You Save Me

3

If there was one thing in the world that Addison Montgomery Shepherd hated, it was doing laundry.

She didn't mind other things. Cleaning, vacuuming, even cooking weren't that bad. But laundry was the worst of the worst, and she completely hated it. So when she returned from work after losing a baby in a first time mom's c-section, she had been more than angry when she'd realized that her husband had neglected to do the laundry on his day off like she had requested.

Addison was not a stupid woman. No matter what Derek had thought of her over the past couple years, she was not stupid, and definitely not shallow. She wasn't sure when it had happened, but at some point he had stopped looking at her the way he had when they had first been married, he'd stopped holding her hand just because he could and stopped seeing her.

That was why she had started shopping. Coach bags, Pradha shoes, fancy living room sets....she bought them all just to fill the void in her life that was left when Derek had drifted away from her.

She'd spent a lot of time over the past few months trying to decide what had happened. She knew that she had lost focus on her marriage when she'd first started her residency in the practice that she loved. But when she had finally had the energy to start fixing things, Derek had disappeared.

He was still there, doing everything she asked of him. Or almost everything, she thought as she shoved a load of darks into the washing machine. But even though he was physically there...he wasn't there for her. When she told him she wanted to spend time with him, he automatically took her out to dinner and ordered a bottle of her favorite wine, but he never simply sat up with her in bed and talked the way they had when they were first married. And for the past three years, her birthday celebration, his birthday celebration, and their anniversary celebration had been the same. She'd been stupid to think that he would do something other than plan dinner and a show for her birthday the coming weekend. When he'd told her about the plans he had made, she'd been strangely disappointed. But she knew she shouldn't have been, because it was the same as everything else he'd done for her in the past.

Everything was the same. Everything was always the same, and the only thing that brought her any kind of excitement in her life was Mark Sloan, her husband's best friend, his brother.

She shook her head slightly as she thought about Derek's best friend, the man who had been the best man at their wedding. She wasn't sure when it had happened, or how, but sometime in the past six months she was sure that Mark had become the best part of her life.

She felt more than a little guilty about that fact. The first night that they had spent together had been when Derek had been away on a conference, and they'd sworn that it would never happen again. They had both felt extreme amounts of guilt, both of them cheating on a man that was very important to them. But then Derek had called one night telling her that he had to cancel the one night that he had actually agreed to stay home, cook her dinner and talk. So she drank an entire bottle of wine before she'd called Mark and told him how much she wanted to talk.

He had been there in less than fifteen minutes.

It wasn't that she loved Mark more than Derek, or that she really loved him at all. But he was there. He was there and Derek wasn't, and that's why she couldn't stop herself from seeing him.

Addison froze as she reached into Derek's pocket, pulling out a business card with a woman's name scribbled across the back. Meredith. She dropped the pants to the ground, reaching for the washing machine for balance as she felt realization coming over her. Derek was sleeping with someone else.

She knew that she didn't really have a reason to be angry. She had been sleeping with Derek's best friend, the man that Derek had seen as a brother since kindergarten. She had no reason to feel betrayed or sick to her stomach, but she did. And now she had no idea how to confront her husband, or tell him what she had been doing with Mark, even if he was cheating on her.