you're bad news (i don't care i like you) {mark/lexie}
Title: You're Bad News (I Don't Care I Like You)
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Mark/Lexie
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,071
Prompt: #30 - New Year for 100_tales
Author's Note: I've owed this to crickets for a while, so here goes nothing. Hope you like it! You'll notice the bolded words in the song lyrics that act as headers (one of them is butchered) are your word prompts -- all but three of them.
Summary: Post 5.10. This is a game of strategy (don't let them find out), of procrastination (neither of them really knows what they're doing), of learning (the teacher to the student, in so many ways).
i’m cutting through you track by track (tell me how we got this way)
They have their morning routine down pat.
Eventually, after this became something other than a one-night, two-night, three-night stand, she decided that going between his hotel room and either Meredith’s house or her and George’s apartment led to both lack of sleep and lack of time. Of course, she didn’t actually get to vocalize that much before he found her passed out on the couch at two in the morning, but she had planned on it.
“I’m sorry, I just…I guess I fell asleep,” she’d murmured, as he kneeled in front of her in the dimly lit room, one hand on her bare arm, the one he’d shaken her awake with and then never bothered to remove. “I’ll go.”
Which is when he did something he’d come to both be thankful for and regret. His sleep addled brain allowed him to pull her up by her arm and lead her back to bed. A minute later, she’d been asleep again, close but not crowding him, and somehow that had been almost comforting.
And then came the morning, and the issue of how she was supposed to get to work or, more specifically how they were supposed to get to work, which is how Mark and Lexie both started getting to work at four-fifty in the morning, a lovely precautionary tactic thought up to ensure that no one she was supposed to be living with ever saw them together.
The ride over was always fun.
Lexie had this nasty habit of being a morning person which was fine until they got into the car, because Mark just wasn’t anything but completely exhausted that early in the morning, and she had this thing with the radio. She’d turn the volume up as soon as she got in the car, before it was even started, and half the time he’d jump out of his seat when it came on blaring. The other half he’d fight with her to just give him some peace and quiet and almost get them into a car crash trying to find a way around her hands that, just like at night, seemed to be everywhere.
“I’ll make you sit in the backseat, I swear to god Little Grey.” He’d warn and she’d laugh in a way that was also far too loud for this early in the morning, and the first time they’d get to a red light he’d smack her hands away from the radio, and switch it to some terrible country station that neither of them could stand, just so she’d turn it down while she tried to find her way back to where she’d been.
He starts to miss the company on the mornings when she isn’t there.
---
if you were here baby, we’d increase the dose
Lexie’s never on his cases. Strategically. First it was because he wanted to ignore this…whatever it is, at the time merely attraction, now it’s so as not to draw attention.
He brushed up behind her during surgery one too many times, a little too close and a little too comfortable; Meredith started noticing, Derek started glaring, and Mark started backing off. In public anyway.
Sometimes, he’ll see her down the hall from him, her eyes catching his from a patient’s room, and her lips will turn up at the corners, her eyes will glint with something like mischief, and he realizes it’s better for the patient if they keep on doing this dance of avoidance at work.
She has his attention, all of it, whether he wants her to or not.
---
tangerine, you’re ripe on the tree, but then you fall (don’t we all)
She’s too young, and Meredith doesn’t want this. That would be the first argument. This would be Derek’s.
She’s normal, not screwed up, not dark and twisty - don’t mess it up now. That would be the second. This would be Meredith’s.
Mark has these memorized, from the way it would start to the way it would end, and all the lines in between, like some movie he’s seen far too many times. It plays in his head on the drive home; it plays against the ceiling at two in the morning while she sleeps next to him.
Like he said, she’s all he can think about sometimes.
“What do they know,” she exhales, against his skin, and she isn’t talking to him so much as out loud to herself, in a way that he’s not even sure she’s doing it. She probably isn’t, because last he checked she was half asleep, and when he glances over at her he can see her eyes are still closed, even if her fingers are still moving against his arm, some random pattern he can’t really comprehend fully.
“Lex,” he says, quietly, a test, and she makes a faint ‘hmm’ sound that he feels more than hears. “Did you say something?”
She shakes her head, or makes an attempt to, and then she’s quiet for the rest of the night.
A few days later, Thatcher Grey makes his latest appearance at Seattle Grace, drunk and accusing, fresh out of a one-car accident. His injuries are minor, but Mark can hear him from the hallway outside the ER, and the insults he sends flying aren’t. Meredith pushes past him on her way out the door with red-rimmed eyes, and he can hear Karev in there telling Thatcher to calm down, sticking a syringe full of something that the man probably doesn’t need, but will sedate him, into his arm. To Lexie, who stands still a few feet away, he offers a look that hovers somewhere between sympathy and apology. Thatcher’s quiet and out like a light barely a minute later.
“Are you…” Alex starts to ask, the sentence dropping off intentionally, and he sees Lexie nod. He leaves then, giving Mark a look on the way out.
He should be the next one in there. He should be in the one at her side. But he can’t bring himself to that and so he shrinks back from the door like he was never there to begin with, leaving down the hallway to nowhere in particular.
She isn’t normal, she is screwed up, he’ll think later, she just does a better job of keeping that under lock and key, projecting a different image to everyone else, than Meredith herself does.
What do they know?
---
and how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangle
As someone whose job it is to know the human body, the way it works, the way it’s built, sometimes it’s easy to let your mind shift into that mode. The mode where you see things as nothing more than bone and muscle, pulse points and pressure points and all that’s in between.
He traces the line of her spine with his fingertips, her collarbone with his tongue, his lips. He kisses his way down her stomach, his thumbs pressing into her inner thighs, spreading her legs wide. Mark breathes against her and her hips buck when he does, on reflex. It makes him chuckle, a second before he makes better use of his tongue, flicking, curling, inside of her.
There’s a reason it’s called the Sloan method, and there’s a reason that it’s perfected.
---
in the end I win every time, but the ink remains
Her pen explodes on a particularly shitty day for the both of them (mostly the day Derek and Meredith find out - but they aren’t talking about that) and her fingers and hands wind up covered in blue ink.
“Don’t touch me with those,” he warns, using one hand on her back to keep her both far in front of him and directed toward the bathroom before she can mess up anything in the hotel room. “Why didn’t you do this at the hospital?”
“I did. I told you it won’t come off.” Somehow, hands-free, she manages to turn around in his careful grasp, palms out flat, bringing them towards him and he ducks and swerves and she starts laughing at his antics. “Seriously, it’s ink. You will live.”
“I like this shirt.” He tells her, vainly, and she only keeps laughing, so he grabs her by the shoulders again, turns her back around, and gets her through the doorway. In the second it takes him to turn on the water, she’s managed to flick him in the arm, and he doesn’t even know how to describe the expression that works his way onto his face. “Are you five?”
She shrugs her shoulders, this shit-eating grin on her face as she says, completely seriously, “That’s what they tell me.”
Mark shakes his head, taking her by the wrists and putting her hands under the water, holding them there so that she doesn’t splash him, as he says, “You’re incorrigible, you know.”
“Oh, you don’t even know what that means. Probably saw it in a movie somewhere,” she mutters that last part, and he switches the water to colder with his free hand, taking pleasure in the little shriek she gives when he does.
---
so this is the new year, and i don’t feel any different
There’s a New Year’s Eve party. Apparently there always is, but it’s more by word of mouth than anything, and usually Mark’s too shitfaced, or already in bed with some blonde he’s deemed worthy of ringing in the new year with.
Lexie finds out about it though, because the interns this year are even chattier than last year’s, if that’s possible. “I’m not asking you to go with me, I’m just saying I think that you should go. And telling you that I am going.”
She doesn’t bring it up after that, and he has this little internal fight with himself about how going, even if it’s not with her, just she’s there and he’s there and they both work there, is kind of like surrendering, admitting that they are something other than just a quick fling. She practically lives with him, he’s her ride to work nearly every day; they should’ve done this, this shouldn’t be so hard.
He goes.
People stare, people say things. He does kiss her at midnight, as unceremoniously as possible. It’s a statement, at least he thought that’s what it would feel like.
But.
He doesn’t feel any different at 12:01 than he did at 11:59. He doesn’t know what that means.
---
tattered shoes outside the door, clothes all over the floor; every day feels like the morning after
He wakes up earlier than usual the day after, nearly falls over the shoes that he thought she had kicked off at the door but somehow had ended up in the middle of the room. Placing them against the wall, he tosses her clothes onto the chair near the bed, wondering how she ended up the messy one here.
Sometimes it unnerves him, the way the bottom two drawers in the dresser are full of her stuff, her shoes lined up next to it. Her toothbrush is next to his in the bathroom, her shampoo in the shower, a tiny pink smear on the counter in the bathroom clearly her lipstick.
Mark’s done this once before. With Addison. Briefly. Derek left and they lived together for a short while. Her stuff had taken over, completely, to the point where there was more of hers than his. Lexie’s different. Everything’s equal with her.
Balanced.
If there’s something he needs right now it’s probably balance.
---
cigarettes and chocolate milk, these are just a few of my cravings (you’re the other one)
“This is ridiculous,” she says, voice an octave higher, breathy, breaking when cold metal comes into contact with the bare skin of her back, shirt half pushed up thanks to his roving hands.
“You don’t seem to mind,” he replies, and he can tell she’s trying to look over his shoulder to make sure the door is locked. It is. He’s horny, not stupid. She pulls out of his arms, and he rolls his eyes, “It’s locked.”
She glances back at him, like she didn’t expect him to know what she was after. “I’m just checking,” she pulls at the handle, which remains firmly in place, and he gets right up behind her so that when she turns it’s into him. Lexie smiles, and he gets his hands back on her, pulling her up so that she can wrap her legs around his hips, and they’re moving. Back to that exam table, so that she’s sitting on the edge of it and he can stand between her legs.
“Couldn’t have done it in an on-call room,” she chides, softly, before she presses her lips to his, just as needy as he is, if not as vocal about it.
Some days, on good days, this is how it is.
---
i touched you with unclean hands (i was half honest - don’t say you love me)
There are also the bad days.
Because, yes, Lexie is more messed up than people at first assume. But she’s also a dreamer, an optimist, someone who gets in relationships and likes them. Mark’s never really been any of those things. He stays away from women like that. At least he does when his brain is having any say in the actions of his body.
He tried, he failed, and now there’s this. This thought that they should be moving. This look in her eyes every now and then like maybe she’s a lot more invested in this than he’s letting himself be.
Mark isn’t a good man; he isn’t the kind of man she should be able to care about, she should be able to love.
---
we cannot sweat this poison out, it’s in my skin and in my mouth
Tension finally boils over and he and Derek finally have that yelling match that they’ve been headed towards for weeks. Derek storms out of the room in the middle of Mark’s sentence, but somehow he knows they’ll be fine in the end.
If they could make it past Addison, they can make it through anything.
“Should we really be doing this?” He asks, at night, back at the hotel, after he’s had time to think. This has nothing to do with Derek at all; this is something else.
Lexie turns nervous, wide eyes on him, but they fall toward the floor after a moment in which he can’t make his gaze meet hers. Her voice is small, but confident as she says, “This is the part where you say we should see other people, or that you have been seeing other people - you don’t have to do the whole speech.”
He hates that she reads people as well as she does.
They stay silent for a long minute, and then something seems to click inside her head, because she sits up straight and looks at him, hard, the kind of look that forces him to look. “Why? I mean…what is this even about? And why did you wait so long to say something if this is how it was all going to end up?”
Mark doesn’t have the answers she’s looking for. None of them. He never planned past getting her in bed; he’s never done this before, not really. He was never supposed to have feelings for Little Grey.
“Why keep doing all of this and then just don’t bother to give it a chance. At least if it didn’t work we’d know that much.” There’s a plea in her voice but more than that there’s an accusation. Her hand reaches for his arm, tentative when she makes contact. “Mark?”
“It won’t,” he sighs out, finally, his hand coming up to cover hers, and she stands, ripping her hand away.
“Derek was right,” she starts, and it cuts. Nothing is ever easy, he should expect this. “They were right. And I believed you. I believed in you.”
He rests his head in the palm of his hand, no longer looking at her. This will be easier if she leaves angry, less so if she cries. He doesn’t want to see that.
After a moment, he feels more than sees her come to kneel in front of him, like he had with her that first night she’d stayed over. The irony strikes him. A beginning and an ending. “And you’re over-thinking this.”
Lexie kisses him, something deeper than the kind of kiss that generally means their clothes won’t be on much longer. This means something. His head is filled with thoughts of why this isn’t going to work, why this is just going to make everything worse, why he should just push her away.
But one thought overrides all the others, the thought that’s governed his life pretty much up until her - fuck it, what does he have to lose?
This was always going to be something bigger than them, more than they could control, anyways.
---
being born again into the sweet morning fog
“Mark,” he wakes up to her prodding his shoulder. “It’s five o’clock. We’re late.”
He rubs the sleep from his eyes. “You know we don’t actually have to be there that early, remember.”
She exhales, remembering, letting her head fall back against the pillow. “Oh yeah, I forgot.” He listens to the sound of her breathing for a few seconds, fighting sleep because, yes, they do have to get up, regardless of how cold February in Seattle seems to be and how warm it is under the sheets. “Wait, did your alarm even go off?”
There’s a long moment where he just considers lying to her. Maybe that would be better. Instead, he hits the button to turn it off prematurely, so that he doesn’t have to listen to it blaring when it does go off, and tells her, “No. I set it back.”
She’s on her side again, resting her weight on her elbow, facing him. “Why?”
He shrugs as much as he can while lying flat on his back. “Because who cares who sees us coming in together.”
Her breath catches, just a little, barely audible, and she smiles around the word, “right”, before dropping down so that her head half hits the pillow, half rests against his shoulder.
It’s the dawn of a new morning routine - maybe a new everything.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Mark/Lexie
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,071
Prompt: #30 - New Year for 100_tales
Author's Note: I've owed this to crickets for a while, so here goes nothing. Hope you like it! You'll notice the bolded words in the song lyrics that act as headers (one of them is butchered) are your word prompts -- all but three of them.
Summary: Post 5.10. This is a game of strategy (don't let them find out), of procrastination (neither of them really knows what they're doing), of learning (the teacher to the student, in so many ways).
i’m cutting through you track by track (tell me how we got this way)
They have their morning routine down pat.
Eventually, after this became something other than a one-night, two-night, three-night stand, she decided that going between his hotel room and either Meredith’s house or her and George’s apartment led to both lack of sleep and lack of time. Of course, she didn’t actually get to vocalize that much before he found her passed out on the couch at two in the morning, but she had planned on it.
“I’m sorry, I just…I guess I fell asleep,” she’d murmured, as he kneeled in front of her in the dimly lit room, one hand on her bare arm, the one he’d shaken her awake with and then never bothered to remove. “I’ll go.”
Which is when he did something he’d come to both be thankful for and regret. His sleep addled brain allowed him to pull her up by her arm and lead her back to bed. A minute later, she’d been asleep again, close but not crowding him, and somehow that had been almost comforting.
And then came the morning, and the issue of how she was supposed to get to work or, more specifically how they were supposed to get to work, which is how Mark and Lexie both started getting to work at four-fifty in the morning, a lovely precautionary tactic thought up to ensure that no one she was supposed to be living with ever saw them together.
The ride over was always fun.
Lexie had this nasty habit of being a morning person which was fine until they got into the car, because Mark just wasn’t anything but completely exhausted that early in the morning, and she had this thing with the radio. She’d turn the volume up as soon as she got in the car, before it was even started, and half the time he’d jump out of his seat when it came on blaring. The other half he’d fight with her to just give him some peace and quiet and almost get them into a car crash trying to find a way around her hands that, just like at night, seemed to be everywhere.
“I’ll make you sit in the backseat, I swear to god Little Grey.” He’d warn and she’d laugh in a way that was also far too loud for this early in the morning, and the first time they’d get to a red light he’d smack her hands away from the radio, and switch it to some terrible country station that neither of them could stand, just so she’d turn it down while she tried to find her way back to where she’d been.
He starts to miss the company on the mornings when she isn’t there.
---
if you were here baby, we’d increase the dose
Lexie’s never on his cases. Strategically. First it was because he wanted to ignore this…whatever it is, at the time merely attraction, now it’s so as not to draw attention.
He brushed up behind her during surgery one too many times, a little too close and a little too comfortable; Meredith started noticing, Derek started glaring, and Mark started backing off. In public anyway.
Sometimes, he’ll see her down the hall from him, her eyes catching his from a patient’s room, and her lips will turn up at the corners, her eyes will glint with something like mischief, and he realizes it’s better for the patient if they keep on doing this dance of avoidance at work.
She has his attention, all of it, whether he wants her to or not.
---
tangerine, you’re ripe on the tree, but then you fall (don’t we all)
She’s too young, and Meredith doesn’t want this. That would be the first argument. This would be Derek’s.
She’s normal, not screwed up, not dark and twisty - don’t mess it up now. That would be the second. This would be Meredith’s.
Mark has these memorized, from the way it would start to the way it would end, and all the lines in between, like some movie he’s seen far too many times. It plays in his head on the drive home; it plays against the ceiling at two in the morning while she sleeps next to him.
Like he said, she’s all he can think about sometimes.
“What do they know,” she exhales, against his skin, and she isn’t talking to him so much as out loud to herself, in a way that he’s not even sure she’s doing it. She probably isn’t, because last he checked she was half asleep, and when he glances over at her he can see her eyes are still closed, even if her fingers are still moving against his arm, some random pattern he can’t really comprehend fully.
“Lex,” he says, quietly, a test, and she makes a faint ‘hmm’ sound that he feels more than hears. “Did you say something?”
She shakes her head, or makes an attempt to, and then she’s quiet for the rest of the night.
A few days later, Thatcher Grey makes his latest appearance at Seattle Grace, drunk and accusing, fresh out of a one-car accident. His injuries are minor, but Mark can hear him from the hallway outside the ER, and the insults he sends flying aren’t. Meredith pushes past him on her way out the door with red-rimmed eyes, and he can hear Karev in there telling Thatcher to calm down, sticking a syringe full of something that the man probably doesn’t need, but will sedate him, into his arm. To Lexie, who stands still a few feet away, he offers a look that hovers somewhere between sympathy and apology. Thatcher’s quiet and out like a light barely a minute later.
“Are you…” Alex starts to ask, the sentence dropping off intentionally, and he sees Lexie nod. He leaves then, giving Mark a look on the way out.
He should be the next one in there. He should be in the one at her side. But he can’t bring himself to that and so he shrinks back from the door like he was never there to begin with, leaving down the hallway to nowhere in particular.
She isn’t normal, she is screwed up, he’ll think later, she just does a better job of keeping that under lock and key, projecting a different image to everyone else, than Meredith herself does.
What do they know?
---
and how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangle
As someone whose job it is to know the human body, the way it works, the way it’s built, sometimes it’s easy to let your mind shift into that mode. The mode where you see things as nothing more than bone and muscle, pulse points and pressure points and all that’s in between.
He traces the line of her spine with his fingertips, her collarbone with his tongue, his lips. He kisses his way down her stomach, his thumbs pressing into her inner thighs, spreading her legs wide. Mark breathes against her and her hips buck when he does, on reflex. It makes him chuckle, a second before he makes better use of his tongue, flicking, curling, inside of her.
There’s a reason it’s called the Sloan method, and there’s a reason that it’s perfected.
---
in the end I win every time, but the ink remains
Her pen explodes on a particularly shitty day for the both of them (mostly the day Derek and Meredith find out - but they aren’t talking about that) and her fingers and hands wind up covered in blue ink.
“Don’t touch me with those,” he warns, using one hand on her back to keep her both far in front of him and directed toward the bathroom before she can mess up anything in the hotel room. “Why didn’t you do this at the hospital?”
“I did. I told you it won’t come off.” Somehow, hands-free, she manages to turn around in his careful grasp, palms out flat, bringing them towards him and he ducks and swerves and she starts laughing at his antics. “Seriously, it’s ink. You will live.”
“I like this shirt.” He tells her, vainly, and she only keeps laughing, so he grabs her by the shoulders again, turns her back around, and gets her through the doorway. In the second it takes him to turn on the water, she’s managed to flick him in the arm, and he doesn’t even know how to describe the expression that works his way onto his face. “Are you five?”
She shrugs her shoulders, this shit-eating grin on her face as she says, completely seriously, “That’s what they tell me.”
Mark shakes his head, taking her by the wrists and putting her hands under the water, holding them there so that she doesn’t splash him, as he says, “You’re incorrigible, you know.”
“Oh, you don’t even know what that means. Probably saw it in a movie somewhere,” she mutters that last part, and he switches the water to colder with his free hand, taking pleasure in the little shriek she gives when he does.
---
so this is the new year, and i don’t feel any different
There’s a New Year’s Eve party. Apparently there always is, but it’s more by word of mouth than anything, and usually Mark’s too shitfaced, or already in bed with some blonde he’s deemed worthy of ringing in the new year with.
Lexie finds out about it though, because the interns this year are even chattier than last year’s, if that’s possible. “I’m not asking you to go with me, I’m just saying I think that you should go. And telling you that I am going.”
She doesn’t bring it up after that, and he has this little internal fight with himself about how going, even if it’s not with her, just she’s there and he’s there and they both work there, is kind of like surrendering, admitting that they are something other than just a quick fling. She practically lives with him, he’s her ride to work nearly every day; they should’ve done this, this shouldn’t be so hard.
He goes.
People stare, people say things. He does kiss her at midnight, as unceremoniously as possible. It’s a statement, at least he thought that’s what it would feel like.
But.
He doesn’t feel any different at 12:01 than he did at 11:59. He doesn’t know what that means.
---
tattered shoes outside the door, clothes all over the floor; every day feels like the morning after
He wakes up earlier than usual the day after, nearly falls over the shoes that he thought she had kicked off at the door but somehow had ended up in the middle of the room. Placing them against the wall, he tosses her clothes onto the chair near the bed, wondering how she ended up the messy one here.
Sometimes it unnerves him, the way the bottom two drawers in the dresser are full of her stuff, her shoes lined up next to it. Her toothbrush is next to his in the bathroom, her shampoo in the shower, a tiny pink smear on the counter in the bathroom clearly her lipstick.
Mark’s done this once before. With Addison. Briefly. Derek left and they lived together for a short while. Her stuff had taken over, completely, to the point where there was more of hers than his. Lexie’s different. Everything’s equal with her.
Balanced.
If there’s something he needs right now it’s probably balance.
---
cigarettes and chocolate milk, these are just a few of my cravings (you’re the other one)
“This is ridiculous,” she says, voice an octave higher, breathy, breaking when cold metal comes into contact with the bare skin of her back, shirt half pushed up thanks to his roving hands.
“You don’t seem to mind,” he replies, and he can tell she’s trying to look over his shoulder to make sure the door is locked. It is. He’s horny, not stupid. She pulls out of his arms, and he rolls his eyes, “It’s locked.”
She glances back at him, like she didn’t expect him to know what she was after. “I’m just checking,” she pulls at the handle, which remains firmly in place, and he gets right up behind her so that when she turns it’s into him. Lexie smiles, and he gets his hands back on her, pulling her up so that she can wrap her legs around his hips, and they’re moving. Back to that exam table, so that she’s sitting on the edge of it and he can stand between her legs.
“Couldn’t have done it in an on-call room,” she chides, softly, before she presses her lips to his, just as needy as he is, if not as vocal about it.
Some days, on good days, this is how it is.
---
i touched you with unclean hands (i was half honest - don’t say you love me)
There are also the bad days.
Because, yes, Lexie is more messed up than people at first assume. But she’s also a dreamer, an optimist, someone who gets in relationships and likes them. Mark’s never really been any of those things. He stays away from women like that. At least he does when his brain is having any say in the actions of his body.
He tried, he failed, and now there’s this. This thought that they should be moving. This look in her eyes every now and then like maybe she’s a lot more invested in this than he’s letting himself be.
Mark isn’t a good man; he isn’t the kind of man she should be able to care about, she should be able to love.
---
we cannot sweat this poison out, it’s in my skin and in my mouth
Tension finally boils over and he and Derek finally have that yelling match that they’ve been headed towards for weeks. Derek storms out of the room in the middle of Mark’s sentence, but somehow he knows they’ll be fine in the end.
If they could make it past Addison, they can make it through anything.
“Should we really be doing this?” He asks, at night, back at the hotel, after he’s had time to think. This has nothing to do with Derek at all; this is something else.
Lexie turns nervous, wide eyes on him, but they fall toward the floor after a moment in which he can’t make his gaze meet hers. Her voice is small, but confident as she says, “This is the part where you say we should see other people, or that you have been seeing other people - you don’t have to do the whole speech.”
He hates that she reads people as well as she does.
They stay silent for a long minute, and then something seems to click inside her head, because she sits up straight and looks at him, hard, the kind of look that forces him to look. “Why? I mean…what is this even about? And why did you wait so long to say something if this is how it was all going to end up?”
Mark doesn’t have the answers she’s looking for. None of them. He never planned past getting her in bed; he’s never done this before, not really. He was never supposed to have feelings for Little Grey.
“Why keep doing all of this and then just don’t bother to give it a chance. At least if it didn’t work we’d know that much.” There’s a plea in her voice but more than that there’s an accusation. Her hand reaches for his arm, tentative when she makes contact. “Mark?”
“It won’t,” he sighs out, finally, his hand coming up to cover hers, and she stands, ripping her hand away.
“Derek was right,” she starts, and it cuts. Nothing is ever easy, he should expect this. “They were right. And I believed you. I believed in you.”
He rests his head in the palm of his hand, no longer looking at her. This will be easier if she leaves angry, less so if she cries. He doesn’t want to see that.
After a moment, he feels more than sees her come to kneel in front of him, like he had with her that first night she’d stayed over. The irony strikes him. A beginning and an ending. “And you’re over-thinking this.”
Lexie kisses him, something deeper than the kind of kiss that generally means their clothes won’t be on much longer. This means something. His head is filled with thoughts of why this isn’t going to work, why this is just going to make everything worse, why he should just push her away.
But one thought overrides all the others, the thought that’s governed his life pretty much up until her - fuck it, what does he have to lose?
This was always going to be something bigger than them, more than they could control, anyways.
---
being born again into the sweet morning fog
“Mark,” he wakes up to her prodding his shoulder. “It’s five o’clock. We’re late.”
He rubs the sleep from his eyes. “You know we don’t actually have to be there that early, remember.”
She exhales, remembering, letting her head fall back against the pillow. “Oh yeah, I forgot.” He listens to the sound of her breathing for a few seconds, fighting sleep because, yes, they do have to get up, regardless of how cold February in Seattle seems to be and how warm it is under the sheets. “Wait, did your alarm even go off?”
There’s a long moment where he just considers lying to her. Maybe that would be better. Instead, he hits the button to turn it off prematurely, so that he doesn’t have to listen to it blaring when it does go off, and tells her, “No. I set it back.”
She’s on her side again, resting her weight on her elbow, facing him. “Why?”
He shrugs as much as he can while lying flat on his back. “Because who cares who sees us coming in together.”
Her breath catches, just a little, barely audible, and she smiles around the word, “right”, before dropping down so that her head half hits the pillow, half rests against his shoulder.
It’s the dawn of a new morning routine - maybe a new everything.