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CHAPTER SEVENTY sympathy for the parents. season six, episode nineteen.
MARK SLOAN IS A WHORE.
This fact had been established for years, decades, even. It had made it's way into the metaphorical history books of his youth, hundreds of pages filled with the names of his conquests, all tied together with a pretty pink ribbon. Women, men, and a few people somewhere in between, each one of them falling victim to his charms over the span of his adulthood; honestly, he'd lost count ages ago.
He took pride in the harsh title, a faint blush rising to the apples of his cheeks each time it was brought up. In a way, he liked to think it made him a good feminist. Gone were the days of calling a woman a whore for sleeping with one or two guys; with Mark around, anyone with a body count less than fifty looked like the goddamn Virgin Mary. It was progressive of him, if anything.
Sure, Mark spent the majority of his young adulthood sleeping with anyone who was willing, but only once in his life had he ever fallen in love.
Cassie didn't come into his life on whim. It wasn't a meet-cute turned sudden romance, or a budding cliche between a naive girl and her prince charming.
They were friends, best friends, who may or may not have slept with each other on occasion; though, that was just due to their mutual loneliness.
No, his love for Cassie didn't develop overnight, or even over the span of several nights. It took years; years of friendship, years of platonic love, and years of denial for him to finally accept that he had fallen for her, and that she had fallen for him, too.
But as hard as it was to accept that he loved her, it was a million times harder to accept that he had to stop.
What wasn't hard, though, was falling back into old habits. Sure, sleeping with the same nurse who publicly and shamelessly ruined Lexie and Rue's relationship wasn't ideal, but beggars can't be choosers, right?
Besides, it's not like he was one to judge.
The nurse — Sophie, he remembered her name after a moment of concentration — tossed him his scrubs which had been discarded onto the floor of the on-call room, dark blue colliding with his skin, though, his focus was elsewhere.
"Stop staring, Dr. Sloan," she teased him, mistaking his spaced-out gaze as a flirtatious one. "Or else we might need to make this a two-time thing."
But Mark wasn't staring because he wanted it to happen again; no, he was staring, because he regretted it happening at all. And despite what he'd been trying to convince himself throughout their twenty minute tryst on the twin sized mattress, Sophie really did look eerily similar to Cassie.
