Mark contemplates his feelings for Lexie.
She's curled on her side, one hand folded between her cheek and the pillow, the other resting on your stomach.
She sighs softly, smiles in her sleep, snuggles a little closer and burrows deeper under the comforter. She turns sleep into a pleasure, an active source of contentment.
You don't sleep as well as her. (Too many years of on-call rooms and pagers and sneaking out before you were called on not knowing someone's name). But your pleasure is in watching her, feeling her body against yours, knowing that this – you and her – is right and that you fit.
Before Lexie, bed was a place to pass out exhausted (or drunk); a place to fuck women you had no intention of holding in the morning.
You betrayed your best friend in bed. Then the woman you sold out your friendship for sold out your dreams, crying on the cold sheets next to you for a baby she wouldn't allow you to mourn with her, while you ached for a love you couldn't have (even if you'd known how to show it).
And much earlier, there was the dark - before you learned to turn on all the TVs – where the kind of dreams a little kid was supposed to have always turned into nightmares whose phantoms said way too much about your life when you were awake.
With Lexie, bed is the home you never really had. And if you don't sleep so well? Not really a problem. The reality of being with her is better than any dream you ever knew how to have.
