chapter five: bar story
Dr. Bones was a skeleton in a lab coat who stayed on duty at the bar. On call, as it were, with a comically dropped jaw, eye sockets that glowed with cautionary-yellow luminescent paint.
Mari guesses with 95% assurity, that the skeleton was the real deal, absconded from across the street, probably by someone who was drunk enough to think it was a good idea.
Death as an exhibit, a voyeur to the libations of life, after the patrons have lost to it, rarely cheated it, and only delayed it's calling.
Joe is behind the bar, hale for a man who was made a Frankenstein experiment, killed to later be revived, to save his life from an aneurysm, and save it further from medical debt.
He greets her, undeniably friendly, like she isn't still a stranger. He says 'welcome back to Oz', as part of an inside joke, and doesn't blink at her ordering water, doesn't push when her smile remains closed mouth, and disengaged, as she takes a seat with delicate care, and her eye stays on the door.
Maybe that's why everyone at Seattle Grace has Joe stories, times he helped them when the hospital got too much, when they hadn't yet made their mark, or found a path. Families of patients probably had Joe stories too, but they filtered in and out, didn't linger, found other places to haunt away from the hospital oasis, and took their stories with them.
Meredith, Alex, George, Izzie, and Cristina liked to end a 14- and 16-hour shift at Joe's. Her roommates stumble in, in a haze of cheap beer and tequila. Laughing, and loud, and drunk, chattering in the kitchen as Izzie suddenly wants to bake something, and Meredith and George share the bowl of cookie dough or melted chocolate, too impatient and too easily distracted to wait for the oven.
After those nights, there's always sugary confectionary left for the morning, and mountains of bowls, and spoons, and baking trays, and other projects of great ideas, left to be picked up and put away. Popcorn spilled in the living room, a blue television glowing where another Ellis Grey surgery was started and ended.
They probably had dozens of Joe stories.
Mari had just the one.
Six months ago she was driving Meredith to the intern mixer. Listening to her grumble through why do I have to do this? Complaining about the hair, and the makeup, and the dressing up.
'It's not like these people weren't about to see each other sleep-deprived, and bare faced, and living in scrubs for the next year!'
Mari hummed, or maybe rolled her eyes, thinking it would have been nice, is something like this was thrown for non-surgical residents to join. When she goes into work tomorrow, if will be blind.
They stopped at a light next to a lane of brownstone businesses, with Mari looking at the hospital signage to familiarize herself with the layout, and Meredith's attention turned the right, looking up at the green neon glow of 'The Emerald City Bar' as she mused that at least at the mixer there was free booze.
Mari followed Meredith's attention, and nearly missed the light change, jolting when the car behind her started honking.
Meredith doesn't notice that Mari's jaw is working, her hands sliding down to the bottom of the steering wheel to hold tight.
"Wish me luck."
"Yeah." Mari agreed, distracted, telling herself not to read into it. "Have fun."
Mari carefully peels peanuts along their seams, her glass of sparkling water untouched as she periodically checks the glass above the back, to check on the door.
After getting into a routine of shelling groupings of little prime numbers, she looks over her shoulder and flinches to see Mark in her shadow, still in smooth black leather, with his hand outstretched like he was about to touch her shoulder.
"Hey," he says slowly, tilting his head at her. "I guess you didn't hear me."
No, she really didn't. Maybe because his flirtatious spirit seems low, and he didn't attempt to whisper it near her ear this time.
"I'm sorry. The music."
He narrows his cat like eyes, finding the music, and the chatter, particularly low, for this kind of place.
"Right. So, is this seat taken?"
She wordlessly shakes her head, carefully turning back in her seat.
She misses his order to Joe, but she catches Joe's subtle look at them both sitting together. He grabs a bottle of single malt Scotch, and Mari realizes, oh.
It's a strange déjà vu, to find herself in the same spot, and him in Derek's, ordering the same drink.
She glances to her right, like she expects the scene to recreate itself, and finds Mark with his large shoulders hunched forward, focused exclusively down on his drink.
The vision of Derek dissipates.
Mark murmurs something into his glass that Mari doesn't catch. It's only when he glances over, like he's waiting for a response, that Mari guesses it was something she was meant to hear.
"Pardon?"
His greyish blue eyes search her face, his voice now slow and deliberate. "I said," he enunciates. "That you look sad."
She glances up at the bar mirror, but because of the angle, there's only an outline of her, no dice of catching her expression. She's not sure, with the way he sometimes exaggerates and stretches out his words if he's mocking or genuine.
"You're not waiting for Derek, are you?" he continues with, letting his observation go without further comment.
"No?"
"Oh. I thought we might have that in common."
"Waiting for Derek?"
He rolls his eyes. "No. You, waiting for Derek. Me, waiting for Addison."
She's still watching the mirror for Meredith, glancing over at Mark only absently, when he speaks, to make sure she's catching it all.
She's not sure if she wants Meredith to show.
She doesn't want the…meeting, to go badly for her. But she wants to make amends for how abrupt she was when she rejected her offer. To explain herself this time. Still distracted she asks, "why are you waiting for her?"
"Why aren't you waiting for him?"
She blinks, focusing.
Mark turns so he's sideways along the bar, glass loose in his hand as the remnants glow amber.
"What you said, about delayed response. You really don't think hitting me had anything to do with you?" he raises his brow. "It just happened to work that way, after seeing your almost striptease?"
She presses her tongue against the back of her teeth.
"You make that sound tawdrier than it was."
He shakes his head. "I'm talking about what it looked like. To him."
Mari feels a bone deep weariness from too long delayed rest. She's maybe-sorta fine with conversation, but not to be back in the exam room, trying to probe at the wound to see if it bleeds.
"Why are you here?" She asks, edgily exasperated. Here on the other barstool when she planned to sit here alone, and just…here. Here altogether.
His brow quirks at her expression.
"I get Addison." And she does. She gets giving someone space and realizing too late that you've given them too much. That people don't come back on their own. "She heard about me, and hopped on a plane to see if her marriage could be salvaged. Your actions make. less. sense."
"Can't I want the same thing?" he asks semi-rhetorically.
How is what he wants comparable to that? To fixing a marriage?
"Which is what, exactly?" she asks, matching the semi-serious tone by turning to him too, brow raised like she's daring him to answer.
He pursues his lips. "You are so not what I pictured."
She makes a face. "That's because your imagination is pornographic."
By all that is sacred, she doesn't want to hear a comparison. She's not Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd. She doesn't have old Hollywood charm of female fatale sensuality, doesn't have the look of leading the Valkyrie. She doesn't play with scalpels.
If this were a play, Addison would have been cast as the other woman, and the audience would have rooted for her anyway. If she were Addison, she'd probably have slapped Mark across the shoulder for every non-answer or deliberate goad about Derek.
Mari instead narrows her eyes to stop from rolling them, keeps her body still only because she's walking injured, and can't wave him off, or shake the tightness from her shoulders.
She wants a hot bath, and a cold compress, and for this entire day to be over.
Mark smirks, like he finds her annoyance amusing.
"So, what's your reason?"
She shoots him an apathetic look, returning to looking up at the bar mirror again.
Mark waves his hand at her, to get her to look at him. "You're sitting here, shelling peanuts, with a glass of water. You know why I'm here, but why are you?"
"I don't know why you're here," she corrects.
"I told you."
"You lied," she declares easily.
"When?" he asks, sounding almost offended.
She flicks the peanut debris towards him since he's the one who drew attention to them. He dodges it. "If you truly don't know, I'm afraid I'm going to have to charge you 400 dollars for my answer. I hear that's your going rate."
His brows shoot up.
"Extortion," he accuses, head tilted contemplatively.
Mari fixes the pile of shells, not expecting him to set his glass down, and reach in his jacket for his wallet. After flicking through the bills, he lays four hundred-dollar bills on the bar top between them.
("Okay, he get what that looks like, right?" Joe mutters to himself, keeping an eye on the pair, since he's familiar enough with Mari's bad luck with Derek, and thinks this handsome Marlon Brando type, Streetcar Named Desire, not Godfather, looks too devilish.
He's not too worried about Mari doing something she'll regret, based on the look on her face, and her being stone-cold sober, but still, he's secretly invested in the Derek-Mari romantic tragedy, and he's been waiting for something new to develop on that front.
What can he say? Dr. Shepherd saved his life and he wants the guy to be happy.)
Mari looks up at Mark to see if he's serious.
Tell me, his eyes say.
He actually wants to give up four hundred dollars to hear what lie she's caught him at.
The fact that he carries more than that in his wallet, makes her wonder what lifestyle Derek actually left in New York, if Seattle had been the complete reverse. A trailer in the woods, freshly caught fish for his breakfast, warm, soft red and blue flannel. She can't picture him in a leather jacket or waving down the bartender like he's used to being served.
She can picture New York Derek, sometimes, but she tries not to. It makes her wonder how much of Seattle Derek is an experiment, was a distraction.
Mari pulls in her lip, looking around and seeing just how deserted the bar is, how it's not as drunken behaviorally, or too warm from the press of other bodies, as she expected. It's nearly as private as the exam room had been.
Like then, she's thinking about Mark getting hit and not getting back up.
After Derek hit him, and the Chief yelled about decorum and liability, and Derek had stormed off, and Addison had followed at a skirted distance, Mari was standing there, with everyone running off, and Mark at her feet, touching the blood on his face, and looking at the stain on his fingers, as if to make sure it was really there. Something more relieved, and not at all defensive, when he had looked up at Derek.
"Did you think if he got to hit you, he might be able to forgive you?"
Mark shakes his head, chuckling ruefully. He can't help but add, "I came for Addison too."
She scrutinizes his face for guile, or insincerity, and finds the absence of it even more tragic.
"And did you think, when she came here to fix her marriage, that they'd move past it and come home?"
So this visit was Mark mimicking Addison. Coming to Seattle to find out where things stand, earn forgiveness too.
Mark swallows the double of whisky in one go.
"They're not fixing it," he declares. "Believe me, that's not Derek and Addie. They both need to wake up to reality."
'Addison is my family. That is 11 thanksgivings, 11 birthdays, and 11 Christmases. And the one day I'm supposed to sign a piece of paper and end my family? A person doesn't do that. Not without hesitation.'
"It's a lot to give up," she murmurs.
He gives her a look. "Not if it's already gone."
It doesn't feel gone.
She shakes her head, disagreeing because she has to. To think of Derek and Addison's marriage ending anyway, makes her feel guilty, and angry, and selfish.
She's not sure what to do with his certainty, other than try to break it, so he'll stop saying Derek's name to her, and pushing.
"You had one night with her. What is that compared to eleven years of marriage?"
Mark frowns over at her.
"One night?" He repeats.
Mari, who is absently sweeping peanut crumbs away from her until the bar top is mirror smooth, feels her heart skip. The beat flickering like a hummingbird.
No. He, he couldn't have meant –
She reads it in the drop of his face, and the impact feels like shrapnel.
She inhales too deep, loses her posture like a marionette with severed strings.
She feels…cheated.
She thought it was empty lust, or sad desperation, or something tragically stupid, to make Addison, in her own words, commit 'the worst mistake of her life'.
Mari was the sinner in it, to want what she shouldn't have. To date him, and sleep with him, and know him, and want him, and want him, and want him.
She can't breathe. Really, really can't breathe, caged by her own ribs.
Mark lunges for her as she's topples from trying to get off her stool, to find air.
Mari presses against the hurt, hearing the explosion, and Dylan shielding her with his weight, and she's a terrible person for convincing Hannah -
Mark hoists her up, tucking her hair behind her ears, cradling her neck with both hands and pressing his thumbs under her chin to get her to lift her head up, up until she's gasping.
His eyes are no longer cat like, but blown, running over her face. He exaggerates each word, forcing her to hold eye contact.
"Hey, look. at. me. Breathe."
('Is she okay?'
'Should we call someone?'
'Does she-'
"I've got it handled. I'm a doctor," Mark barks back, trying to get Mari to focus.)
"Come on, Mari. Breathe. You know how this works. Follow along." He starts counting.
She messes it up, falls off the count, growing dizzy as she tries to mimic his breathing until she's there. Not too deep, not too quick, and each one burning.
"What the hell happened to you, huh?" he asks, patting her cheeks, pushing back flyaway curls stuck to the tears that leaked.
I think I cracked my ribs further. Or worse.
Please don't let there be any more broken.
"Remember what I said," she coughs, her voice breathless and strangled "about bombs in patient's chest cavities? Not as, as" she coughs "fun as they sound."
She did not expect, when she woke up for a mind-numbing therapy session, that she would end it with the guy Addison cheated on Derek with, helping her out of her shirt in a Joe's bathroom.
'Are you taking anything for the pain?'
'It might have worn off five hours ago.'
'You could drive a man to drink, you know that? Forget it. Do you want a drink?'
'I don't drink when I'm sad.'
He helped her out of the wrappings, looking over the livid bruising she couldn't even see because of the height of the mirror.
'And your hearing loss? Is that from the explosion too?'
Her eyes widened.
He rolled his. 'I'm an ENT too. I can tell when someone is compensating by reading lips.'
"You gonna tell Derek?" he asks after a long moment, helping her re-wrap while she pressed an ice compress to the worst of it. She's thinking about the 17 stair steps she'll have to take from the porch to the staircase, to get to her room. She'd almost prefer an on-call room, but she's adamant about not going to Seattle Grace in this state.
"He thinks my sister was the Dr. Grey that was in the explosion."
He pauses on a rotation. "That's not what I meant."
She releases her breath slowly.
He means tell Derek about him and Addison.
She closes her eyes.
First Night at Joe's
"So, what's your story?" he asks.
"My...story?" she echoes, bemused.
Who asks that, of a stranger? Really asks it. Meets it with undivided attention and genuine interest? In a bar, where even here people still look past each other, wait for any pauses they can fill with their own chatter, without hearing a word of what the other guy said. She looks at Joe, who's moved farther away, at the people passing behind them on their way in or out, and at him, who's still, strangely there, present in a way she isn't used to.
The story of Mari Grey, she thinks.
How do you cut out parts like: why she's in this bar when she isn't drinking. Why she's waiting for someone she doesn't want to show. Why she's in this city at all.
Or the job she's starting tomorrow, where Dr. Ellis Grey had made her start. Why she's unsure about venturing into the premier surgical hospital on the West Coast when she is adamantly not a surgeon and rife for disappointed comparison.
She's moved into a new house, that's really the old house, left with the ghost of a broken marriage, a secret home that meant more to her mother than any attachment she formed anywhere else.
There are too many thorns to untangle from the roses.
She can play a half dozen instruments markedly well, can speak even more languages, but she messes up idioms, and hallmarks of American culture, and continues to own very little besides pictures and postcards, in the face of having left too much behind. Her life is alien, to the uninitiated. Her mother made her strange. Dr. House made her a little stranger, showed her his way before med school could get their chance to teach her rules.
She doesn't want to talk about family, or work, or why Seattle, and finds little else she can mention in an overview.
"It's still in the works," she decides, squinting in thought. "New town, new chapter."
"Ah." He says like he agrees. She eyes his smile, cataloguing that he's in a dive bar, in an expensive red silk shirt, intentionally left untucked, peeked open at the chest. He doesn't look like he's taken off a suit jacket, or a tie that choked him after a hard day at work, but like he prefers a purposeful dishevelment. Something new, rebellious maybe, when his nails and his hair, show he is fastidious about personal hygiene, maybe even a little high maintenance, used to fine things. Drinking single malt in a sticky bar built on rounds of shots and pitchers of beer.
New to Seattle too.
She tilts her head, thinks of something the Seattle version of her could enjoy. The girl she doesn't know yet. She's close enough to see his eyes aren't as dark as she thought, more of a silver-y blue. "I might start running," and there's enough honesty in it, to maybe mean something less casual. "On the trails," she clarifies. Maybe take in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, not so different, and yet very different, from her life in New Jersey pines.
He hums, tilting his head slightly in concert, understanding. "I'm going to fish. I've always wanted to learn fly fishing."
The only thing she knows about fly fishing is seeing a magazine cover in a waiting room.
"Is that what got you here, was there a brochure?"
He presses his lips to contain his smile, lowering his voice too. "It was very persuasive."
She hums, "so, I know you're new to Seattle too, and you can't fly fish…"
He laughs. "Yet. And I have…. other, qualities," he grins, eyes crinkling in his self-conscious flirtation.
"Can you sing? Dance?"
He coughs, "uh, no. Badly."
Dare, she thinks. But that's entirely contingent on seeing him again, and she's known him for five minutes.
"Play an instrument?" she asks, a little too interested to compare to her usual type.
He ruffles the back of his hair, an indecisive breath escaping him. "Well, I played sax, in high school."
"Jazz?"
"Uh, no. More...marching band."
"Marching band," she echoes.
"With the uniforms. The hat." He laughs at himself.
She didn't go to high school. She didn't tire of the travel the way Meredith did, when she chose boarding school. She should have watched American high school movies, so she'd have something to draw from.
"I've never heard a marching band," she muses, wondering how one goes about experiencing it. Maybe it was too late. "So, favorite band, outside of your marching days?"
"You like music," he realizes, eyes dancing at the discovery.
She flushes, feeling that heady thrum that comes from meeting someone who looks and listens and finds it worthy of note.
"So, this answer is important," he guesses. "It's going to tell you something about me."
She hums. "Yes. Answers do tend to do that."
"I should wait then. For the second date."
She bites the corner of her lip, trying, and failing to not let her smile give her away.
Second date. As if this chance encounter was the first? "Not the third?" She parries, as an allusion to the date typically associated with intimacy.
"No. Third date is when I show off my impressive, newly acquired, fly fishing skills."
She laughs. He laughs too, like he can't help it.
"You still have a few questions left, if you're going for the full twenty," he encourages. That wasn't quite her intention, but her curiosity gets the better of her. She touches the back of her hand to her blush, rolling her eyes good-naturedly.
"Okay, can you…finish a crossword?"
"If I cheat."
She tisks. "Hmm...Do you smoke?"
"Occasionally. With a very good cigar."
With the rising stance to ban smoking indoors, most casual smokers are reluctant to admit to the habit. Would think no was honest enough.
Lies, hedging, omissions, are interesting, but she's a moth to a flame, when it comes to that rare honesty.
"Favorite color?"
He takes more time to commit to this answer. For a split second she wonders if he'll choose the flirtatious answer, about her eyes or what she's wearing. Her eyes are hazel grey and she's wearing a black spaghetti strap that shows off the golden tan doomed to fade under Seattle skies. "Blue. But not light blue. Indigo."
"Favorite book?"
"Sun Also Rises."
Never read it. "Was it a sad or happy ending?"
He pauses, the moment carrying more weight than she expected. "Sad," he says, slightly subdued, touching his scotch for the first time since he's sat next to her.
If he's learned that she especially likes music, she's learned that something in the ending of this book she hasn't read, mirrors a sadness in him.
"That is so not what the Monty Python boys say," she exaggerates.
He tilts his head, like he's running movie quotes though his head, trying to figure out which she means.
Mari's hand idly twists the Queen of Hearts she was still gripping, turning it like a spun blade, as she looks over her masterpiece.
Casually she strikes, watching the house tumble. The cards falling in front of her.
"So," she regards the wreckage with potential "how steady are your hands?"
Meredith comes in, in her slinky black dress, and her strappy heels, and moves to the bar like she's done it a hundred times before. She orders tequila, straight. The bartender looks over her head, towards Mari who's moved away from the bar to a table, as he pours. There isn't much in terms of family resemblance, no matter that both are often compared to their mother. (They'd have to be, right?)
She supposes Joe remembers her warning, her worry. Dirty blonde and shots of tequila.
She doesn't have to pull out her phone to know that Meredith hasn't called her. Might have never intended to, or did, but only after.
"Everything okay?" Derek asks.
She looks at him blankly, not sure what to think yet.
"Do you have any siblings?"
His brows raise. "Four sisters."
She 'huh's, but her attention is elsewhere. He says something but she doesn't hear it. It feels like she's in a tunnel, or like they were walking together, but she suddenly feel into a deep hole, and he's still up there, but she's down here, and...
"I'm sorry, Really - it's just…" She wants to stay, but –
She needs to know what her life is going to be like, here with Meredith. If she's going to go back to living with an alcoholic, a frequent, or just sometimes drunk. Cleaning up the mess, flinching at the mood swings. Getting her in the shower and sleeping with the door open so she can hear her snore and know she's still breathing, that she's still on her side and won't asphyxiate. Caring for someone, who resents that she's a witness to it.
He sees something, in her face, some tie that's pulling her away. "You have to leave," he realizes.
She spreads the cards back on the table, tries to find the battered Queen of Hearts, and finds the wild instead.
She writes her name and number in the available space, swallowing her nerves like she's done this before.
"So you don't take me running, the wrong way," and just as quickly as she slides it over, she's out of her seat, and moving to the bar, too flustered to possibly look back.
Meredith says, "you had to get away too?" like they've stumbled on common ground, like it wasn't strange, to find her sister at her barstool.
"What do you think I'm getting away from?" She asks slowly, confused.
"You know," she gestures absently with her wrist, her speech more relaxed than she was before the mixer. "The house. The boxes. My boxes, and your boxes, and Mom's boxes."
Right. Maybe she was, a little.
"No, I was just…waiting for you," she decides, playing coincidence.
Meredith wrinkles her nose. "I stayed as long as I could. I smiled. I smooched. I hated it."
That's more honest than she expected. Meredith didn't tend to use sentences that started with 'I'.
"Was it weird being there?" She wonders, pushing to see how deep Meredith's unease runs beneath the still surface.
The question causes a grimace. "I don't know," she downs a shot, making a gesture to Joe for another one. "Yeah, sort of. I mean, not yet, because nobody knows yet, but..." she shrugs, like she's resigned to it.
Derek comes up to the bar, on her other side, to settle his bill. She hopes he doesn't ask for an introduction. She feels tense, like the warm, fuzzy feeling will dissipate if it meets this part of her life.
"We could have gone together," Meredith muses aloud. "If you hadn't been such an overachiever. Or, if I hadn't of been an underachiever? We'd be doing this together. Or I would be ahead of you, and you could actually come to me for advice, ya know?"
Too much of that sounds like a precursor to buried resentment. She has a keen ear for it since Meredith became a teenager. Building and building. That way you're not blinded by the shift change.
"There's no wrong time to start something."
Does it actually bother her, that Mari is further in her career? Did it matter, when Meredith was going for surgery, and Mari didn't?
She thought they were doing this together. Wasn't that the point of Seattle, of keeping the house and sharing it?
Meredith keeps her eyes on her empty shot glass. Her voice gaining a new, sardonic edge. "Very inspirational. You should put that on a poster. With a cat."
Derek has his head tilted on her other side, but instead of announcing himself, he leans to whisper good luck near Mari's ear, close enough his nose brushes one of her bound curls.
In the reflection behind the bar, she can see the pause that she can feel. Mari watches him walk behind her and disappear in the silver glass.
"If you rather get laid then stand at your sister's elbow, ruining her buzz, it looks like you're missing your window of opportunity," Meredith waves her hand, whether to emphasis her point, or get Joe's attention, is unclear. Her delivery is perfectly flat, though a little slurred.
Mari watches the shot glass refill. The fourth. The bar is louder than it was with Derek, music, and conversation, and laughing, and cheering, and the shot glass clinking against the bar top after Meredith drinks it straight. Mari tries to tuck herself away as people keep brushing against her, headed further towards a new game of darts.
Meredith doesn't look like she wants company, and Mari doesn't want to offer it if it means staying here.
She's taken the best part of her night and dismissed it. For this.
She tries to convince herself to take the bar stool. To watch Meredith's guard lower with libations, and pose careful questions that won't change their relationship at all, just Mari's understanding of it. She pictures Meredith seeing through it, especially if Mari doesn't drink with her, and shutting down her responses even more.
"You have my number," she tells this version of her sister. "Call me when you're done." And she slides into the crowd, brushing against one of the guys who looks about her age, in a suit with a loosened tie. He says hey, in the preamble of a look or a come on, in a deep voice with a rural, Midwestern inflection. She doesn't look up, certain that by the time she passes, his eyes will have found a new target.
She gets out on the street and breathes in blessedly cool air, and the smell that comes with fresh rain.
"Hey!"
Derek turns his head, key in the door of a tan station wagon.
(Not exactly the car she envisioned him having.)
She's slightly out of breath as she jogs to him, certain another moment would have made her miss him. She's too used to fleeting, fleeing things.
"Hey," she swallows. There's a crinkle between his brows, as he blinks the rain out of his eyes, off his lashes. The rain shows his coifed hair is being contained by product and mouse, with curls starting at his temples. She hasn't seen a side she doesn't like, but this?
Her heart hits her ribs as she presses forward to kiss him.
It's a soft press, as she hasn't anchored herself against him, is precariously tilted on her toes.
He presses back, sliding his hand right above her braid, cradling, as he kisses her, the other looping around her waist. The relief of having it reciprocated melts her. Electricity buzzes under her skin, pushing her to arch into him, pressing her hands into his sides, at his waist, cold dew on their face, as his tongue slides against her.
Her whole body shivers. She's so close she can feel his heart beating into hers.
She pulls back for air, his lips and his warm panting breaths, sliding to the corner of her mouth, her cheek.
"I needed to do that," she pants, heady and dizzy.
His mouth is still parted, eyes heavy-lidded, as his hand plays through her curls, massages the back of her skull.
"The Clash," he says, in a daze.
"Huh?"
He grins.
"Favorite band," he clarifies.
She slides her hands around his back, using his leverage to tilt her chest away so she can breathe, their hips slotting together. "I thought that was second date conversation," she murmurs.
"Couldn't wait," he teases, lightly brushing his nose against hers, sharing her grin.
When Joe was in surgery to remove his aneurysm, Derek Shepherd looked up from the operating microscope, and asked Burke, "what's your 'Joe story'? Seems like everybody around here has one."
"You first."
"Okay," Derek agrees gamely, not wanting to think about Addison being somewhere in this hospital, or Mari finding out about his marriage in nearly the worst way he could have imagined. "I went to Joe's place the night before I started working here. I'd only been in town, you know, a few days. I saw this woman." He decides not to go with a descriptor, to give it all away. The warm light hitting her blonde hair, the expanse of golden tan skin, the black spaghetti strap that looked like silk, cut in a v to show the planes of her upper back.
"She was constructing a house of cards very seriously, like it was surgery." He chuckles. "And when she placed one just right, she'd smile."
He blinks to the present. "So, Joe put another stack next to her, and he gave me this look, like here's your opportunity to go over and talk to her. So, I did. I like to look at it as my initiation into Seattle."
Initiation. Beginning. If only he could tell her that.
"What about you?"
Burke looks at him completely straight. "Oh, I don't have one. I just wanted to hear yours."
Notes: I did it. I finished the four parter. Originally I planned to show Mark's day, and the day after meeting Mari at the bar, and what he'd say to Derek about it in here, but I'll save that for later as I liked keeping to the chapter's theme. This is the last flashback I plan for, as the story will start at the first day at Seattle Grace and go straight from there. No more jumping around.
Hopefully Mari and Derek's relationship is coming across as different from MerDer, hinting how Mari doesn't process things the same as Meredith, and so the relationship and fallout unfolded differently.
I always thought it was a shame Mark and Meredith didn't develop much of a friendship. I like the Dirty Mistresses Club.
Also, about her freak out. She's in bad shape, physically, from the bomb, which went a differently from the show, and she's taking great pains to hide it, which isn't good emotionally. Waking up alone messed with her head. Now, she finds out from Mark that she gave up on Derek while Addison left a lot out from her side of the story.
There's a Sliding Door reference, since I take my username from that movie.
'You know what the Monty Python boys say, always look on the bright side of life.'
Oh, also! I changed up the first four chapters before this one, to get myself back in the groove. Nothing major was changed, but the difference was like...4,000 words, so.