A/N: Hi all. Here is doctor, doctor. Hope you enjoy this story. Stephanie Meyer owns Twilight, not me.
Chapter 1 - Convenience
"Push another round of epi and charge to six hundred." Dr. Paul Lahote ordered the two nurses on his team.
The patient he and his team were working on, came in with ventricular fibrillation. His wife, who came along in the ambulance had told Paul that her husband had come home from work complaining of chest pains and nausea and had collapsed on his way to the fridge for some water.
"All clear." Paul shouted. The nurses stepped back and watched the patient jerk as Paul shocked him with the defibrillator, in yet another attempt to get his heart back into sinus rhythm. They've already failed twice, and this was now their third attempt.
The team, including Paul, held their breath, watching the monitor to see if they had succeeded this time. The seconds felt like hours. The clock on the wall behind the curtains ticked audibly, mocking them. There was an united silence in the E.R. as everyone, including the admin clerks and nurses involved with other patients, came to a standstill, waiting to hear the beep of a normal heartbeat from the monitor behind the curtains. The room was so quiet that you could have heard a pin drop.
'Come on, come on. Please?' Paul thought. He refused to let this patient die.
"Yes!" Paul exclaimed loudly when finally, the monitor beeped out the sound of a regular heart beat. Strong and steady. "Good job, everyone!" He smiled at the nurses. "You guys are rock stars."
"You're the one who did it, Doc." The male nurse said to his right and high fived him.
"It would have been impossible without you guys. As always." Paul said in earnest. He really did have a good team tonight.
Paul yanked back the curtains as everyone resumed their previous tasks, the E.R. once again in a hustle and bustle as the staff rushed to administer medication or carry out orders.
"Mrs. Scott, your husband's heart was beating very rapidly and erratically. His heart chambers were basically quivering instead of contracting normally to pump blood through his body. We've already sent away blood for testing, hopefully to get some proper answers. At the moment it's not quite clear what the cause was, but I will let you know as soon as I get the results."
"Thank you, Doctor. You saved his life." The relieved wife sighed and embraced Paul tightly. "Can I go sit with him now?"
"You sure can, m'am. Just keep in mind that he needs his rest." Paul tried and failed to keep a slight blush from creeping onto his russet cheeks.
Paul parked himself in a chair and rubbed his face with his hands. He's been up and running for the past thirty odd hours and he felt physically drained right now. First had been his patrolling shift and then his regular twelve hour shift at the hospital. As luck would have it, one of the night shift doctors had called in sick, just an hour before he was due to head home. Home to Grace. Fuck! She was so pissed at him when he told her he'd have to do a double shift, that they'd ended their phone conversation less than ideally. And what he meant by that was, she had started ranting on and on about how he was never home and how, and when he actually was home, he'd always wanted to spend time with his friends.
'Grace. 'Ha! Everything but.' Paul thought.
Things with Grace really was difficult. She wasn't his imprint, which of course meant that he couldn't tell her anything involving the wolf pack. If he really had to admit it to himself, he could see where she was coming from. Keeping these secrets wasn't fair to her. To either of them. But it was the only way to protect the pack.
Why, then, did he keep going on with this relationship, you may ask? The answer was simple. He needed a woman in his life, who could keep the household running and as selfish as it may sound, he needed the sex as well. He was only a man, after all. A tired man who was too god damned exhausted and way too busy to go out looking for someone else. Their relationship was convenient.
Paul pushed these thoughts aside and started on his paperwork, hoping that he could stay awake. He really did love his job. He loved the rush, the chaos and most of all, the satisfaction of saving lives. Not in an arrogant way. He just loved helping people.
He finished up his admin as fast as possible, so that he could go check on the abdominal pain and the broken ankle that he had started treating just before the ambulance with Mr. Scott had arrived. He signed all the orders that he'd given, scribbled a few notes on the charts and stacked them on top of each other for the nurses. They still needed to write their entries.
Paul looked around the E.R. which was now relatively quiet. God, he loved this place. It was a shame that he loved it more than he loved his girlfriend. It wasn't supposed to be like this. He yearned to feel this way about a woman again. He used to, years ago. About Bella Swan. Maybe he still did love her, but she was now leading her own life, like she'd asked him to do, as well. But he knew deep down, that it was not Grace that held his heart.
Paul remembered the night of the break up.
Bella was crying bitterly as she spoke the words, "Paul. I can't do this anymore. I need to focus on what I want right now. My career. I got a really great offer to go work in California. Under one of the best OB/GYN's. So, I'm asking you to let me go."
"Why can't we do the long distance thing?" He tried desperately to change her mind.
"Be realistic, Paul. It's too much travelling. And you know neither of us have the time right now to try and make a long distance relationship work. It would be madness."
"So you're just gonna leave Seattle to go work in Cali, where you've got no friends and no family?"
"Yes." She had said so simply. The finality of her words cutting him to the bone.
He snapped out of it, focusing his attention back to his job. He needed to go see how his patients were doing.
"How's that ankle treating you, Holly?" He asked as he sat down next to his patient with the broken ankle, on the gurney.
"Still a little painful, doc, but much better." The blonde young woman said and smiled at him. It was one of those smiles that he was so used to by now. It really didn't bother him anymore. It used to be distracting and even a little irritating the first couple of years when he'd started working in the hospital, but now he just blithely ignored the flirts, smiles and sometimes the touching.
"We're going to send you to theater soon. Dr. Sutton will be doing the operation and I can promise you that he is an incredible orthopedic surgeon . So no need to worry. It does however mean that you'll have to stay off the ankle for about six weeks. But I'll let Dr. Sutton explain all of the nitty gritty details to you." He smiled reassuringly at his patient and made his way over to the next bed, before he gave the poor blue eyed girl the wrong idea.
As it turned out, his patient with the abdominal pain had over indulged when he had joined his friends for eat all you can pizza night, and thus, the result was indigestion. He wrote a prescription for an antacid and antispasmodic that would sort out the problem very quickly, discharging his patient with a firm handshake, shoving the prescription into the man's hand.
Paul forced his tired body toward the kitchen to go make himself a cup of coffee, hopefully to aid him in getting through the last forty-five minutes, before this shift ended. And then it meant sleep. He had the weekend off and he sure as hell was going to rest. He didn't have anything planned, but there would probably be a dinner at Sam and Emily's. One that he would have to miss out on, or go to alone, thanks to Grace who wasn't very fond of his friends.
Paul and Grace had made up when he got home this morning, that being the reason that he now found himself buried deep inside of his girlfriend. God, he was really tired and couldn't seem to find his release, which was lucky for Grace though, satisfying her needs more than once. For some reason, Paul found himself thinking back on the times he'd been with Bella. Their love making had always been so fierce and passionate, needy even. He remembered the way she responded to the slightest touch from him. How, without even really trying, he could make her cum. He had never struggled to find his release once, on the contrary, it had usually taken all of his self control not to cum too soon.
The thought of Bella made him pump himself harder into Grace, fucking her relentlessly. He knew how wrong this was, but as Paul released deep inside of Grace, trying not to moan out his ex's name, he was silently thankful that it had finally happened. He didn't need his girlfriend to think that something was wrong. He didn't have the energy for another fight.
Paul fell asleep soon after Grace had gotten up to get ready for work. She gave him a quick kiss and an 'I love you', before she headed for the bathroom.
When he woke again, he pulled his phone from the charger and checked the time. Twenty two minutes past three. He stretched in bed, pulled the covers off of his body and sat up on the side of the bed, rubbing his face. He felt a little disoriented. For a moment, he wasn't sure what day it was or if he was supposed to be at work or not. This is why he hated night shift.
Later, when Paul finally felt like he was properly awake, he drowned his last mouth full of coffee and checked his phone again. Sure enough, just as he had predicted last night, there was a message inviting him to join his friends for dinner at Sam and Emily's house tonight.
"Hi, darling." Came Grace's response as she picked up after only one ring. God, he hated being called darling. Especially by her. "Did you sleep well?"
"I did, thanks. How's work?"
"Oh, you know. Boring as always." Grace replied with a sigh.
Grace was the owner of a small second hand bookshop in Forks. Needless to say, neither her day nor mind were filled with many challenges. Grace wasn't dumb, per say, but she definitely wasn't one of the brightest women Paul had ever dated. It was exactly this fact that had attracted him to her in the first place. He had thought that it would make for an easy relationship, which it did in the beginning. Until her true colors started to show. Grace's emotions were like a fucking one man circus. Up, down and then up again. There was a word for someone like her. Mental.
"So, Sam's invited us for dinner, tonight. All of our friends will be there."
"All of your friends." Grace emphasized. "Not mine. See, this is exactly what I talked about last night. You've been working for more than twenty four hours, and this morning I got to see you for all of thirty minutes, before I had to leave for work. And now that you're off for the weekend, you're already making plans with your friends again."
"So come with me, then."
"No. Why don't you stay home with me?"
"Because I want to see my friends."
"So let me get this straight. You'd rather spend time with them than with me?" Even though Grace had made it sound like a question, Paul knew better. It was an accusation.
Late afternoon found Paul getting ready to go to his friends. Needless to say, he was going on his own and he needed to hurry and get the fuck out of the house, before Grace came home. He didn't feel like dealing with more of her shit. The conversation from earlier had heated up quickly, turning into yet another fight. One that was getting old, very quickly.
A/N: So, what did you think about the first chapter? Please read and review. Much love. MrsLMB xxx