day two-thousand, one-hundred and ninety {ensemble} (cont'd)
“I’m not entirely clear on what you want me to say,” Lexie says, eventually, after mulling over the blow-by-blow he’s just given her of his conversation with Meredith.
This is far from the first time she’s ended up in his office to act as a glorified sounding board. She doesn’t mind it - he’s usually pretty good about only paging her when he knows she isn’t busy - but, generally, any advice she’s giving is either already what he was thinking, which is most of the time, or completely, radically, different, which is rarer and seems to be humored but later ignored.
Right now, however, he’s looking at her like he literally does not know what to do, a blank slate, open to any and all suggestions. In fact, he looks desperate for those suggestions. That shouldn’t please her nearly as much as it does.
“Something. Anything.” He says, and his posture belies whatever internal conflict must be going on. Everything about him but his expression and his eyes seems relaxed, comfortable even, and she sighs from her perch on his desk, her dangling legs brushing against his thigh.
“I don’t even know what you two were arguing about in the first place.” She admits, thinking on that while watching her tennis shoes dance slow shadows over the floor, looking back up when she realizes she needs to add, “You don’t even know what you two were arguing about in the first place.”
He looks offended at that accusation. “The hell I don’t.”
“Oh really?” Lexie says, not really asking, because she’s ninety-nine percent sure she’s right and those are good enough odds to make her cocky about it. “Okay then, enlighten me.”
It’s entirely possible that he growls at her in response to that. Entirely. Not that he’ll ever admit to that. What they’re both sure of is that he says, “Look, I just can’t have Meredith in here every other week breathing down my neck because Derek the neuro god had his surgery pushed back. It’s not like I specifically pick him.” She gives him a raised eyebrow. “Alright, well it’s not like I always specifically pick him. Once in awhile when it comes down to either moving his surgery or someone else’s maybe. But there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s just all in his mind. Maybe he feels guilty.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” she says, with a shake of her head. “And there is something wrong with it. You two were friends for decades, now you aren’t even on speaking terms, over something you both can’t even remember. Probably that stupid fight that shouldn’t have happened in the first place - “
“The fight was worth it,” he cuts in, like it’s programmed into him to automatically say that.
“The fight had nothing to do with what you consider it worth it for. If you remember correctly, he quit directly afterwards. That had absolutely nothing to do with you or me.”
“He‘s being a jerk.”
“So are you.” It surprises her how easily that rolls off the tongue, surprises him too if the look he gives her is anything to go on. “It’s true, okay. And you need to be the bigger man and fix this. Six years and you two barely communicate, for no reason. Do you know how high school that is?”
“You’re supposed to be helping me,” he half-says, half-whines, in what has got to be the most pathetic voice ever.
“I am helping you. You just don’t even know what help looks like when it comes to things like this.” Lexie sighs, and he gives her these eyes that she so does not appreciate because they pretty much make her feel like she should be telling him that this is all Derek’s fault, and that he’s better off without Derek. In other words, he makes her feel like she should be lying, because it’s easier and neater to deal with than the truth.
She hops off his desk, catching a glimpse of her sister through the window, watching her hurry to catch up with Alex, start saying something to him. She can’t fix her own relationships, can’t even really start them - but she can fix his. Probably. Hopefully.
It gives her sudden incentive, and she places her hands on her hips, standing over him, and tells him, “You either do something about this - I don’t care what, say something, talk to him, act like a human being, whatever - or I will lock you two in the same room.” He looks like he might laugh, and she cuts her eyes at him, gives him her best serious face. “And if you think I’m kidding, I will get Sadie involved, and you will find out that I do play dirty.”
Too late, she figures out just what kind of trap she’s created for herself. The “I know you do,” comes simultaneously with his hands on her hips, pulling her down into his lap. She ends up more or less straddling him, his hands moving just under the hem of her shirt, under the waistband of her scrub bottoms, and she’s thankful for the cabinets he’s moved in front of, the ones that block the hospital’s view of them from about chest height down. They’re not about to have sex on his desk, but it offers them just enough privacy for him to have his fun without anyone seeing anything out of the ordinary.
Lexie can feel his hard-on pressing against her and she maintains a cool, calm expression even as she grinds into him a little, whimpers in a way that completely means she almost wishes they could go at it on his desk. Instead, she takes a deep breath, gives him a quick, fairly chaste kiss on the lips, and then pulls herself out of his arms. She can manage a teasing smile with her face inches away from his as she tells him, “No.”
He looks like a little kid who got his hand smacked for trying to steal a cookie before dinner. And that’s when she gets the idea that is absolutely guaranteed to put an end to all this trivial crap between him and Derek.
“In fact, no sex for you until you at least try to make amends with Derek.” He starts to speak, or maybe it’s just a surprised, slightly threatened noise coming out of the back of his throat, but she gives him a determined look, and tells him, “And I meant that.”
She walks out before he can come up with a sufficient response to that.
---
Callie’s spent the past twenty minutes or so with her shoulder against the far wall from the door, inside the fairly empty gallery in the middle of the afternoon, half-watching whatever surgery Derek Shepherd’s got going on below her. There are papers in her hands, scans and tests from one of her cases, one she can’t quite figure out, and she’s gone here to think on that, on other things too, except she can’t seem to do either.
The problem is Callie is currently one of three people in the gallery. There is, of course, her, on one side, and Sadie on the other, in the chair by the door, and every now and then Callie will feel Sadie’s eyes burning into her. Some intern from psych, who has their own paperwork and seems to just want someplace quiet to work, and has probably given up on the on-call rooms what with all the not-sleeping that goes on in them, exists as a buffer between the two.
It’s certainly silent. To the intern. Not to Callie. Because with Sadie’s eyes on her, she keeps trying to shrink into the wall, and goddammit, this hospital really is high school with scalpels no matter how old you get. Maybe not with men, but certainly with women. Callie isn’t a newborn, or whatever Arizona had called her all those years ago, but following that logic she’s still a child, or if she’s lucky a really horny teenager, and that really doesn’t fit with the whole late-30s, very professional, very talented, adult image that she’s both saddled with and trying to maintain as best she can without, you know, losing herself and her personal life entirely.
She could manage that image just fine with Arizona around. Because she was all of those things, at least when she was working, and it sort of rubbed off on Callie, just enough that she got her life in order, got it just the way she wanted it, liked it. So of course Arizona moved onto bigger and better things, namely a hospital that wasn’t number twelve and was, in fact, number four on the list, at the time (if she cared about things like revenge, at least on that level, she would probably go on to point out that Seattle Grace is now number three, but she doesn’t, and she hasn’t spoken to Arizona in three years anyways), and Callie stayed here because this was home now, even if the people in that home kept leaving her in the dust.
Sadie, on the other hand, despite her stint somewhere in Europe (a stint that she will talk about but most people, Callie included, are a little too concerned with having some things left to the imagination to hear about), both has not left and is not professional, or overly talented (mediocre, a good doctor if she would focus more), or very adult at all. So it’s kind of conundrum to her, whether that’s a sign or not, and whether or not she should, you know, shove her up against a wall in the bathroom at Joe’s, or in an on-call room, or a supply closet, really anywhere, and have her way with her. At least then it would either stop the looks or quite possibly garner more of them, but in a mutual sense.
These are the kind of thoughts she’s been having for the past few weeks or so, wrestling with them at night and during the quiet moments she manages in between surgeries and patients. These are the kind of thoughts she’d like to just not have to deal with. Sadie being here doesn’t exactly help that.
However, what helps that less is when Sadie crosses the room, at minute twenty, and takes the seat next to her, actually moving it closer, and drops her voice to a low whisper as she says, “You’re single right?” Callie has to turn her head to look at her, wide eyed and mildly surprised by the question. Sadie continues anyways, perhaps not wisely, “Because Lexie didn’t know and the prospect of asking Sloan who you’re fucking, when you might actually be fucking him, is probably not the best course of action. So, therefore, I’m asking if you’re single.”
The way it’s phrased, the same kind of rambling that Lexie often employs, should be laughable. Somehow though, Sadie manages to have every single word just absolutely dripping in sex appeal, enough to make Callie acutely aware that they are in a public place, as empty as it is, and people could still possibly overhear them. “Um,” Callie starts, which is probably not the most confident nor brilliant way to reply in a conversation of this sort, and she takes a breath, remembers back when she was the one making people uncomfortable and semi-speechless. She tries for something other than an overtly desperate ‘yes’, going with, “Why?”
“Can’t a girl be curious?” Sadie replies, pulls back so that she’s no longer mere inches from Callie’s face, and gives this sly little smile before she gets up and walks right out the door. Callie just sits there for a moment, trying to comprehend it all, while the psych intern frowns at her, looking at the door, and then her again, with raised eyebrows.
That Callie can deal with. “What are you looking at?” She asks, in her best ‘don’t mess with me’ tone, and the psych intern has his eyes glued to the papers in front of him in no time, leaving her with time to focus on the wall and the surgery in front of her. Certainly not Sadie, or Sadie’s lips, or how this really needs to end soon.
---
This is the second patient of the day, second surgery, and Alex is getting tired. The clock keeps telling him it’s not even three in the afternoon, but it feels like it’s been more than twenty-four hours since he got in that shower this morning.
His patient is some fourteen year old, and her mother won’t get out of the room for more than five minutes at a time, and those are bathroom breaks, and the girl’s older sister is trying very hard to lengthen that amount of time, but she’s failing, and she keeps looking at him like maybe he could, you know, save her too, as well as her sister. In the end, he sends the mother off for coffee, and has an intern keep an eye on her, and lets the sister stay in the room, while nurses bustle in and out, and he tries to figure out which of the sorry interns is going to do pre-op, and when exactly he’s going to get his next break so he can just crash in the on-call room and have the whole damn day just be over with.
And then the sister starts looking at him, out of the corner of her eye, every few seconds when she thinks he doesn’t notice, and he knows without a doubt what that’s all about. Unfortunately. He’s the surgeon who will probably save her sister’s life and now she’s got a nice case of hero worship. It’s not like he can do anything about it, so he just walks out of the room and pretends nothing’s off at all.
She follows him anyways. It’s a gutsy move, rare enough, and so when she says, “You look like someone’s been keeping you up all night,” he tries not to frown and goes along with it.
“Not exactly,” he replies, eyes carefully held on the woman’s sisters chart. Unlike her sister, the woman is easily 20, if not a few years older, just old enough for him to be having a conversation like this with her, without feeling like someone entertaining a thing for catholic school girls or cheerleaders. Not that he’s interested. But she is, for the moment, and he understands that maybe she needs to take her mind off of her mother, and her sister maybe not making it through surgery okay. He gets that. He’s been on the other side now; things are much clearer than they were years ago.
“Yeah, right. You don’t have to lie to me.” She says, smiling like she knows him. “I’ve seen you with that woman, the dirty blonde, like half the day. She your girlfriend?”
Meredith, he’s sure of it. “She’s a friend.” He can say that without meaning anything beyond it, and it’s somewhat of a comfort, because he’s never really had very many relationships with women that didn’t either begin or end with sex. “And I’m just a little tired.”
“Aren’t we all?” She shrugs, and he can’t quite remember her name, he realizes, Katie or Kacey or Camille - yeah, maybe that’s it - but he thinks he remembers her face, so similar to dozens of others. They all blur after a while. “You maybe want to get some coffee sometime. I mean, you know, after the surgery and everything?”
“I’m a little busy,” he starts, and he’s never been very good at letting people down gently, so it probably comes out harsher than he intends. Alex never really got any better with emotions.
Katie or Kacey or Camille’s face falls, just a little, and she nods, a laugh bubbling in her throat, slipping from between her lips, the sort of nervous giggle one tends to find in drunk college girls, except she’ll remember this in the morning. She won’t in a week or a month though. “Right, of course you are,” she says, running a hand through her dark brown hair, swept back in a ponytail that’s far too messy and loose. “I’m just going to,” she gestures behind her, back into her sister’s room, and another stilted laugh escapes, before she turns and tries to walk away like she’s not all embarrassed.
Alex is starting to wonder if it’s always going to be like this. Pretty girls propositioning him, only for him to send them on their way, in exchange for quick fucks at Joe’s or the cramped interior of his car, rarely his apartment, and empty beds and too-early mornings, coffee for one and only his reflection staring back at him in the mirror.
He wonders if Izzie Stevens is ever going to crawl out from under his skin and release her hold on him.
---
Meredith’s taken three flights of stairs, two elevator rides, and countless hallways, all on her quest to find Derek. Fittingly as soon as she does find him, courtesy of the nurse on floor five, she doesn’t even make it to the door before someone stops her.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Lexie’s breathless, like she just ran down the hallway, speaking rapid-fire, and she catches Meredith’s wrist and all but yanks her out of sight of the doorway and the people in the room, with a certain sense of urgency. “You can’t go in there.”
“Why not?” Even as she asks, she lets Lexie lead her back against the wall, just off to the side of the room. With as little interaction as they have these days, she figures this must be particularly important.
“I’m withholding sex.” She looks deadly serious, and Meredith can’t decide whether to frown or laugh. “And I really don’t want to be withholding sex any longer than I have to, so you can’t go in there.”
What she can do, Meredith decides, is peek through the slats in the half-closed blinds that cover the small window next to her. She can make out two figures, and after closer inspection she realizes it’s actually Derek and Mark, in the same room together, not yelling, which is a sight she hasn’t seen in something close to forever. Which is when she realizes why Lexie is so averse to her interrupting them. “Is that how you…is that why they’re in there?”
Lexie nods, a little overeagerly, beaming like she’s just pulled off a miracle, and in a way she truly kind of has. It certainly not anything Meredith’s managed, hell she stopped trying a long while ago, save for her little reminder of it today. “Yeah. I mean, I think so. I hope so.”
Meredith nods, resting flat against the wall again, sighing out a, “God, I hope this works.”
“You and me both,” Lexie replies, joining her along the wall, and they rest and wait in the silence, something like common ground between them, for once.
---
Part 4