Lexi leaves her house keys on the kitchen counter nine days after Derek's funeral.
She can't stay any longer, and she nervously hides the new ring on her finger from the poster child for post-it widows. No one else knows what to say, either, when they're not apologizing profusely for things that aren't their fault - or sending fruit baskets.
That's why your kitchen still looks like a flower shop, and why Cristina looks jittery and solemn when she comes by that afternoon to drop off Alex's meds, and why she hasn't returned to calling him Evil Spawn yet, since you just brought him home.
She doesn't even complain about stopping by the pharmacy, while you sit glassy eyed watching Sponge Bob and Scooby on the only channel not regularly interrupted by news bulletins, and she just quietly checks on Alex herself rather then have you go upstairs, passed a bedroom strewn with Derek's things.
You get why you can't sleep much, and why your rare dreams – of Sponge Bob riddled with bullets and dripping cheese, of Scooby drowning in a sea of angry clams – jolt you awake before dawn, and why Cristina stays on the couch across from yours when she's not on call, and why people seem as scared of you as they were of any crazed gun man.
You understand it perfectly: One bullet missed all major arteries by a mile, yet killed Derek anyway. Another did far more extensive damage, to a body that still had to drag itself half way across the hospital, yet Alex was right upstairs, sleeping peacefully.
Location, location, location, it was the mantra late night Real Estate moguls crowed in their infomercials. But Derek already had miles of land, and house plans with bed rooms for the children. That hits you again as kids swarm the Cartoon Network's commercials. You wonder what their names are, and what name he would have picked for yours.
It made you irrationally angry - at Cristina and Richard and Sponge Bob and Owen and frosted crumb cakes and Bailey and white lilies and the skinny guy who kept delivering the freaking fruit baskets - even at Alex. It set you glowering at Lexi's crying jags, at the harrowing tale that poured from her lips, as you sat at his bedside days after the funeral, watching his chest rise and fall to the ventilator's mechanical rhythm.
It wasn't fair, since he'd had plans too, with a woman that he apparently still loved, a woman he apparently still missed desperately – a woman miles away, who still hadn't called – plans that would do him as much good as Derek's house plans would do him.
But you couldn't do denial, not like Alex, and you couldn't do bargaining, since you had nothing left to barter for, and you snapped at Dr. Wyatt when she mentioned depression and acceptance – impatiently, as if you weren't doing the stages in the order spelled out on her grief management check list – so anger erupted like a forest fire.
It flared over everything: Derek for dying, Izzie for walking away, Lexi, for hiding her ring, Cristina for returning to Owen, Owen for leading her on, Alex for breathing, even the application forms for Chief Resident that sat untouched on the kitchen table, daring you to make plans for the future you just buried.
It was probably a bad sign that your sort of understood Gary Clark's fury, though you were still sane enough, at least, not to tell Dr. Wyatt that much.
You're supposed to be beyond this, she insists, this familiar impulse to burn it all down. That was the old you, who scavenged one night stands in dark bars and screwed like a whore and downed tequila until you hurled; who carved bloody chasms into your arms in college just to prove you were alive, and sank to the bottom of an icy bay when just being alive just wasn't enough anymore - no matter how hard he tried.
You were supposed to be beyond this, beyond having to set yourself on fire. But Wyatt didn't get it: you can't be the new you without him, and you can't be the old you without tequila and dimly lit bars, and you can't sit in your mother's haunted house anymore, with your back pressed hard against that door - to the bedroom where the new you died.
You can't even open it – can never open that door again - and you can't stay where you are – where your skin crawls and your blood chills and your stomach clenches as you jolt awake before dawn, day after day, slumped in a frigid hallway teeming with ghosts- so you burst headlong in the opposite direction, determined to burn time itself to ashes.
His windows are still closed, and it annoys you that Cristina even remembered he'd be cold otherwise, and you glare at the meds she lined up neatly beside two water bottles on his bedside table – meds which let him sleep past day break - and you're tempted to remind him that he's been home for three days and Izzie still hasn't called.
Cristina may not be Cristina yet, but you know he's still him, and you're still you, and some things never change - screw Wyatt – and dirty mistresses always recognize their own kind, and that's all that matters as you ease the faded Iowa tee shirt off over his shoulders. His eyes flutter half open as you hastily untie his thin grey sweat pants, but they're out of the way before he can say anything and your clothes join his on the floor.
The room's dark and he's groggy but he's awake enough to whisper that he can't in a strangled rasp that reminds you he'd been on a vent for nearly six days. Recalling the image chills you, but you're already straddling him as he tries to raise his arms.
He's paler then Derek was when you buried him, and you wince at the thick bandage covering his right side but you know that his "I can't" is half hearted at best and only meant literally – that it has nothing to do with Lexi or Izzie or your being a new widow or his just being dumped again, or whose name would be on his lips or whether you were using him as a scratching post or a grenade – but that he just can't.
You know that, since his limbs creak stiffly and he still smells too much like antiseptic mixed with hospital soap and he's still sewn together none too tight, and you suspect this isn't included in his post-op instructions, which sit in the blue folder on the kitchen table.
He can't, but he has to, just like you, and his lone protest comes out as a sigh as your hands pass over his flanks, and the sigh becomes a sudden gasp as you skim his bare hips and the gasp becomes a moan as your fingers burrow between his thighs and he's already quivering as your lips follow your fingers and you're sure it's been too long for him, too, when he finally shudders beneath you and his deep rumbling groan echoes through your body.
You wonder if this qualifies as arson, and you feel his heart beating against you, and he's drowsy and sated as you pour into the smooth curve of his torso, along his left side, and another satisfied murmur escapes him as your skin slides lazily against his and you sink into the simmering warmth of his flesh, sheer heat and exhaustion lulling you to sleep.
It's well past dawn when you wake abruptly - to images of your bloody hands sinking through his chest, so vivid that you frantically check his bandages for Sponge Bob's bleeding cheese – and you find yourself in a fevered tangle of limbs - as if you've fallen asleep in bowl of warm spaghetti – which you may also have dreamed, since the Cartoon Network seems to be owned by whoever makes Spaghetti-O's.
You give him his meds when he wakes much later and you drag him to the shower and half hold him up as he trembles and you wonder perversely if he'd fill with water if the wound was uncovered. It's just easier to get in there with him then – and he's definitely not a girl behind the shower doors – and he really can't do this again but he's still him and you're still you, and you still even manage to get all the shampoo out of his hair.
More flashes of actual Alex break through the following week, and he's pissed when his limbs still tremble in the shower –and not just because of you - and he wobbles on the stairs and he still can't stay awake for a full day and the weights in his room taunt him, since he still struggles to lift the milk carton, and you almost laugh at his war to open the new cereal, until he tears through the bag with his teeth.
He seems even more like him again some days, when he's grumbling about the sports pages or picking warily at the apple pies that your well-meaning neighbors leave on your porch. But he never mentions returning to the hospital and he scarcely snarls when Cristina just firmly pushes his hands away and determinedly checks his incision again.
He still tries, though, to hold his own when you climb into his bed. That almost makes you madder, though, since you've seen his bloody path to the elevator, and you've heard Lexi's story, and you wonder why the hell he fought so hard and crawled so far – and whether Derek fought hard enough – and that kind of wondering is his fault, too, since Derek's gone and Alex is still right there in the bathroom trying to tape himself together.
You'd help him, but he still pushes your hands away from his right side in the shower despite your teasing – since, honestly, you are a surgeon, and you wonder if he's punishing himself for something, too – since that would be him – and if he's doing all five stages at once, since he's extreme like that, and how much he'd piss Dr. Wyatt off – since she thought you were so bad – and he'd never do her check lists, anyway, and it would be just like him to blame his simmering frustration on the baseball scores and not his on-going battle to tie his own shoes.
He watches Sponge Bob and Scooby with you instead and barely raises his eye brows at your channel selection and you get him fruit and Jell-o and bland crackers and take him to his post-op appointments. You drink tequila in front of him, too, even though it doesn't mix with his meds, and you snicker when he glares, since the meds alone make him nauseous and he still hasn't gotten the remains of that last slice of apple pie off his shoe laces, and you'd help him, but then you'd just remind him bluntly that he needed it.
You finally tell him about the non-baby baby and silently dare him to apologize for it, or to look at you like you're a piece of your mother's fine China, over delicate and prone to shatter, or to offer you a sandwich or a thick slab of crumb cake, or to tell you that you're young or have your health, or that it's all part of some freaking plan or that everything happens for a reason, or to say what you already think- that the kid is probably better off.
He does none of those things, just watches more Sponge Bob and Scooby with you and doesn't change channels when children swarm the commercials, like Cristina sometimes does – and, really, you want to ask her, what's the point of that - and you see another Spaghetti-O's commercial and almost tell him it reminds you of waking up in his bed.
He's still not drinking with you the following week and you don't care if it's because he can't or he won't until he tells you you're a nasty drunk now that you've just got half a liver. You smirk at him as you grab another bottle and snort when you remind him it's probably genetic, since he should know that as well as anyone, and he just rolls his eyes and "whatever-s" you and Sponge Bob makes more sense after a few drinks, anyway.
You're still seething days later, because his words sting and you haven't fought so hard not to be your mother just to end up like your real father or your fake father – you're not sure which you consider which, really – and dawn still comes too soon no matter how much you drink the night before so you just dump the last bottle in the recycling bucket since you're back to work full time now.
Lexi continues her peace offerings over the next week – since it's her fault that you're a widow and Alex's got a hole in his chest. But she leaves them in your work cubby since she avoids him, too, with her shiny ring. She hasn't told you yet that you're not in the ceremony, but you've figured out already that post-it widows are bad luck.
You've had enough of weddings, anyway, and he finally stops checking for phone calls that you know will never come, and he finally stops shuffling through the daily mail after the divorce notice arrives, and it still pisses you off because at least he got an official state certificate written in bold black calligraphy, and at least it wasn't like Thatcher, or Ellis, or Richard or Derek or everyone else who just vanished on you without a word.
You'd mention that to him, but he'd just say he hadn't been waiting for a call or a note or anything else anyway, and you could tell him that denial is covered on pages 8 through 11 in the latest pamphlet that Dr. Wyatt gave you, but he just shrugs when you mention Lexi's plans and tosses Izzie's junk mail into the wicker basket by the phone – as if he even knows if she needs new patio furniture or half price satellite television service - and polishes off the stale crumb cake you'd been meaning to toss for the last three days.
You finally run into Lexi the following week in the cafeteria and she looks like she's ready to flee into traffic to escape you – there's a lot of that going around - and you bite your tongue not to tell her that her fast-track wedding plans have nothing to do with her seizing the day or life being too short and everything to do with her fears about marrying a genuine dirty mistress, not the pretender that she was trying to be, and with her on-going inability to drag her heart out of her vagina.
You still take the research articles that she offers you, though, because really, when did she ever take your advice. She leaves you a tube of some gel from Plastics, too, a new medicine that's supposed to remove scars, and you know it's for Alex and you'd laugh at her innocence if it wasn't so damn annoying.
You take the tube anyway because he still twists his right side away from you in the shower – which Wyatt would also call denial, and he calls reaching for the soap - and he doesn't look when he hastily tapes it back up, and you could understand vanity but it's not like you notice or care and it's not like he's bringing bar skanks home since he sort of still -can't- all that well, yet, or at least, not in a way that would do his ego much good.
He won't use it, you think, because it smells like strawberries, the only fruit on the planet that he doesn't like. But he still cringes when your hands brush his side and he still can't turn comfortably, and that'll just get worse as the scar tissue thickens, so you read the research articles and you wait until he's asleep before working it into his skin. You're half sure you'll wake him, and spark more feral snarling as he shoves your hands away again, but he barely stirs when you finish, sighing softly as you drift off to sleep yourself.
He returns to work a month later, part –time at first, and you're still invisible or carrying a medieval plague - and he gets whispers and stares - and lunches are just odd, since you can't say anything about Owen without seeming bitter, and you can't say anything about Izzie, since she still hasn't called, and Derek's name stops every discussion cold.
You can't say anything, really, not about Lexi or Mark or Teddy, or so many other people you've almost lost count, or about how Cristina actually calls Alex – Alex – once while demonstrating a stitch for a pediatric cardiac case for him, or about how Evil Spawn and the Crack Whore still aren't back, really - or about so many other things that it's probably best not to think about how the three of you end up quietly suturing bananas at the table.
All the practice is probably just as well, since a month later you finally apply for Chief Resident. Cristina applies too, even if you're already set up for the pity vote or the legacy vote – since you're no longer you amid the uncomfortable silences, but a Grey daughter or a Shepherd widow or an easy lay for a guy with the stamina of a gold fish.
The bile still stings and you know it's not his fault, and you know it's his bed even if it's in your house. But your rage doesn't spook him, and he just shrugs and sweeps when you hurl the last vase from the funeral parlor into the garbage, and he hauls all the empty fruit baskets out to the curb, and you're not a leper or a piece of fragile China under his sheets and he doesn't ask why you're there - which might have bothered the old new you but barely merits a smirk from the new old you.
You have no idea who he is, though, even by the following month, since the old him ran and lifted weights and trolled bars, and the old new him catered to Izzie, and the newer new him was a duck. But the current him is still too weak to be the old him, and the old new him got dumped on a sheet of loose leaf paper, and the duck follows Arizona Robbins around Peads like he's imprinted on her now, and all of them still labor too hard to stay awake past eight to give much thought, really, to what you're doing in their bed.
You know it's not rebound sex, because that's not you, or him; its not comfort sex, because he's still pale and drowsy afterward; it's not grief sex, because it's not on Dr. Wyatt's check list; it's not duck sex, either, because that's a whole different animal.
It's simpler anyway, since you're still you, and he's him enough now not to mind any more where your hands travel in the shower, and he's inventive enough with sponges and soap that you really have to focus on getting to work on time, and you recall that laughing under water is just bad physiology, and you still manage to get all the shampoo out of his hair even if it leaves you gasping and giggling and breathless and him dripping and spiky haired and rolling his eyes and smelling like strawberries – which he still hates.
You never figure out what to call it. But you ignore Cristina's questioning glances the following month, when she finally catches on, and you silently dare her to say anything since her unholy threesome will be the talk of the hospital once everyone else sees it – and she opens her own eyes - and she can crow all she wants to about being named Chief Resident but it won't do her much good when Teddy makes her move on Owen.
You wonder if she'll ever notice, though, since she's intent on being the New Nazi, and you don't envy her, much, trying to herd Alex and the new guys in Neuro. You're busy in General, anyway, and you're not just a post-it widow or your mother's daughter when you're on the Real Nazi's service, and you're still the best surgeon in your cohort, no matter who the Chief Resident is, and you remind them both of that after they watch you solo on an advanced stomach cancer case.
You're 100 percent sure that you're not your mother's daughter, too. And you just can't take the pouting weeks later when the apple pies finally stop turning up on your porch, and the ones in the grocery store are all frosted, which he doesn't like, and how hard can it be, really, if the neighbors make them so often, and you pick up a recipe in the fruit aisle and it looks as simple as any experiment in organic chemistry -which you aced- so you toss the ingredients into the shopping cart with the dish detergent and the milk.
It turns out that organic chemistry is much easier then baking and you're coated in apple guts by the time he pops into the kitchen and the snarking leads to him being covered too and your mix never morphs into a pie. But he does love apples – no matter where they are, apparently – and you're no longer covered in the batter when he's done with you, and it occurs to you afterwards, as you watch him untangle your bra from the kitchen table leg, that this may be why your neighbors use their own ovens so frequently.
Lexi continues to leave tubes of gel in your locker over the next month, and the bandages are long gone, and he's stopped looking away when he climbs out of the shower and he no longer skirts the bathroom mirror - though he still avoids elevators - and you still tease him about that when he's awake, prompting grumpy squawking, and you still smooth the goop over the lengthy gash before he dozes off, prompting deep rumbling murmurs.
You poke at it a little more forcefully over the next month, though - all of it - since it's never been any version of him to accept a Pit assignment from Cristina with barely a growl, or to nod and write rapidly as Dr. Robbins deliver instructions, and you wonder if it's all finally sinking in: that Izzie's never coming back, that the scar's never going away, and that he'll never live down the Peads thing as long as Cristina is drawing breath.
You wonder if that's all sinking in - in a way that's drowning him. He doesn't do steps, you get that, and he's finally back to snarling at idiot interns and snarking with nurses. But he mostly complies when the Crack Nazi – his grudging new dig - introduces new charting guidelines, and he submits them in a semi-civil way that probably surprises them both, and almost makes you feel like you're watching Duck 2.0.
It becomes a running joke over the next few weeks, even, about him morphing from Evil Spawn into Evil Stork, and you wonder as you grab Lexi's latest miracle cure from his bedside table if he'll open his eyes this time, or at least squawk back. But he just curls under you fingers as you smooth the gel into his skin, as usual, and you smirk at the chorus of murmurs as you teasingly brush imaginary duck down from beneath his ribs.
You can tell him from experience, though, that duck-hood is a bad idea, since you tried it too – you imagined children's bedrooms, and a new house on a different hill, miles from your mother's, and growing old with a man who promised he'd always remember you – as if you could make the future different from the past if only you worked hard enough.
You've given up on that idea though, and you still skip bargaining, and despair bores you, since you've done it before, and you're sure he's got denial covered, and you're probably supposed to be accepting, since that's the only stage left. But you still avoid your old bedroom – where clothes still hang just where they were left, and fifty eight cents linger on the dusty nightstand, atop an old Neurosurgery journal.
That takes a back seat, anyway, to the Great Mice Invasion in your attic which begins the following month. It starts with the pitter patter of little feet, and soon escalates into Alex launching a scorched earth campaign against "Mickey and all his freaking friends." You hear rustling and crashing and swearing and shattering and toxic chemicals spraying and almost wonder if the house will still be standing by the time he fiercely declares victory.
Surveying the collateral damage the following week, you wince at the fate of some of your old toys, of a seriously horrific orange – orange? - prom dress, and more ornate dishes then three households could use in a century, and gnawed boxes of clothes and books and papers, and antique vinyl records that actually spin. Well, you either wince at that, or at the Rubble of Mouse Haven West, as Alex triumphantly describes it – and you contemplate what to salvage while he suggests a dumpster and new attic insulation.
The only grandmother whose name you even knew used the chipped plates, though, and you were out of that hideous prom dress long before midnight anyway, and your mother's moldy wedding gown has every right to stay in her house, and your musty old toys are all just too familiar, and the cracked ceramic Christmas decorations were from the only year your mother ever actually tried to do a holiday, once your father left; it all has to say.
The dumpster idea gets raised repeatedly over the next five days, though never by you, and you just can't explain how people come and go, but their stuff can't leave once they do, and it's the only thing that lasts, really. It makes even less sense when you say it out loud as he's dragging thick new rolls of insulation up the narrow stairs, but the grumbling eventually gives way to hammering and drilling as cracked floor boards and shredded pink fibers are replaced, and "all that old crap" is securely stashed once again.
The last chapter in the epic war with Mickey Mouse and his freaking friends is finally written by then, though you still laugh over it in the gallery with Cristina a few weeks later as you watch him solo on a pediatric heart surgery- and consider what his patients would think of his pitched battle against a beloved Disney character.
You imagine even Arizona Robbins giving him the evil eye for that. But you spy him in the nursery afterwards with another tiny patient curled close to his chest and you wonder what he feels like to her and if she can feel the scar through his lab coat, and if he still winces sometimes, when other people come too close to it or he's not expecting them.
You wonder what her name is, too, and what color her eyes will be, and if her parents are as excited as they seem when they finally pry her from Alex's arms, and if their obvious joyous relief in whatever he's telling them has anything to do with the casual smirks that meet your and Cristina's taunts about lollypops and baby sitters and roller skating Attendings.
You might even mention that to Cristina or to him, but she's already distracted enough, and by the following week you're on your way with her and Owen to City Hall. You wonder how he got to her, and how she could possibly think this would end any better then the last time, though at least her mother wasn't in town, since she didn't even know.
It's another of those life is too short decisions – since a shooter's madness still ripples through the hospital - and you wonder how Owen is suddenly an improvement over Burke, and you still don't trust him. But it only takes one lunch hour, and she's scrubbing in with Teddy later that afternoon – and she still has her eye brows – and even Alex holds his tongue in the cafeteria the following day, and at least no one mentions acres of white taffeta or pads of office stationery.
That doesn't surprise you, since he'd just rolled his eyes the week before when you mentioned Lexi's up-coming wedding. She finally invited you, you and an unspecified guest, and you were sure she was rushing to seize the day, and that her vows would be just as clichéd, and you doubted that the real dirty mistress that she was about to wed had suddenly reformed, since you would know, but she never did listen to you, anyway.
You blackmail Alex into being the unspecified guest, since Lexi still leaves the miracle cures in your locker for him, and you remind him while you're showering before the ceremony that they're the only reason he's waterproof again – and he just smirks at your medical wisdom and there's more giggling and moaning and hands wander freely and you're on the verge of being late again, if you're not both dressed in the next ten minutes.
You finally wrestle him into his suit and tie and you're there on time and you slip quietly into the back row and you imagine a different best man in Owen's place and you smile politely during the vows and you just clink glasses with Alex and laugh afterwards, when one drunken guest speaker after another babbles on about promises and love and forever.
The laughter dies away long before the quiet car ride home and you wonder why people even bother with plans, and you're still awake hours later when you glance at the alarm clock on his bedside table and remember he's due. Grabbing Lexi's latest offering, yet another new paste that's supposed to diminish redness along the scar line, you sniff it curiously, and then lightly trace it on, watching as his breathing continues undisturbed.
She'll end up in plastics, you're sure, not because of her but because of Mark; she'll have a child before she's ready – because he's pushing – and live in the house he chooses for them, and she'll plan her entire future around something that could end in a heartbeat, in a random car accident when she's not paying attention, or an ill-advised romp in an on-call room, when a new nurse catches his eye. She'll be in plastics for good, you suspect, because she can't imagine anything else at the moment, as if moments like that ever last.
They don't last, nothing does, and it all gnaws at you like a parasite – damn near eats you alive, damn near drowns him in the residual bile - until the following month, when you finally crack your old bedroom door open like a crypt, and pull the framed post it note down from the wall, shoving it into the wastebasket with the dated Neurosurgery journal and the dusty coins and a drinking glass that had stood half full for almost a year.
Trash bags pool around your feet an hour later – filling with shirts and papers and house sketches – and you ignore his questioning glances as the bags quietly disappear down the stairs and you finally get to bargaining as you work, over whose marriage ended worse, and it's Alex's fault, and Lexi's, and Cristina's, and it's as pointless as the other stages – screw Wyatt – since she still talks about the new you – the new you now sitting discarded on the curb – and the room all but empties and you're still right back where you started.
A twilight haze filters through the windows and silver grey shadows still hover in the corners, and your instinct is to run, and he catches you in the hallway. You're sure he sees the ghosts mirrored in your eyes but it still doesn't spook him when you pin him to his bed, and what begins with you peeling his clothes off ends with you sobbing into his chest, again – in torrents you fear may drown him - though he's done this before.
You feel his arms tighten around you again, and you startle again like a hunted rabbit when his lips brush your hair, and the din finally recedes into silence, and its hours later before you wake in another familiar tangle of limbs. You search his body, relieved that he's not spilling open at the seams and that you haven't pulled him under with you, and it's another quiet hour before he stirs, though he won't open his eyes until you make him.
That's part of the game, you remember with a smirk, and had been since Lexi's miracle cures had become a running joke between you, once it stopped mattering if he stirred before you'd finished applying whatever new paste or potion she'd run across that week, or if they'd do any good at all, much less provide the scar free future they promised.
They d never work, really; you'd both known that for months. But Lexi kept leaving them, and he just melded into your hands no matter where you touched him by then, and you'd already noticed months earlier how a soft sigh led to a deep murmur as he shifted lazily under your fingers, and how his heart beat filled your ears as he curled around you, and how mornings came and went more peacefully after his lips brushed your hair.
You'll never forgive him for that, either, because dawn was supposed to be hard now - it was supposed to lodge like a permanent lump in your throat, between every yesterday and every tomorrow. He was never supposed to breathe so evenly, though, or to look into your eyes without flinching at the ghosts who peered back, or to wrap himself around you as if he expected to still be there when morning came and went again.
He wasn't supposed to be here at all, judging from the size of that angry scar. But that is how you tumbled into him - like Alice down that freaking rabbit hole – poking curiously at an open wound, and smoothing it over with potions and pastes, and teasing him about water proofing and imaginary duck down - while his body slowly knit itself back together again, fiber by fiber, quietly sealing you inside.
You'll never forgive him for that, either, since he's the one who stopped pushing your hands away first, and it's still his fault moments later when he's gasping and quivering, and his next sigh comes out as a plea, and he's wide awake as he squirms off the bed and flees into the shower, and it's definitely all his fault when he's dripping and smirking and you're trembling and giggling and coating him with strawberry shampoo again.
He'll always be the one who stopped pushing your hands away first, too, and you still roll your eyes when he says black tiles would be sexier and you'll never understand building materials as foreplay and you imagine that his dream house involves an open shower in the middle of the bedroom - and you do see the point, since that way you could avoid scandalizing the ghosts in the hallway as you drag him dripping back to his bed - but then you're shivering and moaning again and that's all his fault, too, and just as unforgivable.
You wonder what other things can never be forgiven, though, since ghosts have keen eyes and long memories.
You wonder if they make allowances for bad advice, too, and you'll blame Lexi, if they don't, because you warned her about the fate of faux dirty mistresses. But what you told yourself, that you were still a different shade of Grey, that you wouldn't feel a thing – wouldn't feel the rhythm of his heartbeat, or the brush of his lips as he curled sleepily around you afterwards - yeah, that advice you gave yourself – that missed by a mile.