The Ex-Mistress (Grey's Anatomy, Meredith/Addison, PG)
The thing about hospitals is that after a point, it all gets ridiculously incestuous. Addison forgot this when she was married, but now that’s over she’s reminded of it every time she even vaguely considers someone else. She’s been there for three years now, and every single person she might be interested in can be connected to her ex-husband in, at most, three steps.
Some of them, of course, can be connected in far less than that. Some of them aren’t just her ex-husband’s ex-mistress’s ex-lover. Some of them are just the ex-mistress. And while he’s had a few, Addison knows that the only one she’d even consider would be that first one. The one who changed everything.
Looking back, she knows now that there was a whole list of reasons for her divorce, but at the time his sleeping with Meredith seemed to take over everything. Looking back she knows it was a convenient excuse, a reason to be angry instead of hurt and rejected. Looking back she knows that if it hadn’t been Meredith it would have been someone else. Meredith didn’t steal Addison’s quota of love and desire; it was already out there, looking for someone to accept it.
But of course it’s easy to make these excuses when Meredith is the one who’s a part of her life now. Addison never thought that Meredith would be her protégée. During the divorce, she didn’t want to have to look at her, but somehow she ended up scrubbing in on so many of the neo-natal surgeries that her face became a familiar presence in Addison’s OR.
And now she is Meredith Grey, that promising young surgeon ready to follow in Addison’s footsteps, and Addison has to remind herself periodically that this is the same Meredith Grey that slept with her husband.
She has to remind herself that it would be ridiculous, the ex-mistress and the ex-wife, that the tangled web of relationships and hook-ups in this hospital doesn’t need that particular string added to it.
Derek would think it was all about him. Derek would think it was some kind of comfort for them both, their way to forget him and the fact that he’s working his way through the staff of the surgical department like there’s no tomorrow. And everyone else would come to the same conclusion.
They don’t talk about him. They talk about everything else under the sun - politics, music, good restaurants. Once Addison mentioned ferryboats and it surprised them both that it didn’t hurt. When Addison tells stories about her life in New York, or when Meredith talks about her first year as an intern, they mention ‘my ex-husband’ or ‘my ex-boyfriend’ as though they’re not the same person, and this unnamed man is merely a shadowy figure in whatever story is being told.
But he’s there. Not all the time, but in the moments. They laugh together over something at Joe’s, and then Addison goes to the bathroom and when she comes back there’s a dark-haired guy talking to Meredith and she remembers, in that moment, that her friend is the same woman who her husband met in this very bar once upon a time, that it probably started off right like the scene that’s playing out in front of her eyes now.
Addison is over it. If anyone asks, she is completely over the fact that the man she used to love slept with the woman she spends more time with than anyone else. They’re friends because they work together and it has nothing to do with Derek.
But she won’t let herself consider Meredith as someone she might be interested in, won’t let herself admit how she feels when Meredith’s hand rests on her arm, and in those moments when she remembers just who exactly Meredith Grey is, she knows exactly why.