After Friday, it naturally became Saturday.
In the last year before Derek left, Saturday had been filled obsessively with working out, cleaning, grocery shopping, picking up or dropping off dry cleaning, painting the living room, and many other activities of the like that occupied her entire being but allowed her mind a considerable amount of dormancy.
The day that most of her activity was mundane, banal, ritualistic. She spoke only to accomplish tasks. She did not think more than was necessary to finish whatever she was physically doing. On Saturday, she busied herself to an unfathomable degree of occupation so that if someone wanted to talk to her, see her, or anything, she could say, "I'm busy," or "I'm just in the middle of something," legitimately.
It was an easy, detached way of existing.
And in the time after Derek left, it became her lifestyle.
She didn't feel the pain, because she was too busy.
Her surgery record soared.
She won an election onto the hospital's ethics board.
The house—she had stopped calling it home—was never dirty.
She worked out every day, and her body was in the best physical shape of her life.
Her refrigerator was better stocked than ever before. It didn't matter if the food went bad after a few days because she stopped eating—it was there. And when it went bad, she had an excuse to leave and buy more.
She bought more clothes in those months than she had since she graduated medical school.
She had never attended as many benefits, hospital functions, or house-warming/engagement/baby showers in her adult life.
She repainted the entire brownstone before she sold it, which took less than two weeks.
When she began staying—not living, staying—at Mark's, the project of cleaning his previously deplorable bachelor pad had kept her busy for the entire first weekend. Not that she noticed.
Every day was Saturday. She didn't note passage of time, or much of anything, on Saturdays.
Until Friday came again.
She could still see Mark as he was on this particular Friday.
He wore a blue silk shirt, with a matching tie loosely knotted on his chest. His pants were black, as were his shoes. His hair was longer then, in need of a trim, curling a little more around the ends than he normally let it. He had facial hair, for her unexpressed desire.
When he stood in the doorway of the bedroom, one arm leaning against the doorframe and the other casually tucked in his pocket, the light shining from the living room, giving him a Hitchcockian silhouette as she looked from the darkened bedroom, accentuated his admirable physique.
She spared him only a glance when she realized his presence, and without a word, went back to packing.
"What are you doing?" he asked calmly, though his voice betrayed his worry. She did things like this sometimes—he would come back to the apartment and she would be sitting, awake in the dark. Or she would have every light in the house on and be asleep. Or she would simply not speak, unless absolutely pressed. He chalked it up to her moodiness. She had never been particularly placid, and her life with in a tailspin at the moment. He resented it, sometimes, because he tried so hard to make it better for her, but only sometimes. Most of the time, he just worried for and about her.
He was worried that night.
This particular somber stupor had lasted a week.
After no response from her, he flicked on the bedroom light.
She stopped packing, straightened from her stooped position, but didn't turn back to face him.
"Addison, what the hell is going on?" he demanded, stepping into the room slowly, assessing with shock the scene before him.
She looked at down at the Donna Karan dress in her hands.
"I'm leaving." She said simply. She had hoped she would have been gone before he had arrived home. She'd already planned the perfectly stated message she would leave him upon arriving in Seattle. Too bad.
"I…see that. Where are you going?"
She swallowed.
"Seattle."
A few brief moments of silence passed before she heard a violent thud to her left. She didn't have to look to know he had just thrown a shoe at the wall.
"I knew you'd go." He growled. "After Webber called, I just knew…"
"Then why the theatrics?" she asked calmly, turning finally, but moving past him to pick up her fallen Manolo Blahnik. He was watching her, clenching and unclenching his fists. She moved past him again, and felt the heat permeating from his rage.
"Why…who…what…Addison…" he tried to form some question, but was unable. Especially with her just walking around casually, folding things ever so calmly, and neatly packing them in the suitcase. When she tried to get her moisturizer from the dresser behind him, he grabbed both of her arms by the elbows and forced her to be still.
As he held her, his eyes bore into hers with anger, and most notably, hurt. She had seen that hurt before. She had experienced it. And it was razor sharp. She closed her eyes to escape it, but couldn't. Mark was there, more a presence to her than anyone had ever been, and his pain was palpable.
When she opened her eyes, a sheen of tears glistened over them.
"What?" she whimpered miserably, losing her grip on her Saturday detachment. It was Friday, again.
"Why are you going back to him?" Mark demanded, desperately, pulling her closer so their noses practically touched, shaking her slightly with each sentence. "He left you here. Alone. In pieces. He didn't want to work on it, he didn't even want to talk to you."
"Because I have to go, Mark, Richard has a case…"
"This isn't about a case and you know it. You're running back to him!"
"You know I got the divorce papers!"
He let out a rueful laugh.
"That you haven't signed. That you'll hand him wearing the wedding rings you saved, and hid in the back of your jewelry box." He said darkly. She yanked herself free of him, shoved past to the bed, grabbed the suitcase, and threw it at him. He caught it, barely managing to keep his balance.
"Look, look inside and see. They're in there. Waiting for him to sign. What does it matter if I haven't yet?" she demanded, fiery tears burning her cheeks. She didn't address the wedding rings he had been right about.
"Because, Addison, if you really wanted this to happen, you would have signed them months ago, and had them served to him there. There is no need for you to fly across the country! But you are, because you still love him." He threw the suitcase to the floor between them. "You still love him, even after he left you."
In the time it took him to rage at her, the icy veneer of detachment had reformed.
"You don't know everything." She informed him bitterly, bending down to gather the strewn clothes, spilled papers, and upturned suitcase and place them back on the bed.
"Fine." He returned, grabbing her hand once it was empty and turning her. "Then say it."
Her eyes widened and her face flushed.
"What?"
"You know." He implored with bitterness, holding her hand in a deathly tight grip. "Say you don't love him."
She felt, suddenly, like she was going to be sick.
In the months since he had left, she had thought of Derek only as an absence. It had virtually been a waiting game until he would surface again. It was Saturday, a day full of meaningless activities with no other purpose in the week than to allow for those activities to be fulfilled and then end, making way for another day.
"I have to make the flight." She replied coolly. He closed his eyes.
"Fine." He let her hand go, and she took to busily stuffing things into the bag. Neatness didn't matter. She needed to be gone, out of Mark's presence, as soon as possible.
When she had concluded with that suitcase and maneuvered around the bed to retrieve another, she felt the bones in her hands shake, a strange nervous phenomena she had noticed in high school right before she would play in the band. With each move, she felt a pulsing unsteadiness. It had been overcome in her years as a surgeon, and its resurface now alarmed her.
When she came from the walk-in closet holding another bag, Mark was still leaning with his back against the dresser, his hands on either side of his head, pressing and kneading with force. She accidentally brushed him when she moved, and he grabbed her again.
"Stop man handling—," his mouth covered hers before anything else could be said.
His kiss was always a surprise to her. Maybe it was years of him being her and Derek's best friend that she couldn't picture Mark kissing her. Maybe it was the gut instinct she had always had and fought thinking about when he smiled, picturing his mouth against hers. But it always made her freeze for a moment, even in the most casual setting.
Now, it froze her, but his busy hands did not. He possessively clung to her hips, holding her against him in a nearly inescapable position. All she could do to distance herself from him was press her hands into his chest, but all that accomplished was to notify her of his pounding heart. Whether it was panic or arousal, she couldn't tell, but she knew if she allowed this much longer…
She finally, after what seemed to be a long stretch of time, dug the heels of her palms into his chest. After one final oral attack, he allowed her to push him away. She blinked, her eyes blurred by tears and desire, and regarded his face. Her lipstick had made a hue of pink appear on his lips, and his eyes were cloudy and unsettled. But not in a way that frightened her. In a way that made her want to comfort him, and allow herself to be comforted by him.
Dangerous, dangerous thinking.
"I'm going…to miss my flight."
She didn't look into his eyes when she said it. She stared at his face, but not his eyes. She only knew of his surrender because the weight of his hands and the heat from his body withdrew. She didn't know what else she packed—she filled the Vuitton suitcase on the bed, collected the other two, and left.
She wasn't sure even if they said good-bye. She doubted it.
A charming, clean-cut, stockbroker type had helped her stow her bags on the airplane. She wondered if he was trying to pick her up, or if he just noticed how badly she was shaking. When he let a hand pass over her backside as she stretched to close the compartment, she knew his motive.
Luckily, he was easily put off. Lucky for him, really.
After the ritual greetings and customary warnings crackled and popped over the speakers, a tall, lanky, dark-haired man in his early twenties, marinated in one of those pungent Abercrombie and Fitch scents and hair gel, made his way over to Addison, adjusting his uniform self-consciously.
"Can I get you something, Miss?" he added hopefully, obviously enamored. She couldn't imagine why. She hadn't seen a mirror in ages, not really. She decided she would have to, before the plane landed.
"Miss?" he asked again, an eyebrow hooking in curiosity.
Back to the present.
"Would you like a drink? We have an extensive selection of wine and spirits."
She blinked, and tried to think of what she could drink.
Alcohol hadn't passed her lips in months. Living like she had would not have been feasible with alcohol. She relied too much on schedule, on performance, on shallow existence. Alcohol hindered obviously schedules and performances therein, but it also had a nasty, nasty way of causing her to, among other atrocities, introspect. And she hadn't made room for that in months. Not since that fateful Friday when she had last seen Derek.
And now, she was going to see Derek again. She would be married again. She would blot her feelings for Mark again. It was really a return, of sorts, from a very long hold.
And most of all, it was Friday.
So, in honor of a return to her marriage and to Friday, her choice was obvious.
"Sambuca, please." She ordered, disregarding the offered menu. "Straight up."
When he went to retrieve her order, she slipped her wedding rings from her pocket and ceremoniously slid them back on.
Note: So…that's that. Meredith Grey isn't the only dark and twisty woman around here anymore! At least, not in my world.