The Ties That Bind Us - Chapter 10
Content Warning: mushy feelings
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Not for the 7 a.m. shift.
Not for the two back-to-back traumas that hit before his first bathroom break.
And definitely not for Y/N Williams to show up in glasses this morning.
He had been getting ready for the shift ahead, halfway through reviewing overnight notes, when the sliding doors opened.
He didn’t even look up at first—he knew that walk.
Quick. Focused. A little heavier than usual.
But when he glanced up, his hand froze mid-scroll.
Same black scrubs. Same ridiculous yellow cardigan she refused to retire, even though the left sleeve was slowly unraveling at the cuff.
But today, today she had on glasses. Brown-framed, slightly askew, perched on the bridge of her nose like an afterthought. Her ponytail was lopsided and loose, strands falling out and catching in the corner of her lip gloss.
A wave of quiet affection hit him, all at once, and he didn’t know what to do with it.
She glanced at him over the top of the lenses with a bleary squint, like she couldn’t quite focus on his face yet.
“Don’t start,” she muttered, voice still coated in sleep and irritation.
Robby set the tablet down and raised both hands in mock surrender, the beginnings of a grin tugging at his mouth.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were absolutely going to say something,” she countered, shouldering past him toward the counter.
He folded his arms across his chest, leaning back against the counter just to watch her move. The glasses made her look somehow younger and smarter and more infuriatingly attractive all in one. A walking contradiction. His brain short-circuited trying to process it.
“Fine,” he said, eyeing her over the rim of his own coffee cup. “You look like a sexy librarian who moonlights as an ER doctor.”
She froze with her hand on the keyboard.
Then turned her head slowly, her expression hovering between suspicion and amusement.
“That’s disturbingly specific.”
“It sounds like a fantasy.”
He shrugged, unapologetic. “I didn’t say whose.”
Her cheeks flushed, betraying her irritation, but she turned back to the machine without another word, reaching for a tablet. He noticed her hands shook just slightly—maybe from lack of caffeine, maybe from something else.
“These are my backup glasses from med school,” she said finally, tapping her ID badge on the computer “My contact prescription expired. I feel like I look twelve.”
Robby tilted his head, gaze trailing slowly over her profile.
She was frowning down at the screen. Her glasses had slipped again, resting precariously on the tip of her nose, and she pushed them up absently with her ring finger—an old, unconscious habit, probably from residency. Something about the motion made his chest ache.
“You really don’t,” he said.
There was a softness in his voice that surprised even him.
You paused mid-type, fingers tightening around the mouse. For a beat, she didn’t move at all. Just stood there, like she wasn’t sure what to say—or maybe like she didn’t want to say something that might be too much.
She turned slightly, eyes meeting his under the muted fluorescent lights. Her expression wasn’t playful anymore.
“You okay?” Robby asked gently.
She hesitated. Then nodded once.
“Yeah. Just… didn’t sleep great.”
Her gaze lingered on his face. And for a flicker of a second—just a heartbeat—he saw it. The wall slip. The thing she didn’t let anyone else see. The part of her that carried everything, that held tight to every mistake, every bad outcome, every pressure to be perfect and untouchable and fine.
“Yeah,” she said, almost too quietly. “That.”
Robby opened his mouth. He didn’t even know what he was going to say—maybe something dumb and sweet, maybe something dangerous and real—but before he could, the intercom above their heads crackled to life.
“Code One Trauma, ETA four minutes.”
Just like that, the moment dissolved.
You turned on your heel, all business again. But her eyes lingered on his for half a second longer than they needed to.
They fell into step down the hallway, walking shoulder to shoulder toward the trauma bay like they had a hundred times before. No more talking. Just the beat of their sneakers on linoleum and the weight of the unspoken hanging in the space between them.
By 10:30, they’d already cleared two trauma rooms and started prepping for a third.
They hadn’t had a break. Hadn’t spoken about anything outside of clinical orders. But Robby kept finding himself watching her—not just watching, but noticing.
The way her glasses slid down her nose every twenty minutes, and she pushed them back up with the back of her wrist without even thinking.
The way her lashes fluttered when she focused hard on a BP drop or scanned a chart.
The way her cardigan kept slipping off her shoulder and she never once fixed it, too busy thinking two steps ahead of everyone else in the room.
Every time he looked at her, it hit him harder.
This woman—this terrifying, brilliant, sarcastic woman—was undoing him with the stupidest things. A squint. A cardigan. A pair of backup glasses that didn’t even fit her right.
And she didn’t even know.
She didn’t see the way the nurses looked between them sometimes. The way his residents had started to raise their eyebrows when he followed her out of a trauma room instead of heading to the next patient.
She didn’t feel the way his pulse jumped every time she brushed past him in a hallway or said his name in that low, unimpressed voice she used when he teased her too much.
And maybe it was better this way.
Maybe it was safer if she never did.
But as she bent over a monitor, squinting to read an ABG without realizing her glasses had slipped all the way to the end of her nose, he couldn’t help it.
He walked over, reached out, and gently pushed them up for her.
Then turned her head, eyes wide and unreadable.
He dropped his hand and stepped back before he could say something stupid.
“You were gonna go cross-eyed,” he said casually.
She stared at him. Then smiled and looked away.
He turned back toward the supply cart, pulse hammering in his throat like he’d just crossed a line.
But in that moment, watching her tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear and pretending her ears weren’t turning red, Robby knew exactly what was happening to him.
He was falling.
Hard.
Helplessly.