All Along The Watchtower - Part 20.6 (Snow falling at Christmas)

[ariaadagio]

Title: All Along The Watchtower
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Mer/Der
Rating: M
Summary: S6 continuation. Immediately post Sanctuary / Death and All His Friends.

In a supreme hurry to get this posted tonight because of my crazy schedule.  Sorry I haven't replied to any previous feedback yet.  I hope to do that sometime soon.  I hope you guys enjoy this!  It's NOT work safe.  I borrowed a quote from SOSG.  If you can find it, you get a cookie :)  Thanks again, betas, feedbackers, everybody!  Oh, and for anybody curious, no, the title of this chapter has nothing to do with the subject matter.  It's more of a metaphorical association of the feelings involved.  If you read the entire chorus of the song I'm stealing lyrics from, it'll probably make more sense.  Without further ado:

All Along The Watchtower - Part 20.6 (Snow falling at Christmas)

A soft, soothing heat pressed against Meredith's skin as the fireplace popped and sputtered.  She and Derek sat on the fuzzy shag rug in front of the fire, which Derek had started after she'd begged him.  That request, at least, hadn't left him as nonplussed as he'd been when she'd dragged him outside in the waning daylight, barely clothed, to look for perfect sticks.

Perfect for what? he'd said with a frown as his flip-flops had clapped against the damp earth.

She glanced at the big living room window.  The colors surrounding the cabin had eased from verdant greens and cerulean blues to sapped grays and the blackest blacks, though at least the moonlight illuminated the now silver lake a bit like something out of a fairytale.  She gazed at the shifting, flickering flames in the fireplace, which were bluish where they hugged the burning logs, only to flare into haunting orange at the tips.  She rubbed her bare arms with her hands and blinked, trying to sever the hypnotic pull.

She migrated her gaze to Derek, and a whole new languid slowdown turned her thoughts to mush.  Derek sat Indian-style beside her on the soft rug, wearing nothing but a loose pair of black sweatpants that stopped under his navel, just below a dark whorl of hair.  His Adidas flip-flops rested on the corner of the rug by the spruce-colored couch, which they'd pushed back against the wall with the coffee table to clear space for their endeavor.  He was barefoot, and bare-chested, and his dark hair crowned his head, loose and unkempt with the tangles of recent sleep and sex.  His eyes were bright, and a delectable smirk tugged at the corner of his upper lip.

Her insides fluttered.  She wanted to kiss him.

“What is with you and marshmallows?” Derek said, as if he'd mistaken her trip to la la land for a food craving instead of a craving for him.

She blinked.  “Marshmallows are the best thing ever,” she said absently as she shifted on the rug.

“Better than me?” he said with a faux pout.  His eyes twinkled.  “I'm hurt.”

She scrunched her toes.  The soft yarn threads of the rug moved against her skin.  Her muscles ached, and she felt a bit sore between her legs and deep within her quadriceps, but it was a good kind of sore.  A kind of sore that said she'd had a lot of awesome sex after a while without.  She smiled, and her palm slipped to her bare leg to rub as she thought of about it.

Her eyelids lowered as memory sparked in her mind's eye.  Memory of his palm chasing up the curve of her hip.  Memory of his lips as he languorously worshiped her.  Memory of the hot, slick slide of his body against hers.  He'd touched her everywhere as he'd moved within her like a heavy piston.  Kissed her everywhere.  He'd left no part of her unloved, inside or out, and when he'd found his own release, she'd been so buzzed and loose and crackling like live wire, she'd thought she would never move again.

“Food,” she said, blinking, trying to bring herself back to the task at hand, which was roasting marshmallows.  Not sex.  They'd had sex already.  Lots of it.  More would... be really... really nice, though.  If he wanted it, anyway, and she didn't want to pressure him.  Their attempted sex had turned out fantastic and fulfilling, and they'd even managed that wacky position from her book for a few minutes before he'd had to put her down and rest his arms.  She didn't want to ruin the streak or bust his confidence after he'd built himself up so far.  She shook her head.  Marshmallows.  “Best food thing ever,” she said.  “You're definitely the reigning king at sex.”

“Mmm.  Thank you,” he said.

She couldn't help but notice how his shoulders straightened at her words.  How his general demeanor inflated.  His improved freedom of movement, along with his recovering stamina, had made a big appearance today.  The hungry, confident smirk that crept across his face warmed her soul, and she smiled at him as she fiddled with the plastic bag full of jumbo-sized marshmallows.  The plastic crinkled.

He glanced at the bag.  His eyebrows raised as he looked back at her.  “So, you think marshmallows are even better than strawberry ice cream?”

She frowned.  “Well, no.”

“Chocolate?”

“No.”

“Pizza?”

“I guess not.”

“My pancakes?” he said.

She sighed.  “No, but--”

“This isn't going to be like the fluffernutter, is it?” he said, a look of distaste pushing his mirth aside.

She rolled her eyes and jabbed a fat marshmallow at the end of the thin spear-like stick.  She'd selected it for him from the myriad of other sub-par roasting sticks that surrounded the cabin in the woods outside.  “No, it's not like a freaking fluffernutter, Derek,” she said as she slid the marshmallow into place and released it.  “It's better.  Much better.”

Derek frowned at the marshmallow she'd bisected.  “It's hard to be worse than that.”

“Would you just humor me?” Meredith said.

“I am humoring you,” he said.  “I'm here, aren't I?”

“Well, yes.”

He waved the stick at her.  Though the stick was thin, the marshmallow didn't jiggle, which meant the wood was strong enough to support it.  “And I have a marshmallow on a stick, don't I?” he said.

“Yes.”

“See?” he said.  He leaned across the pile of marshmallow bags, Hershey bar wrappers, and graham cracker boxes littering the space on the rug between them, and he kissed her on the cheek.  “Humoring you.  So, what's next?”

She grinned.  “Light it on fire.”

“What?”

“The marshmallow,” she said.  She pointed to the fireplace.  “Burn it.  Some people waste time trying to roast it evenly to a perfect, bubbly brown, but I think the trick is to mercilessly blacken the outside.”

“I'm quite sure in the times I've seen this done before that the fire stayed in the actual fire pit,” he said, a mischievous glint in his eyes.

She frowned.  “I thought you said you've never made one!”

“I've never performed a quadruple bypass surgery, either.  That doesn't mean I've never seen one done.”

She narrowed her eyes.  He had a point.  “Well,” she said, “my way is better.  So, light it on fire.”

He laughed.  “Seriously?  So, bossy.”

“Yes, but you love it,” she said.  “And, really, the whole freaking point is to get it gooey and perfect.”

“Gooey and perfect,” he said.  “By lighting it on fire.”

“Yes!” she insisted with a laugh.  She grabbed his wrist, trying to ignore the brief zing at the soft feel of his skin underneath her fingertips, and poked the stick at the fire.  “You're supposed to be humoring me.  Remember?”

He shook his arm loose from her grip and warily dangled the marshmallow over the flames.  The bottom of the marshmallow browned a bit.  He spun the stick and presented the white edge of the marshmallow to the fire.  “I really don't see the point of all this,” he said.  “How are marshmallows on graham crackers any different than marshmallows on Wonder Bread?”

“Because of the chocolate and the graham stuff and the warm gooey goodness!” she insisted, jerking with surprise when he dipped the marshmallow into the fire and caught a blast of flame with it.  The marshmallow ignited.  She clapped.  “Oh!  There you go,” she said.  She squeezed his shoulder.  “Now, pull it out of the fire, and blow on it.”  The look he gave her as he withdrew the stick from the flame made her swallow before she could shake off the heady desire.  “Blow on it,” she said, trying to flatten any lurking, smirk-y innuendo before he could utter it.  He puffed on the marshmallow at her direction, and the flame winked out.

She gave him an excited grin as she pulled two graham cracker squares and a Hershey bar loose from their packaging.  She gestured with the two graham crackers.  He presented his stick to her, marshmallow end first.  She smashed the marshmallow between the crackers and the chocolate.  The chocolate softened, and the crackers slid a bit in her grasp.

“What next, Ms. Expert?” he said.

“Pull it out,” she said.

He gave her another look, and she rolled her eyes.

“The stick, Derek,” she said with a giggle.

He snickered, but he did, and she held the leftover marshmallow concoction together between her palms.  She could smell it.  The roasted, gooey marshmallows.  The soft, melting chocolate.  She licked her lips and held it out for him.

“Okay, now, try it,” she said.

He stared at her with dark, hungry eyes as the fire flickered.  The light danced in his pupils.  After a long pause, he held his hand out.  She gave him the s'more and watched with bated breath as he lifted it to his lips.  He bit into the cracker with a crunch.  He paused for a long moment, as if assessing what was on his tongue.  Utter stillness hugged his frame.  For a moment, he didn't even breathe, but then his jaws began to work, and he chewed.  His eyelids drooped, and a small, deep sound loitered in his throat.  She watched his temples move with his jaw as he ate in silence.  When his Adam's apple rolled, he blinked, and let loose a low, pleased, “Oh,” that made her toes curl with desire.  He usually only said things in that tone during sex, a fact for which he'd given her ample reminders that day.

He leaned back, and he stared at the s'more with new appreciation.  He took another bite without prodding, and then another.

“See!” she said.  “See, it is good!”

His happy expression evaporated into a humoring smile as he rolled his eyes.  “Yes, Mere, you're absolutely right,” he said.  “It's very good.”

She pumped her fist.  “I knew it!”

“I'm not budging on the fluffernutters, though,” he said.

“When the OB-GYN proves my conception theory, and you have to eat a real one with real marshmallow fluff, I think you'll change your mind.”

“That won't happen, because I'm right on the conception date.”

She snickered.  “Do you have any idea how statistically improbable it is that you got me pregnant on the first try?”

“Me getting you pregnant on the first try is more probable than me getting you pregnant through birth control, which I did, might I remind you.”  He winked.

“Derek, there's virility, and then there's pure hubris.”

“What can I say?” he said with a haughty smirk.  “I am good at getting things on the first try.”

She laughed and shook her head.  She couldn't help it.

“Look, I'll give you s'mores,” he said.  He took another happy bite of the subject in question.  His temples worked as he chewed.  “But conception date is mine,” he said around a mouthful of graham cracker.

She grinned as a thin white line of marshmallow stretched into infinity when he pulled his hand away from his mouth.  The gooey string of sugar snapped back and curled over his lip, and she sat on her hands to keep from licking it off him.  The room seemed warm and floaty as she watched him polish off the rest of the graham cracker and gooey marshmallow.  Not only because he was him, and he was gorgeous to look at, but because he was eating, and he was enjoying it with an almost cheerful gusto.

His appetite seemed to have barreled back into place like a linebacker tackling a ball carrier.  Yesterday, she'd had to prod him just to make a freaking sandwich.  This morning, he'd eaten his naughty banana pancake leftovers without her prodding.  And then he'd eaten pancakes once more, whipped cream included, when he'd made them again for lunch at her behest, once they'd gotten back from the non-fishing fishing trip.  He'd eaten a full dinner without being reminded, too.  And, now, this...

Sweet, delicious dessert.  She stared as he licked his finger clean.  She cleared her throat, trying to force her mind away from sex.  Sex...  “What about the sex of the baby?” she said.

He swallowed, and he looked at her.  “You still think it's a girl?”

“I know it's a girl.”

“I'll even let you have that one,” he said.  “No arguments.”  He smiled and made a faux zipper motion across his lips with his thumb and his index finger.

She rolled her eyes.  “Because you want a girl.  That doesn't freaking count.”

“I want anything as long as it's with you,” he said.  “And you wanted a boy, I thought.  So, why are you so set on it being a girl?”

She pressed her hand against her soft shirt.  Warmth spread through the fabric to her skin.  She smiled at the contact.  “Because I just know it's a girl.  But I'd really be happy with anything as long as it's with you.”

His expression smoothed into something... almost post-coital.  Relaxed.  Sated.  His eyelids dipped, and he stared at her with a satisfied gaze.  “I'm glad we agree on something, at least,” he said, his voice a husky slip and slide of syllables against her skin that made her think of his hands.  Touching her.  His tongue.  Tasting her.

She shook her head.  She jabbed another marshmallow on his stick and then put one onto hers.  They pressed their sugary bounty into the flames together.  “How is it that you've never made one of these before, anyway?” she said as both marshmallows bloomed into fire at once.  They withdrew their sticks and blew on them.

“When would I have?” he said.  He mashed his marshmallow between two graham crackers and the Hershey bar, and then withdrew his stick, almost as though this hadn't been a foreign concept to him not ten minutes earlier.  She mirrored his certain movements.

“You never made a bonfire on the beach when you went with your family?” she said.

“Sandy Hook doesn't allow bonfires.  Or, it didn't then, at least.”

“Well, that's stupid,” she said.  “Bonfires on the beach are like... essential.”

He smiled.  “Like s'mores are essential?”

She bit into her first s'more of the night and sighed as it sat on her tongue, a chocolatey, gooey, warm mess of sugar and everything right in the world.  She almost couldn't bring herself to chew while she savored the calories in their tasty, full-figured glory.

“Mmm,” she purred before she could recover her drifting senses.  She swallowed.  “I mean, yes, like s'mores,” she said.  “When we go to the beach, we're going to one that allows bonfires.”

He grinned.  “When we go?”

“Well, you didn't think this was going to be our only vacation ever, did you?” she said.

Her cheeks bulged as she stuffed her mouth full of the s'more.  She had no idea how she'd eaten the entire graham cracker square in less than four bites, but she'd managed it.  She licked all of her fingers, one after the other, scouring them for every last bit of dietary sinning she could manage, and then she stabbed another marshmallow on her stick.  She shoved the stick into the fire with a merciless grin.

She was being a pig.  A big, oink-y, unrepentant pig.  But... these were so, so good, and she never had opportunities like this anymore.  It often seemed like if she wasn't sleeping or playing nursemaid, she was at the hospital.  She didn't have any freaking time to slow down.  She couldn't remember the last time she'd had a two-day weekend that didn't involve her or Derek being injured or sick.

Her marshmallow burst into flame, and she pulled it out of the fire.

Derek held a pair of graham crackers in his hands for her, and she flattened her newly charred marshmallow between them with a Hershey bar.  She smiled at him.  At least, despite the omission of s'mores from his childhood repertoire, he made up for lost time like a pro.  She forced herself to slow down and not take a bite.  Pain to enhance the pleasure.

“What beach did you have in mind?” he said.  His gaze danced in the firelight.

“One that won't freeze off my toes when I step in the water.”

He snorted.  “That pretty much rules out the entire west coast.”

“I'm sure you'll think of something.”

He raised his eyebrows with incredulity.  “I'll think of something?”

She nodded.  “I got us this cabin,” she said.  “It's your turn to be creative.”

“Richard got us this cabin.”

“Because I said we should do a vacation while he was standing there, or did you miss that part?”  He shook his head with a laugh, and she barreled onward.  Sugar made her bouncy and hyper and happy, and her brain raced.  She felt... good.  Great.  Excellent.  She gave him a bubbly grin.  “So, what about camping?”

“For a vacation?” he said.

“No, silly.  For making s'mores,” she said.  “They're like... a classic camping pastime, and you're all nature-y.”

“Now, yes,” he said.  “I grew up in Brooklyn, Mere.  The nature bit is a recent development.”

She gave up on patience and took a huge bite.  The graham cracker crunched, and then her incisors sliced through soft, melting chocolate.  She chewed, letting her eyes close.  Just for a moment.  To savor it.  “You never even went camping as a kid?”

“Meredith, I really didn't--”

“Not even as a boyscout?” she prodded before he could finish.  She swallowed.  “Or a cub scout?  Or a scout-y something?”

“I didn't want to.”

She bit into her s'more.  “Why wouldn't you?” she muttered around the graham cracker.

“Because I got picked on and teased, and I had no desire to spend any more time with the kids at school than I had to,” he said.  He took his own bite.  Crunching filled the silence as he stared into the fire.

I wasn't very popular, he'd said.

She swallowed.  “Oh,” she said.  “Why did you get teased?”

He shrugged.

She polished off the rest of her s'more, and she shoved the pile of wrappers and refuse away, under the coffee table with the sticks, both his and hers.  She scooted closer to him across the soft shag rug.  She rose to her knees, wrapped her arms around him, and rested her chin on his shoulder.  “Well, they were idiots,” she said.  She kissed the crook of his neck.  “I got teased, too.”

He gazed at her, and his eyebrows rose, as if he couldn't fathom why anybody would want to do that.  That thought, that simple support, even without a word from his lips, made her smile.  She pressed her cheek against his warm shoulder, rubbing his abdomen with her palms.

“I think kids are a bit like sharks,” she said.  “They'll pick off anybody who's bleeding in the water a bit.”

He finished his s'more and turned.  “I somehow can't picture you as shark bait.”

She shrugged.  “Having a single mom was rarer back then.  I just didn't feel like I fit anywhere, and I didn't have many friends.  At school, I just...”  Her voice trailed away.

“I know the feeling,” he said.

“But your parents were awesome.”

He nodded.  “They were.”  A long silence stretched.  He filled himself with a huge breath and blew it out between his lips.  As though it were a struggle to think back to that time without making himself upset.  “I was small,” he admitted in a voice that was just as small, as though those ancient wounds still lingered underneath his skin.  “I got teased because I was small.”

She stared at him in the flickering light.  A sense of wholeness filled her as more and more of him made perfect sense.  His attitude.  The way he compensated for insecurity by acting more secure than anyone, acted secure to an arrogant degree, but at the same time, was probably one of the most insecure people she knew.  Insecure, but... also the warmest, sweetest man she'd ever met.

“I bet they're all eating their words, now,” she said.

He smiled.  His eyes danced in the dim light.  “Meredith...”

She licked her lips.  This was a vacation.  He hadn't bothered to shave, and after a day, his stubble was a thick, scruffy carpet across his face, which... while not being the funnest thing to kiss, made him look freaking hot.  The overall effect gave him an unkempt, dark look that matched his dark, almost obsidian eyes.  His bare toes moved underneath his thighs, and his knees shifted, as though he felt like getting up and pacing.  The dark sweatpants matched his dark hair, but contrasted with his pale skin.  He seemed...  Like a pent up panther, all sleek lines and the promise of sex.

I can take it incredibly slow, he seemed to growl in her ear.

Her body flushed as her thoughts tightened their sexual noose.  She couldn't help herself or stop herself.  She was selfishly lost, feeling his phantom caresses as they explored an ocean of her skin.  She leaned against him, and she nuzzled him.

“You're smart, funny, sensitive...” she murmured against his skin.  He turned into her touch with a low, dangerous sound in his throat, as though she were playing with fire, and not just sitting next to it.  “Successful,” she continued, “extremely hot, really great at sex, and you're all...”  She paused to lick a drop of melted chocolate stuck in the stubble of his chin.  Sugar and cocoa melded with the salt of his skin.  “Mine.”

“Mmm,” he rumbled against her, a deep, vibrating well of need as she kissed him.  “Again?” he said, but he didn't sound surprised or at all put out.  Only desirous.  Wanting.  Demanding.

The fire he'd threatened her with burned her to cinders as he crashed against her and laid her back on the floor, his bigger body dwarfing hers.  She reveled in the heat.  He pushed his hands underneath her shirt and touched her.  His palms slid along her abdomen, past her navel.  He cupped her breasts as he kissed her.  The heat of the fire stroked her skin, and the air seemed to whoosh out of the room.  She brushed his sides, found the waistband of his loose sweatpants, and pushed underneath the band to his toned gluteal muscles.  She squeezed.  His skin was slick and smooth and hard beneath her palms.  His breaths chuffed against her, and the room ignited with their tangled war of push and pull.  He nuzzled her, and then pressed in to kiss her again, his weight heavy against her.

Memories flickering like kindling, she recalled how he'd touched her in the shower after they'd returned from the lake, his hand between her thighs as soapy suds had meandered down her spine, and again when they'd moved to the bed.  He'd made love to her until she couldn't do more than lie there in a pleased, pleasant catatonia.  He'd made the whole day and all the passing eternal hours about her.  Pleasing her.  For the bouquet of orgasms he'd given her, he'd taken only one for himself that she could remember.  When they'd been in the bed.  Before he'd collapsed next to her in a panting, sated heap, and slept, sweat dotting his pale skin.

He'd done that since he'd been shot.  Always drove the intimate moments, refusing to give her the keys.  She'd made love to her husband exactly once in the last three months or more, and that moment seemed to have been a fluke, when he'd been too tired and hurting to support himself, and too far gone into the act to stop himself from wanting to finish despite any reservations.  He'd let her crawl on top, then, and she'd given him release, like the ones he'd given her over and over and over again.  She'd thought then that they'd been making progress, but today, their first sex since then, and he'd never once relinquished control.  He was better, now, physically, but his mental wounds still ran deep.

The pain of denying him scorched her, but she swallowed, and she pushed at his shoulders.  He pulled back from her lips, a surprised look loitering on his face, dark in the flickering firelight.

“What?” he said, his voice low.  Murmuring.  Like a slide of satin along her spine.  Deep concern hovered in his gaze.  “Are you feeling nauseous?”

She rose up on her elbows.  Her loose hair spilled behind her, and she kissed him, staring into his eyes.  “No, I just...” she said.  “Will you let me?”

“Let you what?” he said.

She reached and stroked his face.  His hair.  And then she pushed, guided, not expecting him to listen.  He surprised the hell out of her when he moved at her direction onto his back, and they swapped positions, her slight weight resting flush against his side while he stared up at her.  She rubbed her palm against his sleek, flat abdomen, and then chased his raised, pink scar to his throat.  She rested her fingers on the raised bump at the tip of the scar, a knob like a marble, just below his clavicles.  It was an ugly, rough remnant of his surgery that would remain for a long time.  She kissed it to prove it didn't matter.  And then she kissed his lips.  Hope twisted in her throat as he submitted.

“Let me do this,” she said against his skin when he pulled away to breathe.  “Let me do for you what you do for me.  Please.”

“Meredith...” he said.  No, he didn't say.  But she could see the word in his eyes.  No, I don't want you to do that.  He wanted to say it.  He wanted to.  The indecision in his eyes killed her, and she hated Gary Clark again.  She'd gone for several days without wishing the dead man ill, but, now, Derek lay underneath her, ready, wanting, but not wanting because it wasn't on his terms, and that just... hurt.  Stung.  Ripped her open like a horrible wound.

She stared at Derek.  “Please.  Please, let me.”  He blinked and looked away.  Her lip trembled, and lust slid out of her like oil through a funnel, sluggish, but... moving all the same.  Dripping.  “It's just us,” she said.  She coiled her index finger in the hair dusting his chest.  “Just you and me.  Please?”

A deep, troubled sound loitered in his throat.  She kissed him.  Stop, she waited for him to say.  Actually say.  I don't want to.  Real words instead of just a mopey stare left for her to interpret.  But he didn't say that.  Didn't say anything.  His lips parted, and he let her in.  She lay against him, searching, tasting.  His hand touched her back, sloped down, cupped her ass, squeezed, as if he couldn't simply be still.  As if he had to do... something.  She shook her head as she pulled away from him, placed her hands in the soft tufts of hair at his armpits, and pushed him back.  She chased her hands along the lean muscle of his triceps, and then his forearms, and then she tangled with his fingers, pressing him flat against the soft rug.

She bit her lip.  “Is this okay with your arms like this?” she said.  Keeping his arms over his head could be painful for his sternum or his back or both.

“I'm okay,” he said, his voice deep and low.  No pain hovered in his tone, and his face seemed relaxed.  He breathed, steady and even.

As soon as she moved her hands away, he pulled his arms down, just a fraction before she leaned and pushed him back.  “No,” she said.  “Stay.”  He lay with his wrists crossed above his head.  She could almost imagine him relaxed and sated on his back in a hammock.  “Please, let me.”

He shook his head, his gaze confused.  “Please, let you what?”

“Love you,” she said simply.

She kissed him, and then she straddled him.  He watched as she grabbed the hem of her shirt with both hands and lifted it over her head.  She looked down at him through her naked cleavage, watched his breaths quicken, and his gaze narrow with need.  He'd always been about visuals, and she'd become a master painter over the years.  She cupped herself, rubbed her nipples with her thumbs to perk them up, and then let her breasts fall free in the warm air.  His lips parted, and he stared, his dark gaze stripping her more bare than she'd felt wearing only her skin.  His pleased look made her smile back at him.  Her lower body throbbed at the sight of his desire.

“You want me,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” he replied.  “I want you.”  He stared at her with adulation, as if he couldn't believe he'd found her, or that he had her, or that she was and, in that moment, sitting on top of him, wet and almost naked.

She rolled her shirt into a wrinkled, twisted line of fabric.  She leaned forward, and she placed the twisted shirt over his wrists.  He kissed a nipple as she slid past, and she jerked back in surprise.  He gave her a sly grin as she pulled away, as if to say, What?  It was there.

She brushed his face with her palm.  “I want you to pretend the shirt is a rope.”

He frowned.  He lifted his wrists off the rug an inch before resettling.  “It's a pretty shoddy rope.”

“Use that imagination you said you have.”

“But--”

“If you move your arms, we stop for the night, and I put my shirt back on,” she said.

He sighed.  “Meredith...”

She shook her head.  “Please, Derek.  The rope is fake.  You can always move if you need to.  You always have choices.  I love you, and I want you, and you've been perfect, but I don't want to feel kept anymore.  I want to do this for you, and I want you to let me.”

The fire snapped and popped.  The glow flickered against his face.  “I didn't mean to make you feel kept.”

“Well, you do,” she said.  “When it's all about me, and never about you, all I am is a prized plaything.”

“I didn't mean...”  His voice cracked, and he looked away.

She kissed him, brought his gaze back to hers.  “I know it's what you needed, Derek, and I was happy to give it for a while because of that.  But I want to go back to how we were, now.”

“How were we before?” he said darkly.  He swallowed.

Meredith shrugged.  “Equal.  You gave, but you took, and so did I, and I want that back.  I want you to let me give.”

He stared at her.  She swallowed against nerves when she realized his body trembled, and she didn't think it was from lust.  She stroked his skin, the hard expanse of his chest.  Her palms plowed over the soft hairs dusting his front.  He breathed, long and slow.  His fists clenched and then relaxed.

He blinked.  “I thought... you were happy.”

She pulled his fingers through his hair.  Her eyes watered.  “I was, Derek.  You satisfy the hell out of me.  You do, and I love you very much.  But how would you feel if things were reversed between us in the long term?”

He tipped his head toward the fire to look away from her.  Closed his eyes.  Swallowed.

I just want to be able to give... something, he'd said, their first time together since the shooting.  Because it was my choice.  I need that.

She'd frowned.  You don't feel like letting me be on top is giving something?

I don't know.  I...

She deflated.  She'd been a stupid idiot, and she'd pressured him, and she'd said a bunch of things.  Things that had fallen out of her mouth like a freaking waterfall of insensitive idiocy.  “I'm sorry,” she said.  She wiped her eyes with her palms.  “If you're not ready, I can--”

He threw off the shirt and moved his hands to clutch her thighs, which stopped her from sliding off of him.  “No,” he said.  He took a breath.  He blinked as he watched the fire, and then he turned to face her.  “Okay,” he said.  I trust you.  “I'll play.”  For you.  A smile curled his lips as he put his hands back behind his head.  He winked.  “Be gentle, though.  I'm fragile.”

No funny business in the shower, all right?  I'm fragile, he'd said mere days after he'd been shot.

For a long parade of seconds, all she could do was blink at him.  The hugeness of the moment popped in her chest like an overladen balloon.  She breathed, blinking back the stupid, upset, hormonal tears that plagued her.  She wiped her face again.  She returned her shirt to his wrists, 'binding' him.  She kissed him as she scooted away, down his waist, down past his knees.  She leaned over his body, and she grabbed the waistband of his sweatpants.

“You're sure?” she said as she tightened her hold on the elastic that kept him hidden from her.

He nodded.  A small smile curled his lips.  “I can think of worse ways to cure me of this stupid hangup.”

“It's not a stupid hangup, Derek,” she said.  “But I would like it to go away.”

“Me, too,” he said in a soft, choked voice.  “I'm sorry.”

“Shut up,” she whispered.

He laughed, soft, self-deprecating.

With a nod, she pulled his pants away, all the way to his ankles, and off his feet.  She kept her eyes averted, knowing if she stopped to stare, she wouldn't stop staring, and that would be... bad.  Bad when he was lying there, stripped, his will taken from him by a submission game they were playing at her behest.  She spread his legs until she could comfortably kneel between them, and then she laid the pants across his ankles, the soft, fleecy side against his skin.  His toes curled and straightened.

“Another rope that's not a rope?” he said.

“Yep.  If you move your legs, the sweatpants go back on.”

“That would be...”  He swallowed.  “Really frustrating.”

She grinned as she moved back to him.  She kissed his lips.  “That's the idea.  I needed a good deterrent.”

“So, if I move my legs, my pants go back on, and if I move my arms, your shirt goes back on?”

She nodded.  “That about sums it up.”

His eyelids lowered, and he stared at her through his thick, dark eyelashes.  “I guess I'm ready, then,” he said, his voice soft.

She brushed her fingers through his hair as she stared at him.  A slow smile spread across her face.  She kissed him.  “Okay,” she said.

She pushed her panties down her legs as he stared, and then she lay along his side and settled against the warmth of his body.  He breathed, long and slow as she stroked his chest, and she listened to the rhythm of it.  His life.  His heart, thumping underneath her ear, bold and strong, and the soft, rustling whooshes of the air filling his lungs.  She kissed his left pectoral, and then underneath, where the bullet had pierced him.  His skin had an ugly pockmark there, an indentation to show him where his life had bled away.

Please, don't die, she'd begged.

“Well,” he said, his voice low and throaty and rumbling through his healing sternum where she pressed her ear.  This would have been one of those moments where he would wrap his strong arms around her and tell her he was fine, and that he loved her.  But he didn't move except to breathe.  His head tilted to the side, and he met stare her with his eyes.  A smirk-y smile twitched his lips.  “I'm here.  I'm sinfully naked.  What do you plan to do with me?”

She didn't answer right away as the moments passed.  “I don't know,” she decided.  She lay naked against his body, her arm draped across his torso.  She stroked his ribs in slow, soothing, repetitions as she wondered.  Would he get impatient?  Would he wonder what was going on?  Would he get more nervous, or antsy, or...?

She tested him, staring at the fire.  Stroking him.  Skin to skin.  He didn't move his arms or his legs.  The lasts remnants of his trembling eased into perfect stillness.  Patient, he let her do what she wanted.  The minutes passed.  She checked his face.  His eyes were open, but half-lidded.  He seemed relaxed.  Content to be in her arms, even if she did nothing else all night.  The warmth of the fire pressed against her face, and she sighed as she shifted into action.

She kissed him.  She didn't pull away.  “What do you want?” she said.  When she pressed her lips against him, he met her with a starving sort of desperation that made her body hum and belied his calm stillness.  She'd built him up.  Ignited his anticipation.  He tasted chocolatey.  Sweet.  He devoured what she gave him, only the sounds of their breaths and the pops and crackles of the fire interrupting the intimate silence.

When she pulled away, his even breathing had become panting.  She licked the taste of him from her lips and grinned as she stared through her eyelashes at him.  At his pale, naked body.  She ran her fingers through his hair, staring at him as he grappled with her abandonment.  His fingers flexed.

“What do you want me to do, Derek?” she said.  She kissed his Adam's apple as he swallowed, licked the crook between his clavicles, tasted his scar and his skin and then, when he still didn't answer her question, she took his left nipple between her teeth and tweaked.  “This?” she said.  She moved to his right and sucked.

“Mmm,” he said.

“That's not an answer.  You're not answering,” she said, her voice a disappointed pout.  She continued her journey of discovery.  Touching.  Tasting.

“How about that?” he said, cheerful, encouraging between jerky breaths.  “I like that.”

Entirely too composed for her tastes.

She slid the flat of her palm past the bullet wound, along the ripple of his ribs, to the crease of his groin.  He wasn't hard or even semi-erect.  The Paxil hadn't left him unaffected.  He'd proven, now, that he could still function on demand even on his high dosage, but no amount of enticing visuals, or staying north of his navel would fire him up on all cylinders.  He needed a more... direct sort of help, so to speak.

She hefted his flaccid weight in her hands, and he gasped as she said, “Maybe... this?”

She circled his scrotum with her index finger and thumb and lifted it away from his body.  The gentle pulling sensation was one of his favorite things, she'd learned over hours and hours of experimentation.  His back arched and then snapped straight at the unexpected touch.  She sank the fingertips of her free hand into the warmth between his legs, behind his sack, and stroked his perineum once, twice.  Another of his favorites.

A deep, shivering moan wrung from his lips.

“Do you want more of that?” she said.

“Yes,” he managed.

“I didn't hear you.”

“Yes,” he blurted, and her lower body throbbed and her breaths tightened from the simple act of watching him undone and at her mercy.  She pressed and stroked and teased.  A sensation of emptiness hollowed out her body as she stared.  She wanted him, wanted him, now, and suddenly it was hard to think in more terms than the simple beauty of his anatomy.  His dark, curly hair framed his lower attributes like a bulls-eye, sort of his own pick me, choose me, love me.

She thought of him aroused and full and ready, and she thought of his girth as he cleaved her.  A gasp tightened in her throat.  She shook her head.  Focus.  She had to focus, or they'd both be in the frustrated bowels of sexual purgatory, unable to ascend.  Getting him going, now, took... calculation.

“What about this?” she said as she moved, and she pressed her lips to the whorl of soft, wiry hair underneath his navel.  She skipped down his front, following the fuzzy arrow to its terminus, exactly how she'd imagined earlier that day, kissing, touching.  With a slight stroke of her fingertips, she retracted his prepuce.  It slid down his length.  He sucked in a breath at the gentle motion, and then she kissed his sensitive head.

“Does that feel good?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, his voice hoarse and raw.

“Really good?”

The muscles in his lower abdomen twitched as she kissed him again, and then she licked once, looping her tongue around his corona much like she imagined working the raised ridge of a Tootsie pop.  A rough, deep sound pealed from his throat.  Sort of like a yes.  More of a moan.  Animalistic.  The panther she'd seen in the coils of his muscles, growling.  Caged and dying to be released.

That was more like it.

When she took him into her mouth and sucked, his whole body skipped off the rug like he'd been zapped.  The shirt against his wrists shuddered, and his knees poked upward in surprise, dislodging his fleecy sweatpants, but she let his misdemeanor go with a light, chastising slap to his smooth hip.  “Hold still, or the pants go on,” she threatened, and he settled, his breaths chuffing with desperation.  When she ran her hands along his quadriceps, along the flat expanse of skin below his bellybutton, the tightness, the unyielding tension she found there made her throb.  He was trying to be still.  For her.

You know you're my best friend, right? he'd said in the car on the way home from the hospital.

Mark is your best friend, she'd replied.

He hadn't blinked.  Now, who's got no faith?

She ached.  For all the torture she committed, she received it back in spades.  Her breasts felt as full as her core felt empty, and a hot flush swept across her naked skin, along her cheeks, down her throat, and over her chest.  She forced herself to breathe.

She licked the underside of his length, gratified to feel that his blood had begun to pool there.  The veined skin was hot and feather soft and filling with the deep, blushing promise of sex.  Soon.  A bit more help, and he would be ready to fill the horrible void between her legs.

She raised her head to grin at him.  “What do you want, Derek?” she said, her voice low, husky.  Ready.

It's intense, you know.

What?

This thing I have for you.

He blinked at the ceiling, and his fingers clenched and unclenched.  “Do... that.  Again.”

She licked her lips and pulled away.  “You'll need to be more specific.”

“Your mouth,” he said.

“What about it?”

“Taste me.”

She knelt before him between his legs, encircled his widening girth with her hands, and took him into mouth her again.  She bobbed up and down, once, twice, a slip and slide, pressing him into the back of her throat.  When she pulled away, she sucked.

“F... fuck,” he said.

She gave him a languid grin.  “That's the idea,” she said, her voice even despite the churning coil of desperation underneath her guise of command.  She wanted him, and she felt.  So.  Empty.  She pressed her breaths in and out of her chest with the force of her diaphragm alone.  She stroked him, encouraged him.  Touched him.  Kissed him.  Tasted him.  Until his arousal was a thick, heavy weight.  Ready.  Eager.  Enticing.

“What do you want, Derek?” she asked again.  She reached underneath his erection and massaged his perineum, a barrage of his favorite stimulation.

Do you have any idea, how often you turn me on?

He blinked at her, a glazed look of desire on his face.  “I want...”  He gasped.  Twitched.  “You.”

“How do you want me, Derek?”

His eyes widened, as though he were incredulous that she expected him to be able to explain the needs his nerve endings at that moment.  Nerve endings she was twisting up with erotic fire in all his favorite spots.  At that moment.  She ran the nail of her index finger along his frenulum, and his whole body jerked.  The sweatpants at his ankles shifted, but he didn't dislodge them.

“How, Derek?”

“I want...”  His breaths squeezed in his chest, and she couldn't help but mirror him.  The empty void within her throbbed.  “Mmm.”

“Yes?”

His knee twitched.  He blinked like he was trying to concentrate.  “Dirty.”

“You want it dirty?”

He bared his teeth at her in a grimace of sexual frustration.  “Dirty fucking...”

“We could do that,” she replied.  “But you're going to have to be more specific than that.”

He panted.  “Pool.  Dirty... fucking... p...”

She laughed, stroking him.

He moaned, deep and low.  His arms shifted.  Three inches.

“Don't move, or we stop,” she warned.  “Remember?”

Her heart beat like a crashing gong in her chest as she stared at him, naked and glistening and ready, if only he would say the words.  Derek was a want, take, have sort of guy, and now he couldn't take or have.  He could only want.  The tables had been flipped on him.  She licked her lips with anticipation as she watched him attempt speech.

“I want to be...” he said.  His eyelids dipped as she applied pressure.  “Mmm.”

She eased forward.  “You want to be...?”

“Please,” he said.  “Inside.”  His breaths came thickly.  Quickly.  She watched his ribs slide and jerk with his desperation.  “Just fuck me,” he blurted at last.

“That,” she said as she straddled him, “I can definitely do.”

She gripped his erection with her hand as she raised her lower body.  For a moment, she hovered as wicked, thrilling anticipation pounded through her body.  She guided him to her.  The head of his erection pressed against the nerve clusters at her opening.  She gasped.  Twitched.  Delighted at the feel of him pushing against her, a mere fraction inside.  Pleasure set her nerves on fire, and the conflagration made it difficult to think.

He sucked in a breath and pushed up with his hips, slamming into her, wanting, taking, having.  His hot, slick length slid home to her center.  Her teeth clacked shut in surprise with the jounce, and then gravity took them down to the rug again with a jolt.  She blinked.  Her vision fuzzed and then corrected.

“Oh,” she moaned as her insides adjusted to him, and her body throbbed with unmet needs.

He looked at her, panting, a familiar sly smirk slathered on his face, as if to say once more, What?  It was there.  Neither of the two 'ropes' had moved.  She couldn't exactly fault him for speeding things along.

She squeezed with her insides, feeling him deep within her, ready, hot, and he groaned a mirror, “Oh,” that bounced back at her with the same desperation of hers, only in a lower, choppier pitch.

“You feel really good,” she said.

“So do you,” he said.

Her lips parted, and she panted as the desire to move coiled within her like a spring.  Her engine idled, ready and aching to accelerate.  Go, said her brain.  Just go.  Go, go, go.  Shaking, resisting, she squeezed around him as she splayed her palms against the flat expanse of skin below his navel.

“I really love you,” she said, looking down at him.

Maybe, we just fit.

“Hmm,” he said.  His nostrils flared.  He panted, and he stared at her with a fathomless expression that said those same words without any words at all.  I love you.  The fire made the dim light between them flicker and dance.  She lowered herself to lie flush against his body, her breasts mashed against his heaving ribs, her lips at his throat.  Where their skin met, the heat between them bloomed with perspiration.

She scrunched her fingers in his damp hair, and she kissed his lips.  His chin.  His throat.  His chest.

“I love you,” she repeated, a murmur.

“I love you, too,” he managed.

And then she started to move.

Slowly, at first.  Up and down to give him the sensation of thrusting, though he didn't thrust.  He filled her, and then he left her, though he didn't move much.  He rocked his hips against gravity to meet her on the downswings.  Over and over.  But he didn't move his arms, or his legs.

I'm in love with you, he'd said.  I've been in love with you... forever.

His tight abs struggled to keep her pace as she leaned back, changed gears, and eased into more frantic thrusting of her own.  Rocking.  Like a grinding wave against his pelvis.

“Huh,” he managed, not a question.  An observation.  He smirked, though the expression carried more need than amusement.  It was as though the heat of friction had taken his mind from him, and he burned.

“What?” she said.

“Save a horse.”  He blinked.  A rough groan stuck in his throat.  “Ride a surgeon?”

“I swear you've said that before,” she said.

“Maybe...”  He panted.  “In another universe.  Fuck.”

She snickered.  “Feels good?”

His head twitched.  Sort of like a nod.  “Ye... oh.”  His body snapped back in an arch of sinew and lean muscle as she slowed her rhythm, jerking her lower body in tight circles.

She pressed her fingers between her legs, jamming herself between their bodies to add needed pressure in the right places.  Needed touch.  She moaned as she hit her spot.  A breath funneled out of her like a tornado.  The feel of his shaft running her through her from underneath, while she pressed with her fingers over top...

“Oh, Derek.  You feel so good.”

“Dit... ditto.  You're so... wet.”

She clenched her teeth as a wave tore through her, made her toes twitch and her shoulders heave.  “It's for you,” she said.  “You make me that way.”

His pleased look gratified her.

The room fuzzed as she massaged herself.  She bit her lip.  Glorious need crushed into a fine point like a diamond stuck in the earth.  She throbbed with it.  Pulsed with it.  She was ready.  On the cliff.  Looking down into the valley.  She could jump, if she wanted.  Enter freefall, if she wanted.

If she wanted.

She pulled her hand away and left herself dangling on the precipice, wanting and in glorious pain from it.  She focused on him.  This was about him.  She only wanted to be able to find completion when he did.  As much as he humored her by lying there bound in fake ropes, she doubted he would be okay with it if she didn't finish, and he did.

She leaned down, mashing her body against his.  She nuzzled his throat.  Kissed him.  He ravished her  with his endless hunger, returning what she gave him and more.

“What do you need?” she whispered against him.

His mouth moved.  She saw her name form on his lips, but he didn't speak the word.  He gasped.  She met his eyes.  His unfocused, desperate expression sucked her in like quicksand, and it took eternity to escape.  She pushed against his groin, and he moaned, deep, low, unfettered.

She pulled away, re-seating herself.  She rocked against his body.  Slow, and fast, and fast and slow.  Alternating.  Patterns gave him no end.  Neither did change.

“What do you need?” she repeated, breathless, almost frustrated.

Something was wrong.  Was something wrong?

His fingers clenched and unclenched.  Beads of sweat formed on his brow.  She watched his Adam's apple slink along the skin of his throat.  He thunked his head against the rug, and his gaze rolled back to the ceiling behind him as the knife edge of orgasm split him open.  His body arched as he rose to meet her and then snapped flat.

Nothing happened.  He panted.

“Fucking,” he said.  He jammed his lower body into her.  “Paxil.”

All the dots connected in a rush.  He'd had one orgasm for her many because he'd camouflaged his slower climax with a meticulous ode to her body.  He'd kissed her.  Touched her.  Every crease and crevice.  Every freckle.  Every hair.  He'd sent her into blissful paroxysms once and again and a third time while he'd been sheathed within her, hot and hard and powerful, but not because he'd held himself back.

Paxil could cause delays.  He'd used it to his own advantage then, and he'd enjoyed it.  Now, he thought she was waiting for him, and he couldn't send himself down the beckoning slide.  He was stuck and letting himself feel stuck instead of allowing the sensation to build his pleasure.

She slowed her pace and relaxed with a sigh.  She smiled.  She stroked herself to renew her toehold on  sweet oblivion.  She stared at him through her eyelashes.  “We'll get there,” she said.  “I'm just enjoying the ride.”

He'd smirked.  You're telling me I'm a smooth ride.

She squeezed her insides around him, and he groaned.

She tangled her fingers in the delicate hair below his navel.  She touched his flat, sweat-slicked lower body, and she splayed her palms.  She flattened against him, a wave of flesh, still moving, rocking.  She rode on top of him, against his skin.  The heat between them built as she stared into his eyes.  Endless blue stared back at her.  Needing.  Wanting.  Having, not taking.  She plunged her fingers into his sweaty hair and brushed it away from his face.

“I love you,” she said.  She kissed him, and he drank her down, panting.  “And we'll get there.”

When we got married on the post-it, there was you, and there was me. And we made...  We made a team.

“Meredith,” he said, the word a murmured group of loosely connected syllables.  He tilted up his head to kiss her.  Derive his existence in her skin.  Her heartbeat.

She grinned.  “It's not work if it's totally fun, right?”

A helpless smile crinkled the skin around his eyes and lit up his face.  He laughed breathlessly against her lips as she kissed him.  Pressed against him.  Became him.

Time seemed to slow and stretch into the infinite.

She lost track of the moments they shared in the endless, buffeting heat.  Staring at each other while the dying firelight flickered.  Slipping against each other in a well of friction.  She rode him into the darkness, toeing the line and towing him with her, waiting, encouraging.

Until she heard it.  The telltale gasps of his breaths tightening in his chest.  Felt it.  The tension coiling his muscles into tight, pressure-loaded springs.  Saw it.  His eyes rolling back.

He'd passed close to no return.  The sliver between him and release was the size of an atom.

She pressed her fingertips into the slick heat between them, pushing down as he pushed up.  The flare as their two opposite forces met was cataclysmic.  Brilliant.  Punishing and perfect and bright all at once.  She grimaced, showing her teeth to him.  Not in pain.  And then it all came apart at the seams.  Euphoria sparked at the ends of all her nerves.  She loosed a pleased, desperate moan.  Her insides fluttered, squeezing around him in rhythmic pulses.  She collapsed against him, boneless and out of steam.

Momentum carried him the rest of the way.

He arched backward into the floor.  His belly pressed into her as he came off the rug, lifting her with him an inch.  Two.  His lungs filled to the bursting brim, and then he didn't move.  Didn't breathe.  Didn't speak.  Bliss evened his expression into blue glass.  His lips parted.  And then his whole body jerked.  Twitched.  He spurted within her.  Liquid heat filled the space between her legs.

He sank to the floor with her like the subsiding crush of a wave, and then he stilled.

They lay against each other, breathing.  Silent.  Exhausted in the languid aftershocks.

The last lick of fire popped.  Snapped.  Died.

It'd been a long day.

You were like coming up for fresh air.  It's like I was drowning, and you saved me.  That's all I know.

They didn't need words.

They slept.