Disclaimer and Author Notes: See Chapter 1.
Note to All Readers: I know I said that I'd be posting only one chapter a day, but this one is pretty short, so I'll post two. Consider it a "thank you" for all the nice comments I've received. Happy reading!
Note to My Latest Guest Reviewer: Thanks ever so much for the kind words. I'm afraid that I'll have to disappoint you about the ending, though. This fic is trying to stay pretty close to events as they were portrayed on the show, despite a few deviations-some on purpose, some not. :-D If you'd like to discuss my theories about Mark and Addison's relationship-why it worked and why it was fated to end-PM me.
Move On
We're Gonna Be All Right
Chapter 7
Even though he was exhausted at the end of a long day that had come at the end of an even longer week, Mark stared steadily at the ceiling in the darkened room. He couldn't remember ever having had a more discouraging week in his life. He hadn't felt this alone since he was a kid, and . . . since he was a kid.
Losing the baby had been hard-harder than Mark wanted to admit. Even so, he'd listened to Addison talking about her patients often enough to know that miscarriages were not uncommon and that one miscarriage should not be taken as a sign that they wouldn't be able to make another baby. He could-he could-he told himself firmly, start over once Addison recovered. So, it wasn't the loss of the baby that made Mark uneasy. It was the way losing the baby had changed Addison.
Mark understood that Addison was bound to be more deeply affected by the loss of the baby than he was. He'd expected her to be sad, even weepy-and wanting lots of attention while she recovered. He'd been prepared to ask Johnson to take over the practice for as long as it took (a week? two weeks? Maybe take her away for a mini-vacation?) to help her get back to her normal high spirits. Instead, he'd watched her draw away from him, politely but firmly rebuffing his attempts to reach out to her.
It wasn't that he expected her to have intercourse with him; he understood that her body was going to need time to recover. No intercourse for now. But no intercourse didn't have to mean no fun. But now? Nothing. No games, no toys, no role-playing, no creativity. No testing the boundaries between pain and pleasure.
Before the miscarriage, he and Addison had spent time talking together even when they weren't having sex. And that had been fun, too. But since she lost the baby? Having exhausted their share of "How was your day?" small talk over dinner, there didn't even seem to be anything left to talk about once it was time to go to bed. He missed her.
The irony of the timing didn't escape him. That Addison should leave him feeling this way just when the fucking guilt from his last random encounter at Hanratty's had him wondering whether he wanted to give monogamy a try just seemed like a sign from the universe that he was a fool for even thinking about trying. And yet, for reasons he couldn't explain, even to himself, he wanted to try. At least for a little while. Derek managed for more than eleven years-even more when you counted from the engagement or even from when they started dating seriously. He could give it a try.
If she didn't drive him out of his fucking mind first.
The first night, after dinner at Acqua, Addison had gone to bed alone (at her request) while he killed time watching a Mets game before joining her. Several hours later, he'd woken to find Addison's body jammed into his side while she sobbed quietly. He then made the mistake of asking her what was wrong, which sent her flying into the bathroom as she mumbled something about cramps. Mark turned on the light and sat up to wait for her, wondering whether this was a medical emergency or just the normal aftermath of a miscarriage. When she hadn't come back after a few minutes, he tapped on the bathroom door to ask her if she needed help, only to be met with a whimpered plea for him to please go back to sleep. Knowing he was unwanted and getting tired of being treated that way, Mark stifled several sarcastic comments and went back to bed. Once there, he closed his eyes and lay still enough to give Addison the impression he had done as she asked. Ten or fifteen minutes later, Addison did come back to bed, albeit to the far side of mattress. He eventually fell into a fitful sleep, only to wake up and find her curled around him as if the past few days had never happened. Carefully remaining still so as not to disturb her, Mark relished the feeling that life was finally returning to normal. However, when Addison awoke, she immediately disentangled herself from him with a pleasant politeness that had him feeling as if he were a guest in his own bed.
On subsequent nights, Addison continued the pattern. There were no more sobbing fits in the bathroom, but Addison would keep her distance until he slept (or at least, seemed to sleep), whereupon she would snuggle into his embrace—his arm over or next to her body, her head and hand lying on his chest—until morning. As soon as he showed the slightest signs of consciousness, she'd withdraw to her side of the mattress. He savored the feel of her body against his while it lasted, resisting the realization that these brief interludes were the only indication he had left that Addison still wanted a future with him.
And as for the daytime? Mark learned to keep his distance-mostly as an increasingly begrudging acknowledgment that secret snuggling-snuggling so secret even he wasn't supposed to know about it!-was the only support Addison seemed to want from him.
Confused and resentful, Mark wished like hell that he had someone he could talk to about what was going on. However, his support system until now had consisted mostly of Shepherds, so . . . Derek? Next. Mrs. Shepherd? He hadn't really talked to her about any of the females in his life since he was a teen-ager, but if the woman he'd fallen in love with hadn't been Addison, he would have wanted to bring that woman "home" to meet her-but the woman was Addison, so. . . . And the others? Derek's sisters could always be counted on to offer opinions when it came to his relationships with other women, even if they contradicted each other. In this situation, Nancypants would have been the ideal person to confide in. Both as a GYN and as the sister-in-law closest to Addison, she could let him know whether Addison's behavior fit within the normal ranges of reaction to a miscarriage or whether he should be concerned over something more. On the other hand, Lizzie had had two miscarriages before they diagnosed her luteal phase defect; she and Donal could provide moral support. Amy and Kathleen-no special expertise there, but-
"Idiot!" Mark growled at himself. Kathleen really didn't have any special expertise in this area-her practice specialized in adult survivors of childhood abuse-but the fact that she was a psychiatrist reminded Mark there was more than one department at Sinai that could be helpful. He'd wondered before about asking one of gynecologists whether he should be concerned about Addison's reaction to the miscarriage, but he knew that Addison didn't want him asking her staff for information that might connect her personal life to the gossip mill. A psychiatrist was less likely to know who either of them was-and besides, he could just say that he was asking about a patient. It was perfect.
No. Almost perfect. If people assumed he was willing to perform plastic surgery on a woman who'd just lost a baby, it would damage his professional reputation. Fixing people's outsides could help them feel better about their insides, but there were certain clearly defined groups who just weren't good candidates for plastic surgery no matter how badly they wanted it-and that included people who had recently suffered a traumatic loss. So, he'd change the story to the wife of a patient. That would work.
Mark grinned. He had a plan. A good plan. A plan that would work. And why shouldn't he? He was a man who'd perfected the art of unraveling relationships. He could find a way to reverse engineer the process. He was Mark Sloan.
And Mark Sloan had a plan.
He slept.
divider-divider-divider
Addison stared dry eyed at the ceiling, her thoughts caught in same whirlwind they'd been riding all week. Should she stay or should she go?
She should go. Savvy was right. But what came next? She still hated the idea of going back to the brownstone and couldn't think of anywhere else she might go that wouldn't involve awkward explanations. And Mark? Mark was Mark-incredibly sexy, and funny, and . . . and unexpectedly kind-a perfect distraction-and-at least for now-willing to do whatever it took to make her happy. She'd be a fool to throw that away, one part of her brain pointed out rationally, while yet another part-a part she hated-snickered at the phrase "at least for now."
Addison stifled a groan. She knew that the relationship couldn't last forever, and that it would be better to make her exit sooner rather than later. It made no sense to make an already incredibly complicated situation even more so. And yet-! It would be so much easier to leave if Mark would provide her with an excuse-something to convince herself that leaving was the only option and to forestall any attempt on his part to make her stay on the grounds of their "love." This would all have been so much easier if only she'd found a stray earring or an unfamiliar set of panties somewhere in the condo-or caught him coming out of an on-call room with a nurse. Why couldn't he just get it over with?
She sighed.
It was time to start making some real plans, and that meant admitting the truth. Despite her earlier illusions about Derek's belief in the permanence of their vows, he probably wasn't coming back. Savvy was right to advise her that she should be ready to offer him a generous settlement and avoid a court fight. Tomorrow-no, today, she corrected herself after she realized what time it must be, she'd see H. L. Winthrop, the family lawyer, about getting the papers drawn up. Even so, it didn't have to be too generous, she thought spitefully; she might be the cheating spouse, but she was also the abandoned spouse. And, after all, she'd paid off all his student loans and provided the buy-in for the fancy practice he had taken over at the end of his residency; there was no way he could have become the darling of the Upper West Side so quickly without her money and connections. If she agreed to waive all claims to her half of his practice and hand over the brownstone (which she couldn't imagine wanting again, anyway), half of all their joint accounts, and ten years' worth of reasonable alimony payments so that he could continue to enjoy "the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed," she was offering him more than he would end up with after a protracted fight in court over their assets. That kind of fight would enrich only the lawyers and the tabloid reporters.
Another bonus to a quiet settlement was the fact that it would keep her family off her back. Well-at least it wouldn't make anything worse. After all the years she'd spent lecturing the Captain and Archie about their relentless libidos, it was beyond believability to expect that they wouldn't have plenty to say about her affair with Mark.
And as for her mother? Even though she had nothing to fear in the way of a rebuke or even a tease from Bizzy, admitting the truth to her would be a hundred times worse. Bizzy would never be gauche enough to speak directly to her about her transgression. WASP-speak demanded that the touchier the topic, the more heavily one relied on misdirection to communicate-to the extent that one communicated at all. But fear of her mother's reaction wasn't the point. She burned with shame at facing her mother knowing that she'd treated Derek the same way the Captain had treated her.
Some part of Addison knew the comparison was overblown, to say the least. Her own one-night stand . . . her desperate, incredibly stupid attempt to get Derek's attention-was so different in essence from her father's continual, barely veiled adulteries that they should scarcely even be mentioned in the same breath. And yet, late at night . . . it was hard to ignore the fact that she and her father had both earned the label of cheater. Or that she respected Derek's angry departure as a far more dignified choice than Bizzy's deliberate blindness to what was going on right in front of her. Or that she'd sunk even lower than the Captain by pretending to be in love with Mark instead of admitting that she no longer felt that way about him-if she'd ever loved him at all.
No, that wasn't fair. She had loved Mark. Yes, she had. No matter how drunk she'd been, she had to have loved him to have fallen into his arms like that. For that moment, for that night, she had chosen him over Derek. She'd been drunk and angry and . . . and crazy, but she'd chosen him over Derek. What had she been thinking? She'd escaped following in her mother's footsteps by marrying a man who was faithful to her, and then she chose Mark! She couldn't, she wouldn't do this to herself or to her someday children.
