dance in the dark {grey's - cristina; burke/cristina}
Title: Dance In The Dark
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Cristina. Burke/Cristina, with implied Owen/Cristina, Owen/Teddy and various other pairings.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,149
Author's Note: For nursebadass. Sorry it's not smuttier.
Summary: Post Season Six Finale. She tells him she'll be at Joe's and that's a lie. He tells her he's just working extra hours, there's a shortage of doctors since the shooting, and that's a lie too.
Her surgical mask hangs around her neck, half untied, like a noose around her neck.
She tells herself that accounts for the discomfort that she feels, the tightness along her throat.
“I’ll be at Joe’s.”
“Really?” She watches Owen’s hands under the sink; he’s looking at her. “Cause I was thinking about doing dinner. Might be nice to sit down, have a meal, talk.”
There’s unneeded weight to that last word.
Distantly, she’s aware of dinners long since passed. Incidents involving too hot frying pans.
She blinks.
Wishes she could say that was the reason for what she says next.
“Yeah, sorry. I’ve already got plans.”
-
At this point, it’s more than a simple hunch.
At this point, she flat out knows he’s fucking Teddy, or as much as she’s going to know until she has the misfortune on walking in on them in the on-call room, his face obscured by a mess of blonde hair, hands digging into her hips.
She wouldn’t mind it at this point.
Really, she’d rather just get this over with.
-
Joe’s is a lie, but Owen won’t go to check it out and the only one who would know otherwise is Meredith.
He wouldn’t ask Meredith.
Owen understands the basic concept of self-preservation, after all.
-
She unhooks her bra one-handed at a stoplight, slips it off through her shirt and lets it land in the passenger seat.
The guy in the truck one lane over winks at her; she rolls up her window and cuts him off when the opportunity presents itself.
Cristina’s been ready and raring to go since she woke up this morning and the drive to the hotel feels far too long for its fifteen minutes.
Time is of the essence here and she’s found that, though the red lace match set turns him on, it’s really just her that does it for him more than anything else.
Let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t.
Let’s not pretend that seduction is necessary.
-
It started with condoms in a drawer.
Specifically, it started with the way the condoms would disappear from the drawer even though they weren’t having sex all that often, and when they were they weren’t using them.
She had a pill for that, just like he had a pill for sleeping now.
It wasn’t hard to connect two and two, and Teddy hadn’t been meeting her eyes for longer than three seconds for weeks.
Cristina stopped bothering to check, after awhile.
-
Once, not so long ago, she left a message with Mama Burke.
It was the only number she had, a shot in the dark.
Sometimes those pay off.
-
The door to his room isn’t locked.
He’s been expecting her.
“Hey.”
There’s a long pause where Burke is nothing but a still form stretched out on the bed, a book with the spine butterflied resting on his torso.
His shirt is laid over the back of the chair, by the desk, and she kicks off her shoes by the door.
When she looks up again, the book is on the night stand and he’s dangerously close to invading her personal space. Close enough that she can smell soap, can tell that he’s fresh from the shower, and can feel the heat from his body.
“Hey.”
-
He’s slated to leave in a little under a week.
She’s got decisions to make.
-
“Okay, if Izzie came back - ”
The grit of Alex’s teeth has little to do with pain. It’s a warning.
She’d come looking for Meredith; he was only second best and if she cared enough she might start wondering when he ranked even that high.
(“Talk to Meredith.”
“She’s not here and you are, so, sucks for you.”)
“Yeah, whatever. You won’t even remember this in a few hours.”
He swims through a hazy state of confusion on an almost daily basis, and he just downed a handful of pills twenty minutes ago. Her assumption must be pretty accurate because he mumbles a frustrated agreement.
“If it was Izzie, if she came back after this - thing - and you had to choose between her and Lexie, who would you choose?”
“Word to the wise, Yang,” he stretches next to her on the bed, cocky smirk in place, a newfound rarity, “if you think I’m fucked up, Hunt’s in a whole other category.”
His meaning is clear: get out, get out while you still can.
-
The geometric shapes they have contorted themselves into aren’t lost on her.
She’s sleeping with Burke. She’s also occasionally sleeping with Owen.
Owen’s sleeping with Teddy, who’s still occasionally sleeping with Mark, who wishes he was (and one time does) sleeping with Lexie, who’s supposedly still Alex’s girlfriend.
Really, someone’s the seventh wheel here.
-
She spends more of her nights than she doesn’t in Burke’s hotel room.
He’s like every man she’s ever slept with (save for Owen, who spends many a night pacing the rug threadbare), falling asleep in the afterglow.
It allows her to rationalize it: she just doesn’t want to wake him up.
That’s all.
(She tells Owen she’s at Meredith’s, a convenient scapegoat.
He starts working longer hours at the hospital, later ones, which is code for ‘fucking Teddy at a more traditional hour’.
If they were ever in love, she knows they aren’t anymore.)
-
The night Burke showed up, they did the talking thing after.
He had pressed her into the bed, familiar weight bearing down on her, hard against the inside of her thigh and his mouth on her collarbone. She arches her body against his, and when his fingers brushed her clit, almost like an accident, her hips followed his hand as it drew back.
She came the first time with three fingers sliding inside of her, the second bent over the bed with his name echoing off of the walls and her fingers clawing at the sheets.
-
Afterwards, the journey from her living room to her bedroom required a third of a bottle of tequila.
-
“What don’t I know?”
Meredith corners her in an exam room but she’s got one hand on the door.
This can be short, if she wants it to be.
“Nothing.”
“You can handle it?”
“I can handle it.”
“Okay then.”
-
“You sent your mother for your things.”
It’s the bitterness glaring through; Joe’s was a pit stop between the hospital and here.
“You left and you sent your mother for your things.”
She’s laughing before she’s crying, or perhaps it’s the other way around.
-
“She blew him in the conference room.”
“Alex,” Meredith hisses.
He’s been dying to blurt it out all day. Cristina can tell.
She regards the information with passive indifference.
“What? Your sister’s turned into a gossip.”
To fill the empty spaces in the conversation is sort of implied. Because Alex knows Lexie cheated on him with Mark, and Lexie knows Alex knows, yet neither of them wants to own up to it. So there’s gossip and too much of her nervous babbling mixed with his hard stares.
How she still manages to have the monopoly on unhealthy relationships, she’ll never know.
-
Thursday night he’s on the phone and her underwear is tucked in the first desk drawer, right where he told her they were.
She ran out on him the night before, the beeping of her pager and his nod, “it’s fine, go.”
Cristina hadn’t felt guilty about choosing the possibility of late night surgery over him. More importantly, he hadn’t tried to turn it into a choice.
It was nothing more than a foregone conclusion.
She ends up on the bed by the time he hangs up, her purse on the desk as a reminder of sorts, her clothes still on. They don’t jump straight to the sex automatically. Not after the first few nights.
“They need me back earlier than expected. There were complications with one of my patients.” His phone shuts with a click and she pages through the book on the nightstand. The name Eugene Foote stands out like the flashing lights of an ambulance in the dark. “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”
Now it’s her turn to tell him if he’s coming back.
She understands how this goes.
Burke’s looking for a declaration. Owen’s always looking for them.
“Cristina.”
-
Her mother always wanted her to find a man.
There was Cristina’s father and then Saul came into the picture, short succession because that’s what her mother needed or wanted or however she wanted to qualify it.
Her mother expected the same of her. There was Colin Marlow and then there was a break. Seattle and Burke. The wedding that didn’t happen. The three month grace period that followed before her mother was back at it again.
Owen and her mother have never met.
She thinks her mother would like him.
He’s polite where it counts, but still overbearing and concerned, protective, in a way that she thinks her mother would like.
From the outside, for someone who’d never heard of PTSD, never heard him pace through the living room for two hours, never seen him snap, the two seconds in the hallways or their bedroom where she knows without a single doubt that he doesn’t recognize her at all before it clicks into place, he looks like someone who could take care of you.
Cristina doesn’t want to be taken care of.
She doesn’t want to rely that strongly on anyone but herself.
-
“Cristina.”
“What?” She fumbles the book, manages to get it on the nightstand far less smoothly than she would’ve preferred. “What do you want me to say? Stay? Go?”
He’s perfectly calm, now that he has her attention, and it makes her sit up straighter. It makes her angry that she wants to yell and say all the things she never got around to saying and he’s simply content to put a major life-changing decision in her hands like this is about the damn weather.
It makes her angry that she cares enough to get angry.
“Because where I come from we flip a coin and drink until we like the outcome.”
-
Where she comes from is Joe’s.
She can’t say that she thinks Meredith would be very proud of her right now.
Then again, she can’t say that the Meredith she knows now would be very proud of the Meredith she knew then either.
-
“I need to know.”
He should be more dismayed by her statement.
The man she almost married would have found her attitude too cavalier.
“Well I needed to know a lot of things when you were too busy getting on the first flight to Alabama.” She’s off the bed now, on her feet. There is no inching towards the door, rather her path is obvious. She will leave first, if anyone does.
And not just because this is his hotel room either. Not because of something as simple as that.
“So, what? I say yeah, sure, stay, let’s try this again, and then you leave when you decide that this isn’t enough for you? Because that doesn’t really work for me.”
It’s still not the understatement of the year.
This feels more and more like a preemptive strike.
“And this is? This - thing you have with Hunt. You would call that a success?”
“Oh, what the hell do you know about it? You’ve never even met him.”
She doesn’t point out that what she and Owen have by now is a relationship in name only. Falling apart at the seams. It wouldn’t help her argument.
“I have friends here, Cristina.”
“Yeah? So do I.”
Purse slung over her shoulder she decides now is the time for action. That action should be a slamming door, the sound of her car coming to life in the parking lot.
Seven feet from the door, she turns back around and grabs fistfuls of his shirt when she kisses him, hard and bruising. His hand winds through the thick curls at the nape of her neck and she’s torn between pushing and pulling, between staying and going.
Because that’s what this whole thing is about, so of course there is no aspect that doesn’t remind her of the underlying decision.
She threads her fingers through his, tricks his hand from leaving her hip, tight grip, and then releases him just as quickly, steps back and down and out, purse secure on her shoulder and keys in her hand a moment later.
He calls her name and there is no part of her that moves to turn around.
-
Cristina lets herself into Meredith’s house and makes a bed for herself on the couch.
She wasn’t lying; she does have friends. The kind of friends who won’t question it when she’s still here in the morning. Derek has become somewhat of a recluse and Meredith is her person and Alex knows all too well what it’s like to not want to talk about these things.
Lexie turns out to be her blind spot.
She doesn’t account for the stumbling in the darkness, nor the tiny little gasp that her presence elicits. One minute she’s half asleep and the next Lexie’s standing over her, wide-eyed.
“Yeah?”
The other woman recoils. “I’m sorry, I thought - were you here earlier?”
Cristina shifts until she’s up on her elbows. Lexie’s still standing there and if she backs up another half inch or so the back of her leg will collide with the coffee table and the rest of the house will be awake in a matter of seconds.
That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to her.
“No,” she answers. “And you might want to watch where you’re walking. You live here; how can you not navigate in the dark?”
Lexie gives a little shrug, crossing her arms over her chest a tad defensively. The wide eyes stay that way and Cristina deduces that she probably wasn’t sleeping when she came down here.
“Why are you even down here?”
“I was going to - ” Lexie can’t seem to meet her eyes, “never mind. I just came down for a glass of water.”
“Okay, I’m not even entirely conscious right now and I can tell you’re lying.”
Lexie’s eyes flit to the stairs and Cristina can see where this is going half a second before Lexie even says it. She’s been here. “He has dreams.”
She’s going to hate herself for this, but she does it anyways. Moves into a sitting position and draws her legs towards her, glancing at the now empty space next to her.
It’s not like she was going to sleep all that much tonight.
And it is Meredith’s sister.
And she is one of them, sort of.
“So does Owen,” she offers, after a moment.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No.”
Lexie doesn’t pry for any more information and that’s what drives that last point home.
-
Early afternoon, just before lunch, she finds Owen in an on-call room.
She has an idea of how this is going to end the moment she sees his reaction to her, the surprise and fleeting nervousness. His shirt is off. The sheets are as yet untouched.
“Okay,” she says, and then kisses him.
It’s important to note that, by this point, she had a game plan.
It’s important to note that it goes as planned.
Her nails dig into his arm when the door opens and his mouth is hot against her neck.
Cristina notices first. Hears the startled gasp and the shoes that come to an abrupt stop. She swallows and Owen is hard against her but her clothes are still on and her dignity is still intact.
It might be more than she can say for anyone else is in the room.
When he realizes they have a visitor, he stills, shocked, Teddy’s name falling from his lips instead of hers.
Right.
She takes the opportunity to extract herself from Owen’s grasp. His pager sits on the table and she kind of figured that it was Teddy he was waiting for this whole time; she’d just distracted him.
“He’s all yours,” she tells Teddy, sickeningly sweet smile on her face that doesn’t stretch and ache as much as it probably should, and she walks out.
-
This is not a case of trading one man for another.
She ends it with Owen for herself.
-
After her shift ends, she cleans her closet of his things, lays them out on the bed and leaves a note that gives him two days to get out.
She grabs a change of clothes for herself and drives the fifteen minutes to the hotel.
-
She does not have this conversation from the confines of his bed, wrapped up in the sheets or him, and she does not have it in the space between when their lips touch and when oxygen becomes a necessity again.
She has it from the doorway of his hotel room, both feet solidly outside.
“I love you,” she says, and it used to be the last thing you would think would come out of her mouth but, for today, it’s the first. “I loved you then and I love you now, but I’m never going to be the woman who walks down the aisle in a white dress and I’m never going to let myself get put into a position where I have to choose between who I am and who you want me to be.”
If the skies open up and rain pours down on her she supposes the movie cliché would be complete, but it doesn’t and it won’t and there will be no sequence where they make out in the rain and declare their undying love and proclaim that they’ll never leave each other again.
Life doesn’t work that way and neither do they.
“Owen is out of my life. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me and what I want. And I want you but I don’t want what we had. I don’t want to feel like I have to try to fit a mold because it’ll make you happy. I want to be enough for you.”
He is quiet, reserved as ever, but he’s still looking at her and he isn’t arguing. “We’re different people now, Cristina.”
“I know,” she says, and she does know. She knows who she is and, more importantly, who she’ll never be.
“And I wouldn’t have come back if you weren’t enough for me,” he finishes.
She keeps her feet on the ground. “I’m not moving in with you yet. We don’t go right back to where we were. This is a trial run.”
Burke smiles, small but strong. “Okay.”
Cristina takes a breath and one step forward and none backward.
-
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Cristina. Burke/Cristina, with implied Owen/Cristina, Owen/Teddy and various other pairings.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,149
Author's Note: For nursebadass. Sorry it's not smuttier.
Summary: Post Season Six Finale. She tells him she'll be at Joe's and that's a lie. He tells her he's just working extra hours, there's a shortage of doctors since the shooting, and that's a lie too.
Her surgical mask hangs around her neck, half untied, like a noose around her neck.
She tells herself that accounts for the discomfort that she feels, the tightness along her throat.
“I’ll be at Joe’s.”
“Really?” She watches Owen’s hands under the sink; he’s looking at her. “Cause I was thinking about doing dinner. Might be nice to sit down, have a meal, talk.”
There’s unneeded weight to that last word.
Distantly, she’s aware of dinners long since passed. Incidents involving too hot frying pans.
She blinks.
Wishes she could say that was the reason for what she says next.
“Yeah, sorry. I’ve already got plans.”
-
At this point, it’s more than a simple hunch.
At this point, she flat out knows he’s fucking Teddy, or as much as she’s going to know until she has the misfortune on walking in on them in the on-call room, his face obscured by a mess of blonde hair, hands digging into her hips.
She wouldn’t mind it at this point.
Really, she’d rather just get this over with.
-
Joe’s is a lie, but Owen won’t go to check it out and the only one who would know otherwise is Meredith.
He wouldn’t ask Meredith.
Owen understands the basic concept of self-preservation, after all.
-
She unhooks her bra one-handed at a stoplight, slips it off through her shirt and lets it land in the passenger seat.
The guy in the truck one lane over winks at her; she rolls up her window and cuts him off when the opportunity presents itself.
Cristina’s been ready and raring to go since she woke up this morning and the drive to the hotel feels far too long for its fifteen minutes.
Time is of the essence here and she’s found that, though the red lace match set turns him on, it’s really just her that does it for him more than anything else.
Let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t.
Let’s not pretend that seduction is necessary.
-
It started with condoms in a drawer.
Specifically, it started with the way the condoms would disappear from the drawer even though they weren’t having sex all that often, and when they were they weren’t using them.
She had a pill for that, just like he had a pill for sleeping now.
It wasn’t hard to connect two and two, and Teddy hadn’t been meeting her eyes for longer than three seconds for weeks.
Cristina stopped bothering to check, after awhile.
-
Once, not so long ago, she left a message with Mama Burke.
It was the only number she had, a shot in the dark.
Sometimes those pay off.
-
The door to his room isn’t locked.
He’s been expecting her.
“Hey.”
There’s a long pause where Burke is nothing but a still form stretched out on the bed, a book with the spine butterflied resting on his torso.
His shirt is laid over the back of the chair, by the desk, and she kicks off her shoes by the door.
When she looks up again, the book is on the night stand and he’s dangerously close to invading her personal space. Close enough that she can smell soap, can tell that he’s fresh from the shower, and can feel the heat from his body.
“Hey.”
-
He’s slated to leave in a little under a week.
She’s got decisions to make.
-
“Okay, if Izzie came back - ”
The grit of Alex’s teeth has little to do with pain. It’s a warning.
She’d come looking for Meredith; he was only second best and if she cared enough she might start wondering when he ranked even that high.
(“Talk to Meredith.”
“She’s not here and you are, so, sucks for you.”)
“Yeah, whatever. You won’t even remember this in a few hours.”
He swims through a hazy state of confusion on an almost daily basis, and he just downed a handful of pills twenty minutes ago. Her assumption must be pretty accurate because he mumbles a frustrated agreement.
“If it was Izzie, if she came back after this - thing - and you had to choose between her and Lexie, who would you choose?”
“Word to the wise, Yang,” he stretches next to her on the bed, cocky smirk in place, a newfound rarity, “if you think I’m fucked up, Hunt’s in a whole other category.”
His meaning is clear: get out, get out while you still can.
-
The geometric shapes they have contorted themselves into aren’t lost on her.
She’s sleeping with Burke. She’s also occasionally sleeping with Owen.
Owen’s sleeping with Teddy, who’s still occasionally sleeping with Mark, who wishes he was (and one time does) sleeping with Lexie, who’s supposedly still Alex’s girlfriend.
Really, someone’s the seventh wheel here.
-
She spends more of her nights than she doesn’t in Burke’s hotel room.
He’s like every man she’s ever slept with (save for Owen, who spends many a night pacing the rug threadbare), falling asleep in the afterglow.
It allows her to rationalize it: she just doesn’t want to wake him up.
That’s all.
(She tells Owen she’s at Meredith’s, a convenient scapegoat.
He starts working longer hours at the hospital, later ones, which is code for ‘fucking Teddy at a more traditional hour’.
If they were ever in love, she knows they aren’t anymore.)
-
The night Burke showed up, they did the talking thing after.
He had pressed her into the bed, familiar weight bearing down on her, hard against the inside of her thigh and his mouth on her collarbone. She arches her body against his, and when his fingers brushed her clit, almost like an accident, her hips followed his hand as it drew back.
She came the first time with three fingers sliding inside of her, the second bent over the bed with his name echoing off of the walls and her fingers clawing at the sheets.
-
Afterwards, the journey from her living room to her bedroom required a third of a bottle of tequila.
-
“What don’t I know?”
Meredith corners her in an exam room but she’s got one hand on the door.
This can be short, if she wants it to be.
“Nothing.”
“You can handle it?”
“I can handle it.”
“Okay then.”
-
“You sent your mother for your things.”
It’s the bitterness glaring through; Joe’s was a pit stop between the hospital and here.
“You left and you sent your mother for your things.”
She’s laughing before she’s crying, or perhaps it’s the other way around.
-
“She blew him in the conference room.”
“Alex,” Meredith hisses.
He’s been dying to blurt it out all day. Cristina can tell.
She regards the information with passive indifference.
“What? Your sister’s turned into a gossip.”
To fill the empty spaces in the conversation is sort of implied. Because Alex knows Lexie cheated on him with Mark, and Lexie knows Alex knows, yet neither of them wants to own up to it. So there’s gossip and too much of her nervous babbling mixed with his hard stares.
How she still manages to have the monopoly on unhealthy relationships, she’ll never know.
-
Thursday night he’s on the phone and her underwear is tucked in the first desk drawer, right where he told her they were.
She ran out on him the night before, the beeping of her pager and his nod, “it’s fine, go.”
Cristina hadn’t felt guilty about choosing the possibility of late night surgery over him. More importantly, he hadn’t tried to turn it into a choice.
It was nothing more than a foregone conclusion.
She ends up on the bed by the time he hangs up, her purse on the desk as a reminder of sorts, her clothes still on. They don’t jump straight to the sex automatically. Not after the first few nights.
“They need me back earlier than expected. There were complications with one of my patients.” His phone shuts with a click and she pages through the book on the nightstand. The name Eugene Foote stands out like the flashing lights of an ambulance in the dark. “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”
Now it’s her turn to tell him if he’s coming back.
She understands how this goes.
Burke’s looking for a declaration. Owen’s always looking for them.
“Cristina.”
-
Her mother always wanted her to find a man.
There was Cristina’s father and then Saul came into the picture, short succession because that’s what her mother needed or wanted or however she wanted to qualify it.
Her mother expected the same of her. There was Colin Marlow and then there was a break. Seattle and Burke. The wedding that didn’t happen. The three month grace period that followed before her mother was back at it again.
Owen and her mother have never met.
She thinks her mother would like him.
He’s polite where it counts, but still overbearing and concerned, protective, in a way that she thinks her mother would like.
From the outside, for someone who’d never heard of PTSD, never heard him pace through the living room for two hours, never seen him snap, the two seconds in the hallways or their bedroom where she knows without a single doubt that he doesn’t recognize her at all before it clicks into place, he looks like someone who could take care of you.
Cristina doesn’t want to be taken care of.
She doesn’t want to rely that strongly on anyone but herself.
-
“Cristina.”
“What?” She fumbles the book, manages to get it on the nightstand far less smoothly than she would’ve preferred. “What do you want me to say? Stay? Go?”
He’s perfectly calm, now that he has her attention, and it makes her sit up straighter. It makes her angry that she wants to yell and say all the things she never got around to saying and he’s simply content to put a major life-changing decision in her hands like this is about the damn weather.
It makes her angry that she cares enough to get angry.
“Because where I come from we flip a coin and drink until we like the outcome.”
-
Where she comes from is Joe’s.
She can’t say that she thinks Meredith would be very proud of her right now.
Then again, she can’t say that the Meredith she knows now would be very proud of the Meredith she knew then either.
-
“I need to know.”
He should be more dismayed by her statement.
The man she almost married would have found her attitude too cavalier.
“Well I needed to know a lot of things when you were too busy getting on the first flight to Alabama.” She’s off the bed now, on her feet. There is no inching towards the door, rather her path is obvious. She will leave first, if anyone does.
And not just because this is his hotel room either. Not because of something as simple as that.
“So, what? I say yeah, sure, stay, let’s try this again, and then you leave when you decide that this isn’t enough for you? Because that doesn’t really work for me.”
It’s still not the understatement of the year.
This feels more and more like a preemptive strike.
“And this is? This - thing you have with Hunt. You would call that a success?”
“Oh, what the hell do you know about it? You’ve never even met him.”
She doesn’t point out that what she and Owen have by now is a relationship in name only. Falling apart at the seams. It wouldn’t help her argument.
“I have friends here, Cristina.”
“Yeah? So do I.”
Purse slung over her shoulder she decides now is the time for action. That action should be a slamming door, the sound of her car coming to life in the parking lot.
Seven feet from the door, she turns back around and grabs fistfuls of his shirt when she kisses him, hard and bruising. His hand winds through the thick curls at the nape of her neck and she’s torn between pushing and pulling, between staying and going.
Because that’s what this whole thing is about, so of course there is no aspect that doesn’t remind her of the underlying decision.
She threads her fingers through his, tricks his hand from leaving her hip, tight grip, and then releases him just as quickly, steps back and down and out, purse secure on her shoulder and keys in her hand a moment later.
He calls her name and there is no part of her that moves to turn around.
-
Cristina lets herself into Meredith’s house and makes a bed for herself on the couch.
She wasn’t lying; she does have friends. The kind of friends who won’t question it when she’s still here in the morning. Derek has become somewhat of a recluse and Meredith is her person and Alex knows all too well what it’s like to not want to talk about these things.
Lexie turns out to be her blind spot.
She doesn’t account for the stumbling in the darkness, nor the tiny little gasp that her presence elicits. One minute she’s half asleep and the next Lexie’s standing over her, wide-eyed.
“Yeah?”
The other woman recoils. “I’m sorry, I thought - were you here earlier?”
Cristina shifts until she’s up on her elbows. Lexie’s still standing there and if she backs up another half inch or so the back of her leg will collide with the coffee table and the rest of the house will be awake in a matter of seconds.
That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to her.
“No,” she answers. “And you might want to watch where you’re walking. You live here; how can you not navigate in the dark?”
Lexie gives a little shrug, crossing her arms over her chest a tad defensively. The wide eyes stay that way and Cristina deduces that she probably wasn’t sleeping when she came down here.
“Why are you even down here?”
“I was going to - ” Lexie can’t seem to meet her eyes, “never mind. I just came down for a glass of water.”
“Okay, I’m not even entirely conscious right now and I can tell you’re lying.”
Lexie’s eyes flit to the stairs and Cristina can see where this is going half a second before Lexie even says it. She’s been here. “He has dreams.”
She’s going to hate herself for this, but she does it anyways. Moves into a sitting position and draws her legs towards her, glancing at the now empty space next to her.
It’s not like she was going to sleep all that much tonight.
And it is Meredith’s sister.
And she is one of them, sort of.
“So does Owen,” she offers, after a moment.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No.”
Lexie doesn’t pry for any more information and that’s what drives that last point home.
-
Early afternoon, just before lunch, she finds Owen in an on-call room.
She has an idea of how this is going to end the moment she sees his reaction to her, the surprise and fleeting nervousness. His shirt is off. The sheets are as yet untouched.
“Okay,” she says, and then kisses him.
It’s important to note that, by this point, she had a game plan.
It’s important to note that it goes as planned.
Her nails dig into his arm when the door opens and his mouth is hot against her neck.
Cristina notices first. Hears the startled gasp and the shoes that come to an abrupt stop. She swallows and Owen is hard against her but her clothes are still on and her dignity is still intact.
It might be more than she can say for anyone else is in the room.
When he realizes they have a visitor, he stills, shocked, Teddy’s name falling from his lips instead of hers.
Right.
She takes the opportunity to extract herself from Owen’s grasp. His pager sits on the table and she kind of figured that it was Teddy he was waiting for this whole time; she’d just distracted him.
“He’s all yours,” she tells Teddy, sickeningly sweet smile on her face that doesn’t stretch and ache as much as it probably should, and she walks out.
-
This is not a case of trading one man for another.
She ends it with Owen for herself.
-
After her shift ends, she cleans her closet of his things, lays them out on the bed and leaves a note that gives him two days to get out.
She grabs a change of clothes for herself and drives the fifteen minutes to the hotel.
-
She does not have this conversation from the confines of his bed, wrapped up in the sheets or him, and she does not have it in the space between when their lips touch and when oxygen becomes a necessity again.
She has it from the doorway of his hotel room, both feet solidly outside.
“I love you,” she says, and it used to be the last thing you would think would come out of her mouth but, for today, it’s the first. “I loved you then and I love you now, but I’m never going to be the woman who walks down the aisle in a white dress and I’m never going to let myself get put into a position where I have to choose between who I am and who you want me to be.”
If the skies open up and rain pours down on her she supposes the movie cliché would be complete, but it doesn’t and it won’t and there will be no sequence where they make out in the rain and declare their undying love and proclaim that they’ll never leave each other again.
Life doesn’t work that way and neither do they.
“Owen is out of my life. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me and what I want. And I want you but I don’t want what we had. I don’t want to feel like I have to try to fit a mold because it’ll make you happy. I want to be enough for you.”
He is quiet, reserved as ever, but he’s still looking at her and he isn’t arguing. “We’re different people now, Cristina.”
“I know,” she says, and she does know. She knows who she is and, more importantly, who she’ll never be.
“And I wouldn’t have come back if you weren’t enough for me,” he finishes.
She keeps her feet on the ground. “I’m not moving in with you yet. We don’t go right back to where we were. This is a trial run.”
Burke smiles, small but strong. “Okay.”
Cristina takes a breath and one step forward and none backward.
-