A/N: Thank you to EscapismRocks for the read-through.
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you
Fairytale of New York, The Pogues
"Hey, Addie."
She turns at the sound of her name. She had thought she was alone. Utterly. But there are people in this city who know her, she supposes, and she plasters on a cheerful smile.
It fades instantly.
"Mark! What the hell are you doing here?" she actually screeches, loud enough that she attracts the attention of a man and little girl.
He shrugs and grins. "Must be fate," he says. He slurs it slightly and, come to think of it, his stance seems a little unbalanced.
"Are you drunk?" she asks.
He shrugs again and his grin gets wider. "'S good to see you, Add," he says.
"What are you doing here?" she insists. "You live in Seattle. On the other side of the country. Why are you here?"
"You live in L.A.," he retorts indignantly and then he waves his hand at nothing in particular, lurching a little, and says, "Wanted to see the tree." He glances down. "It reminds me of you."
"Well, I don't want you here! Looking at this tree was a tradition, Derek's and my tradition and I don't want you here."
"So what else is new?" His eyes almost bore into hers, suddenly focused by resentment and old pain. "Thing is, this was always my tradition. Standing here, shit-faced on Christmas Eve, wondering what it'd be like if you wanted to come and see this tree with me instead of him."
A part of her wants to soften. But he always has that effect on her — temporarily — and giving into it never gets them anywhere good.
"You came all the way from Seattle for that?" she asks acidly, while a little voice in her head asks simultaneously why exactly she feels the needs to be such a bitch. He talks a lot of crap when he's drunk and he can never live up to it when he's sober. But while he's saying it, he means it and she can see that her question hurts him a little.
"No," he says awkwardly. "I came to see my family. Thought it was time."
"Oh." The admission throws her. She's known him long enough that even she can't be unsympathetic about this subject. He has told her almost nothing about his family: it's what he didn't say that told her everything she needed to know. "How did that go?"
"As expected," he says. "Nothing changed, we're all just two decades older. I had enough after three hours and came here . . . via McSorley's." His grin returns, sort of, because she sees now how tired he looks. "Speaking of which, you want to get a drink?"
"Don't you think you've had enough?"
He shakes his head. "There's no such thing, Add," he says gruffly.
Suddenly her heart tightens. There was a time when she loved this man. It was painful and confused and most of the time she thought it was second best. But she can remember loving him. She can remember it very well, actually, more and more as she looks at him and walks towards him and takes his hand.
"Let's just look at the tree," she says softly and it shocks her when she finds that she really wants to. His hand is cold and a little reluctant but, nevertheless, he squeezes hers with the strength she remembers.
They stand together, in silence, looking at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, until he leans his head on her shoulder and whispers, "I love you, Addie."
"You . . .?" She tries to turn around, expecting him to lift his head, but it's like a dead weight.
"Mark?" She shoves him a little. "You . . . you can't say that. You really can't." Her voice isn't strident any longer, more gently remonstrating. But he really can't say that.
His response is something unintelligible as he nuzzles into her neck and then slumps, the weight of his head even heavier.
"Oh, God no!" she squeaks, looking around at the little groups of happy people with simple lives that are lived in the present, not in some screwed-up loop that always returns to the worst, most heart-breaking parts of the past.
"Mark!" she hisses and shoves him again. But he stumbles and she is compelled to put an arm around him and use all her strength to hold him up. It's not the first time she has valued her height and her five-inch heels, but it's the first time the ability to support a drunk ex-lover was her reason.
"Excuse me," she says in a voice calculated to be small enough to sound entreating but loud enough to be heard and, after she's repeated herself three or four times, a nice looking man in his fifties comes to her aid.
"I know how awful this looks," she pleads, "and I know that's not why you came here tonight, to get involved in the wreckage of other people's messed-up lives. But—" She breaks off when she sees his look of kindly concern diminish to resigned embarrassment with each extra word. "I'm sorry. Too much information. But can you please get me a cab and help me . . ." she turns her head as far as she can and strains her eyes to look at Mark, who appears to be smiling, goddamn him, "pour him into it?"
The man is very obliging and after the requisite pleasantries and "Merry Christmas" and snapping "Four Seasons hotel" at the driver, Addison leans back against the worn seat, closes her eyes and sighs.
"Addison?" Mark (whom she and the nice man deposited at the other end of the bench seat) wakes up and asks blearily.
"Don't Addison me," she says. Her eyes are still closed, but if they weren't, she would be staring angrily ahead. "Don't say anything, okay?"
"'kay," he says. Then he collapses slowly towards her and before she can react he's snoring in her lap.
"Feeling better?" she asks, one eyebrow raised as high and as disapprovingly as she can manage, as he sits up on the couch she and the concierge dumped him on two hours earlier.
"Addison," he says, focusing on her in a puzzled attempt at reorientation, as though he's searching for the north point on a compass. Then he smiles, his eyes latched on to hers, and repeats her name in a way that makes it sound surpassingly beautiful and absolutely sexy.
The tight feeling tries to grip her heart again, but she ignores it.
"Coffee?" she snaps self-protectively and pours him a cup from the large thermal pot she ordered an hour ago from Room Service.
"Thanks." He takes the delicate, white bone china cup and saucer from her hand. For a moment, he stares at the impediment introduced by the saucer as though he doesn't quite know what to do with it and then, with deliberation, as though he's made a life-saving decision in the O.R., sets it down on the end table next to the couch, turns the cup around so he's holding it by the non-handle side and drinks the coffee down in one gulp. He holds out the cup for more.
Addison wishes she didn't find this performance endearing. She wishes she didn't like him being in her hotel room. She wishes she'd stayed in L.A. so she wouldn't have to know that he still has the power to make her heart beat just a little faster by doing the most ordinary things. She wishes she still thought she'd forgotten him.
Mark clears his throat. "I didn't know you were going to be there," he says.
"Of course not," she concedes, busying herself with coffee pouring so she doesn't have to look in his eyes.
"What are you doing here anyway?"
"I wanted to surprise Savvy," she says. "But she and Weiss had already left for Aspen when I got here."
"I thought they always left, like, December 27th," he says.
"Well, so did I. But apparently everything changes." She shrugs. "I didn't feel like going home, though." Well, L.A., because really Manhattan always feels like home to her; more than the upstate snobbery she was born to and more than anywhere she's moved since. She smiles briskly to dislodge any nostalgic sadness that might insist on clinging. "I felt like seeing a little snow, I guess."
He looks towards the darkened windows reflexively and is considerate enough not to point out that it isn't snowing, hasn't been and probably won't.
"Why did you say you love me?" she suddenly blurts out.
He sighs. "'Cause I talk crap when I'm drunk," he says and smiles wearily.
"You remember saying it though?" She's not certain why she's having this conversation, especially not in the sharp, demanding tone that keeps emerging from her throat. But she doesn't seem to be able to stop herself.
It takes him a while to answer. "I remember thinking it," he mumbles finally. He replaces the cup in the saucer, gets up from the couch, still slightly unsteady and indicates the door. "I'm just gonna go now. It was good seeing you, Addison."
He's almost out the door when she asks him to stay.
She can hear him in the shower and she burrows further under the thick comforter. She can still feel his mouth against her breasts, his hot breath between her legs and her toes curl with the memory of the expert things he did to her with his tongue, the delicious rush of wetness, the feel of him as he pushed into her, slower than she remembered, the look in his eyes when he came.
He kissed her when they were done. His mouth covered hers, hard and longing, then little kisses at her throat, her jaw, her face and then finally in her hair, as he cradled her against him and said, again, that he loved her.
She didn't say it back. She wonders whether she should tell him that, once again, he's just her rebound guy; that the surprise visit to Savvy was an attempt to get away from her newly lonely status in L.A.
He emerges from the shower and stands in front of her, grinning, drying himself off and then throws himself on the bed beside her. "Merry Christmas, Add," he says happily. He's so ridiculously hot, naked and clean and smelling incongruously of her L'Occitane shower products, that she can't help smiling. He shouldn't be here; they shouldn't have had sex; it shouldn't have felt so damn good; and most of all, she shouldn't want him to stay. But it's Christmas, the time of universal denial, and, once again, she gives in.
"Merry Christmas," she offers in return and finds herself kissing him.
After breakfast and coffee and more sex that just seemed to follow naturally after the other two like a third course, Mark fell asleep. He was, despite his enthusiasm and stamina, hung-over and it caught up with him when he finally paused for breath between orgasms.
Addison gets up and showers and dresses in cashmere lounge pants and a matching v-neck sweater, chicly gray and soft, and curls up on the couch. She rarely watches TV, but the remote is to hand and it's Christmas and there's something so comforting about being cocooned in this room, sated with sex and warm croissants. There's something comforting about being cocooned in this room with Mark.
She allows herself to enjoy it. It's not going to last, they were over long ago, if they ever really even began, but she's experiencing a rare moment of contentment and she'd like to stay that way for a while. She channel surfs until she finds Jimmy Stewart and settles in for the morning. It's still not snowing, but she doesn't care. At least for a few hours of temporary delusion, she has, right here, everything she needs to make Christmas perfect.
A few hours later she comes to her senses and wakes him up with a cup of hot chocolate.
"Juju," he grunts sleepily and puts the cup aside without tasting the contents. "Does that mean you're going to throw me out?" His eyebrow is raised and he's grinning and it sounds like flirting; she just wishes his eyes didn't look so hopeful and hopeless at the same time.
She smiles and lightly touches his hair out of an instinct for closeness that she immediately regrets and pulls her hand away.
"Well, I'm going back to L.A. tomorrow," she says softly. "You don't have to leave quite yet, but . . . " She shrugs and smiles. "This was nice, Mark."
It sounds so lame, so inadequate, perhaps even cruel. But she's her and he's him and they're them and that's the way it has to be.
He gets up and finds his clothes where she hung them neatly while he was sleeping and dresses in silence. But when he's fully dressed, even down to the leather jacket, instead of leaving, he sits heavily down on the couch.
"I meant it," he says quietly. He doesn't specify that what he meant was 'I love you,' but she gets it, although ignorance might have been preferable. He's not drunk or post-orgasmic and he has no excuse.
She sighs. "You can't say that," she says. "You don't mean it, you don't even know what it means."
"Because this was just sex?" he asks, his voice surprisingly matter-of-fact and devoid of accusation.
"Well, yes, Mark! Since you ask. We haven't seen each other in over a year, we're not even friends really, anymore. So, yes, it was just sex." She picks up her own cup of hot chocolate and hides behind it, sipping.
He smiles when she eventually lowers the cup, his eyes focused on her mouth, and she realizes she's left a moustache of pale brown foam and wipes it away. Why does he have to be so damn cute when she's trying to blow him off?
"Like you said, we haven't seen each other in a year and I . . ." he sighs, "I guess I changed."
"I don't want to have this conversation," she says.
He nods. "I know. But I need to know I tried."
She swallows. "Okay, before you say anything, just listen. I have someone, kind of. It hasn't been working for a while now, so we're taking a break from each other. But I have someone. His name is Kevin. He's a S.W.A.T. guy." She's not sure why she feels the need to add this detail and her face reddens a little. "Anyway, I have him, but it hasn't been working and I needed to get away for a while and I thought I could spend some time with Savvy. And," she may as well make this as clear as possible, "once I got here and I was alone I found myself thinking a lot about Derek, which is why I went to look at the tree. So there's Derek and then there's Kevin and you . . . you were just there. And now you have to go, okay?"
"Me too," he says cryptically. "And I do know what it means." He doesn't move from his seat on the couch and he doesn't elaborate.
"You too what?" she snaps.
"I had someone. A real someone. No other women, great sex and . . . she liked me. Probably a lot more than I deserve, but she liked me. Loved me, I guess. And I guess I . . . I loved her."
"I thought Callie was —"
"Lexie Grey," he interrupts her. "Meredith's sister." It's on the tip of her tongue to say something about the perfect nine year old, but the soft, caressing resonance he put on the words 'Lexie Grey' effectively stops her.
"You broke up?" she asks instead.
He nods.
"But you said you loved her and she loved you."
He nods again. "That was the problem," he says. "Loving her made me realize that I loved you more."
"You're unbelievable!" she screams, only just restraining herself from hurling her bone china cup across the room at him. "Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but nobody forced you to screw a skanky nurse! Or should I say nurses? Or any other woman who had five minutes to spare and was willing to spread her legs!"
This has been going on all afternoon now, and the sky outside the window is charcoal-colored and frosty. It started out with her trying to patiently argue him out of his insistence that he loves her; and to adamantly prevent herself from falling (more than she already had) for his 'I loved you more.' Now it has spiraled into something old, immature and thoroughly nasty.
"After you made it clear that you didn't want my kid! You wanted a baby, you just didn't want mine, remember, Addison?"
"I hadn't made anything clear! I didn't even know what I wanted. I was scared! And what did you do? Walked out on me and got laid! Because that's what you do, right? Forgive me if I don't believe it when you say 'I love you' — whatever epiphany you claim to have had while you were committing statutory rape!"
His eyes darken and his muscles tighten, most visibly around the jaw line, and Addison wonders for a second whether he's controlling an urge to hit her. She knows she went too far with this vicious trashing of something that he openly and uncharacteristically treasured.
Nevertheless he lets it go and instead says intently, "I wanted the baby, Addison. I told you that. I bought you all that stuff and I marked the calendar and—"
"After you'd worked out your issues with Charlene," she spits.
"Because you were too much of a bitch to listen to my side without turning it into a fucking melodrama!"
"No – because you're a whore!"
"Yeah, well, at least I didn't sleep with Alex Karev!" he yells and the second it's out of his mouth scrubs a hand down his face as the corners of his mouth turn up in an embarrassed grin. "Just forget I ever said that, okay?"
She shakes her head, caught between shock that he knows about her on-call room rashness and the inappropriate urge to giggle at the image he's just created for her.
In the end they both laugh a little, and then pause, until Addison breaks the silence with a softly determined, "You slept with someone too." The statement is supposed to be her closing argument.
"Yeah, about that," he says. "I may have lied."
"I have a S.W.A.T. guy," she murmurs, distracted by the leisurely after-play of his fingers in her pubic hair, his hand warm and confident. "And you . . . you should go back to Grey."
"I'm your S.W.A.T. guy," he drawls, thumbing her casually in a way that makes her let out a little squeal. "Special weapons and tactics, right?" She can't see his grin but she can feel it against her ear. Then it turns into a soft kiss and suddenly he's serious. "And Lexie needs to be with someone who loves her as much as I love you."
She sighs. "We can't do this," she says.
"We are doing it, Add."
"Then we have to stop," she insists and turns on her side so she can look into his eyes.
"Why?" he asks simply.
"Because."
"Because why?"
"What if I don't love you?" she asks. It doesn't quite make sense: she had been going to say 'Because I don't love you,' but somehow that wouldn't come out of her mouth.
He shrugs. "But you do," he says.
She wants to argue. She wants to say that this wasn't supposed to happen. That she never wanted him to show up at her and Derek's defunct Christmas tradition; that she never wanted him at all. But she's already trotted out all these arguments at least once today and none of them has stuck. Not with him and, more to the point, not with her.
She has no idea how she moved from yesterday when, if anything, he was an afterthought, to today when he's all that's on her mind. Maybe he was always there, imperceptible beneath the surface of other loves that seemed more important but touched her just a little less. Maybe he really has changed and this really can be something new.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay?"
She nods, scared as hell. "I think I wish I didn't, but I think I love you too," she says warily.
"Well, I guess that's a start," he says and pulls her closer. "Merry Christmas, Addie," he murmurs into her hair.
"Yeah, it is," she sighs and curls into the warm space he makes for her.