Lobsters

By Bleu

Honey, why you callin' me so late?

It's kinda hard to talk right now.

Honey, why you cryin'? Is everything okay?

It's really good to hear your voice

Sayin' my name

It sounds so sweet

Hearin' those words

It makes me weak,

And I never want to say Good-bye…

"Fuck." A hand shot out from beneath a tangle of covers, groping with hostility in the pitch black for the phone that had exploded in a shrill, cacophonous ring.

"What…what is it?" Melissa murmured distractedly from the other side of the bed, rolling over restlessly as she spoke, indicating she didn't really care.

"I'm about to find out." Mark Sloane snapped as his motor skills became functional and he finally wrested the phone from its cradle. "Sloane!" he greeted gruffly.

There was only silence.

"Sloane here, who the hell is this?" he demanded edgily, scrubbing at his eyes with his free hand and squinting at the time on the bedside table.

"…Mark?"

His entire body went rigid as a few beats ticked by. Jesus Christ.

"Hold on." He ordered. In an awkward, graceless fashion he detangled himself from the bed and Melissa's sexual snare, snatching a discarded pair of black silk briefs from the floor and stumbling into the adjoined office.

Once inside, he yanked the briefs swiftly upward to cover himself and took a breath.

"It's good to hear your voice." He told her softly.

More silence.

"Addie?" he asked softly, not out of secretiveness from Melissa, but because the mere sound of Addison's voice saying his name sweetly threw an emotional switch inside him. It triggered an uncharacteristic tenderness in him, and he noticed, a sweet vulnerability about her, equally out of character.

He closed his eyes and took a moment to enjoy listening to her breathe on the other end of the line.

"Mark…I…"

"What is it?" he asked, more urgently. She sounded like she was crying.

"I…shouldn't have called." She murmured, and a small gasp of a stifled sob stung his ears.

"What's wrong? Is something…are you okay?" he ran his hands through his tousled hair.

"No. I'm not." She whispered. "I'm not okay."

"Addison, what is it?" he demanded huskily. God, how he wanted to touch her, hold her, keep her from crying like this.

There was a terrifying minute of silence before she spoke again.

"Do you remember the lobsters?" she asked weakly.

He pressed his eyes together. "Of course."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not angry. I wasn't then, either."

"I know, but you always loved lobster."

"Yeah, well, we have do without things we love sometimes." He replied, bitterness shooting through his voice. He had to sit down, and when he did, the chair creaked and balked.

Addison took a sharp breath.

"I was thinking about lobsters tonight."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"—Mark?"

He turned so sharply the chair nearly collapsed.

"Mel! What are you doing up?" he exclaimed with a voice he didn't recognize. Melissa was standing in the doorway of the office, the sheet wrapped seductively around her naked body, blonde hair tousled sinfully, mouth in a pretty little pout.

At that moment, she was about as attractive as a forty-year-old balding man wearing greasy overalls as far as Mark was concerned.

"Come back to bed." She purred, running her daggers she called nails down his arm possessively. He maneuvered out of her grasp, thanking God Addison had kept her nails trimmed.

"I will…in a minute."

She scowled, playfully, and stuck out her lip. Christ, sometimes it was like he was dating a child.

"All right, but you're in trouble mister." She teased, wriggling her eyebrows as she sashayed out. Mark waited until the bed shimmied and the sheets rustled indicating her return before he slid the door shut and returned to the phone.

"Sorry."

"Who was that?" Addison asked, attempting noncommittal and failing.

"My girl." He lied, deliberately using the endearment he had used exclusively for her in their all-too-brief episode of being lovers.

"Oh." Her hurt was tangible. "Does she know who I am? Will she be upset?"

"Does Derek know what you're doing right now?" he returned nastily.

She exhaled miserably.

"No." was her gloomy reply. "No."

Another stretch of silence spanned the space between them, but the glory of modern technology and telephones helped to make it seem like it wasn't quite as large as 3,000 miles.

"I dreamt about you." She told him finally. "Do you…do you ever dream of me?"

When he pressed his eyes together now, it was to blot out tears.

"Yes." He said simply. He could have told her how he dreamt of her every night, even when it was another woman he made love to. He could have told her how he dreamt of her even when he was awake, seeing her face, hair, body in women at the hospital, on the street. He could have told her how he was never not thinking about her…

"I just…wanted to know." She murmured. With that, he slammed his fist on the desk.

"Why, Addison?" he demanded, hissing his breath. "God damn it, WHY? Why are you calling me? Why are you torturing me like this? What do you want from me?"

At this point, her crying was clearly audible, and as soon as his tirade was over, he felt like a prize bastard.

"I don't know!" she blurted as much as one could blurt in a whisper. "I just…I had a dream, and I woke up thinking of you and lobsters. I just needed to talk to you!"

"Well if you were here, with me, in bed next to me, where you should be, you wouldn't have had to waste your long distance minutes to talk to me!"

"Mark, don't…"

"Don't what? You called me!" he snapped. If he had any self respect he would have hung up, gone back to bed, and screwed the brains out of Melissa until dawn. Instead, he was shaking, gripping the telephone until his knuckles were white with strain, and desperately hoping.

"I know. It was a mistake. I'm sorry, Mark. I shouldn't have. I'm sorry."

"No. You don't get to be sorry. If you were sorry, you'd come back."

"I can't!" she cried. "Don't you realize I can't?"

"That's different from not wanting to." He whispered evenly.

A siren wailed in the distance, seemingly deafening as it flooded the silence of the room, which was cut through only by prickles of static, Addison's halted breathing, and Mark's racing pulse.

"I know." Click.

She was gone.

Mark put the phone down slowly, calculating, fighting with impressive strength his desire to slam it down with all his frustrated weight and feel it shatter in his hands. He stared at it for a while, just staring intently at the silver keys illuminated green, jammed into the bed of black plastic.

He drummed his fingers methodically on the mahogany of the desk, not aware of the dull thump, thinking only of their conversation about lobsters.

Lobsters mate for life, you know. (He couldn't remember now why he had even brought it up.)

Yeah?

Yeah.

…But what if one dies?

Well then…I don't know, I guess the other is alone.

Forever?

I guess.

Huh.

What? They're romantic, fatalistic little creatures.

But on our part, it would seem that by eating lobster, one is effectively robbing another lobster of its life's love and condemning it to a life of loneliness. That's…heartbreaking, isn't it?

He changed his order to pasta that night, but she left for Seattle the next morning.

Melissa opened one heavily shadowed, mascara-encrusted eye a few minutes later when he tore through his closet roughly, throwing things haphazardly into an overnight bag. He was dressed now in grey pants and a black shirt, his was jaw set in determination, and his voice was clipped as he barked commands into his cell phone.

"Baby, where you goin'?" she asked groggily after he snapped the sliver of metal shut.

"Seattle."

Fin.

Lyrics in the beginning are from "Lips of an Angel" by Hinder, and also my inspiration. Hope you liked it.