AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thanks to C. Midori for the feedback, psych profiles and encouragement. Thanks to Heather for posting this at the Lounge.

SUMMARY: What Abby did with her day after Carter's hasty retreat . . . and the dreaded conversation.

Chapter 6: The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

Abby had an incredibly productive morning after Carter left, considering the fact that her stomach had been clenched uncomfortably for hours on end. She did her laundry, swept her apartment floors, balanced her checkbook – all before noon. Then, desperate for tasks to distract her from a hovering sense of foreboding, she organized her CDs, according to whether they were hers outright or whether she had "borrowed" them from Richard. Standing back and admiring the two piles, she was gratified to see that the Richard pile was bigger.

OK, she thought, NOW what do I do?

Although Carter had given her no overt reason to think he was mad at her, she couldn't stop thinking about how distant he'd seemed this morning. Reconstructing their brief conversation in her head, she kept coming back to her drinking. That had to be it, she thought. Carter had listened to her, advised her, even chided her and manhandled her in an effort to get her to stop drinking again. Abby reached the conclusion that he'd finally deserted the cause, unwilling to tax himself any longer for her benefit.

That must be why Carter seemed aloof, she reasoned. I've blown off his advice one too many times and now he's given up on me.

The thought deflated her, and she sunk down in her couch. She had vacillated so often between desperately craving Carter's approval and callously testing his limits, calculating just how far she could push him, to see how much he really loved her.

She could now see she'd pushed too hard with her drinking. She wanted to cross back to the happy side of the line. She decided that she would go to a meeting today – she knew there was one nearby at two o'clock. That way, she'd have that under her belt as a kind of peace offering the next time she saw him. She guessed that would be early tomorrow morning, when her shift started and his would be close to wrapping up. It wouldn't be the first time she'd gone to a meeting for him. And the hope that it might melt some of the tension she'd felt emanating from Carter was the best reason she could think of for going to a meeting.

Now she had only two hours to kill before the meeting. She stood with renewed determination, hands on her hips, and looked around her apartment. The fridge caught her eye, offering up a distinct challenge. Abby spent the better part of the next hour throwing away any item that appearing to be hosting a moldy lifeform and sanitizing the shelves with enough Lysol to kill every germ at County.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Night still hung in the sky when Abby's alarm went off at five the next morning. She punched the alarm quiet, and shifted under her comforter. A cold front had accompanied last night's rain – the weatherman had been correct, and the big storm veered north of Chicago and had instead pummeled the holy hell out of Milwaukee before dying over Lake Michigan.

Abby padded around her chilly apartment, getting ready for work. She knew Carter would be on until eight this morning. The fact that he didn't call her at all yesterday made her uneasy – he must've been madder about her drinking than she'd first guessed. Hopefully, though, once he found out she'd been to an AA meeting yesterday, things would be normal again between them.

Abby didn't relish the notion of bringing up her drinking with Carter, but she knew she'd have to broach the topic in order to set things right.

Briefly fostering a hope that telepathy would work instead, mooting the need for the conversation to come, Abby headed to work in the stiff, cool darkness.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A three-car MVA had everyone unimaginably busy all morning at County. By the time Abby finally could get a word in with Carter, his shift was over. Had it not been for the endless stream of accident victims, she would've thought he'd been avoiding her.

As he strode down the hallway toward the exit, she snuck up behind him, grabbing him by the waistband of his khakis. He slingshotted back toward Abby, turning to look at her. The smile on her face wasn't mirrored on his.

"Hey stranger," she grinned. "Haven't seen you around this morning."

"It's been busy," he said without any inflection.

This was going to be more difficult than she'd anticipated. She tried to compensate for his dark mood by speaking even more frenetically and smiling broader.

"Do you want to get a coffee?"

"Abby, I'm really wiped out."

She wanted so much to take the exit he was unknowingly offering to her, but she steeled herself.

"Actually, I was hoping we could talk."

He peered in her eyes for a moment, and she could tell he was truly conflicted about her simple request. Finally, he relented. "OK, let's talk."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Down by the river, Abby and Carter sat on their bench, sipping weak coffee from paper cups.

"Well?" Carter broke the silence. "You wanted to talk," he prompted.

Abby grew slightly defensive. "Sorry, but this isn't easy for me."

"What? Talking?" Carter's abruptness startled her. "Here, I'll make it even easier for you. Why don't you explain what happened to nights ago?"

Her guess had been dead on, Abby figured. He was pissed about her going out and drinking.

"John," she started, "I know you think I have a problem. But I'm managing it. Yesterday, I went to a meeting . . ."

"Managing it?" He interrupted, his face turning red. "How exactly are you managing it?"

Upon hearing the anger in his voice, her shields instantly went up.

"Don't get upset with me, Carter – I'm handling my drinking."

"Yes, I can see how well you're handling it."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. It's just that I don't think that getting drunk and sleeping with your ex-boyfriend exactly qualifies as handling your alcoholism."

Abby felt as though she'd been smacked in the face. Her brain turned circles in her head as she tried to catch up to Carter's runaway assumptions.

"What? You think I slept with Luka?" she managed to spit out.

Utterly cold and calm, Carter said, "Tell me you didn't."

"I shouldn't have to," Abby gaped, her breathing now labored. It now dawned on her that Carter somehow knew Luka had spent the night.

"You also shouldn't be going out, getting drunk, and taking other men home with you." As the words flew from his mouth, Carter wished he could stop this torrent of accusations, but he couldn't help himself. "I can't believe you thought you could hide this from me – do you think I'm a child?"

"Well, you did sleep with one," Abby's armor bit back. He wants to bring up exes, we'll bring up exes, she thought.

Carter was taken aback by her allusion to Rena – he hadn't thought about that failed relationship in forever. His frustration and hostility soon returned, however. "Look, this isn't about me, this is about you."

"No, it's about you," Abby countered. "You think I'm a drunk."

"You are a drunk, Abby," Carter crescendoed. "Maybe you want me to act indifferent toward you, but I can't. I'm not Luka. I actually give a damn about what happens to you. Look, I understand that you're leery because your father deserted you when you were a kid, but you can't keep testing me like this, seeing how much crap I'll put up with – why can't you just accept the fact that I love you?"

Where the fuck did THAT come from? Abby's consciousness screamed inside her head. "Whoa, my father?" She leaped up from the bench and stood in front of Carter, oblivious to the stares of the joggers passing by. "What am I, part of your psych rotation now?" She threw the coffee cup on the ground at his feet, spraying the hot liquid all over the cuffs of his pants.

"And you're not in love with me," she continued. "You're in love with this vision of what you want me to be. Some potentially wonderful girl who's suitable for the great John Truman Carter. But this is it, this is me," she smacked herself in the chest as she spoke, hot tears of anguish pooling in her eyes. "I'm sorry that's not good enough for you."

She whirled around so he couldn't see her crying and muttered, "I've got to get back to work." She marched back toward County. Once she was certain he wasn't following her, she paused. Placing a steadying hand on the cold concrete wall of an office building, she shook with sobs, unable to breathe.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Carter's fury imprisoned him on the bench. He wanted to scream, to expel all these feelings in an aching roar, as if such a thing were possible. His anger at Abby slowly swung back like a pendulum, striking him hard. Nauseating waves of disappointment bobbed in his stomach, and he tried vainly to fathom this woman. She had been his friend for more than two years now – they'd been through so much together. She really didn't have any other friends – no close friends, at least. She didn't talk to anyone else.

Susan comes the closest, Carter thought, but that's it. Something's going on inside her head, something is telling her to keep drinking. I should've tried to listen to her . . . but she never opens up!

He reflected on how, when they were still just friends, she had talked freely with him about herself in the context of Maggie or Luka – but she rarely talked about just herself, about what she was feeling at any particular moment. When she did, it was haltingly, begrudgingly – like when she finally opened up to him after Mark's death and told him when she'd started drinking again. Honestly, it amazed him how he could talk with her for hours and still come away having learned absolutely nothing about her. It was as if she loathed sharing pieces of herself. Every once and again she'd offer up tiny nuggets of truths about herself, as part of her little honesty show, which existed to make people think she wasn't trying to stay as far away from them as she actually was. But it was a rarity, and Carter started to consider that maybe they couldn't feed and sustain their fledging relationship with the mere crumbs Abby was offering up.

As the object of his infatuation, when he'd thought constantly about her and couldn't have her, Abby's air of mystery had intoxicated him, impelling him closer to her.

But as his love, now that they were together, the mystery seemed out of place, seemed more like obfuscation than something darkly alluring.

He leaned down and picked up her discarded coffee cup, threw both cups in a nearby trashcan, and headed back to his car.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

END NOTES: Chapter title comes from the Garbage song of the same name, which includes the lyrics: "She's not the kind of girl/Who likes to tell the world/About the way she feels about herself./She takes a little time/In making up her mind./She doesn't want to fight against the tide." The Abby-Carter "Haven't seen you around this morning"/"It's been busy" exchange was lifted from the Carter-Abby exchange in "Brothers & Sisters" (which, in turn, was lifted from the Luka-Abby exchange in "Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic"). The "honesty show" comments are a paraphrase of Carrie Fisher.