Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟳𝟰 maroon

She seemed to let the silence stretch out between them for a little too long, staring at the side of his face.

(It was within moments like these that Mark could feel it, the hesitation that they both had when it came to saying things that they really meant. He wished he was better at communication. He wished he knew what to say.)

    "I'm sorry," She repeated.

    "It's okay," He repeated and he didn't look at her this time.

In his peripheral, he could see the way that Beth seemed to shrink even smaller in her seat, her arms folding tighter over herself and her shoulders sinking.

"We're going to figure it out, okay?" He said, "We've got time."

    "We have?"

    "Yeah," Mark hummed as he felt her eyes stick to the profile of his face; absently, he itched at the side of his nose, wondering whether Beth was still drunk from the bottles of wine. "We've got all the time in the world-- I'm not in a rush, are you?"

He said it matter-of-factly as if it startled him to think of anything else.

He caught the way Beth smiled, leaning her head back until the crown of her head brushed against the headrest and she was staring at the ceiling a stretch away from them.

Her smile didn't fade, not even when he could tell her mood dipped a little.

    "You don't like sleeping alone..."

Beth, meanwhile, donned the exact same tone. It wasn't a question. It was declarative.

It was indifferent as if she'd just made a comment about the passing scenery, but it had a lasting effect. His grasp on the steering wheel tightened.

"You wait for me to come home before you sleep," Beth said, "Sometimes I find it hard too."

Again, he had no idea how to respond to that.

Beth was watching him so closely, catching every single muscle that tensed in his face as he let those words just settle in the car. Since when had it felt like such a small space?

He could, somehow, feel every single breath that escaped her lips-- it was as if her every movement was an extension of his own.

When Beth looked over at him, he felt contractually obliged to look back.

They held each other's gaze in a world illuminated by the brake light of the car in front of them. Her face was red. His jacket was red. The half-smile (half glossed in sadness and half in tenderness) was blood red.

Idly, Mark wondered whether his thoughts were red too-- because they were there, there were so many that had tumbled around the dustbowl at the back of his head as soon as Beth had shared her observation.

He swallowed as he felt them line up, one by one on his tongue, ready for deployment.

    "I don't really like the dark."

Mark felt oddly like a kid admitting that to his girlfriend.

He was glad that the world was red, otherwise, she would've seen the flush of his cheeks as he realised how embarrassing that sounded aloud. (It was the sort of thing he'd carried from childhood and it had always stuck. It had come from long nights alone in his childhood home. Long dark and cold nights, the sort that had chilled him to the core.)

What he wasn't sure whether he was glad about, was the way that Beth nodded gently, propping her chin up with her knuckle.

Her lips twitched into a wider smile.