This is the first of three ficlets that will be posted as part of the Summer of Smut project that I’m working on with @desperationandgin and @smashing-teacups. Check out Gin’s blog tomorrow and S-T’s blog on Sunday for their spin on our first theme/item to incorporate (water). I’ve had an absolute blast working on this wee project with you two, and am so grateful for all of the cheering from the sidelines that you’ve done to bring this across the finish line. Special thanks to @kkruml for putting up with me and calling me out on my nonsense, and to @ttwaffles for repeatedly sending me an ask with only an avocado emoji until I relented.
Well into the sixteenth hour I had spent on my feet, I emerged from the sterile, artificial ventilation of the hospital into fresh air. It was just past midnight. My lungs ached drawing in the heavy, wet greenness of the outdoors. It had been pissing rain (Jamie’s term) for more than seventeen days, and Edinburgh felt lush. Inhaling, I tipped my face towards the sky, looking for nothing at all and exhaled an entire week’s worth of worry (the confounding cases, odd complications, departmental in-fighting, and a dodgy tuna fish sandwich procured by Geillis that made me green in the gills shortly before five).
“Ye look like ye could scream.”
My head snapped to the right, and my face broke.
Jamie.
In film noir, the disembodied voice would have belonged to a trench coat-clad man in a pork pie hat, the deepest of shadows and grey filmy cigarette smoke obscuring the rest of his form.
Tori