This is not a love story. She does not drink tequila. He doesn’t let her. The rain comes pouring down the eaves of their roof in time with her tears. Slow then strong, another Seattle storm and she is green silent slivers of wet walking out the front door into everyday cataclysm. He follows; stands beside her with his hands in his pockets, barefoot and drenched and watching. She tilts her head up into the onslaught, eyes closed with mouth open. He imagines she is washing away all the hopes she built on wooden stilts, now rotten before their time.

He stands as she soaks them both to the bone with her sorrow. Pale, petite waif of a woman gone drowned alley-cat in less than five minutes. It isn’t attractive but pain never is, and she borrows his stoicism so she can regain her own cynicism. A short cough of a laugh and she offers him a twisted smile.

“Her name is Rose,” It’s the first thing she’s said in the last four hours and he shrugs nonchalantly against the weight of her admission. She shivers slightly with a show of relish. He frowns and wiggles his toes on the stone walkway.

“At least it isn’t Izzie,” he retorts darkly. She steps outside herself; watches him, watching her with this look, a mix of concern, understanding and scorn. He’s being her person, still raw with his own wounds. It stops her cold. Because he is standing half-naked in the wet, this farm boy from Iowa that she doesn’t really know. Dark eyes and slick thick skin hiding damage that she lays bare in herself. Her hand rubs up and down his arm involuntarily: a wordless apology.

“I never thought I’d miss Addison,” she mutters bitterly. Not the strong woman she was before Alzheimer’s and Derek and drowning. He pats her soaked scalp, strokes his way down to her shoulder.
“Tell me something I don’t know Grey.”

She leans on him. Nearly chokes on his bear grip around her neck. It’s more abuse than affection but neither of them ever learned the distinction. They stand in the rain for an hour. He tugs her hair and she pokes his ribs, but they don’t speak and there’s nothing romantic about it.

*~*

Two days later, Alex comes home to Meredith cooking and disturbingly enough, it smells good. He blames this on a shift with trauma after trauma until his nose burned with hospital cleaning solution. Plus. He has a cold. She does not tell him to sit down, so he does and catches her attention halfway between the cookbook and the sherry she isn’t drinking. Her hair is lighter, swinging against her cheeks to the rhythm of her silently moving lips. He eyes the sherry critically. Meredith scowls.

She has just come from her first session of therapy and feels foul. Her Boston Brahmin roots are screaming traitor. A siren’s call to alcohol, and she overheard that Derek is “the bees knees” (she could kill Debbie) to Rose. This is progress, she thinks, but looks lost with an array of items scattered before her on the counter. A skillet smokes slightly behind her, the source of mouthwatering scents

“I’m cooking chicken breasts in a reduction of sherry and spices,” Meredith braces for the sarcasm. After, “The Lexie Breakfast” Alex taunted her constantly in the kitchen. He looks around for signs of a struggle that do not materialize. Meredith’s hands are on her hips, a dark blue apron around her waist, still waiting for his censure. Alex’s gaunt cheeks flush as his stomach gurgles and Meredith’s eyebrows jerk northward in surprise. A smile creeps along the pointed underside of her face, the thin slope of her cheeks slowly grow peach-sized with her grin.

“I’ll make rice” he declares, grabbing the sherry to put in the cupboard before she can protest. Meredith thinks she should feel insulted but she is done with it anyway, and Alex is flicking a dish towel over one shoulder.

 “You can boil water?”

They bicker and snark, the camaraderie effortless because her dye job is worse than her cooking for once, a sign of the apocalypse. Meredith ponders a different shade, maybe pink like in high school and Alex’s look is priceless; mouth half-open in disbelief at the thought of her being such a childish rebel. She almost wants him to dare her, because that would be fun. Light-hearted in a way their lives never are, not for long anyway.

Stepping close, Meredith does not smell like lavender anymore. She offers the scent before he can ask. Cinnamon spice, dark and warm, it makes him think of cold winter mornings with cups of hot cocoa. The kind of idyllic childhood neither of them knows much about. She stirs the chicken frantically, the rice is on simmer and Meredith is a picture of domesticity. Normal. Alex imagines that is what she means by cooking. She pauses, does not look up.

 “Think I could still sleep with Sloane?”

The question falls flat. Hard. Neither shocking nor irritating because this is who they are, unapologetically flawed with their foibles on display for each other. The spoon slips from her grasp easily. Alex tastes the sauce. Licks it off his lips with pleasant satisfaction.

“My God Grey! You can cook something edible!” Her tongue finds its way past her frown. He stirs the rice and demands she gets plates, Meredith realizes that he will not soothe her conscience. Her choices are her own, which is really the first of many problems.

He leans into her, setting plates down on a table they never use. She bumps back, angling her hip into his thigh with a stab of bone that tells him just how thin she really is.

“You want a pawn, not another player Grey,” Alex blurts angrily. The words are harsh, because he is, and Meredith flicks her hair back, fumbling for words that do not come. She sits because he tells her to, and they eat until he’s full. It doesn’t occur to either of them, that sex no longer means love.