BASELINE | grey's anatomy (ON HOLD INDEFINITELY)

THREE: "the boxer"

EAST BRONX, NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 2005

NORA NEVER CONSIDERED HERSELF A TEASE UNTIL SHE MET MARK SLOAN. Not met in the sense of a stranger turning into a familiar face over the years, where you saw them arbitrarily and had a jaded sense of who they were. But truly met-- intimately-- the kind where you knew what was in their freezer or medicine cabinet, the kind where you could wear your favorite ratty sweatshirt and a facemask with no fear of judgement.

The latter was what Nora had been doing with her brother's best friend, among other things, though she was sure Mark had a growing index of better ways they could spend their nights straight from the Kama Sutra. In other words, she hadn't put out in the two weeks since Addison and Derek's anniversary party, and for some reason Mark was still hanging around.

Normally, Nora was almost clinical with her men-- or, more specifically, her one night stands. She liked them in her bedroom by ten forty-five p.m. (ten if she had work the next morning), she liked her panties and bra matching black lace, she liked them a maximum of three beers or two hard drinks in so they weren't nervous but still performed well, and she liked them slinking out her door by two thirty a.m. with no last name attached to a vague first.

But with Mark, the only guideline she'd had with his never-ending presence in her loft was that they weren't having sex (yet). She wasn't bothering with her expensive perfume or the nice crystal glasses Bizzy Forbes had sent via Addison and Archer when she graduated from Harvard-- it seemed all of the extended Forbes-Montgomery liked Nora more than her brother at times. Mark got Buffy reruns and lukewarm beer, the selection of faded takeout menus she kept in a kitchen door, and trashy music that blasted from her speakers. And for some reason, he seemed to enjoy it.

He watched from her grey couch as Nora closed her eyes and swayed to the Simon & Garfunkel song sailing smoothly through the living room. The woman had met him straight after surgery, and she still smelled faintly of antiseptic, her waist-length brown hair curled slightly from the braids she wore beneath her scrub cap. Mark felt slightly perverted, tracing the outline of her hips beneath a pair of lowrise jeans and a red tank top that had ridden up to expose her smooth stomach. The debauched feelings came not because of the way she looked, but because Mark was wondering to himself for the umpteenth time about when Derek's shy little sister had grown into the self-assured woman in front of him. Despite the fact that she was in her late twenties, nowhere near a little girl anymore, Mark still remembered how old she'd been when he first met her, hardly even pubescent. He felt dirty.

But, God, had dirty ever looked this good?

She hummed to herself, clutching the neck of a glass beer bottle, flipping through the stack of records Mark had brought with him. They had both surprised each other with their love of classics, like Bruce Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac. Mark had always pegged Nora for the angry feminist type, Fiona Apple and Sinéad O'Conner, what with her intense college education and variety of sisters. Nora, on the other hand, reduced Mark to his fratboy lifestyle (one that he never got to truly fulfill at undergrad at Brown, or med school at Columbia) and assumed he enjoyed 50 Cent or the Black Eyed Peas. But then they had gotten to know each other, found their taste was similar in a plethora of ways. They preferred Gorillaz when going on a run, thought Nickelback was overrated, enjoyed Weezer and the Offspring and thought Jack Black in Tenacious D was a bonafide genius. The pair liked vinyl, too-- although Nora's player was a vintage Victrola she had found at an estate sale and Mark's state of the art Wrensilva set-up expanded over an entire wall of his penthouse suite and cost more than Nora's car.

And it was more than that, the way they complimented each other. Although Nora preferred second-hand shops in Brooklyn and Mark's wardrobe existed solely on Fifth Avenue, they found that they held devotional at the same bodega in Hell's Kitchen and got their coffee the same way-- no cream, extra sugar. Mark's social circle ran exclusively in the terraces of Tribeca fine-dining while Nora and her friends enjoyed brewery-hopping in Greenwich Village, but they all mutually agreed that  a hole-in-the-wall pub in Kips Bay was the best place to watch baseball games. Nora liked gardens and bookstores where Mark liked coffee houses and car showcases, and yet they both frequented the plethora of museums their city had to offer. It was harmonious in the strangest way.