Viscosity

Summary: In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. A continuation of my one-shot 'Simple'. Addison/Alex, but let's be honest, this is pretty much my interpretation of the rest of season 3.

Rating: Eh, maybe a little T+.

Author's note: Slowly but surely. This chapter's a little bit of an interlude. And trust me, we're far from done with Mark.

Chapter 4: Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken

"I had an abortion," she said, leaning back against the porcelain tank, which seemed so stark and foreign for her to say. Her admissions had always been easily numbered—Mark, first, and Mark only by default, because how else was she supposed to explain away her pregnancy? And then Callie, and she remembered that moment, the rush of air in her lungs, the casual and yet measured gait of her speech. One, two, three, and she told Callie. She didn't even have to summon the courage with Karev, who sat in front of her with a kind of fearless unambiguity that she longed for.

He could judge her. She was beyond caring about that, about the eyebrow raises and the judgment calls from people who were all pretty they would have done the same thing if they were in her position, but they hadn't been in her position, and they didn't know, and he could raise his eyebrows and judge her if he wanted. Mark had done enough of that for one lifetime, the tantrum-throwing and the violent outbursts that had only ever succeeded in proving her point. "He wanted it, and I didn't. It was my choice to make, so I made it."

Karev watched her, and his fingers drummed absently on the tip of her shoe. She liked the vibrant reminder that he was there, jammed into the too-small bathroom stall in the women's restroom, and that he wasn't going anywhere.

She waited for him to have something to say, anything, even harsh words or a 'what kind of woman aborts her unborn child', and when neither of them said anything more, Karev moved the icepack from his eye, scrunched the side of his face—the bruising and swelling even worse, in spite of the ice—and then he said, "Is that it? That's why that guy pisses you off so much?" He grimaced and slid the ice pack back to his eye and said, "I don't blame you. I wouldn't have that dude's baby either."

Addison laughed in spite of herself and the subject manner, and she nudged Karev's leg with the tip of her shoe. "And you know," he continued, grabbing her ankle with his free hand, "I'd tell you your taste in men was pretty shitty if it weren't for me."

"Oh, is that so?"

"Well, come on. Shepherd's not bad, but Sloan's a jackass."

She had to agree, and in a way that summed up her life to that point. Shepherd wasn't bad, Sloan was a jackass, and Karev was her best demonstration of good taste to date. Which was strange, because he was young, brash, impulsive—evidenced by the icepack against his eye, about which she could only make assumptions—and she knew next to nothing about him. What she did know wasn't through frank discussion; it was observation, the silence of watching him check a newborn's heartbeat, or the simplicity of his caring for a patient whose name he didn't know, whose face he couldn't see, and whose child would never be born. And she knew what could make him angry, but she didn't know why or what had happened to him in his life to create that in him, and suddenly she wanted to know. She wanted to know all of it, because she liked who he was, and she wanted to know what made him this oddly contradictory guy.

"What about you?" she said, watching him shift his wait backwards, to the door behind him.

"What about me?" He pulled back the icepack again with a sense of resignation, maybe realizing that there wasn't much to be done for it, and he shifted his head to the side so Addison could have a better look at it. "What do you think? How does it look?"

"I think it looks like someone gave you a black eye," she said, and when she moved forward on the closed toilet lid to reach out and touch it, he winced. "Sorry, I didn't mean to—you really should get that looked at." It was unnecessary for her fingers to run from the bruising down the side of his face to his jaw, unnecessary for her to bring her fingertips from the ascending ramus to his mental protuberance, and it was odd to her how her brain still qualified things like a textbook, like a copy of Gray's Anatomy, and it would be alright, she told her brain, to say, This is his face, this is his jaw, this is his chin.

He met her eyes, and she realized that his warm hand was still around her ankle. She suddenly didn't know what to do with her hand, still at his chin, but she knew what she wanted to do, which was slide her fingers to the back of his neck and pull him to her to kiss him. His hand pulled at her leg, and he moved forward the tiniest bit; what had once been a fairly innocent position was suddenly intensely arousing, and it was Addison's instinct to run. There was no running from this though, no getting around Karev, no escaping him, and she found she didn't want to.

"Did Mark do this to you?" she asked, turning his head to the side a little again, and his hand moved from her ankle to her calf, under the hem of her scrubs, his fingertips rough, but the patterns they traced were deftly surgical, precise, unconscious.

Karev laughed a little and said, "Only after I did it to him. Twice."

"Why?"

"He's a bully."

"Did he say something?" There was a flair of protectiveness inside Addison's chest—she had no doubt that Karev could handle himself against Mark, who was mostly flimsy and all talk, but that didn't mean she couldn't be worried for him or that she was okay with him throwing himself in the line of fire, whether it was for her or not. It looked bad in the harsh light of the bathroom, and it would look worse come morning, when the ruptured capillaries had time to spread through the space under his skin.

Karev shook his head at the question and pulled away from her a little, breaking the eye contact, breaking the physical contact with her hand too, and she said, "What is it?"

"I used to wrestle," he said, and it was almost absently. "You know, in college and high school. My dad was a bully. Worse than Sloan, but a bully." He looked down to where his hand rested around her calf, his thumb brushing over the bulge of her fibula, and she put her hand to the side of his face again, ran her fingers through his short hair, ran her thumb along his cheekbone—just to remind him that she was there, that she was going nowhere. "I started wrestling to help my mom, you know? Sometimes it was really bad. He was really bad. Heroin, all kinds of other shit, and one day I finally put him into the hospital. And that was just, you know, that."

She didn't know what to say. In the span of twenty minutes, they'd managed to reveal to each other the most painful of their secrets, and when he looked back at her to say, "It really pisses me off sometimes, the way he treats you," she had the sudden, rushing realization that Alex Karev might not be so hard to fall in love with.

There was a joke she thought to make, a whisper of 'Yeah, me too', but she couldn't make that joke, not with her feeling the way she felt and not with him looking at her like that, like he saw her, like he'd always seen her. Like he'd take care of her. Like he'd never forget her birthday or their anniversary. It was so easy to be so far ahead of herself when he looked at her like that, and she didn't know who moved towards the other first, her hand pulling at the back of his head, his hand moving from her calf to the ticklish spot just above her knee, but when they kissed, Addison marked it down in her internal scrapbook as the third proper kiss.

It didn't seem to matter suddenly that she was older than he was or that her baggage was often too heavy for her to carry, that she was divorced and damaged and just trying to figure things out. At first his kiss was delicate, and then its rhythm changed, enough to disarm Addison. Karev shifted, and she realized he was moving onto his knees, and when he had to break the kiss to readjust his position, suddenly between her legs and almost at her height, she let out an involuntary whimper. He laughed at her—and rightfully so, her brain said—and then his hand was in her hair and his mouth on hers again. God, it had been too long since the last time she kissed someone who legitimately made her excited, and he knew exactly what he was doing, pressed between her legs, and she wanted to reach her hands around to his back and pull his scrub top up over his head, but they were in the hospital restroom of all places, and she couldn't—

Her train of thought was gone completely as his mouth moved to the tender spot just under her ear, and one hand was still on the back of her head, but the other dropped to her thigh. When she whimpered again, her own lack of control dismaying to her, he laughed against the skin of her neck and said, "I like that noise."

She put her hand to his neck and pulled back to look at him, and she said, "Shut up, Karev."

He laughed the kind of heady, deep laugh that made her want to do things to him that she hadn't done since her chandelier-swinging medical school days, and he said, "Yes, ma'am," and then there was his mouth again, and his tongue touched hers with a shock that quickly faded as she reciprocated. This was what it felt like to be out of practice, years of sex with no one but Mark and Derek, and they were fine and good, but Alex Karev made her feel, for the first time in a very long time, beautiful and wanted and alive. She wanted to be closer to him, inside his scrubs—inside his skin—and she moved her hand to his face to pull him even closer to her.

"Fuck," he said, and it wasn't a sexy half-grunt of a 'fuck'; it was her hand hitting the bruised side of his face that did it, and the moment was ruined. "Now," he said with a laugh, holding the side of his face, "now I probably need to get someone to look at it."

"I happen to know a very good plastic surgeon."

"Oh, shut up," he said, and his tone was teasing, intimate, personal, and she tried to think of the best way to ask him what the hell they were doing, he between her legs, she a little hot and bothered, the taste of him still very on her mouth. She tried to figure out a way to ask him out, to do it properly, how to say, Hey, you and me—and before she could even find those words, the door opened.

"Hey, guys, if you're getting biblical, I don't want to intrude, but the chief's looking for you, for both of you—and he looks pissed," came Callie's voice, and it seemed less like an interruption than a pause, a comma in what Addison knew would continue later.

And Karev looked at her and kissed her softly on the mouth before standing up and adjusting his pants, she noted with amusement and pride. She still had it in her to get the men worked up. He grunted, half-swallowing the sound, and as he looked down at where she sat, still on the toilet seat, he said, "I wonder if I have time for a cold shower."

…

Twice she found other women's panties in the belongings of the man she loved. The second time, they were Meredith's panties, black, ridiculous, and tiny—but it was the first time that was gutting. The first time, they were pink, tiny, and ridiculous, and they were in Mark's things. She sat on her bed, her bed, because she had to address everything in the singular, because what had once been their bed, hers and Derek's, was now just hers, and it would never be hers and Mark's, no matter how much time they spent there, and she sat on the bed holding the pink pair of panties, not Victoria's Secret but some knock-off with an embroidered pair of lips on the hip. They weren't just ridiculous, they were trashy, and it was the first time her brain used that word to describe Mark. Trashy. Ridiculous.

She couldn't cry. She wanted to, God, did she want to. She wanted to cry and scream, and she wanted to run to Mark and tell him she couldn't believe she gambled everything on him. She wanted to be vengeful and spiteful and a hundred other –fuls, and then she wanted to come back to her place and listen to Nancy Sinatra, and she wanted to put on her favorite pair of heels and then get blitzed and laid and go back to the beginning and start over again with something fresh and new and good.

There was just one small problem with that, she realized, sitting on her bed, holding a pair of pink panties, wearing just a towel. The problem was she loved him. She loved him with everything that was left over from Derek, and that might not have been a lot, but it was everything she had left. And there was nothing after that. That was all there was to Addison Montgomery-Shepherd. There was Derek, and then there was Mark, and she couldn't bring herself to cry.

And maybe it was what she deserved, she realized—to be cheated on. That was what she deserved, because she had done it to a man who loved her. She had taken everything good and pure about Derek and wasted it on a man who was good in bed and took his time to tell her she was beautiful when her own husband couldn't say hi when they crossed paths, eternal ships in the night. She had done that, and when he finally left, even though it was only a handful of days after the incident—incident, she liked to call it, because it came from the Latin for to befall, and that implied that maybe she wasn't the only guilty party—she called Mark. And Mark sat across from her and pledged his allegiance to the flag of Addison, and she said, Alright, let's do this.

But then there was the issue of the pink panties in her hand. She got dressed in silence, ate breakfast in silence, and she replayed the moment of discovery over and over again. He had left for an early surgery, and she went to his drawer—and she'd done it a hundred times, which meant the panties were new, and this was recent, this betrayal—to grab a t-shirt of his, and there they were. A badge of honor. Mark's inability to keep it in his pants. You could take the man-whore off of the market, but you apparently could not keep the market off of the man-whore.

She slammed cabinets with the calm security of a woman scorned. For the first time in weeks, she had moral superiority. Derek, on the other side of the country, could still judge her, but Mark was a different story. Mark would see Addison Montgomery at her best—or her worst, depending on the point of view. Moral indignation suited her, she decided, pouring herself a cup of coffee. For a solid hour, she steamed, and for a solid hour, she watched the pink panties in the center of her dining room table, as though they might stand up and announce their ownership.

They didn't need to. She knew precisely whose they were.

When she got to her office, she brought the pair of panties with her. She vaguely considered stopping to behave like an adult, ending things with Mark, calling it a very long, bad day, but she was not a woman to let things go lightly. Other women could suffer in silence. Addison liked to suffer out loud and in front of other people.

Her receptionist, Suzie, was already at work, which was just as Addison planned it. Suzie, that was a ridiculous name, just like her ridiculous panties, and Suzie looked up at her from the desk in the waiting room. The only thing that could have stopped Addison's impending outburst would be patients waiting for her, because the one thing more important than her pride was her practice, but it was too early for anyone to be in, too early for pregnant women holding their stomachs with the pain of morning sickness. Suzie, Suzie, Suzie, Addison thought as she stopped at the desk to pick up her messages, scrawled with Suzie's name, little heart over the I, and she languidly read through them. Had it been last night, when Addison was delivering the newborn Thompson baby? Was Suzie looking at her, thinking about how she'd slept with the man Addison loved?

Suzie had had sex with Addison's Mark. That was what he was. He was her Mark. He was her Mark and she was going to stab him with a stiletto, preferably one belonging to what she could only imagine to be many girlfriends, but Suzie, well, Suzie was going to suffer Addison's wrath in a different way.

"How are you today, Suzie?" Addison asked her, still idly scanning through her messages.

"I'm good, Dr. Montgomery-Shepherd, how are you?"

I'm homicidal, she almost said. I'm going to gut you and hang you up to be eaten by the birds, she almost said. She looked at Suzie, and she thought of when she went to surprise Mark at work and he was giving Suzie a consult, she in her underwear—those absurd panties—receiving a … consult. Consult, breast job, it just didn't matter. Her panties were in Mark's drawer, and Addison was going to hit someone.

Instead what she did was reach into her coat pocket and pull out the balled-up panties and set them on the counter. With just her fingertips, she took one hip and then the other, and she spread them out and held them up. "These, I believe, belong to you, Suzie."

Addison always liked anger because of how clean it burned. Once she got angry enough, everything else disappeared in the white-hot flare of it. Anger made her feel better. But Suzie clearly didn't feel better because of Addison's fury. Her face turned white and then promptly shifted to bright pink, and she opened her mouth to try to stutter an explanation, and Addison said, "Sweetheart, save it."

It wasn't much, but it was enough for Addison. Nobody was going to play her for a fool, and nobody was going to pull one over on her. Suzie still had no response, and Addison set her panties on the counter, gathered her messages, and headed back to her office.

…

Addison was the first to step into the elevator after the meeting with the chief, where she'd been called to defend a sexual relationship she wasn't having—yet, at any rate—and there was a soothing familiarity to the paneling inside the elevator, to the fact that it would always be there, always be necessary. It would always run up and down, and that, at the very least, would never change. Richard was right, of course, that there could be no yelling matches, attending vs. attending, there could be no physical fights, intern vs. attending, and just because everything was a little strange around Seattle Grace as of late it didn't mean that everyone could start acting like there were no rules. Addison knew that. Addison had been on the receiving end of that particular lecture more than once, and it was suddenly funny to her, the way it was probable that some of them would simply never grow up. Mark, for one, but maybe she could lump herself into that category too. The hospital was too self-contained, too much an entire subculture all on its own. People lived, slept, ate, worked, and played at Seattle Grace, the same way it was at every hospital, and there would be slips from time to time, bad judgment calls, punches thrown, mistakes made, and every once in a while, people would fall in love. And they would get heartbroken, hurt, destroyed, damaged. Most of the time they got up and went to work the next morning in spite of it. Addison had always gone to work the next morning, even if it had been to ask for the day off to do some drinking. Even if she got up early to dye her hair blonde. She still went in.

The next person to get into the elevator was Mark, who wouldn't look at her, his bottom lip still extended to show the depth of his sorrow about his wounded face. Karev could take it like a man, but Mark took it like a plastic surgeon, surveying the damage, wondering how much less or more sex would be coming his way because of it. He looked at her, and then he turned around. His shoulders were tense, and she could almost feel his clenched jaw from a couple of feet away. He might have been legitimately angry with her, she realized, and maybe he had reason to be. She and Karev were doing poor jobs of concealing their mutual attraction, and she was the one who said that she didn't want to give up all of the history between her and Mark. It was her deal, and she was breaking it. "You know, Addison," Mark said as the elevator started to close, and then there was a hand between the elevator doors, pushing them back open.

It was Karev, and he looked at Mark and then grinned at Addison shamelessly, and she thought back to the moment in Richard's office when Richard looked at the three of them and said, 'Are you two having a sexual relationship?' We're not, no, we're not, Addison and Karev had said, overlapping each other, making themselves look guilty as hell, and the memory of barely being able to keep from laughing then made her laugh in the confinement of the elevator. Karev came to stand next to her, and she braced herself with one hand on the railing behind her. At first she made an honest attempt to stop the laughter, but it had been a long day, and she had to turn around to face the wall, both hands on the railing. Karev leaned against the wall, and the elevator doors slid shut behind her.

It was funny—and she couldn't help that—that a year ago she was in love with two men, fighting for one of them and avoiding the other. It was funny that she gave up a successful practice in New York to come to Seattle, a place she hated, to pursue a man who wanted nothing to do with her, and it was funny about Meredith Grey. It was funny too about the various women Mark had slept with, and it was funny that Addison kept going back for more, in spite of her much better judgment. It was all just so funny, the thousands of things that had lead up to her standing in an elevator with an intern she wanted to get naked and an attending she'd seen naked, and when Karev looked over at her, it made her laugh even harder. He started to laugh too, and she wondered what Mark was thinking, whether he thought they were laughing at him or if he was too preoccupied with his damaged face to care, and when the elevator stopped on some floor, any floor, Karev wrapped his arm around her waist, turned her around, and lead her out and around Mark, who said and did nothing.

He was still laughing when he told Mark, "We're getting off here," and when the elevator doors slid closed on Mark's unamused expression, Karev tightened his grip around Addison's waist and said, "We're going to be in so much trouble."

…

When Addison arrived at Exam Room 2 to pay her promised apology to the McEnroes, it was Mrs. McEnroe who looked at Addison first and said, "We've chosen a name."

Baby McEnroe was back in the incubator to ensure his temperature stability and his breathing, and Addison wanted to say that she understood how hard this had all been for them, but it would have been a lie. She understood intellectually, and she understood on paper. She understood what she had observed in other people, but she didn't know the gut-rot of losing a child that you didn't choose to lose or the fear of the prospect of it. She did understand in a way how hard it must have been for them to find a way to hope.

Karev was behind her, but he moved around her to go into the room. Addison watched him, and she thought she could see the seams of his adulthood, the creases of his growth, the pull of his mental skin where his strength had outgrown his body. She didn't know how many cases he had taken responsibility for over the last couple of months, but she did know that, whatever happened between him and her, she had to encourage him towards this and away from plastics. It had nothing to do with Mark and everything to do with the lives he could save.

Baby McEnroe's mother, to whom Addison still referred as Mrs. McEnroe, even though the family was unmarried—because to be a parent was to be joined, inseparable in this thing even if in nothing else, was a small woman, too tiny to have given birth to a child. Baby McEnroe was tiny too, but he was a survivor, and as Addison leaned against the door, she realized that maybe Baby McEnroe's mother was a survivor too. Baby McEnroe's father sat on the bed next to her, his hand touching her knee through the fabric of her sheets, and Baby McEnroe's mother looked at Addison and said, "We thought about it—when we heard you and the other doctor fighting. And you're right, we have to give our baby a chance, and we have to fight for him."

"And Dr. Karev said," Baby McEnroe's father said, looking over his shoulder to Karev, who stood in his familiar place by the windows, "that we'd always regret not fighting for something we loved."

It was always jarring, the change in perspective. She should have expected that Karev would continue to surprise her, but no matter how prepared she thought she was for it, he found new ways to silently tell her that she hadn't seen anything yet.

"And that's why," Baby McEnroe's mother said, looking to her husband for last-minute approval, "we've decided to name him Alex."

Karev coughed and said, "What?" as though for a moment he couldn't remember his own name, or that he had no idea that his bearing upon another person's life could be so meaningful as to bestow his name on another human being. He looked at the McEnroes and then at Addison, who felt strangely proud of him, of the things he'd accomplished by just being a good doctor. "Wow, I—" he said, and then he shook his head.

This, she realized, was the moment of his maturing as a doctor. More than losing a patient or making a mistake was this, the pivotal, defining moment, the realization of one's effect, the cognizance of his own power. This was something Karev would remember for the rest of his life, and there would be days later on when he would stop and remind himself that there was a child out there with his name, and it was because of something he said or did, a touch he gave, the honesty in his voice, the precision in his heart. This would be what he would carry with him forever, even if he remembered nothing else about this day, not Addison, not punching Mark Sloan, he would remember this.

"I think it's an excellent name," Addison said, filling the space, and the McEnroes smiled at her.

Karev's attention was elsewhere, and he pulled his pager off of the waistband of his scrubs, and he said, "9-1-1 call." And then, to cover for the lack of sound, he said, "I turned it on to silent. Because we were in the chief's office." It was a lie; Karev knew just as well as Addison did the specific rules about the pagers, number one being never to turn them to silent, no matter the situation, but he excused himself from the room, and Addison watched him go.

…

He stood next to Baby McEnroe's incubator—no, Alex McEnroe's incubator, Addison corrected herself—and Addison watched him from the doorway. He had yet to notice her, and she watched his careful precision in the hearing of the child's heart, the taking of his temperature, the monitoring of the vital signs. She'd been there for five minutes with no cognizance on his part, and when she finally said, "You deserve that, you know," he started, surprised, and looked up at her.

Oh, thought Addison; his eyes were red from the tears he had yet to cry, and this was the desperate, scared side of Alex Karev she had yet to see, the side that felt so vibrantly as to move her. She went to him, and he did not withdraw his hands from the incubator, and he still said nothing. It was not bravado. It was not ego. It was not anything but the beautiful simplicity of his love. Maybe he wasn't the kind of guy to cry at Hallmark commercials, but by God, he could be moved. He could be affected. "It's an excellent name," Addison said again, watching his face, and when he pulled his hand out of the incubator to stubbornly wipe away a tear, she knew he'd been right back at the elevator—they were going to be in so much trouble.

To be continued.