"The Beaver Bin"
Title: The Beaver Bin 1/?
Rating: PG-13
Summary: I'm fulfilling a fan fiction request for rezeaka who wanted to see "the first time in a gay bar" portrayed in a story. Thursday's episode where Callie talks to the Chief about Arizona being a better lesbian than her and having so many friends it was like a subculture who didn't take well to Callie's past adventures with men, kicked me in the pants to write this. What was going to be a one shot quickly morphed into a multi-chaptered story.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. At all. All characters belong to Shondaland. Also "The Saloon" is just a generic name. I'm sure there's a Saloon gay bar in every major city, but this one is not modeled after any in particular.
A/N: I read through this a million times and hope you'll forgive any mistakes I've overlooked. Also, this has reference to Callie and Arizona having separate apartments, so this is set prior to this season, and before the shooting.
Callie Torres relished her breaks. It was the time when, if Arizona Robbins didn't have her against the back of door in a storage closet, she and a behemoth-sized cup of chocolately mocha goodness could be found nestled into an on-call room reading a book. Today she was re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird, because it had been too long and the plot was hazy, and she remembered grudgingly writing a book report about it in the ninth grade. Curled up in one of the beds with her feet under the thin sheet, she read about Scout's sadness when her brother called her too much of a girl. "Scout was totally, totally gay..." Callie mumbled, curling her toes and sipping from her paper coffee cup. She checked her watch. With only fifteen minutes left on her break, she resolved to cherish it.
The knock on the door startled her out of her reverie and she looked over to it expectantly. Arizona bounded through, lopsided grin perched on her mouth. It was not her usual grin, but one that Callie had come to refer to, silently, as the proposition grin. Because it usually preceded a...
"I have a proposition for you." Arizona said as she sat next to Callie on the cot, surveying the closed book. "Oh, Scout is also totally a lesbian, by the way."
"Okay..." Callie answered, tentatively, and closed her book. "That's so what I said, by the way." She grinned, sharing a brief, yet knowing smile with the woman.
"I know tomorrow's date night," Arizona began, sliding a lock of Callie's hair behind her ear.
"Are you canceling?" Callie asked, trying to hide the disappointment in her voice.
"No, no, I'm propositioning. So, let me finish."
"Right, go ahead." Callie smirked, amusedly.
"Well, okay. I love our date nights. I do. I think it's fun spending like four hours in bed. And watching romantic comedies. And eating from that Thai place… and then spending more time in bed, but..." Arizona's eyes twinkled.
"But..."
"We never really go out-out. We always just stick to the safe, married couple stuff. And I like it, but..." Arizona was turning up the charm, smiling to her love.
"But...?" Callie pressed.
"I want to take you out, and maybe even show you off, because you're hot. And I want you to meet some of my friends that don't live, eat, and sleep this hospital." Arizona had her thumbs on either side of Callie's cherubic face, nearly smashing her cheeks together.
"Okay…One, no more coffee today for you. And two, where would we go? Joe's doesn't count, we go there all the time." Callie asked, gently removing the hands from her face, gazing at the blonde inquisitively. It was often hard to take her seriously with an arm-waving monkey embroidered on her white coat, no matter how hard that blue gaze tried to emphasize her point.
"Well, I used to go to this bar called The Saloon. It's kind of a little divey. No, a lot divey. But the people are great. Maybe we could go there? I'll buy you mojitos? Wait, they probably don't have all the stuff for that. I'll buy you shots of tequila. Please, please, please? Next week can be whatever you want to do."
"That welding class?" Callie's voice lilted hopefully
"Um, well, maybe...?"
"Going to the Zombie Opera?"
"Uhh..." Arizona paused, furrowing her eyebrows together.
"Arizona!"
"Fine, fine, whatever you want to do." Said the blonde, urgently trying to seal the deal.
Callie paused and touched the back of Arizona’s hand, noticing the blonde’s expression hadn’t changed from hopeful, "Okay, it's a date."
Arizona wrapped her arms around Callie's shoulders and pressed her lips to hers in a sweet kiss. "Yay, you're so the best."
"I know, I know..." Callie grinned and stole one more kiss before her beeper went off to remind her that break time was over.
=====
Later that night, Mark and Callie had their own brand of date night. Mark liked to call it their “bromance,” but Callie refused to call it that. They both sprawled on Mark’s sofa, eyes glued to the television, watching last innings of the Yankees’ game. Baseball was not Callie’s favorite sport, but she made Mark sit through a Tivo’d marathon of So You Think You Can Dance the date night before. He'd earned his slot of sports watching. The lid to their pizza box slung open, giving way to the cold slices remaining; empty bottles of beer staggered across the coffee table and onto the floor. They talked for the first forty five minutes or so, but the rest was spent in this comfy silence, while Callie enjoyed a completely platonic foot rub from Mark’s obviously capable hands.
“Big date night tomorrow, huh? What’s on the schedule? Pizza or Chinese?” Mark joked, laughing at his own self-appointed hilarity.
“We’re going out-out, actually,” Callie said curtly, shooting Mark a scowl.
"So you and Blondie are trudging out on the town instead of holing up like two silvered card-carrying AARP members?"
"Yeah, she wants to take me to this bar her friends go to or something. It's called The Saloon." Callie mumbled, nearly catatonic due to the beers and baseball.
"Whoa, wait, The Saloon?" Mark said, shoving Callie's feet from his lap.
"Yeah...?" Callie said, furrowing her brows and sipping from her warming bottle of Budweiser.
"You two really ARE Ellen and Portia now! That's a beaver bin!" He exclaimed, grinning wildly as he sat up on the arm of the sofa.
"A beaver bin?" Callie asked, still excruciatingly confused, and kind of missing her foot rub.
"A dy-- gay bar. A girly gay bar."
"And how do you know that, Mark?" Callie seethed.
"Oh, I dated a manager there awhile back. She was only half gay. The other half was pretty excellently straight." He rubbed his hands together, chuckling deviously.
"Oh..." She paused, drinking the rest of her beer. "Oh! This is going to be my first time in a gay bar...well, I take that back. I've been to gay bars, but I think I've always been too blacked out to notice, and definitely not with my girlfriend." She stared at Mark who was laughing so hard he was clutching his stomach, big booming guffaws filling up the silences in her scattered thought process.
"We really are Ellen and Portia now..." She said with widening eyes, watching him fall off the couch with laughter.
=====
The next day, Callie had every intention of picking a bone with that bubbly blonde of hers, but surprisingly she was nowhere to be seen. When she checked Pediatrics, the floor nurses told her she was busy in a patient consult or overseeing surgeries. The on call rooms were eerily empty, and when she tried to page her, it was unsuccessful. And as much as Callie wanted to talk to her, she would never feign a 9-11 when it was not a crisis.
Grumbling now, Callie decided she'd go to the coffee cart and buy a caffeinated pick me up to fill her with a solid ten minutes of java-induced euphoria. It was there, behind a fake plant, she saw Arizona, trying to eat a carrot muffin in a speed to rival competitive eaters. And it was there she strode over to her and slipped into the seat across from her before Arizona had any time to react.
"Why didn't you tell me The Saloon was a gay bar?" Callie asked, as Arizona took an enormous bite of her carrot muffin.
She chewed, cheeks puffed out like a hibernating hamster, shrugging her shoulders and pointing to the mass of food bulging her cheeks.
"Chew and swallow." Callie chided.
Once she could, Arizona did, and she dropped her shoulders, sighing. "Okay, Okay. Listen." She mumbled. "I didn't want to freak you out and make you think you had to be all... different for tonight. I just wanted to take you somewhere that made me feel comfortable, and hopefully it'll do the same for you. It's an awesome place. You've been to gay bars before haven't you?"
"Yeah maybe when I was like... twenty? But not with you. Or any girl. Or any girlfriend! What should I even wear?" Callie was stumped, and a little peeved, but only just a little. It was kind of hard to stay agitated with Arizona.
"Whatever you want to wear. It's a relaxed environment. Make yourself comfortable. I prefer you in that black v-neck thing with the long sleeves... mmm... but that's just me." Arizona punctuated her statement with a look that suggested anything but chaste, and that lip bite that sent Callie’s thoughts into the gutter.
Regardless, Callie didn't look sufficiently convinced and Arizona took one of her hands. "If it's too weird, we'll leave. Okay?" She said, voice suggesting nothing but sincerity. While Callie wasn't entirely sure about the bar, she was entirely sure about the woman sitting across from her with muffin crumbs on her scrub top.
=====
What Callie had been banking on all day was finishing at seven, taking a shower at home, and taking her good ass time to get ready. She'd probably have a beer in the shower, tweeze her eyebrows, listen to Whitney Houston and go out preened and pretty. What she wasn't banking on was a car accident that left the driver needing his shoulder re-aligned and a hundred stitches across his back. When she was finished with that it was flirting with ten thirty, and all Callie could do was deposit her soiled scrubs into the proper receptacle, change into the jeans and white t-shirt she came in with and wrestle with her leather jacket, so that it would behave, and sit on her torso properly. She finally got it into place, and out of the elevator, bounding through the main doors, just in time to run into the back of Miranda Bailey who was also looking forward to getting off the premises as quickly as possible.
"Doctor Tor-- Callie, what in the hell are you doing?" Bailey demanded, glaring up at the taller woman, picking up her purse that had just fallen to the ground after the impact.
"I'm late. I'm so late. I'm supposed to meet Arizona at The Saloon and then there was a car accident and a shoulder, and I'm just late. I don’t even have the time to shower…or put anything on that’s nicer than these stupid jeans and this stupid shirt." Callie said, trying to brush past the other woman, who swiftly grabbed her by the arm.
"Wait. That gay bar?" Bailey asked. "That place is fun. I went there for a Halloween party when I was still an intern. Damn fun, if you ask me." Full lips came to a broad smile while the woman patted Torres on the side of her leather clad shoulder.
"Am I the only human being in this hospital that doesn't know about this place?!" Callie demanded, raising her hands toward the heavens.
Instead of commenting though, Miranda shook her head and brushed past Callie, knowing after many years of Seattle Grace, not to get involved. Or at least, try not to get involved.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: I'm fulfilling a fan fiction request for rezeaka who wanted to see "the first time in a gay bar" portrayed in a story. Thursday's episode where Callie talks to the Chief about Arizona being a better lesbian than her and having so many friends it was like a subculture who didn't take well to Callie's past adventures with men, kicked me in the pants to write this. What was going to be a one shot quickly morphed into a multi-chaptered story.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. At all. All characters belong to Shondaland. Also "The Saloon" is just a generic name. I'm sure there's a Saloon gay bar in every major city, but this one is not modeled after any in particular.
A/N: I read through this a million times and hope you'll forgive any mistakes I've overlooked. Also, this has reference to Callie and Arizona having separate apartments, so this is set prior to this season, and before the shooting.
Callie Torres relished her breaks. It was the time when, if Arizona Robbins didn't have her against the back of door in a storage closet, she and a behemoth-sized cup of chocolately mocha goodness could be found nestled into an on-call room reading a book. Today she was re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird, because it had been too long and the plot was hazy, and she remembered grudgingly writing a book report about it in the ninth grade. Curled up in one of the beds with her feet under the thin sheet, she read about Scout's sadness when her brother called her too much of a girl. "Scout was totally, totally gay..." Callie mumbled, curling her toes and sipping from her paper coffee cup. She checked her watch. With only fifteen minutes left on her break, she resolved to cherish it.
The knock on the door startled her out of her reverie and she looked over to it expectantly. Arizona bounded through, lopsided grin perched on her mouth. It was not her usual grin, but one that Callie had come to refer to, silently, as the proposition grin. Because it usually preceded a...
"I have a proposition for you." Arizona said as she sat next to Callie on the cot, surveying the closed book. "Oh, Scout is also totally a lesbian, by the way."
"Okay..." Callie answered, tentatively, and closed her book. "That's so what I said, by the way." She grinned, sharing a brief, yet knowing smile with the woman.
"I know tomorrow's date night," Arizona began, sliding a lock of Callie's hair behind her ear.
"Are you canceling?" Callie asked, trying to hide the disappointment in her voice.
"No, no, I'm propositioning. So, let me finish."
"Right, go ahead." Callie smirked, amusedly.
"Well, okay. I love our date nights. I do. I think it's fun spending like four hours in bed. And watching romantic comedies. And eating from that Thai place… and then spending more time in bed, but..." Arizona's eyes twinkled.
"But..."
"We never really go out-out. We always just stick to the safe, married couple stuff. And I like it, but..." Arizona was turning up the charm, smiling to her love.
"But...?" Callie pressed.
"I want to take you out, and maybe even show you off, because you're hot. And I want you to meet some of my friends that don't live, eat, and sleep this hospital." Arizona had her thumbs on either side of Callie's cherubic face, nearly smashing her cheeks together.
"Okay…One, no more coffee today for you. And two, where would we go? Joe's doesn't count, we go there all the time." Callie asked, gently removing the hands from her face, gazing at the blonde inquisitively. It was often hard to take her seriously with an arm-waving monkey embroidered on her white coat, no matter how hard that blue gaze tried to emphasize her point.
"Well, I used to go to this bar called The Saloon. It's kind of a little divey. No, a lot divey. But the people are great. Maybe we could go there? I'll buy you mojitos? Wait, they probably don't have all the stuff for that. I'll buy you shots of tequila. Please, please, please? Next week can be whatever you want to do."
"That welding class?" Callie's voice lilted hopefully
"Um, well, maybe...?"
"Going to the Zombie Opera?"
"Uhh..." Arizona paused, furrowing her eyebrows together.
"Arizona!"
"Fine, fine, whatever you want to do." Said the blonde, urgently trying to seal the deal.
Callie paused and touched the back of Arizona’s hand, noticing the blonde’s expression hadn’t changed from hopeful, "Okay, it's a date."
Arizona wrapped her arms around Callie's shoulders and pressed her lips to hers in a sweet kiss. "Yay, you're so the best."
"I know, I know..." Callie grinned and stole one more kiss before her beeper went off to remind her that break time was over.
=====
Later that night, Mark and Callie had their own brand of date night. Mark liked to call it their “bromance,” but Callie refused to call it that. They both sprawled on Mark’s sofa, eyes glued to the television, watching last innings of the Yankees’ game. Baseball was not Callie’s favorite sport, but she made Mark sit through a Tivo’d marathon of So You Think You Can Dance the date night before. He'd earned his slot of sports watching. The lid to their pizza box slung open, giving way to the cold slices remaining; empty bottles of beer staggered across the coffee table and onto the floor. They talked for the first forty five minutes or so, but the rest was spent in this comfy silence, while Callie enjoyed a completely platonic foot rub from Mark’s obviously capable hands.
“Big date night tomorrow, huh? What’s on the schedule? Pizza or Chinese?” Mark joked, laughing at his own self-appointed hilarity.
“We’re going out-out, actually,” Callie said curtly, shooting Mark a scowl.
"So you and Blondie are trudging out on the town instead of holing up like two silvered card-carrying AARP members?"
"Yeah, she wants to take me to this bar her friends go to or something. It's called The Saloon." Callie mumbled, nearly catatonic due to the beers and baseball.
"Whoa, wait, The Saloon?" Mark said, shoving Callie's feet from his lap.
"Yeah...?" Callie said, furrowing her brows and sipping from her warming bottle of Budweiser.
"You two really ARE Ellen and Portia now! That's a beaver bin!" He exclaimed, grinning wildly as he sat up on the arm of the sofa.
"A beaver bin?" Callie asked, still excruciatingly confused, and kind of missing her foot rub.
"A dy-- gay bar. A girly gay bar."
"And how do you know that, Mark?" Callie seethed.
"Oh, I dated a manager there awhile back. She was only half gay. The other half was pretty excellently straight." He rubbed his hands together, chuckling deviously.
"Oh..." She paused, drinking the rest of her beer. "Oh! This is going to be my first time in a gay bar...well, I take that back. I've been to gay bars, but I think I've always been too blacked out to notice, and definitely not with my girlfriend." She stared at Mark who was laughing so hard he was clutching his stomach, big booming guffaws filling up the silences in her scattered thought process.
"We really are Ellen and Portia now..." She said with widening eyes, watching him fall off the couch with laughter.
=====
The next day, Callie had every intention of picking a bone with that bubbly blonde of hers, but surprisingly she was nowhere to be seen. When she checked Pediatrics, the floor nurses told her she was busy in a patient consult or overseeing surgeries. The on call rooms were eerily empty, and when she tried to page her, it was unsuccessful. And as much as Callie wanted to talk to her, she would never feign a 9-11 when it was not a crisis.
Grumbling now, Callie decided she'd go to the coffee cart and buy a caffeinated pick me up to fill her with a solid ten minutes of java-induced euphoria. It was there, behind a fake plant, she saw Arizona, trying to eat a carrot muffin in a speed to rival competitive eaters. And it was there she strode over to her and slipped into the seat across from her before Arizona had any time to react.
"Why didn't you tell me The Saloon was a gay bar?" Callie asked, as Arizona took an enormous bite of her carrot muffin.
She chewed, cheeks puffed out like a hibernating hamster, shrugging her shoulders and pointing to the mass of food bulging her cheeks.
"Chew and swallow." Callie chided.
Once she could, Arizona did, and she dropped her shoulders, sighing. "Okay, Okay. Listen." She mumbled. "I didn't want to freak you out and make you think you had to be all... different for tonight. I just wanted to take you somewhere that made me feel comfortable, and hopefully it'll do the same for you. It's an awesome place. You've been to gay bars before haven't you?"
"Yeah maybe when I was like... twenty? But not with you. Or any girl. Or any girlfriend! What should I even wear?" Callie was stumped, and a little peeved, but only just a little. It was kind of hard to stay agitated with Arizona.
"Whatever you want to wear. It's a relaxed environment. Make yourself comfortable. I prefer you in that black v-neck thing with the long sleeves... mmm... but that's just me." Arizona punctuated her statement with a look that suggested anything but chaste, and that lip bite that sent Callie’s thoughts into the gutter.
Regardless, Callie didn't look sufficiently convinced and Arizona took one of her hands. "If it's too weird, we'll leave. Okay?" She said, voice suggesting nothing but sincerity. While Callie wasn't entirely sure about the bar, she was entirely sure about the woman sitting across from her with muffin crumbs on her scrub top.
=====
What Callie had been banking on all day was finishing at seven, taking a shower at home, and taking her good ass time to get ready. She'd probably have a beer in the shower, tweeze her eyebrows, listen to Whitney Houston and go out preened and pretty. What she wasn't banking on was a car accident that left the driver needing his shoulder re-aligned and a hundred stitches across his back. When she was finished with that it was flirting with ten thirty, and all Callie could do was deposit her soiled scrubs into the proper receptacle, change into the jeans and white t-shirt she came in with and wrestle with her leather jacket, so that it would behave, and sit on her torso properly. She finally got it into place, and out of the elevator, bounding through the main doors, just in time to run into the back of Miranda Bailey who was also looking forward to getting off the premises as quickly as possible.
"Doctor Tor-- Callie, what in the hell are you doing?" Bailey demanded, glaring up at the taller woman, picking up her purse that had just fallen to the ground after the impact.
"I'm late. I'm so late. I'm supposed to meet Arizona at The Saloon and then there was a car accident and a shoulder, and I'm just late. I don’t even have the time to shower…or put anything on that’s nicer than these stupid jeans and this stupid shirt." Callie said, trying to brush past the other woman, who swiftly grabbed her by the arm.
"Wait. That gay bar?" Bailey asked. "That place is fun. I went there for a Halloween party when I was still an intern. Damn fun, if you ask me." Full lips came to a broad smile while the woman patted Torres on the side of her leather clad shoulder.
"Am I the only human being in this hospital that doesn't know about this place?!" Callie demanded, raising her hands toward the heavens.
Instead of commenting though, Miranda shook her head and brushed past Callie, knowing after many years of Seattle Grace, not to get involved. Or at least, try not to get involved.