There was no going back.
Mr. Monopoly.
So you just kinda don't have any respect for me.
You kinda don't like me.
Maybe Maggie was right.
No. she wasn't. Until I had aced my MCATs and told Mom that I had taken them in the first place, no one had ever expected anything from me. I was the pretty one, looks and no brains, that was what everyone had thought about me. I'd proven them wrong again and again with test scores and impressive internships. Plastic surgery may not have been what the infamous Harper Avery or Catherine Fox wanted for me, but I was a damn good plastic surgeon. I changed people's lives for the better and gave them the chance to be themselves. I did pro-bono surgeries frequently. And now, well, I didn't have any sizable inheritance. Everything I had left had been put to Harriet.
This was a mistake. If Maggie thought that I was Mr. Monopoly, she didn't know me at all. There was no way that she could move in with me. If she was so averse to trying new experiences and couldn't respect me, then there was no way that she could have a significant role in Harriet's life. I wanted Harriet to grow up and be willing to try new things, to embrace different experiences, not to be stuck in the known. Maggie wouldn't be the right role model for that.
It was a good thing Harriet has April.
I wasn't sure how long I had been walking through the thick fog. It was hard to see where I was going other than the fact that I was following the road, able to feel the smoothness of the road compared to the crunch and softness of the forest floor. But I'd heard the crash – which meant I was probably headed toward downtown.
"Help! Help us! Please!" A man's voice shouted in the distance.
Picking up my pace into a jog and trying to catch up with the sound of the man's voice, it took me a few moments to find out who was shouting. I could barely make out the outline of a car. Or what had once been a car.
"Help! Please, help!"
The outline of one man standing outside of the car was barely visible even as I got close. The beam of the flashlight shone just enough that it got his attention and he waved me over. "Please, we need help! I can't get her out and she can't breathe!" He yelled.
"Let me help," I spoke. "Ma'am, can you hear me?" I questioned as I moved next to the car door.
"Yes," she gasped out. "Can't–"
"It's okay, I've got you," I promised her. "We're going to get you out of here, I promise. I need you to try and keep your head as still as possible?" There was no way that help was going to get out here in time. If she couldn't breathe, then we couldn't risk leaving her in there. We had to get her out as soon as possible.
It took a good bit of hauling and leverage for both me and the other man in order to get her out. The strain nearly throws out my back but it was enough to get her from being stuck between bent metal, laying her out on the grass beside the road to try and minimize the risk of things getting worse. There's a bad leg wound to put a tourniquet on, but other than that, she was stable enough to wait until an ambulance came.
After a few minutes of waiting, it was clear that it was going to take a good amount of time for the ambulance to get there. Gasoline and smoke were beginning to fill my lungs with each passing breath.
"We need to get further away from the car," I warned him. "Help me move her."
Grabbing onto the woman's upper half, we barely get the chance to lift her up and move her a few feet away before the car goes up in flames with a loud explosion, sudden clarity in the thick fog of the afternoon from the orange flames bursting in the air. All three of us are flung back. Ears ringing, it took a moment for me to be able to gather myself again to sit up and recognize what exactly had happened.
"Hey– hey–" Looking around for either one of them, a small flame catches my attention. The woman and her sleeve.
"Shit!" I swore under my breath and quickly stripped off my jacket, using it to fan over her and put out the flames. There was likely to be a nasty burn there on top of what the damage from the car crash had already done. She needed to get to the hospital and fast.
Ambulances didn't seem to know that, though.
A few minutes pass and it seemed like it wasn't going to a problem, like she might be able to make it for the arrival of an ambulance to transport her safely to a hospital. The few minutes are good, but they're not enough. Her breathing began to get shallow as she suffered from the consequences of the deep burns on her flesh. It became more and more shallow before it stopped altogether.
"C'mon, c'mon..." With one hand on top of the other, I begin with compressions. They're hard and fast, keeping count of them so I know when to pause and bend down to breathe into her.
I'm not sure how long it took for the ambulance to alive, but it was long enough that I could feel the sweat dripping down the sides of my forehead and feel the soreness in my arms and shoulders. When the ambulance and paramedics arrived, they quickly got her set up and began to take over the chest compressions themselves, allowing me for a break. But it's a bad burn and there was no one else in the hospital that would be able to take care of it as I could. I had no choice but to ride back with the paramedics to Grey Sloan Memorial.
Because the fog was so thick, the ride to the hospital was longer than it should have been. I rotated performing compressions and checking on other vitals with the paramedic in the back of the ambulance. It was taking too long and she needed the kind of help that only a state of the art burn center could give, not this.
The ambulance pulled to an abrupt stop as it reached the hospital. A few seconds passed before the doors to the ambulance opened up sharply so that we could unload her and bring her into the hospital.
"What do we got?"
Of all the things that I had expected at that moment, the absolute last had been my ex-wife.
"April?"
"Jackson?"
Despite the confusion, neither one of us hesitated to get her out of the ambulance. I have to put aside my questions to explain. "Car crash victim, barely got the chance to get out of the car before it exploded. Her sleeve caught fire. I did my best to treat her at the scene but she needs to go up to the burn unit."
That means past the emergency room – past where she was meant to be working, apparently.
"Alright. I'm coming with you," April replied with a nod of the head, getting a hand on the gurney to assist with pushing.
"What are you doing here?" I finally questioned when we reached the elevator. "I mean, the clinic and all. You left?"
"No," she answered. "But Bailey called me and asked me if there was any way that I could help. Teddy had her baby and apparently Meredith, Alex, and Webber all got fired for some... fraud thing, or something. I didn't ask a lot of questions because she sounded desperate and well, you know Bailey. She never sounds like that."
"Wait, they all got fired?" I blinked in surprise, brow forming a deep furrow.
"That's what Bailey said," she glanced away for a moment. "But I'm sure it's not going to last. It never seems like it does with anyone around here. Everyone always comes back, one way or another."
"Except for you." The words slipped out my lips before I could stop them.
April looked up at me with wide eyes. "I love trauma, there's no doubt about it, but... there's a lot of people who need help out there. And it feels good to work pro-bono all the time. It really does."
"I'm happy that you're happy." But I missed her. Before she had been my wife, she had been my person. The hospital didn't really feel the same without her peppy presence.
The elevator dinged before the door opened and our conversation hit pause. April may not have been a plastic surgeon, but I knew that she was familiar with treating burns. She had always taken extra precaution with anything that may have involved any kind of smoke inhalation after the mother that she had lost our third year of residency. When she made a mistake, she learned from it.
I kind of felt like I needed to do a little more of that.
It took a few minutes to get the woman set up with pain medication and to properly treat and debride the wound. It goes a little faster with her working along my side. Even if she hadn't been working at the hospital for months now, and we only saw each other for Harriet usually, it was like nothing had changed between us.
"You don't look very happy, Jackson," April remarked as we stepped out of the room, taking off the paper gowns.
"What?"
"You said that you're happy I'm happy," she reminded me as she looked up. "But you don't seem very happy."
"I..." A loud sigh parted my lips and I ran my hand over my face, chewing the inside of my cheek for a second as we headed back toward the elevator. "It's just been a rough day."
April stepped into the elevator behind me. "Are you sure that's all?" She had always been able to read me.
"I don't know," I leaned back against the wall.
"You can talk to me about it, you know," her head tilted as she made the offer. "It was... good, talking to you when you were exploring faith and God. It was really nice. I always wanted that for you, to feel the way that I've gotten to feel my whole life. I'm glad that you feel that now. We haven't talked as much lately."
"It was," I agreed. "Things with Maggie, uh, haven't exactly been great. She doesn't respect me. Thinks I've never had a hard day in my life just because I didn't have to worry about money. And I realized I've been spending our entire relationship trying to make her into someone that she wasn't. There's... nothing left for us. Let alone a future."
Unloading it from my chest felt good even if the words weren't happy ones.
"I left Matthew." The words slipped out of her lips as casually as the weather.
"What?" I blurted back.
"The marriage was never a legal one because of the way we went about it. I woke up the next day... wondering what I had jumped into if I'd had too many glasses of champagne the night before. All I wanted to do was help him, but not like that." She explained. "I know that I used to be all about... going through absolutely whatever it took to make things work out. But I learned something from you. That's not always the best way to handle things."
How had I not realized that sooner? I saw her weekly. Matthew – well, I hadn't tried to pay attention to him beyond the first week or two. It'd been easy for him not to be there.
"Well, at least he wasn't kind of related to you," I offered a weak smile.
"Yeah, you've got me beat there." She chuckled gently as we moved to the E.R. and she grabbed a tablet from the nurses. "Do you want to help out down here, since you're already here? We're short staffed and now that ambulances can actually make it through the fog, we could really use the help."
"Of course," I nodded my head and grabbed a tablet of my own. "Tell me where you need me."
Working with her again really was just like old times, better times between us. I felt as though I had been transported to a better part of my life. Yet at the same time, it only made me miss her even more, knowing that this was temporary. She would go back to working with the homeless and I'd stay here. Even if she wasn't going back to Matthew, it still stung. April had said that she felt like she learned something from me about knowing when to throw in the towel, yet I felt as though I had learned the exact opposite from her. A mistake had been made.
Although there was plenty to do with the cases coming in the emergency room at a rather quick pace, the time seemed to fly by. Maybe it was because I wanted to be here and working with her, not sent home after a long, productive day.
But eventually, the emergency room got cleared out enough that it looked like a normal day again.
"This place doesn't work the same without you here," I commented as I looked down at her, smiling. "Are you sure there's no chance that I can tempt you into coming back here?"
April laughed. "No, I don't think so."
"You know I have to try," I chuckled. Looking down at her, I gravitated closer with a step. Her hazel eyes turned back up to me, waiting for me to say something. For a few seconds, I had nothing else to say. Nothing that she didn't already know.
The electricity that should have disappeared with our divorce didn't. I could still feel it there, alive as ever. My gaze dropped from her eyes to her lips, looking just as soft as they ever had. I wondered if they still tasted as sweet as they once had. When my eyes finally returned to hers again, I realized that she was doing the same.
"I miss you," I admitted.
"I'm only a couple of miles away," she pointed out.
"I know." And I did. "It's just... not the same as having you around all the time. That's all."
Her hand reached out and took mine, giving it a squeeze. "I miss you too. And this place. After everything, after I almost died... I needed something more. And I got to find it. I'm really lucky. But I'm still always here for you."
"Do you want to get dinner tonight?" I asked suddenly.
"I need to pick up Harriet from daycare."
"All three of us can go," I suggested. "A family night."
"That's a good idea." The smile on April's lips was so bright it nearly stunned me into silence. "I'd like that."
My fingers gave hers a squeeze and I dropped down my head a little more. "Maybe, uh... we can begin to do it a little more regularly. Spend time together, all three of us. Like when we were all living together." I missed those days.
"I think we can work something out," she nodded her head and her gaze dropped, looking down at her hands. "Jackson..." she began.
After a few seconds of silence, I spoke. "What?"
"I, uhm..." A little laugh left her lips before she looked back up at me again. "I just guess I've missed you a lot more than I realized. That's all."
A few more quiet seconds passed.
Before I could begin to think enough to talk myself out of, I dipped my head down just enough to capture her lips with a soft kiss. April froze before she responded in turn, lips moving against mine and deepening the kiss. I released her hand so I could grab both sides of her face with my hands, moving closer to her, trying to fill every gap of space between our bodies. She was just as soft and just as sweet as she had always been. No one filled me with quite the same warmth as she did by kissing her alone. Nothing compared to kissing her.
Both of us were panting by the time that our lips separated from one another, but we didn't move, my forehead tilting forward to rest against hers. Her hand climbed up to rest on my cheek, thumb stroking along my stubble gently.
"Jackson..." The way that she said my name felt like praise.
"I told you, I miss you." A small smirk tugged at my lips.
"What about Maggie?" She questioned.
"I told you, I don't have a future with her." There was a little guilt there, sure, but it wasn't about kissing April. It was about the fact that I had let things go on far too long with Maggie in the first place.
"And what about me?" I knew what she really meant by the question.
"Our futures are already intertwined because of Harriet," I barely shrugged my shoulders. "Might as well see if maybe there really is something else there after all."
Her smile gave it all away. "You know that this is crazy, right?"
"I do." I put another kiss on her mouth, softer than the one before. "But I've always been crazy for you. I'll break up with Maggie. We'll do this the right way. No one walking down the aisle with another and getting interrupted. Just me and you."
"I really missed you too." April kissed me again, deepening it for a moment before she pulled away. "Let's go get our girl."