Come lie with me

Chapter 28

By the time that Wednesday rolled around, the anticipation was beginning to build within Lexie. Because she was not working at the hospital, she had plenty of free time to make sure that everything was perfect, but it also caused her to be done early leaving her plenty of time to think. Which was not good. For it was in those lonely moments that her thoughts drifted to her mother.

Lexie knew that Susan Grey would have liked Mark Sloan. Deep within her belief that her mother brought them together was the idea that even if she had been living, she would have seen the good in him. The good that Lexie could see.

So as she gained excitement from each wedding related task, Lexie also felt nostalgic and sad as well. There was the dress shopping which her mother wasn't there for. The floral arrangements her mother wasn't there to nitpick. The chapel her mother wasn't there to worry about the location of. The bridesmaid dress for Molly which her mother wasn't there to call risqué. And this was all leading to the wedding which her mother wouldn't be there to see.

Each task was a double edged sword, both pleasing and painful.

It finally came to a head on Tuesday evening when she was curled up in bed with Mark. He was sleeping soundly, his breath blowing gently against her neck. The conflicting emotions seemed to hit her all at once: her sorrow at her mother's absence, the stress of her accident, and the joy she felt over marrying Mark. She had no defenses in place for this, and soon her shoulders shook in silent sobs.

It was too much. Much too much for one person to endure. She felt so alone, and it began to fill her until she felt a hand rubbing up and down her back, carefully avoiding her pink incision.

"What's wrong?" Mark whispered in the darkness. Lexie rolled over to face him, and he had to fight from gasping at the utter sadness that he saw in her eyes.

His throat clogged with emotion as he whispered, "Tell me, Lexie." It felt as if he was dying inside, but he promised himself he wouldn't react if she called off the wedding.

"I just…I miss my mother," Lexie confessed, causing Mark to blow out the breath he had been holding.

She continued, "All of the planning and the preparing have reminded me that she won't, that she can't, be there for me on Saturday. I thought I was over it, you know? But I…" She began to cry again.

Mark pulled her small body against his chest, kissing her hair lovingly. "I wish I could do something for you," he murmured.

Lexie shuddered in his arms, thinking through her tears how happy she was that Mark was hers. "There is nothing you can do, just hold me."

Mark continued to move his hands soothingly over her hair and down her back. He tried to think of something, of anything, to say. "When you were in the hospital, in the trauma room, I thought you were going to die," Mark said into the quiet of the bedroom. "I was standing there, feeling utterly helpless, and I had myself convinced that you were lost to me." Lexie raised her tear filled eyes to his, as he spoke in a halting voice. "You were so still Lexie, too still. And I felt certain that if you died, all that was good inside me, all that you helped me discover, would die too. The world didn't seem worth living in without you, so I wouldn't live. I would have slept and ate and breathed, but no one could have called it living. But when you came out of surgery, and you opened your eyes, all that hopelessness drifted away and I knew I still had something to live for."

Lexie's eyes gazed steadily into his, and Mark continued. "What I am saying is that you once asked me if I thought you and I being together was part of some sort of fated plan. I said no then, but I don't think that way anymore. There were moments in the ER when I felt like I was about to give up, like the billions of cells inside of me telling me that you would live were wrong. But there was something stopping me from getting to that point. Something or someone. I believe in something now Lexie, and you should too. Your mother loved you, and I know she will be with us on Saturday."