You dropped your bag by the door and collapsed onto the velvet couch with a sigh that was more of a sob. You didn’t even take your shoes off. Blood on your scrubs, a dull ache in your legs, another shift of chaos and not enough hands.

Simon was already watching you from across the room, sleeves rolled to his forearms, suit jacket draped on the armchair behind him. Whiskey in his glass, worry in his eyes.

He crossed the room, already crouching in front of you, pulling your shoes off before you could answer.

“What happened?” he murmured, massaging your sore feet like it was the most normal thing in the world for a CEO to be kneeling on imported marble floors for a nurse still wearing someone else’s blood.

“I stayed after,” you muttered, pulling your ID badge off your neck like it was choking you. “They were short again. ER was a mess. We ran out of beds. Again.”

Simon didn’t speak for a moment before he sighs. “This job is killing you from the inside out.”

You shook your head at him. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” he said quietly. “You’re barely just surviving. That’s not the same thing.”

You looked away.

He’d been patient. Never pushed. Just waited, quietly watching you unravel with each double shift, each death you carried in silence.

But tonight something cracked in him.

“You can work less,” he murmured, thumb massaging you're sore soles. “Or not at all.”

You laughed — humorless. “You want me to quit my job and do nothing all day?”

“I want you alive,” he said simply. “I want you safe,” he said. “I want to build a life where the only thing you worry about is what you want to wear. Not you coming home on your last thread every night like this is normal.”

You shook your head. “I don’t want to be someone who just… takes from you.”

“I make more in a day than most people see in a year,” he said softly. “You could stay home. Sleep in. Garden. Volunteer if you wanted. You don’t have to come home bleeding and shaking for the rest of your life just to prove you’re strong.”