Every time, he swears it's the last time.
He'll press her against the on call room door literally on fire with a passion that has long since burnt out with Adele, her lips hard and insistent and scorching against his own, and feel so electrically alive the shock of static stuns him when he runs both hands underneath her scrubs. He's a married man, and she a married woman - a mother, too, to the prettiest child he's ever seen - but it's hard to remember ebony skin and ivory silk and platinum gold with Ellis's heat suffocating him. The life he's spent years building with the woman he promised forever gets impossibly hazy, fading into the background in the face of this intoxicating affair.
It's never the last time.
(Not until Adele stops asking when he's coming home, and Ellis starts asking when he's leaving it; not until Adele stops asking for a child, and Ellis starts neglecting her own with an ambivalence that makes him sick; not until Adele stops crying in favour of welding her own armour, and Ellis starts sobbing at him through the cracks he's made in hers.
Not until he remembers that he's scared of fire, and desperately misses the quiet comfort of ashes.)
Every time, he swears it's the last time.
He drinks straight from the bottle, fist curled so tightly around the glass he is sure it must be seconds from splintering. The slow slide of amber liquid down his throat burns in a way that is soothing, yet uneasily reminscent of a heat he is trying so hard to forget. He closes his eyes as the bitterness of the alcohol settles in his stomach like an old friend; snaps them back open when ice blue eyes swim behind his lids, and starts swallowing scotch like it's oxygen at the haunting realisation he has no idea which Grey they belong to.
It's never the last time.
(Not until he hears that Ellis has moved back to Boston, and Adele still waits for him at home just beyond the ferryboats; not until he hears that Ellis won the Harper Avery, and Adele holds him close when he slips with a scalpel and nearly kills a seventeen year old; not until Ellis stops writing letters, and Adele still doesn't write up divorce paper drafts in spite of everything he's done.
Not until he sees the desperation in his wife's eyes, and resolves to fix them both.)
Every time, he swears it's the last time.
He oversteps boundaries like he's learned nothing from the messes he made with her mother - and that worries him more than he's willing to let on, if he's honest - but he just can't help himself. Her eyes are exactly the same as when she was a child, grey and blue and haunted, and he knows undoubtedly he had a hand in colouring them with their perpetual darkness, and there are few things he wants more in the world than to right the wrongs he caused this woman.
So.
He doesn't discipline her according to protocol for dating an attending, or report cut L-VAD wires, or suspend her for authorising clinical trial surgeries he gave orders to discontinue, or fire her when she breaks the restraining order he issued after she battered an already battered woman.
It's never the last time.
(Not until he realises that when Ellis died and Meredith nearly joined her, he was trying to save a life she gave up willingly due to consequences of the last time he crossed the line; not until he hears about the post-it wedding, and aches at the thought that he could have been like Shepherd had he chosen differently; not until she helps him keep his secret from her husband, and nearly loses him in the process.
Not until Adele's brain is saline free and his pleading eyes cost Meredith her job and the family she'd built from the remains of the last one he'd broken.)
Every time, he swears it's the last time.
But he just can't stop making mistakes.