Wide Awake
Seattle, Washington 2010 - S6E15
Lexie rolled over in her sleep, her hands in her hair, her lips parted slightly. Her hand drifted over to lay on her forehead as she tried to fight the urge to open her eyes and reposition herself. She sighed half-heartedly. Every time she closed her eyes all she could see was him. And not the him she was allowed to picture either. Hooking up with Alex was supposed to be a distraction, but it wasn't working. Every moment with him sent her flashbacks. The way he touched her, where he touched her, who the last person to touch her there was. It didn't matter that he sounded different, and smelt different, and felt different underneath her fingertips. In her dreams, it was all the same. All Mark, over and over.
She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling. For once, she was at home, with a full night's sleep before her. If she could only access it. Outside Seattle was raining away a thunderstorm, the rain slashing against the roof so loud Lexie wasn't surprised she couldn't sleep. She stared for a while until she felt her eyelids begin to droop again. She was tired, off a twenty-four hour shift that she was doing over time on because she didn't want to leave a patient after she'd been awake all night. But now she was in bed, she was hot, and sticky and everything about it was wrong. She flipped the comforter away from her and tried to sleep in the cool draught blowing through the attic.
An hour later, the thunder started. Big, booming crashes across the sky shook Lexie from the slip of sleep she'd managed to claim. She pulled the covers back over her body and rolled onto her side. She checked her phone for the time and considered calling Alex but that was pretty dumb if he was downstairs, and unfair if he was still at the hospital. She hoped he would be there when she started her shift in the morning instead.
She tossed and turned for a while, lost in her dreams of him. Nightmares of guilt and longing. She couldn't bite her lip in her sleep to stop herself from letting out soft moans. There was an endlessness to the cycle of being awake in a thunderstorm, to being asleep in a fit of dreams all overlapping and melting together until she couldn't take it anymore.
At five thirty, when the thunder eased off and the rain began to pelting a little softer, Lexie pulled herself out of bed and pulled on blouse and a pair of jeans. She slipped her phone and her pager into her pocket and then braved the harsh conditions. Her car was parked in front of Meredith's on the drive, so it wasn't like she could go anywhere. As soon as she sat down in the driver's seat, keys still in the bowl in Mer's hallway, the tears began to split from her eyes and slip down her cheeks.