Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟴𝟮 sober

Yeah, he was the end. 

Dom was the sort of person who finished things. 

Sometimes that was shutting down billion-dollar medical corporations and then sometimes, on the other side, that was a relationship. It varied depending on the client, he found. He'd spent a lot of time with an array of different people with different problems and, a few times, he'd resolved to watching the love between two people wilt and wither. He'd broken the hearts himself and he'd done it all for the greater good. Usually, the prospect of doing something like that made him drag his heels--

From the five calls he got in succession from Seattle, Dom figured that, this time, he couldn't have gotten there quicker.

He had to settle for arriving when the rain was the worst. 

By the time his flight landed and the plane grinded to a halt, the weather had kicked up into a wailing wind and rolling thunder. The turbulence had already jostled his mood, making the grimace on his face was as prominent as the gloom across the city. It was a world away from what had, originally, been his morning in Los Angeles. He'd found himself a very nice guy in a very nice bar and now, this was his reality—

God, the things he does for money.

(Although, he guessed, maybe it was doing him a favour. The nice guys never were just nice, were they?)

He had to remind himself of that as he descended off the nice warm and dry plane. 

The pay-check, the fat pay-check, the reason why he'd left a very handsome man in his bed. Dom counted each step with a plan for his next weekend off: Step. This will pay for a nice house in Napa Valley. Step. Maybe he'd even splash out on a nice bottle of Moet. Step. Maybe, if he was really fucking great at kicking ass, Andrew would add an extra zero to the end of his pay-check—

(God but the handsome man had had a very pretty smile.)

Dom frowned at the rain already speckling the collar of his suit jacket. It was enough to reverse all of the money he'd put into getting it laundered just yesterday morning.

(Yeah and make that two extra zeroes, Andrew.)

It wasn't that he didn't appreciate being people's first call. For the record, he did. When he'd first started working with Calum in their little start-up office in Toronto all those years ago, it had been rough. They'd spent the last seven years building clients from across the USA, bouncing through pitches and trading business cards. They'd worked hard to get the clientele they had and Dom couldn't name a time he'd ever been prouder than the day he'd been given his law account at his Aunt's foundation. He earned every goddamn dime of that pay-check. He liked getting the recognition he deserved.

The money was good, and he'd been a materialistic bastard for a long time now.

 (He blamed his family, where the money was just too good to be true and everything just seemed to come to them without question. His Aunt had worked hard for it, he knew, but sometimes he felt a little too out of touch. He blamed his friends too, running around with the elite had worn down the Black kid that had grown up hauling his ass through college. Although sometimes he questioned whether they considered him a friend at all, or just a staff member on payroll to clean up their slip-ups.) 

He wasn't kidding when he said that he was thinking about all of the ways he could spend it even before he'd earned it—a nice night in Malibu, a fast car ride down to San Diego... Dom craved the feeling of the California sun.

But then there was the mess at hand. 

A big mess, quite possibly the biggest, inevitable mess he'd ever seen in his twelve years working at March & Fox Solicitors.