(no subject)
01 - No Obstacles, Only Challenges
02 - Girls Like Us
03 - Champagne Beat Boogie
04 - You're the Lucky Ones
Title: Groove ♠ Duke's Up [5/14]
Pairing: Mark/Addison
Rating: Hard PG-13, if that's possible.
Summary: Discussion with Boy #2, who doesn't know about Baby Girl Montgomery until Addison opens the front door.
“How the hell does he not know?” Addison tipped her head back and looked at Ellie upside down from the couch.
“You’re somewhere in the middle of your fifth month, I guess you can still sort of hide it and you’ve only told a few people, fuck I don’t know. I mean, the logic is that he should know.”
Even upside down, she noticed her sister squirming and put that together with her somewhat un-Ellie like behavior that evening and groaned. “Elizabeth, what’s between the two of you?”
Ellie made a face, though she knew she couldn’t keep it from Addison forever. “Sex. More constant than before but...just sex.”
“Just sex,” Addison repeated and sat up. She blinked and everything clicked into place. “Mark’s coming up here to have sex with you, not to have anything to do with me. But you won’t put out until he talks to me.”
“Addie...”
Addison shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe you,” she said quietly and somewhat disappointed and hurt, almost a little betrayed. “You said you were done with him.”
“I know. But he’s like heroin, Addie. Unless you have a huge kick in the ass like you did, you keep going back.”
She raised an eyebrow in partial confusion, partial concern but her voice remained quiet, though wavering. “You were there, too.” While she knew that Mark had an uncanny ability to make everyone need him at some point, she never thought that her strong and stubborn little sister would put up with his crap for long.
Ellie bit her tongue and counted to five and then turned to fully face her sister. “Addison, you’re not the only one of us who gets to try to be happy. I know there’s the chance that he’ll end up hurting me. But in the meantime, the sex makes me happy and I’m willing to take that risk.”
“That sounds remarkably self-destructive for you.”
Ellie laughed a little. “Well, I’m not married. So it’s a little less self-destructive for me than it was for you.”
Tears threatened at Addison’s eyes; Ellie’s comment had stung sharply. “El...” she trailed off softly.
Ellie saw how much her words had hurt Addison and offered her a quiet apologetic smile and reworded her next thought. “Mark is a vibrator that buys me dinner and doesn’t need double-A batteries. The only thing I’m going to fall in love with is his -”
“Ellie!” Addison cut off her sister even though she was pretty sure Ellie was going to end the sentence with tongue. Mark definitely knew how to use his.
She smirked, her sex toy line having the desired effect of making Addison smile (albeit in embarrassment). “So, yes. He’s coming up here to have sex with me and I’m not putting out until he talks to you.”
“Why doesn’t he know that I’m pregnant? If you two are...whatever, why haven’t you said anything?”
“Because that’s your story to tell, Addison.”
--
“When did that happen?” Mark crossed his arms and looked at Addison in her front doorway. He had been debating about starting with pleasantries but since an obviously-pregnant Addison opened the door and he remembered her leaving three months earlier very much not obviously pregnant, he figured that she had some explaining to do and Hi, How Are You wasn’t really worth the effort or the fake answers both of them would give.
“About five months ago.” She crossed her arms, matched his posture and leaned against the doorframe, appearing bored but secretly glad that he didn’t bother to ask how she was.
“Were you going to tell me?”
“I was thinking about it.” Addison bumped the door the rest of the way open and held it for him and rolled her eyes as he walked past her.
He spun around slowly and hung up his coat on an empty hook by the door. “I sort of have a right to know.”
Addison pursed her lips. “Well, since I don’t know if you are her father, you don’t exactly have any right to go around demanding anything from me.”
“What?”
“I have no idea whether you’re the father or whether Derek’s the father. Okay? I slept with both of you, without protection, in the same week that she was conceived. I’m not going to know until she’s born.”
Mark blinked and followed Addison into the kitchen and nodded his thanks at the glass of water she handed him, though what he really wanted was a glass of scotch. Or four. “Wait, you knew? You knew for two months that you were pregnant and didn’t tell me?” He was almost certain that she had been on the pill, but by then it was a moot point so he didn’t say anything.
Addison decided not to point out that it was really only a month and a half that she knew. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
She took a deep breath and couldn’t really figure out why it was so hard to say. After all, she didn’t go through with it. “Because I wasn’t planning to keep her.”
Mark started to say something but stopped, his words had been formed in his brain before she finished speaking. “What?”
“We were not a good couple, Mark. And you would’ve been a terrible father. I’m sorry and I know it hurts, but you’re not the guy I want as the father of my children.”
“Derek is.”
“Someone like Derek, yes.” The recent finalization of the divorce still hurt.
He sat down on a stool, things hitting him. In the span of thirty seconds, he found out not only that he might be a father but that he almost wasn’t possibly a father. It made his head spin a little. That he knew he wouldn’t make a great father didn’t make the sting of her words any easier to bear. Mark took a breath as if to say something and let it out. He tried again. “You weren’t going to include me in that decision.”
“No.” Part of her wanted to say that she thought it was his up until a few weeks ago, but that seemed to be a fact better suited to soothing Derek’s nerves than Mark’s. Telling him that she almost aborted what she thought to be definitely his baby wasn’t going to make things better.
“What made you change your mind?”
“What?”
“You said you weren’t planning to keep...her, but clearly you did.” He gestured toward her stomach. “What changed your mind?”
“That night I caught you with Ellie, it...it was a wakeup call. That you weren’t good for me and I didn’t want to be with you, child or not. And a few days later, she pointed out that I really wanted a baby and if I wasn’t going to be with you or Derek, time was going to start running out.”
Mark raised an eyebrow. “So your sister told you not to do it.”
“No. She reminded me of what I wanted, that’s all. I did the rest.”
“Did you think I would never find out?”
“What would you have done?”
Mark faltered. He wanted to say that he would’ve come up to Boston and demanded to know why she didn’t tell him and then demanded to be part of the baby’s life (since he did help make her and somewhere deep below his jackass manwhore exterior he did want to be a father some day), but that was wrong. He probably would’ve called to know why she didn’t tell him and then simply ignored it and run scared for the rest of his life trying to avoid Addison. “I don’t know,” he answered, settling for the (mostly) truth.
“That’s why I didn’t tell you.” Addison made that up on the spot, but a month and a half of living with her sister and nearly two months of living near her had taught her a lot about making up conversations as she went along and inventing the truth. “Because if you don’t know what you would do when you found out you had a kid, if you think you might run, you have no business even knowing.”
He sighed though didn’t outwardly show that he knew she was right. “We could’ve made it work.”
Addison slammed her empty water glass on the counter in anger and caused him to jump. “Dammit, Mark! We could not have made that work. How many people did you sleep with when we were together? Did you really think that Ellie was the only one I knew about? For two months the only thing you wanted from me was for me to take off my rings. And I did. And you didn’t notice. You and Derek are more similar than you think.”
He was a little more comfortable now that she was angry. He was used to dealing with angry Addison; he knew how to handle her. But the unfortunate consequence was that he got a little angry, too. “You didn’t tell me you were pregnant.”
“I wasn’t going to keep her, that’s why I didn’t tell you. And now? Now I don’t know who the father is! So, really, would that have made things better?” Addison swore under her breath as she realized her mistake too late to catch it.
“Now? Now you don’t know?” Despite that her statement didn’t make any biological sense, Mark knew exactly what she meant and it nearly caused him to blow up. “You mean you thought you knew before? Addison, whose did you think it was?” Mark dropped the gender pronoun because he knew it would piss her off and he stood up and took a step toward her.
“Yours. I thought she was yours, Mark.” Holding her ground and not moving back, Addison caught his gaze and held it harshly, her jaw clenched in anger. She knew that no matter what she did, how much she taunted him, he would never do anything to physically hurt her so she took the bait his silence gave her and ran with it. She was in no mood to put up with his crap and her hormones were on an anger streak lately. “Yes, Mark. I almost aborted what I thought was your baby. Deal with it.”
“You should have told me beforehand.”
“Really?” Addison cocked her head in antagonism. “First of all, my body, my choice. I know you agree with that platform, don’t even think about arguing. Second of all, we were a succession of one-night stands. If I was one of your disposable bed-warmers and got pregnant, I wouldn’t tell you before I did it. And third of all, by the time I decided to do it we were beginning to fall apart anyway.”
“You were not a disposable bed-warmer, Addison.”
“Right, I was reusable.”
“Addison...”
“Mark, why are you here?”
“Come home.”
“No,” she said firmly, ending the back-and-forth shouting. “We sold the brownstone and your apartment was sort of a place to stay.”
At the mention of the brownstone, Mark turned slightly jealous. “Does Derek know?”
“Yes.”
He walked away to the other side of the kitchen. “Are you trying to hurt me?”
“I don’t see why Derek knowing about this before you should hurt. God, we got divorced, Mark; it was finalized a week ago. Of course I was going to talk to him before you.”
“You could’ve called me.”
“Look.” She crossed her arms and glared. “You can whine all you want, but don’t do it in front of me. Even though we’re getting divorced, I’m closer to Derek than I am to you. I tell him more than I tell you. It’s always been that way.”
“Except when he forgot your birthday.”
“That didn’t mean I wasn’t close to him. It meant he wasn’t close to me. There’s a difference now shut up and let me finish.” She slowly walked toward him. “You don’t get to bitch now, Mark. In four months, you have a fifty-percent chance of earning that right to bitch. And if you earn that right, feel free to whine and complain and yell at me all you want for this. But until then and until that moment when I tell you you’re a father...” she trailed off, now standing right in front of him. “Shut the fuck up and get out of my house.”
“Addison...”
“Out.”
--
“Mark, she’s scared and confused. Give her some slack.” Ellie propped her head up on her pillow and looked at Mark staring at the ceiling. She was long used to post-coital conversations with Mark being complete non-sequitors from most anything else. “She’s this really weird and really frustrating combination of scared, hurt, and happy. So don’t be so mean to her.”
He turned over onto his side and raised his eyebrows. “Why not?”
Ellie shrugged and tugged the sheet up around her. “Because you love her.”
“If I love her, why am I in bed with you?”
Any other woman would’ve taken it as an insult, but Ellie knew Mark and knew what he meant and knew it was a legitimate question. “Because you can’t have her and it’s your way of getting back at her. And you know I’ll always be here for the sex.” She stared off over his shoulder and blinked. “Plus I look like her. Which I’ve honestly always found to be a little weird.”
“What, that you look like her?”
“No, that you sleep with me because I look like her.”
He reached out and tucked a chunk of perfectly-highlighted red hair behind her ear. “Ellie, why do you do this?” She had asked him the same thing years ago.
She caught his hand and pulled it away and set it down on the rumpled sheets between them. “Because I’m the female version of you, Mark. This is what we do.”
“Self-destruct?” Mark asked as he rolled closer and hovered his lips over hers.
“Yes.” Ellie cupped a hand around the back of his neck and pulled him the rest of the way down for a crashing kiss.
&spades 20 Minutes of Disco Glory
02 - Girls Like Us
03 - Champagne Beat Boogie
04 - You're the Lucky Ones
Title: Groove ♠ Duke's Up [5/14]
Pairing: Mark/Addison
Rating: Hard PG-13, if that's possible.
Summary: Discussion with Boy #2, who doesn't know about Baby Girl Montgomery until Addison opens the front door.
“How the hell does he not know?” Addison tipped her head back and looked at Ellie upside down from the couch.
“You’re somewhere in the middle of your fifth month, I guess you can still sort of hide it and you’ve only told a few people, fuck I don’t know. I mean, the logic is that he should know.”
Even upside down, she noticed her sister squirming and put that together with her somewhat un-Ellie like behavior that evening and groaned. “Elizabeth, what’s between the two of you?”
Ellie made a face, though she knew she couldn’t keep it from Addison forever. “Sex. More constant than before but...just sex.”
“Just sex,” Addison repeated and sat up. She blinked and everything clicked into place. “Mark’s coming up here to have sex with you, not to have anything to do with me. But you won’t put out until he talks to me.”
“Addie...”
Addison shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe you,” she said quietly and somewhat disappointed and hurt, almost a little betrayed. “You said you were done with him.”
“I know. But he’s like heroin, Addie. Unless you have a huge kick in the ass like you did, you keep going back.”
She raised an eyebrow in partial confusion, partial concern but her voice remained quiet, though wavering. “You were there, too.” While she knew that Mark had an uncanny ability to make everyone need him at some point, she never thought that her strong and stubborn little sister would put up with his crap for long.
Ellie bit her tongue and counted to five and then turned to fully face her sister. “Addison, you’re not the only one of us who gets to try to be happy. I know there’s the chance that he’ll end up hurting me. But in the meantime, the sex makes me happy and I’m willing to take that risk.”
“That sounds remarkably self-destructive for you.”
Ellie laughed a little. “Well, I’m not married. So it’s a little less self-destructive for me than it was for you.”
Tears threatened at Addison’s eyes; Ellie’s comment had stung sharply. “El...” she trailed off softly.
Ellie saw how much her words had hurt Addison and offered her a quiet apologetic smile and reworded her next thought. “Mark is a vibrator that buys me dinner and doesn’t need double-A batteries. The only thing I’m going to fall in love with is his -”
“Ellie!” Addison cut off her sister even though she was pretty sure Ellie was going to end the sentence with tongue. Mark definitely knew how to use his.
She smirked, her sex toy line having the desired effect of making Addison smile (albeit in embarrassment). “So, yes. He’s coming up here to have sex with me and I’m not putting out until he talks to you.”
“Why doesn’t he know that I’m pregnant? If you two are...whatever, why haven’t you said anything?”
“Because that’s your story to tell, Addison.”
--
“When did that happen?” Mark crossed his arms and looked at Addison in her front doorway. He had been debating about starting with pleasantries but since an obviously-pregnant Addison opened the door and he remembered her leaving three months earlier very much not obviously pregnant, he figured that she had some explaining to do and Hi, How Are You wasn’t really worth the effort or the fake answers both of them would give.
“About five months ago.” She crossed her arms, matched his posture and leaned against the doorframe, appearing bored but secretly glad that he didn’t bother to ask how she was.
“Were you going to tell me?”
“I was thinking about it.” Addison bumped the door the rest of the way open and held it for him and rolled her eyes as he walked past her.
He spun around slowly and hung up his coat on an empty hook by the door. “I sort of have a right to know.”
Addison pursed her lips. “Well, since I don’t know if you are her father, you don’t exactly have any right to go around demanding anything from me.”
“What?”
“I have no idea whether you’re the father or whether Derek’s the father. Okay? I slept with both of you, without protection, in the same week that she was conceived. I’m not going to know until she’s born.”
Mark blinked and followed Addison into the kitchen and nodded his thanks at the glass of water she handed him, though what he really wanted was a glass of scotch. Or four. “Wait, you knew? You knew for two months that you were pregnant and didn’t tell me?” He was almost certain that she had been on the pill, but by then it was a moot point so he didn’t say anything.
Addison decided not to point out that it was really only a month and a half that she knew. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
She took a deep breath and couldn’t really figure out why it was so hard to say. After all, she didn’t go through with it. “Because I wasn’t planning to keep her.”
Mark started to say something but stopped, his words had been formed in his brain before she finished speaking. “What?”
“We were not a good couple, Mark. And you would’ve been a terrible father. I’m sorry and I know it hurts, but you’re not the guy I want as the father of my children.”
“Derek is.”
“Someone like Derek, yes.” The recent finalization of the divorce still hurt.
He sat down on a stool, things hitting him. In the span of thirty seconds, he found out not only that he might be a father but that he almost wasn’t possibly a father. It made his head spin a little. That he knew he wouldn’t make a great father didn’t make the sting of her words any easier to bear. Mark took a breath as if to say something and let it out. He tried again. “You weren’t going to include me in that decision.”
“No.” Part of her wanted to say that she thought it was his up until a few weeks ago, but that seemed to be a fact better suited to soothing Derek’s nerves than Mark’s. Telling him that she almost aborted what she thought to be definitely his baby wasn’t going to make things better.
“What made you change your mind?”
“What?”
“You said you weren’t planning to keep...her, but clearly you did.” He gestured toward her stomach. “What changed your mind?”
“That night I caught you with Ellie, it...it was a wakeup call. That you weren’t good for me and I didn’t want to be with you, child or not. And a few days later, she pointed out that I really wanted a baby and if I wasn’t going to be with you or Derek, time was going to start running out.”
Mark raised an eyebrow. “So your sister told you not to do it.”
“No. She reminded me of what I wanted, that’s all. I did the rest.”
“Did you think I would never find out?”
“What would you have done?”
Mark faltered. He wanted to say that he would’ve come up to Boston and demanded to know why she didn’t tell him and then demanded to be part of the baby’s life (since he did help make her and somewhere deep below his jackass manwhore exterior he did want to be a father some day), but that was wrong. He probably would’ve called to know why she didn’t tell him and then simply ignored it and run scared for the rest of his life trying to avoid Addison. “I don’t know,” he answered, settling for the (mostly) truth.
“That’s why I didn’t tell you.” Addison made that up on the spot, but a month and a half of living with her sister and nearly two months of living near her had taught her a lot about making up conversations as she went along and inventing the truth. “Because if you don’t know what you would do when you found out you had a kid, if you think you might run, you have no business even knowing.”
He sighed though didn’t outwardly show that he knew she was right. “We could’ve made it work.”
Addison slammed her empty water glass on the counter in anger and caused him to jump. “Dammit, Mark! We could not have made that work. How many people did you sleep with when we were together? Did you really think that Ellie was the only one I knew about? For two months the only thing you wanted from me was for me to take off my rings. And I did. And you didn’t notice. You and Derek are more similar than you think.”
He was a little more comfortable now that she was angry. He was used to dealing with angry Addison; he knew how to handle her. But the unfortunate consequence was that he got a little angry, too. “You didn’t tell me you were pregnant.”
“I wasn’t going to keep her, that’s why I didn’t tell you. And now? Now I don’t know who the father is! So, really, would that have made things better?” Addison swore under her breath as she realized her mistake too late to catch it.
“Now? Now you don’t know?” Despite that her statement didn’t make any biological sense, Mark knew exactly what she meant and it nearly caused him to blow up. “You mean you thought you knew before? Addison, whose did you think it was?” Mark dropped the gender pronoun because he knew it would piss her off and he stood up and took a step toward her.
“Yours. I thought she was yours, Mark.” Holding her ground and not moving back, Addison caught his gaze and held it harshly, her jaw clenched in anger. She knew that no matter what she did, how much she taunted him, he would never do anything to physically hurt her so she took the bait his silence gave her and ran with it. She was in no mood to put up with his crap and her hormones were on an anger streak lately. “Yes, Mark. I almost aborted what I thought was your baby. Deal with it.”
“You should have told me beforehand.”
“Really?” Addison cocked her head in antagonism. “First of all, my body, my choice. I know you agree with that platform, don’t even think about arguing. Second of all, we were a succession of one-night stands. If I was one of your disposable bed-warmers and got pregnant, I wouldn’t tell you before I did it. And third of all, by the time I decided to do it we were beginning to fall apart anyway.”
“You were not a disposable bed-warmer, Addison.”
“Right, I was reusable.”
“Addison...”
“Mark, why are you here?”
“Come home.”
“No,” she said firmly, ending the back-and-forth shouting. “We sold the brownstone and your apartment was sort of a place to stay.”
At the mention of the brownstone, Mark turned slightly jealous. “Does Derek know?”
“Yes.”
He walked away to the other side of the kitchen. “Are you trying to hurt me?”
“I don’t see why Derek knowing about this before you should hurt. God, we got divorced, Mark; it was finalized a week ago. Of course I was going to talk to him before you.”
“You could’ve called me.”
“Look.” She crossed her arms and glared. “You can whine all you want, but don’t do it in front of me. Even though we’re getting divorced, I’m closer to Derek than I am to you. I tell him more than I tell you. It’s always been that way.”
“Except when he forgot your birthday.”
“That didn’t mean I wasn’t close to him. It meant he wasn’t close to me. There’s a difference now shut up and let me finish.” She slowly walked toward him. “You don’t get to bitch now, Mark. In four months, you have a fifty-percent chance of earning that right to bitch. And if you earn that right, feel free to whine and complain and yell at me all you want for this. But until then and until that moment when I tell you you’re a father...” she trailed off, now standing right in front of him. “Shut the fuck up and get out of my house.”
“Addison...”
“Out.”
--
“Mark, she’s scared and confused. Give her some slack.” Ellie propped her head up on her pillow and looked at Mark staring at the ceiling. She was long used to post-coital conversations with Mark being complete non-sequitors from most anything else. “She’s this really weird and really frustrating combination of scared, hurt, and happy. So don’t be so mean to her.”
He turned over onto his side and raised his eyebrows. “Why not?”
Ellie shrugged and tugged the sheet up around her. “Because you love her.”
“If I love her, why am I in bed with you?”
Any other woman would’ve taken it as an insult, but Ellie knew Mark and knew what he meant and knew it was a legitimate question. “Because you can’t have her and it’s your way of getting back at her. And you know I’ll always be here for the sex.” She stared off over his shoulder and blinked. “Plus I look like her. Which I’ve honestly always found to be a little weird.”
“What, that you look like her?”
“No, that you sleep with me because I look like her.”
He reached out and tucked a chunk of perfectly-highlighted red hair behind her ear. “Ellie, why do you do this?” She had asked him the same thing years ago.
She caught his hand and pulled it away and set it down on the rumpled sheets between them. “Because I’m the female version of you, Mark. This is what we do.”
“Self-destruct?” Mark asked as he rolled closer and hovered his lips over hers.
“Yes.” Ellie cupped a hand around the back of his neck and pulled him the rest of the way down for a crashing kiss.
&spades 20 Minutes of Disco Glory