An Affair to Forget

As usual, I have used real locations in this story, though the characters are all fictional. The story is set in 1994-1995, when texting 'alphamate' pagers were in use, but before everybody had cell phones.

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"Oh, my God, what are the police doing here?"

That was my girlfriend Libby, as we were sitting around, sitting around not exactly dressed in her living room after a fun morning in the sack.

"Quick," she said, "go hide in the laundry room," practically pushing me up and out, as the officers knocked on the door.

"Hold on a moment," she yelled, "I'm not dressed." Then she ran to the bedroom, grabbed her robe and my clothes, throwing them into the laundry room as she answered the door.

"Mrs Hollister? I'm Officer McDaniels, and this is my partner, Officer Williams. We've come to tell you that your husband has been shot."

"Oh my God," I heard Libby scream, "Is he going to be OK?"

"He's in the emergency room at Hampton General, and we're here to take you to see him. We've heard that this isn't life-threatening, but still pretty serious. If you'll get dressed, we'll take you to see him."

Libby was crying, and only half coherent saying to give her a moment to get fully dressed.

This left me hiding in the laundry room, of course, having to keep absolutely silent. Libby's husband was a Hampton Police Officer, so naturally the other officers were going to be on his side and take care of him, and the last thing Libby and I needed was for them to catch me here. The laundry room didn't have an exit to the outside, save through the kitchen, which was visible from the living room.

And I about had a heart attack when my alphamate pager started to vibrate. I grabbed it with my right hand, to keep the buzzing from being heard by the officers.

My name is Jeff Richardson, and I'm the Chief Orthopedic Resident at Hampton General, and even though I'm not on duty today, I was being paged. Our Attending Physician was in the Bahamas, lucky stiff, and thus the cases got shifted down to me. "Badly shattered femur/knee, GSW in ER, needs emerg surgery."

Libby had gotten dressed in about three minutes, and the officers were hustling her out the door. As soon as it closed behind her, I used her phone to call the hospital and let them know that I was on the way.

Or at least I would be once the police cruiser had a chance to clear the neighborhood.

I'd had a bad feeling about this on the ten-minute drive in, and, sure enough, I was right: the victim was none other than Officer George Hollister. Normally, protocol does not allow physicians to treat family members and loved ones, etc, but I couldn't beg off of this surgery, because I couldn't reveal that I was the officer's wife's boyfriend. How fucked up is that?

And pushing this surgery down to the next resident wouldn't have been cool anyway: I was the best orthopedic surgeon in the hospital, including our Attending, and the next resident down, while he was good, don't get me wrong, wasn't as good as me. The x-rays were on the viewer as I scrubbed, and they looked nasty, nasty, nasty!

Dr Wright was there, scrubbing as well. He wasn't an orthopedist, but our best vascular surgeon. That he was scrubbing told me all I needed to know: there were a lot of compromised blood vessels, perhaps even the femoral artery, involved. I felt a real twinge of guilt: Officer Hollister got badly wounded while I was in his house, in his bed, fucking his wife!

But I didn't have time to bother with guilt: I had a man's leg to save!

oo0oo

Christmas was always a good time, with everybody in the holiday spirit. Impromptu Christmas parties were held throughout the hospital, and I was on my second cup of alcohol-free egg nog; I just love nog! This really cute nurse, with highlighted blonde hair, was as much of the life of the party as she could be while still staying sober and on duty. She was wearing regular scrubs, but somehow, someway, they looked as though they had been tailored just for her. She was tall at somewhere around 5'8" or maybe 5'9", and slender, almost a college coed's type body. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but loosely, with the band lower rather than higher on her scalp.

But the really killer thing was her eyes! She had the clearest blue eyes I had ever seen, eyes that drive every other thought out of a man's head. Her lashes were just dark enough that she didn't need mascara, and really, if she was wearing any makeup at all, it was so subtle that I couldn't tell.

It was Friday, December 23, 1994, and the hospital was about as shut down as a hospital can get. The clinics had closed at noon, meaning there wouldn't be many admissions before the clinics opened on Tuesday the 27th. Oh, there would always be admissions through the ER, but the weather wasn't bad, in the upper 40s with just a little bit of rain. Traffic was heavy, with Christmas shoppers filling the roads, heading to Coliseum Mall and places, but with it moving so slowly, auto accidents normally didn't result in too serious injuries.

That was where I met Libby. She was down to two patients, both of them easy ones, and her nursing assistant was watching them. She had hugs and kisses for everybody, just friendly ones, but I've got to admit it: I was more than a little bit turned on by her looks and effervescence. When she gave me that friendly hug, she felt something unexpected pressing into her.

I suppose that some women would have ignored it, but Libby got this shit-eating grin on her face, and gave me a, "Seems like you're ready to celebrate, huh?" before she half-danced off to continue the party.

Nothing happened at the Christmas party, but it was hard to get the image of that cute nurse out of my head. Most of the ortho patients weren't on that floor, so I rarely saw her, until, one day, about a month later, I spotted her eating lunch in the cafeteria, and sitting alone. I quickly got a tray, and went to sit down with her in the booth.

"Hi, I'm Dr Richardson," I said, introducing myself.

"Yeah, I know, I remember you from the Christmas party. It seemed that you had, um, noticed me." She had a shit-eating grin on her face. She seemed to have more of a playful attitude than one which might lead to seduction.

"Well, yeah, I noticed you, and how you were the life of the party."

"Oh, life of the party, huh, that was what you noticed."

"Well, your eyes, too."

"I'm glad you like them," she said, smiling broadly, "but while you're cute, there's kind of a stopper here." With that, she raised her left hand, showing off her wedding ring.

Thud! Well, that certainly put a crimp in my plans.

"My husband is a police officer, and he carries a big gun," she teased me some more.

That was when I got stupid. "Hey, you already know that I'm carrying a big gun, too, and my marksmanship is first rate."

Yeah, that was stupid, as she barely caught herself before snorting a mouthful of coffee all over the cafeteria table. She laughed at me, picked up her tray, dumped it at the garbage chute and headed out the door. Boy, had my seduction technique failed me today.

oo0oo

Dr Wright had a worse job than I did, because the femoral artery was compromised. He had to repair that, and do it first, before the officer lost his leg due to tissue death. I assisted him some, but that wasn't my expertise, while I was busy measuring and figuring out what rods I was going to need to set this man's leg. The femur was broken in six places, and I was having to reassemble it as best I could, inserting pins and screws to try to hold the thing together. I saved as much as I could, but Officer Hollister was going to need a complete knee replacement as well, but that would be another day; it's not like we have replacement knees, in every size, just sitting on the shelf around here.

Dr Wright and I were in surgery for seven hours, but we saved the officer's leg. I was exhausted, not so much from the physical effort but the sheer nervous energy expended in such an intense surgery. This was the worst injury I had ever had to repair, and I was still uncertain whether it was going to work.

But worse than the surgery was having to go out and speak to the family. I've done that hundreds of times, with worse outcomes than this one, but this meant speaking calmly and professionally to my lover as well as her family, and never letting a clue about our relationship slip.

To say that the family was a mess would have been an understatement, although they had already known that the officer wasn't going to die from his injury. "Mrs Hollister," I began, and she looked straight at me, knowing that I was having to keep our secret. "Officer Hollister is in as good a shape as we could expect at this point. At least so far, we've saved his leg, but he will have further surgeries, to replace his knee, and we'll quite probably have to try to replace his femur as well. I've tried my best to save his femur, but it was badly shattered, and there is no guarantee that the work I did will heal and hold. Dr Wright here, he's the vascular surgeon, did a wonderful job on the blood vessels which were compromised, and he has good blood flow established. There are no guarantees, of course, but it looks like Mr Hollister's leg will survive."

Libby practically collapsed into a chair, and an older man, one who looked like he must be the officer's father, eased her fall into the chair.

"When can we see him?" he asked.

"He's in recovery right now, and still out of it. He'll be moved to the fourth floor ICU from there, in probably two more hours, and should be regaining consciousness by then. But I warn you: he's going to be in a lot of pain, and they'll be keeping him kind of doped up."

"When will you be doing the knee replacement?" the guy I believed to be his father asked.

"It'll be a bit yet. Not only do we need to get the knee in, but I want to see how the femur's healing progresses. If I have to replace the femur as well, it's better to do it in one surgery rather than two. Officer Hollister is going to be in the hospital for a good while yet.

oo0oo

It seemed that Libby just loved holidays, and any reason to party. St Patrick's Day was on Friday this year, and she showed up to work in green. More, it was sunny and in the low seventies, a great almost spring day in Hampton, and spring fever was abounding. We were both at work, and I spotted her walking to the cafeteria for her lunch break.

"Hey, Libby, why don't we each grab a sandwich and then eat outside?"

I really hadn't had that much interaction with her since the previous time in the cafeteria, but spring fever helped my case, and she said sure. Naturally, being St Patrick's Day, they had corned beef and cabbage, and even some corned beef and cabbage sandwiches, on rye bread. It's a good thing that we both got one, 'cause it would sure leave you with stinky breath!

At any rate, we grabbed one of the outdoor tables, but instead of sitting across from her, I sat at the 90º side, closer to her. She was just captivating. Our sandwiches done -- wolfed down, more precisely, because we didn't have much time -- we were drinking our sodas, when I took a chance, and reached over and took her hand, caressing it gently.

"Look, Dr Richardson, . . . ."

"Please, it's Jeff."

"OK, look, Jeff, you already know that I'm married."

"Yeah, I know, but, truth is, I'm just captivated by you."

"Captivated? That's a pretty strong word."

"I know it is, but it's still the truth. I'd at least like a chance."

"A chance? A chance to what, screw a married woman?" There was a slightly harsher tome in her voice at that point.

"I'd like more that that, Libby, a lot more."

"Jeff, this isn't a good idea."

That was when I knew: I did have a chance! It wasn't an outright rejection!

oo0oo

It was Saturday, April Fool's Day, at 1:15 in the morning. Normally I'm not the guy on call, but it had been a rough few days with motor vehicle accidents, or as the nurses liked to call them, multiple crunches. Everybody in the department was beat, and I went ahead and took Dr Graves' on call shift for him; he was a walking zombie. That was when I got a call from Libby.

"Jeff, Mrs Wallace, the patient in 412, she's having a real problem with pain. Her cast is bothering her pretty badly, and she's gotten herself all tied up in knots trying to get comfortable. All she has written for pain is Tylenol PRN, and it's not helping enough. She's just too agitated. Can I get her something else?"

"I hate to prescribe narcotics for her. I'll be up and check her out."

It turned out that I didn't have to give Mrs Wallace anything. She's been so agitated over her discomfort that she just wore herself out and fell asleep. Come morning rounds, we'd check her more thoroughly and talk about pain management for her.

"I'm surprised to see you, Libby. I thought that you only worked day shift."

"Usually, that's right, but I took a week of nights to help out a friend. It was a crazy trade, but it's not too bad. Still, it's hard to get used to how slow it is on night shift. Time just drags by."

"You got time to get some coffee down at the cafeteria?"

"I guess that I can, not that anything is good down there during this shift."

That was when it happened. There are some dark, empty areas of the hospital at this time of the morning, including a storage room with what's called a circle bed in it. I was flirting with Libby on the way down to the cafeteria, and just pulled her into it.

"What, Jeff, you think you can just take me in here or something?"

"I'd like to. It would be so hot, and sure make night shift more fun."

She just stared at me with those amazing blue eyes of hers. And I guess that she must've been on the horny side anyway, because she suddenly stepped closer and said, "You'd better make this worth it."

That was all: in the next heartbeat we were pulling each other's clothes off, or at least some of them. For Libby, it was her nursing shoes, scrub pants and bikini panties; we never bothered with her top, due to the rush in time. No foreplay, barely any kissing, and I was fully hard and aiming for the promised land.

Yeah, she was really horny all right, because even in that brief time she'd gotten wet enough to do this. She bent over the circle bed, and I took her from behind in one long stroke, bottoming out right from the get go. There was nothing gentle about this, just hard animal fucking, and it must've been what she needed, because I could hear her struggling to hold down the noise as she had her release, not even a minute after I entered her.

"Hurry up, don't hold back, damn it, cum in me and let's get back!" she said, in a strange half-yell and half-whisper, if that makes any sense.

I did as she asked.

We were lucky: there was a stash of sanitary napkins in this storage room, and she put on a pad to keep from leaking all over her underwear and scrub pants. It was almost clinical in the cleanup, and it's a good thing it was a quickie; my pager went off again.

One thing about cheating: once you've crossed that line once, it gets a lot easier to do it again. A week later, we ran into each other on morning rounds, and I slipped her a note telling her I was off this weekend if she was. Yeah, she was, and her husband had to work. This time I took her out to Virginia Beach, for a little fun in the sand -- it was nice and warm, but the ocean water was still way too cold -- and a seafood lunch at Ocean Eddie's on the Virginia Beach pier. By one o'clock we were in room 511 at the Dunes, an oceanfront hotel, but a lower rent one, and without the press of time we went a lot slower this time.

Her husband should be home around 4:30 she said, so no cumming in her pussy. OK, I could live with that, as she rode me from the top, and when I was getting close she dropped down and finished me with her mouth. Libby had already cum at least twice, hard, and she was liking this being naughty on the side. A quick shower when we were done, and she was able to beat her husband home by almost an hour.

oo0oo

Office Hollister's femur was just too far gone, and I wound up having to replace it from hip to artificial knee. I was thinking about Bo Jackson's hip replacement surgery a few years earlier. I had done the absolute best I could, and with the city paying for everything, the best replacement parts that could be obtained, were. Still, I had my doubts that Officer Hollister could ever return to street duty.

I read about what he had done in the Daily Press, the Newport News/Hampton daily newspaper. Officer Hollister walked in on what turned out to be an armed robbery in the Shell station on the corner of Mercury Boulevard and Foxhill Road. He surprised two thugs, and one took a shot at him, but missed. The Officer pulled out his service weapon and shot the perp who fired on him dead in the chest, sending him straight to Hell. The second perp then shot at Hollister, striking him in the thigh, but the policeman got off a round of his own. The shot was a bit low, but still did the trick, ripping through his guts and severing his spine on the way out; perp number two lived, but he'll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his miserable days. The clerk and three women, with children, in the store were all saved unscathed, though certainly shaken up by what happened. George Hollister was a hero!

And I was fucking his wife.

One thing about being a surgeon: when you do a good job fixing up something that has really gone bad, you feel a real sense of pride, you're on top of the world. While I'm not one of those who thinks that he's somehow a god, I can understand how some guys wind up thinking like that. I took the leg of a local hero in my hands, a leg that stood a damned good chance of having to be amputated, and I'm going to enable him to walk out of here on his own two feet.

But it's a bit hard to think of myself as a god when I've been playing the devil with his wife. We'd played a total of five times, and I thought it was great, but the last time we got together was the day her husband was shot.

Why did we do it? Well, I'm single, and if not exactly a pussy-hound, I do like women, a lot. As the Chief Resident, I was now down to working only about sixty to seventy hours a week, rather than the ninety to a hundred as an intern and first and second year resident. I'm not exactly ugly, and with being a doctor, finding women wouldn't normally have been a difficult thing, other than my ridiculous schedule.

And I shouldn't have pursued a married woman, but there was something about Libby that just captivated my soul.

As for Libby? Well, there's a lot of sexual tension in hospitals, though I don't really know why; everybody is just too busy. Still, flirting goes on, kind of a lot, and I guess that part of it's because overworked doctors don't get laid nearly enough. Libby, well, she told me that she always knew I was trying to get into her scrubs, but that one night shift I just happened to catch her while she was both bored and horny.

She didn't even let me think that I was bigger or better in bed than her husband. The most she would say was that I was different, that she didn't know what I was going to do next, unlike a husband of nine years. And the naughtiness of an affair was exciting.

There was danger, too, and that was exciting. We weren't worried about losing our jobs if we got caught, since I wasn't her supervisor, though we could get reprimands if we got caught screwing on the clock. BFD: with such a shortage of nurses, no hospital was going to can a good one for an affair.

Still, even before her husband's injury, I could see that there was absolutely no future in this. Libby wasn't even slightly interested in dumping her husband, and even if she did like me, a lot, she wasn't nearly as captivated by me as I was by her.