day two-thousand, one-hundred and ninety {ensemble} (cont'd)
“I love you.”
It’s far from her traditional opening, and Owen looks up from the medical textbook he’s got with him in the on-call room, something like a frown on his features. He doesn’t say anything, instead waits.
“I love you, and I don’t understand why that’s not enough for us to just be okay.” She continues, closing the door securely behind her, stepping forward. There’s confidence in her stride, as if to say ‘I know what I’m doing so don’t try to stop me’. Cristina stops inches from the bed, close enough to reach out and touch him if she felt so inclined, and he watches her hands clench and relax at her sides, her chest deflating a bit as the air goes out of her in a rush, echoing in a dead silent room. “But I do understand that it’s something you need to do,” her eyes raise, looking at some blank spot on the wall away from him, “and that you want me there to support you. So I will.”
He dog-ears the page he’s reading, puts it down on the bed, and moves to stand in one swift, fluid movement, rising to his full height. It blocks her view of whatever point on the wall she’d chosen to focus her sights on, forces her to look up at him, and when she does her eyes are clear, wide open, like she’s maybe understanding something for the first time.
“Are you sure about this?” He asks, fighting to keep his hands to his sides, because he needs an answer, a real answer, before they venture into the kind of territory his fingers are just itching for.
In true Cristina fashion, she seems a little confused by the posing of the question itself, telling him, in a completely different tone than she’d previously been using, “Why would I be saying it if I wasn’t?”
And that’s when he knows that they’re going to be just fine.
---
This type of thing happens at Joe’s. It might as well be some unwritten rule for things like Mexican standoffs and hookups, based in part off of bad decisions and too much alcohol. The rule would read simply: whoever makes eye contact first loses.
Callie spends an hour at Joe’s, purposely not looking at Sadie, or the way her jeans hug the curve of her ass perfectly, like she picked them out especially for this kind of occasion (which she might since Callie guesses Sadie spends a good amount of her time doing her best to sexually frustrate people into submission), focusing on her drink and the way Mark’s carefully doing the exact same thing to Derek, except for the part where they’re not fighting over who’s fault it’s going to be in the morning when they wake up in the same bed so much as who’s going to be labeled as the bigger man and who’s going to be labeled as the asshole who tried to drag their fight out longer.
Minute sixty-seven, while Joe’s pouring her another drink with an amused shake of his head, she lets herself look, casually, across the bar at the way the necklace Sadie’s wearing dips low into her cleavage, the way the neckline of the shirt that she’s wearing accents that, and then Sadie looks away from whoever she’s talking to, locks eyes with her, and gives Callie the most self-satisfied smirk she’s ever seen, barring a few of Mark’s.
Game over.
Sadie says something to the guy she’s with, and gets up, heading to the ladies’ room, passing Callie on the way there, feigning having to weave through a crowd that’s only moderate tonight, and just brushing against her as she goes along her way. It’s about a subtle as a two-by-four, what her intentions are, and Callie’s face flushes, even though she knows no one has any clue what’s going on but her and Sadie.
Callie clears her throat, downing her drink in one gulp, liquid courage, and says a tiny prayer that at least tonight ends well. She’s not asking for miracles, she’s just asking for a bit of luck; she thinks she deserves that much by now. And then she starts walking.
They’re alone. Callie realizes that the minute she walks in and the heavy door closes behind her. In the reflection of the mirror over one of the sinks, Sadie watches her, that same knowing smile, as she fixes the blonde waves that keep falling into her face.
“Dr. Torres,” she says, all fake innocence, like she doesn’t have any idea why Callie’s here other than the supposed obvious. Callie breathes in deep, can’t stop thinking how similar this is to another night, to long ago, with Arizona, except this time she knows what she’s doing. This time she won’t be caught by surprise. This time she knows who she is, even if she still isn’t sure exactly what she wants.
So Callie counts to five, still looking at Sadie’s reflection, the expressions that flick over her face, anticipation and satisfaction and maybe a little confusion after Callie still hasn’t said anything to her or moved. That’s what Callie wanted, to make her lose that sense of control, if just for an instant, before she closes the space between them, turning Sadie around to face her and then Sadie’s mouth is hot against her own, and Callie lets herself sigh against the other woman’s mouth, as her tongue slips inside.
For the first time in a long while, Callie feels some amount of relief.
---
Mark’s waiting with baited breath. He could probably have any single female in this bar if he wanted to, and it all comes down to him waiting for Lexie, to make sure he’s back in her good graces.
Derek, in one of their more bitter moments, somewhere in the middle of a series of rather harsh exchanges that has made up the past few years, once called him her lapdog. He’d nearly damaged his scalpel hand again, coming this close to throwing a punch the way of his former best friend, but he had been right, even if he’d intentionally been trying to be rude, as much as Mark hates to admit that fact.
She’s got him wrapped around her little finger, and he’s helpless to that, always has been.
So he waits, long after Callie’s abandoned him at the bar, presumably for Sadie, much as she’d tried to hide that, after Derek’s stopped avoiding his eyes and gone home, after he’s passed the threshold from tired to likely to pass out as soon as he hits the bed tonight.
Lexie slips onto the stool beside him eventually, wearing a smile and nudging his shoulder with her own as she settles in, lingering against him for a few seconds too long to be nothing more than playful. She’s tired too.
“I talked to him,” he says, wasting no time to get that out, maybe a little proud of himself, more concerned with her being proud of him though.
She nods, that smile spreading. “I know. I saw. I was scared you were going to kill each other at first, but, you know, once you got past the first thirty seconds and didn’t throw any punches I figured everything would be just fine.”
He’s pleased with that, until he thinks better of it. “You followed me?”
“I didn’t believe you.” She replies, after a moment of what appears to be careful consideration as to whether or not she should even say that. “I mean you two don’t have a civil conversation for years and some idle threat gets you to get it together and try? Doesn’t seem realistic.”
Mark raises an eyebrow. “Idle threat?”
“We both know I’m not that self-sacrificing,” she says, her cheeks coloring a little in the dim light, and she can’t yet blame that on the alcohol. “But you did good. You came through. I’m proud of you.”
That’s what he was looking for. It may not have been completely why he did it, because dammit he did miss Derek sometimes, most times, even if he didn’t ever vocalize that fact, but it was part of it. He doesn’t tell her that, instead he plays it off, cocking his head and giving her a mischievous smirk.
Lexie rolls her eyes, knowingly, “What? You want me to show you just how proud I am?”
She knows him far too well by now. “I have no idea what you mean by that.”
“Shut up,” she replies, shaking her head with a sigh that somehow ends with her head landing on his shoulder, as she closes her eyes and inhales the scent of leather and his cologne, with a soft smile. They may be talking big, but he isn’t quite sure if they’ll do anything but sleep once they got home.
“Come on,” he says, with a quick kiss on the top of her head, readjusting her so that he can stand without her toppling over in her chair, his hand intertwined with hers as he tugs her once towards the door. “We’ve got some competition tonight.”
Her brow furrows in thought, before she realizes what he’s alluding to. “Who is it this time?”
“Let’s just say I think Callie will be a lot happier in the morning.”
Lexie’s laughter rings in his ears, long after the bell over the door has quieted in the distance.
---
They come home in separate cars, and Meredith breaks out the tequila, setting down on the couch with the bottle and a glass, for once not drinking straight from the bottle. There’s a purpose for it this time, other than just to drown her sorrows.
By the time Derek gets home, she’s been staring at the glass, the bottle still closed, her throat dry and her hands cold, for too long for it to be hesitation or thought. There are tears in the corners of her eyes and every breath kind of hurts and it’s taking everything in her not to cry, so she really can’t look up and smile at him, give him some false cheery voice as she asks how his day was, even though she sort of already knows enough about it that she can figure it out on her own for the most part. Instead, she just looks up at him, as is. He can take it; they’ve been together long enough that she knows he can take it.
“You’re not okay,” he says, decisively, hanging up his coat, and coming to take a seat next to her on the couch, eyeing the bottle and the unused glass.
She shakes her head, repeats, “I’m not okay.”
He stares at his hands for a few moments, before he inhales and says, “I know.” She looks at him, quizzically. “I know what today is. I know why you’re upset. I remember now.” Meredith can’t find her voice, so she just nods, keeps her lips pressed together, and he adds, in a marginally sadder tone, “I was the one who operated on her, of course I remember.”
Meredith picks up the glass, produces another from the other side of the bottle. “It was going to be a tribute,” she reasons, missing long nights at Joe’s and equally long ones here, just her and Izzie and George, after that Alex, with the tequila flowing. A tear escapes, falls down her cheek.
Derek nods. And then he uncaps the bottle and pours it into the twin glasses, setting the bottle down and handing her a glass, his own securely in his hand. “To lost friends,” he begins, adding, “and to lost friendships.”
Their glasses clink when they toast, something hollow, the way she feels as the alcohol burns down her throat.
Another unhappy anniversary, she thinks, and knows tomorrow will be day one out of the three hundred sixty four she has before she resigns herself to thinking about this again.
One day, the pain will lessen. Eventually. Everything does in time.
---
He saves the girl. Her surgery runs long, but she’ll be okay, and the mother kept crying and calling him a savior and about a million other things he doesn’t deserve. Alex just kept nodding, stuck to the medical specifics, about how the surgery went well but there are always side effects, we’ll have to keep an eye on her, the same routine, while his head spun and he couldn’t wait to get away from the prying hands of the girl’s family.
The older sister hadn’t been there, Camille, he’d heard someone call her, an aunt or something, and Alex wasn’t really surprised. He figured he scared her off.
He’s wrong.
Footsteps on the pavement behind him, on the way to his car, catches his attention, and he throws a glance over his shoulder to find Camille on his heels, her brown hair swept back up into a neater ponytail. Her eyes are red and watery, lack of sleep, overload of emotion, and he stops, rather than make the girl run any more. She’s mere feet away from him a moment later.
“Thank you,” she says, as she comes to a stop in front of him. “I wasn’t there to say it to you, earlier, and I just wanted you to hear that. So just…thank you. So much.”
“Your sister’s going to be here for a few days,” he says, before he really knows what he’s getting at. “So we can keep an eye on her.”
“I know.” She replies, lowered eyebrows. “I’m, um, I’m staying the night with her. So that she’s not alone when she wakes up.” Camille crosses her arms over her chest, says into the night, not towards him exactly, but the meaning’s ever-present, “Nobody should be alone.”
Alex can’t meet her eyes then. “Right.” They stand there, across from each other, for a little too long in the silence, before he finally says, “Have a good night,” and gets in his car, gunning out of the parking lot. She never says a word, never says goodbye.
In the morning, when he checks on the girl, Camille’s asleep in the gray chair next to her sister’s bed. He hands her coffee and fakes a smile.
It’s day two thousand, one hundred, and ninety-one.
---
Fin.