The same old scenario, the same old rain
And there's no explosions here
Then something unusual, something strange
Comes from nothing at all

Amie, Damien Rice

It's raining hard the night she shows up at your apartment, and she's wet. So you ask her in, find her a sweatshirt from the pile and throw her a towel to dry her hair.

It's fine. It's not like there's any kind of a big, dramatic silence between you. She didn't want the life you had to offer; you did without her. And, yeah, there was yelling and, yeah, it hurt for a while. But you've hurt and been hurt far worse than that and, now, you co-exist at the hospital, and sometimes find yourselves hanging out at Derek and Meredith's place at the same time. And it's fine.

She left some textbooks behind, she says. You point her in the direction of the box in your bedroom full of the bits and pieces of her stuff you find now and then and, while she goes through it, you sit in the living room and drink a beer.

It's fine.

It's just that this is the first time since you broke up that she's been in your apartment.

Well, that and, when she comes out of the bedroom, carrying the box in her arms, something happens to your heart that only she can do. You guess romantics would call it skipping a beat; your co-workers would call it arrhythmia. You? You'd call it Lexie (although you never needed a word for it until today).

There are remnants of blonde at the ends of her hair, where she dyed it for Alex Karev. At the time, in the hospital, being Mark Sloan (the guy who consoled himself with Addison and lived to fuck another day), you'd kidded her about it. Stevens 2.0, you believe you said, tactlessly and almost embarrassingly trite. Now, though, looking at her, the damp, glossy brown glowing above the mistake, you don't know how you got the joke past your lips.

You want to touch her hair. You want to have the right to touch it again. Just once. Instead, you offer her a beer.

"Okay," she swallows, puts down her box and perches at the edge of the couch, tugging at her clothes.

It's only then that you notice the sweatshirt she's wearing – old, frayed, dimly displaying Columbia from your days there. It's the sweatshirt she wore your first night together; the one she always called her favorite. (How the hell did you manage to pick that one? The fucking thing has so many memories, you're almost surprised it didn't burn your hand when you gave it to her.)

Your eyes are fixed on her chest, effectively staring at her boobs (although, today, that has nothing to do with anything), and she follows your gaze down her body, suppressing a gasp when she reaches the lettering which, apparently, she hadn't noticed either. When she half-looks up at you, tears are welling behind her eyelashes.

"It's just a sweatshirt," you say, your voice coming out gently gravelled in way that contradicts every syllable. But you shrug, as if it's an emphasis and not just a hopeless gesture.

She nods, unconvinced. "It was . . ."

It was. But so were a lot of things, and they're all gone too. "I'll get you a beer," you say, and save yourself by going into the kitchen.

When you come back, open bottle in your hand, the sweatshirt's folded neatly on the couch, the Columbia hidden from view. But as she sips her beer, her hand strays to it, and she seeks out your eyes again.

"We could have done it better," she says. "The breaking up. I could've done it better."

You shrug again. "Your heart wasn't in it," you say. "I shouldn't've pushed you like that."

"No," she says, slightly too loudly. "My heart was in it. My heart was in it." Your throat tightens as she turns the easy cliché into something deep and delicate. "You and I . . . it's not," she searches for a word, "it's not nothing just because we're over."

"It's not?"

She shakes her head, casting her eyes down, courage almost gone, until she looks up again and says, "We should . . . we never had break-up sex." She nods quickly a few times, as if that'll make the difference between you agreeing and throwing her out, or laughing in her face, or getting down on one knee and proposing something undying that neither of you know how to do. "We should have break-up sex."

It's not exactly logical or prudent or, honestly, anything good. But you don't want to let her go now she's here; not quite yet. And that's how it starts (or rather, ends) between you and her. One last time.

There were things you used to do with her in bed, always just shy of your full range of experience, but never making it to the routine end of familiarity.

None of that matters, now, though. It's just you and her and how you feel.

You're braced above her; she's beneath you, looking up into your eyes. The fingers of her right hand are twined in yours, clasped hard against the pillow; her left runs a finger along the length of your erection, cups your balls, comes to rest against your hip as you dip your mouth to her breast.

She exhales a long, soft sigh, reaches for you, draws you inside her; and you bury your head in the soft crook of her neck, feeling the silk of her hair, smelling her scent, hearing her breathe in your ear.

Her muscles clench around you, her hand firm against your ass pulling you further in. It's all rhythm and breath and something like infinity, and you don't know or care if you're any good, you just know you're inside her. It's you and her and that's all that matters.

She lets out a little cry, trembles against you, bites your neck softly; and you let yourself go, quietly, a version of yourself you don't know how to be (don't really know, period) without her.

She runs her fingers through your hair; you kiss her eyelids; you breathe each other's breath.

Then it's over and you're separate again, brought back to the real, fractured world by the condom, sticky in your fingers, reminding you what you're feeling is all just an echo of the past.

A half-hour later, she gets after-sex giddy, padding naked through the apartment for beer and stray cigarettes. She comes back wearing the Columbia sweatshirt like a talisman against the inevitable, and you talk, almost like you used to, sharing one drink and one cigarette at a time until she falls asleep, curled up with your arm around her, breathing as though she's peaceful.

She's right: what you had, you and Lexie, is not nothing just because you're over.

You've always known sadness could feel this bad; you just never knew before today it could feel this good.