Chapter Text
Samira Mohan has spent all of her residency veering between being distinctly underappreciated, often undermined, frequently underestimated and pointedly underfucked.
Despite that, she isn’t a vindictive person. She never meant for this to happen.
Not really.
She can explain. She absolutely could explain this and they’d laugh.
…if they’d give her the opportunity.
Samira sits on the end of the bed as Robby and Jack talk above her head and puts her head in her hands and lets the feelings rush through her for a long, uncomfortable minute.
Pittfest changed everything. Not immediately, but there’s a distinct line between that one day in September and every day that came after. How Samira Mohan, a woman who had not had sex for her entire residency, suddenly was having so much sex she could barely have a night alone. How trauma is a cat with a long tail. That is one of Robby’s little aphorisms, that it will trip you up if you don’t look out for it, and now here she is, flat on her metaphorical face.
Jack is heartbroken and embarrassed. Robby is being unnecessarily nice about this whole thing, but in a way that is a little too smug to be truly sincere. Samira exhales and stands between them, arms folded over her chest, viscerally aware both that her left breast is basically hanging out and also that she can feel the marks of Robby’s teeth in her nipple.
There’s nothing she can say right now to make it better. They’re all a little bit too metaphorically fucked when the plan was to be everything but that.
In the end, very little explaining or talking happens. Jack takes Robby’s room, and Samira takes another, much longer shower and when she comes out, Robby is asleep with all the lights on, his phone lying on his chest, voice noting his snores to Jack.
Samira presses pause and locks the screen, placing the phone on her spare charger, and then climbs into bed and turns the lights off.
The blackout curtains make the room feel claustrophobic with the presence of someone else in them. For all they’ve been frantically fuckbuddying for the last few months, Samira has never actually slept with Robby before.
She lies there and overthinks. Thinks about all the times she has slept with Jack, how their exhausted naps turned into long-weekends spent mutually ruining their sleep cycles on each other, until time has no meaning and both night and day shifts are equal struggles. Thinks about the double edged sword of a blackout curtain and a white noise machine. Thinks about how good it feels to be bodily and mentally exhausted without the complication of stress.
She's about to fall asleep when there's a polite knock on the door. She answers to find a flustered waiter with a cart holding her forgotten food. He whispers his apologies; there had been a fire alarm pulled in the kitchen, he is so very sorry it has taken so long. The food has been comped, of course, and is still hot.
She thanks him, and takes one of the plates off the trolley and directs him to take the other one to Robby’s, well, Jack’s room, and closes the door. She feels bad that she hasn’t tipped him, in that reflexive way she feels if she gives less than 30%, but then decides she’s too tired and heartbroken to care right now.
She eats the sandwich slowly sitting on the edge of the bed, finding the little pots of sauce with the light of her phone. Not that it matters, even the smell of food doesn’t seem to wake the living dead occupying the right side of the mattress. He truly could be on the US Olympic Sleep Squad, though he’d lose style points for the snoring. She amuses herself thinking up the rest of the scoring criteria until she’s finished the food and re-brushed her teeth, then curls back up in bed, and tries to quieten the shame in her heart to the rhythm of Robby’s breathing.
“It'll be better tomorrow”, she chants to herself, as sleep digs its fingers into her. “It has to be better tomorrow. There’s no way it could be worse than today.”
The next day is a fucking nightmare.
Samira wakes up hungover, sore and exhausted having spent the whole night in some kind of half-conscious daze. Robby is still snoring when her alarm goes off, and she’s never hated him more than she does in that moment.
The shower is incapable of drowning her, but she tries really hard to make it work, stubbornly leaning against the wall and letting it soak her until Robby bangs on the door, his invectives muffled but meaning clear. There are no towels or robes left, so she does what she can with the hand towel and slips damply back into her pajamas, not really wanting Robby to see her naked. Even though at this point he’s probably one of the people who have seen her naked the most, it feels like something he needs to re-earn.
The other person who is aware exactly where her birthmark is is down the hall. If everything had gone to plan, he would be arriving at lunchtime, arriving just in time for the presentation, and then they would have sneaked away and left Robby to do the gladhanding, and lost themselves in each other and the city…
Fuck.
What was she doing? What was she thinking? Even if it had gone right, there’s no way she would have gotten away with it…
She wrenches the door open.
“Samira, I think we should…” Robby says as she pushes past him. He’s holding a towel and is still in the robe he hastily slipped on last night, tied loosely around his narrow hips.
“Shower,” Samira cuts him off. “You should shower. We’re going to be late for registration. In fact, we’re already late, I’ll see you there.”
He sighs. He’s basically nude right now, she can see the crease of his thigh and the chub of his morning wood. He’s got a great dick, and god, her stupid traitorous body is thinking about pushing him down onto that overly soft mattress and letting him do that thing with his thumb again.
She focuses on thinking unkind things about his skinny legs instead. They really are ridiculous. It's like he’s never heard of leg day. Not like Jack…
He’s still trying to talk to so she shoos him in with her hand, and once the door is shut, wrenches open her suitcase. She has her outfits already laid out for each day of the conference, though she messed it up by grabbing that dress last night. Still, she had a plan, and day one, presentation day, is still in its packing cube, so she pulls it out; a sleek suit with an incredibly flattering pencil skirt in dove grey which she found in a consignment store. It fits like a dream, and she pairs it with a soft knit tank, thinking hard so it looks casual and chic and not like she spent hours on Pinterest working out how to look effortless, like she has no need to try. She’s got a pair of heels for the presentation, but steps into a very well-researched pair of flats for the day on the floor. If there’s anywhere where comfortable footwear will be indulged, it’s an emergency medicine conference.
Robby’s taking his time in the shower, and thankfully she bought extras of her makeup, because there’s no way she’s going in there to grab her bag. She gets her laptop bag together and dumps the contents of her handbag into it in a rush as she hears the shower turn off, and is out of the door before Robby can try and distract her further.
She goes down to the continental breakfast and eats a croissant and a coffee standing up and then follows the crowd of doctors across the busy London streets to the conference hall, all the time feeling like there’s a stone in her stomach, churning its edges away on her soft insides.
The conference centre from the outside is suitably grand, but inside it feels like any other carpeted liminal space, the only charm and character limited to the parts of the ceiling they couldn’t hide away. She stares up at them as she waits to register, only dragging her eyes back down to reality when her phone buzzes.
“I have to go back to my room to get clothes, will be late.” Robby’s text says. She sighs. At least he didn't ask her to grab his badge for him.
The line is moving slowly. She wishes she’d gotten a coffee to go rather than scalding her mouth. She can already feel the skin lifting into a blister.
As she reaches the front her phone buzzes again. “Jack and I are going to talk,” it reads. “Will meet you later.”
That’s when Samira realises that she has fucked up yet again. This is the absolute worst situation, for the two men she has been having sexual relationships with for the last few months to now be locked in a room together unsupervised exchanging stories. They’ve been friends for decades, weathering thorny careers, tragedies and triumphs with that male stubborn stoicism.
She’ll be lucky if she has a job to go back to at the end of this. Neither of them are spiteful or vengeful men, but everyone has a limit.
She thinks about going back over there and solving this whole thing right now, throwing herself on the bomb and letting it rip her apart, but she desperately does not want to do that. This conference has been her dream. She’s never going to come back here easily, especially considering the state of US research. This is potentially it. She has to make the most of it. She’s Doctor Samira Mohan, MD. A hard fought R4, one of the heroes of PittFest, good at what she does, with so much more still to give. She’s barely started. She can’t give up now.
So Samira grabs her namebadge and affixes it to her lapel, opens the welcome pack to the conference guide and picks a session, and with a set of her jaw, turns off her phone, puts her newly printed business cards in her pocket, and gets to doing what she does best.
The first session is on novel airway techniques, and it's exactly what she needs to blow the cobwebs out. She takes a lot of notes, the scratch of her pen keeping her grounded and focused on the session, asks a well received question, and chats to the lead researcher for ten minutes after. They exchange business cards, and he gives her three recommendations of further sessions she’ll be interested in.
She floats slightly late into the next one, and repeats the process, slowly and surely getting high on the supply of intellectual vim and vigour.
By the time they break for tea she feels like she’s floating. She loves emergency medicine so much! Nothing can touch her. It's almost better than sex.
She thinks about turning her phone back on, but decides against it when someone sidles up to the awkward tall table she’s leaning against and inserts himself into her eyeline.
“Hi,” the man says. He’s average looking and not very tall, but he’s got a lovely accent, incredibly blue eyes and a full mouth, and those are definitely things she can work with.
“Hi,” she says, pouring charm and confidence into it, and holding out her hand. “Samira Mohan,” she says.
He takes it. Nice handshake. Soft hands, but not too soft. She has opinions on that, these days, alongside facial hair, length vs girth, and which popular erectile dysfunction medicine is best for getting railed within an inch of her life.
“Lovely to meet you, Doctor Mohan,” this new man says, pronouncing her name correctly, and ugh, maybe she’s been setting the bar too low, but her pulse positively flutters. “I’m Tom Chipton, Leeds General Infirmary.”
“Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center,” Samira says, and Doctor Chipton’s eyebrows shoot up, delighted.
“A celebrity in our midst! I must say, everyone’s excited for your presentation later. I think I’ve seen it highlighted when I’ve sneaked looks over everyone’s shoulder. Last year’s plenary wasn’t enough, we want all the disgusting little details, like the weird perverts we are.”
Oh yeah. Robby, for all his anti-social nervous breakdown chic and vigorous complaining, had spent the last year doing the academic rounds, which had gone a long way to placating hospital management, who would have sold their HR records to the Weekly World News if they could get away with it. They would prefer he bring in cold hard cash or political favours, but universities love funding almost as much. Almost. Robby, despite everything, is a world class speaker. Confident, charming and a little twinkly around the edges, he always speaks without notes and can take any question head on.
“You’ll have to wait for this afternoon,” she says, then leans in, and Doctor Chipton leans in too, “but spoiler alert: it’s going to be a good one,” she says, with a wink. Chipton laughs, and there’s something in it that makes her look away.
Over the heads of the crowd she sees Robby casting around looking for her. She can’t see Jack, but emergency medicine tends male enough that the European crowd average is too tall for him to be visible.
“Excuse me,” she says, though she takes the time to slide a business card across the table before she goes, which he pockets extremely smoothly, and grabs her bag and retreats to the bathroom to regroup.
Sitting on the closed toilet, she leans her head against the wall, then shakes herself off and with a sigh, turns her phone back on.
Her heart sinks when she realises that there’s a text from Jack.
“Robby and I spoke. We’re all adults, I think we can come to an agreement. Don’t let it ruin your day, this is your conference, your success. Put it out of your mind, we can talk tonight. I’ll always be there for you.”
Samira groans and presses her head against the cool wall and groans loud enough that the woman in the next door stall asks if she’s okay.
Unlike her thing with Robby, Jack was far more gentlemanly in his approach, all soft smiles and acts of service, coffee orders and notes in the margins, but once they’d accepted that 1. the crush was mutual and 2. that acting on it wasn’t going to impact their work, all that gentleness was replaced with an intensity gothic novelists would raise an eyebrow at. Samira has never felt more consumed than the way Jack looks at her. He’s unabashedly into her, all heavy breathing, bitten lips, palming himself when he sees her in her lingerie, moaning like there’s no such thing as shame. She tries her best not to compare him with Robby because it feels unfair, but Jack has a sleazy side he loves to indulge and a sense of humour and a sexual playfulness that is unlike anyone else she’s ever gone to bed with. Jack will say the most outrageously grossly sexual things with a straight face and it makes her fucking drip, he also sees sex as an endurance sport. He has absolutely no qualms about taking viagra, he has a collection of cock rings, and the first time he opened the bottom drawer of his nightstand Samira blushed all the way down her sternum.
She had been worried she wouldn’t be enough for him but he was always so generous, so genteel, so willing to meet her where she was at, and didn’t push, and that expanded her sexual boundaries more than anything. Just the opportunity to try things was heady enough to be addictive.
“We shouldn’t be ashamed of any of this,” he said one night in his hot tub. Oh yeah, Jack Abbot has a hot tub on his deck and a vape with the really good stuff and loves to mix them on clear nights, the stars stretching above them. They were passing it back and forth, Samira taking tiny sips on Jack’s recommendation, having not smoked weed since college. “You and me baby,” he says, eyes crinkling, “we aint nothing but mammals.”
That night they’d fucked under the stars, Jack sliding inside her from behind with Samira positioned in front of the jets so she could be driven slowly insane by the feeling of them against her body, pressing at her ass like an additional lover asking for forgiveness rather than permission, and he’d groaned and said all these filthy fantasies to her with his whole chest.
Despite the fact that Samira felt like she was ready to graduate from the school of advanced sex under his tutorage, and the fact that she had utterly fallen in love with him weeks ago, Jack kept his wedding ring on, and told her that while she was wonderful, he wasn’t open to having another serious relationship. He also implied that she wasn’t his only sexual partner, though he’d done it in a way that she didn’t really believe him. When would he have the time to fuck someone else, she didn’t know, but Jack Abbot did a lot of things that seemed impossible.
He was also not above lying to protect his heart. He admitted that too. An open book yes, but one written by an unreliable narrator. Being involved with Jack was like how she thought being involved with Robby would be, and vice versa.
He wasn’t the type to make a grand romantic gesture. It was why she was so sure she would get away with keeping the delicate balance, but she had been right to doubt him. That maybe, just maybe, Jack Abbot wasn’t as impervious to oxytocin as he made out.
Samira wipes her eyes, flushes the toilet and steps out to examine the damage to her eye makeup. Thankfully, the mascara she had bought was as waterproof as advertised.
Checking the session list, she squares her shoulders, and steps out into the rapidly emptying hall, not letting her eyes stray from the prize of seminar room C, and letting it all fall away as best she can.
The rest of the day’s sessions blur into anecdote and headline numbers. Twenty percent reductions leading into discussions of the significance of seven hour waiting times crossed with breaches of confidentiality and novel strategies against burnout. True to Jack’s message, Robby and Jack both keep a polite distance, even as they occupy the same spaces, their preferences revealed to be complimentary as they find each other again and again, room after room, question after question.
She continues to avoid them at lunch. She lets the head of the research unit at UCL talk her head off about the research opportunities of an academic career, and discusses the finer benefits of R and Python for analysing patient data with another American, ultimately deciding that it depends on which one you like better. It’s a nice conversation in a sea of other nice conversations in an academic oasis. It is appealing to imagine this being the way her life goes, swapping the back to back twelve hour shifts for the challenges of teaching and research, doing just enough clinical work to keep her hand in, to stay competitive, to stringing herself from six to twelve strings by working smarter, not harder.
But then she thinks about the way the ED feels, how every day is different, how it feels to see a man like her father, a woman like her aunt, a girl like she was, a boy like her first love; all who had turning points in their lives in fluorescent-lit clinical hallways for better or worse, and how the doctors were part of this failing machine that changes these mundane little lives despite an uncaring world and cruel system, a leaky barricade against death. She isn’t ready to give up being the bulwark, not yet.
They aren’t presenting until 4PM, but as the day crawls on and the jetlag hits like a fist, she wishes it was earlier. The tiredness dogs her, slows her down as it nips at her heels, softens her own defenses so that the dread creeps in and she finds herself wishing it was over.
3pm comes and they should all be preparing together. The slides should be checked, the notes pooled, and they should be talking her out of this nervous shake, but instead she goes to the room and finds herself alone there. Sure, she’s an ER doctor, performing under pressure is literally what they have spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars training her to do, and if she can run a shift then she can give a talk to a few hundred people she won’t see again while her personal life falls apart. That’s just called being a doctor.
To their immense discredit, Robby and Jack appear at 3:45PM and look suspiciously friendly, like this is just another handover, which somehow feels worse than if one had turned up with a black eye or not turned up at all.
4pm comes around and the room, fittingly, is standing room only, as Doctor Chipton promised. The presentation goes fine. Not the greatest, but it's an academic conference, not Carnegie Hall. There are a lot of questions, but they’re mostly more like comments, so she just politely answers them and defers a few to Robby and Jack, and then it's the end of the hour, and they’re done. Her research is out there. A few people come up to talk to them one on one with questions that would have been far better to be asked in the hall, but she answers them with grace and interest.
There’s one more session before the break, then the plenary, and then dinner somewhere designed to impress. She chose the vegetarian option, but now she wants to sack the whole thing off and go and get drunk somewhere and lose herself and her bad decisions and try and rescue this trip, somehow. Probably by making more.
She’s looking at her phone when a shadow crosses her screen, and she knows before she looks up that it is Robby looming over her.
“We should talk,” Robby says, quietly. “Don’t worry. It's not bad,” he says. “Meet me and Jack in the hotel bar in fifteen minutes.” He leans down and kisses her cheek, and then she watches him join Jack and nod, and she feels a distinct feeling like she’s an R2 again, being actively managed, terrified that around every corner is pending disciplinary action.
Anger flares through her. She considers just walking out, getting on a plane home, but it's stupid, her passport is in the room safe anyway, she’d have to go back there, and she’d pass them in the lobby. She looks around wildly to see if any hot British doctor is lurking to sweep her off her feet and give her a new life and crucially, a new passport in 3-5 business years, but everyone is just drinking bad coffee and the stale biscuits left over from the afternoon tea break.
The final session is about to start. She doesn’t have to do what Robby tells her to do. She can just go and learn about something, anything, then have dinner and slink back drunk after dark, and avoid this for another day.
Unfortunately, her father always called her brave, so Samira decides instead to go face her demons. At least if it all goes wrong, she can get her passport and credit card and go home.
She walks out into the spring chill and hurries across the street and, squaring her shoulder, goes into the bar.
Jack and Robby are sitting like a united front, half-drunk beers in front of them. Robby’s on his phone but Jack is scanning the horizon, watching out for her. She sees him elbow Robby when she walks in and he smiles that heartbreaker smile and kicks the chair on the other side of the table out for her smoothly.
“Do you want a drink?” he asks, and is already up when she says ‘gin and tonic’. He’s back a few moments later and slides the glass across to her, and retakes his seat.
She takes a sip and listens. Robby and Jack spread out their carefully negotiated solution to the problem like it's a difficult differential. They start by establishing some facts, peppered with self-effasive reflections on their own flaws, before rounding in on hers, and when they’re done, they just look at her the way they do when they’re waiting for her to catch up.
She asks an obvious question, and they look at her like she’s insane. They lay out their plan again, and there’s a perverse genius to how perfectly calibrated it is to make sure no one ends up happy, and then they sit there and watch her with their stupid, smug faces of self-sacrificing indifference. It's actually kind of impressive how they’ve come up with literally the worst possible solution to the problem.
“What do you think, Samira?” Robby asks, in the leading way he does when he’s trying to teach her something, like their sexual entanglement is something that can be solved with more socratic questioning.
She can’t even honour that with an answer, so instead she just mutters ‘I need another drink,’ and gets up and storms over to the bar, takes a seat in one of the tall stools, and flags down the bartender.
“What are you having, love?” he asks.
“I need something brutally irresponsible,” she replies, echoing their horrible words, and the bartender nods just as a woman a couple of stools down laughs.
“That’s a cocktail that requires the accompanying story to go with it,” the woman says.
“If you pay for my drink you can have it,” Samira says, after looking at the menu, hastily doing the currency conversion and thinking about the available balance on her credit card.
“Deal, make that two brutal irresponsibilities,” the woman says, moving down the bar to sit next to her, and together they watch the bartender mix together something golden brown and complicated, that drains from the shaker silkily into the glass, and is then topped with dried fruit and a little umbrella, because why not.
“Cheers,” her new friend says. “Now, why don’t you tell me what’s ailing you?”
“Where do I begin?” Samira says, clinking glasses and taking a sip. It is almost entirely liquor. Perfect.
Her new friend twists in her seat and then raises an elegant eyebrow. “Has it got anything to do with the two men over there who are glaring daggers at you?”
"They just found out that I've been sleeping with both of them," Samira says, taking a sip and letting it take her down with it.
Her new friend raises the other eyebrow. "Good job. Respect." She raises her glass and toasts Samira again, who returns it with a wry nod.
She shrugs. "Yeah well it was stupid and has probably jeopardised my career, but I’m not really ready to be sad about it yet when I can be angry."
“What career is that?” her new friend asks.
“ER doctor,” Samira replies. “They’re my bosses. We’re here for the conference, and Jack decided to surprise me by arriving a day early, and caught me in bed with Robby.”
“That’s one hell of a story.” she holds out her hand. “I feel I should introduce myself, Miss Caroline Lam. Guy’s and St Thomas. Consultant Thoracic Surgeon.”
“Doctor Samira Mohan,” Samira replies. “Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre Emergency Department.”
If Miss Lam recognises her name or hospital she doesn’t indicate it.
"I suppose the obvious question is was it worth it?" she asks.
Samira chuckles into her drink. "Oh yeah. I'm mostly sad I'll just have to pick one of them."
Miss Lam shifts in her seat to cross one leg over the other. She isn’t hiding that she’s looking Jack and Robby over, her eyes scanning and passing judgement. "Who says you have to pick?"
"They do. That's why I’m over here. They’ve spent the day arguing about who gets to be the biggest martyr and stop having regular fulfilling sex for the first time since the pandemic started, and they’ve decided to quote ‘honour my decision’. They're not angry, they're not even disappointed. They're just a couple of egotists who thought they invented oral sex with younger women as a mid-life crisis and are upset they aren’t that original."
Miss Lam hums, thinking, tapping her short, well manicured nails on the brass bar top. "Who would you pick? If you had to?"
Fuck it, there’s no point pretending this isn’t what it is. They’ve been talking about her all day, so she might as well turn it on them. Samira turns on her stool and looks at them appraisingly, taking care to play it up for the audience.
"Jack, the silver fox? The maddest pussy game in the business. He's taught me things about my clit that should either be illegal or taught in school, I can’t decide which. He's creative. Experimental. Kinda sleazy in the way that means I’ve done things that make me blush and loved every second of it, but at the same time he's safe, calculated, he always knows where the exits are. He keeps me at arms length. That’s why he took me by surprise; he’s not a ‘fly across the Atlantic to surprise her a day early’ kind of guy.” She sighs. “He's not going to push me against a wall and eat me out while at work. He's not going to lay me out on the roof of his car and feast. He's got self-esteem and good mental health and a sex toy collection probably worth five figures."
Miss Lam nods, taking it all in. "So the other one is more that other style?"
"Robby? Not normally, he's sort of addicted to holding himself back. Don’t get me wrong, that's hot too. He's my actual boss, and I spent the first three years we worked together sure he hated me, and then after we had a screaming match, suddenly it's like this different man. He's still feeling guilty about it. Not enough to not do it, of course. I'm definitely not his first student he's given in and fucked, fairly sure our former senior resident’s new baby is his, kid practically came out with a beard and trauma, but he will turn on a dime. So yeah. He absolutely has spread me across his car and made me scream, but he feels bad that he did it. It's a real masochistic thing for him, the whole younger woman, student, old-enough-to-be-my-dad thing." She shivers. “He really fucking loves oral sex. I think we’ve had normal sex twice, but I’ve sat on his face more than my own couch in the last two months.”
Miss Lam looks appraisingly at Robby at that. "And what about with each other?"
Samira shrugs. "There are rumours. Just rumours. I tried to ask Jack about it but he shut it down."
"You are a surprising young woman," Miss Lam says. “You give me hope for the next generation of doctors.”
"I'm mostly just someone who works too much and has no life outside of work," Samira admits.
Miss Lam shrugs. “So you make a life inside work. It makes sense. Hospitals are arcologies these days. Microcosms of the world as a whole.”
Samira sighs dramatically, turning back to her drink, aware of Jack’s excellent lip reading skills. “So yeah, they spent the day talking, and now I have to choose one of them. I don’t get to be part of this decision, you see. I’ve ‘done enough’.” she sarcastically airquotes around it. “Ugh, I guess it could be worse, at least I get to choose. It's not like they’d be open to the other option.”
“Did you ask?” and Samira looks at her and laughs. “First thing I said. They’re not, quote, comfortable with that.”
“Hmm,” Miss Lam says pensively. She stretches out one long leg, and Samira watches alongside every man in the bar. “You know, I think it might be fate that we sat next to each other tonight.”
Samira, for all her workaholic tendencies, has been hit on a lot in her life, and this drink is very nice and very strong, so she smiles. “I'm game. What room are you in?”
Miss Lam does a double take and laughs. “Oh, no, darling. I don't swing that way. What I meant is…have you heard of Weibermacht?"
"It rings a bell,” Samira muses. “I minored in art history for a bit... isn’t it women dominating men in art? Right? Judith and Holofernes?"
Miss Lam nods. "It means the power of women, and yes, it's mostly used to refer to things like that in art, but it's also a private members club I have a controlling interest in. I'd like to invite you and your old men to come and visit it tonight."
"Um, wow. Sure? I mean, I have no idea if they’d be up for it, and we’re all jetlagged and have had a long day..."
While Samira is prevaricating, Miss Lam stands up and drains her drink. "This is a one time invitation, just for tonight. We have an event happening. I think you would be a good...fit. All three of you."
She looks at Samira the way she looked at Jack and Robby, up and down, raking and exposing, and tilts her head to one side, as if doing calculations in her head. "You can multiple, right? You look like the type."
Samira frowns, confused. "Multiple?"
"Orgasm," Miss Lam says, plainly. “How many times can you come in an hour, if you had to give me an estimate.”
Samira flushes. "What kind of club is this?"
"You could answer the question and I'll tell you."
"I can,” Samira says, and then thinks fuck it. “Robby has tested it and we kinda lost count after eight, but yeah. A lot of times in an hour, but like, only from oral."
"Oral is all that counts tonight, darling." Miss Lam winks. “Have you got a cocktail dress?” Samira nods. “You go get changed. I’ll deal with your old men. See you down here in 30? Even if they don’t agree, you can come as my guest.”
Samira looks at her watch. It's 6pm. She could catch the end of the plenary, make it to the dinner, if she rushed. “I don’t know…”
“You’re a practical woman,” Miss Lam says, reasonably. “You need to choose between them and they need to get over themselves, and Weibermacht open will sort both of those right out.” She winks. “Trust me. You won’t regret it. What else are you going to do on a wet Monday evening?”
She doesn’t give Samira much of a choice at that point, turning on one perilously high heel and stalking over to where Jack and Robby are desperately whispering to each other. So Samira does as she’s told and goes to her room and gets dressed and then stares at herself in the mirror. Her dress is red; Jack said he liked her in red, and Robby has never really given much of an opinion on her clothes as he always strips her as soon as he can, seeming to be as into her in rumpled scrubs as the one time she wore the blue silk dress. She liberates her heels from her laptop bag and swipes the red lipstick off the nightstand and reapplies it, blotting on a tissue before reapplying. She brushes her teeth, and applies some perfume, and finally releases her hair from its chignon, letting the curls cascade down her sensitive upper back.
When she gets back downstairs she’s genuinely surprised that both Jack and Robby are still there. They’re talking to Miss Lam, heads together, low and heated, but neither look particularly angry. They were in their suits ready for the plenary and dinner anyway, which must work for this club. Samira hangs back for a moment, taking in the scene, but when Miss Lam sees her, she beckons her over.
“You look wonderful, Doctor Mohan,” she says, pronouncing Samira’s name flawlessly, kissing her on the cheek. She flips her glossy black hair back and pulls out her phone. “The car will be arriving to pick us up momentarily, so please, follow me. We will be at Weibermacht before you know it.”