Thank you so much for your reviews on the previous chapter! I'm really enjoying writing this story, even when Addison is having a tough time. I'm excited about what's coming up in this story, and I hope you enjoy it too.

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Bargains
..

Here's what happens next: Derek walks into Joe's with Meredith Grey and her intern gang while Callie and I are having a drink, and we all nod at each other – politely and professionally – and move on with our pleasant, unremarkable evenings.

Or that's how it would happen for someone else, anyway.

But not for me.

I don't get pleasant, unremarkable evenings and I'm pretty sure if you asked Derek he'd say you forfeit the right to evenings like that when you screw your husband's best friend in his not-favorite-sheets.

So here's what actually happens next: Derek sees me and does a sort of a double take and when he lets go of the door those stupid bells jingle loudly like they're mocking us.

Callie turns around to see what I'm seeing and I'm pretty sure she's judging me except she's not, she's exchanging a look with Karev that I don't understand. Stevens looks like she'd rather be drinking somewhere Satan-free and Derek looks worse but somehow Grey seems fine.

Self-possessed.

Maybe it's the expression of someone who's won.

"I need another drink," I mutter to Callie, who looks down and notices that I've barely made it halfway through my gin and soda.

That's not the point, of course. Derek is approaching the bar now like the Pied Piper with a trail of interns and I either need to drink more or throw up. Now.

As in right now.

Callie seems to get it. "Let's move," she says. "Hey, Joe? We're moving to a table."

"Just like that, huh?" Joe is smiling at us, though. "For such good customers … take any table in the house."

Callie is joking with him a little while I try to get down from the barstool without falling on my face.

And then we leave the bar and its less than welcome occupants behind and sit down at a sticky little two-top. I wish we were drinking somewhere else, somewhere more pleasant.

Like hell, maybe?

Seriously, though, I should break into my trust fund – which I don't ever plan to touch until I figure out what charity would piss Bizzy off the most and donate the whole thing there – and build a freaking ice palace next door to Joe's just to have a memory-free place to drink. Of course I wouldn't want to put Joe out of business. He's actually decent to me. I guess I could move his bar, and then –

"Addison." Callie is looking at me curiously. "You okay?" She slides my drink toward me a little like it's medicine.

Oh, just fantasizing ways to throw money at all the problems I've created for myself, but I know they wouldn't work. Nothing works.

"I'm fine." I take a sip.

Even though sips are like putting a bandaid on a spurting arterial wound. I sip anyway and try to recapture the feeling I had before Derek reminded me that he's moved on. Despite what he said in his office, the suggestion that maybe our divorce wasn't quite as much fun for him as he's been making it seem … he's fine. He's Derek, and he's always fine.

But before he got here, when Callie and I were talking, and I was a person instead of a walking car crash, things were different.

So I sip and prop my head in my hand to block my peripheral vision. I don't want to see where Derek and Meredith go next.

The vision-blocking works well.

Maybe too well.

"Room for one more?"

Ugh. He's leaning over both our chairs at once. The bar is too loud to hear him at once. Mark should have to wear a bell like they put on cats who can't be trusted not to kill birds.

(Is that why Joe has bells on the front door? I'll have to ask him sometime.)

"No," I say without turning around.

"That's okay, I have a good view from here of my two favorite girls." Mark sounds amused. Mark always sounds amused.

"You mean any two girls," I correct him. I turn a little without meeting his eyes. "And actually … we're women."

"You certainly are," he agrees, and there's a lascivious twinkle in his eyes when I look at him. Okay, fine, I handed him that one. But I'm not handing him anything else.

"Did you want something, Mark?"

Look, it's not my fault that everything sounds like the lead-in to a double entendre when Mark is in the room.

Somehow, he doesn't rise.

(No comment.)

"I wanted to sit," he says. "But it might be a tight squeeze." He indicates the lack of room between our two chairs.

Thank goodness for tiny-table favors.

"That's too bad. I guess you'll have to move on, then." I take another sip of my drink.

"But I wouldn't mind dancing," he says.

My eyes widen; I can't help it. This isn't exactly a dancing kind of place. I mean, there's a jukebox, and there are drunk people, which can add up to dancing under some circumstances. There's also a dartboard in fairly consistent use, and even in a bar packed with doctors I can imagine that flying darts plus drunk dancing rarely turns out well.

"Dancing?" I repeat, even though I wasn't going to engage.

"Dancing. You've heard of it, right?" He looks at me in that way he does, without words, that reminds me of all the things I've let him do to me. I look down at my drink.

"There's a jukebox. There's a nice empty dance floor."

Dance floor is pushing it. There's a patch of empty floor in front of the jukebox, fine. No one else is dancing.

Callie and I exchange a look.

"Dance with me," Mark says, glancing from one of us to the other.

"No, thank you," I say politely.

Callie nods. "Go find someone who doesn't know better," she adds.

Mark actually looks hurt for a moment – or maybe I imagined it, because he smirks at us both and saunters off without saying another word.

I'm sure it won't take him long to find someone who'll say yes. It rarely does.

..

So this drinking slowly thing.

It's a little weird.

It means I'm still conscious of everything that happens around me, which kind of sucks when what happens around you … tends to suck.

Callie actually finishes her drink before I do. She doesn't know me well enough (yet?) to realize how surprising that is.

(See? Someone can have a front seat to my terrible sexual decisions and still be surprised by how many other parts of my life I can screw up.)

I offer to get her a refill and it goes off without a hitch.

… in my head.

"Addison."

That's what actually happens. My name, in his voice. He has so many different ways of saying it – just three syllables, or two if he's feeling the nickname. I could always get the measure of him just from how he pronounced it.

This time it's a one-word, three-syllable, begin-and-end greeting. Hello and goodbye all at once.

So I take his cue and nod, even though I'm stuck standing next to him at the bar.

"Derek," I say.

He orders a beer without making eye contact and it's my fault. I'm the next one to speak, even though it's his turn. Double volley, double fault.

"I guess Joe didn't blacklist you after the other night."

I meant it as a joke – I think – but it comes out more like a challenge.

Derek glances at me. "Apparently Joe believes in second chances."

"At least someone does."

"Usually people who haven't been burned," Derek says.

I guess I deserve that.

He doesn't say it viciously, just sort of … tiredly. I could almost think, for a second, that he's as exhausted by all of this, by everything, as I am.

But then I remember the way he smiled at Meredith when he held the door open for her.

Derek isn't tired.

Derek is … bright and shiny.

"So this means things are better with Meredith?" I try to ask it brightly. And … shinily, which I'm pretty sure isn't actually a word.

Derek looks confused for a moment.

"You're on a date with her," I prompt him.

"A date." He looks at me for a moment, then takes a sip of his beer. "It must have been a while for you if you think this is a date," he says.

"It has been a while." I raise my eyebrows. "I was married for eleven years."

In case you've forgotten.

He grimaces. "It's not a date."

"You would know." I glance over at where the interns are huddled near the dartboard. Maybe they're picturing Derek's face when they throw the darts. Maybe they'll let me play.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that you're the one dating."

"And if I were … what's wrong with that?"

"Nothing." I remember why I'm here and order Callie's drink, then turn back to Derek. "It's good that you're … moving on."

He turns fully to look at me, his eyebrows raised. "Did I miss the part where screwing Mark without dating him makes you morally superior?"

"I didn't say I was morally superior."

"Good," he mutters, taking a sip of his drink.

"And I'm not screwing him. Not anymore."

Derek doesn't respond to that with anything more than a raised eyebrow. I've been married to him long enough that we can speak whole sentences that way. Paragraphs, even. So I read it loud and clear: You already admitted to me this morning that you slept with him last night.

"I didn't say you were morally superior either," I point out.

"Addison." He shakes his head like he's trying to clear it. "Believe it or not ... I came here tonight to have a quiet drink."

I open my mouth, then close it again. I realize I'm not sure whether he's saying he wasn't on a date, or just trying to get rid of me.

Either way, I guess I can give him that.

At least I have Callie so I don't have to sit alone.

..

But when I get back to our little table, fisting a new drink for Callie … it's empty.

I'm confused until I look over to the jukebox and see that she apparently stopped saying no once I wasn't there to back her up.

(I know that feeling well.)

She's dancing with Mark.

They're dancing closely in that way that's not quite sex with your clothes on – because Mark can do that too, so I know what that looks like – but isn't so far off either. I don't know that I would have though Callie was Mark's type, if you'd asked me a few weeks ago, but I can tell just from the way she moves her hips to whatever stupid song is playing on the jukebox that she knows what she's doing.

She wasn't going to sleep with him again. Wasn't that our semi-spoken pact, our No More Mark Sloan pact? I mean sure, I slept with him last night, but I still think that was a fluke. She's turned her back to him, moving against him with his big hands skating over her hips and I guess she's going to be breaking the pact too.

I'm watching them, and – okay, it's kind of hot, but in a weird way, like I'm watching myself. I guess this is what I'm never sleeping with Mark Sloan again looks like from the outside.

It looks like giving up.

It feels like it too.

I pull out my chair and sit down – alone, which really shouldn't surprise me at this point.

I take a sip of the gin and soda that's getting muted with melted ice. I resist the urge to gulp. I play a little game with myself – if I wait a full minute between sips, things will be better in the morning.

Surgeons are superstitious. I used to do this when I was a kid, too.

If I hold my breath for sixty seconds in the bath, the new nanny will stay longer than a month. If I brush my hair a hundred times before bed, I won't trip in ballet class ever again. If I keep really quiet about what I saw, I'll actually get an ice cream cone the next time.

It never actually kept bad things from happening, though. Bad things happen all the time.

I keep up my end of the bargain. By the time I finish my drink, we're three songs into the Mark and Callie Show … but there's no indication anything is going to be better in the morning.

Figures.

"Is this seat taken?"

I look up to see Derek tapping the back of the chair next to me. I mean, I recognized his voice before I saw him, of course, but he doesn't need to know that.

"I guess not," I say, indicating the impromptu dance floor.

Derek watches Mark and Callie for a moment, dancing in one sinewy tangle of limbs.

"Did you warn her about – "

"Of course I did. And she warned me right back," I tell him.

"Ah." Derek takes a sip of his drink. "But they're still … ?" He gestures, just a little flutter of his hand that could mean anything but here, I have to assume, means about to screw.

"Yeah. They're … still." I reach for his bottle of beer, even though I don't like this brand – it's a moment that's begging for alcohol – and then make a face.

"Why do you do that it if you don't like it?" he asks, not for the first time.

There's no answer for that. Why wouldn't I take a sip of his drink?

He glances at the dance floor, then back at me. "You want your own drink?" he asks abruptly.

"What happened to thinking I'm an alcoholic?"

"I never said you were an alcoholic."

"Yeah, but you thought it."

His mouth twitches like he's going to laugh. "I'm offering to get you a drink," he says. "I'm not offering to get you the bottle. Is that consistent with your recollection?"

"Make it a double, at least."

He smiles a little bit.

It's not a double, though.

It is a gin and soda and I'm grudgingly impressed. Two limes and everything. I guess he remembers that I like my mouth to pucker when I'm wallowing. Why shouldn't everything be as bitter as I feel?

"Thanks for the drink."

"You're welcome."

I don't know why I'm so surprised every time he remembers anything. I guess it's because he spent most of the time I've been in Seattle acting like he'd forgotten our whole marriage.

The chairs are set up so we can either talk closely – like Callie and I were doing – or face outward and watch Mark and Callie attempts to take each other's clothes off through sheer hands-free friction alone.

"You think they're going to leave together?" I ask.

"I hope so," Derek says. "Better than doing it right here."

I almost laugh around the rim of my glass. I forget, sometimes, how much we used to laugh together.

Then I find myself watching Meredith Grey and her friends again, from my vantage point of this little table where I'm shoulder to shoulder with Derek. We're not touching and I wouldn't say we're friends but … we're sitting together.

Maybe it's seeing Meredith but I get an unwelcome memory of the same bar – same table, maybe? – and Meredith knitting and declaring her celibacy.

(We all know how well that turned out, but bear in mind the only person who's worse at declaring celibacy than she is would be – well – me.)

I walked away from them, that night. After declaring how we were all friends. I'm embarrassed for that woman, the one who was still playing at reconciliation. Then again, Derek came back to our table. He left her and sat down next to me and it was little bits of hope he doled out like the stale peanuts on Joe's bar – that kept me hungry.

"What's wrong with your drink?" Derek asks, frowning a little.

It's actually perfect, but I guess the fact that I've barely taken two sips shocks him. Maybe I do drink too much.

"Nothing's wrong with it. I'm taking my time."

"Ah." Derek sips his own drink. "That's new."

"People can change."

He opens his mouth to reply to that – probably to point out my hypocrisy – and then Mark just goes ahead and proves me wrong anyway when he seems to catch sight of me from the dance floor.

"Addison!" Mark calls. He indicates the quasi-dance floor with a nod of his head. "Don't be a wallflower."

I make a face. It's kind of hard to hear him over the music, but he manages.

I turn to roll my eyes at Derek, but his chair is empty.

Okay, then.

Another song starts.

"There's still room for one more," Mark says now, loudly enough for me to hear him. "Come on, we can fit you in before we … leave."

Callie catches my eye and makes a face, kind of like apology, or embarrassment, or something. I smile at her like I don't care that she's about to go fuck the man who helped me destroy what was left of my marriage.

But this means she's definitely planning on leaving with him.

So I do the thing you're supposed to do, the girl thing, and march up to them.

"How drunk are you?" I ask Callie.

"How drunk are you?" Mark responds before Callie can, freeing one hand from her waist and landing it on mine.

"Not drunk at all, unfortunately." I push his hand away. "Seriously, Callie – "

"Seriously, Addie," she repeats, smiling at me, "it's fine."

When did she start calling me Addie?

"Okay, you satisfied yet, Mom?" Mark raises an eyebrow at me. "You want a breathalyzer too?"

"You'd fail," I tell him. "I hope you're not planning to drive."

"Already called a taxi," he says. "One step ahead of you, huh?"

I don't know about that – but it's true that I feel a step behind.

Then I remember then that Mark was my ride to work this morning. I guess I'll be calling my own taxi to get back to the hotel.

Which is just great. I don't even have my leased car that still smells like the dealership to drive to my hotel room. Everything I do tonight is going to be temporary. And blank. And depressing.

And Callie is drunk, but she's not that drunk.

Still, I linger.

"It's okay, really." She's apparently noticed I'm still there. "Hey, let's have breakfast tomorrow," she says.

"You might be otherwise occupied tomorrow morning," Mark warns her, and she laughs.

I wrinkle my nose.

"Give it up, Addison." Mark shakes his head. "Stop playing babysitter, that's not you. You used to be fun."

He doesn't know me, not anymore. That's what I want to say.

I don't say anything, though, because I feel one of his big hands on my waist and then he's pulled me in close, and his body is hard against mine – there's so much of him and I can feel the softness of Callie's body on my other side.

And with one flash that I remember from drunken nights in college while I was still figuring out my limits – I start to wonder what's going to happen next.

I step outside myself like I'm a rather interesting novel, oh, see the adulteress now, and I have no idea.

I can't control it.

I can't decide it.

I can just … let it happen. Whatever it is.

"Addison."

I look up, still somehow in this weird hypnotic sway with the lights from the foggy jukebox making all of us look a little blue, and Derek is standing a foot away.

He doesn't say anything other than my name. It kind of brings home that this isn't a dance floor at all. It's just a patch of sticky at a crappy hospital-adjacent bar and I'm – I don't even know what – dancing? Snuggling? With Mark and Callie and god knows who can see us.

My face floods with heat.

"I wanted to see if she was okay," I tell Derek, even though he didn't ask for an explanation. Not out loud, anyway. I'm still pressed up between Mark and Callie and I try not to remember what happened the last time Derek found me this close to Mark.

If Mark's bothered by it all, there's no evidence. He just turns the clump of us so that I can't see Derek anymore, only a wedge of the bar between Mark's shoulder and Callie's. There's a dark-haired woman who looks vaguely familiar sitting right in my line of vision, talking to a man I don't recognize. God, I hope she's not one of my residents.

"She's fine," Mark is saying, presumably to Derek. "They're both fine."

"Maybe Callie's fine," Derek says evenly. "I don't know. I don't know her."

"Shepherd, Torres. Torres, Shepherd." Mark is grinning; I can't see his face since he's talking to Derek but I can actually feel the movement of his jaw. "There. Now you know each other."

Derek doesn't say anything but I can actually feel the change in the air when he starts moving. Right before he says my name again.

He walks around so that I can see him. "Addison, don't do this."

It's like a splash of cold water or waking up from a bad dream.

He's right.

He's so right and I push on Mark with both my hands to try to extricate myself but it's like trying to shove a brick wall. "Mark. Mark."

He just pulls me closer. "Derek can cut in later," he says, close to my ear, "but he has to learn to wait his turn."

Ugh. I push him again. "Would you just – "

"Mark," Derek says sharply, and he's suddenly a lot closer than a foot away. "She said no."

"I forgot who's here," Mark raises his eyebrows. "The white knight, riding in on his horse to save the day. Maybe he won't actually trample the fair maid on his way out this time."

The metaphor is kind of jumbled but Derek seems to take something from it. There's a prickle in the air between Mark and Derek that feels different from the closeness I saw when Mark was nursing his hangover.

I decide to intercede before they can blame me for screwing up their friendship again.

"Derek …"

But if he hears me, there's no indication. His focus is on Mark, and they're somehow squaring off and it feels a little dangerous, a little testosterone-y for my taste even with the simultaneous elements of the ridiculous: there's a song blaring from the jukebox that I'm fairly certain is Top 40 from about ten years ago and still manages to be an earworm, and Mark is still holding onto both Callie and me, and Callie's eyes are half closed as she sways to the music.

She's the only one still dancing.

"Mark," he says again.

And then Derek is shoving Mark and it seems to work better than when I did it, because I'm ducking away from Mark and then Mark is shoving Derek back and I'm getting the back of someone's elbow and the floor is damp as well as sticky so I skid, of course I skid, it's just my luck, and I end up on the floor.

"Addison!"

They're both kneeling next to me, one on either side.

Finally, the attention is on me.

"Addison, are you okay?"

Callie sounds worried. She's crouching at my head.

"I'm fine."

It's true, although my tailbone is already throbbing. I'm more worried about what the floor is doing to my skirt. I'll have to burn it, and based on how the floor smells up close that might not even be enough.

When I look up, Derek and Mark are each holding out a hand.

God, when did my life become an R-rated version of The Lady and the Tiger?

I look from one to the other.

Then I put my left hand in Derek's and my right hand in Mark's and let them pull me to my feet together.

..

Derek ends up driving me back to the hotel.

He's had one drink, as he does, and it's fine. I'm not really injured - but I don't say no.

"Callie only had two drinks," I tell him. I don't know why I'm trying to defend myself. As much as I've decided she's the closest thing to a friend I have in Seattle, I don't really know her that well.

And Derek? We all know how little he thinks of me. There's no reason to assure him I wouldn't leave a compromised woman in Mark's hands.

Derek glances at me when stoplights illuminate the car, but he doesn't say anything.

I'm sitting in the passenger seat of his jeep with my knees basically at my chin. I know Derek notices but he doesn't say anything; we both know who sat in this seat most recently and she takes up a hell of a lot less room. But I don't want to move the seat. Not when my presence in the jeep is temporary. It's basically a taxi, that's all.

A free taxi.

Free financially, that is. Emotionally is a different story.

Emotionally is always a different story, which is why I recommend avoiding emotions at all cost. If only I could take my own advice …

When he pulls up at the drop-off spot at the Archfield, I can tell we're both avoiding thinking of his last visit to this hotel.

"Thanks," I say without looking at him. I don't open the door though, not yet.

He doesn't say anything for a moment; when I look up, he nods shortly. "You should put some ice on your … ."

"Coccyx," I remind him with dignity. "Don't tell me you've forgotten Anatomy already."

"It's been a while."

"But some things you don't forget." I find myself reaching behind me to rub the sore spot where I fell. It'll bruise. My body is a map of marks of my time in Seattle. Trace them and they'll retell my story.

(Not that I would want to hear it again.)

I realize that I'm not actually sure whose elbow knocked me off balance, Mark's or Derek's.

I feel off balance again when I look at him. I can see the lobby lights reflecting in his eyes, through the glass. It's dark in the car, but I see him.

I open my mouth to say good night.

"Do you, um, do you want to come up?"

I kind of want to die after I say it.

But unfortunately … I don't.

To be continued - stay tuned! Thank you for reading and I hope you'll review and let me know what you think, because I love hearing it. Next chapter is halfway done, and you know how to speed up this machine ... :)