Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟳𝟮 this is me trying ¹

𝙇𝙓𝙓𝙄𝙄.
THIS IS ME TRYING / PART ONE

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okay so to set this chapter with a lil bit of context,
the dinner takes place on the evening before the hospital scenes,
so the hospital parts are the morning after.

if u need help for clarity pls just yell for me.
i can be summoned like a v low budget genie free of charge.

this is also split into two parts because it's obnoxiously long
but i have three words for you:

✧ mark in therapy ✧

HAVE FUN!

SEATTLE

THE DINNER

HE COULDN'T REMEMBER the last time he'd been on a date.

A date. An actual date. 

He supposed he'd had them once. 

That sort of a date. Sweaty-palms slick against dress pants, bashful glances, too much cologne and a reservation in a restaurant downtown. Of course, he'd had them. 

He'd learnt to small-talk and smile somewhere, right? 

He'd learnt to charm and seduce and sweet talk-- but he couldn't give a specific when or where.

He, however, definitely had a who in mind.

When he did think about dates, he thought about a time in particular: of swinging out of liquor stores in the West Village and the car engine still running. 

He thought of the little black dresses and the way he'd avoid drinking and driving, booking it over the Brooklyn Bridge to go show her some off-the-cuff park, the sort they didn't have back in suburban Connecticut. He thought of long nights, guessing the cases in ambulances as they passed down the street and sticking to street corner lamp posts like moths, hungry for bare skin to touch bare skin. 

He thought of nightclubs, of how he'd never really liked them and preferred to make conversation within clouds of nefarious smoke. With a smile, thought of that one time that his car had gotten broken into just down from Bedford-Stuyvesant and someone had stolen fifty bucks and a lighter from his glove box-- she'd turned to him, gave him a wicked smile and said, just like a true New Yorker, "We're half a block from Marcy Houses. What would Jay-Z do?"

Seattle wasn't like New York. 

He couldn't remember a city that had felt so different; he didn't bounce out of bodegas and he sure as hell didn't break the speed limit. 

Maybe he could remember the last time he'd felt that particular way, nervous and bashful like a kid holding a Valentine's favour. 

His past two relationships had been very reminiscent of that: he'd actually felt things. He'd been nervous, he'd had clammy palms and he'd actually allowed himself, for a second in time, to feel something other than the righteous burn of his ego.

(It seemed to flare through him like hellfire itself in the worst of times. Sometimes he loved it, sometimes he didn't. Mark knew that he took after his father in that way.)