Viscosity
Summary: In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. AU post Some Kind of Miracle and for the rest of the season.
Rating: T.
Author's note: Before anyone freaks out about this chapter, this story is 197 percent Addisex, and it will end up happy, I swear on everything good and pure. I'm still only about 50 percent of the way through what I plan to do, and hey, it took Meredith and Derek forever to work things out. The next chapter is something a little bit of a surprise, so sit tight. As usual, thank you for the warm response, you guys are awesome.
Chapter 9: I Can't Feel My Hand Anymore, It's Alright, Sleep Still
She took her time to stop by the locker room, to change out of her scrub top, to remove Alex's shirt, which still smelled a lot like him but mostly like her now, which made her feel like maybe she'd made the whole thing up, the sweet, small kisses in the morning and him kissing her neck while Izzie Stevens sat on the bed, and she probably had made it up, she realized, just like she made up that she and Mark could make it work or that she and Derek could go back to the way they used to be, pre-Meredith, pre-black panties, and she folded his shirt, placed it on the bench in front of his locker, and put her scrub top back on. Her pager beeped again, the second round, which meant it was an orange alert now, a major hospital disaster on its way to them, compartmentalized in ambulances, one after the other, and the shirt folding wasn't much, but it felt a little like vengeance.
…
The first woman they unloaded from the ambulances was pregnant—or she had been, and that much Addison could see just by looking at the twelve inches of glass protruding from her abdomen. Dr. Bailey called for her, her voice coming like a bellow over the cacophony of the sirens, and she pushed her way through the sudden swell of people to the back of the ambulance as the paramedics lowered the girl's gurney to the ground. One of the paramedic's hands slipped, and the gurney bounced on the pavement. "Could we please try not to kill the people who aren't dead?" was Miranda's sharp criticism, and the paramedic had the good sense to look scared and sheepish.
"Does she have a name?" Addison asked, and the girl was unconscious, being fed her life through an oxygen mask, and the paramedic, who couldn't have been much older than twenty-five, looked at Addison, panic in his eyes. "A name," she said, "does she have a name?"
The wound was intense, a sucking, gaping wound into which the shard of glass had worked itself, a sliver of death directly into her side. The mother might have been savable, but the child was gone. There was no way for it to be alive, and her stomach was so round that she had to be eight or even nine months into her pregnancy—and there might be no way to dispose of the baby, God, dispose, like it was garbage, but in a way it was, and a dead child inside of a mother could cause more problems through the umbilical cord, further complicating any recovery. The blood soaked the gauze wrapped around the piece of glass, and it cascaded down onto the gurney, too much blood and too deep a wound, and the blood was thick and so dark it could have been blue, and Addison looked at the second paramedic, who handed down the saline solution and the oxygen, and she asked again, "Does she have a name?"
"Carly," the second paramedic said, "Carly Sampson."
The girl's eyes fluttered at the mention of her name, and the second paramedic began to push the gurney past the waiting line of flashing lights and siren wails, and what she must have been thinking, Carly Sampson, on her back in the gurney, was that her child was hurt—or maybe the shock was enough, too much for her to take, and maybe somewhere there was a father to this child, a husband to this young woman, panicked and losing his mind over her. "She couldn't have been driving a car," Addison said to the first paramedic, who had seen enough tragedy for one day. "She's too far into her third trimester. Someone else was driving her. Find out who and do it now."
He nodded, the move so short and tense Addison thought he might have been a balloon about to pop, and it was only when they got the gurney moving, it bumping over the seam between outside and inside, that Carly Sampson reached out and grabbed Addison's hand. Her grip was weak from the blood loss but strong from the conviction. Her eyes opened, and she couldn't speak for the oxygen mask over her face, but it didn't matter—she spoke the universally translatable language of every young mother that Addison saw walk into her hospital. It was the terror of the situation that gave her clarity, the instinctual, primal mother's fear for her child. And there was no way to tell her that the baby was already dead. There was no way to look into her eyes and tell her that there was no saving her child, only saving her, because what kind of life would remain for this woman after this? Judging from her wounds, Addison couldn't even be sure the woman would be able to bear children ever again.
A nurse handed her a stethoscope, and its heaviness in her hand belied its ineffectiveness. All it could do was determine a single vital sign, a rumor of a heartbeat deep inside someone's body—and it was with resentment that Addison, still holding Carly Sampson's hand, bent to find a heartbeat in her womb. The echoing silence of death was what ripped Carly apart more than the piece of windshield lodged in her stomach, and Addison withdrew the stethoscope, unprepared to note the time of death until she knew for sure, and when she met Carly's eyes again, she knew that the other woman knew. And she knew too that she was hoping against hope, and God damn it, Addison was going to hope too.
"Carly," Addison said, and she handed the stethoscope back to the nurse, whose eyes were wide with the impending tragedy, "Carly, my name is Dr. Montgomery. We are going to take you into triage, and then we are going to have to operate. How far along are you? Just nod. Are you eight months?" Her voice was cooler than her head was,
and Carly's eyes flickered and she nodded, the movement difficult for the tubes and wires surrounding her. The nurse reached across in front of her to redress the wound, and it was a massacre of blood around Carly's abdomen. "Okay, Carly, we're going to have this baby a little early," Addison said, and the nurse met Addison's eyes. They both knew. There was no ignorance.
And it was Addison's decision. It was her decision not to tell.
She knew the panic of losing a child. She'd had that moment of panic, and it had been her decision. It was her decision to go to the doctor and have it taken care of, another euphemism she hated, because 'taken care of' implied something else altogether, and then in the hours, days, weeks after, she felt the loss so supremely that it could have been as though she had a miscarriage, which was what it technically was. Forced miscarriage. Blood in the toilet, thanks to the drugs, and that was the wonder of modern medicine, but there were no drugs for the destruction of her body and the contagion of her head. And in the moments when she needed people most, Derek was in Seattle, and Mark wouldn't speak to her nor she to him, and that was her fault too. Her decision.
Just like this was her decision. "Carly," she said, bending low over the young woman again. She could tell she'd been a beautiful girl, still was a beautiful girl for the panic in her face and the blood on her skin, and Addison said, "Carly, was your husband driving your car? Just nod for me."
It was then that Carly's expression of panic and fear turned to tears, and as they welled up and spilled over out of her eyes and slid down her face, they traced paths in the dried blood—and she nodded. "Find the husband," she said to the nurse, to anyone who would listen. "Stop this bleeding, prep her for surgery, check the board for the OR, and get her to me as quickly as you can. I'm going to go scrub in. And someone page Dr. Karev for me—I need his hands on this one."
…
The call to the OR came from one of the other operating rooms, and it was Derek for Addison, and one of the surgical nurses answered and held it out and said, "Dr. Shepherd, Dr. Montgomery." Her hands were scrubbed clean but not gloved, and the nurse held the phone to the side of Addison's head and it was Derek's voice to tinnily tell her that he had Will Sampson in his OR with major head and spine trauma and it was unlikely that he'd survive, and even if he did, the spine was severed. He would be paralyzed, regardless of the outcome of the surgery. And Addison digested this. Carly Sampson was moments away from an emergency c-section on Addison's operating table, her husband was only a few doors down, and Addison knew, sickly, that it was improbable that the child she pulled out of Carly's womb was intact, let alone alive. And she had to take a shaky moment to gather herself. She didn't know what she was saving this woman's life for—the chances were high that what she would be living with was the death of her husband and the death of her child, and how would she survive that? Addison didn't know Carly Sampson, but she didn't have to. To lose a husband, to lose a child, it could be nothing short of devastating.
But it wasn't her call to make, the determination of life or death for a young woman for whom life might be worse than death. Primum non nocere—first, do no harm. The windshield in her side had missed vital organs but impaled the womb, like an arrowed death warrant for the child alone, and Addison had to stop in the doorway between scrub room and operating room and bend over to keep from vomiting. Would she want to be saved? If she, pregnant and married, knew her child and husband would not survive, would Addison choose to live? Would she take the noble course and go on with her life, determined to overcome, as she was always so proud of doing? Or would she give up?
It was not a choice a doctor would allow her in a time of disaster. This was the power bestowed upon her, and it was the responsibility. She would save Carly Sampson, regardless of what happened beyond the operating room. Addison Forbes Montgomery would do what she was trained to do.
The outside door to the scrub room opened and shut with a perfunctory swish of its plastic base on the tile floor, and Addison looked to see Alex Karev, fresh in his scrubs, light blue for interns, and his matching light blue scrub cap, passionless and lacking personality, but he would grow into that too, and she suddenly regretted having him paged for this surgery. It was too much even for her to bear—and no matter how angry or how hurt she was by the carelessness of his actions, she could not retaliate in kind.
"Ad—Dr. Montgomery, are you—"
She straightened up, and with the movement solidified herself, rebuilt her backbone. She had faked it the night before. Now there was no faking. For the sake of Carly Sampson, there was no faking. "Dr. Karev, I don't want you scrubbing in on this surgery."
"But I got the page—"
"They need you down in triage more. I can handle this."
She met his eyes fearlessly, and he almost balked under her strength. And then she saw it, the animal of anger and defensiveness rising in his eyes, the defense mechanism he must have learned from years of mistreatment from his father or from other people in his life he did his best to love but never could; she hated that she brought it out in him, but she would not do this to him. She would not let him help her pull a dead child out of a woman's womb, and she would not let him be there when she had to tell the mother. These were the things better suited for experienced surgeons, and no one, not even Addison, was strong enough for it. But the burden was hers. It was her decision. And she would keep him at arm's length surgically if it was what it took to save him this.
"We're a good team," Alex—Dr. Karev—said, the anger hardly disguisable in his voice. Some things he could hide well, and some things he could easily color over with other things—as Addison had learned from their personal situation—but this was different, as though an affront to his professional ability.
"I don't have time to explain this to you. Leave, Dr. Karev."
He wouldn't understand. And she couldn't expect him to. When he turned and went, slamming the door behind him, she knew that that had been her decision too, but one day he'd thank her for it.
…
The child was dead, and as was protocol in a time of disaster, it was put into a tiny body bag marked with a disaster tag, DOA, and there was no removing the image of the six-pound infant, white from blood loss and blue around the mouth from lack of oxygen, shriveled in upon itself, being placed into the body bag, the smallest the coroner had but still too big for the newborn. And it was hardly a newborn, the born an inaccuracy, and Addison vomited into a garbage can behind the nurse's station after the surgery, and then she prayed to a God she wasn't always sure existed for the strength to do the next surgery, the surgery on the mother to repair the womb and the internal injuries.
It was adrenaline that kept her going, the roughness of its edges and the grain of its texture, and as she stood, her hands tight around the edges of the garbage can, Derek interrupted her, a hand on her shoulder. It was the reassurance of one surgeon to another, and she didn't have to ask him to know that Will Sampson had died on the table. The bodies were beginning to pile up outside the morgue, as they did in a time of disaster, the morgue too small to accommodate the number of people who arrived at Seattle Grace and ended up with DOA tags on their toes. It was the physical representation of tragedy, and Addison wiped the back of her hand over her mouth and met Derek's eyes.
And it hit her then that he never knew about her abortion, about her decision to destroy a child who hadn't even developed enough to be included in the legal definition of child, but Derek was her family, her husband-who-was, and he never knew. Her secrets she had given away to Alex Karev, who did with them what he would and then slept with a girl, casually and without thought, in the on-call room. "Addison," Derek said, and she shook her head and said nothing. There was just nothing to say.
…
She went to triage after she could do nothing for Carly's womb—her chances for family had been mutilated by an overturned oil tanker on the interstate, wiped away in a second and then damaged beyond recognition—and it was there that she got the page to return to the ICU to talk to her patient, who was slowly waking up. Medical school had been rife with role-play situations, mimicking this kind of thing, but when the role-play was over, everyone laughed and criticized everyone else's acting talents, and that just wasn't going to happen with Carly Sampson. She got into the elevator to return to the intensive care floor, and the person to step inside with her was Mark.
Addison was too exhausted for it, the torment of his wishy-washy affections, his determination to make her feel like hell at the same time he wanted to win her back, back, as though there was a back to return to, and when he pressed the button for the third floor, he said, "Tomorrow's the day."
She wrapped her hands around the railing behind her, and there was something about it, something so profoundly pathetic, that she could feel the heat of tears in her eyes, and she turned around to face the wall and steady herself. It didn't matter about Alex and Izzie Stevens. It didn't matter, because she wasn't going to Mark. There would be no capitulation, no changing of her mind—she would not just give up on the things she decided, because then she was just proving to herself that she could not stand on her own without Alex Karev. To tell Mark that she would be with him when they had both upheld the ends of their bargains, both of them without sex for sixty days, made her sick. Just like the thought of Alex and Izzie made her sick. And the thought of Carly Sampson, broken womb and soon-to-be-broken heart, in a bed in ICU as Addison stood in an elevator so concerned about her love life made her sick too. And there was just no going back, whether Alex was in the equation or not.
She and Mark had never been about her and Alex. And the pathetic thing, the thing that made her hate Alex, was that she and Alex had never been about her and Mark. No, she was doing that on her own. Because she liked him. Because she cared about him. And God, maybe over the last couple of months she'd even begun to fall in love with him a little. But that was okay. She'd overcome.
"So I guess that's it then," Mark said, and it was strange, because she never expected him to be the one to throw in the towel first. She always suspected him to be the last man standing, but maybe Mark had matured. Maybe he saw in her that they were never going to be together again. Just like she said. Or maybe he just thought she'd broken yet another promise—and the idea of that made her angry.
"I guess that's it," she echoed, and she wiped at her eye before the tears could find the audacity to spill. "And on the record, I never slept with him."
Mark didn't say anything, and the closure was abrupt and a little sadder than she'd ever intended, but that was the way her closure seemed to be packaged lately—in harsh, small packages delivered at inopportune times and by unfortunate people, and she would take it whichever way it came. She could stave off the tears for a little while too, because once those elevator doors opened, she would have to be a professional. "This is a little sad," she said, turning back around to face the doors, her eyes dry and her resolved stiffened.
Mark looked over his shoulder at her and he said, "Yeah. Yeah, I know."
When the elevator reached the ICU floor, Addison didn't look at him again or say anything further. And that, as far as she was concerned, was that.
…
The hospital psychologist waited outside Carly's ICU room, more prepared than Addison was to deal with the emotional fallout, but it was Addison's job to deliver the news, an eternal messenger of pain and death, and this was the part that was the worst. To lose a patient on the table, that was horrible, and to witness death again and again and again was devastating, but to stand in front of the ones who were left and make their worlds a little lonelier with the deliverance of a couple of pieces of information, that was the hardest. Until the doctor arrived, people could pretend, they could make it go away. Addison was the hard truth no one could escape. Carly looked small and half-eaten by the ICU bed, her legs truncated by the incline, and with her face and hair cleaned, she looked more like the pert, pretty blonde Addison expected her to be. Carly had been in and out of consciousness, that was what her ICU nurse had said, and Addison clutched the girl's chart to her chest like a security blanket or a barrier to the pain, and she knew that was selfish.
Addison got to go home. She got to come back to work the next day. The people she loved, they were still alive, and she'd have the time in her life to make a hundred different mistakes, and maybe one day she'd still have a family with a man who loved her, but Carly would never have that opportunity, not biologically, and not with the man she'd chosen to spend the rest of her life with.
When Derek finally arrived—and it was protocol for him to be there, as the physician operating on Carly's husband—he put his hand on the small of her back and lead her into Carly's ICU room. It was just like any other patient's room, just like any other occasion in which Addison had had to walk in and deliver bad news, but this time was different. It was so different Addison could feel it in the nerves of her teeth, and she took the seat next to the bed so that she could meet Carly's eyes. "Carly, I'm the surgeon who operated on you. My name is Dr. Montgomery? Do you remember me from the emergency room?"
The nod of her head was shallow; she had to be weak and groggy still from the drugs, but her eyes were lucid, and Addison knew what she wanted to know most. And what could she say that didn't sound callous or unfeeling? What was there to say that wouldn't break her heart? The delivery was negligible. The news was the same. "We had to remove a large piece of glass from your abdomen, which severely damaged your womb."
Derek took a seat on the other side of the room, and the movement distracted her for a second. He was watching her and not Carly, and she met his eyes, hoping to draw from him the same strength she'd always been able to, the kind of strength that had always made them Addison-and-Derek, but although his eyes were kind and warm and sympathetic, he was reserving his strength for himself. She'd have to find hers on her own.
And when Addison looked back at Carly, she knew that the other woman knew what was coming, had probably known from the second the gurney landed on that sidewalk outside and Addison's eyes met hers for the first time. "In order to save your life, we had to perform an emergency c-section. You will make a full recovery, but—"
But what, Addison? her brain asked her. But what. You're about to tell a woman your child is dead, and it was so different from waking up from an outpatient surgery to a doctor saying, 'Well, you're all done'. It was so vastly different, and Addison's throat constricted, and her mouth was suddenly dry, but this just wasn't about her. It was about the young woman in the bed who had spent all day fighting for her life and won, but in the process lost the things dearest to her. "We were not able to save your child," Addison said, and the internal monologue had only taken seconds, but it felt like years. "And it is unlikely that, without a womb donor, you will ever be able to bear children naturally."
And that was it, the band-aid ripped off, and that was the end of the hard part for Addison but the beginning of the terrible part for Carly Sampson. It wasn't over for Carly. Addison kept her eyes on the other girl's until Carly began to cry, silent tears that filled her eyes and burst onto her cheeks, and that was when Derek stood up to take Addison's seat.
…
It was only a little later when Addison stepped into the elevator with Preston Burke that she started to cry, the exhaustion of the day finally catching up to her and pulling her down with it. In her first moment of being away from the maddening crowd, she let it all go, the uncontrollable devastation of losing Carly's child, her despair at her inability to save Carly's womb, Alex and Izzie Stevens in the on-call room, and Mark too, because goodbyes, no matter how desired, were never easy, and she let herself cry for the first time in what felt like a very long time. The mascara didn't matter, the way she knew it would run down her cheeks and leave her with the long dark track marks that would serve as evidence of her breakdown. All that really mattered was that girl in that ICU room and Addison's sheer willpower to just keep going.
But she had to turn around and face the wall again, because Preston was her friend, but more than that he was her colleague. And she couldn't stand there and pretend that everything was fine. He leaned against the wall of the elevator, and she saw him out of her peripheral vision, strong and solid and there, and she cried in her silence, and what Preston Burke said was, "You don't quit. Addison Montgomery never quits."
"I don't quit," she repeated, and she meant it, every last God forsaken syllable of it, but she felt drained, her hair loose and limp, her face wet with her own tears, black pools of makeup forming under her eyes. She felt tired enough to give up, if only for a day, but Preston was right—Addison Montgomery didn't give up. Not now, not ever.
The elevator stopped, and Addison tightened her hands around the railing, hoping to get strength from the cool, solid piece of metal. The door behind them opened, and Addison saw Preston move forward, and she heard him say, "Maybe you should take the next elevator down."
That was friendship. It was good, true friendship, like the kind she had with Callie, and with that too there was respect, a kind of professional courtesy that doctors paid one another. Everyone had their days. Addison was no different. And she expected the nurse or the doctor or the lost patient or whoever it was to stop, agree, and turn around, but it wasn't any of the above, and when someone said, "What's going on?" she recognized the voice quickly and immediately as Alex's.
"Dr. Karev, I really think you should take another elevator."
It was Preston's measured surgical coldness that made him so scary, but Addison knew that Alex was not going to let himself be bullied, not twice in one day. And the truth was that maybe she didn't owe him a thing, not after what had happened before—maybe they didn't owe each other anything, which is how what happened before happened, and she straightened her back and said calmly, "Dr. Karev, I really think you should go."
"No," he said, and the single syllable was explosive, as though he'd been waiting all day just to tell her to shove it. That was rich, Addison thought, because she'd been waiting all day for the same thing. "No. What the hell is wrong with you? You kick me off of a surgery, and now you won't even let me into an elevator."
"Dr. Karev," she said again, and the name was like a walking stick, steadying her for the long haul ahead of her. Her back completely straight, she crossed her arms over her chest, and she stared hard at the wall, but it was her voice that betrayed her, not her crooked body language. "Please leave," she said, and they both knew it sounded more like 'please stay'.
It was her curse that in spite of everything that had happened to her and everything that she had done, she could not cut herself off from the men who hurt her. She returned to them again and again, because they were comfortable, because their arms fit perfectly around her waist, and because the smell of their aftershave triggered memories of times when she wasn't feeling so bruised. And the worst of it seemed to her to be the moments in which she realized that she had not just bruised herself, but they had helped in the bruising too.
"Addison," Alex said, and there was the sound of his hand hitting the closing doors of the elevator and their responsive sliding open again. "Addison, talk to me."
Oh, how she wished she could. How she wished that when he said her name like that, low and sweet and intimate, she didn't imagine him between Izzie Stevens' legs, kissing her neck with a graceful tenderness that Addison hoped was reserved for her, maybe both of them laughing about how stupid Addison had been to let herself fall, even a tiny bit, for Alex Karev. She should have known better.
"Dr. Karev," she said, and it was then that she finally decided to turn around, to face him, tears in abundance and mascara weeping down her face, her arms over her chest. She said, "Take the stairs." It was not a suggestion or even a plea, but Alex was immovable.
And she hated that. She hated that it was impossible for her to forget that he'd been in the on-call room with Izzie, and she hated that it was harder to forget sleeping in his bed, in his arms, Jesus Christ, she had been in the on-call room with him at one point. She felt herself waver, and no matter how tough she felt, how hard the outer shell was, sometimes she had to break. Sometimes it had to be okay to not be okay.
"What's going on," Alex tried again, and this time it was with less insistence, less accusation than before, the 'what the hell is wrong with you' changing into something deeper, softer, more personal, and she met his eyes steadily.
"I don't want to talk to you about it," Addison said, and it overlapped with Preston's warning, "Dr. Karev."
"Dude, what the hell," Alex said, and she could see the fringes of his frustration bubbling over the edges of his professionalism, tinting the color of his concern for her. He looked at Preston and he said, "Can we have a minute?" and Addison's eyes never moved from Alex's.
"Go ahead," Addison said, weighing the silence. "I can handle this."
She could. She could deal with cheaters and liars, because she had known cheaters and liars, because she had been a cheater and a liar. Preston made a noise deep in his throat, a grunt of disapproval, and he looked at Addison and then at Alex, and he said, "Watch yourself."
And as scary as Preston always was, Alex showed no sign of shrinking under the weight of Preston's words. Preston passed by Alex on the way out of the elevator, and he gave her once last look, as though to rally her strength, and then Alex stepped past the boundary of the elevator doors and let them close behind him. He turned and pulled out the button for emergency purposes only, and the elevator stopped before it had even really begun, and then they were in silence—complete pregnant silence.
And he stood there a moment and looked at her, his expression one that said he didn't really know what to do for her, and in a moment of forgetting herself, she thought that it might be nice to go to him, wrap her arms around his neck, and let him take care of her. She simply could not do that in spite of herself. She couldn't do it just for the comfort. That would make her a whore for it, and as compelling, as desperate as her need was to go to him, it was her self-respect she stood to lose. He crossed his arms over his chest, mirroring her, and he exhaled loudly, the only sound in the otherwise empty elevator car, and he said, "Dude, seriously. What's going on with you today?"
She hated the way he said that—today, as though it were an accusation of PMS or a dismissible bad mood—and it was her defensiveness to answer for her. "You have no right to stand in front of me and ask me what's wrong."
"Don't do that."
"Do what."
"That thing. Where you push me away."
She had to laugh in spite of her tears, because she couldn't understand the sheer audacity of his standing in front of her and telling her to open up to him. Maybe this was how she had appeared to Derek, begging his forgiveness, but Alex wasn't doing that. He hadn't even acknowledged it, it, the sin, the betrayal of her trust, and maybe he wouldn't. Maybe she wasn't supposed to care. Maybe that's what he thought this would be, as though he could come to her and seek her company when he wanted that, and if not, he'd find it where the finding was good. It made her sick. "I don't want you anywhere near me."
"What the fuck is wrong—"
"You can just leave this elevator now too," she said, no patience for yet another demand of her to explain her actions, as though she had anything to explain. She went for the button by the door, but he was firmly between it and her, and he stopped her, one hand moving to her hip, the other to her neck, thumb just below the line of her jaw. It made him too close for her to refuse, close enough for her to remember but hardly close enough for her to forget, and she said, her voice calm, her stomach in shreds, "Get your hands off of me."
His hand moved from her hip to the other side of her face, and he pulled her closer and said, "Addison, I get that you're into this whole stronger-than-everyone thing. I get that. I do it too. But with me—hey, look at me—with me, you don't have to."
It would have been so God-damned perfect. It would have been the sweetest thing anyone had ever managed to say to her, and in spite of the sincerity of his mouth and the intensity of his eyes, she couldn't believe him. She couldn't get where he got off, who he thought he was manipulating. And she wanted to be so angry with him—but she wanted to give in to him too, he with the warm hands and the warmer arms, who looked so ready to take care of her. It was the disparity that killed her—the difference between the man Alex Karev was when he stood in front of her and the man he seemed to be when he was elsewhere. This was the Alex Karev who held tiny Alex McEnroe in his arms and cried, and this was the Alex she was saving from having to pull a dead infant from his mother's womb, and for a second the thought that hit her mind was that what if it was her in there where Carly Sampson was. Husband dead, child dead. Life gone. And what if instead of being Addison Montgomery she'd been Addison Karev and her unborn child had been theirs, the one thing she'd have of him long after he was gone, and what if she lost them both in the sudden squealing of tires and one car pilling up onto another?
This was the thought that wrecked her, and she felt herself crumple. There was no hiding from him now. Her tears gave her up, as they always did, and she tried to turn away from him, but his grasp on her was too tight, and when she started to cry, his hand went from her face to the back of her head, and he simply pulled her to him. It was the gracefulness of the act that scared her so badly that she had to wrap her arms around his neck. She needed this, and worst of all, she needed him, but she could not forgive him. She couldn't. She just couldn't. It mattered little when her knees started to give and he lowered them both to the cold floor of the elevator, she half in his lap and his arm moving to tighten around her waist. They were all awkward legs and arms, he holding her so tightly she could hardly breathe, and they clung together, the need stark and desperate, something she wouldn't have been able to articulate except through this, the exposure of herself to him.
Hers was a wound that would never heal, but she had come to accept that. His was a hurt that could never be eased, and she understood that too. It didn't change anything, but she could ignore it. Just for now, she told herself. Just for now. On her mouth was the salt of her own tears, and Alex's hand moved away the hair on her neck so that he could kiss her skin. They were not sensual kisses—instead they were the fierce, loyal kisses of a man who cared, and he let her cry. He just let her cry, his arm squeezing tighter whenever a sob moved her rib cage, as though to remind him that he was there.
It was only when the tears were replaced with exhaustion that she allowed herself to move back and look at him. Her arms still around his neck, they were close enough to kiss, and he brushed some hair off of her cheek that had stuck with the wetness of the tears. She waited for the almost condescending clichéd whispers of comforting things, the things he would say that would make no difference at all and only sound hollow, but they never came. He said nothing, and she was the one to kiss him first.
It was because, she told herself, she didn't remember kissing Derek goodbye, and she couldn't remember kissing Mark goodbye, and this one she wanted to remember. She wanted to carve it into the bark of her memory and take it with her, long after this was over, and she might label it under the file of The One Who Got Away. The kiss was pressing and a little desperate, but his hand moved to the back of her head again and he kissed her back, both of them tasting of salt and the cups of coffee they'd managed to grab to keep themselves awake in between tragedies, and she didn't know where the need came from. She didn't know what started it or when it would end. Addison had never needed anyone, but she needed him.
Or maybe she was getting her vocabulary wrong. Maybe it wasn't need. Maybe it was something else, something stronger, and she couldn't afford that. There was no way to convince herself that it would be alright to let herself fall for a man who slept with other women in the on-call room. There were too many pairs of other women's panties in her history.
And it was while kissing him that she decided they couldn't do this. His kisses were sweet and strong and everything she had been wanting from a man for so long—and it wasn't that he wasn't like Derek or that he was like Derek or that he wasn't like Mark or that he was like Mark, because they no longer factored. This was her and Alex. And she just couldn't do it. She broke off the kiss, a little breathless from the tears and his mouth against hers, and she covered his mouth with her fingers so she wouldn't kiss him again. Maybe she looked like a train wreck, but she couldn't let her emotions be the same way, and she said, "No, we can't. We can't do this. I can't do this, Alex."
"Yes, you can," he murmured against her fingers, and he didn't seem to get it. This wasn't the usual protestations of a woman who wanted a man to chase her. This was Addison Montgomery, putting her foot down.
"No," she said. And then more firmly, "No." It took all of her willpower to stand up, to extract herself from him, to lean over and press the emergency button. The elevator heaved with the weight and then began its course again, and as she stood up, he stood up too. She straightened her scrub top, smoothed her hair, brushed the remaining tears from under her eyes, and she said, "We can't do this."
"What the hell. You and I, we make sense. What is this even about?"
His look was one of genuine confusion. Maybe he hadn't realized he'd been caught in the on-call room. Maybe he felt as innocent as the day he was born. There were mascara marks on his scrub top, her black stains left on him, and she met his eyes and said, "This is about the on-call room, Karev."
The last name came like a divider, the separation of her from him. It was a reversion to the people they once were. "The on-call room?" he said, his eyebrows slipping upwards in surprise. "When you and I—oh, you mean Izzie."
Oh, you mean Izzie. Just that cavalier. So glib and flippant. Like it was nothing. And Addison waited for what he had to say for himself, because some part of her, some aching inner part of her, thought that maybe, just maybe, if it was a damned good reason then she could forgive him.
And let herself fall in love—even if she suspected it might have been a little late for that.
But what he said in the stead of any good explanation was, "What does that have to do with anything? Unless—unless you're still—" And then the bright dawning of realization spread. Unless I'm still what, Addison thought. Unless I'm one of those women who likes the men she's involved in things with to not be involved in things with other people, she thought, and she retreated to the other side of the elevator.
It chimed, signaling its arrival finally, and she saw something flicker in his eyes, the old animal of defensiveness, and in the seconds before the door opened, he said, "You know, I totally get it now. So just—whatever. Forget the whole thing."
And then the doors opened and he walked out, and it was strange to Addison how she'd been the one to call the whole thing off and yet she was the one feeling heartbroken.
To be continued.
