Simple
Rating: T.
Spoilers: Everything up to 'Some Kind of Miracle'.
Addison liked her world simple; even in medicine, A tended to lead to B. For every problem, there was an equal solution, and while the solution sometimes solved nothing, there it was—in the textbooks, in the starkness of black and white print, sometimes accompanied by a helpful graph or visual aid. It was graduate school before she learned the difference between the words simple and simplistic, always opting for the latter, falsely assuming them to be synonyms. She liked the word simplistic because it sounded like the more sophisticated of the two, and back when she was just Addison Montgomery, before she became Addison Montgomery-Shepherd, before every humbling minute of that relationship, she liked longer words. She liked things messy and complicated, and the same could be said of Addison Montgomery-Shepherd, who fell in love with two men, and—God, she hated this part of her—something deep inside her chest enjoyed it. She liked the push-pull of her own emotions. She liked situations that tested her.
And then, and then, and then. That was the way she used to talk, differentiating between now and then. Simplistic was one thing—the tendency to oversimplify an issue by ignoring the complexities. Addison Montgomery Shepherd was simplistic, and she knew it, the way she thought that she could solve an insoluble problem. To fix her marriage, that was one thing. To fix her problems with Mark, that was another. And still another was to tend to the wounds her deliberate loss of her child had caused. It sometimes surprised her that it had taken so long for her to figure out how to be an adult.
Even then, she was still learning how to simplify. She was learning how to bring everything back to zero, to start over again, tabula rasa. The letters she was writing to other hospitals stayed comfortably on the desk in her hotel room, waiting to be sent. She thought about them only fifty percent of the time, when her head was tied up in the consideration of leaving Seattle Grace. No matter how much she tried, there was something in her that couldn't fit in with these people. Maybe it was her own doing, just like she'd always tried to set herself apart in medical school and as an intern and doing her residency. She always had to be the very best—at everything she did, and lately there was the pathetic feeling that all of her failures were on display. It didn't help that all of her colleagues were so quick to advertise everything they felt, a pinprick of emotion and there it was, tattooed all over the hospital walls.
Things had been tense at Grace. Ever since Meredith died, or almost died, or did die. Ever since Ellis Grey died. Ever since George O'Malley's dad died. Ever since the chief dyed his hair. Ever since Mark got there. Ever since, ever since, ever since. Maybe they'd always been that way, and Addison hated that saying—'things had been tense'. What things, she wanted to know. Whose things? What had changed? They weren't becoming different people, and their worlds hadn't gotten any smaller, and she still felt like she was suffocating.
She took a sip of her hot chocolate, which was probably another sign that she hadn't made it all the way into that nebulous realm of adulthood, and she tapped her pen against the top of the chart. It was a slow day, but every day was a slow day lately, every day impossibly like the last. She'd become a doctor in order to make a difference in people's lives, and that difference was shifting into sameness. To save a baby, born prematurely, to return the child to the arms of its mother, that was a miracle, yes, but there was something terrifying that lived inside of her that kept whispering that maybe, probably, this was all going to be exactly the same a year later or the year after that.
She blamed it on being twenty-three hours in what was doomed to be a thirty-hour shift, and she'd never been one to be able to grab a few minutes of sleep here or there. She had never found a way to be okay with the impermanency of it. Wasn't it okay to want a home to go to instead of a hotel? And wasn't it alright to want to be number one to some guy who wasn't going to cheat on her? Or to some man who wasn't going to idolize his medicine more than he idolized her? Wasn't that okay? Did that make her so bad of a person to want that for herself?
"Dr. Montgomery?"
She didn't know how long she'd been there, bopping the end of her pen against the top of the chart while standing at the admitting desk, and she didn't know how long he'd been there either, watching her chew on her lower lip like she was teething, but there he was, Karev, Alex, whatever her brain would let her call him that day. Karev, she decided, because it was impersonal and like a pet name all in the same two-syllable breath. He looked young and bruised, like he always did, like someone had treated him unfairly in his life before now, unfairly enough to make him want to become an übersuccess, to go into the world of prettying people up just so they could feel, for a moment or two, like they were whole before they went back to feeling bad for themselves. That wasn't fair of her to dismiss plastics like that, but when she thought of Karev and plastic surgery, she thought of Mark, and then she thought of her and Mark, and then she thought of Derek, and then of Meredith, and then it took her back to Karev and the stinging humiliation of what he'd said to her a few weeks past. That was what she meant by not wanting to hang her embarrassments up for the world to see; if she let just one person in, they'd know everything, every flaw, every piece of the mess that made up Addison Forbes Montgomery. And how complicated that might be.
She hadn't opened her mouth to speak, and when she realized this, she lowered her glasses to the tip of her nose and arched an eyebrow at him. "Karev? What do you need?"
He had this way of looking like he'd been kicked, which was funny to Addison, because she had some idea that he'd learned how to kick back at some point in his life. He learned to kick, and yet he wasn't too scared to pick up Izzie Stevens like someone's life depended on it. She remembered that, how pink Stevens' dress had been, how somber Karev was. She was too scared, too panicked, too tied up in Derek and the desperate retrieval of what she thought they had to notice him then, but she remembered. She remembered how he had been strong enough for that, and she didn't mean physically. She meant the spine men grow when they become men.
Karev, still standing in front of her, said, "I'm going home. I just thought I'd tell you. Everything's fine with her, and if you need me—" He left it there, like there might be something impenetrable under the surface, but then he smiled in that way he had that looked like frowning and shrugged his shoulders. She watched him go, still biting her lower lip. Thinking of the kiss was inescapable, and thinking of what happened after was worse, but what overrode all thoughts of him and her were thoughts of their patient, the Jane Doe, the woman with a baby she didn't know. Addison felt sick, sick with her own selfishness and her sick, sad desire to leave, as though that would solve anything. She should have learned from Derek that running did nothing to help anyone.
There was something she thought to say as she watched him go, a whisper of 'thank you' or 'Do you want to grab a drink?' There was something painful and exquisite about watching him go, just like there'd always been about watching anyone walk away, and she thought of Derek then, which was strange to her—Derek and Karev in the same thought, Derek's leaving with Karev's walking out. As though the two were comparable. As though the latter might rise to the former's place in her mind.
"It really bothers you, doesn't it?" was the next thing she heard, the voice gravelly and unmistakable. No, gravelly was the wrong word, a writer's cheap word for something that had more to do with the way whisky tastes—that was Mark's voice, the sting of alcohol, the slap of it against one's throat. It was fifty-five days since she'd made her deal with the devil, since Meredith was in that hospital bed, comforted by Derek. Since Mark had made that outrageous claim that his feelings for her somehow rivaled Derek's for Meredith. Since, since, since. Fifty-five days and in five more she'd have to start over again with Mark. She'd have to learn to trust him again. She'd have to, all in the name of a promise she'd made in the heat of the moment, she standing there, wanting someone to love.
He didn't know, though, about her and Karev. He couldn't know, and she wondered if her cheeks were as pink as they were warm, and she slid her glasses back up her nose and turned to look at Mark. His face was fresh, as it always was, because Mark cared in some exquisitely banal way about the way he worked—and maybe that was important to a plastic surgeon, to be as attractive as possible in order to assure patients he could make them as attractive as possible, but if that held true for her too, what could she say to her patients? I don't know if I would make a good mother, she'd have to tell them honestly, because on occasion I've been known to choose me first. "Mark," she said, her tone measured, and she slid the pen into the top of the chart and moved her hand to her hip. It was knee-jerk, her reaction to him.
"It bothers you that I am going to be able to do it."
He wasn't talking about Karev at all, and her relief was only slight. He didn't know, but there she was, thinking about him when she knew he didn't think about her. Did that make her a sad person? She didn't want to be a sad person. She didn't want to be that person who was purposefully blind to the things everyone else knew. She didn't want to be Dr. Montgomery-Shepherd anymore, she just wanted to be Addison. She wanted to be loved and adored and in control but not too in control that she couldn't let someone else in, someone like Karev, who spoke of his family never, but when he did, when she asked him if he had a father, his tone was soft and his eyes softer. Wouldn't it be easy, she thought, to let him in—physically, emotionally, all of it. It didn't matter that he was younger, because in so many ways she was still the child. The only thing that mattered was that he didn't want her, and she had to cauterize the wound before it even began to bleed. That was what was simplest. Or was it what was most simplistic? She didn't know any more.
"I don't even have any proof."
"Addison, don't make excuses." He took a step forward, closer to her, and she moved a step backwards to compensate, her heels clicking on the tiled floor. "It just scares you that you're going to lose to me."
What scared her was how flip he was about it, how he had no idea how much it mattered to her to feel whole again, to not feel washed up and old and so far past her prime that no one would even look at her again. What scared her was that he was right, because it was capitulation. It was losing. It was going back on everything she'd ever said she'd never do again. She said she'd never take him back. She said she'd never do that again. She said that after finding the underwear underneath her own bed. She said that after being told by not one but two women that they'd recently had sex with Mark. She said never again, and she was finally, absolutely determined to mean it. That was the spine girls grew when they became women.
"I don't have time for this, Mark—"
He held up a finger when his pager beeped at him, just the single finger to shush her, and she pursed her lips to keep from laughing. It was too easy to be so right about Mark. It was too easy to pin him down, and that made her a little sad for him. Maybe somewhere, a long way down, he was just a guy wanting to be loved too. It didn't matter. Addison couldn't be the woman to do it. She couldn't be his yo-yo. Mark grimaced, but he excused himself anyway, off to go take care of an important nose job patient, and Addison glanced at her watch. Six hours to go.
In the elevator, it was just her and Derek, which made her think of what Karev had said—that he'd notice if she were gone. Then the comparison slipped out, the one between him and Derek, and she didn't mean for her brain to do that, because they were so radically different, but that was exactly the thing. Derek was the angel she should never have tried to sully. Even that was laughable. They were all a little fucked up, but she and Derek were incompatible in the most obvious of ways: he was an optimist and she was the realist, and she knew, for better or worse, that things would almost always air on the side of the negative.
She, exhausted, leaned against the back wall. She'd been the first person to get into the elevator, and when Derek joined her, just getting on his shift, he looked back at her with the childish smile of someone who had just survived a major catastrophe and had come out better for it. He grinned and then pressed the button to his floor, and she focused on the yellow light of her floor before either of them said anything.
He was the one to interrupt the silence that she was completely happy with. She was too tired to think of conversation, in that pleasant state between waking and sleeping when everything was too funny and too blurry to be material, and when he spoke, it took her a moment to process it. "I'm happy," was what he said, and she struggled to remember if they'd been having a conversation just then, or if this was a continuation of some earlier thought.
Then, when she understood, she had to think about why he would tell her that, what value it held, if there was anything to accomplish. For a long time that was all they'd been—accomplishments and competitions, arguments lost or won, nights spent alone on the couch because of one or the other's inability to apologize. But then she got it, even in the fog of her exhaustion—he said it because it was true. Because he felt it. Because he needed to tell someone, and there she was, Addison Montgomery-who-once-was-Shepherd, and it wasn't a step back to being his best friend that she'd taken. No, it was a step forward, a step past the hyphen. "Good," she said, sounding insincere, but she knew he knew her well enough to know the difference.
"I want you to be happy too," he said, his head bobbing slightly as he spoke. The elevator whirred around them, and Addison's hands were tight on the railing behind her. She focused on the NO SMOKING sign on the wall, and she knew that he said that because he meant it too. He did want her to be happy. He wanted her to be happy, because he knew what happy was and he wanted to share it. Maybe that was the difference between them, she realized—she wanted to hoard her happiness. And then—"And you can be. Just not with Mark."
The elevator stopped at his floor, and the lift jerked and then paused, the doors opening, and Derek turned to look at Addison, his smile the shy, impetuous one she knew so well from the time that they met. That smile wasn't for her any more, but that pain was gone. Whatever remnants there were had been put into the disposal and ground into pulp when she saw him when Meredith was about to slip away. She wasn't angry with them any more. She couldn't be. She didn't know how to be. When he stepped out and the doors shut after him, Addison knew he just said it because he believed it, because he knew her, and he knew that that wasn't how it was going to work, the forfeiture of her pride.
Laughing a little, she straightened up and leaned forward enough to press the button to the main floor.
One of the nurses was all over Karev at the bar, leaning on him in her sloppy, uncomfortable way, the kind of way that always made Addison nauseous and piteous for other women. Was it necessary to spread their legs for every guy who came along? Sure, he was attractive—Addison could vouch for that, because God knew she'd had more than a few sick fantasies about him, some involving her bed and ties, but that was the alcohol talking—but what was so special about him that women had to make themselves into fools? She wasn't even pretty, the nurse, and it wasn't until Joe came over and told Addison she was staring that she even began to care.
"Is it easier if you're gay?" Addison asked him, her hand tight around the neck of her beer bottle, and Joe laughed at her and shook his head.
"It's pretty much always going to suck."
There was something easy about being so obvious to a bartender, like he was required to keep her secrets, and she didn't feel bad about glaring down Karev's little girlfriend. Neither of them were paying her any attention at all, certainly not Karev, who mattered, and then she felt stupid for admitting that to herself. "He matters, you know," she said to Joe, and then she felt stupid for admitting it to Joe.
"Does he know that?"
Did he? It was a loaded question. Yes, he does, that was Addison's first instinctual response, but she pursed her lips in the reconsideration of it. Did he know he mattered? Did he know that he was one of the reasons why getting up and coming to work, surrounded by the reminders of not only her past but her mediocre present, wasn't so bad? Did he get that? Did he know that she would fight for him to stick with her specialty? And it had nothing to do with the way her stomach fluttered in his presence. It had to do with his being a good doctor, his potential for surgical excellence. It had to do with him and his manifold talents. It just had to do with him. She thought of him in the closet, telling her that he wouldn't be another one of the interns sleeping with an attending, and she looked at Joe and said, "No, I don't think he does."
"I'd tell you to tell him, but I know you're smart enough to know that."
That was funny to her, and in the spirit of drunken exhaustion, she laughed. She laughed loudly enough to draw Karev's attention from the other side of the bar, away from his perfect little blond hussy—and why was it that men liked women like that, women like Meredith, who constantly had to be protected and taken care of? That's what the nurse looked like to her, Meredith 2.0, Meredith-the-Prettier, Meredith-the-Conqueror. No, that wasn't fair to Meredith. Addison hadn't lost Derek to Meredith. Addison had lost Derek to Derek. It was frightening to her how lucid her inebriation was.
Karev's smile as his eyes met Addison's was lackluster, just the corner of his mouth tipping upwards, but to his credit he seemed suddenly disinterested in the blonde beside him. Maybe he had some sensitivity to the fact that she'd tried to shove her tongue down his throat and then he hadn't even given her an opportunity to backpedal. Beyond the closet, they were living in a happy place of quiet ignorance. She could live with that, and yet, she was the one alone at the bar, and he was the one with a pretty blonde on his arm, and she started to peel the label off of her beer to distract herself.
It was moments like this that she came close to being able to convince herself that settling for Mark wasn't settling at all. He would be here at the bar with her if she let him, and that knowledge humbled her. Who was she to act as though she had no one and no options? There was a lot of life in her yet, and there was a sexy, vibrant man in Mark Sloan who was ready, willing, and able to take her any way she'd give him.
And yet, all this made her feel was alone. That had to change, she knew. It was within her power to change, and this she knew too. Addison Forbes-Montgomery had never needed a man in her entire life to make her feel like she was something special. She knew she was something special. There was nothing about Mark that made her feel any better; all he succeeded in doing was making her feel like she was doing herself a disservice. "Joe," she announced to the bartender, who had moved on to other customers. "Joe, come back here," she said, and she waved him back, and when he found his way back to her, she pushed her hair off her face and she said, "I'm never going to let a man make me feel like I don't deserve to be happy again. So help me God, if that means no more standing out in the rain."
This didn't mean anything to Joe, but it didn't have to, and he reached his hand to grab her beer and replace it with another one, but there was another hand stopping him suddenly and the scraping of a bar stool as it moved out to accommodate someone. "I think she needs to be cut off," the voice said, not gravelly or like whisky, but solid and penetrating, just like Karev had always been.
"I've only had three," Addison said, but she knew Karev was right. There was something deeply satisfactory about the small move, the way it was almost protective, and Addison's newly repaired self-esteem, plied with alcohol, surged. It didn't matter what he'd said in that closet—she knew men, and she knew he wanted her. The first thing she'd ever realized about Alex Karev was that he was a master bull-shitter, and along with her resolution to never let Mark undermine her again was a vow not to let a man bravado her to death.
Karev laughed at her and settled himself into his bar stool. He smelled like deodorant and aftershave and peanuts, of all things, and Addison met Joe's eyes. Joe looked at her with an expression she couldn't interpret, but it didn't matter, because she was also tired of waiting for other people to tell her what to do. She was tired of waiting on other people's decisions. Derek's, Mark's, whoever's. "I didn't say anything because there's the off-chance that I'm a little insecure, you know," she said to Karev without looking at him. It was quick, almost a throwaway, but it was Addison, a little intoxicated, but fully in charge of herself.
Karev laughed again, and it was a shallow laugh, as though he didn't believe her, and then he stopped and looked at her. She could feel his gaze on the side of her face, and she couldn't look at him. There were a thousand things he could say, and she began to count every single one of them, ranging from the most hurtful, another rant that he wasn't interested and it wouldn't happen again, to the inane, to his standing up and walking away. She prepared herself for every eventuality.
Peripherally, she saw his hands as they folded and unfolded the damp napkin upon which one of her three beers had sat, and when he said, "Yeah, well, me too," she didn't know what she'd heard or how to react.
"You too what?"
"There's an off-chance I'm a little insecure too."
"Oh," she said, and that was that. She still didn't look at him, and he leaned back in his stool and set his arm on the back of hers. It was idle, the tiniest of gestures, but it was enough to get her to look at him, and when she did, he wasn't looking at her. His gaze was elsewhere, the game on the TV, the blonde across the bar, but then she felt his hand on her back, his thumb just under her shoulder blade, the gentle rubbing of it across the line of her scapula.
Nobody said they were sorry, not for the harsh words or the assumptions. And for once, with Karev's hand on her back, she didn't feel all that sorry.
He dropped her off at her hotel, and he walked her to the front door of the building, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. "We should both get some sleep," he said, and Addison thought about how he was handsome—not cute, because that implied a childishness, and not sexy, because that connoted an objectification, but handsome, because that's what men were. "Because I know you're going to let me scrub in tomorrow, right?" He grinned at her, and she laughed a little and agonized over asking him up.
The worst he could say was no, she decided, and she pulled her coat tight around her and said, "You could come up, if you wanted." Open-ended was good, because it was encouraging without being forceful, and she held her breath, prepared for the hit of his rejection.
He glanced upwards, as though there would be a neon sign in her window, and then he looked back at her. When she first met him, she'd been surprised at how young he always seemed, but in the half-darkness of the hotel front, she was surprised by how manly he was, how solid and good and strong. He stepped forward, close enough to breathe her air, and he cupped her cheek and kissed the corner of his mouth. "Don't get me wrong, I want to, and don't think I'm an ass for saying this," he said, his lips touching her skin, "but ask me up again when you haven't been drinking. You know, and it's just you and me."
"I can't believe you turned me down again," she told him, her eyes shut, her mouth painfully cognizant of the proximity of his. His hand moved to her wrist, holding it as though he were keen just to touch her, and they both laughed a little, both knowing it was hardly a rejection, not this time.
You know, and it's just you and me, he said, as though he knew about the versions of Mark and Derek that played in syndication in her head. She was wrong. The worst thing he could have done would be to accept her, and when she turned her head to kiss him softly and then backed up to turn around and go into her building, she knew he knew that it wouldn't be long until everything was simple, until he was the only thing on her mind. Not long at all.