing country songs her entire life, which apparently, she had. But it wasn’t just the voice. It was what happened to her the second the first line left her mouth: her vowels stretched long and warm, the accent Samira hadn’t even known she was supressing rising to the surface thick and unmistakable, West Virginia hills in every syllable. She sang about not wasting a good invitation, about a truck and an open road and no interest in taking things slow, and every line came out sounding less like a song and more like something aimed directly into the crowd at Samira—the promise of a good time and no apologies for it, boots and all—no half measures if Emery had anything to say about it.
She’d shed the hat halfway through the first verse, tossed it into the crowd where some stranger caught it with a whoop, her hair falling loose, one hand on the mic stand like she’d done this at a hundred county fairs before this one, hips finding the rhythm without any apparent effort, that low West Virginia drawl wrapping around every line like it had never left. Trinity had abandoned all pretense of her own performance and was just watching from the side of the stage with her jaw somewhere near the floor. Whitaker had actually stopped filming himself to film Emery instead. Garcia, next to him, mouthed what the hell to no one in particular.
Samira did not remember, later, most of the specific lyrics. What she remembered was the accent—thick and honeyed and unguarded, nothing like the Emery who spoke with such precision across an open abdominal cavity—and the way Emery had found her in the crowd somewhere around the second verse and simply stayed there, singing the rest of the song straight at her, something about not needing a fancy invitation, about coming as she was and staying as long as she wanted, delivered with a slow, knowing grin that made Samira’s knees buckle.
The song ended on a long mid-range note that Emery held without any visible effort at all, and the crowd went up—real applause, a couple of whoops, someone near the back shouting marry her that Samira chose to take incredibly surface level—and Emery took a small bow, scooped her hat back out of the stranger’s hands with a word of thanks, and stepped off the stage like none of it had cost her anything.
It had clearly cost Samira everything.
“You okay?” Yolanda asked, far too innocently, watching Samira fan herself with one hand in the humid evening air. “You’ve gone a little—”
“Don’t,” Samira said.
“—pink. For someone who wasn’t even the one singing.”
“I said don’t, Yolanda.”
Emery reached them a moment later, cheeks still a little flushed from the stage lights, entirely too pleased with herself, and the accent hadn’t fully receded yet—it clung to the edges of her voice, her vowels blurring when she leaned in close to Samira’s ear.
“You look like you saw a ghost, Mohan.”
“I feel like I need to sit down,” Samira said, honestly, and Emery laughed deeply, rumbling in her chest.
“Boots and barrels, baby,” Trinity said, arriving with Whitaker in tow, throwing an arm around Emery’s shoulders. “That was criminal. You’ve been holding out on me for years, Dr. Walsh.”
Emery caught Samira’s eye over Trinity’s shoulder and threw a wink her way that promised this conversation was very much not over.
They stayed another twenty minutes—long enough for Whitaker to demand a rematch he had no business demanding, long enough for Emery to make Garcia swear on her medical licence that the footage would never surface in the group chat, a promise Garcia had zero intention of honouring—before Emery’s hand found the small of Samira’s back again, a warm palm pressed against her spine sent tingles all the way up to her neck and around to her core. When Samira leaned back into the touch, Emery’s fingers flexed against her skin and Samira let out an almost imperceptible whimper. Almost. She would’ve been convinced Emery had missed it if not for the barely unrestrained growl she let out in response.
Samira turned to look at Emery before reaching up to tuck a stray curl behind Emery’s ear, fingers scratching lightly at her scalp before taking Emery’s hat from her hand and placing it on her own head, the cream contrasting stunningly against warm brown skin, darkened further by the sun. Emery’s breath caught in her throat as Samira’s eyes glazed over her sternum, pupils dilating slightly.
“We’re heading out,” Emery told the group, not so subtle about it, and Trinity’s grin said she’d clocked exactly what that meant, and Yolanda’s grin said she’d clocked it several hours ago.
“Have fun storming the castle,” Trinity called after them, and Whitaker, already turning back towards the karaoke stage to challenge some stranger to a duet, didn’t appear to register they’d left at all.
By the time they left, the sun had gone down proper, and the festival had shifted into its nighttime register—a new band taking over the main stage, string lights outside coming on, set by set, the crowd loosened up by two-for-one drinks specials. Emery had, true to her word, paid for everything—waved off all of Samira’s attempts to offer her own card with a look that brooked no argument, and tipped generously as all good gentlemen do.
“You’re gonna spoil me,” Samira said as they walked, close enough for their arms to brush.
“That’s the plan,” Emery replied.
Emery’s truck was, unsurprisingly, an actual truck. An older one, burnt orange and chipped, clearly well-loved. Emery had text Garcia to confirm she was going to stay with Trinity before opening the passenger door for Samira like it was the most natural gesture in the world.
“You’re really committed to the gentleman thing,” Samira said, climbing in.
“I told you, I like taking care of people.” Emery shut the door, rounded the hood, and slid behind the wheel. The truck smelled like leather and hay and, faintly, the ghost of Emery’s cologne from that morning. There was a duffle bag and a cooler in the bed and a bench seat up the front that put Samira close enough to Emery that their shoulders brushed when Emery reached to start the engine. “Especially people I’m trying to impress.”
“You already impressed me. Several hours ago. It’s a done deal.”
“Good.” Emery started the engine, pulled out of the lot, one hand loose on the wheel, hat now tossed on the dash.
“Then I get to keep going for the fun of it.”
The drive back to the motel was maybe twenty minutes, mostly dark road, headlights catching stretches of field and fence and, once, a startled deer that bolted before Emery even had to brake. Samira watched the shadows go by, warm from beer and laughter and exhaustion, and didn’t notice Emery’s hand leave the gear stick until it landed, easy as anything, on her thigh.
Samira’s whole body went electric.
“Eyes on the road,” Samira managed, a little breathless.
“Both eyes are on the road,” Emery replied, true to her word—eyes still on the road. Samira could see her mouth twitching at the corner in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. “I can multitask.”
Emery didn’t do anything at first. Just left her hand there, warm and heavy, her pinky tracing a slow line along the inside seam of Samira’s shorts, and Samira stared very hard out the windshield at the dark road and the occasional passing headlight and tried to remember how lungs worked.
Then Emery’s fingers started moving.
A slow drag of fingertips along the inside of Samira’s thigh, up toward the hem of her shorts and back down, tracing idle patterns that had no justification and every possible ulterior motive, her thumb sweeping a low arc that made every nerve in Samira’s leg light up like a switchboard. Emery’s eyes stayed mostly on the road, like she wasn’t doing anything at all, like her hand wasn’t currently dismantling every coherent thought in Samira’s head.
“Multitasking is a strong word for—” Samira’s voice caught as Emery’s fingertips dipped, just barely, under the frayed denim seam, tracing the crease where thigh met hip, and retreated back before Samira could do more than gasp. She was testing the waters, wanting Samira to feel the promise of it without cashing the cheque just yet. “For that.”
“For what?” Emery asked, all innocence again, eyes fixed dead ahead on the road like her hand wasn’t committing an act of arson on Samira’s composure.
“You’re going to get us killed.”
“I’m an excellent driver, Dr. Mohan.” Her hand slid higher, fingers spreading, thumb tracing one slow line up the inside of Samira’s thigh that made her breath catch audibly. “I have very good hands.”
“I’m aware. I’ve seen you operate.”
“Not quite what I meant.” Emery glanced over, just for a second, just long enough for Samira to catch the heat in her gaze before her eyes went back to the road, “but I appreciate the vote of confidence.”
Samira’s thighs pressed together on instinct, which did absolutely nothing except make Emery’s fingers press a little firmer where they rested.
“You’re killing me,” Samira said.
“You’ll live,” Emery said, entirely too pleased with herself, “Probably.” Her voice was rougher now, the country-boy ease cracking slightly to show the want underneath it—and Samira spent the rest of the drive in a state of simmering torment, Emery’s hand a constant, teasing presence on her thigh, never going higher than an inch under her shorts, never staying anywhere long enough to give her anything to hold onto, until the motel sign came into view, flickering pink neon against the dark, and Emery mercifully drew her hand back to shift gears and pull into the lot.
Samira was fairly certain she’d stopped breathing normally somewhere about four miles back. Emery pulled into a spot near the end of the row. Samira sat there in the sudden quiet after the engine cut, chest heaving slightly, thighs pressed together, painfully aware of how worked up she was from twenty minutes of a hand that hadn’t even really done anything.
Neither of them moved to get out.
Emery looked over at her and took in the flush high on her cheeks, the way she was sitting, the fact that she hadn’t reached for the door handle just yet.
“You okay there, Dr. Mohan?”
Samira opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“So,” Samira said, and then stopped, because what she wanted to say next was embarrassing in a way that felt very high-school, and she was thirty-one years old and almost an attending physician and she was about to say something so deeply, catastrophically teenage that she almost laughed at herself before she even got it out.
“So,” Emery echoed, turning to look at her properly now with a revered patience that had Samira suspecting Emery would wait all night if that’s what it took.
“Can we—okay, this is going to sound insane.”
“I doubt that.”
“Can we make out? In the back seat. Before we go in.”
Emery blinked. “That’s not insane.”
“It’s a little insane. I’m thirty-one.”
“Why the back seat, specifically?”
Samira felt her face heat further, which she hadn’t thought was possible at this point.
“Because I never—” Samira exhaled, tried again. “okay—in high school, I never made out with anyone in the back of a car. Everyone did it. Prom, homecoming, whatever, there was always some boy with a truck and a blanket in the truck bed, and I just—never wanted to. I told myself it was because I was too focused on school, too busy or whatever.” She could feel her face going hot again, the flush climbing, visible even in the dim orange light of the parking lot lamp. “So I never got the… cliché. The dumb, stupid, backseat-of-a-car cliché. And then I figured out why, which was obviously that I don’t like boys, at all, ever, which in retrospect explains a lot about my complete lack of interest in prom—”
“I’m going to need you to know,” Emery said, “that discovering you’re a lesbian by way of retroactively analysing your disinterest in prom dates is the single most emergency-medicine thing I have ever heard. You differentially diagnosed your own sexuality.”
“Emery,” Samira whined.
“I’m just saying that it tracks. It tracks so hard, ‘Mira.” Emery grinned. Samira’s stomach swooped at the nickname falling absentmindedly from Emery’s lips.
“I will get out of this truck,” Samira said, “and walk home.”
“You will not,” Emery said, already unbuckling her seatbelt, “because you just asked me very sweetly to make out with you in the backseat of a truck like a seventeen-year-old and I am, God help me, thrilled about it,” and then she was climbing over the console with far more grace than the space should have allowed, folding herself into the small back bench, and reaching a hand out for Samira to follow. Samira opened her mouth to speak but Emery cut her off.
“Shut up and get in the back seat with me, Miss Mohan. Let’s give teenage you the send-off she deserved.”
“Yes ma’am,” Samira replied sweetly, resulting in a deep, throaty breath from Emery.
--
They laughed at the sheer logistics of it—Emery’s truck was not designed for grace, and there was a moment of chaos involving elbows, and a seatbelt buckle that made them both crack up before they got settled—it was, objectively, a terrible place to kiss someone. Emery’s hat ended up somewhere in the footwell in the scuffle of it all, and Samira’s knee wedged against the door. She landed on Emery’s lap, hips straddling hips, her back to the front windscreen and her chest pressed against Emery’s. Her thighs and hips burned under the warmth of Emery’s hands, tracing up and down slowly. Samira’s fingers danced lightly across Emery’s jaw, leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake.
“Hi,” Emery said, eyes flicking back and forth from Samira’s eyes to her lips, and back to her eyes.
“Hi,” Samira said, and then Emery kissed her.
It started slow—deliberately slow, Samira would think later. Emery’s way of saying we have all night, and I intend to use it—Emery’s mouth soft against hers, one hand cradling Samira’s jaw, the other rising to the small of her back, tugging Samira’s hips towards her. It was, without question, the best kiss of Samira’s entire life.
When Samira made a small, helpless sound against her mouth Emery’s control audibly slipped, deepening the kiss as her hand slid into Samira’s hair to tilt her head exactly where she wanted it.
Samira’s hands found Emery’s shirt, fisted in the fabric, and she could feel more skin than fabric under her palms where the buttons sat open, finally, after months of stolen looks and arguments that were never really arguments and every single ounce of restraint that either of them had shown at work. Emery kissed like she did everything else—with refined skill, intentional movement, and absolute perfection.
“You taste like barbecue sauce,” Samira murmured against her mouth. Emery laughed and kissed her again before she could say anything else stupid.
Emery’s mouth moved to her jaw, her throat, a slow drag of lips and the occasional graze of teeth that made Samira’s hips shift against Emery’s, a small helpless movement she couldn’t have stopped if she’d tried. One of Emery’s hands slid down, over her ribs, the outside of her thigh, back to that same spot from the drive over, except now there was no steering wheel demanding attention, nothing at all standing between Emery’s hand and exactly what it wanted.
“If you keep doing that,” Samira breathed, mouth still against Emery’s, hips already chasing the pressure of her hand without her permission, “I’m going to need at least three orgasms tonight to make up for every shift I’ve spent staring at you thinking about this exact thing.”
Emery went still for half a second, her breath hitched, then she laughed against Samira’s jaw. “Noted,” she murmured. “Filed. I don’t forget a number, Mohan, you should know that by now.”
“That wasn’t a—that was a joke, that was hyperbole—”
“Was it, though?” Emery kissed the corner of her mouth, smug as anything. “I heard three. I’m holding you to three.”
“Emery.” Samira’s voice thicker than Emery had ever heard it before. “We should—inside, we should go inside.”
“Mm.” Emery pulled back just far enough to look at her, pupils blown wide, hair a mess, mouth kiss-swollen and satisfied in a way that made Samira’s whole body ache. “Yeah. We should.”
Neither of them moved for another thirty seconds.
“Inside,” Emery said again, like she was reminding herself, and finally pulled back, straightening the bandana—now crooked across Samira’s chest—with hands that weren’t entirely steady, which Samira found more satisfying than she probably should have. “C’mon, Mohan. Room’s paid for. Let’s not waste the AC.”
--
Emery’s motel room was two doors down from the one Samira was supposed to be sharing with Trinity. The room was nothing special—a queen bed, an aircon unit rattling out cool air, a lamp that gave everything a warm amber cast as shitty hotel lamps do—a fact that stopped mattering the second the door clicked shut behind them, because Emery was on her immediately, backing her against the door with a hand splayed warm at her waist, mouth finding the line of her jaw, her throat, the spot just below her ear that made Samira’s whole body arch into her.
“Hat,” Samira managed, deft fingers already working the buttons of Emery’s shirt, “keep the hat.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t make me say it twice, Walsh.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Dr. Mohan” Emery said, laughing against her throat, breathless and delighted, and she reached back without breaking contact, retrieved the hat from where she’d tossed it on the dresser on the way past, and set it back on her own head, and Samira nearly came undone on the spot at the sight of it—Emery Walsh, shirt hanging open, nipples peeking through her lacy bra, belt already loosened, cowboy hat tipped low, looking at her like she was something worth devouring.
“Better?” Emery asked, low.
“So much better,” Samira breathed, and then there wasn’t much room for talking.
Emery undressed her agonizingly slow and painfully deliberate, the same way she’d teased her in the truck, mouthing along Samira’s collarbone as she untied the bandana, dragging her lips down the newly bared skin with reverent attention that made Samira’s fingers claw against the door frame as Emery moved to her knees. Lips trailed across her hips, down her thighs, grazing across the inside of one knee. Samira lifted her leg over Emery’s shoulder, heel pushing her closer for barely a second before Emery was back on her feet with a smirk slapped across her lips.
“You think I’m gonna let the first time I taste you be against a shitty motel door?” Emery nibbled along Samira’s jaw and up to her hairline, lips ghosting across the shell of her ear, “get on the bed,” Emery commanded.
Samira’s hands grasped at the sheets as they made it to the bed. Emery’s pupils were blown, looking at Samira as if she were made of gold.
“You’re stunning,” Emery whispered, absent of her usual teasing, “You know that, right?”
“Say it again with your mouth on me and I’ll believe you.”
“Bossy.” But Emery was already smiling. Every point of contact felt deliberate between them, Emery taking the time to learn how Samira’s body reacted to each touch. Every pause felt like punctuation, keeping them from getting too ahead of themselves too quickly.
Emery took her time—that was the thing about her, Samira thought under the fog of sensation, she took her time. Everything Emery Walsh did was deliberate, including this, apparently. It was at times, terrifying to witness, but Samira had never truly considered what it meant to be on the receiving end of it. She took her time mapping every place that made Samira gasp or arch or grab fistfuls of the bedspread, she laughed softly against Samira’s skin any time she let out a strangled Oh God, and then did it again, deliberately, just to hear it. Teeth scraping over nipples before being replaced by a soothing tongue. Nipping at her collarbone, grazing her ribs, licking down her stomach and smirking as Samira’s abdominal muscles tensed beneath her tongue.
Emery moved lower, and lower, until Samira’s hands were in her hair—careful of the hat, which Emery had somehow, miraculously kept on through all of it, tipped back just enough to stay out of the way, which should not have been as devastating of a visual as it was—Emery hummed against her skin as Samira’s fingers scratched at the base of her neck.
By the time Emery had her flat on the mattress, shorts gone, skin flushed dark under her already brown complexion, Samira was trembling, so far gone that when Emery settled between her thighs and looked up at her from under the brim of that ridiculous, wonderful hat, all Samira could manage was her name.
“Emery—”
“I’ve got you, baby,” Emery said, and made good on it.
Grinning against her stomach, Emery dipped her tongue into the dip of Samira’s hip bone, sucking a small bruise at the site. Her core was alight, every cell in her body buzzing with desire and arousal. The months years of relentless flirting and lingering eye contact had been leading to this, and if this was as far as it went, Samira would already consider it worth it.
Samira’s legs part on instinct, rising slightly to find Emery’s mouth. That draws a chuckle from Emery, her free arm coming to wrap across Samira’s stomach and hips, pinning her to the bed.
“Easy tiger.”
Samira twitched as Emery’s nose brushed her clit, the surgeon groaning in anticipation of tasting the woman below her. She gives no warning before she licks and mouths at Samira like a woman starved, her tongue drawing a flat stripe from her opening to her clit, before her lips wrap around the bundle of nerves igniting her core. The sound drawn from Samira’s throat at first contact can only be described as primal and it settles in Emery’s chest as her new favourite sound. Something she can only hope she has the privilege of eliciting over and over again.
“Em’ry—”
“I know baby, you’re doing such a good job ‘Mira.”
“Please. More.” Samira begs, her leg coming up over Emery’s shoulder again, this time Emery lets her dig in with her heel.
A gasp is pulled from her throat as Emery pushes two fingers inside in response, Samira immediately quivering around her. Emery drinks her down with barely a single breath of air, lapping and sucking at Samira’s clit as her fingers curl against the spongey spot deep inside her walls.
Samira felt her body flush, heat rising from her core to settle beneath her chest, her heartbeat in her throat and black spots dancing at the edges of her vision.
Her fingers find the top of Emery’s hat, burying her deeper, and Emery’s moan against her clit sends her over the edge. Her orgasm broke hard, waves of pleasure coursing through her body, core gripping Emery’s fingers so tightly her fingertips were barely moving anymore.
Her hands fisted sheets as Emery’s name became a ruined whisper in the dark room, her whole body shaking with it.
“There she is,” Emery murmured against her thigh, sounding entirely too pleased with herself, continuing to alternate between light kisses and deep, hard sucks that were guaranteed to mark.
“Em’ry—” Samira’s voice cracked around it, oversensitive, still trembling. “Emery, give me a second—”
“Mm-mm.” Emery’s mouth curved against her skin, and she pressed a kiss to the inside of Samira’s knee. “You said three, Mohan. I heard you say three, back in the truck, mumbling into my mouth like you were begging. I intend to collect.”
“I didn’t say three, I said—I don’t think I said anything coherent.”
“Relax baby, I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere.”
And she didn’t—she stayed right there, attentive and thorough and maddeningly patient, and Samira realised that Emery had absolutely no intention of stopping at one. She coaxed Samira through a second peak that crashed through her embarrassingly fast on the heels of her first, and left her boneless against the mattress, thighs trembling, one hand still loosely in the sheets. She managed to crack an eye open long enough to glare at Emery when she heard a soft two come from between her legs.
Samira was left breathless at the sight of Emery Walsh below her; one hand braced against her stomach to hold her steady, murmuring something filthy against her skin that Samira would later be unable to fully reconstruct, only that it had made her whole body go tight, and then loose, as her ears rung out.
“Emery, I can’t—” Samira gasped, “I need—let me—I want to touch you—”
“One more,” Emery said, unmoved, hat brim brushing against Samira’s stomach as she pressed a kiss to her ribs. “You can give me one more. I know you can.”
The third one undid her completely, the slowest of the three. Emery took her apart with an unbearable gentleness, murmuring against her ear the whole time, what started as teasing, you’re doing such a good job, ‘Mira, taking my fingers like they’re made just for you, quickly turned into praise when Samira caught Emery’s gold chain between her teeth and tugged her ever so slightly closer. You’re so—God, Samira, you have no idea how beautiful you are—until Samira came apart around her fingers with a whimper, her walls clamping around Emery’s fingers in ripples.
Emery worked her through the aftershocks, her wet mouth alternating between soft kisses and long slow licks between her thighs, cleaning up the mess she’d had an active part in making, before moving up to her stomach and ribs, face nuzzling into the crook of her neck, tongue laving at her pulse points until Samira’s breath calmed. She hovered over Samira, hair falling loose around her face, chin glistening with Samira’s slick. There was something akin to awe in Emery’s expression, a slight disbelief that she’d been allowed this.
“Three,” Emery breathed, pressing her forehead to Samira’s shoulder, sounding almost as wrecked as Samira felt.
“No more—” Samira begged
“No more, baby, just bringing you back down,” Emery promised.
It took Samira a long moment to find her voice again. “Get down here,” she finally managed, tugging at Emery’s shoulder. “My turn.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Emery Walsh.” Samira caught her jaw, tipped her face up, kissed her slow and languid, ignoring the fact that tasting herself on Emery’s mouth sent an entirely new wave of arousal through her. “I have been thinking about you in that hat for approximately ten hours. Let me return the favour before I lose my mind.”
Emery’s expression cracked open in surprise, a little helpless and entirely undone by being wanted this openly. She let Samira flip them, let Samira press her back into the mattress and take her time in the same unhurried way Emery had taken hers.
“My turn,” Samira mumbled again against her mouth, voice wrecked.
“Mm,” Emery said. “Do your worst, darlin’.”
Samira groaned against Emery’s throat, refusing to believe she was turned on again, this soon after three mind-blowing orgasms. Samira kissed up Emery’s jaw, soft bites soothed by a warm tongue, before taking Emery’s bottom lip between her own, and sucking.
Emery groaned, hands flying up to grip Samira’s hips so hard there would undoubtedly be bruises in the shape of her fingers tomorrow.
“You like it when I bite, huh?” Samira huffed, teeth leaving a dark read bruise on Emery’s breast. Emery’s fingers clawed at her skin in response, the sting of her nails down her back sending heatwaves to Samira’s already burning core.
And if Emery Walsh, terror of the trauma bay, unshakeable under pressure, turned out to be embarrassingly loud and completely wrecked under Samira Mohan’s mouth and teeth and hands, well.
Samira filed that away, greedily, for later.
--
Much later—the string lights of the festival long gone dark somewhere out past motel walls, the room quiet except for the rattly hum of the aircon unit—Samira lay tucked against Emery’s side, head on her chest, listening to her heartbeat slow. Emery’s fingers traced lazy, absent patterns along her spine the same way they’d traced her thigh in the truck hours earlier. With their legs tangled beneath the scratchy motel duvet, Samira reached over to the abandoned cowboy hat on the nightstand and set it carefully on her own head.
“How do I look?”
Emery propped herself up on one elbow, taking her in with an expression so soft it made Samira’s chest ache. “Like you should never take that off again.”
“Your mom’s going to ask about this weekend,” Samira said, into the quiet.
“She is,” Emery agreed. “What do you want me to tell her?”
Samira thought about it—about denim shorts and cowboy hats and fried pickles and a thumb sucked slow and filthy across the table, about a backseat kiss she’s wanted her entire adolescence and finally got at twenty-nine, about the terrifying warmth of being wanted this thoroughly by someone this steady.
“Tell her the someone has a name now,” Samira said.
She felt Emery smile against her hair.
“Yeah,” Emery said. “I think I will.”
Samira thought, as she drifted off to sleep, with Emery’s heartbeat steady under her ear, that she could get used to this—the boots, the hat, the wonderful cliché of it all, thirteen years too late and equally, right on time.