i've got your wedding bells in my ear {ensemble}
Title: I've Got Your Wedding Bells In My Ear
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Meredith/Derek, Alex/Izzie, Mark/Lexie, Owen/Cristina, Callie/Sadie (light), George, Richard, others mentioned.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,251
Prompt: #12 - Envy for writing_rainbow
Summary: These are the parts they always speak of about weddings: joy, love, happily ever after and clinking glasses. These are they parts they try to forget: desperation, envy, disappointment and misery.
The alarm goes off far too early, and Cristina lets her arm fly out to press the snooze button, stopping herself with her finger on the button, ready to push down. She doesn’t get the luxury of sleeping in. Not today.
“Okay, Mer,” she starts, letting her fingers drop from her alarm, stretching her other hand out to poke Meredith in the arm, getting her up if the alarm hadn’t. She moves her arm up then down, finding nothing but empty space, and she turns over to look, confirming what she already suspected. She was the only one in the room, much less the bed.
It goes without saying that the biggest problem here is that her gut instinct is that if Meredith isn’t in bed that means she probably also isn’t in the apartment. In fact, she’s probably in her car, on her way out of Seattle, knowing her, and that gets Cristina out of bed in seconds.
This is not what she needs today.
“I’m going to kill her,” she mutters, softly, to herself, digging in the bag she’d slung over the chair in her room looking for her cell phone. There are no missed calls, no voicemails, no messages. She shakes her head, taking it with her as she heads towards the living room.
In retrospect, she would’ve saved herself a minor heart attack if she’d just gone there first.
The living room and kitchen in her and Callie’s apartment are connected, the only boundary line where the carpet fades into tile. The flaw in this design is that the wall that lines the hallways juts out in such a way that you can be standing at the end of the hallway, and have full view of the living room, while the kitchen is still in your blind spot. It means that she can be knocking on Callie’s bedroom door, frantically, inquiring, “Have you seen Meredith?” and not realize that Meredith is in fact standing in her kitchen, making coffee.
“She left a little while ago.” Meredith’s voice startles her, and she lets out a breath, harsh and audible. She smiles faintly, at Cristina’s obvious relief. “You thought I left didn’t you?”
“Are you planning on it?” She has to ask - it’s the responsible thing to do. Meredith’s too calm for her to not ask that. Something has to be off.
“No.” Cristina raises an eyebrow, as if to ask if she’s sure. “I have to do this. I don’t want all the pomp and the ceremony, but if it’s what it takes then I’m going to do it.”
She seems decided, resigned, and it’s then that Cristina realizes that she really isn’t going anywhere. She’s really going to do this. This wedding is really going to happen.
They’re adults now, no longer green interns. And this is what happens when you grow up.
---
George almost forgets.
He wakes up and throws on his normal going-to-work clothes, makes coffee, tries to ignore whatever kind of bug that is that scampers across the floor. He glances at the newspaper and walks past the calendar at least three times before the red circle around the 15th of May jumps out at him. ‘Wedding’ is written in careful scrawl, Lexie’s handwriting, left there from months ago.
Meredith’s wedding. He’d almost forgotten. He’d gotten the invitation, told her he’d be there, of course he’d be there, and he was her friend. But he hadn’t heard anything about it for at least a week, and so it hadn’t even crossed his mind. Not that he’d seen a lot of Meredith lately, or anyone for that matter. Increasingly, he was on the outside of things. At lunch, sometimes in the hallways, he’d see her or Izzie, and they’d talk and everything was fine. But something was still off and he couldn’t put his finger on it no mater how hard he tried.
He lays out the same suit he wore to Cristina’s almost wedding on the bed, heads back to the kitchen and his bowl of cereal. There are two chairs in the kitchen area - the one he sits in, and the one with Lexie’s red jacket laid across the back of it. It’s still there, untouched, despite the fact that she hasn’t been here in at least a month. She just up and left and started living with Meredith and never took her stuff. She still paid half the rent, but for all the use it’s getting she might as well be paying for a storage unit. He misses her most days, tells her about it less. She still smiles at him, that same smile, but it’s never the same as it used to be, and he thinks maybe they were friends for the wrong reasons if unrequited feelings were all it took to break them like this.
It just yet another thing that makes him wonder how he became such an outsider in all of this.
---
“Are you sure she’ll be there?” He hates that he has to ask these questions roughly six hours before he’s supposed to watch her walk down the aisle. He hates that he’s got to talk through Cristina, who sounds tired and frustrated, as well. “She’s not going to back out?”
“She’s not going to back out.” Cristina repeats, for him, and the fact that she hasn’t hung up on him already insists that Meredith is actually in the room, keeping her from doing so. “You know, you two should’ve just eloped.”
“Not helping,” he can hear Meredith hiss in the background, and he smiles. She’s still there. This still might happen.
“We need to get ready if you actually want her to show up, so - “ Cristina begins, her way of ending the conversation.
“Tell her I love her.” He says, and from across the room he watches Mark give him a look that very concretely says that he is edging on desperate.
“Tell her yourself.” And then the line goes dead. He thinks that was supposed to be a positive comment. He’s going to try and treat it as such.
“Who knew you were such a sap,” Mark observes, the comment Derek just knew was coming.
Derek ignores that, lets it slide. Mark is one hell of a best man, in that he pretty much manages to defy the support and encouragement part of the deal, more than he goes along with it. Instead he goes back to trying to keep his eyes focused on the newspaper and not the clock, keep himself from counting seconds, minutes, hours. Mark takes the phone away from him, turns the digital clock around, and stares at him. “So who’s your date?”
“Don’t have one.” Mark tells him, quickly, adding, “And why are we doing this in the trailer? Couldn’t we just her house if she’s staying with Yang.”
The change of topic is too quick for his tastes. “What are you hiding?”
Mark gives him a raised eyebrow; knows exactly what he’s referring to. “Why do I have to come with a date? Plenty of available women who will be desperate at the reception. Weddings do that to girls.”
Derek studies him for a moment, trying to decide if that is a genuine answer. It’s just crass enough that it probably is. “Just make sure it isn’t someone that’s going to cause a scene.”
“Look at you, all worried. I think you’re more freaked out than she is. Should I be watching to make sure you don’t bolt first?”
“I’m not leaving.” He’s doing this. He wants this. He’s just worried that she doesn’t, that she’ll change her mind at the last minute. They’ve had so many ups and downs, break ups and make ups, that he can’t even help it anymore.
“Well neither is she.” Mark tells him. “Just focus on the after. When this is all over.”
He’s trying, he really is. He just has a feeling he can’t shake.
(He waits for it to pass)
---
“Iz,” Alex’s hands are warm on her bare skin, and she opens her eyes to a wall and empty space. She blinks, turns towards him, wetting her too dry lips. “You okay? The alarm went off an hour ago.”
“Yeah, sorry.” She sits up in bed, the sheets sliding down off her body until they pool around her legs. Izzie yawns, runs a hand through her hair so it’s out of her face, and asks, “Wait, is today…”
“The wedding. You have to be in a dress and over at Yang’s in like…” he glances at the clock, “a little over an hour.”
“Dammit.” She groans. It’s not that she’d forgotten, not really, she’s just tired. But that’s normal. She’s always tired, always worn out, lately, and it’s just all about not showing it.
Everyone knows now anyway; it just doesn’t bear repeating.
“You need anything?” He asks, still sitting on the edge of the bed. The air was cold and the bed was warm and so was he, so she was half-tempted to pull him back in bed with her and say screw it with this whole thing. But Meredith needed her, and far be it from her to leave her in the lurch on this particular day. Izzie had more sense than that.
Regrettably, she shakes her head. “No, I’m just going to shower.”
He nods, then, on second thought, tells her, “Might want to wait a few minutes. I think Sadie’s still in there.” She nods, leaning back, half against the pillows and half against the wall. Alex reaches out a hand again, this time falling on her arm, as he adds, “You should come downstairs; maybe eat something.”
“I will,” she tells him, and the first part sounds good, even if the second makes her stomach turn. It’s the medication she’s on, a treatment but not a cure. It kills her appetite the same way cocaine did for a few of the models she used to know way back when. If they could only see her now, sick, a ticking time bomb with the countdown obscured, a doctor only until the medicine stops working. She looks perfectly fine, but she isn’t.
He kisses her then. Like he always does. Long and full of something like meaning (he used to do that because he was scared of losing her to Denny; now it’s a fear of losing her to something else entirely). And then he leaves.
For all his faults, for all the hell they’d put each other through, after everything is all said and done Izzie’s fairly sure that he might just be exactly what she needs. He said he’d never leave, then proved it when he didn’t let go of her hand the day Derek told her what was wrong with her. It was hard to faze someone who was the child of a junkie and a woman who was, practically by his own admission, crazy; his version of normal was different than everyone else’s.
The problem is sometimes Izzie doesn’t think like that. She pulls out the mint green bridesmaid’s dress she needs to have on sooner rather than later, and all she can think about are weddings and fairytales and dreams she had and then lost. Denny. She thinks about Denny and how he proposed and how much she wanted that life and that ending.
It’s just not an ending that makes sense for her anymore.
Instead she gets to watch everyone else move on around her while she waits and tries to hold onto what she’s got.
---
Owen knows, distantly, that there’s a wedding today. It’s where a good portion of the hospital staff he sees and interacts with on a daily basis is, or will be. He’s also aware that he wasn’t invited. Not that he’s feeling the need to place blame on anyone. He’s still very new to this place.
Which is why, when faced with a ringing cell phone sometime after eight in the morning, he can’t even begin to speculate on who’s or why’s.
He picks up with a swift “hello”, and hears shuffling on the other end before:
“I need a date.” Cristina would open with that. No preface, certainly no hello. Straight to the point.
He can’t help but ask, “Where?”
“The wedding.” No names needed. It’s been ‘the wedding’ for weeks around the hospital, people talking about what the dress would look like or whether Meredith would pull a Runaway Bride. Those people, like him, were also not invited. It still rapidly became the event of the year, or at least the past couple of months. It was a marvel that some of these people got any work done.
Owen checks the clock again. “Isn’t it a little late for that?”
“It’s in like five hours,” she tells him, adding, “Look, either say yes or no. I don’t have all day.”
And you would think that if someone was truly in desperate need of a date they would go about this a little more gently (granted he’s fairly sure Cristina isn’t the kind of person who ever really needs someone with her, but the thought is still pertinent). Not her though. The fact that she’s asking and not telling is probably a step in the right direction. In spite of himself, he sighs a “yes” into the phone.
“Good. I’m assuming you have a suit that you didn’t decide to shower in?” She asks, and he murmurs an acknowledgment of this, that she must take for an answer, because she just tells him, “Meet me there,” and hangs up.
He really did know how to pick them.
---
“Derek thinks I’m hiding something.” Mark tells her through the phone, voice a harsh whisper.
Lexie pauses, more to finish her mouthful of cereal than for effect. She can practically hear him getting more and more anxious by the second. “But you are hiding something.” He greets her response with nothing but silence. “Everyone else knows anyway.”
“Everyone else does not know.” He swears. Apparently, he thinks he’s sneakier than he really is.
She sighs, watching Alex - or more accurately the back of him - as he empties the dishwasher, weighing her options before she blurts, “Alex, does everyone in the hospital know I’m sleeping with Mark Sloan.”
“Everyone knows you broke his penis too.” Alex says, not exactly addressing her initial question, but pretty damn close to it. She can hear Mark choke on the other end of the phone, and she internally congratulates herself on a job well done.
“Fractured,” she still corrects, and Alex just glances over his shoulder to raise an eyebrow at her. She narrows her eyes, but it’s more playful than anything and he just shakes his head and goes back to what he was doing. Into the phone she continues, “Do you see my point?”
“I don’t like your point.”
“That wasn’t the question I asked.”
He groans into the phone, and then starts talking to someone who definitely isn’t her. Apparently he’s telling Derek she’s Callie. As usual. Callie’s been his scapegoat for far too long.
“Seriously?” She talks over his and Derek’s conversation, hoping that she’s yelling in his ear and that he’s not holding the phone away from him. Judging by the static that keeps going in and out it’s the latter. She figures as long as he can’t hear her she might as well as have some fun. “I will tell him myself if I have to. Go right up to him and do it. Or get on the PA system; make an announcement to the entire hospital. Tell them all about how exactly one fractures their penis, how it usually happens among younger, inexperienced men. That’ll go well with your reputation.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
She smiles, wonders how long he’s been listening. “You should know better than that by now. I thought you figured out there’s not a lot of things I won’t do.”
Alex, clearly listening, gives her another one of those looks. That last part is meant to sound just as dirty as it apparently sounds to him. “It’s been awhile since I’ve done a bridesmaid,” he tells her, now that Derek is clearly out of the room.
“I’m only a bridesmaid because Meredith felt obligated.” It’s sad, but it’s true; Lexie has long ago stopped fooling herself into thinking Meredith and her would ever have any kind of sisterly bond beyond what the other felt like they had to say or do. Maybe, in the future, they could be friends, but she didn’t envision having family get-togethers or anything of the sort. “And what makes you think you’re going to be doing anything with a bridesmaid tonight?”
“Come on, Little Grey.” He says. His tone is this close to begging, and she’s so enjoying this while it lasts. He knows where she’s going with this. “Don’t do this.”
“Tell Derek or enjoy having that big bed all to yourself with no one to keep you warm at night.” It’s the equivalent of putting her foot down. She doubts he’ll tell Derek, and she probably will give in sooner rather than later, but the illusion of power is enough at the moment. This isn’t the first threat she’s made about this, and it won’t be the last. Someday it’ll work. “Should be fun since you’ve either already slept with everyone who will be there, or they aren’t single, or they’re too freaked out too sleep with you considering your previous experiences.”
“What happened to this ‘I’m sorry I hurt you’ song you were singing a few months ago?” Mark asks.
“It got old.” She’s still smiling into the phone. He has this way about him that keeps her from getting mad at him for very long, even if she really, really wants to. And should be. “Think about it,” she tells him, finally, and then in the spirit of getting the last word in she flips her cell phone shut.
If nothing else, watching him squirm should be amusing. The jury’s still out on the rest of this wedding.
--
Part 2
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Meredith/Derek, Alex/Izzie, Mark/Lexie, Owen/Cristina, Callie/Sadie (light), George, Richard, others mentioned.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,251
Prompt: #12 - Envy for writing_rainbow
Summary: These are the parts they always speak of about weddings: joy, love, happily ever after and clinking glasses. These are they parts they try to forget: desperation, envy, disappointment and misery.
The alarm goes off far too early, and Cristina lets her arm fly out to press the snooze button, stopping herself with her finger on the button, ready to push down. She doesn’t get the luxury of sleeping in. Not today.
“Okay, Mer,” she starts, letting her fingers drop from her alarm, stretching her other hand out to poke Meredith in the arm, getting her up if the alarm hadn’t. She moves her arm up then down, finding nothing but empty space, and she turns over to look, confirming what she already suspected. She was the only one in the room, much less the bed.
It goes without saying that the biggest problem here is that her gut instinct is that if Meredith isn’t in bed that means she probably also isn’t in the apartment. In fact, she’s probably in her car, on her way out of Seattle, knowing her, and that gets Cristina out of bed in seconds.
This is not what she needs today.
“I’m going to kill her,” she mutters, softly, to herself, digging in the bag she’d slung over the chair in her room looking for her cell phone. There are no missed calls, no voicemails, no messages. She shakes her head, taking it with her as she heads towards the living room.
In retrospect, she would’ve saved herself a minor heart attack if she’d just gone there first.
The living room and kitchen in her and Callie’s apartment are connected, the only boundary line where the carpet fades into tile. The flaw in this design is that the wall that lines the hallways juts out in such a way that you can be standing at the end of the hallway, and have full view of the living room, while the kitchen is still in your blind spot. It means that she can be knocking on Callie’s bedroom door, frantically, inquiring, “Have you seen Meredith?” and not realize that Meredith is in fact standing in her kitchen, making coffee.
“She left a little while ago.” Meredith’s voice startles her, and she lets out a breath, harsh and audible. She smiles faintly, at Cristina’s obvious relief. “You thought I left didn’t you?”
“Are you planning on it?” She has to ask - it’s the responsible thing to do. Meredith’s too calm for her to not ask that. Something has to be off.
“No.” Cristina raises an eyebrow, as if to ask if she’s sure. “I have to do this. I don’t want all the pomp and the ceremony, but if it’s what it takes then I’m going to do it.”
She seems decided, resigned, and it’s then that Cristina realizes that she really isn’t going anywhere. She’s really going to do this. This wedding is really going to happen.
They’re adults now, no longer green interns. And this is what happens when you grow up.
---
George almost forgets.
He wakes up and throws on his normal going-to-work clothes, makes coffee, tries to ignore whatever kind of bug that is that scampers across the floor. He glances at the newspaper and walks past the calendar at least three times before the red circle around the 15th of May jumps out at him. ‘Wedding’ is written in careful scrawl, Lexie’s handwriting, left there from months ago.
Meredith’s wedding. He’d almost forgotten. He’d gotten the invitation, told her he’d be there, of course he’d be there, and he was her friend. But he hadn’t heard anything about it for at least a week, and so it hadn’t even crossed his mind. Not that he’d seen a lot of Meredith lately, or anyone for that matter. Increasingly, he was on the outside of things. At lunch, sometimes in the hallways, he’d see her or Izzie, and they’d talk and everything was fine. But something was still off and he couldn’t put his finger on it no mater how hard he tried.
He lays out the same suit he wore to Cristina’s almost wedding on the bed, heads back to the kitchen and his bowl of cereal. There are two chairs in the kitchen area - the one he sits in, and the one with Lexie’s red jacket laid across the back of it. It’s still there, untouched, despite the fact that she hasn’t been here in at least a month. She just up and left and started living with Meredith and never took her stuff. She still paid half the rent, but for all the use it’s getting she might as well be paying for a storage unit. He misses her most days, tells her about it less. She still smiles at him, that same smile, but it’s never the same as it used to be, and he thinks maybe they were friends for the wrong reasons if unrequited feelings were all it took to break them like this.
It just yet another thing that makes him wonder how he became such an outsider in all of this.
---
“Are you sure she’ll be there?” He hates that he has to ask these questions roughly six hours before he’s supposed to watch her walk down the aisle. He hates that he’s got to talk through Cristina, who sounds tired and frustrated, as well. “She’s not going to back out?”
“She’s not going to back out.” Cristina repeats, for him, and the fact that she hasn’t hung up on him already insists that Meredith is actually in the room, keeping her from doing so. “You know, you two should’ve just eloped.”
“Not helping,” he can hear Meredith hiss in the background, and he smiles. She’s still there. This still might happen.
“We need to get ready if you actually want her to show up, so - “ Cristina begins, her way of ending the conversation.
“Tell her I love her.” He says, and from across the room he watches Mark give him a look that very concretely says that he is edging on desperate.
“Tell her yourself.” And then the line goes dead. He thinks that was supposed to be a positive comment. He’s going to try and treat it as such.
“Who knew you were such a sap,” Mark observes, the comment Derek just knew was coming.
Derek ignores that, lets it slide. Mark is one hell of a best man, in that he pretty much manages to defy the support and encouragement part of the deal, more than he goes along with it. Instead he goes back to trying to keep his eyes focused on the newspaper and not the clock, keep himself from counting seconds, minutes, hours. Mark takes the phone away from him, turns the digital clock around, and stares at him. “So who’s your date?”
“Don’t have one.” Mark tells him, quickly, adding, “And why are we doing this in the trailer? Couldn’t we just her house if she’s staying with Yang.”
The change of topic is too quick for his tastes. “What are you hiding?”
Mark gives him a raised eyebrow; knows exactly what he’s referring to. “Why do I have to come with a date? Plenty of available women who will be desperate at the reception. Weddings do that to girls.”
Derek studies him for a moment, trying to decide if that is a genuine answer. It’s just crass enough that it probably is. “Just make sure it isn’t someone that’s going to cause a scene.”
“Look at you, all worried. I think you’re more freaked out than she is. Should I be watching to make sure you don’t bolt first?”
“I’m not leaving.” He’s doing this. He wants this. He’s just worried that she doesn’t, that she’ll change her mind at the last minute. They’ve had so many ups and downs, break ups and make ups, that he can’t even help it anymore.
“Well neither is she.” Mark tells him. “Just focus on the after. When this is all over.”
He’s trying, he really is. He just has a feeling he can’t shake.
(He waits for it to pass)
---
“Iz,” Alex’s hands are warm on her bare skin, and she opens her eyes to a wall and empty space. She blinks, turns towards him, wetting her too dry lips. “You okay? The alarm went off an hour ago.”
“Yeah, sorry.” She sits up in bed, the sheets sliding down off her body until they pool around her legs. Izzie yawns, runs a hand through her hair so it’s out of her face, and asks, “Wait, is today…”
“The wedding. You have to be in a dress and over at Yang’s in like…” he glances at the clock, “a little over an hour.”
“Dammit.” She groans. It’s not that she’d forgotten, not really, she’s just tired. But that’s normal. She’s always tired, always worn out, lately, and it’s just all about not showing it.
Everyone knows now anyway; it just doesn’t bear repeating.
“You need anything?” He asks, still sitting on the edge of the bed. The air was cold and the bed was warm and so was he, so she was half-tempted to pull him back in bed with her and say screw it with this whole thing. But Meredith needed her, and far be it from her to leave her in the lurch on this particular day. Izzie had more sense than that.
Regrettably, she shakes her head. “No, I’m just going to shower.”
He nods, then, on second thought, tells her, “Might want to wait a few minutes. I think Sadie’s still in there.” She nods, leaning back, half against the pillows and half against the wall. Alex reaches out a hand again, this time falling on her arm, as he adds, “You should come downstairs; maybe eat something.”
“I will,” she tells him, and the first part sounds good, even if the second makes her stomach turn. It’s the medication she’s on, a treatment but not a cure. It kills her appetite the same way cocaine did for a few of the models she used to know way back when. If they could only see her now, sick, a ticking time bomb with the countdown obscured, a doctor only until the medicine stops working. She looks perfectly fine, but she isn’t.
He kisses her then. Like he always does. Long and full of something like meaning (he used to do that because he was scared of losing her to Denny; now it’s a fear of losing her to something else entirely). And then he leaves.
For all his faults, for all the hell they’d put each other through, after everything is all said and done Izzie’s fairly sure that he might just be exactly what she needs. He said he’d never leave, then proved it when he didn’t let go of her hand the day Derek told her what was wrong with her. It was hard to faze someone who was the child of a junkie and a woman who was, practically by his own admission, crazy; his version of normal was different than everyone else’s.
The problem is sometimes Izzie doesn’t think like that. She pulls out the mint green bridesmaid’s dress she needs to have on sooner rather than later, and all she can think about are weddings and fairytales and dreams she had and then lost. Denny. She thinks about Denny and how he proposed and how much she wanted that life and that ending.
It’s just not an ending that makes sense for her anymore.
Instead she gets to watch everyone else move on around her while she waits and tries to hold onto what she’s got.
---
Owen knows, distantly, that there’s a wedding today. It’s where a good portion of the hospital staff he sees and interacts with on a daily basis is, or will be. He’s also aware that he wasn’t invited. Not that he’s feeling the need to place blame on anyone. He’s still very new to this place.
Which is why, when faced with a ringing cell phone sometime after eight in the morning, he can’t even begin to speculate on who’s or why’s.
He picks up with a swift “hello”, and hears shuffling on the other end before:
“I need a date.” Cristina would open with that. No preface, certainly no hello. Straight to the point.
He can’t help but ask, “Where?”
“The wedding.” No names needed. It’s been ‘the wedding’ for weeks around the hospital, people talking about what the dress would look like or whether Meredith would pull a Runaway Bride. Those people, like him, were also not invited. It still rapidly became the event of the year, or at least the past couple of months. It was a marvel that some of these people got any work done.
Owen checks the clock again. “Isn’t it a little late for that?”
“It’s in like five hours,” she tells him, adding, “Look, either say yes or no. I don’t have all day.”
And you would think that if someone was truly in desperate need of a date they would go about this a little more gently (granted he’s fairly sure Cristina isn’t the kind of person who ever really needs someone with her, but the thought is still pertinent). Not her though. The fact that she’s asking and not telling is probably a step in the right direction. In spite of himself, he sighs a “yes” into the phone.
“Good. I’m assuming you have a suit that you didn’t decide to shower in?” She asks, and he murmurs an acknowledgment of this, that she must take for an answer, because she just tells him, “Meet me there,” and hangs up.
He really did know how to pick them.
---
“Derek thinks I’m hiding something.” Mark tells her through the phone, voice a harsh whisper.
Lexie pauses, more to finish her mouthful of cereal than for effect. She can practically hear him getting more and more anxious by the second. “But you are hiding something.” He greets her response with nothing but silence. “Everyone else knows anyway.”
“Everyone else does not know.” He swears. Apparently, he thinks he’s sneakier than he really is.
She sighs, watching Alex - or more accurately the back of him - as he empties the dishwasher, weighing her options before she blurts, “Alex, does everyone in the hospital know I’m sleeping with Mark Sloan.”
“Everyone knows you broke his penis too.” Alex says, not exactly addressing her initial question, but pretty damn close to it. She can hear Mark choke on the other end of the phone, and she internally congratulates herself on a job well done.
“Fractured,” she still corrects, and Alex just glances over his shoulder to raise an eyebrow at her. She narrows her eyes, but it’s more playful than anything and he just shakes his head and goes back to what he was doing. Into the phone she continues, “Do you see my point?”
“I don’t like your point.”
“That wasn’t the question I asked.”
He groans into the phone, and then starts talking to someone who definitely isn’t her. Apparently he’s telling Derek she’s Callie. As usual. Callie’s been his scapegoat for far too long.
“Seriously?” She talks over his and Derek’s conversation, hoping that she’s yelling in his ear and that he’s not holding the phone away from him. Judging by the static that keeps going in and out it’s the latter. She figures as long as he can’t hear her she might as well as have some fun. “I will tell him myself if I have to. Go right up to him and do it. Or get on the PA system; make an announcement to the entire hospital. Tell them all about how exactly one fractures their penis, how it usually happens among younger, inexperienced men. That’ll go well with your reputation.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
She smiles, wonders how long he’s been listening. “You should know better than that by now. I thought you figured out there’s not a lot of things I won’t do.”
Alex, clearly listening, gives her another one of those looks. That last part is meant to sound just as dirty as it apparently sounds to him. “It’s been awhile since I’ve done a bridesmaid,” he tells her, now that Derek is clearly out of the room.
“I’m only a bridesmaid because Meredith felt obligated.” It’s sad, but it’s true; Lexie has long ago stopped fooling herself into thinking Meredith and her would ever have any kind of sisterly bond beyond what the other felt like they had to say or do. Maybe, in the future, they could be friends, but she didn’t envision having family get-togethers or anything of the sort. “And what makes you think you’re going to be doing anything with a bridesmaid tonight?”
“Come on, Little Grey.” He says. His tone is this close to begging, and she’s so enjoying this while it lasts. He knows where she’s going with this. “Don’t do this.”
“Tell Derek or enjoy having that big bed all to yourself with no one to keep you warm at night.” It’s the equivalent of putting her foot down. She doubts he’ll tell Derek, and she probably will give in sooner rather than later, but the illusion of power is enough at the moment. This isn’t the first threat she’s made about this, and it won’t be the last. Someday it’ll work. “Should be fun since you’ve either already slept with everyone who will be there, or they aren’t single, or they’re too freaked out too sleep with you considering your previous experiences.”
“What happened to this ‘I’m sorry I hurt you’ song you were singing a few months ago?” Mark asks.
“It got old.” She’s still smiling into the phone. He has this way about him that keeps her from getting mad at him for very long, even if she really, really wants to. And should be. “Think about it,” she tells him, finally, and then in the spirit of getting the last word in she flips her cell phone shut.
If nothing else, watching him squirm should be amusing. The jury’s still out on the rest of this wedding.
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Part 2