The ER didn’t have clocks.

Not really.

It had heartbeats, alarms, footsteps, the sharp inhale before bad news and the hollow silence after it. Time didn’t pass there. It stacked.

And today had stacked high enough to press on Robby’s skull.

It wasn’t even the cases. Not really. He’d handled worse. Seen worse. Walked out of worse like it hadn’t carved something into him.

No. This was something else. Something he’d been avoiding. Something that used to have an easy solution.

You.

The “break” between you had been his idea. Or at least, that’s what he told himself when people asked why he’d been more irritable lately. Shorter. Sharper. Like every little thing was sandpaper against his nerves.

Turns out, cutting off your favorite way to blow off steam doesn’t make you better. It just makes everything louder.

Break time.

If you could call it that.

Five minutes stolen between patients. Just enough to breathe. Maybe drink water if you remembered how.

Robby didn’t even think about it when he pushed into the bathroom. It was instinct at this point. Muscle memory. Door, sink, stall, out.

Simple. Except it stopped being simple the second he saw you.

A glance. That was all it took. Tension snapped tight like a wire pulled too far.

No words at first. None that mattered. Just that charged silence, the kind that already knew how this would end even if neither of you said it out loud.

It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t smart. It definitely wasn’t professional.

But restraint had been hanging by a thread for days, and all it took was one wrong pull for everything to unravel.

Now—

After—

The bathroom felt smaller. Quieter. Like it was pretending nothing had just happened.

Robby sat back against the closed toilet lid, head tipped slightly, breathing uneven but slowing. His shirt was wrinkled, sleeves pushed up like he’d forgotten halfway through fixing himself.

For the first time all day, the tension wasn’t clawing at him.

It had slipped off somewhere in the last few minutes. Left behind in the mess of impulse and bad decisions.

“...Yeah,” he muttered under his breath, more to himself than anything.

A hand dragged over his face, lingering there for a second before dropping.

Across from him, you stood at the sink, eyes on your reflection. Fixing what could be fixed. Composing what needed to be composed.

Like this was just another thing to clean up before going back out there.

Robby’s gaze drifted up, landing on you through the mirror.

Something unreadable flickered across his expression. Not regret. Not exactly. But not nothing either.

“…We’re really bad at this,” he said finally, voice quieter now, rough around the edges. Not asking. Not joking. Just… stating it.