A/N: I still don't own it, but I like to write fanfiction! :D

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Day Three

The First Step Must Be Lust

I sit at my desk, kicking the file drawer with my shin from my perch in my chair, staring at my computer screen, squinting. I keep clicking through the file that Victoria sent me and it just makes me squint even harder at the screen.

Angela walks into the room, almost silently, grabbing the files from next to the door that belonged to my patients I had seen before lunch. "What's wrong?" she queries, her tone concerned. She shuffles her papers into order as she comes to look over my shoulder.

I sigh. "Nothing. Just looking through some women that Victoria thinks might be a good fit for my new friend." They would all be great, except that I seemed to find a flaw in every single one of them.

Angela pushes her glasses up higher on her nose. "Any prospects?"

I roll my eyes. "Not that I think would work out."

Angela leans closer to my screen. She points to one of the girls. "What about that one? She's pretty."

I shake my head. "Her family owns a textile company. She's independently wealthy, which is good, but she has little to do with the company and that concerns me. Potential gold digger."

Angela frowns and looks at another girl, this one blonde, statuesque, and with cheekbones that look like daggers. "What about her? Irena?"

I feel my eye twitch at the mention of that name. "There's something off there…"

Angela laughs and raises an eyebrow. "Like what?"

I purse my lips. "I can't put my finger on it, but she almost seems too...perfect."

Angela laughs again. "Well, if you look at everyone in that light, no one is ever going to be good enough." Angela fixes her files again. "I still think that, if you're interested in him, you should just tell him. Call off the whole bet. Ask him out to dinner. What's the worst that can happen?"

I roll my eyes. "I'm not interested in him."

Angela makes a noise that I can only describe as a scoff. "Sure, you aren't. Just like he has no interest in you. That's why he brings you flowers and food."

I roll my eyes. "Angela, I promise you...men like Edward Cullen do not fall in love with women like me."

Angela rolls her eyes as I shuffle papers around on my desk. "You keep saying that, but, I'm not convinced." I huffily turn in my chair and look at some files I laid behind my desk. It's all of my clients for the remainder of the day. I pretend to go through the files, as if I need something inside them. "Oh, hi, Edward!"

Angela's voice makes me throw the papers on reflex and spin around in my chair. When I face her, Angela is smiling in the doorway. "And you don't feel anything for him, huh?"

I glare and Angela is out of the room as quickly as she came. I don't understand why people are teasing me about Edward. He was my client. It didn't matter that we had known each other in the past or that he was Alice's brother...he was my client, as simple as that.

My cell phone gets a text through to it. I groan.

Jacob -

Dinner tonight?

I have little desire to go to dinner with Jacob Black, my friend who has an infuriating crush on me, but...I am also available tonight and have no reason to say "no"...and I think my boundaries are clearly set.

The little nagging voice on my shoulder that is constantly reminding me of my biological clock - I call it Alice - is also telling me that he's only two years younger than me and that he has a decent job as a mechanic in one of Washington's best body shops.

He's no Edward...but, he's not a completely bad catch, either. He'd be a decent father to any kids we would have and he wouldn't ever force me to get married because he barely believed in the institution himself…

I chew on my lip. Accepting the invitation from him would be as good as saying I was amiable to going on a date with him.

Briefly my mind strays to thoughts of Edward and his high cheekbones, his glistening emerald eyes, and the flowers that he brought me.

I groan again and pick up my phone without a second thought.

Me-

Thanks. I'll meet you at the restaurant?

I can't think too hard about it or I might regret it…

I'm going to stop accepting dinner invitations from everyone. And, I mean everyone. Nothing good ever comes from me going out to dinner, be it date or no date.

"That asshole is going to be sorry!" Alice mutters, angrily as I sit on the emergency room's exam table. At five foot nothing, she's hardly threatening and, instead, looks adorably cute. Her dark pixie cut is perfectly spiked out as she puffs out her cheeks and flips through her phone, her face a twisted look of rage.

I attempt to shake my head, but the motion makes the pain in my temples worse. "It's not his fault," I settle for, instead. The gash in my forehead is making it hard to focus. Luckily, one of the nurses has given me a piece of gauze to hold to my forehead and try to stop the bleeding, but they were still concerned about a concussion.

Alice fumes. "Like hell it isn't!" She nearly yells. The little pixie jumps from her chair and starts to pace the room, her bright green high heels clicking against the tile floor as she pulls her grey knit tunic dress down over her black leggings. She crosses her arms under her chest and gets angrier and angrier as she paces about.

I curl my lip. "Alice...I ran into a pole."

Alice throws her arms up in the arm. "And he should have warned you before you ran into it!"

I shrug, my vision still hazy. I hit that pole ridiculously hard… "I think I'm ok," I lie easily. I don't like hospitals, despite how accident prone I am. Every nurse on staff that has come in the room knows me and have been annoyingly nice to me.

With any luck, I'll be out of here by the time the sun rises, but, I also am not holding out my hope.

"They have to make sure you don't have a concussion!" Alice says, waving her hand dismissively.

I sigh. "I've been sitting here for an hour and a half. I think I would have started puking by now, or whatever it is they expect me to do if there were something seriously wrong with me." I press on my forehead again and wince. "I walked directly into a pole. How bad can it be?"

Alice snickers, but tries to cover it with her hand. "Oh, if only I didn't know you, Bella."

Thank you, Alice, for your concern. I twitch.

"At the very least, this will be a funny story to tell later!" I try to enthuse brightly. With my accident proneness, I have enough "funny stories" to last lifetimes, but, what's one more?

I'm also vaguely aware of the fact that, perhaps, the exam room is not the best theater to deliver dry comedy.

There is a knock at the door which I don't bother to answer. In three seconds, a nurse or doctor will walk into my room, smiling falsely and holding my chart, acting as though there is some divine inside joke that we share…

We'll laugh about the gash on my head and then they'll order some tests and I'll be gone.

But, my heart drops when I see the figure walking through the door. In his scrubs and barely sparing a glance at me to look through the file in his hand, is Edward.

"What are you doing here?" I growl, shooting straight up. Alice waves at her brother and returns to her phone.

He raises an eyebrow before he turns his attention back to the file in his hand. "Honestly, Bella, I'm not pleased to see you, either, but, I'm also not in the habit of throwing out patients who have a head injury." I don't know why his voice is so cold. The last I saw him, I was leaving him on the street outside Victoria Clark's office so that he could go into a shift at the hospital, and I thought we parted on genial terms. "You did what, exactly?"

My brain has problems wrapping around his words. It takes me almost a fully minute to answer him, which means that this new holier-than-thou, scrub dressed moron comes up with a new way to phrase his question. "You ran into a pole?" He prompts me, shutting the door and walking to the computer to input some kind of data, laying down my file.

"Yeah…" I stammer. "I wouldn't even really say 'ran' into it so much as literally walked straight into it."

Edward pulls on a pair of gloves, clinically. He studies me briefly and pulls out a flashlight. Without warning, he approaches me and shines it into my eyes. The same strange look I keep noticing crossing his face, but he fixes it and is quickly back to cold professionalism. I glance at Alice to see if she notices, but she's looking at her phone again.

"Eyes forward, please," Edward says, smirking now as I look back at him. "You've been here enough to know the drill, Ms. Swan." His humor is not appreciated by my pounding headache. I remain staring straight forward, blankly.

Edward continues his evaluation, moving on from my eyes to my cut head. He gently takes my hand away from it, but is soon replaced by his cold touch prodding my forehead. It makes me want to scream. I bite my lip to refrain from yelling at him and hiss instead. "I have never met anyone who could give themselves a concussion by walking into a pole before," he says, lightly.

I bite my lip harder. "Well, I'm very talented," I return, snippily. He's starting to become the Edward I know, but, I'm still wary. He moves away and takes off his rubber gloves quickly. The snap of the rubber makes me cringe.

"That you are," he says, genuinely. He takes a deep breath, looking me over and, then, continues. "I'm going to order a CT scan and that cut is going to need stitches, unfortunately.

The word stitches isn't even fully out of his mouth before Alice hops from the chair she has been planted in. "That's where I'm out!" She says, running for the door. "I can't watch this! I'll be in the lobby!" I watch her cringe as she opens the door.

Funny. Edward hasn't even pulled out a needle yet. I don't even run until they pull the needle out.

I sigh. There goes my moral support. "That's no problem, Alice," I say. "Call Rose and Emmett to let them know I'm ok...and Jacob, if you can." I chew on my lip. "I'll be out whenever they discharge me."

Alice salutes me and shuts the door with a soft click.

She has purposefully abandoned me and left me on an island with Edward Cullen.

Edward studies me one more time. "I don't think that you have a concussion...but I do wonder if you're going into shock," he says seriously. "You have a rather glassy look in your eyes," he remarks, making some notes on my file in his hand. "And, you did this of your own accord and I don't have to strangle this 'Jacob', correct?" Even though his tone is nonchalant, his body language says that he is seething.

See, Victoria? I can read body language.

Kind of…

"Yep," I say, sighing. "I legitimately walked into a pole myself…" I grimace. "I was trying to walk through a door."

Edward shakes his head and opens a cabinet above the computer station. "Why does that not surprise me?" I try not to look at anything he pulls out of the cabinet. He's putting gloves back on and picks up gauze and pours alcohol on it when I deign to look. "Should I ask if you've ever had a CT scan before or should I just assume?"

I almost laugh. "Just assume." I don't want to know more about my head being shoved into a machine.

Edward doesn't say anything, he just gently begins to clean the cut on my forehead with the piece of gauze. Once again, it burns and the pressure makes me want to yell out, even though I know he is trying to be gentle. "It's not as bad as I thought now that it's cleaned," he says, softly. He cleans the blood away, looking at the cut the entire time, never at me. But, the close proximity still makes me bristle. I try not to think about where I would rather have his hands.

I definitely have a concussion.

"I can close this with steristrips," he says, as I tense. "I feel like that would be more preferable to you than stitches."

I look up at him through my eyelashes. "You'd do that for me?" I have hated stitches since I was five years old and a wooden swing had come back and hit me in the mouth. It meant that I has to have multiple stitches in my lip and I never wanted to experience it again.

Edward nods, his clinical assessment over. "Normally, I would rather stitch this closed, just to be safe, but, I'll use adhesive strips on one condition."

I nearly jump. "Anything!" I say, quickly. I don't even need to know what it is, I will do it!

He smiles. "You have to let me check up on you until that's healed."

I furrow my brows. "I can agree to that...afterall, I'm supposed to meet with you every day for the next twenty-seven days…"

He nods, already beginning to stretch the adhesive strips across the cut. He gently puts a piece of gauze over it and taping it into place.

He smiles at my defeated face. "There," he remarks. "You're as good as new."

I smirk. "Only slightly more bandaged," I joke back with him.

He moves to take his gloves off and throw them in the trash. "But, at least we know that you will heal." He comes back to stand right before me and I think about how easy it would be to kiss him...or do other things to him. A long silence ensures between us, where I watch him glance at my lips. I want to reach up and brush his lips with my fingertips...but, he is off limits.

I feel my face blush. I can't do it…

But, I don't even have to. His hand gently cups my chin and his thumb strokes my lower lip. "When you make that face, I don't know how I've kept from kissing you this long…" My lips part under his touch and he leans in even closer. I extend my neck. Maybe...just, maybe, I can close the gap and maybe...this was ok.

Some strange and alien creature comes over me and I pull his thumb into my mouth and suckle on it for a moment, hoping to be tantalizing...and Edward closes the gap for me. He gently kisses me, tasting of honey and sandalwood. He is so horribly soft that I don't want to part from him. I move my lips against his, slowly escalating the kiss, slowly reaching my arms around his neck.

Is this wrong?

He is the one to pull away first. I am horribly dazes when he does so. "I…" he begins to say. He crosses the room, urgently. "I don't think the CT scan is necessary. You should be out of here within the hour...I'll finish your paperwork."

He's out the door before I can say anything further.

I am a horrible therapist.

A/N: What did you think?

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