Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟬𝟴 guiltless

𝙑𝙄𝙄𝙄.
GUILTLESS

──────

NEW YORK

I DIDN'T EXACTLY remember when Mark Sloan and I had decided to become enemies , but I was pretty sure that it happened around the time that he decided to sleep with one of my friends from college.

I hadn't been able to give her the pep talk, the exact same speech that Addie had given to me when I'd even made the slightest moment of eye contact with the Upper East Side's most notorious bachelor. It was a lengthy one and, somewhere in between the extensive studying, it'd completely slipped my mind. Sadly, I'd forgotten that, much like the Herpes breakout in Columbia's undergrad dorms in 1993, Mark Sloan happened to be everywhere and a reasonably potent threat to any woman over the age of 18 in Lower Manhattan.

There's something so tart about the disappointment of realizing that one of your friends fell into bed with your sister's designated 'throwaway friend'. It was a bitter pill to swallow and I'd mostly blamed myself for not warning her. 

My friend was sweet. She was a hopeless romantic and she'd managed to fall into whatever golden, gilded trap that Mark set out in dive bars. She'd fallen for his wit and his smile and she'd given him a night just for him to do exactly what Addie had said he always did-- it seemed as though Mark invented the term ghosting years before it's social media debut. 

She'd woken up in his bachelor's pad on the other side of the city, met his blank stare and his disinterested smile and been told, could muster, to get going while he had a shower.

Asshole.

She'd been distracted. There was something even more devastating about the disappointment of being treated like dirt, like a cheap lay that was expected to evaporate when the sun rose. I'd sympathized with her. I hadn't lied when I'd said the exact thing to Mark himself: I knew men like him. He might've looked pretty but I had the very strong feeling that he was, more than likely, a completely terrible person.

That, naturally, had resulted in this:

" You're an asshole ."

Mark's eyebrows raised as I sat down, tossing that sentence at him as a way of greeting. We were at a bar downtown and Derek had invited me for drinks. The neurosurgeon in question was a few tables away, attempting to order a something-on-the-rocks with a crumpled twenty, but Mark, oh Mark was blinking at me as I slung my jacket over the back of the chair beside me.

It was safe to say that I hadn't taken a shine to him. There was something about his conceited attitude and his stupid smirk that made me want to rip something. It seemed as though I'd fallen in line with my siblings, sharing their same distaste like an inherited membership for the 'Anti-Mark-Sloan-Club'. 

He regarded me with the lifted brow, the slightly caught off-guard smile and the glimmer in his eye that reminded me so vividly of a live, dangerous wire.

"Probably," was his dry, deadpan response. "What did I do?"

It was, for all intents and purposes, not what I'd expected from him. I just shook my head at him, exhaling loudly as I pressed a palm into the tabletop. He was sat there in some dumb blue shirt with his dumb collar popped open, a dumb smirk on his dumb handsome face-- I blew a stray hair out of my line of sight and made a dramatic scene of displeasure.