Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The irony is, none of it would have happened if Derek hadn’t tried so hard. Or, most of it, anyway. Some of it is her fault, too, she can admit that.

--- 

When Derek visits Meredith in her private room the day after her miraculous revival, he’s distraught. He holds her hand with the hand that isn’t busy worrying his hair into a state of anarchy and tells her the minute by minute account of her near-death.

She doesn’t have the heart to tell him it was a death, after all, or her version of the events. Something tells her he wouldn’t appreciate hearing about her conversations with the ghosts of patients past.

“I was so scared, Mer,” he whispers, again, more broken than the last time he repeated the words. “You… you were unresponsive for over an hour… we worried about brain death. They wouldn’t let me in, can you believe that? Addison—fucking Addison, of all people, kept updating Mark and I…”

That gives her pause. every telling of events, everyone who’s visited her, there is a personal story. How much her almost death scared them, hurt them, how hard they fought to keep her alive, how relieved they are… but no one has mentioned the neonatal surgeon. It sticks, because everyone in the room had a reason to be there. Richard, Burke, Bailey—they fought to keep her alive. Derek, obviously, and Mark, oddly, and Christina is her person.

But Addison?

Addison has no reason to be in her room. There were countless other patients—surely she was needed elsewhere.

Evidently, Derek is still talking. Meredith tunes back in just in time to see his contrition crumple into something darker, his lips curling into a near snarl around his words. “You know how to swim, Meredith. You know how to swim.”

She’s quiet, mouth numb and sluggish.

“You told me, how you used to swim at the Cape… you told me you once swam what, a mile? And then you…”

He’s not just scared, he’s angry. She can see it, overlayed though it is. “I—“ she starts, and stops, and starts again, not unlike her heart not twelve hours ago. “It was so cold, Derek. I did swim. I did!”

“Did you?” That snarl again, louder. “How then, did this happen, Meredith? Why did I have to pull you out of that water when you know how to swim!”

She wants to answer him, she does, but there aren’t any words to explain that feeling. That moment. Meredith swallows, faltering. Derek doesn’t give her much space to explain. “Honestly, I—“

“Derek, that’s enough.” Meredith blinks, turning slow at the rich, honeyed tones of Addison Montgomery. She almost flinches at the way her words are clipped and tight, scolding. “She’s had a hell of a day, Derek. Now’s not the time for one of your interrogations.” And Meredith wonders, then, how familiar Addison is with this side of McDreamy that isn’t so McDreamy at all, the sides she’s only caught glimpses of. If he’s the sort of man to interrogate, and what he’d interrogated her over before. While Meredith is dark and twisty and liable to make many, incredibly stupid mistakes, Addison is well, Addison. Meredith doesn’t think anything the redhead does it a mistake, even Mark.

(Sometimes people do desperate things to get someone’s attention.)

“This doesn’t concern you, Addison. This is between Meredith and I.” Anger has shifted to contempt, thick and malicious. She’s heard this tone before. It’s the “adulterous bitch voice”—the way Derek spoke to his wife when she first showed up. It always made Meredith uncomfortable, and it doesn’t fail to now.

“Der—“

“Meredith Grey is a patient in this hospital,” Addison hums, “and as an attending surgeon in this hospital, I have an obligation to see she is cared for appropriately. You berating her like this is not aiding in her recovery. So I’m going to ask you to leave, or I will page Bailey and the Chief.” There’s a moment where it looks like Derek will push her to do just that, but then he stands with a huff and a long, lingering glance at Meredith. He gives her his sorrowful, puppy dog eyes and she feels a tinge of guilt for not speaking up. For not telling Addison she’s fine. Except then Derek storms out the door, shoving past Addison in a way that is not dreamy at all, and Meredith feels the axis tilt just a bit further, towards that unnamed feeling that swarmed her in Elliot Bay.

She’s left in the silence with Satan, who doesn’t seem so devilish at all. After Derek leaves, Addison softens. She steps quietly into the room—for once without the tell tale click of her famous high heels—but she doesn’t hover long. She refills Meredith’s cup of water and then bends to fix the blanket that has twisted with her pulse-ox monitor.

“A nurse could do that.” Meredith murmurs, voice fraught. They’ve never been this close. Close enough that she can smell the undoubtedly expensive shampoo Addison uses, or see the shadows etched under her eyes beneath wearing concealer. “You don’t have to… you…”

“Grey,” Addisons voice is warm honey, the soothing tone she’s heard her take with patients. But it’s weary too, fatigue that seems older than the days events weighing her down. “I don’t mind.” There’s the press of one of her hands against Meredith’s waist. Her stomach flutters in a way it shouldn’t, not for Dr. Montgomery. Not for Satan, for Derek’s bitchy, posh ex-wife. For the woman who turned her life on its axis. And yet, she feels the loss when the redhead pulls back. “I think it’s best Derek gives you a bit of peace, don’t you?” Her brow quirks up, although there’s no smirk to match. The older woman just looks… tired.

Meredith, uncomfortable again but not in the way she expected, swallows. “It’s fine… I…” she shrugged. “He’s just scared. Everyone was scared, for me. Everyone’s come by and told me how terrifying it was, how much I scared them.” She sags against the bed, gaze leaving the attendings and trailing down the long lines of her form, noting the scrub cap tucked into her navy blue top, the claw clip at her waistband. “Did you just come from surgery?”

If the non sequitur bothers Montgomery, she doesn’t let on. She nods, running a hand though her loose curls, as if putting them back into place. “Placental abruption. Unrelated to the accident, except for a delayed delivery. Mother pulled through, thank god.”

Meredith generally avoids OB at all costs, and Addison hasn’t requested her recently, but she knows that is a long and unpredictable surgery. “Thanks to you.” She doesn’t know what brings her to say it, to compliment her. “I just mean, well. You’re the best in the world. She pulled through because you’re… you.”

Dr. Montgomery frowns, and then sighs. “I can’t win them all, Grey. But thank you.” She steps back, edging toward the door. “I’m going to tell the nurses to give you some peace, so no more visitors for now, alright? Get some rest, Grey.”

She’s gone before Meredith can thank her. No one has offered her peace. No one had thought that she might have her own experience of her death, that she might not want to hear countless stories of the pain she’d inflicted. No one, strangely, except her sort of boyfriend’s ex-wife. And stranger still, she feels at peace in the wake of the redheads interruption. As the room was stuffy before, and she cracked open a window.

— -

When Meredith wakes, Addison Montgomery is seated in the rooms single chair, a medical journal propped on her knee and a pen dangling lazily from her long fingers. She’s changed since her last visit, her scrubs discarded in favor of a black pencil skirt and emerald blouse. Her glasses are poised halfway down her nose. Were it anyone else, Meredith would make a sexy librarian joke. As it is, she stays quiet, almost motionless. The other woman is beautiful when she’s focused—full lips pulled tight and green eyes moving so fast Meredith doubts she could even process at that speed, her elevated foot rocking just slightly, drawing Meredith’s eyes to the long, lean line of her calf. She wonders (not for the first time) what the hell Derek saw in her after being married to that.

“Your nurse paged me.” Dr Montgomery murmurs, eyes slowing. “Derek has been hovering.”

Meredith huffs out an awkward, stilted laugh. She feels like a kid with her hand caught in the cookie jar. “And so you’re… Derek-repellent?”

“It’s evidently effective. He about had a heart attack when he saw me.”

She’s joking, Meredith realizes. She breathes another laugh and relaxes, sinking into her blankets just as the other doctor sets the journal aside. Blue eyes eye meet green, and Meredith can’t keep quiet anymore. “I know how to swim.” She blurts, a train already in motion. “I do. I’ve always been a strong swimmer. And I didn’t… I didn’t not swim. I swam. I did. But then I had… a moment.”

“A moment.” Addison repeats, not sounding skeptical at all. If anything, she sounds like she knows exactly what Meredith means. And that allows her to continue.

“A moment. One second I was swimming up, back toward the pier, and the next I just… stopped. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think “oh, I want to drown.” It wasn’t like that at all.”

She can’t take her eyes off the other woman, off the startling warmth in that greenish gaze, even as the silence drags on and shifts from comfortable to heavy. Meredith begs, silently. She just needs someone to understand. To not need her to explain.

It’s a minute before Addison sighs and leans back. “I had a miscarriage, about a year before Derek moved here.” Her voice is quiet, and that fatigue is back, heavy in her words. Meredith is grateful for the remarkable control the redhead has over her expressions. She can’t do more emotions today. “We’d talked about a family, but we weren’t trying. It was a conversation left unresolved. All the same, it hit me… hard. And I had… a moment. A few weeks after. I thought I was fine, over it, and then I was out with Savvy and Weiss and Mark and we were leaving the bar, and I went to get my cab, and stepped into the street. There was a truck, coming far too fast. I saw it. I saw it and I didn’t move. I knew I should step over, just one step, and I was going to, and then I just… I didn’t. Someone pulled me back, some passerby. None of my friends, none of them saw it. So… I know exactly what you mean, Grey. I didn’t want to die. I never had a thought like that, not one. I just didn’t move.”

She sighs and looks away, somewhere between the door and the partially closed blinds.

They’re not friends. Meredith isn’t even the type to hug her friends (except Cristina, but her person doesn’t count) and yet she wants nothing more than to hug Addison in that moment. Instead, she nods and manages to find her voice. “So you get it.”

“I get it.”

She breathes in and the tilted, stomach lurching feeling starts to ease. “Thank you. For telling me. I… no one asked, really. No one asked me what happened, and I didn’t think anyone would believe me, if I told them. So… thank you. I don’t think anyone else would understand.”

Addison looks back up at her, her smile soft and sad. “I know. That’s why I never told anyone that—certainly not Derek.”

“Why? Why Derek especially?” She watches the redheads brows pinch, and there’s that old, deep seated fatigue again. Something resigned that Meredith doesn’t want to become familiar with enough to name. She suddenly feels cold. But not off balance. Addisons still looking at her, and the calm control in her gaze is enough to steady Meredith.

After a moment, Addison takes off her glasses and pinches her brow. “I’m not here to badmouth my ex-husband, Grey. But I will tell you that Derek doesn’t handle this sort of uncertainty well. Those things we can’t explain, when you don’t know why you do something. He never has. I learned that very early on in our marriage.”

Meredith wonders what she means but she doesn’t ask. They’re not friends, and in the short time she’s come to know Addison Montgomery-no-longer-Shepard, the attending hasn’t been forthcoming about her past. Meredith knows the bits and pieces, the broad contours of a life in Manhattan, of Addison’s relationship with Derek’s family. She knows the distance between them at the end, but she knows nothing of the marriage that spanned those years. She can’t trace the shadows in Addison’s eyes to their origins.

You’ve never done this before. He’d smiled at the revelation, weeks ago. Meredith had felt relieved that he knew, that he’d done this before—this relationship business. She trusted him to lead her through, to let her stumble. To come back when they argued. But seeing the ghosts in his ex-wife’s gaze, she wonders exactly what he’d done before. After all, Derek hadn’t come back to Addison.

— -

She stays in the hospital for two more days, and Derek doesn’t visit. Addison comes by again that evening with a stack of charts and two cups of juju and doesn’t say anything except “can’t win them all.” And so Meredith just watches her, notes the way she seems to soften as her curls go limp and her eyes grow heavy. She pretends to be asleep when Addison finally finishes the charts and takes them to the nurses station. She’s glad, because the redhead comes back five minutes later and tucks her in, adding a downy soft, knit blanket that is most definitely not hospital issue. Meredith isn’t sure why she does it, but she keeps her eyes closed and simply breathes in the faint hints of amber, vanilla, and chocolate.

In the morning, Cristina pops by before rounds and sits on her bed. “Why is this so soft,” she asks, before Meredith is really awake. She has the blanket—Addisons blanket—wrapped around her.

“Hey! That’s mine.” She grabs for it back like a child, her pout undercut by a grin.

“No it’s not. This is way too nice to be yours,” Cristina pulls back, clutching the blanket around her like a prize. “Seriously. Did McDreamy drop this off? Doesn’t seem trailer issue…”

“No,” she speaks too fast, and Cristina latches on like a dog with a bone.

She unwinds the blanket and gets close enough for Meredith to grab it. Childish indeed. But it’s soft. And she’s recovering. It has nothing to do with the fact that it’s Addison’s. “Right,” Yang drags out the word too long, the vowels trailing, voice low. “Because he hasn’t been allowed to visit your room. Because Satan is guarding you. What the hell is that about?”

Meredith doesn’t want to tell her. It isn’t, really, her story to tell. Not hers alone anyway. She feels she owes Addison her silence. Besides, she doesn’t know why Addison is there. So she tells her what she can.

“Derek is really upset with me,” she sighs. “He started accusing me of… of doing it on purpose. And Dr. Montgomery overheard. I think… I think she’s familiar with that side of him. I wasn’t, but when she interrupted… I don’t know. I saw something.”

“Saw what?”

“I don’t know! Like… like she knew he could be like that. Like it would escalate. And she’s got the nurses paging her when he tries to see me, and she wouldn’t do that for nothing. I don’t know much about their marriage, Cristina. Derek doesn’t exactly talk about it.” She hasn’t admitted how curious she is before. That would mean telling Cristina why, and she doesn’t want to tell her about those thoughts. The ones she can’t acknowledge even to herself.

Her person hums, laying sideways over her legs. “So McDreamy isn’t so dreamy and the Wicked Witch is bringing you blankets.”

“And juju.”

“Blankets and juju. Jeez. I gotta step up my game.”

Meredith smiles at that, snuggling into the blanket. “Honestly, you do. She told me she’d bring me actual food today, too.”

Cristina huffs and rolls her eyes. “Wow. McMommy is taking real good care of you, isn’t she?”

She can’t help but blush, but she can’t deny her. Addison is taking great care of her.

She recovers, quickly. Maybe rest and relaxation—peace—is good for her. Meredith can’t remember the last time she had so much uninterrupted time to herself, with her own thoughts. There’s nothing to fill her hands with, no tasks to distract herself from idleness. Normally, she can’t handle downtime. Rest isn’t restful at all, not with the way her thoughts rush in to fill every inch of space.

But it’s different this time.

Maybe it’s that she hasn’t thought of Derek since that first evening. Maybe it’s because she hasn’t thought of her mother at all. And of course, it doesn’t hurt that in addition to good taste in blankets and take out, Addison has very good taste in literature (or at least, in trashy romance novels). She leaves the books and the blanket in her office when she checks out, but she keeps the newfound sense of peace Addison gave her. She draws it around her when she comes back to work to even more stares and whispers than before, insulates herself from the gossip and the questions and the care.

Very quickly, Addison herself becomes something of a safe harbor. Meredith doesn’t mean to take advantage of her, but the redhead is so unbelievably kind she can’t help herself. It’s not the kind of kindness that feels saccharine and leaves a strange bitter taste in her mouth. It’s not Susan with her hovering, her care, her endless bags of groceries and gentle smiles. It’s not Izzie and George, with their too pleasant conversation and obvious monitoring. It’s certainly not Derek, fashioning himself a knight in shining armor when she never asked to be rescued.

Addison doesn’t do any of that. Addison offers her space—the quiet of her office to hide from her friends, the passenger seat of her (rental?) car when Meredith is blind drunk at Joe’s. She doesn’t ask questions. But she does give damn good advice.

“I don’t know how to tell her not to mess it up,” Meredith sighs, half sprawled over the surprisingly comfortable little couch in Addisons office. They’re on the fourth floor, next to the obstetrics patient rooms, and it’s blissfully quiet. Meredith tells herself that’s why she’s made a recent habit of camping out in the neonatal surgeons office, and that it has nothing to do with the woman herself. She slouches further into the couch, almost laying on it now, her leg stretched absently to the side and her head coming to rest on the arm.

Sometimes she falls asleep there. That alpaca blanket tends to make an appearance. Addison never says anything.

“It’s just… we need this. Is that selfish? To need Cristina’s relationship to work out?”

There’s a hum from the desk to her right. She glances over, but Addison isn’t looking at her. Still, it’s a nice view. She’s developing an unhealthy obsession for the sight of her her with hair half back, glasses perched at the bridge of her nose. Not that she needs that in her life. “And why do you need it to work out?” She drawls, noting something down on the surgical plan in front her her. “For you. Not for her. Right?”

That’s the thing about advice from Dr. Montgomery. She sees right through Meredith.

With a sigh she closes her eyes. “Because… because Cristina is like me,” like us, she almost adds, “so if it can work out for her, it can work out for someone like me. Someone dark and… damaged.”

“Everyone is damaged,” Addison sighs, sounding less bored. She sounds almost frustrated. They’ve had this chat before. “No one gets through life without a few dings and cracks. And some more than others, but that just means you can handle more. It makes you the compassionate, idiotically selfless person you are. And I don’t think you need this as proof that there isn’t anything wrong with you.” Her glasses have slid down her nose and she peers at Meredith over them, perfect brow arched as usual. It’s disturbingly attractive in a way that Meredith can’t begin to acknowledge.

She can never control her blush when Addison compliments her. She has to bypass the affirmation or else she’ll… well. Best not to go there. “I still… they’re good together. And I don’t want Cristina to mess it up. For Cristina.”

“Of course,” Addison hums, and she can hear the smirk in her voice., calling her out on her bullshit. “But you can’t tell her that. Why don’t you try to find out what has her so bothered, instead? And you and I both know it’s not the dress or the flowers. You’re her person, right? Well push her. Preston won’t.”

She forgets that Burke and Addison are friends. That Addison will be on his side of the isle at the wedding. Meredith gets distracted, picturing the redhead in a dress without her lab coat to obscure her figure. She’s blushing when she looks back at her.

“What if it’s something I can’t fix,” she asks, hesitant.

Addison sets down her pen and is looking at her over the rim of her glasses in amusement. “It’s not going to be something you can fix and it’s not your job to fix it. It’s your job to help her determine if it’s something she can move through, or not. You need to hold space for her, so she can fix it herself.” It’s such an Addison sentiment. Meredith knows that the older woman tends to take care of herself, that she isn’t the kind to rely too heavily on others to solve her problems. She admires that, truly. And Cristina is like that too. Meredith tries to be, but she finds that since starting her internship she’s been leaning on others in a way that makes her uncomfortable. Maybe that’s why Derek keeps thinking he needs to save her—she’s been playing damsel in distress.

“Ok,” she sighs. “I can do that.”

She watches Addison stand and straighten her notes. “Good. Now, are you scrubbing in with me or not? Stevens was my intern on this case but she’s at her hours limit and this baby won’t wait much longer.”

Technically, she’s on Derek’s service. But she’s avoiding him, and even though she doesn’t love OB, she loves watching Addison command an OR. So she shakes off the fatigue and hops off the couch. “Yep. All yours.”

It’s worth the lack of sleep when Addison lets her handle almost all of the sutures, even taking her hand to guide her at one point, and rewards her with a smile that leaves her green eyes sparkling. Meredith ignores the way her heart flutters when the redhead murmurs “Well done in there, Grey” as they scrub out.

Chapter Text

She knew better than to lean on someone who wasn’t stable enough to be a crutch. And yet she did it anyway, ignoring her better angels.

“Is this our thing now?” Addison smirks, leaning against the wall of an empty exam room on the fourth floor. She’s wearing a deep teal blouse that makes her eyes especially green and her hair especially red. Meredith swallows, doing her best not to let her eyes rove over the other woman too obviously. She isn’t quite sure when that started, her ogling Addison. She also can’t bring herself to stop. “You know you’re always welcome to stop by and use the couch. That can’t be terribly comfortable.”

With a slight blush, the intern shrugs. “I was here first. It’s not my fault Richard put your office on the fourth floor.” The other surgeons are mostly on the third floor, but since Addison is also head of OB, her office is on the quiet fourth floor. Meredith has always found peace in the East hallway, which is scarcely used. She shrugs again and lets her legs cross beneath her on the gurney. That peace also extends to the other woman’s office, just around the corner. She can’t admit that she went there first, but didn’t want to interrupt the call Addison was on. The older woman looked upset, pacing around the room with her Blackberry tight to her ear. The furrow hasn’t left her brow, its faint impression lingering.

She doesn’t ask. That’s not how they’re… friendship (yes, that’s what they are. Right?) works. Addison doesn’t offer up her troubles, but why would she? She’s a double-board certified attending, one of the best in the world, with her perfect hair and designer fashion. What advice could Meredith possibly offer her? Addison is lately like her Yoda, even if the comparison is terrible unflattering.

Addison steps closer, and Meredith can’t help but watch her lithe legs move and wish her pencil skirt was just a few inches shorter. Addison must be lethal in a bikini. Christ. Where did that thought come from?

“Here,” there’s a small cup in the redhead’s hand that she presses into Meredith’s. She can still see the fresh whip cream. Addison must have made it in her office. Or doctored it. The coffee cart does not keep whip cream on hand, as far as she knows.

“Juju?”

“Juju.” The attending confirms, lips in a thin line. “The surgery this afternoon is not a procedure I like performing,” she confesses quietly, as if the words are taboo and may trigger some contemptuous spirit. Meredith wasn’t aware there were procedures Addison didn’t like. She wasn’t aware Addison was capable of feeling unprepared.

Did Yoda ever falter?

She takes a sip and tries to summon enough confidence for the both of them. She glances over, hesitant. She’s not sure Addison really wants her advice, her comfort. But she’s there, beside her, and Meredith feels foolish in the silence. “But you know how to do it. I bet you’re over prepared for it. Just so you could explain it to me and not have to think about what your hands are doing. Right?”

It’s strange, being the one to reassure Addison. She’s never thought of Addison as the sort of person who needed reassurance before. But in the quiet of the hallway, as the taller woman sinks down onto the gurney next to her, she starts to see the cracks in marble facade. As she explains the surgery, there’s a line of concentration in her brow that seems particularly deep today, and her hands move with a nervous energy the has Meredith wishing to take them in her own. And yet, at the same time, she is as flawless and precise as ever, still teaching Meredith, still checking the intern’s knowledge of the procedure until her pager beeps.

“It’s Bailey,” she explains by way of apology, straightening out her baby blue scrubs as she hops down from the gurney. “She needs me in the Pit. I’ll be back for the surgery though!”

Addison only nods, sipping the dregs of her now-cold juju, “Three o’clock, OR2, Dr. Grey.”

“OR2. Got it!” She smiles as she speed walks down the hall, ignoring the sinking feeling in her stomach as she rounds the corner. It’s only when she joins Christina in the elevator that she realizes she’s still holding her half drunk cup of hot chocolate.

“And she brings gifts,” Yang grins, taking the cup eagerly. “Ugh. Your coffee is cold,” she sips it anyway, only to nearly spit it out. “And not coffee! What the hell?”

“It’s Juju.” Meredith giggles, her grin wide and open.

Yang frowns, pressing the cup quickly back into her hands. “ Juju? Excuse me? Isn’t that Dr. Montgomery’s weird karma thing? The bad surgery thing?” She looks scornful. Of course, Cristina vocally disapproves of the neonatal surgeon’s belief in the universe. It falls in the same category as Burke’s faith in God. Neither are appropriate, in her option, for the hallowed halls of the surgical floor.

“You haven’t even had a surgery yet today.”

Meredith shrugs, sipping the cold liquid. It’s not unpleasant, even if it’s reminiscent of the powdered chocolate milk she used to make herself as a kid. “Not yet. We have a tough one this afternoon and Addison was worried about it.”

Cristina’s brows shoot to her hairline. “Addison? Since when do you call Satan Addison? And why is she telling you if she’s worried? Doesn’t she have McSteamy for that?”

“We’ve been working together a lot,” she offers, lamely. It’s not entirely true, anyway. Alex has been on OB for most of the month. “And we get along…”

“So you’re friends with Satan now?”

“Were… no. Yes? I don’t know. We’re friendly.”

“Why? She’s…”

The skepticism in Cristina’s voice is starting to annoy her. It’s too close to open disdain and for some reason it rubs under Meredith’s skin, burning like a fresh splinter. “She’s just as dark and twisty as us, you know?” She interrupts, almost snapping as they step off the elevator, “Actually, I think she’s worse . Because she’s dark and twisted and she still manages to seem fine, happy and bright and shiny and godlike, despite it. That’s kinda scary, isn’t it? Like sociopathic.”

“Godlike. You think the she-Shepard is godlike!”

“Cristina!” She throws up her hands in exasperation. Thankfully the small cup is now empty. “Honestly? Yeah, I do. But that’s not the point—the point it, she’s like us. And so it’s easy to be friendly.”

—

When they check in on their patients that evening, Meredith finds herself staring more than usual. She’s always worshipped Addisons bedside manner—that just like Burke, she seems warm and yet unflappable in the face of any challenge. But today she finds herself wishing she was on the receiving end of the soft smiles and encouraging words. Not that Addison doesn’t encourage her, but she knows what it feels like to be cared for by the redhead, and now that she’s had a taste she can’t help but crave it.

“I’m going to keep you both here for a few days,” she’s leaning close to their patient, Mrs. Crane, with her finger delicately gracing the chubby cheek of her newborn son. The smile on the redheads face is nothing short of breathtaking. “But you’re doing quite well, both of you. You’ve got a strong one here…” she wiggles the baby’s foot and pulls back.

Meredith finds herself smiling too. She excuses it as the fact that baby Crane is actually very cute, but it has far more to do with the woman standing next to her. It takes her brain a moment to kick start.

“Well come by in the morning to check on you, and the nurses will keep a close eye on you both. But if all goes well, you can head home tomorrow.” Meredith smiles, shifting from foot to foot. It’s her last patient of a very long day, but she’s buzzing.

It’s when they leave Mrs Crane and step into the hall that all that buzzing turns into a frantic energy. The words tumble out of her mouth before she can think through them properly.

“Let’s go to Joes,” she’s smiling, but taking in the arched brow and skeptical expression on Addisons face, she fumbles. “To celebrate, the surgery. I know it’s a pretty routine thing for you, saving babies every day… and I know we don’t … we aren’t that kind of friends, that see each other outside of work… not that we aren’t… I just thought…”

“Meredith.”

She stops, physically stills even though her mind is running ahead of her, and stares back into the sheer amusement on her attending’s face.

“Go get cleaned up, and I’ll meet you in the lobby in say… 15? Do you need longer?”

“Nope. 15 is perfect. Yep…”

Addison chuckles softly and turns to head back to her office. But she stops. “And Meredith?”

“Yeah…”

“We’re friends. I think we passed that when you started taking naps on my couch, don’t you? We can be the kind of friends who get drinks.” There’s a bright, mischievous smile on her burgundy lips.

She sashays off , her heels clicking and her hips even swaying, Meredith is sure she isn’t imagining that, leaving Meredith gobsmacked in the hall. She curses her stupid brain for the way that smile makes her heart flip in a way Derek’s McDreamy smile never has. She can’t be thinking of Addison that way.

—

They do, in fact, go to Joe’s. That first night, tucked in the back corner away from prying eyes, Meredith drinks her tequila with the lime mixed in, for once, and Addison sips a very dirty martini. The way she smirks with each slow sip makes Meredith blush. If Addison notices, she never comments. Between drinks two and three they stop discussing work and start discussing life, or what little they have of it. For all that she doesn’t have (money, time, energy), Meredith realizes she might not win the game of whose life sucks more.

Addison has money, and time, but little else. The way the redhead’s lips purse as she speaks of her semi-permanent residence on the twenty-second floor of the Archfield belies a loneliness her aloof tone can’t hide. Her stories of the past come with a glimmer of melancholy, a tinge of bitter nostalgia. The life the older woman describes back in New York was fully of friends, the names Meredith is starting to catalog (Savvy, Weiss, Naomi, and of course, Mark…). But here she’s alone.

“Addison,” she hesitates, downing the last sip of her margarita as the older woman peers back at her, brow arched. It’s enough to make her stumble. She wants to ask what she needs, if she can help with the loneliness that gnaws at the light in the older woman’s eyes. She wants to ask her to come over, to share a seat on her worn couch to eat leftover pizza and homemade muffins. But it feels like too much and not enough. So she holds up her empty glass.  “I… Do you need another?”

She never does tell her they could make this a regular thing, spending time together. She never offers to have her over to the house to partake in more of Izzie’s baking. She chickens out of suggesting another night at Joe’s.

They have one anyway, a week or so later. The circumstances are different, Addison’s smile made all the more brittle by the end of “the Bet” with Sloan. In the dim lights of the bar with her hair pushed behind her ears and her eyes fraught with those increasingly familiar shadows, she seems much less sage advisor. Meredith is pretty sure Luke never watched Yoda have his heart broken.

“Here,” Meredith sets two shots of tequila in front of the redhead with a smile.

“None for you?”

She scoffs. “What kind of friend would I be if I let you drink alone?” She grabs two more from the bar and returns to their table in the corner. Addison offers her glass to clink before she’s even properly sat down.

“Fuck men.” It’s a hiss, slipping through the grimace she makes as the liquor burns down. Any other time, Meredith might have laughed. Not tonight though. Not when she watched Addison pause outside the doors of Seattle Grace after she spoke with Alex and seem to utterly deflate. Not when she chased her down halfway to the parking lot and felt her startle at her touch, like she was forcing the crumbling pieces of herself to hold. Not when she can still see the watery edges of her eyes, the threat of a tempest she worries the older woman doesn’t know how to weather. Instead she stacks her glass and grins.

“They’re idiots, you know that right?” If Addison catches onto the use of the plural, she doesn’t seem disturbed by it. She merely glances away, far off. Meredith hesitates before resting her hand over hers. “McSteamy knows you’re too good for him, Addison. He’s an idiot. But you’re so out of his league…” She surprises herself that she means it.

Addison doesn’t meet her gaze. “It’s almost comical, really. He’s done this before, in New York. Not the Bet, of course, but…” she sighs, closing her eyes for a moment. “I keep hoping he’ll grow up. That he means it when he says he loves me.”

“For what it’s worth, I think he might.” Meredith doesn’t tell her about her night with Mark at the bar when he first arrived. It feels like an invasion of the older man’s privacy, as if she’s breaking some unspoken covenant of the Dirty Mistresses’ Club by talking about that night. She’s never forgotten the look on his face that night—the hope marred by pain, by disappointment.. It’s the very same she sees on Addison’s now.

She doesn’t tell her how witnessing it makes her heart clench and her stomach roll. How she wishes that longing weren’t for a man who can’t begin to comprehend what he’s being offered.

The deep fatigue on her face is familiar. Meredith recalls the expression on her face when she confronted Derek all those months ago. She’s reminded of all she doesn’t know--15 years of history. She knows even less about those three months in New York. While she was living her McLife with Derek, Addison was… with Mark Sloan. She knows that much (from Derek), but Addison has never spoken much about her relationship with the plastic surgeon.

All she knows is that Mark looks at Addison much the way she does—as if she’s something untouchable, meant to be appreciated from a distance. Except Mark has had the privilege of touching her, and Meredith hasn’t. The fact that her fingers ache with longing must, of course, go ignored.

Addison offers her second glass as a way to break the silence, managing a smile. “That’s sweet of you, Grey.” She doesn’t linger for a third shot.

In the morning, Bailey informs them that no one will be on OB that week, that Dr. Montgomery is out . It takes everything she has not to corner Alex in the locker room and berate him. She does snap at Sloan that day, getting herself kicked off his service and on Scut. She tells herself it’s because Addison is a friend, and because she’s hurting. It has nothing to do with how she feels about the redhead. Nothing at all.

Chapter Text

On Monday, Addison’s office door is open.

Although she tried not to, Meredith comes by a few times, despite being on Dr. Ayagari’s service and having no business being on the fourth floor at all. Each time, the office is empty. She ignores the thrum of disappointment, the pulse of worry, and

 settles in on the couch, Alpaca blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and finishes her charting. Addison is back, she should be happy. But she has a bad feeling. It catches in the back of her throat, stutters her words even more than usual. Addison is back, but she hasn’t seen her at all. Christina hasn’t either—she asked her twice today. The text she sent on Saturday went unanswered, too.

We’re friends. Addison assured her of that, weeks ago, but friends would tell you how they are. Friends would reassure you they didn’t have a moment and step out into traffic or jump into frigid waters.

She’s being dramatic.

A glance at the clock reveals it’s past seven. Her charts are done, and her shift ended 30 minutes ago, but Addison’s Coach tote is still in its spot beside her desk, her trench coat still on its hanger in the closet. And that feeling is still there, churning in her gut. Meredith sighs and closes the charts. The floor is quiet by now, the patient rooms at the other end of the hall silent too distant to disturb the peace. This of the floor end has the nurse’s station and a few other offices, a couple of ultrasound exam rooms, and a pair of supply closets. She heads for those, the left one specifically. It’s weirdly large, deep, and a place she herself has hidden. It’s her best guess, but she hesitates at the door.

They’re friends. Except… Addison isn’t in the business of sharing her pain with Meredith. Even that might at Joe’s—the night before she vanished—she never delved into the pain etched on her face. Meredith has

 never had a problem finding her before, but then again, she’s been the one seeking out help. It feels like crossing a line, to go looking for the Attending.

Her steps halt in the empty hall, sneakers squeaking on the tiles. She shouldn’t be doing this. But then she thinks of the melancholic way Addison describes New York, the shadows in her eyes, the sorrows drowned in olive-soaked gin. She thinks of the grim set of Sloan’s jaw when she dared make a comment about the older woman earlier that week. She reminds herself that Addison was there, when Meredith needed her and didn’t even know to ask. She opens the door.

—

She’s being chased by pregnant women. It’s a foolish, ridiculous thought. Addison knows she signed up for this, that pregnant women are the majority of her job. And it appears that God has no tenderness for Satan today, and there’s no interesting gynecological emergency to take her off the OB floor. She’s been smiling all day, reassuring women all day, holding their joy in her hands when any hope of her own died back in an overly sunny office in L.A.

Naomi called that morning, again, and Addison hasn’t bothered to check the voicemail. She hasn’t spoken to Nay since she left her office, grabbed her things, and sped all the way back to Seattle. Somewhere in Northern California, after the dusty fields had dissolved to forests and the pin-straight lanes of i-5 started to wind through the mountains, she pulled over and drank herself sick in a hopeless little bar in a nameless little town. She doesn’t remember renting the motel she woke up in (she definitely wouldn’t have settled for it sober).

She’s sober now and she wishes she wasn’t. With the gin clouding her mind, it’s easier to pretend she isn’t alone. Because the thing is, she calls Naomi her best friend, but it’s in the way you refer to old friends by what they once were. If Naomi were her best friend, she’d have told her when she left New York, she’d have told her the truth about Mark, she’d have told her about the abortion and the peds nurse. She’d have called when she found the panties in Derek’s coat. She’d have flown down to L.A. before the ink dried on her divorce papers.

But she didn’t. Because they haven’t been that sort of friends since their residency.

Truth be told, she doesn’t have those sorts of friends.

She has Savvy—beautiful, brilliant, forgiving Savvy who she hasn’t had a proper conversation with since the Holidays when she called, broken hearted in the waning lights of a Christmas tree, with Derek’s words playing in her mind. Christmas makes you want to be with the people you love… There’s only so many breakdowns one long-distance childhood friend is supposed to answer. And besides, fertility issues aren’t new to Savvy, and it seems cruel to cry about her own when she at least had a chance. Never mind that she ruined it.

She had Naomi—had, because she knows Naomi won’t forgive her flight from L.A. easily.

She has Callie Torres—the closest thing she has to a friend in Seattle, which doesn’t mean much. A few nights out and sullen hallway conversations, brief life updates in the hallways. She likes Callie, but Callie doesn’t know her well enough. She may have told Callie about the abortion, but she didn’t shed a tear. She can’t imagine crying on her shoulder.

Which brings her to Mark—he’s well used to her crying on his broad shoulders. In his arms. In his bed. Mark has always been the exception to her personal rules—perhaps because nothing she did seems to shake his support of her. Until that day in New York, when she shattered his dreams for them. She knows he’s forgiven her almost everything else, that he dropped a very lucrative surgery to take the next flight out to Seattle after her divorce. Mark loves her, in his own way. But he doesn’t love her enough to be hers alone, and that hurts most of all.

For what it’s worth, I think he might. Wasn’t that what Meredith had said? She’s too much of a seasoned drinker to forget the expression on the intern’s face that night. Meredith might actually be her closest friend in Seattle, if only because the intern is similarly damaged to herself. But she’s so young, and Addison doesn’t have it in her to share her pain when the blond already has so much of her own. She’d gone so far as to ask Miranda to assign her elsewhere, knowing that Meredith would read the dark circles under her eyes as a confession. Never mind that she wanted to see her, that she—

“Addison?” light spills into the closet, cutting through the soothing, womblike tranquility of the pitch black she’d been holed up in for the better part of an hour. She can’t imagine how she looks in the harshness of that light, with remnants of her mascara dried on her cheeks, haggard and spent. Just like she is. Dried up. Barren.

She swallows, brushing her hair back for the millionth time. It must be greasy by now, with how she’s been abusing it this evening. “Dr. Grey.” The attempt at formality is undercut by the raw, shattered tone of her voice. “I… why…”

“I was looking for you. And well… I used to hide in here. Before, before you.” Before she laid claim to the OB floor and the younger woman’s dream life. She doesn’t want to imagine what Meredith (and her husband) got up to in that closet.

“Right.” She looks down, twisting her bare fingers together. “Still, why?”

Meredith seems woefully oblivious to the bite in her tone, the clear dismissal. She folds her bird boned frame to sit knee to knee with Addison. “You left.” She frowns, her brow pinched. “And you didn’t call me back. I was… worried.”

“Why?”


Any other time, she might have found the way the younger woman cocks her head in confusion adorable. “Because we’re friends, Addison. And I worry about my friends when they go missing without a word.” Her hand has found a place on the bare skin of her knee, resting in a calm reassurance. Addison doesn’t move away. In truth, she hadn’t expected anyone (except perhaps Mark) to notice, or care, that she disappeared.

Mark had called, about ten times. He never left a message. She couldn’t bring herself to play Meredith’s.

Addison swallows, feeling a fresh wave of tears prick at her eyes. “Meredith… I’m fine.”

“Bullshit,” the blond smiles, “Besides, that’s my line. I can tell you’re not fine. You look like you lost a fight with a printer.”

Despite herself, she lets out a watery laugh. She lets Meredith start to wipe the mascara streaks off her cheeks and doesn’t choke down her tears. “I was in L.A.,” she explains, quietly. When she speaks, the knuckles of Meredith’s hand brush her lips. “I have a friend there, from residency. She’s a… a specialist.”

Meredith freezes, still painfully close. Addison can feel her breath, can see the way it catches. “Are you…”

“No.” It’s a sob. “I um…” God, she can’t get the words out. She pulls back, curling in on herself as a fresh wave of tears starts. She doesn’t know how to do this, how to tell this girl (because she’s so young) what it feels like to lose the life she imagined for herself. She never thought she’d end up alone.

Slender arms slip around her, drawing the little ball she’s curled herself into closer with surprising strength. “Addison. It’s ok…”

“It’s not!” She whimpers, unable to force herself to unfurl despite the voice in her head scolding that it’s terribly unseemly.

There are things Addison doesn’t say. She doesn’t say “I’m barren.” She doesn’t say, “I wasted the one chance I had to be a mother and Mark has never forgiven me for it, and I haven’t forgiven myself either.” She doesn’t say “hold me, because if you don’t I think I might disappear.” Silent, she leans her head back against the shelves and avoids Meredith’s gaze.

“Let’s get you out of here,” she says after several minutes, “There’s no one on the floor, come on.” Numb and surprised as she is, Addison follows. Meredith’s arm slips around her middle for the short trip to her office, and she lets herself lean  into her and cry on her shoulder for just a minute more.

—

Addison was silent on the short trip to her hotel. Meredith drove, not trusting the redhead to operate her fancy Porsche with her shaking hands. Despite her better judgement, she doesn’t follow her in.

But she does place a call to the other member of the dirty mistresses’ club.

“Addison is one of my best friends.” Mark murmurs, voice low, almost drowned out by the din of the Emerald City Bar. “But broken things are more Derek’s thing than mine. I’m not the kind of guy a woman with damage needs. I’m not… careful and caring like that. She needs that. Care. I step in when I can, but I have no idea how to be the kind of man Addison needs. And she knows that.”

Broken things are Derek’s thing. Meredith barely hears mark after that, because she sees the truth in it. If Addison is broken, then she is shattered. And Derek found them both. She wonders if he doesn’t see Addison as broken anymore, as if time healed the cracks into veins in marble.

“She needs someone,” she murmurs quietly, “you… you have to try, Sloan. She trusts you, as much as she trusts anyone.”

“Yeah?” He glances sideways at her, something bitter in it. “And how well do you know Red? Didn’t think y’all got along.”

She thinks of late nights in the hall, cups of juju, the plush blanket on the small sofa in the redhead’s office, and the tab she must have rung up at joes on top shelf dirty martinis and cheap tequila. “We… I don’t know. We’re friends.”

He hums, shrugs, and finishes his scotch. “But she doesn’t tell you things, yeah?”

“Well… sometimes… I don’t know. Sometimes I think she does. She told me about New York, about… what happened with you two. She… she’s told me some of how she’s feeling, now. At least I think so.” I should have let go. I don’t know why I kept trying—why I keep trying—when it’s clear I have nothing left to offer. She didn’t know what to say then and she doesn’t now. She doesn’t know how to tell Mark that Addison logs every time he flirts with the nurses, every lingering glance. That she counts them like marks against her, proof that she’s past her prime. That she’s not enough. “She cried when you broke the bet.” She says instead, even though it feels like a betrayal to tell him.

She doesn’t expect Mark to laugh. “I didn’t. She did. I just… I told her I did. Always a manwhore, right?”

“She what?”

“She slept with Karev.” He growls, clearly bitter. “Before her trip to LA.” He’s clearly jealous, too, and Meredith finds herself right there with him. She knew, already, or she suspected, but it’s different all together to have it confirmed. And she can’t help it, she wishes it where her Sloan was jealous of, not Alex. She wouldn’t have sent Addison away. If she ever got the chance to have her, there’s no way she’d let her go.

But Addison doesn’t, couldn’t, want her. Not like that.

—

Addison gets herself up to the twenty second floor, but she can’t muster the energy to take off her dress or her shoes, even her coat. She feels wrung out, empty. Barren.

The ceiling of the suite is an unforgiving, blasé beige and yet the smooth plaster holds her interest for the better part of an hour. Her eyes have lost their focus, hazy with tears. She blinks them away, rising slowly to pounding on her door. Only then does she take off her shoes, haphazardly kicking the Manolo Blahnik’s to the corner. She’ll pick them up later, arrange them into their spot in the walk-in closet with the other black pairs. Or she doesn’t care. The precise care for her shoe collection and the obsessive order of her hotel suite hardly seem to matter now.

“Red, I know you’re in there.”

Mark.

No. She can’t deal with him today. She can’t swallow another disappointment, she’s choking already.

“Red!”

He’s making a scene, the WASP-y part of her rallies against her decision to leave him in the hall, to damn the noise complaints and humiliation. It drives her halting steps forward until she’s opening the door, sagging her body between the wood and the frame, a poor excuse for a barrier. “Mark.”

He looks haggard. There’s no smirk on his face now, not like when he broke her heart (again).

She stands there for a moment and then steps back, a silent admission that whatever comes next isn’t meant for the bright fluorescents of the hallway. In the near dark of her room, the faint light spilling out of the bathroom cuts the angles of his body sharper. It draws her eye to the grim set of his jaw, the muscle flexing there like a misplaced heartbeat.

“You left.” It’s an accusation, and a true one. Addison can only nod, her voice caught. “You sleep with Alex Karev, and then you leave.”

Surprise must be painted on her face because he nods, fast and eager. “Yeah. I know about that. And fuck, Addie. I know why you did it. I know I’m not—“

“It’s not about you. Or Alex.” She shakes her head, limp red strands falling over her face. “Mark, I promise, you… “ She can’t finish the end of that statement, even to herself. She can’t think of that fact that when Alex’s mouth was on her neck, she was picturing another intern in his place, soft full lips replacing stubble, much slimmer fingers on her hips. She still feels vaguely ill at those desires. Addison closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. There’s no way to excuse her actions. Better to let Mark think she wanted Karev, then to try and explain she was trying to prove to herself she still wanted men at all.

His hand on her chin guides her up, rough calluses from his time in the gym brushing the tender skin below her jaw. Those talented fingers slide to her cheek, catching the ends of tear tracks. He doesn’t say anything, merely breathes in her space until her gasps slow to match his steady exhales. She leans forward and tucks her head into the soft fabric of his shirt. “I’m a mess, Mark. I’m the mess, the cheater. I… I don’t know what I want.”

From him. From Meredith. From her current life. So, she runs from it all.

“Addison… shh.” His lips are against her jaw, his tone is steady, so sure. She wants to borrow that certainty.

His hands keep her from running now, although his hold is light. His hands on her arms guide her backwards into the bathroom, away from the light of closet. He doesn’t move to turn on the overheads. It’s dark enough in the bathroom that they’re nothing but a blurred silhouette in the mirror, like shadows of themselves. She watches her shadow self blur into his as he draws her close, lets herself melt into the warmth of his body until the edges blur entirely. Mark is familiar. He’s two decades of history—warm, sunny afternoons in Central Park, late night pizza in the dim hallways of their residency, chaotic, cramped car rides out to the coast. He anchors her to the versions of herself she is not, the versions she is afraid to lose now. Addison holds tight to that anchor. Her hands grip the soft, worn, fabric of his shirt as she presses herself impossibly close. She wants to be the woman she is in his eyes, in his memories. She’s always known who she is, or she thought she did. Since coming to Seattle, she’s been someone else. And in the last few weeks, she isn’t sure she recognizes herself anymore. She’s a performance art installation at residence in her life, and she wants to the show to end.

“Mark,” it’s a whisper as her lips find the heated skin of his throat, the familiar smell of his aftershave gathering in her nose. She finds his pulse jumping predictably and drags her teeth there just the way she knows he likes. She knows this, just as she knows the deliberate press of his fingers to the dimples of her lower back just before he groans out her name. It’s well-rehearsed, practiced steps. There’s nothing fast or fumbled about the way he strips her bare and lifts her to the counter. The marble is cold against her ass but he’s warm between her thighs, against her bare chest.

She appreciates that he doesn’t say anything as he sweeps her hair off her neck and catches the trail of dried tears against her jaw. Her fingers run over the strong muscle of his back, ground herself in this moment, with this man. She wants to be here, with him. He swallows her plea with his mouth just as he sinks into her, slow and drawn out. Mark has always been the more patient of the pair, and it’s not long before Addison hooks her legs around him and draws him closer. “Move,” she purrs, lips smeared in the remnants of her crimson lipstick.

It’s familiar, the way Mark plays her body. Despite the chill of the stone and the insistent press of the counter’s sharp edge against her thighs, it’s comforting. She, at least, knows this version of herself.

--- 

In the warm sunset of her afterglow, she leans back against his chest in the shower and makes hopeful promises, mumbled maybe’s half drowned out by the pounding water against the tiles. She can feel his smile against her neck and ignores the thrum of anxiety in her guts. He starts to purr promises in her ear, so much more determined than her own, and Addison tries to picture herself in them. “Stay tonight,” she murmurs, honest despite the lack of conviction in her earlier words. “Stay with me.” Maybe forever, but she isn’t sure she can manage that long. Not when it feels both so comfortable and so wrong, when it’s all she wanted and not what she wants.

Chapter Text

In the morning, Addison goes through the motions of her routine quietly, painfully aware of the plastic surgeon comfortably in her bed, in her life. She dresses in her favorite skirt and a silky little black blouse, as if the couture will make her skin feel familiar again. She completes the costume with a few coats of a deep wine-red lipstick and slips off to her early morning rounds.

She nearly jumps out of her skin when Meredith finds her by the nurse’s station and presses her hand against her back. A part of her rejoices at the contact, at the touch of delicate fingers rather than a heavy palm. She smiles despite herself and accepts the vanilla latte the younger woman offers.

“You okay?” Meredith is smiling, but her eyes are edged with worry. She doesn’t take her hand away, almost gripping at the fabric of her white coat when Addison takes a half step. “Addison…”

There are too many people around for Addison to let her smile slip, so instead she takes a sip of the coffee and nods. “I’m okay. Thank you, for yesterday. I ah… I’m sorry, that you saw me like that.”

“I’m not,” Meredith shakes her head, relinquishing her grip on her coat. “Sorry. That’s what friends are for, right?”

“Right.” Her smile is honest, even if she could laugh at the simplicity belied in that statement. As if she and Meredith could ever be simple. She hums around another sip of her coffee, letting her eyes fall shut for a moment. “I really am okay, Grey,” her smile is almost genuine. Addison still feels displaced, unmoored. In truth, she’s felt it since long before her trip to Los Angeles. Perhaps that feeling was what drove her to Naomi in the first place. Motherhood is an identity she understands. She’d thought that she could start a new chapter of her life defined by a new role and settle in, build a home in that reality. Instead, she’s caught between her past with Mark and a phantom future she dares not allow herself to imagine.

She almost chokes on her coffee when Meredith leans in close across her body. She’s a soft press of curves so different from Mark, so delicate, and Addison recoils only so she won’t lean into that softness. “I, ah,” she swallows, worries she’s flushed as red as her hair. She lifts her coffee in the direction of the lifts. “I should check on my patients.”

“Mine too,” Meredith’s smile is so warm she almost glows with it. “All week.” The younger woman seems oddly delighted to be stuck on her least favored specialty. Addison dare not think it might be because of her.

She manages a smile and leads them to the lift. “Wonderful. It’s a pretty light day today though, so I might have you in the Pit after lunch…” She prays to a god she doesn’t believe in (who she’s damn sure isn’t smiling on her now) that the day stays quiet, if only so she has a reason to get Meredith out of her sight. It feels wrong to be so close to her after her night with Mark, although she knows logically, she has no reason for the guilt, it still eats at her.

Of course, on cue, Mark joins them in the elevator on the next floor. His grin is bright as he looks at Meredith, turning hungry when he locks eyes with Addison. “Good morning, ladies,” he winks, stepping into the space painfully close to Addie. She can feel the heat of him at her side, as clearly as if he was still pressed against her. “Again.” he murmurs it in her ear, and she sincerely hopes Meredith isn’t listening.

It isn’t that she’s ashamed of Mark, or of sleeping with Mark. She wants him, truly. Her hand finds his at her side and she toys with his fingers, a slow smirk on her lips. “You’ve almost missed the morning, Dr. Sloan. Some of us have busy days.”

“Too busy to meet me in an on-call room later?” He hums, just a whisper. It sends a shiver down her spine, and she casts a furtive glance to her intern, who is diligently reading a chart Addison is certain she’s been over five times already.

“Mark…”

He links their fingers and tugs gently, so she stumbles back into the warmth of his chest. “Come on, Red.”

“We’ll see.” She hums, although she doesn’t move away.

This, she knows how to do. She doesn’t know what to make of the fact that the contact feels not dissimilar to the rush she felt when Meredith leaned into her that morning. She isn’t gay. She loves men, she always has. The pull she feels towards Meredith is transference, not attraction. They were with the same man, naturally she’s been curious about what Derek saw in Meredith. She was attracted to him, and he was attracted to Meredith, and that… made her attracted to Meredith. She clearly didn’t pay enough attention in psych, but she thinks that’s the way it works, generally speaking.

All that matters is now she’s attracted to Mark, and that’s that. 

---

Meredith isn’t blind. She’s well aware of the shift in the dynamic between Sloan and Montgomery. Over the week, Addison suspiciously vanishes between a few surgeries, and Mer doesn’t find her in their usual haunts. She knows better than to check the redhead’s office when the blinds are drawn, or the on-call room on 3. She doesn’t need to see her suspicions confirmed.

In those breaks she lingers in the hall, and that’s where Cristina finds her, propped up on a gurney with a stack of neonatal charts to update.

“Where’s your McMommy?” Despite Meredith’s best efforts, Cristina has grown rather attached to the nickname. “Left you with all her charts I see. Don’t you usually do those in her office?”

“Office is occupied. Occupado.” She huffs, signing the bottom of the chart and putting it in the completed stack. She doesn’t pick up another chart, just leans her head back against the wall and sighs. “I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to go in there again…” she shudders.

Cristina climbs up next to her, shoving the incomplete pile to the end of the bed. “It’s true then? Montgomery and Sloan are back together? I thought the Bet thing didn’t work out.”

She shrugs. “It didn’t. I think it’s my fault, actually….” She pauses, eyes slipping shut as she thinks of her plea to Mark the night before, the worry thick in her throat. She’d done the right thing, but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept the outcome. She should have expected it, but she didn’t.

She saw the way Addison looked at her, felt the way she let herself sag into her for comfort, and allowed herself to hope for more.

She should have known better. But she doesn’t regret it. Addison is hurting, badly, and if Mark helps her then… Meredith can’t be upset.

“Like, I got them back together.”

“Oh, this I have to know. I thought you…” she trails off, but Meredith knows what she means. She’s had far too many drunken conversations that all too often led to her gushing about Addison. Addison and her perfect sutures, Addison and her pretty hair, Addison and how soft she is with the babies, Addison’s legs in that one black skirt…. and on and on. Cristina knows her admiration isn’t innocent.

She frowns and rubs her hand over her scrub-clad thigh, pulling at a loose thread in the cotton. “She was upset. Like… really upset. Shouldn’t-be-left-alone upset. And she didn’t really seem to want to talk to me, or tell me why, so I… I asked Sloan to check on her. He’s known her a long time, so I thought maybe she’d feel more comfortable if he was there, than if I was.”

“And let me guess, McSteamy’s version of comfort includes sex?”

“I guess? I don’t know. It looks like it. Maybe she was upset about the Bet, and he apologized? I really don’t know. We haven’t talked.”

Cristina hums, shifting to slouch low enough on the wall that her legs hang precariously off the side. “I mean, Montgomery doesn’t normally talk much about her life, right? She’s like your… guru or something.” She squeezes the clasps of her claw clip in rhythmic clicks, looking up at the ceiling. “Not that that’s a bad thing. She’s smart. Annoying, but smart.”

“She talks to me sometimes,” Meredith defends, the same way she tried to refute Mark’s accusation that she didn’t know Addison. “It’s just… hard to know what she means, when she does.”

She tries not to mind it; the way Addison speaks sometimes. As if she can only spare a drop of what she wants to say, without delving into the depths.

Maybe she’s worried she’ll drown, if she goes there?

Meredith knows how that feels.

She sighs, restacking the charts to give her hands something to do, to warm them. “This is difficult though. She’s been avoiding me, since she got back from her trip.”

Christina nods, and Meredith can feel her eyes on her even as she studies the faded pink of the binder.

“You could ask her, you know. You never had a problem cornering Shepard, and you have an advantage here. Those heels slow her down.”

She manages a laugh, although the mention of Addison’s heels causes her to blush. She wore the red-bottomed ones today, a deep cobalt, and Meredith personally thought it was quite unfair how good her legs looked in them.

“Yeah, maybe I should…”

She doesn’t.

—

It’s one of those nights where Callie’s last-minute request of “Joes?” heavily implied a please that Addison  first kisses Meredith Grey. She’s supposed to be there with Mark, but he’d texted that he got pulled into a consult in the ER and won’t make it. And she believes him, which is new.

Still, the disappointment blooms like blood from an old scab, the wound almost healed but easily picked open.

It’s not only the similarities to too many nights in her marriage, the very same nights she’d end up on the couch with her legs in Mark’s lap, watching some terrible action movie. She also can’t help but grow wary when he still flirts with every pretty piece of skirt that crosses his path. She’d seen him chatting with one of the temp nurses earlier that afternoon, a pretty little thing that reminded her painfully of Charlene.

It’s enough to ensure she never lets her martini run dry that night.

It’s on her fourth trip back to the bar that she sees Meredith watching her. And, if she’s honest with herself, it isn’t the alcohol that makes her take note of the way the younger woman’s eyes burn as they rake over her figure. Addison finds herself biting her lip, drinking in the obvious want in that gaze. It’s nice to be noticed. Nice to be the center of someone’s attention.

She basks in it, even as she jokes around with Callie. She’s aware of Meredith’s eyes on her, and maybe it has her putting a little more effort into her posture, into the way she stretches her neck as she adjusts her hair. She’s glad she wore a low-cut blouse, white silk that hugs her curves perfectly. So, what if she wore it for Mark? He’s not there to appreciate it and Meredith is more than making up for his absence.

She catches her eyes once more and blushes, almost spilling her drink. “I’ll be right back,” she smiles, resting her hand on Callie’s arm, “Get us another round, will you? I want to hear how you think this saga with Izzie will play out…” she doesn’t really care, but they’re friends, and even if her mind is on another intern entirely, she wants to be there for Callie.

In the bathroom she catches her breath, tries to get some cool air onto her neck to calm the flushed skin. She’s too old to be reacting like this, no matter how many drinks she’s had. With a sigh, she studies herself in the mirror, tilting her head slightly to study the way her makeup has settled over the course of the day. The lighting is harsh, hollowing her out, and Addison is vain enough to know it’s not the most flattering. Still, her lipstick does look pretty in the deeper shadows.

She’s just reapplying it when Meredith walks in, closing the door behind her with a sigh.

“You sound relieved,” Addison hums, rubbing her lips together in the mirror. She smirks as she watches Meredith blush lightly. She’s frighteningly pretty, delicate and soft in the shadows. Addison wishes, absently, that she could see her somewhere more fitting than the halls of the hospital or against the sticker and graffiti covered door of the bathroom.

“Just needed a minute,” she smiles, warm. Her gaze seems to wander, lingering on the red of Addison’s mouth. It has the redhead’s smirk growing. “Christina will not shut up about Mama coming into town and ruining her life and I just… I’m sick of talking about it.”

“Fair,” Addison nods, “Plus, I’m not sure how good your advice would be after what, six shots of tequila?”

“You noticed that?”

“Wasn’t trying to. Something on your mind?” She drops the smirk, genuine concern seeping into her tone. They don’t drink together too often, but often enough for her to know that Meredith turns to tequila as her own form of therapy.

The younger woman seems to hesitate even as she lets herself sag towards Addison. “It’s ah…” she sighs, heavier, and glances down at the floor. “Just a busy week.”

Addison doesn’t believe her for a second, but she’s not going to push. She’s never pushed, not with Meredith. There’s no point, she learned that early on. Instead, she hums and nods slowly.

“You don’t have to tell me. But whatever it is is safe with me. You saw me ugly cry, Meredith. Not my proudest moment.”

She’s rewarded with a small smile and a quiet laugh. “If that is your ugly cry, that’s just not fair. I get all blotchy and puffy… it’s not pretty.”

“You did say I looked a bit like a raccoon…”

Another laugh. “A very pretty raccoon?”

Addison’s smile is soft, tender. Perhaps a little more vulnerable than she’d like, but over the last few months vulnerability has slowly become a part of her friendship with Meredith. She finds herself blushing lightly as she looks back at the blonde’s hopeful expression.

“That’s very sweet, Mer—“

“I mean it,” she assures her, suddenly determined. “You’re so pretty, Addison. I… I…” she stammers, as if so eager to get the words out of her mouth they topple over one another like dominoes.

“It’s ok.”

Meredith looks almost desperate, her hands balled in frustration and her cheeks flushed high. The air feels heavy, almost humid, making Addison all too aware of how little space is between them. She can see the pulse jumping eagerly in the younger woman’s slender neck.

Perhaps it’s the alcohol, making her foolish and bold. Spurring her onward with liquid courage, vodka-soaked certainty. She closes the space between them, pressing Meredith back against the door, her hands on her hips. The fresh coat of lipstick makes their kiss slightly slick, a bit messy. She’s not tentative, desire making up for experience. It’s the four martinis that make her brave enough to weather Meredith’s initial hesitation, and she’s rewarded with the insistent, eager press of her mouth when she finally moves.

—

She’s always found it funny when people described kisses as electric. It seemed corny, borrowed from a cheap dime store bodice ripper. And yet, the press of Addison’s mouth sent a spark through her, straight down to the tips of her toes.

Meredith groans into the sensation, her answering kiss open mouthed and almost sloppy, her hands grasping the supple leather of Addison’s jacket, anchoring the older woman to her. She can’t let go, can’t let her pull away, because she doesn’t want this moment to end. She needs this to be real.

Real is the feeling of Addison’s teeth sinking into her lower lip, the shiver that runs down her spine. Real is the press of the wood of the door against her back as the redhead steps impossibly closer, her thigh pressing between Meredith’s legs. Real is the smooth skin of her back under her fingertips as she slips her hand below the jacket, the feeling of the goosebumps she put there. 

“Addison…” she almost whines and were she in a clearer mind she might wince at how desperate she sounds, but as it is she’s drunk on cheap tequila and the taste of expensive lipstick. She whines again when Addison pulls back. Meredith is almost scared to look at her, afraid she’ll see regret or confusion—never mind that Addison kissed her first.

“Look at me,” a murmur, almost too quiet, “Meredith…” Her tone is wanting, but soft. There’s an edge of vulnerability, of fear, that makes Meredith forget all about her worries. She won’t have Addison thinking she’s anything less than the exquisite being she is.

She smiles, pressing a quick, toothy kiss to her pout. “All I do is look at you, Addie. Have you not noticed? I can’t help it…” she’s blushing now, but the grin that blooms across her pretty mouth is worth it.

“You’re ridiculous.”

“I am not. I’m not lying—I look at you all the time. It’s distracting, really. I’m supposed to be learning and all I can think about is how well those skirts fit you, or how pretty your eyes look when you’re focused in surgery, or—Christ—don’t get me started on the glasses…”

Addison is giggling now, shaking her head even as she smooths her fingers over the exposed skin of Meredith’s back, tracing the waistband of her jeans. “Well, we can’t have that. I hate to think I’m hindering your learning, Dr. Grey… should I take you off my service?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she grins, relishing in the answering laugh. Addison is always pretty, but there’s something special in her honest smile, the one Meredith so rarely sees.

“Oh? This is a teaching hospital; I have a responsibility—“

She kisses her, hard, her hands shifting to grip her hips. “You’d miss me,” it’s a gasp, lost to Addison’s hungry mouth. She doesn’t answer but the intensity of her kiss says enough. Meredith chases the hint of olive brine on her tongue. Every so often she feels the graze of her teeth, the promise of something more, a tease. She wants it. She wants everything Addison has to give.

It’s not long before her hands are under the silk of her blouse, tracing graceful curves and the firm plane of her abdomen. She revels in the small, choked little moan Addie gives when she first cups the lace of her bra. The lace feels soft, molded perfectly to the warm flesh that fills her hand. Even when she gives a cheeky squeeze, there’s no rasp into her palm. So, she works a bit harder, bringing her thumb to create friction against Addison’s nipple.

“Oh! That…” The reward for her effort, a breathy little moan of a plea that goes straight to Meredith’s core. Addison is gloriously response, bending like a bow under her hands. 

Meredith can only grind down on her thigh and groan into the insistent, almost aggressive kiss. She presses down harder against the firm length of her leg, getting the seam of her jeans just right to bring her a little relief. Addison isn’t making it easy, not with the way her blunt nails rake over her sides, or her lips now charting a course over her neck. And those, teeth… fuck.

—

Addison has no idea what she’s doing, and not enough sense left to care. Inertia and desire propel her on, far past her insecurities. She has no idea how to do this with a woman, no idea what comes next. With a man… well, she’d probably already be up on the bathroom counter by now, legs wrapped around narrow hips.


She did, briefly, give a drunken thought to lifting Meredith onto the counter (she’s pretty sure she could), but she hadn’t the faintest idea what to do once she had her there.

Instead, she sinks into her desire, lets herself be led. She traces the straining line of a tendon in Meredith’s neck, nips at her pulse point and grins at the answering moan. She does it again, lower, and again, longer at the sensitive skin just above her collarbone. She only stops when Meredith shoves her back.

The blond is a vision, hair a wreck and wearing smears of her lipstick, eyes ablaze. She could get drunk on the sight alone. She leans back, seeking her mouth, but Meredith stops her.

“You’re a tease,” she laughs, delicate fingers going to her jacket. She’s gentle with it, hooking it over the hook rather than tossing it to the floor like Addison expected her to. She’s grown too used to Mark’s carelessness. “With those teeth. Jesus, Addie...” she shakes her head, hands going to the buttons of her silk blouse. Addison already feels stripped bare. Meredith is slow, and soft, her smile tender and her kisses gentling with each inch of skin exposed.

She follows, letting herself be taught, in this instance.

She doesn’t end up on the counter, but she does end up crying out her release into Meredith’s shoulder, muffling her moans against sweaty, lavender scented skin as the woman crooks her fingers just so.

Addison doesn’t pull back right away, lingering in the aftershocks. Meredith strokes her though and then pulls back, only when Addison’s hold has loosened. She sucks off her fingers with a filthy grin and Addison can feel herself blush as red as her hair.

“That was hot,” Meredith is still grinning. “You, you’re hot. Fuck, Addison, that little sound you make…”

She cuts her off with a shake of her head, holding her hand up. “Shh! Oh my god…” she’s smiling though, like a giddy fool. Her trousers are still undone, and she’s still almost cuddled up to Meredith.

Addison doesn’t step away. Instead, she loops her arms around Meredith and kisses her cheek, despite the violent blush in her own. “You can’t say things like that, Meredith. My god.”

“Oh, don’t turn into a prude on me now,” the blond giggles, drawing her close. “You still owe me one.”

Addison’s blush, somehow, grows deeper.

The bathroom is surprisingly quiet, but the music outside has gotten louder as the night wore on. The song is too muffled to decipher, but she can hear the melody. Addison tucks her face into Meredith’s hair and hums along, until the pair start to sway for a minute. She doesn’t want to leave this moment. She’s wanted this for too long, feared it for just as long, and once they leave this stuffy (rather disgusting) little room, she’s not sure what becomes of this.

So, they sway, until someone pounds on the door.

“Guess that’s our cue,” Meredith whispers. She kisses Addison’s jaw before reaching down to do the zip and find the buttons of her blouse. Addison lets her, even though she could do it faster herself. When the pounding starts again, she can’t help the laugh that leaves her. Maybe it’s the alcohol, or the ridiculousness of the whole setting, but soon she’s giggling, and Meredith is right there with her.

“Wait, wait!” she laughs, pulling her back so she can try her best to clean the lipstick off the younger woman’s skin and tame her hair. “You look a wreck.”

“And whose fault is that!” It’s gentle, fond. Meredith looks at her with those big blue eyes as Addison combs her fingers through blonde waves and all she wants is to stay, to live in that little infinity.

—

By the time the slip out of the bathroom, whoever was pounding on the door has evidently given up. It leaves them alone in the darkness of the hall, caught in the liminal space before they renter their lives. Addison can see Callie at the table, her martini waiting before her empty seat and a glass of scotch now joining their table. Mark.

“I should get back to Callie,” she murmurs, only half glancing at Meredith. She doesn’t let herself watch the intern rejoin her friends or look for her for the rest of the night. But she presses her fingers to her lips when no one is watching, as if to feel the imprint of her there. She digs her teeth into the faintly swollen flesh of her lower lip, and when Mark kisses her she hopes he doesn’t taste the cheap tequila under her top-shelf gin.

Chapter Text

Picture someone you love. Meredith remembers the bomb technician’s words clearly, just as easily as she recalls the suspiciously cool weight of the homemade explosive in her hand, the way the metal fought the grip of her fingers as she tried to remove it. Then, she’d immediately thought of Derek. She’d seen him so clearly, as if he were standing across the operating table from her, like any other surgery. Then, she’d been so sure she loved him. He’d been the only person that came to mind that day, the only person she’d ever truly associated with the word “love.”

She’d thought she loved him, but can you love someone you barely know? Derek had revealed so much of himself in the months since that fateful day. She might have learned of his flaws sooner, seen the faded, fraying edges of her fairytale, had she paid any attention to the way he treated his wife.

It was a prologue to her own story, an allegory she’d failed to listen to. She’d made Addison out to be the villain, the evil queen determined to keep the damsel from her prince. Had she listened, had she studied the fable closely, she wouldn’t have been blindsided after her drowning. She’d have known, well before that day, that Derek was just a man. A flawed, stubborn man, who couldn’t see past the fairytale he wanted with her.

And the evil queen? Taken out of the twisted narrative they’d made together, Addison was so much more than just a woman.

Since that day in her hospital room, it had seemed like Addison might be someone worthy of her love. That the redhead might, somehow, love her back. After all, she took care of her like she loved her. She was there for her, unconditionally, even when Meredith was at her wits end or at the bottom of bottle of Jose Cuervo. She didn’t ask, she didn’t push, she accepted the woman that she was, flaws and all.

And Meredith, how could she help but love her for it?

She’d done it again, hadn’t she? She’d fallen for someone she barely knew. Had Dylan asked her today, to picture someone she loved, it would have been Addie standing across that table from her, coaching her through it. Meredith knew exactly how she would sound, the gentle but firm way the redhead doled out hard truths. The undercurrent of strength in her voice. The feeling of her arms around her when she was done. She knew Addison would have taken her to get cleaned up herself, that she wouldn’t have left her side.

But she didn’t know all that made the woman that way. She knew far less about Addison than she had about Derek, even. The sad fact was much of what she knew about Addison came from Derek. She knew only the outlines of her story, the myths her bitter ex-husband saw fit to sow.

Perhaps, if she knew her better, she’d understand how she could leave her after their moment in the bathroom. How she could leave her side so easily and slip back into Mark Sloan’s arms as if there were nowhere else for her to be.

But she didn’t. She didn’t understand.

She’s not sure she wants to. She’s not sure she can lose the person Addison has become to her, even to know who she truly is.

—

“You have to go to work, Mer.” Christina sighs, staring blank eyed at the pile of blankets concealing her best friend. “Seriously. Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Is this like the bomb incident? Do you feel like you’re going to die again?” there’s worry in her question, because they’ve all become aware of just how close to dying Meredith can indeed come, too many times, too soon.

As much as she might want to die, she doesn’t feel like today is the day.

“No.”

She snuggles deeper into the nest of blankets she’s carefully constructed and groans. She doesn’t really want to die, but she certainly doesn’t want to leave the bed. Least of all to go to the hospital where she’ll have to spend the day on the heels of a certain redhead. When she’d taken the weeklong assignment to Neonatal, she’d been thrilled. But that was before she knew how sweet Addison’s mouth tasted, before she felt her hands blaze over her skin, and before she watched Addison slip into Marks arms as if she didn’t still have the faint impressing of Meredith’s teeth on her lips.

Her cocoon is disturbed when Cristina yanks the fuzzy blanket (a poor facsimile of Addison’s alpaca throw) off the bed and disturbs the foundation. Meredith finds herself on her back with the Asian woman frowning down at her.

“Are you gonna tell me what’s wrong?”

“No.”

There’s a long, uncomfortable silence until Cristina quietly sits on the end of the bed. “Do you… do you have a feeling?”

She has lots of feelings. So many that it feels like a fog in her mind, so dense she can’t see through it. “No.” It’s not trepidation, it’s heartbreak. “Not like that. I just… I can’t. I can’t… see her.”

“Oh.” Cristina seems at a loss for words, even if there’s no confusion on her face. She, of course, knows there’s only one woman Meredith could be speaking of. Lately, Addison has been all Meredith can talk about. With a brief glance at the clock, she sits down beside the blond and worries with the edge of the padded quilt. “Are you gonna tell me what happened? Yesterday you were over the moon to spend time with Satan. Like, literally lapping at her heels.” It was mildly disturbing, especially given Meredith didn’t even like neonatal or OBGYN. Cristina couldn’t see another reason why she’d be so excited to be trapped in the land of pink and squishy.

Meredith is slow to sit up, but eventually she folds in on herself, crossed at the ankles with her arms around her knees. She looks impossibly small, and very lost. Disturbingly like she found herself somewhere she doesn’t know how to be.

“You can’t react,” she mumbles finally, “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know how to talk about it. So, promise me, no reaction, okay?”

“No reaction.” Cristina nods, finding her eyes.

There’s more of that stifled silence, heavy over them, before Meredith finally opens her mouth. “I sorta… kinda… slept with Addison. Or got her off? Got us off? I don’t know what to call it, exactly. We hooked up.”

It takes every ounce of Cristina’s willpower not to react. She blinks owlishly, biting the inside of her lip to keep from gasping. Perhaps she should have seen this coming, given the way Meredith talks about the attending. But she’d pegged Addison Forbes Montgomery as very firmly straight. Or at least, as the kind of woman whose “experimental” days were long behind her.

“Cristina?” Concern laces Meredith’s tone.

She frowns. “You— wait. Does “no reaction” include questions? Can I ask questions?” God, she hopes so. If she has to sit on this until Meredith is ready to talk, they’ll have to admit her, she’ll explode. Blood and guts everywhere.

“Ah… I mean I really don’t want to talk about it…”

“I know, I know. But when? Where? Was she here?” Those are the basics. She needs something, or else her mind is going to run wild. Karev would be jealous, honestly, with the shit she’s come up with.

Meredith sighs and rests her head on her knees, her hair hiding her face. Her words are almost lost, muffled. “Joe’s. The bathroom at Joe’s. Last night… when you went to get more shots and I said—“

“You said you’d gotten sick. So, we left.” She wasn’t the drunk, frankly Meredith wasn’t either. She’d found it odd Mer hadn’t been able to hold her liquor but chalked it up to a bad hoagie at lunch. It had been abrupt though, she’d barely landed at their table before she was taking off again, hastening to the door. She remembers because she almost spilled Torres’ drink when she’d hurried past… “Oh shit. Shit. Wait…”

“She was there with Sloan, Cristina. She was there with Sloan, and she kissed me in the bathroom and I… I don’t know what the fuck that means. But it looks like I’m the other woman, again.”

—

“Grey,” Bailey finds her in the locker room, staring at a packet of the overpriced chocolate chip cookies Addison has discovered she likes and brings her most Monday’s. These ones are two days old, but that day feels like an eternity ago. “Grey!” The smaller woman doesn’t wait for her to look up, taking her jolt as a sign she’s listening. “You’re with Sloan today.”

Sloan. It’s less of a blow than she expected. She doesn’t fault Mark in this. Her fellow dirty mistress, she knows how much he loves Addison. Which only makes her feel dirtier, filthy with the weight of what she’s done. As if her hands and stained red, marked with her sins.

“I’m on neonatal this week.” she supplies, slow-tongued and wide eyed.

“Not anymore.” Bailey shrugs, her nonchalance daring Meredith to argue just a bit more. “Sloan asked for you. He has a partial facial reconstruction for Apert syndrome today and asked for an intern, Montgomery isn’t on the board, so there you go. You should be thanking me!”

“Oh.”

“Grey!”

She startles again, “Right, sorry, thank you Dr. Bailey.”

The thing is, she would have actually liked to spend her day mindlessly suturing and focused on the miniature dramas unfolding in the PIT. At least in the chaos, she’d be distracted from the mess she’s made of her own life. She wouldn’t have to think about Addison, about last night, about the dissolution of her fairytale. She has a feeling with Sloan that’s all she’ll be able to think about.

Meredith doesn’t blame him. She can’t, not when she asked him to check on Addison that night. And Addison is… she’s not the kind of woman you get over. She’s learning that now. If asked, she’d pack up her life and fly across the country for the mere chance, however small, that Addison would want her, too. The prospect is tantalizing, a not-too distant possibility just out of reach. Mark would give Addison anything to close that distance, and Meredith has found herself there with him. Yearning.

She’d told him there Derek wasn’t the kind of guy a woman gives up easily, and she meant it. But Addison simply isn’t something she can imagine giving up at all.

“She’s pretty,” her patient, Caleb, is a sickeningly adorable eleven-year-old boy, far too wise for his age. He reminds her of the boy in Love Actually, which she’d sat through with Izzie a few weeks back, precocious and perceptive, he’s watching her as she watches Addison bump into Mark on the bridge.

“Who?” As if she doesn’t know, as if her eyes haven’t been tracking her from the moment, she heard the telltale click of her heels.

It’s clear from Caleb’s scoff that he’s not fooled.

“You’re staring.” He stage-whispered. The object of their shared attention conveniently steps to give them an even better view.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She grumbles, turning Caleb’s chair back towards the entrance to the skybridge they’d come through. I’s not until they’re waiting in front of the alternate set of lifts that she relents. “Alright, fine. Yes, I was staring.”

Caleb grins, cheeky, eyes bright with mischief that makes him look younger. Like a Victorian imagining of Peter Pan. “Because she’s pretty?”

She huffs out a laugh, relaxing once they’re ensconced in the relative privacy of the elevator. “Sort of.” There’s no way to tell this kid the real reason why she’s staring—that seeing Mark put his hand on the slender dip of Addison’s waist so casually makes her blood boil with jealously, that it pains her to see Addison lean into that touch. That her hands ache to have that right. And that, all the while, she can feel the phantom memory of gentle curves under her palms, a reminder of her misdeeds.

And that she doesn’t regret them, even if she would give anything to change the circumstances.

“You like her.” It’s not a question. It’s spoken like a secret, not a revelation.

She sighs, watching the doors. She can’t lie to a sick kid, a kid who’s having major surgery that night. “It doesn’t matter if I do, honestly. She’s… it’s complicated. She’s with someone else.”

Is she?

—

“I think I might buy a house,” Sloan hums as they wait for Caleb’s final set of scans to come up. He’s smiling, hands on his hips in the way of a man on a mountain top, surveying his land. Proud. Contented. Meredith almost winces at the sight.

She shifts from foot to foot, weighing that statement. A house. Settling down, putting down roots, shedding the life of a bachelor. Mark isn’t a complicated guy; she gets his intent. “Are you still at the hotel?” She asks, politely.

He nods, fingers tapping against the defined muscle of his thigh. “Addison too. Just… I mean it’s a bit soon. But I need to show her I’m… that I’m serious. The kind of guy who hosts barbecues and all that shit, you know?”

“Are you?” Her lips quirk in a near grin. “That kind of guy? Really?”

He pouts, it’s very pretty. “I could be. Don’t look at me like that, I could be.”

“Sure,” she smiles, ignoring the burning in her chest. “But are you sure Addison wants that?”

In light of her recent actions, Meredith has to question what the hell the redhead wants. Or if she even knows. Lately, ever since her trip to LA, she seems untethered. Maybe she always was, and Meredith was just too self-absorbed to notice.

Marks arms cross his chest, tense enough that the line of his bicep becomes pronounced. “Addison wants the whole thing. The family bit. And I already messed that up once, I’m not doing it again.”

Caleb’s scans come up before she can ask about before, leaving one more mystery in her understanding of the other woman. Of this, of those months in New York, she knows painfully little. There was a baby, once, she’s gathered. And then there wasn’t.

“Queen Anne is nice,” she tells Mark as they walk to brief Caleb’s parents before the surgery, “for a house. good schools, safe. Not too far of a commute.”

Maybe this will make up for it. Maybe if she can help ensure that she doesn’t ruin their chance at happiness, she won’t be the homewrecker again.

—

“Alright, enough.” Callie sighs, dropping unceremoniously onto the open chair at the small corner table Addison has chosen. Slightly out of sight where she thought she could hide. Evidently not.

With all the forced nonchalance of her upbringing,  the redhead merely hums  and sips her latte, her scone scarcely picked at. “Excuse me?”

“Whatever this is,” Callie gestures to her, as if illustrating some apparent aura. “You’ve got to stop. It’s been two days of this. WASP-y-ness. What’s up?”

Bizzy would be horrified that anyone could discern anything was off in her life so readily. Then again, Addison doesn’t think her mother has ever let anyone see behind the aura she projects, the false calm. She’s sure that turbulent waters lie below that placid surface, but she’s never been given a glimpse. Bizzy wouldn’t fault her recent behavior but rather everything that preceded it—the fact that she’d ever let Callie see her. The younger woman clearly knows her too well to believe the act. “Callie…” and yet she protests anyway. The act is comfortable, familiar. It reminds her of long nights at Connecticut soirees, listening to the banal thoughts of her father’s colleagues and pretending she couldn’t see them eyeing her chest. The performance is so well rehearsed its routine, social muscle memory.

This, at least, she knows how to do.

“Two days. You haven’t been on the board; I’ve barely seen you. And don’t tell me you’re busy—that might have worked on Mark, but I have intel, Montgomery, and I know it’s been quiet in OB.”

Right. The interns talk to each other, incessantly. And Callie would know from… Addison blinks, slow. If Meredith told O’Malley, or Stevens… No. Callie wouldn’t be concerned if she knew, she’d be angry. Disappointed. As she should be.

She sighs and sets her coffee down, raking her fingers through her hair. She’d blown it out that morning in an attempt to feel more put together. “I did something terrible, Callie, alright? I did something terrible, and I moved my surgeries because I can’t think about anything else, and I can’t operate like that. When I’m not thinking about the patient I’m meant to help.” Her voice is low, quiet, the fear pulling like a noose around her neck choking off her words.

“Okay….” Callie’s eyes are narrowed with concern, her words slow. “What did you do that was so terrible?”

Addison bites her lip and sinks into her seat, her posture breaking as if the iron she willed into her spine over the last 48 hours crumbled away. For a moment she looks up, searching the ceiling of the atrium, because the concern in Callie’s eyes is too much. She doesn’t deserve it. Moreover, she can’t watch disappointment overtake it.

Her voice comes out like a whisper in confessional. “I cheated on Mark. I’m a cheater.”

Three strikes and you’re out, right?

She can’t bring herself to look back at Callie, so she speaks to the space between them. Once she’s started it’s hard to stop. “All my life, I was adamant I wouldn’t be like my father. Like my brother. A cheater. I watched my father cheat on my mother with too many women to count. My nannies, my tutors, hostesses at the harbor… it didn’t matter. And I vowed to myself that would never be me. Because I knew how much those lies hurt people, and I knew that that wasn’t love. That wasn’t what I wanted my life to look like. But here I am, just like them. I cheated on Derek, and now I’ve cheated on Mark and I… I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Callie. I’m not this person!” She presses her lips together to stop the flow of words, finally finding the other woman’s eyes. The confusion that greets her is far better than the disdain she expected.

“Hey,” Callie takes her hand, soothing the tight fist she’s made of it in her lap. “First of all, you cheated, but that doesn’t make you a cheater. It doesn’t define you, and it certainly doesn’t make you your father. And I don’t think it’s fair to compare yourself to them. Hell, I don’t think you get around like that. How many men have even seen you naked, like 6?”

“11,” Addison huffs, her laugh strained and watery. “I med Derek in med-school, remember. I had some fun in my youth…”

“Alright, alright. Montgomery got around,” Callie smiles lopsidedly, shaking her head. “Anyway. Not the point. The point is, it doesn’t sound to me like you did this carelessly. So, what… what happened?”

She has to tell her, doesn’t she? Absolution can’t be purchased with half-truths. Besides, it isn’t the cheating that’s eating her up inside, it’s what that night means about her. 

“I ah… It was Meredith. I… I kissed Meredith, two nights ago. More than kissed, actually. I… well she…” she shakes her head. It feels wrong to give her the details, somehow.

Callie hasn’t let go of her hand, but she’s gone still, her eyes wide. “Wow. Wow! Ok, I was not expecting that.”

“Me either,” Addison mutters, shaking her head. She manages a tight smile. “And now I don’t know what to do.”

“It might not count,” Callie hums after a pause, “Since it was a woman. Mark might not mind, you know? He’d probably find it hot…”

She’s probably right. But something in Addison rails at the thought of Mark delighting in her tryst with Meredith. Something deeper protests the thought of it being reduced to a mere tryst at all.

—

Sloan is unusually quiet in the OR, studying the scans of Caleb’s skull and jaw once more. Meredith doesn’t think she’s ever seen him look quite so serious.

“Is everything okay,” she asks quietly from his left. She’s never really bene sure where they stood, if Sloan considered them friends. Even when she was his best friend’s girlfriend, she was unsure. And now that she’s his girlfriend’s close friend, she’s even less sure. He might bite her head off. “Did you notice something on the scans?”

Sloan hums, his eyes still on the image of the boy’s jawbone. “You want to know one of the reasons I chose plastics, Grey? There are few surprises. I know what I am getting into, and most importantly, what it’s going to look like when I’m done. No surprises. No discoveries to be made once I’m in there.”

She can’t help but think that he has a lot to discover. Perhaps not with Caleb’s surgery, but in his own relationship. Addison seems to lack the certainty Sloan craves.

“With this kid, the level of fusion, I don’t know. I won’t know until we’re in there what I can do.”

“Right,” Meredith nods, “But at least, his airway will be better, right? With the Apert Syndrome, his deformity will crush his airway… so as long as you clear that, anything else is extra.”

Sloan sighs. “That’s one way to look at it. But I’m the best, Grey. I’m not putting this kid through major surgery without improving his life, not just his breathing.”

The problem, she realizes, is that Sloan isn’t a bad guy. She did a very bad thing to a not so bad guy, and someday the other shoe is going to drop. Someday he’s going to get his surprise.

“Scalpel,” Sloan makes the first incision behind Caleb’s left ear. “I’m not afraid to find out, Grey. Surgeons crave certainty. Knowing what the outcome is, good or bad.”

Thankfully, he doesn’t notice her eyes widen.

Certainty. She needs to know, for certain, what last night was to Addison. She can’t be afraid to find out the outcome, good or bad.

—-

It’s fitting that by the time Addison emerges from the hospital it’s raining. Not truly raining, not the way people tend to imagine when they think of rain. Ironically, for all its lore, Seattle doesn’t rain hard. It mists, drizzles, moisture clouds the air and the chill of it settles in your bones, but it rarely pours. Meredith almost wishes for the proper downpours she experienced in Boston, the onslaught of a Nor’easter. The deluge would fit her mood.

Despite lack of dramatic rainfall, the redhead still has to sidestep shallow puddles as she makes her way closer. Meredith watches, observing the careful way Addison weaves through the mire to preserve shoes that cost something close to an intern’s monthly salary. She hates that, how careful she is. Two steps forward, one step back. Too cautious to the approach the problem head on, to face the consequences. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.

Alright, so it was never about the shoes.

“Addison,” she’s close enough now that Meredith can see the surprise on her face despite the low light from the lamps. “Can we talk?” There’s a please tucked in to the end of her words, like the silent “t” she always forgot in her French classes. Silent, but significant.

Both hands grip the handle of her bag, patent leather shiny with gathering droplets. Meredith recognizes that grip, the fingers of her right hand clamping down on her left.

“It’s been a long day Meredith,” she sighs, finally, “For both of us.”

“I know,” she stands, wishing she were eye level. “My shift ended two hours ago.”

Alarm, and perhaps regret, cross the older woman’s features. “You’ve been out here for two hours?”

“No. Your last surgery ended an hour ago. I’ve been out here about half an hour.”

She’d told herself that after Derek she wouldn’t do this, she wouldn’t chase after someone who couldn’t decide if she was worth pursuing. She wouldn’t prove herself to someone again. She wouldn’t beg. That was why she’d gone out with Finn—because he asked. He’d wanted her, and he’d been obvious about it. No wife. No ultimatums. Finn had been easy, but she hadn’t loved him. She hadn’t loved Derek either, she’d recently realized. She’d loved the idea of him, of settling down, of someone wanting to have a proper relationship with her.

In their time together, he’d made her heart race and her head spin. But he’d never grounded her the way Addison so often did. She wanted to settle with Derek, but with Addison she felt settled, as if she didn’t need to run so fast anymore. She could simply be.

And she couldn’t lose that.

So, there she was, out in the rain. Desperate, again. Only this time, she didn’t know what she was fighting against.

Addison hasn’t moved. The rain is starting to wreak havoc on her hair, softening the smooth contours of her blowout. There are shiny beads of water on the lapels of her wool coat, silvery in the dim light from the parking lot. The wool coats, Meredith had warned her before, were terribly impractical for Seattle’s predictably damp weather. I have an image to maintain, Addison had insisted with a laugh. Meredith wishes, desperately, that the sentiment wasn’t so painfully true.

“Will you at least drive me home?” She sighs when the silence stretches out uncomfortably long. “I let George and Izzie take my car.”

Silent, Addison relents. She nods and gestures toward the left side of the parking lot, towards the little black Audi she’s been renting. She stays a half step behind, only the faint clicks of her heels against the pavement reassuring Meredith that she’s still there.

In the car, Meredith strips off her damp hoodie and turns on the heat, waiting for Addison to protest. Instead, she reaches into the backseat and grabs a black jumper, offering it with a tight-lipped smile. “It’s mostly clean.”

Mostly, but it carries a hint of Addison’s perfume. The rich amber and vanilla wash over Meredith as she pulls the sweater over her head. Predictably, it’s sinful soft. Softer, even, than Meredith’s preferred blanket. She snuggles into the oversized fabric as Addison settles into the driver’s seat and dries her hair as best she can. Despite the strain between them, she feels comforted.

She folds herself into the seat, slipping off her trainers to rest her feet on the leather, curled up and cocooned in the warmth. Absently, she picks at the too-long sleeve of the sweater, watching. Addison doesn’t look her way, she just breaths a heavy sigh and tucks her hair behind her ears. After a moment she leans her head back against the headrest and stares at the ceiling. Meredith wonders if she’s praying.

“I don’t know how to do this.” Heavy, low, the words fissure between them. An offering, but Meredith isn’t sure if they’re a gift.

“To do what?”

Another sigh, pulled from somewhere deep. Addison sounds pained. “This. This thing with you. How I feel about you.”

Those words spark delight like a match on lightning strike on dry grassland. Just as beautiful and just as deadly. It’s better to know that she’s not alone in this, that Addison feels something for her. But worse, too, because Addison doesn’t seem happy to feel it. She seems aggrieved, if anything, as if that sentiment is a burden too heavy for her to carry. She’s been a burden before. She can’t go through that again.

Silence stretches between them. Their breath fogs up the windows, making the world outside blur as the air in the car grows humid. At some point, Meredith reaches down and flicks on the defroster. She needs to see the outside world, being in their own seems too dangerous. “I don’t know how to do this either, you know.” She mumbles, stealing a glance at the other woman. Her eyes are closed, but she can see the gossamer shimmer of a tear on her cheek. “I’ve never fallen for my ex-boyfriend’s wife before. I—“

“Fallen for?” Addison’s gaze pins her in place, the hope and the fear in it.

She swallows. “I--yeah.”

“Mer…” she turns, their knees brushing together as Addison tucks her long leg underneath her in the seat. She’s pressed up against the steering wheel in a way that can’t be comfortable. “Meredith I’m sorry…”

“Don’t. Why are you making this sound like a bad thing? I like you, Addie. I really, really like you. So much that it shocks me, honestly. And I’m thrilled to know I’m not alone, that this isn’t some one-sided thing I’ve built up in my head. Right?”

The silence is deafening. Meredith can feel her heart pounding in her  ears, feel the jump of her pulse in her neck. She might be tachycardic.

“Right.” Addison whispers finally, tearily. “I just…”

“So why?” Meredith cuts her off, huffing in exasperation. Her voice is too loud for the confined space of the car, too fraught. “Why is this such a bad thing?”

“I’m 39, Meredith. Isn’t that a bit late to discover my sexuality? I was married to a man for almost 12 years! I’ve only ever been with men, only ever been interested in men.” Addison sounds just as exasperated. “And I… I don’t know what it means for me, this. You. Does it mean all of that was a lie? Most of my life the person I know myself to be, it’s all untrue?” She sounds almost frantic, desperate for an answer that Meredith doesn’t have and wouldn’t offer even if she could.

Instead, she takes her hand, unfurling the tight fist until her fingers can nest with Addison’s. “It doesn’t have to mean any of that. This doesn’t have to define who you are, Addie—“

“But it will.” She sounds so broken, so lost. “I want to believe it won’t, but it will. People will see me differently, Meredith. This will become something that defines me, defines us, even though it shouldn’t.”

That thought doesn’t scare Meredith. All her life, she’s been a disappointment, so what’s one more thing? She was the girl with pink hair in high school, who wore all black and sat in the back of the room, more often sketching than taking notes. She matched every perfect exam score with detention, cut the classes she knew she didn’t need to attend to pass, until it got to the point Ellis had to be told. In college she’d smoked so much weed she routinely felt the intricate workings of her nervous system, each nerve ending aflame (she aced anatomy). She’d never been seen as the achiever, as the best in her class or the smartest or the most put together. People always seemed impressed she was still walking, still breathing, and that was enough for them to applaud her.

Addison, she realizes, isn’t like that. Addison is perfect because she had to be. Addison isn’t used to facing disappointment, to being defined by her choices and her mistakes. Meredith might not have any reputation left to lose, but Addison certainly does.  As much as she wants to tell her she’s foolish to let fear get in the way of her own happiness, she truly can’t fault her. Maybe this, them, maybe it wouldn’t bring her happiness. Maybe it wouldn’t be worth it.

“So why kiss me? Why kiss me if you’re so afraid?”

Chapter Text

In medical school, everyone wrote him off. Whether it was his good looks or his attitude, Mark isn’t sure, but he knew everyone was shocked when he placed second highest in their course, right on the heels of one Addison Forbes Montgomery. Derek, much to his befuddlement, finished sixth.

He’s always been like that—running at her heels. Just a step behind, just out of reach. And he pushes and pushes, desperate to close that gap, lunges hand outstretched like a Yankees outfielder… and comes up short. Even now, with Addison beside him on the rumpled sheets of the Archfield, she’s out of reach. He knows her well enough to know she’s not there with him, most of the time. It reminds him painfully of the months after Derek left—the dim days of a New York winter where he had the life he wanted without any of the joy in it.

He hasn’t slept properly since she came back into his life, into his bed. He finds himself watching her sleep, itching to understand the furrow that never seems to leave her brow. It’s pathetic, but he’s memorizing her. Memorizing this version of Addison that’s his, even if borrowed.

The thing about borrowing something is, that eventually you have to give it back.

Mark sighs and sits up in bed, his back to Addison’s sleeping form. They forgot to close the curtains before they slept and outside the skyline of Seattle is glittering. It’s nothing like New York. Here, downtown nights are quiet. The city sleeps. It shames him for being awake, and he misses the fever of a New York City midnight. New York nights understood him, they absolved his sins with their own, drowned out his thoughts with their cacophony. Here, in the stuffy silence, he has to face them. There’s nothing to distract him from the realization that it’s worse to have the pale imitation of the life he wants than to not have it at all.

He’s no fool, despite what his general image belies. It takes a certain awareness to have the way with women he does, after all. He’s perceptive enough to notice the subtleties of their glances, when their attention is on him—and when it’s not. And Addison’s lately has been absent. It seems, often, that while her body might be nestled into his, he can’t grasp her thoughts or her heart. He’s not ashamed to admit he wants to.

There’s just no point in it. He knows the steps on this road, the pavement well-worn under his Italian leather shoes. He walked it eighteen months before, right to the point where he woke up one morning to an empty bed, only the scent of her perfume lingering. This time, he sees the intersection coming.

In pre-dawn light he leaves the hotel, waving briefly at the concierge. The man, thankfully, is well-used to the late-night comings and goings of the hotel’s surgeon’s in residence and thinks nothing of this particular departure. He is, in fact, headed to the hospital. He skips the lift in favor of the stairs, heading up to the surgical floor and (not without some wandering) finding the intern locker room. According to the posted schedule, Dr Grey has fifteen minutes left of her shift. He settles in to wait on the uncomfortable plastic bench, head cradled in his hands.

It’s the best thing for Addie, he reminds himself, as if that might lessen the ache of what he has to do.

—

I don’t know how to do this.

Meredith plays those words over and over, trying to cling to the hope in them. They’re not “I can’t do this.” Addison never said what she would or wouldn’t do, which in the 30 hours since she dropped her off has become much less optimistic and much more annoying. The trouble is, Addison seems intent on not doing anything at all, on living in the in-between where she might have both of them. Where she can keep her reputation, or whatever’s left of it.

It isn’t fair. Meredith keeps coming back to that fact over the course of her 16-hour shift, between sutures and labs and standing in the cue for a non-emergency CT scan. “I have to tell her I can’t let this go on,” she finally sighs, standing against the wall with Joanne, her 83-year-old French patient who seems to understand far more English than she lets on. “I can’t be the other woman; she has to choose.”

A soft, wrinkled hand finds hers and Joanne gives a faint squeeze. “Of course,” her voice is small, soft, but firm. “She does know. She does.” She sounds so certain, and Meredith wants to question it, but she continues before she can. “Perhaps you choose for her.” She doesn’t know what the older woman means, the statement prophetic. Like all good prophecy, it riddles her.

“I don’t know if I can.” Choosing would mean walking away, wouldn’t it? She can’t control what Addison does, and she won’t grovel. There will be no grand speech this time, no desperate pleas. It was embarrassing enough, sitting in the silent Porshe on the way home, her knees tucked under her like a child. Addison’s sweater still lay on the end of her bed. She had half a mind to keep it, like some morbid relic.

Joanne hums, a knowing smile on her lips. “One of you must.” The woman is somewhat senile, so Meredith shrugs off the remark. She wonders how long limbo will last.

The scans, thankfully, are clear, and Meredith drops the older woman off in Geriatrics before finally trudging to the locker room. Fifteen minutes over shift, but considering the last few night shifts, she’ll count it as a victory. Bleary-eyed, she skims right over the man seated on the bench until he grabs her arm and causes her to startle so hard she slams her shin on the bench.

“Shit! What… Dr. Sloan?” Wide-eyed and suddenly awake, she blinks down at the man. Her shin is pulsing, it’s sure to bruise, but it’s nothing compared to the pounding of her heart.

“Grey.” He’s yet to release her arm.

He knows. He has to. There’s no other reason Mark Sloan would be waiting for her in the intern’s locker room, of all places. At 5 in the morning. She swallows thickly, unmoving. For a moment the silence stretches on, perilous.

“Get changed. I’ll buy you a coffee.” His nonchalance seems forced, something clipped in it. As if he’s restraining himself. But she doesn’t argue. Perhaps she should be glad he’s going to spare her the public embarrassment of scolding her in the hospital. He stays though, a silent sentry, as if she might bolt. Maybe she should. Instead, she strips off her scrubs hastily and forgoes a much wanted shower, slipping back on her jeans and hoodie. Scrubs in the bin, she fidgets with the strap of her bag.

“Did you… did you have a place in mind?” A back alley where he might murder her, perhaps?

Grim, he nods and leads her out, across the car park and to a small cafe a few blocks away. The Archfield casts a long shadow over the place, and she wonders if that was intentional or merely convenient.

“Coffee?” He hums, shattering the strained silence.

She’s yet to find her tongue, her mouth cotton wool.

“Grey. Coffee?” Insistent, this time, but not angry. Only grim, his mouth set in a thin line that has Meredith on edge. She only manages a nod before he stalks off to the counter.

The vanilla latte he places in front of her is a familiar order, but not her own. She can almost picture the rich red lipstick staining the rim. “So… you know then?” She breathes, unsteady. Her hands shake around the paper cup. “Did she tell you?”

Mark sighs, running a hand over his hair. He looks unusually haggard, like he hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep. “No. She didn’t.”

Meredith feels her stomach drop. She’s such a fool. “She didn’t?” Her voice is high, tight.

“She didn’t need to,” he sighs. “I’ve known Addie for almost twenty years, Grey. I’ve never found her particularly hard to read, especially when something is bothering her.” He hasn’t touched his coffee, his hands are busy waging a war on tamed curls, loosening the pomade that holds them back. She wants to take them in hers the same way Joanne had earlier that day and steady them. She doubts he’d find her touch comforting. Instead, she grips her own cup so tightly she worries it might fold.

“I’ve seen how she looks at you.”

At that, her head jerks up. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not a fool, Grey,” he sighs, finally sipping his cappuccino. “Every time I’m looking at Addison, she’s looking at you. Doesn’t take a mind reader to guess there’s something there, with you trailing after her all the time… I think I knew, that night you called me. But I wanted to believe her, I wanted to believe she and I could finally have something.”

The heartbreak in his voice twists the guilt in her stomach to an angry knot. Sloan doesn’t deserve this. She knows how it feels to not be the one chosen, to have what you want within your grasp and be forced to let it go.

He’s not looking at her, even when she finally brings herself to take his hand. He doesn’t seem mad, rather defeated. As if he’d accepted his fate before he met her in that locker room. “I knew and I still let myself hope, so maybe I am a fool…”

“You’re not…” she whispers, shaking her head. “I don’t think Addison knows what she wants. Certainly not if she wants me… I think she wants things to work with you, I really do.” God, those words pain her. Glass shards in her throat, in her lungs. She has to pull her hand away.

Mark only frowns. “They won’t. I’ve been down this road with her, and I won’t make that mistake again. I won’t be her placeholder, again.”

Those words aren’t meant for her, she knows, the anger in them direct at the woman invisible in the space between them. Her presence is heavy. Meredith catches a whiff of vanilla and amber and wonders if it’s merely her imagination. Or perhaps Mark smells like her. The thought has her stomach in a knot.

Swallowing thickly, she shakes her head. “That’s not… that’s not what’s going on… we…”

She can’t define what they are, or what they are or are not doing. She thinks of the heat of Addison’s mouth in Joes bathroom, of the strained sound of her sobs in the car.

Mark looks mournful, his mouth a grim line. Determined. There’s a finality to his expression she envies. “Alright,” he sighs, scrubbing his hand over his face and glancing skyward. She wonders if Mark Sloan ever prayed. He doesn’t seem the type. “Here’s how I see it— Addison wants to be with you, Grey. She’s probably wanted to be with you for a while. And that terrifies her. Connecticut princess she is, she’s a bit stuck in her ways, yeah? Me, that’s a scandal she’s already had to swallow.” His lips quirk up in a strange parody of a smirk. “But you…”

Meredith frowns. “She told me she “doesn’t know how to do this.””

“Of course she did.” He glances off again, grim once more.

Her coffee has grown cold, but she sips it anyway, eager for something to do. Something to occupy her mouth so she won’t say something foolish.

“You know that saying, if you love someone, let them go?” Sloan murmurs finally, tapping his empty cup on the table.

Meredith blinks, nodding slowly. She wants to ask if he means for her to let go, but she can’t manage the words. Before she can speak, Sloan is shrugging on his leather jacket and leaving the cafe.

— -

He’s partway through dressing a burn victim’s chest in Trauma 1 when he sees them together. It’s funny, now that he knows, it’s somehow infuriatingly obvious. The subtle touches, the way Addison leans slightly too close to Meredith, the way the younger woman’s eyes light up at each smile. He noticed, of course. Details are his craft, after all.

All the same, suspecting and knowing are different. He understands now, why Derek had to leave New York. Because seeing them together burns somewhere deep in his ribs, far worse than any side stitch he’s ever felt. It’s morbid, but he wonders if his patient feels the same, a fire still burning, trapped in skin and sinew. Perhaps he’ll leave too. Only, he won’t. He loves her enough to let her go, and too much to abandon her.

He nearly creases the saturated dressing he’s laying, too focused on Addison’s hand coming to rest at the small of Meredith’s back.

Yesterday he’d left Meredith with every intention to go home to Addison and break it off. Only, when he’d walked in the door to her steamy from the shower, he’d promptly abandoned that plan in favor of chasing water droplets down her chest. His mark blooms darkly under the blue blouse she wore today, a brand, a claim.

A fool’s last attempt to lie to himself.

Tonight, he’d do it tonight. They’d walk back, pick up Thai from the little snappy dragon place Addison favored, and he’d set her free before they moved from the spring rolls to the Pad Thai. He closes his eyes for a moment, his jaw clenching at the image. He grinds so hard he swears he feels a molar crack.

“Something wrong, Dr. Sloan?” O’Malley’s voice cuts into his thoughts. The intern hovers just across, brows drawn in confusion or concern. Frankly, Bambi always looks confused and concerned.

He scoffs, glowering. “Does it look like something’s wrong, O’Malley? That’s a perfectly dressed burn. Shouldn’t even leave a significant scar. That’s why I don’t let interns mess with my patients.” Or his girlfriend.

He sets the forceps aside with one last look at the patient and nods, stepping back. “Get her settled in the ICU and administer fluids. Keep an eye on her breathing, it’s a deep burn.” He rips the glove, snapping them off with unnecessary force.

Tonight. He can do this. He has to do this. For his own sake, as well as hers.

—-

Somewhere on one of the small tables in the suite, Pad Thai lies half eaten next to an empty box of spring rolls. Her smile had been too bright, his resolve too weak.

“Do you remember,” Mark smiles, his hand idly trailing through Addison’s hair, the ends of yesterday’s gentle curls wrapping around his fingers, “in medical school, how you used to get up at dawn before our exams, so you’d have time to do your hair?”

He feels her laugh against his side, ribs pressed to his own. “You used to question my sanity.”

“We’d been up all night,” he shakes his head, “we needed any sleep we could get. And there you were…”

“I didn’t want to show up to class disheveled. What would people think?”

His smile is bittersweet nostalgia. “Yeah… you’ve always put so much stock in that. Too much.”

He feels her sharp intake of breath under his hand, ribs expanding quickly. When she speaks there’s too much control in her voice, the gentle tone forced. “And what do you mean by that, Mark? You’re the last person I expected to critique my appearance. You seem to enjoy it well enough…” she pushes herself up on one lithe arm, the gentle cascade of her hair falling short of covering her breast. He can’t help the way his eyes fall to appreciate the view, and he won’t try to.

After all, this may be his last chance.

“You care about what people think,” he murmurs, dragging his gaze back to her face. “To your own detriment. You allow it to hold you back from the things you want, from taking care of yourself. And I see that it costs you…”

He pauses and reaches out, needing the comfort her skin offers. His thumb traces the sharp line of her jaw, the perfect slope of her cheekbone. Even he couldn’t craft something more perfect, no matter how well he wields the scalpel. “Addie,” fuck. Why does it have to be him, losing her again? “You know I love you, Addie. But I can’t… I won’t do this again. I’m not the one you want, Red.”

Once, during a blizzard, back in the days he lived with Addison and Derek, they curled side by side on the couch under two duvets. Derek had been stuck in the hospital and the heat was intermittent. Addison convinced him that the Sound of Music was the perfect film for that day, and he’d begrudgingly enjoyed it. He remembers the scene a little too clearly—the baroness on the terrace, ceding her man to another woman. Somewhere out there is a girl who will never be a nun.

Well, Meredith isn’t exactly a nun, but he understands the gesture for what it is. “Go get your girl, Addison.” He smiles finally, “fuck what they think. So, you don’t know how to do it, who cares? I can teach you the fun part, if you really need help…” he wiggles his brows and finally manages to get a weak laugh out of her.

After a weak smile, Addison sits up and takes his hands. “Mark… I didn’t mean to…”

“I know. I know, Red.”

—

Her things, hastily packed, sit in the freshly appointed suite on the 15th floor of the Fairmont Olympic. Addison herself sits sentry in her car, as she has for the last hour since she saw Meredith pull in.

She’s back in grade school, frozen on the spelling bee stage as she stares out at the crowd, afraid of embarrassing herself even though she knows the letters by heart. She knows what to say. Or at least, that something has to be said.

Someone has to make a move. Mark already has, playing the opening salvo for them before the guest soloist made his gracious exit. The stage is hers.