grey's anatomy fanfiction,mark/addison - if it's not broken, don't fix it
If It's Not Broken, Don't Fix It
Author’s Notes: Major warnings for this one; if you don’t like blood or vague references to self-injury then probably best to avoid it. Angsty and kind of dark and just further proof that I am seriously fucked up somewhere in my head. NC-17.
He found her for the fifth time but that didn’t seem to matter. It always mattered with Derek; she would hear the turn of the doorknob and there would be a mad scramble to hide the evidence, to rearrange the crimson stains until they were buried beneath the crisp white of the towels and to wipe her face free of tears. It always mattered to her that Derek knew or guessed in the end. She cared that he saw her at her weakest and she worried that he would think less of her.
She knew it was her fault that he did, in the end. And she knew it was her fault that he left.
He never tried to make her feel guilty (about the affair, yes, about her motives, no). He never tried to hold her accountable and he certainly never stood up and said what they both knew he was thinking but she knew and he knew she knew so maybe he didn’t feel it was necessary. He wouldn’t blame her because of that annoying sympathy, that ‘Addie, I’m so sorry but I can’t watch you do this to yourself’ face, the ‘please forgive me and love me anyway’ eyes.
Which she fell for, of course, even though she told herself she wasn’t going to and that she deserved more than his pity, that she wasn’t going to be put in the inferior position which pity implies. But she fell for it. She gave him the divorce papers and he said he wanted to try. Addison, things will get better with you and we’ll work it out, just like always.
And she fell for it. Because things would get better and she’d smile again and then they would work it out.
Then there was the way he wore his marital misery on his sleeve in Seattle, like everyone should feel sorry for him because he was the hero, he was doing the right thing, he was staying out of obligation.
She wanted to hit him for that. She wanted to tell him that there was nothing wrong with her, nothing that he could fix by moping around and pretending to be the good guy. She wanted to tell him that she deserved more, she wanted to tell him that she was leaving and it was over because he didn’t love her enough, he didn’t love her enough to deal with the mood swings and the occasional anxiety attack and the stains on the towels in the sink. He didn’t love her enough to help her. He just didn’t love her enough any more, period. It made her so angry, to think that he was belittling her and every time he looked at her with those stupid puppy dog eyes she wanted to be sick.
Go to hell Derek Shepherd. I don’t need you and I don’t need your pity.
But then the doubts would set in, and all the memories of the nasty New York arguments would come back. She couldn’t sleep again. She’d lie awake and listen to the trailer shifting after a day of heavy rain, and the sounds of past and present would collide. She would try to ignore the rain on the roof only to hear his words from years before: You can’t leave Addison, who else do you think is going to put up with you and your moods? And she’d try to ignore that only to have the repetitive noise of the rain drumming against the tin make her skin crawl, the sensation only heightened by the scratch of flannel sheets against her shoulders.
She hated that feeling.
She curled her toes against the lumpy mattress and clenched her jaw. Her hands balled into fists and her nails dug into her palms but no matter how much she tried to ignore it she would have to get up and rummage around until she found her iPod (to drown out the rain) and then she’d have to sleep in the other room, hunched up on the sofa with a blanket drawn around her shoulders (because she couldn’t stand the feel of the sheets any longer).
He would ask her why and she would make up some lie but he never believed her. He would get that sad, I-don’t-really-understand-but-I-feel-sorry-for-both-of-us look in his clouded blue eyes and she would hate him more than she hated herself just for a little while.
But it was still her fault, in her mind. The divorce bothered her more than the flannel sheets and the rain. It even annoyed her more than a crooked picture, a woman wearing cherry red with fuchsia pink or the high-pitched beeping sound her car made when she forgot to put her seatbelt on before reversing.
She hated it.
She hated it more than the average person hates the end of an eleven year marriage because to her it meant failure, and it meant imperfection. It meant a blemish on an otherwise perfect life, at least in other people’s eyes because to her, nothing was ever quite perfect.
And that was why it was her own fault.
Nothing could ever be perfect to her because of her unreachable standards yet teetering on the brink of perfection yet never quite attaining it was another of her pet hates. She hated almosts, she worked in absolutes and always at the ‘amazing success’ end of the spectrum. Failure as most people saw it was rarely in her vocabulary (failure by her own definition was another thing entirely). So she hated it that she could never be perfect and just like she would rather come third than second, since first seemed just out of reach when you came second and a long way off if you were third, she would rather fuck things up than have them almost, but not quite, perfect. (By her own standards: in her general experience, other people would think things were perfect even when they weren’t.)
So she would do things that annoyed Derek, to make him angry with her, pick fights just to prove that she wasn’t the only one who thought herself worthless because she wasn’t flawless. He never realised why and neither did she until years later. It was subconscious. Besides, she needed to win arguments, to be better than him and when he started earning more money than her she needed to be in control of the relationship in some way. It was slightly neurotic but she couldn’t trust him otherwise. He might hurt her.
And then suddenly he wasn’t there. He didn’t respond when she got annoyed that he had moved her shoes (because they all had a set place) or that he hadn’t stacked the dishwasher properly (because there was a set method of doing it). He didn’t notice if she sat on the window seat in the front room and stared at the street for hours without moving. She could cry herself to sleep and not be afraid of avoiding the awkward questions because there were none.
He wasn’t there.
And it surprised her at first how much she liked it. She didn’t have to explain the perversion if she accidentally cut a finger chopping up vegetables and it made her smile because it stung. She didn’t have to make excuses for why she wasn’t eating and she didn’t have to hide the fact that she couldn’t sleep. If she didn’t feel like getting up on weekends, he wasn’t there to act concerned when she pulled the covers over her head until five in the afternoon. When she was in ‘one of her moods’, he wasn’t there to argue with her or try to cheer her up, which inevitably led to an argument anyway. And she liked it.
But then she started to resent him for it because she was hurting all the time and he lived in the same house and he didn’t even notice. She hated him because he didn’t care, which was ironic because before she hated him because he did.
And it was all so almost-but-not-quite-perfect that she had to do something.
Sleeping with Mark was, in retrospect, a stupid idea. It was cruel, because she knew Mark loved her and that Derek did too and she also knew that Derek would find them, eventually, even though she never planned for it to happen the first time. But it was stupid because Mark didn’t look at her like he felt sorry for her. He didn’t pity her. And the lights were on and he traced the perfect scar along the back of her thigh with his tongue and he was a surgeon so she knew that he knew exactly how it got there.
But he didn’t look at her like she was a sick animal beside the road that needed to be taken home and coddled and cared for because it couldn’t look after itself.
He just understood, which was so much worse than pity.
Because she couldn’t hate him for it.
And she found herself spilling all these secrets that she kept from Derek, which could have been the martinis talking but even drunker than this she never would have confessed to him.
It was easy to talk to someone who didn’t belittle her, even unwittingly. And she stayed with him after Derek left because she needed to feel wanted without feeling judged. She didn’t ask him why he wanted her because she knew that as well: Mark likes to fix things, to fix people. Physically, he could mould and shape someone into what they wanted to be better than most. It made sense to her that he wanted to fix her emotionally as well, to put her back together when she felt so broken by everything that had happened.
Afterwards, she kept telling herself that she was just a different kind of surgery to him, but that didn’t really make it any better because he would never give up on a surgery in the same way. He had always been picky about that; after his first solo face lift he had rattled off a long list of mistakes and even though she had tried to reassure him (since the woman looked ten years younger at least) he told her not to try and make him feel better, because it was like her and her table settings.
She understood.
She was never really happy with a surgery either.
(Or her table settings.)
It wasn’t perfect because things could never be.
He found her for the fifth time after the divorce and it played just like any other time. She was sitting in the shower watching blood spill down her leg from just halfway up her thigh, the razor sat beside her, forgotten. She hugged her knees to her chest and studied the tiles, counting the number from one side to the other and irritated by the fact that the shower wasn’t a perfect square.
He opened the door and appeared in a swirl of mist, asking if she was ok and she ignored him.
“Addison?” he tried again.
“How’d you get in?” she asked, trying to sound annoyed but coming off more exhausted than angry.
“I stole your spare key the last time,” he confessed.
“Oh,” she shivered slightly, the hot water becoming lukewarm.
“You’re bleeding,” he said matter-of-factly.
“It was an accident,” she explained quickly.
“I know,” he shut off the water and offered her a dripping hand. She followed the lines of water up his arm in reverse to where they stopped, the arm disappearing beneath the rolled sleeve.
She shook her head, “I think I’ll just sit here for a minute.”
“You’ve been sitting there for half an hour,” he guessed, rather accurately, and pulled a towel from the rail beside the sink.
“I know,” she forced herself to smile as she gripped his hand.
He pulled her into a standing position and draped the towel across her shoulders, “Do you want to talk?”
She shook her head.
He pulled her wet hair from her face and traced the path it took down the centre of her back.
“Do you want to not talk?” he asked, experimentally, tentatively, as though he was unsure of what her reaction would be.
She shivered, goosebumps forming on her arms and the cold skin of her shoulders.
His fingers traced the streams of water curling down her body from the ends of her hair.
She dropped the towel. It fell around her feet but she was only absently aware of that. She stared at herself in the mirror, the glass becoming reflective again as the steam from the shower dissipated. She met his eyes in the reflection and nodded, only slightly, because she didn’t want to talk and she knew she would hate herself afterwards but he managed to make her forget herself for a while so maybe the short moments of relief were worth it.
His tongue made quick work of the water evaporating from her shoulder to her neck. She bit down on her lip and his teeth tugged at her ear, “You are amazing, you know that?”
She whispered her answer, but it was awareness rather than cheek or arrogance, “Yes.”
She spun on her heels and gripped his shoulders before he could respond; her mouth found his to silence any words. She was still wet and the moisture soaked the front of his shirt but she was sure he wouldn’t care. Carefully, she pushed him backwards and her footsteps were wet against the carpet until they reached the foot of the bed. He fell backwards at her insistent push but sat on the edge of the covers and raised a hand to stop her mouth.
“Addison,” he began a sentence, using words and she didn’t want words right now because she had none of her own. There were just feelings and a sort of urge to scream because somewhere in her mind the ability to express herself in English was inhibited.
She shook her head, “Don’t.”
His hands traced her ribs and he buried his face in her stomach, “Ok.”
She slithered out of his grasp and crawled across the bed, arranging herself against the covers, her skin still cold and her hair making wet patches in the fabric.
She eyed him pointedly until he sighed and lay beside her, his hand traced the side of her shoulder before resting on the curve of her breast. Her lips formed a round ‘oh’ in a silent gasp as his thumb roughly brushed against her already erect nipple, sensitive from the cold and she pressed her chest against his hand, smirking a little after the initial shock and close-to-pain sensation subsided slightly. Her toes moved against his shin and her arm crossed his to make quick work of the buttons on his shirt, interrupting his hands.
Their mouths met again as his fingers found a new home against her hips, his nails digging into her skin.
His tongue slid over hers and all of it was so annoyingly possessive. She refused to let herself be kissed, pressing back roughly and shifting slightly until she was above him, propped on one elbow. Stretching against the covers, she let her teeth sink into his chin as he pulled back. She smiled, breathlessly and there was something animal in it: all the anger and frustration and wounded pride and she wanted to hurt him because he had hurt her, more than he probably realised.
He grinned back. It was irrational maybe but she hated him for that. She kissed him angrily before she inavertedly told him about those impulsive flashes of anger and all the other things that made her question her sanity. He didn’t seem to mind and it made her feel a little better, to pin him against the mattress with her arms and press her mouth against his own so hard that it hurt her until they both couldn’t breathe.
She was almost dizzy from it all when she pulled back, breathing hard. He tucked her hair behind her ears affectionately and she wanted him to pull at it, she wanted to be physically hurting since emotionally she was anyway.
There was only one way to self-induce pain during sex. She knew from experience that he would never actually hurt her; he wouldn’t because he was afraid of taking things too far. She usually laughed but tonight it just annoyed her. So she tried to slide herself down his body and take matters into her own hands, or mouth as it were, but when she tried to move, his hands covered her thighs and held her in position. She squirmed a little but he shook his head slightly and refused to let her go.
Before she had a chance to ask, he ran a hand along the curve of her side and tapped her nose lightly, “Just cleaning you up.”
And he pressed the sheets against her leg, wiping away all traces of her mishap in the shower and smearing her blood all over the hotel linen.
“Because you’re still bleeding,” he explained and she nodded silently, slumping forward a little and abandoning her struggle. Ordinarily, she would never try to stop the bleeding. She would watch, fascinated by the deep red tendrils that would form as the deep red beads rose from the wound, fading into each other and winding down her skin in curved paths. It would never occur to her to wipe it clean, from experience cuts would always clot on their own. And this was just a nick from a razor anyway. An accident. Sort of.
She covered his hand with her own, “Don’t.”
“What?” he looked up at her.
“Just leave it,” she whispered, feeling vulnerable and unsure of how he would react.
“Addison,” he didn’t sound angry, just concerned, “Was it really an accident?”
And she pulled his hand up between them and traced the barely visible scars on his wrists and forearm, “Don’t lecture me.”
“I’m not,” he responded, watching as the red on his hand stained hers and pulling at their entwined fingers until they rested on the sheet beside the pillows, wiping them clean.
She pulled his hand to her mouth and ran her tongue over each finger anyway; he watched, not entirely sure why he couldn’t make her stop or look away. And she stared at him the whole time, recognising the perverted way in which he took pleasure from the image. Anything he had to say became hypocritical. He sighed and she smiled, triumphant in her silent victory.
Releasing his hand she leant forward and took advantage of his mouth, already open with the intention of making a statement, covering it with her own and kissing him forcibly again.
“It’s fine,” she told him, murmuring above his lips, “It’s not bleeding anymore anyway.”
“Ok,” he relinquished his higher ground and his hold on her, aware of what was to follow and almost but not quite able to dread it.
She smiled, “Thank you.”
He slid his hands from her hips up over her body and absently cupping her breasts, “For?”
“Letting me do this,” she mumbled, closing her eyes and focussing on the movement of his thumb and forefinger, “I need to. I’m sorry.”
So he let her wriggle her way down his body and fumble with his belt, have a small disagreement with the zipper and helped her in her efforts to divest him of his pants. She was tentative at first, just stroking him through his boxers, because she knew he would stop her otherwise. He pulled her upwards until her body was stretched out beside his and kissed her slowly. She took that as the necessary encouragement to proceed though her hands were trembling a little in nervous anticipation. It made no sense because they had done it before over and over but she always felt a little exposed and he dropped the usual reassuring kiss against her nose.
“It’s ok,” he murmured.
She nodded and pecked at his lips, repositioning herself until she was straddling his knees and tugging down on his boxers. She paused for a moment, hating herself for being so selfish since he never enjoyed it as much as she did when she was in one of her moods. But then her left hand curled around him and resumed the repeated motions and she gradually began to take over with her mouth.
He had never asked her how or when she learnt to do this kind of thing so well but she did have a sort of talent for it. She always moved her tongue inside her mouth and made the transition from mouth to hands seamlessly. The truth was less devastating than he ever would have guessed: she just hated the intimacy of actual sex early in a relationship and it was necessary to keep college boyfriends appeased in this regard; still he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
She pushed her forward further and further each time until she couldn’t breathe and she thought she might be sick which was thrilling in a way which made her forget herself. He tugged back on her hair with his hands and she remembered everything again, where she was and the need to breathe. So she allowed him to control the movements of her mouth, to pull back on her head so she could struggle for air before the exhilarating suffocating feeling returned.
She had never tried to explain to herself why it was that she liked it. From a first-year psyche perspective she knew it couldn’t be anything good so she didn’t bother. She liked it better when he was in control and the sicker she felt, somehow the better it was. She knew he hated the little choking sounds so she tried to stop herself, but that was the only thing she liked about this, the feeling that she couldn’t breathe and the disgusting, stomach-wrenching nausea that inspired. So her head bobbed forward and he thrust into her mouth but she resisted when he tried to push her backwards. And she needed to breathe, her chest was burning and burning but she could hold out just a little bit longer.
He forced her backwards and waited while she gagged and coughed, rubbing her shoulders and staring at the ceiling, unable to look at her flushed cheeks and watering eyes.
When she moved forward, fully recovered, he pushed her away.
“Addie,” he said softly, “Don’t.”
She took the tip of his cock in her mouth and tried to smile. When she spoke her tone was playful, “Why?”
“Because,” he retorted with more force than he intended, “If you want to hurt yourself that’s fine but I don’t want to be a part of that.”
She made no response since there was really no counterargument, opting instead to clamber up over him until her face was above his, “I’m ok Mark, really,” she caught his bottom lip between her own; “You’re not hurting me.”
“No,” he agreed, running his fingers along the hard line of dried blood along her thigh, “You’re doing that all on your own.”
“Are you mad at me?” she stuck out her bottom lip and fluttered her eyelashes at him.
“A little,” he shrugged.
In response she wriggled around until he felt an inch of warm sink down over his erection. She looked at him, wide-eyed and innocent with her lips parted slightly and her breasts brushing against his chest and stopped just short of his mouth to speak, “Really?”
“Addison,” he groaned, “That’s unfair.”
She smirked, sliding herself forward over him and rocking forward to kiss him soundly. He opened his mouth before she had the opportunity to prise it open with her tongue and a hand tangled in her hair.
“Don’t play nice,” she warned, gasping a little because she wasn’t really aroused or relaxed enough to be ready for any of it and the stretch was slightly uncomfortable.
She concentrated on things she normally ignored: their hip bones grinding together every time she moved, the scrape of his teeth as his mouth moved against her neck and his hands squeezing at her chest, much too lightly. She reached up and forced his thumb and forefinger together a little harder around her nipple, pressing her eyes closed and moaning softly.
And she was rocking backward and forward a little too fast and it all hurt a little but that made it so much better. This was, after all, some kind of punishment. She wasn’t meant to do this, and she hated herself for being weak enough to momentarily wish things could be the way they used to be; back when she trusted him enough to let him see that she was made up of tiny little pieces forced together and not the flawless whole that everyone thought she was. She hated herself for wanting him at all, since wanting him was so imperfect, so twisted and wrong and tragic almost that she couldn’t help herself.
Her whole face tensed, teeth pressing against teeth and eyelids squeezed shut to trap the tears.
“Ad,” he touched the side of her face, “You ok?”
It was gentle, almost too gentle as though she was delicate and he might break her.
“You can’t hurt me,” was her determined response. Her voice fell below a whisper, “Not anymore.”
“Hey,” he pulled her chin down until she met his eyes, “Unless your Friday night is more eventful than mine we can go slower, for you.”
“Don’t fucking care about me,” she snapped and then she was crying because balancing the good and the bad that felt good was all too much; she liked these things that it was wrong to like and she loathed herself for it.
“Addison,” he looked concerned and she brushed his hands away furiously when he reached up to wipe her cheeks.
“I’m ok,” she said, because she was, she was ok, she would get through it, she would wake up in the morning and at that point, making it through the day was the best she could hope for. He should understand that. If she had bothered to explain maybe he would have.
“You always are,” he pointed out, rolling over until her wet hair sunk into the pillow. She bit down on her lip and let her fingernails scrape against his shoulders, still trembling and willing herself to stop crying.
He kissed the side of her mouth gently and her eyes darted sideways to avoid the emotional intensity of eye contact. They rested on the red stain on white sheets, a sharper contrast than her hair usually was, and she swallowed the feelings making her chest hurt like she was drowning, making a token effort to press her lips against his.
She reached for his hand where it rested against her cheek and laced his fingers with her own.
“Just do it please,” she sniffed and closed her eyes
He hesitated and she could hear the question before he found the right way of phrasing it.
“I want to,” she said before he could ask, “Please.”
It was slower and she was too exhausted to protest. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t fragile, that she wanted it to hurt but she didn’t know how to make him understand that it hurt more when it was gentle anyway. Usually when he appeared in her doorway they fell into bed together and there was so much lust and a kind of urgency about it all that made it easy. It was all about reaching a common goal as quickly as possible because if she couldn’t feel him everywhere she was convinced she might die from it. Afterwards it was easier to pretend it was just sex. She could feel him under her or above her but the contact was hard and fast in all the right places rather than lingering. The kisses were hurried and rendered superfluous in the face of the much greater business of collapsing in a pile of sweaty entangled limbs and breathlessness. There wasn’t enough time for her to feel overwhelmed by her feelings. When it was slower, without that driving sense of exigency, she had time to think and feel and regret. She hated that.
She refused to open her eyes, so he kissed her eyelids and she thought she might cry. It was too difficult to explain, that all the endearing, caring gestures just made it so much worse, that she was so afraid of breaking in front of him again because he would keep her together, he would fix her but if he ever betrayed her trust she would split, a million tiny fractures running through her, and it would be so much worse than the last time.
He kissed her lightly and reached between them to touch her.
They both ignored the obvious dysfunction implied in the tears that escaped her closed eyes at the corners and focused instead on all the reoccurring motion. He pressed his fingers against her harder, made faster circles, eliciting gasps and moans that became shrieks silenced by her teeth sinking into her lip. She was trembling beneath him, whether it was arousal or tears he didn’t know because he closed his own eyes, unable to look at her when she seemed so pained by everything.
It almost felt like it was happening to someone else, but his thumb circled her clit and the stubble on his chin brushed against her lips and she was sure it was her, even though she felt so utterly wretched that it seemed ridiculous anything could feel so good at the same time. She arched her neck and threw her head back against the pillows, her fingers groping for his hair, so she could pull his mouth to the newly exposed skin. He buried his face between her jaw and her shoulder before she could succeed, groaning and muttering, “Addie, you’re so fucking beautiful.”
It didn’t hurt, which surprised her, but only a little because she was shuddering beneath him and swearing under her breath. It was surprising because she hated it when he said things like that, she hated those reminders of the way things were before Seattle and before the divorce, when they were in New York and they were happy, when she thought she had found someone who understood her and would never hurt her because he got it. But she loved it when he said that, even though she knew it was probably just the sex talking.
She lay with her eyes closed and waited for him to move after, both of them completely still apart from the irregular breathing. And then he moved sideways and ran his fingers through her hair, a gesture so simple it hurt somewhere in her chest, which was stupid because it was so obviously affectionate that it should have made her smile.
She opened her eyes and stared at him with tears in her eyes. Why did everything have to be so fucked up?
She wanted to ask him to hate her since that hurt so much less than him loving her. And he looked at her that way, that way Derek used to look at her, with pity and sadness in his eyes like it was some tragedy that she felt that way, as though they were Romeo and fucking Juliet.
She hated it when they looked at her that way. She hated it that they thought there was something wrong with her. She didn’t realise that he hated it when she looked as adrift as she did, when her eyes got that glazed-over vacant look and there was an absence in her words, like she wasn’t really there at all. He hated it when she looked so thoroughly miserable because he knew there was nothing he could do about it. She didn’t know it wasn’t pity just sympathy and a desire to see her smile. She just knew she hated it when he looked at her like she was something broken that needed to be fixed. It made her so angry.
“There is nothing wrong with me,” she told him.
“I know,” he said simply, with a small smile.
“No,” she shook her hair, matted from collapsing on a pillow as soon as it was toweled and still damp, “You don’t. You have always wanted to fix me Mark, but you can’t because there is nothing wrong with me.”
“What are you saying?” he rolled onto his stomach and stared at her.
“Give me back my spare key,” she returned evenly, her eyes narrowing only slightly.
He sighed and dressed in silence but paused at the door, “I never thought there was anything wrong with you Addison. You were always perfect to me.”
She snorted as the door closed behind him but something in her tightened at the sound.
Determination bordering on obsession had always defined her. She was determined there wouldn’t be a sixth time. She was determined that she was going to let him leave because what they had did not fit into the perfect life she had created for herself and that he had never wanted her for what she was but what she represented: something flawed that he could fix.
He was halfway down the street when she emerged after him, ridiculous heels clacking against the newly wet sidewalk which glistened in the light of street lamps and tail lights. She skidded a little as she wove her way through the Friday night crowds and cursed in frustration.
Normally she was obsessive and determined but in the end, she wasn’t. The conversation wasn’t over. Her shoes matched her skirt perfectly but she kicked them off and left them in the middle of the busy street, running after them in stockings which snagged on the rough ground and laddered up to her knees by the time she caught up with him. She was surprised to find she didn’t really care.
Breathless, she stopped herself by grabbing his shoulder and he turned to face her, shocked.
“I’m not perfect,” she said, gasping.
“I know,” he replied with a sad smile.
“Then why do you love me?” she gripped the sleeve of his coat a little tighter and wriggled her freezing toes, trying to ignore the sensation of wet nylon against her skin.
“What kind of question is that?” he retorted.
“I’m a perfectionist Mark,” she explained, “And I know you are too, to a neurotic extent and you hate yourself as much as I do and you’ve always understood all the weird things I do, so if you’re even half as obsessive compulsive as I am, try to understand why I need to know. How can you love someone as imperfect as I am?”
“Because,” he shrugged, “I just do. No one said it had to make sense to either one of us.”
“And if you love me, why were you trying to fix me?” she pressed.
“No one was ever trying to fix you Addison,” he murmured, clouds of steam rising between their faces, “Not Derek, even if he never understood it, and certainly not me. We can’t be fixed,” he told her, “You and I and people like us, we’re screwed up for whatever reason and people like Derek, who are all happy smiles and denial when things go wrong, don’t understand and can’t accept that. But that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong, that doesn’t mean something is broken and that doesn’t mean something needs to be fixed. I was never with you because I wanted to change you Addison, I just thought you understood things about me that I sometimes don’t understand about myself.”
“It always bothered me how you used to fog up the bathroom mirror in the morning,” she confessed, “Before I had a chance to do my make up but after I left I always did exactly the same thing because I realised I missed it.”
“That’s what love is,” he quipped, “Learning to love someone’s imperfections.”
“I can never love myself then,” she whispered, “Not truly.”
“I never asked you to love yourself Addison,” his breath was warm against the side of her face and it tickled her cold ears.
“I know,” she responded, “And if you can never find it in you to forgive yourself for all the mistakes you’ve made which you hate, I don’t mind.”
As they kissed, she reached for his hand and pressed something into his palm.
“What’s this?” he inquired, curious but not curious enough to do more than mumble the question against her lips.
“My spare key,” she whispered, grinning shyly.
He tucked a lock of hair behind her ears, “Ok.”
She pecked his cheek lightly, “Ok.”
And then she disappeared back the way she came and he kept walking and the crowds swallowed up the space where they stood together just moments before. It was cold and she liked it because she felt it. The numbness of her extremities was all too often mirrored by her insides so she loved the sharp piercing chill of a windswept winter street.
Only one shoe was lying, undisturbed and lonely, when she passed. She plucked it from the ground and eyed in sadly. She liked order. She loved shoes because they came in pairs, even numbers, perfectly symmetrical mirror images. One on its own was imperfect.
There was no knock at her door, which would have scared her but she knew it was him and the grin made her look stupid and probably pulled her nose tighter than could be considered attractive but again, she didn’t care. The stockings were discarded and the imperfect shoe sat beside the wastepaper basket. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it out even if it was useless. She couldn’t quite give up on it yet.
He appeared in the doorway and threw the key down on the table beside the window, folding his coat over a chair.
“Hey,” she said, patting the space beside her on the now-perfectly made bed and wrapping her arms around her shoulders, unsure of what to expect.
“Hey,” he echoed, creating a series of ripples on the covers and she fought the urge to run her hands over them until they were flat again, “I found something in the street.”
He set the shoe down beside her on the bed.
“It looked familiar,” he continued.
“Thank you,” her smile was wide and genuine and tears threatened to spill over her eyelids even though she knew it was irrational to be so emotional over such a simple gesture.
She rose and set the shoe down beside its counterpart, carefully judging the distance and making sure the pair were precisely aligned before returning to the bed to admire her handiwork.
Together, they were perfect.
Author’s Notes: Major warnings for this one; if you don’t like blood or vague references to self-injury then probably best to avoid it. Angsty and kind of dark and just further proof that I am seriously fucked up somewhere in my head. NC-17.
He found her for the fifth time but that didn’t seem to matter. It always mattered with Derek; she would hear the turn of the doorknob and there would be a mad scramble to hide the evidence, to rearrange the crimson stains until they were buried beneath the crisp white of the towels and to wipe her face free of tears. It always mattered to her that Derek knew or guessed in the end. She cared that he saw her at her weakest and she worried that he would think less of her.
She knew it was her fault that he did, in the end. And she knew it was her fault that he left.
He never tried to make her feel guilty (about the affair, yes, about her motives, no). He never tried to hold her accountable and he certainly never stood up and said what they both knew he was thinking but she knew and he knew she knew so maybe he didn’t feel it was necessary. He wouldn’t blame her because of that annoying sympathy, that ‘Addie, I’m so sorry but I can’t watch you do this to yourself’ face, the ‘please forgive me and love me anyway’ eyes.
Which she fell for, of course, even though she told herself she wasn’t going to and that she deserved more than his pity, that she wasn’t going to be put in the inferior position which pity implies. But she fell for it. She gave him the divorce papers and he said he wanted to try. Addison, things will get better with you and we’ll work it out, just like always.
And she fell for it. Because things would get better and she’d smile again and then they would work it out.
Then there was the way he wore his marital misery on his sleeve in Seattle, like everyone should feel sorry for him because he was the hero, he was doing the right thing, he was staying out of obligation.
She wanted to hit him for that. She wanted to tell him that there was nothing wrong with her, nothing that he could fix by moping around and pretending to be the good guy. She wanted to tell him that she deserved more, she wanted to tell him that she was leaving and it was over because he didn’t love her enough, he didn’t love her enough to deal with the mood swings and the occasional anxiety attack and the stains on the towels in the sink. He didn’t love her enough to help her. He just didn’t love her enough any more, period. It made her so angry, to think that he was belittling her and every time he looked at her with those stupid puppy dog eyes she wanted to be sick.
Go to hell Derek Shepherd. I don’t need you and I don’t need your pity.
But then the doubts would set in, and all the memories of the nasty New York arguments would come back. She couldn’t sleep again. She’d lie awake and listen to the trailer shifting after a day of heavy rain, and the sounds of past and present would collide. She would try to ignore the rain on the roof only to hear his words from years before: You can’t leave Addison, who else do you think is going to put up with you and your moods? And she’d try to ignore that only to have the repetitive noise of the rain drumming against the tin make her skin crawl, the sensation only heightened by the scratch of flannel sheets against her shoulders.
She hated that feeling.
She curled her toes against the lumpy mattress and clenched her jaw. Her hands balled into fists and her nails dug into her palms but no matter how much she tried to ignore it she would have to get up and rummage around until she found her iPod (to drown out the rain) and then she’d have to sleep in the other room, hunched up on the sofa with a blanket drawn around her shoulders (because she couldn’t stand the feel of the sheets any longer).
He would ask her why and she would make up some lie but he never believed her. He would get that sad, I-don’t-really-understand-but-I-feel-sorry-for-both-of-us look in his clouded blue eyes and she would hate him more than she hated herself just for a little while.
But it was still her fault, in her mind. The divorce bothered her more than the flannel sheets and the rain. It even annoyed her more than a crooked picture, a woman wearing cherry red with fuchsia pink or the high-pitched beeping sound her car made when she forgot to put her seatbelt on before reversing.
She hated it.
She hated it more than the average person hates the end of an eleven year marriage because to her it meant failure, and it meant imperfection. It meant a blemish on an otherwise perfect life, at least in other people’s eyes because to her, nothing was ever quite perfect.
And that was why it was her own fault.
Nothing could ever be perfect to her because of her unreachable standards yet teetering on the brink of perfection yet never quite attaining it was another of her pet hates. She hated almosts, she worked in absolutes and always at the ‘amazing success’ end of the spectrum. Failure as most people saw it was rarely in her vocabulary (failure by her own definition was another thing entirely). So she hated it that she could never be perfect and just like she would rather come third than second, since first seemed just out of reach when you came second and a long way off if you were third, she would rather fuck things up than have them almost, but not quite, perfect. (By her own standards: in her general experience, other people would think things were perfect even when they weren’t.)
So she would do things that annoyed Derek, to make him angry with her, pick fights just to prove that she wasn’t the only one who thought herself worthless because she wasn’t flawless. He never realised why and neither did she until years later. It was subconscious. Besides, she needed to win arguments, to be better than him and when he started earning more money than her she needed to be in control of the relationship in some way. It was slightly neurotic but she couldn’t trust him otherwise. He might hurt her.
And then suddenly he wasn’t there. He didn’t respond when she got annoyed that he had moved her shoes (because they all had a set place) or that he hadn’t stacked the dishwasher properly (because there was a set method of doing it). He didn’t notice if she sat on the window seat in the front room and stared at the street for hours without moving. She could cry herself to sleep and not be afraid of avoiding the awkward questions because there were none.
He wasn’t there.
And it surprised her at first how much she liked it. She didn’t have to explain the perversion if she accidentally cut a finger chopping up vegetables and it made her smile because it stung. She didn’t have to make excuses for why she wasn’t eating and she didn’t have to hide the fact that she couldn’t sleep. If she didn’t feel like getting up on weekends, he wasn’t there to act concerned when she pulled the covers over her head until five in the afternoon. When she was in ‘one of her moods’, he wasn’t there to argue with her or try to cheer her up, which inevitably led to an argument anyway. And she liked it.
But then she started to resent him for it because she was hurting all the time and he lived in the same house and he didn’t even notice. She hated him because he didn’t care, which was ironic because before she hated him because he did.
And it was all so almost-but-not-quite-perfect that she had to do something.
Sleeping with Mark was, in retrospect, a stupid idea. It was cruel, because she knew Mark loved her and that Derek did too and she also knew that Derek would find them, eventually, even though she never planned for it to happen the first time. But it was stupid because Mark didn’t look at her like he felt sorry for her. He didn’t pity her. And the lights were on and he traced the perfect scar along the back of her thigh with his tongue and he was a surgeon so she knew that he knew exactly how it got there.
But he didn’t look at her like she was a sick animal beside the road that needed to be taken home and coddled and cared for because it couldn’t look after itself.
He just understood, which was so much worse than pity.
Because she couldn’t hate him for it.
And she found herself spilling all these secrets that she kept from Derek, which could have been the martinis talking but even drunker than this she never would have confessed to him.
It was easy to talk to someone who didn’t belittle her, even unwittingly. And she stayed with him after Derek left because she needed to feel wanted without feeling judged. She didn’t ask him why he wanted her because she knew that as well: Mark likes to fix things, to fix people. Physically, he could mould and shape someone into what they wanted to be better than most. It made sense to her that he wanted to fix her emotionally as well, to put her back together when she felt so broken by everything that had happened.
Afterwards, she kept telling herself that she was just a different kind of surgery to him, but that didn’t really make it any better because he would never give up on a surgery in the same way. He had always been picky about that; after his first solo face lift he had rattled off a long list of mistakes and even though she had tried to reassure him (since the woman looked ten years younger at least) he told her not to try and make him feel better, because it was like her and her table settings.
She understood.
She was never really happy with a surgery either.
(Or her table settings.)
It wasn’t perfect because things could never be.
He found her for the fifth time after the divorce and it played just like any other time. She was sitting in the shower watching blood spill down her leg from just halfway up her thigh, the razor sat beside her, forgotten. She hugged her knees to her chest and studied the tiles, counting the number from one side to the other and irritated by the fact that the shower wasn’t a perfect square.
He opened the door and appeared in a swirl of mist, asking if she was ok and she ignored him.
“Addison?” he tried again.
“How’d you get in?” she asked, trying to sound annoyed but coming off more exhausted than angry.
“I stole your spare key the last time,” he confessed.
“Oh,” she shivered slightly, the hot water becoming lukewarm.
“You’re bleeding,” he said matter-of-factly.
“It was an accident,” she explained quickly.
“I know,” he shut off the water and offered her a dripping hand. She followed the lines of water up his arm in reverse to where they stopped, the arm disappearing beneath the rolled sleeve.
She shook her head, “I think I’ll just sit here for a minute.”
“You’ve been sitting there for half an hour,” he guessed, rather accurately, and pulled a towel from the rail beside the sink.
“I know,” she forced herself to smile as she gripped his hand.
He pulled her into a standing position and draped the towel across her shoulders, “Do you want to talk?”
She shook her head.
He pulled her wet hair from her face and traced the path it took down the centre of her back.
“Do you want to not talk?” he asked, experimentally, tentatively, as though he was unsure of what her reaction would be.
She shivered, goosebumps forming on her arms and the cold skin of her shoulders.
His fingers traced the streams of water curling down her body from the ends of her hair.
She dropped the towel. It fell around her feet but she was only absently aware of that. She stared at herself in the mirror, the glass becoming reflective again as the steam from the shower dissipated. She met his eyes in the reflection and nodded, only slightly, because she didn’t want to talk and she knew she would hate herself afterwards but he managed to make her forget herself for a while so maybe the short moments of relief were worth it.
His tongue made quick work of the water evaporating from her shoulder to her neck. She bit down on her lip and his teeth tugged at her ear, “You are amazing, you know that?”
She whispered her answer, but it was awareness rather than cheek or arrogance, “Yes.”
She spun on her heels and gripped his shoulders before he could respond; her mouth found his to silence any words. She was still wet and the moisture soaked the front of his shirt but she was sure he wouldn’t care. Carefully, she pushed him backwards and her footsteps were wet against the carpet until they reached the foot of the bed. He fell backwards at her insistent push but sat on the edge of the covers and raised a hand to stop her mouth.
“Addison,” he began a sentence, using words and she didn’t want words right now because she had none of her own. There were just feelings and a sort of urge to scream because somewhere in her mind the ability to express herself in English was inhibited.
She shook her head, “Don’t.”
His hands traced her ribs and he buried his face in her stomach, “Ok.”
She slithered out of his grasp and crawled across the bed, arranging herself against the covers, her skin still cold and her hair making wet patches in the fabric.
She eyed him pointedly until he sighed and lay beside her, his hand traced the side of her shoulder before resting on the curve of her breast. Her lips formed a round ‘oh’ in a silent gasp as his thumb roughly brushed against her already erect nipple, sensitive from the cold and she pressed her chest against his hand, smirking a little after the initial shock and close-to-pain sensation subsided slightly. Her toes moved against his shin and her arm crossed his to make quick work of the buttons on his shirt, interrupting his hands.
Their mouths met again as his fingers found a new home against her hips, his nails digging into her skin.
His tongue slid over hers and all of it was so annoyingly possessive. She refused to let herself be kissed, pressing back roughly and shifting slightly until she was above him, propped on one elbow. Stretching against the covers, she let her teeth sink into his chin as he pulled back. She smiled, breathlessly and there was something animal in it: all the anger and frustration and wounded pride and she wanted to hurt him because he had hurt her, more than he probably realised.
He grinned back. It was irrational maybe but she hated him for that. She kissed him angrily before she inavertedly told him about those impulsive flashes of anger and all the other things that made her question her sanity. He didn’t seem to mind and it made her feel a little better, to pin him against the mattress with her arms and press her mouth against his own so hard that it hurt her until they both couldn’t breathe.
She was almost dizzy from it all when she pulled back, breathing hard. He tucked her hair behind her ears affectionately and she wanted him to pull at it, she wanted to be physically hurting since emotionally she was anyway.
There was only one way to self-induce pain during sex. She knew from experience that he would never actually hurt her; he wouldn’t because he was afraid of taking things too far. She usually laughed but tonight it just annoyed her. So she tried to slide herself down his body and take matters into her own hands, or mouth as it were, but when she tried to move, his hands covered her thighs and held her in position. She squirmed a little but he shook his head slightly and refused to let her go.
Before she had a chance to ask, he ran a hand along the curve of her side and tapped her nose lightly, “Just cleaning you up.”
And he pressed the sheets against her leg, wiping away all traces of her mishap in the shower and smearing her blood all over the hotel linen.
“Because you’re still bleeding,” he explained and she nodded silently, slumping forward a little and abandoning her struggle. Ordinarily, she would never try to stop the bleeding. She would watch, fascinated by the deep red tendrils that would form as the deep red beads rose from the wound, fading into each other and winding down her skin in curved paths. It would never occur to her to wipe it clean, from experience cuts would always clot on their own. And this was just a nick from a razor anyway. An accident. Sort of.
She covered his hand with her own, “Don’t.”
“What?” he looked up at her.
“Just leave it,” she whispered, feeling vulnerable and unsure of how he would react.
“Addison,” he didn’t sound angry, just concerned, “Was it really an accident?”
And she pulled his hand up between them and traced the barely visible scars on his wrists and forearm, “Don’t lecture me.”
“I’m not,” he responded, watching as the red on his hand stained hers and pulling at their entwined fingers until they rested on the sheet beside the pillows, wiping them clean.
She pulled his hand to her mouth and ran her tongue over each finger anyway; he watched, not entirely sure why he couldn’t make her stop or look away. And she stared at him the whole time, recognising the perverted way in which he took pleasure from the image. Anything he had to say became hypocritical. He sighed and she smiled, triumphant in her silent victory.
Releasing his hand she leant forward and took advantage of his mouth, already open with the intention of making a statement, covering it with her own and kissing him forcibly again.
“It’s fine,” she told him, murmuring above his lips, “It’s not bleeding anymore anyway.”
“Ok,” he relinquished his higher ground and his hold on her, aware of what was to follow and almost but not quite able to dread it.
She smiled, “Thank you.”
He slid his hands from her hips up over her body and absently cupping her breasts, “For?”
“Letting me do this,” she mumbled, closing her eyes and focussing on the movement of his thumb and forefinger, “I need to. I’m sorry.”
So he let her wriggle her way down his body and fumble with his belt, have a small disagreement with the zipper and helped her in her efforts to divest him of his pants. She was tentative at first, just stroking him through his boxers, because she knew he would stop her otherwise. He pulled her upwards until her body was stretched out beside his and kissed her slowly. She took that as the necessary encouragement to proceed though her hands were trembling a little in nervous anticipation. It made no sense because they had done it before over and over but she always felt a little exposed and he dropped the usual reassuring kiss against her nose.
“It’s ok,” he murmured.
She nodded and pecked at his lips, repositioning herself until she was straddling his knees and tugging down on his boxers. She paused for a moment, hating herself for being so selfish since he never enjoyed it as much as she did when she was in one of her moods. But then her left hand curled around him and resumed the repeated motions and she gradually began to take over with her mouth.
He had never asked her how or when she learnt to do this kind of thing so well but she did have a sort of talent for it. She always moved her tongue inside her mouth and made the transition from mouth to hands seamlessly. The truth was less devastating than he ever would have guessed: she just hated the intimacy of actual sex early in a relationship and it was necessary to keep college boyfriends appeased in this regard; still he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
She pushed her forward further and further each time until she couldn’t breathe and she thought she might be sick which was thrilling in a way which made her forget herself. He tugged back on her hair with his hands and she remembered everything again, where she was and the need to breathe. So she allowed him to control the movements of her mouth, to pull back on her head so she could struggle for air before the exhilarating suffocating feeling returned.
She had never tried to explain to herself why it was that she liked it. From a first-year psyche perspective she knew it couldn’t be anything good so she didn’t bother. She liked it better when he was in control and the sicker she felt, somehow the better it was. She knew he hated the little choking sounds so she tried to stop herself, but that was the only thing she liked about this, the feeling that she couldn’t breathe and the disgusting, stomach-wrenching nausea that inspired. So her head bobbed forward and he thrust into her mouth but she resisted when he tried to push her backwards. And she needed to breathe, her chest was burning and burning but she could hold out just a little bit longer.
He forced her backwards and waited while she gagged and coughed, rubbing her shoulders and staring at the ceiling, unable to look at her flushed cheeks and watering eyes.
When she moved forward, fully recovered, he pushed her away.
“Addie,” he said softly, “Don’t.”
She took the tip of his cock in her mouth and tried to smile. When she spoke her tone was playful, “Why?”
“Because,” he retorted with more force than he intended, “If you want to hurt yourself that’s fine but I don’t want to be a part of that.”
She made no response since there was really no counterargument, opting instead to clamber up over him until her face was above his, “I’m ok Mark, really,” she caught his bottom lip between her own; “You’re not hurting me.”
“No,” he agreed, running his fingers along the hard line of dried blood along her thigh, “You’re doing that all on your own.”
“Are you mad at me?” she stuck out her bottom lip and fluttered her eyelashes at him.
“A little,” he shrugged.
In response she wriggled around until he felt an inch of warm sink down over his erection. She looked at him, wide-eyed and innocent with her lips parted slightly and her breasts brushing against his chest and stopped just short of his mouth to speak, “Really?”
“Addison,” he groaned, “That’s unfair.”
She smirked, sliding herself forward over him and rocking forward to kiss him soundly. He opened his mouth before she had the opportunity to prise it open with her tongue and a hand tangled in her hair.
“Don’t play nice,” she warned, gasping a little because she wasn’t really aroused or relaxed enough to be ready for any of it and the stretch was slightly uncomfortable.
She concentrated on things she normally ignored: their hip bones grinding together every time she moved, the scrape of his teeth as his mouth moved against her neck and his hands squeezing at her chest, much too lightly. She reached up and forced his thumb and forefinger together a little harder around her nipple, pressing her eyes closed and moaning softly.
And she was rocking backward and forward a little too fast and it all hurt a little but that made it so much better. This was, after all, some kind of punishment. She wasn’t meant to do this, and she hated herself for being weak enough to momentarily wish things could be the way they used to be; back when she trusted him enough to let him see that she was made up of tiny little pieces forced together and not the flawless whole that everyone thought she was. She hated herself for wanting him at all, since wanting him was so imperfect, so twisted and wrong and tragic almost that she couldn’t help herself.
Her whole face tensed, teeth pressing against teeth and eyelids squeezed shut to trap the tears.
“Ad,” he touched the side of her face, “You ok?”
It was gentle, almost too gentle as though she was delicate and he might break her.
“You can’t hurt me,” was her determined response. Her voice fell below a whisper, “Not anymore.”
“Hey,” he pulled her chin down until she met his eyes, “Unless your Friday night is more eventful than mine we can go slower, for you.”
“Don’t fucking care about me,” she snapped and then she was crying because balancing the good and the bad that felt good was all too much; she liked these things that it was wrong to like and she loathed herself for it.
“Addison,” he looked concerned and she brushed his hands away furiously when he reached up to wipe her cheeks.
“I’m ok,” she said, because she was, she was ok, she would get through it, she would wake up in the morning and at that point, making it through the day was the best she could hope for. He should understand that. If she had bothered to explain maybe he would have.
“You always are,” he pointed out, rolling over until her wet hair sunk into the pillow. She bit down on her lip and let her fingernails scrape against his shoulders, still trembling and willing herself to stop crying.
He kissed the side of her mouth gently and her eyes darted sideways to avoid the emotional intensity of eye contact. They rested on the red stain on white sheets, a sharper contrast than her hair usually was, and she swallowed the feelings making her chest hurt like she was drowning, making a token effort to press her lips against his.
She reached for his hand where it rested against her cheek and laced his fingers with her own.
“Just do it please,” she sniffed and closed her eyes
He hesitated and she could hear the question before he found the right way of phrasing it.
“I want to,” she said before he could ask, “Please.”
It was slower and she was too exhausted to protest. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t fragile, that she wanted it to hurt but she didn’t know how to make him understand that it hurt more when it was gentle anyway. Usually when he appeared in her doorway they fell into bed together and there was so much lust and a kind of urgency about it all that made it easy. It was all about reaching a common goal as quickly as possible because if she couldn’t feel him everywhere she was convinced she might die from it. Afterwards it was easier to pretend it was just sex. She could feel him under her or above her but the contact was hard and fast in all the right places rather than lingering. The kisses were hurried and rendered superfluous in the face of the much greater business of collapsing in a pile of sweaty entangled limbs and breathlessness. There wasn’t enough time for her to feel overwhelmed by her feelings. When it was slower, without that driving sense of exigency, she had time to think and feel and regret. She hated that.
She refused to open her eyes, so he kissed her eyelids and she thought she might cry. It was too difficult to explain, that all the endearing, caring gestures just made it so much worse, that she was so afraid of breaking in front of him again because he would keep her together, he would fix her but if he ever betrayed her trust she would split, a million tiny fractures running through her, and it would be so much worse than the last time.
He kissed her lightly and reached between them to touch her.
They both ignored the obvious dysfunction implied in the tears that escaped her closed eyes at the corners and focused instead on all the reoccurring motion. He pressed his fingers against her harder, made faster circles, eliciting gasps and moans that became shrieks silenced by her teeth sinking into her lip. She was trembling beneath him, whether it was arousal or tears he didn’t know because he closed his own eyes, unable to look at her when she seemed so pained by everything.
It almost felt like it was happening to someone else, but his thumb circled her clit and the stubble on his chin brushed against her lips and she was sure it was her, even though she felt so utterly wretched that it seemed ridiculous anything could feel so good at the same time. She arched her neck and threw her head back against the pillows, her fingers groping for his hair, so she could pull his mouth to the newly exposed skin. He buried his face between her jaw and her shoulder before she could succeed, groaning and muttering, “Addie, you’re so fucking beautiful.”
It didn’t hurt, which surprised her, but only a little because she was shuddering beneath him and swearing under her breath. It was surprising because she hated it when he said things like that, she hated those reminders of the way things were before Seattle and before the divorce, when they were in New York and they were happy, when she thought she had found someone who understood her and would never hurt her because he got it. But she loved it when he said that, even though she knew it was probably just the sex talking.
She lay with her eyes closed and waited for him to move after, both of them completely still apart from the irregular breathing. And then he moved sideways and ran his fingers through her hair, a gesture so simple it hurt somewhere in her chest, which was stupid because it was so obviously affectionate that it should have made her smile.
She opened her eyes and stared at him with tears in her eyes. Why did everything have to be so fucked up?
She wanted to ask him to hate her since that hurt so much less than him loving her. And he looked at her that way, that way Derek used to look at her, with pity and sadness in his eyes like it was some tragedy that she felt that way, as though they were Romeo and fucking Juliet.
She hated it when they looked at her that way. She hated it that they thought there was something wrong with her. She didn’t realise that he hated it when she looked as adrift as she did, when her eyes got that glazed-over vacant look and there was an absence in her words, like she wasn’t really there at all. He hated it when she looked so thoroughly miserable because he knew there was nothing he could do about it. She didn’t know it wasn’t pity just sympathy and a desire to see her smile. She just knew she hated it when he looked at her like she was something broken that needed to be fixed. It made her so angry.
“There is nothing wrong with me,” she told him.
“I know,” he said simply, with a small smile.
“No,” she shook her hair, matted from collapsing on a pillow as soon as it was toweled and still damp, “You don’t. You have always wanted to fix me Mark, but you can’t because there is nothing wrong with me.”
“What are you saying?” he rolled onto his stomach and stared at her.
“Give me back my spare key,” she returned evenly, her eyes narrowing only slightly.
He sighed and dressed in silence but paused at the door, “I never thought there was anything wrong with you Addison. You were always perfect to me.”
She snorted as the door closed behind him but something in her tightened at the sound.
Determination bordering on obsession had always defined her. She was determined there wouldn’t be a sixth time. She was determined that she was going to let him leave because what they had did not fit into the perfect life she had created for herself and that he had never wanted her for what she was but what she represented: something flawed that he could fix.
He was halfway down the street when she emerged after him, ridiculous heels clacking against the newly wet sidewalk which glistened in the light of street lamps and tail lights. She skidded a little as she wove her way through the Friday night crowds and cursed in frustration.
Normally she was obsessive and determined but in the end, she wasn’t. The conversation wasn’t over. Her shoes matched her skirt perfectly but she kicked them off and left them in the middle of the busy street, running after them in stockings which snagged on the rough ground and laddered up to her knees by the time she caught up with him. She was surprised to find she didn’t really care.
Breathless, she stopped herself by grabbing his shoulder and he turned to face her, shocked.
“I’m not perfect,” she said, gasping.
“I know,” he replied with a sad smile.
“Then why do you love me?” she gripped the sleeve of his coat a little tighter and wriggled her freezing toes, trying to ignore the sensation of wet nylon against her skin.
“What kind of question is that?” he retorted.
“I’m a perfectionist Mark,” she explained, “And I know you are too, to a neurotic extent and you hate yourself as much as I do and you’ve always understood all the weird things I do, so if you’re even half as obsessive compulsive as I am, try to understand why I need to know. How can you love someone as imperfect as I am?”
“Because,” he shrugged, “I just do. No one said it had to make sense to either one of us.”
“And if you love me, why were you trying to fix me?” she pressed.
“No one was ever trying to fix you Addison,” he murmured, clouds of steam rising between their faces, “Not Derek, even if he never understood it, and certainly not me. We can’t be fixed,” he told her, “You and I and people like us, we’re screwed up for whatever reason and people like Derek, who are all happy smiles and denial when things go wrong, don’t understand and can’t accept that. But that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong, that doesn’t mean something is broken and that doesn’t mean something needs to be fixed. I was never with you because I wanted to change you Addison, I just thought you understood things about me that I sometimes don’t understand about myself.”
“It always bothered me how you used to fog up the bathroom mirror in the morning,” she confessed, “Before I had a chance to do my make up but after I left I always did exactly the same thing because I realised I missed it.”
“That’s what love is,” he quipped, “Learning to love someone’s imperfections.”
“I can never love myself then,” she whispered, “Not truly.”
“I never asked you to love yourself Addison,” his breath was warm against the side of her face and it tickled her cold ears.
“I know,” she responded, “And if you can never find it in you to forgive yourself for all the mistakes you’ve made which you hate, I don’t mind.”
As they kissed, she reached for his hand and pressed something into his palm.
“What’s this?” he inquired, curious but not curious enough to do more than mumble the question against her lips.
“My spare key,” she whispered, grinning shyly.
He tucked a lock of hair behind her ears, “Ok.”
She pecked his cheek lightly, “Ok.”
And then she disappeared back the way she came and he kept walking and the crowds swallowed up the space where they stood together just moments before. It was cold and she liked it because she felt it. The numbness of her extremities was all too often mirrored by her insides so she loved the sharp piercing chill of a windswept winter street.
Only one shoe was lying, undisturbed and lonely, when she passed. She plucked it from the ground and eyed in sadly. She liked order. She loved shoes because they came in pairs, even numbers, perfectly symmetrical mirror images. One on its own was imperfect.
There was no knock at her door, which would have scared her but she knew it was him and the grin made her look stupid and probably pulled her nose tighter than could be considered attractive but again, she didn’t care. The stockings were discarded and the imperfect shoe sat beside the wastepaper basket. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it out even if it was useless. She couldn’t quite give up on it yet.
He appeared in the doorway and threw the key down on the table beside the window, folding his coat over a chair.
“Hey,” she said, patting the space beside her on the now-perfectly made bed and wrapping her arms around her shoulders, unsure of what to expect.
“Hey,” he echoed, creating a series of ripples on the covers and she fought the urge to run her hands over them until they were flat again, “I found something in the street.”
He set the shoe down beside her on the bed.
“It looked familiar,” he continued.
“Thank you,” her smile was wide and genuine and tears threatened to spill over her eyelids even though she knew it was irrational to be so emotional over such a simple gesture.
She rose and set the shoe down beside its counterpart, carefully judging the distance and making sure the pair were precisely aligned before returning to the bed to admire her handiwork.
Together, they were perfect.