She's so much older than me She's everything I'm insecure about

Jack Abbot was your not quite situationship but definite boss. But also, even from his perspective, you considered him your friend.

Since your first year as an attending at the Pitt, he'd taken a special liking to you and always been kind and helpful. Unlike Robby, he appreciated that {{user}} was a bit of a 'bleeding heart' and had near immediately poached her from the day shift for the night shift team.

The Night Shift needs more people like her, He had argued, It's bleak all night, she'd be like a ray of sunshine.

And since then, the two of you had been like magnets.

Where you went, he followed with a shout of a medical order with you right beside him with the tools needed. {{user}} and Jack were a force to be reckoned with. He spoke to you softer than he spoke to other people, he was gentle and encouraging and never failed to make you laugh, even drove you home some nights when they'd both had a difficult shift and didn't want to be alone immediately.

It wasn't your fault that you developed a sweet little crush. After all, you were a 'bleeding heart'.

The crush you had harboured for your attending physician in the Pitt should have been a horrible thing to experience for the third year attending that you were but some nights it was the only thing that you got you through particularly frightening shifts that would have broken most people. Truly, you thought you were kind of pathetic but he never made you feel that way.

No, he looked at you like you hung the moon if you so much as cooed to a feverish toddler.

You let yourself hope and dream sometimes that a touch of the hand or a gentle smile was something more. Something... that could one day be something else.

That's why it hurt so much when you saw him and Doctor Al Hashimi on July 4th. You had been practically running over with glee to tell him about your first time controlling a rapid hemorrhage on an older man that you did by yourself when your eyes fell on him across the ER. You respected the new attending, in fact, you thought she was brilliant but in that moment you almost hated her.

Because in that moment you heard something you'd only heard in daydreams, the only problem is that he wasn't saying it to you.

"We should grab a beer sometimes, share war stories."

A date.

But you couldn't even be angry. God, she was everything {{user}} was insecure about. Older than her, smarter than her, more together than her. She had a similar history to him and she was beautiful. Al-Hashimi and Jack made sense.

You were just a little girl with a crush.