- Welcome
- A Change is gonna come, by vickysg1
- A Little Bit of History Repeating, by Cutebunny43
- A Vacation on Shadow, by Mizzy2k
- A Vampire Apocalypse in Four Parts, by Grav_ity
- Anathema, by kungfuawynewho
- Before the Storm, by Alley Skywalker
- Between the Shadow and the Soul, by Cinaed
- Blighted by Sin, by Lullabymoon
- Broken Bird, by meekosan & toomuchfandom
- Carnivorus Plantae Mobilis, by roeskva
- Collide, by bluelilyrose
- Dead, But Not Forgotten, by fringedweller
- Discovery, by Danakate
- East of Albuquerque, by Eldanna
- Finding Family, by Heartundone
- First Amendment, by xakliaaeryn
- From the Last to the First, by Hiddencait
- Graven with Diamonds in Letters Plain, by AngelQueen04
- Hanging By A Gossamer Thread, by red_b_rackham
- He Always Gets What He Wants, by Sirenofodysseus
- Home, by Anr
- House of Heretics, by Slumber
- In Oculis Mentis, by Adrenalin211
- Jump in the Line, by Rinkafic
- Life is a Road, by scoobydumblonde
- Living on the Edge, by Traycer
- Love in Search of a Word, by Mzmtiger
- Maid of Honor, by TaleWeaver
- Melting the Ice Queen, by Tanya Reed
- Neither Duty Nor Honour, by buckbeakbabie
- New Hosts, by Hathor_Girl
- Not in Kansas Anymore, by Gelbes_Gilatier
- Now and Then, by ShirleyAnn66
- On the Nature of Daylight, by failegaidin
- Our Old World is Hard to Find, by lucklessforhim
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Sirens, by Lupinskitten
- Rearview Mirror, by ndnickerson
- Rowing in Eden, by Ancarett
- Saved by Grace, Badboy_Fangirl
- Somebody's Hero, by sadwal1538
- Someone Borrowed, by always_a_queen
- Stranger Than Fiction, by Lanna-kitty
- Take Off Your Kid Gloves, by Seren_ccd
- Taking Charge, by h_loquacious
- Taking the long way around, by isdon_isgood9
- Taming the Rider, by YappiChick
- The Ancient History of Solaris, by Sache8
- The Golden Lotus, by Rise Your Dead
- The Law of Tangents, by htbthomas
- The Lies You Live, by Alyse
- The Past is Prologue, by Lit_Chick08
- The Salt Skin, by Hariboo_Smirks
- The Story Of Us, by Shafeferi
- The Tension and the Spark, by lonelywalker
- The Veil That Keeps Me Blind, by Spyglass_
- What If You Catch Me, Where Would We Land, by leigh57
- Winter's Heart, by Rawles
- Yggdrasill Dreaming, by Mekosuchinae
- Dragonsinger - We Want to Live Like Trees Artwork
- Janus_74 - Out of the Dark Artwork
- Lormats - Trouble in Paradise Artwork
- Mizzy2k - The Bad Blood Artwork
- Nicky Gabriel - Happily Chaotic Artwork
- PPanic - The Gentle Princess Artwork
- SGMajorShipper - Time Enough at Last Artwork
- Slr2Moons - Fear the Night Artwork
- TheRisingMoon - Your Hands Artwork
- Site Info
Title: The Story Of Us
Author(s): shafeferi
Fandom(s): Grey’s Anatomy (with cameos from a few Private Practice characters).
Pairing(s): Derek/Addison
Word Count: 27,659
Rating/Warnings: NC-17 (Rating given purely for one sex scene – the rest of the fic is pretty tame, really. Nothing dark.)
Beta: My incredible friend Cat. She’s not on LJ, but she knows who she is.
Summary: During their couples' therapy, Derek and Addison are told to remember how their marriage began in order to regain the magic. Can they do it before it's too late, and are the memories enough to keep their marriage alive?
Author's notes: Both my beta and myself are British, so apologies for any use of British slang/spellings etc, I have tried to keep them to a minimum as this is an American fandom. Also, I’ve taken events mentioned in both Grey’s and PP into account as much as possible, but at times for the sake of the story I’ve felt it necessary to ignore them. Hopefully that won’t affect anyone’s enjoyment too much!
Chapter 1 – The First Meeting
It’s as if they’ve forgotten how to talk. They call it talking, but it’s all snide comments, raised voices, hurt glances, and distance. Distance so great it’s about to swallow them into the void.
The couples’ therapist has noticed (which is good, because they’re not paying him $300 an hour not to notice) and has practically ordered them to talk. Talk about something, talk about anything, talk about when they were happy, talk about when they lost the magic. Unfortunately, deciding what to talk about has turned into another argument.
“I think it’s a ridiculous idea.” Derek gripes, stabbing at his pasta as if it’s done him a personal injustice. He doesn’t need to talk to find out when they lost the magic, he already knows. It disappeared the moment he walked into his bedroom and discovered his wife straddling his best friend.
“Well I think that living in a trailer is a ridiculous idea.” Addison mumbles; her automatic defence whenever her feelings are hurt. Not that he’d notice. He’s far too wrapped up in the pain she’s caused him to notice any he’s causing her in return.
But although he hasn’t noticed the pain he’s inflicting, he does recognise the trailer comment as the prelude to an argument, and tonight it’s an argument that he’s not willing to have.
“Alright.” He sighs, pushing away his practically untouched plate. “What about the day we met?”
~~~~
Not for the first time in the history of their friendship, Derek was seriously regretting the day he met Mark Sloan. It wasn’t that he was a bad friend, in fact he was very supportive when he wanted to be; he just always seemed to get the pair of them into trouble. Like today, for example, when he’d managed to make them both half an hour late to class, warranting a full-scale bawling out from the professor, and he just found it funny. In fact, he seemed determined to get them into even more trouble by attempting to trade partners with Derek when they’d been explicitly told to get on opposite sides of the room and stay there.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Sloan?” The professor asked icily, eying the two of them in a way that suggested that she was Not Amused.
Mark opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again; evidently deciding at the last minute that ‘Derek’s partner is hotter’ would not go down too well, and shuffling off in the direction of his cadaver. Moving quickly before the professor noticed him again, Derek made his way towards his own partner. He wasn’t sure how Mark could judge her hot without even seeing her face, but if this was going to make his best friend jealous, he was sure as hell going to make the most of it.
“I’m Derek Shepherd.” He grinned, raking a hand through his already unruly hair and grinning, a grin which froze in place when his partner turned to look at him. Mark must have had a sixth sense when it came to hot women, because this girl was smoking. And also, he noticed with a sinking feeling, about as impressed-looking as the angry professor.
“Addison Forbes Montgomery.” She replied curtly, turning back to the cadaver, and in any other circumstances he would have mocked her for the rich-sounding name, but he was literally speechless. This was ridiculous, he needed to pull himself together, because oh GodMark had noticed and he was not going to hear the end of this later. But all he could think as he struggled to pull himself together long enough to do something useful was damn she was hot.
Derek stumbled through the rest of the class somehow, focusing on making it to the end without tripping over either his words or his feet (the latter having actually happened once, in front of his high school crush. It had been Chemistry class. He’d been carrying a bottle of hydrochloric acid. Sometimes he still had nightmares about it).
He’d learned a trick or two since high school (growing into his nose had helped), most of them tried and tested in the sleazy bars which Mark insisted upon dragging them to, but this girl seemed impervious to all of them. Perhaps, he mused, thinking back to the thoroughly unwanted lecture which his sisters had once decided to deliver on how to woo a woman, now was the time to just man up and ask her out. Now was certainly the time to do something, given that everyone else was now preparing to leave while he was standing there like a gormless idiot.
“What are you doing this weekend?” He blurted. (Smooth, Derek, real smooth, a voice in his head, which sounded suspiciously like his sister Nancy, chided. It’s meant to be an enquiry, not an interrogation.)
“Studying?” She squeaked, eyeing him nervously (as well she might, he had just for all intents and purposes demanded to know what she was doing with her free time), before throwing her bag over her shoulder and scurrying off. So much for the seduction of the century.
“Well she looked like she’d been shot out of a cannon.” Mark laughed, breezing over. “You didn’t trip over your feet again, did you?” He paused in his tracks, seeing the dejected look on his friend’s face. “Look, man, I wouldn’t worry about her. She looks a bit high maintenance if you ask me. Nice ass though.”
This last came almost as an afterthought, and Derek couldn’t help but chuckle. Mark really did never stop. And, much as he knew it was a bad thing to do, slagging off the latest girl to break his heart never failed to help.
“Did you know she had two last names?”He asked his best friend, allowing incredulity to take over from shame. And that was the last he expected to think about Addison Forbes Montgomery.
~~~~
Chapter 2 – The Awkward First Coffee
Addison’s smiling when she comes into the bedroom, actually smiling, and not in a smug “I just got one over you and your dirty mistress” kind of way. Derek would comment on it, but he knows that it’d just lead to another fight, because her response would be that Seattle doesn’t make her feel much like smiling, and then he would have to retort that it was her who drove him out here in the first place, her and his man-whore of a best friend, and then, well it wouldn’t end pleasantly. So he sidesteps that particular train of thought, and instead opts for asking her who was on the phone, even though he already knows. At least it shouldn’t end in an argument.
“It was Nae.” She grins, flopping down on the bed beside him. “I told her what we were doing, and she said that if we were talking about how we got together then she should get a special mention.”
“Oh?” Derek snorts, remembering just how ‘helpful’ Naomi had been in that respect. “What, for being utterly terrifying?”
“Addison giggles, flipping open her phone. “I’m telling her you said that!”
“You’re stalling.” Derek accuses, making a grab for the phone in her hand.
“Stalling?” Addison arches an eyebrow. “And why would I be stalling?”
“Because you don’t want to remember that dreadful coffee date, which Naomi is totally responsible for by the way!”
“It wasn’t the coffee date that was awful, it was your invitation!” She shoots back, but relents, snapping her phone shut. “Alright Nae, this is for you!”
~~~~
In retrospect it had been pretty dreadful, but then when a date interrupts a marathon study session, it can hardly be expected to be great. Addison was entrenched in the library, surrounded by stacks of textbooks and piles of hastily scribbled notes and utterly convinced that she was about the fail everything and be sent home to Connecticut in disgrace, when she heard someone clearing their throat behind her. She turned around, fully prepared to tell the inconsiderate somebody to either get some cough drops or get out because couldn’t they see that some people were busy having meltdowns here, but then she realised that it was her hot lab partner from Gross Anatomy class. At this she froze, because although her reflection might have said different, in her head she was still sixteen years old with braces and an ‘I Love Band’ t-shirt, and talking to a guy, especially a hot guy, was just about the scariest thing in the world.
Hot Lab Partner Guy (whose name, if she remembered correctly from all of the other millions of facts that she was currently trying to cram into her brain, was Derek) was also looking decidedly uncomfortable, which helped, although only a little.
“Um, hi.” He muttered, addressing his greeting to somewhere around Addison’s left elbow. “I’m Derek. You know, we were lab partners.”
She just nodded, the power of speech not having yet been restored to her. Failing all of her exams and getting sent back to Connecticut was looking more and more attractive.
“So, I was wondering.” Derek ploughed on. “You look like you’ve been studying for a long time, I mean, you have a lot of notes, which would suggest you’ve been here a while. So I guess you must be tired. And coffee helps, if you’re tired that is, so I was wondering, would you like to get some? Some coffee, I mean?”
A long pause ensued.
“With you?” Addison finally squeaked, then cursed herself. Of course he meant with him, he wasn’t going to be just suggesting she get coffee on her own (although by now he might be wishing he had).
“With me.” Derek confirmed, and then added quickly. “I mean, you could go with someone else, but then your scary friend might kill me.”
Addison was shocked out of her muteness by this. “My scary friend?”
Derek froze, his expression stranded somewhere between horror and acute embarrassment. Addison smiled. Watching Derek bumble his way awkwardly through his invitation was making her feel a little less awkward herself.
“Her name’s Naomi.” She offered. “And she can be pretty scary when she wants to be. It’s generally best to do as she says.”
A more relaxed grin spread across Derek’s face. “I guess you’d better accept my offer then. After all, you wouldn’t want to incite her wrath. C’mon…” He added, seeing the nervous look that she gave her pile of notes. “You’ve studied more than everyone else in this entire library. I think you deserve a break.”
She wasn’t sure if it was the grin, or the hair, or (as she would tell everyone who enquired about their first date) the fact that she just really wanted a coffee, but she caved in then, and let Derek lead her out of the library. Suddenly failure didn’t seem quite so important.
~~~~
Chapter 3 – The Birthday Party
“Is that Nae again?” Derek asks, raising his eyebrows at Addison as she sprawls across the bed, phone pressed to her ear.
“It is.” Addison replies, shooting him a look. It’s a look he knows well, the “I wouldn’t have to spend three hours on the phone/buy $900 shoes/stalk around the hospital terrorizing interns if you hadn’t decided to move to Seattle and live in a trailer” look. He has a feeling though that it’s about to be replaced by an even less impressed look, when she hears what he has to say.
“Can I give her a message?”
Addison’s brow furrows in confusion, as well it might. Derek and Naomi speak about twice a year, when Derek calls to ask Naomi what Addison wants for Christmas, and when Derek calls to ask Naomi what Addison wants for her birthday. As neither of those dates is approaching, he has no reason for wanting to talk to her.
“Tell her she wasn’t the only one who brought us together.”
“Oh?” The frown of confusion deepens.
“She only got us over the first hurdle. What really set the ball rolling was tequila.”
The look that his wife gives him as she shuts the bedroom door in his face is painfully clear. “Conversation closed.” It says. “You are not telling that story!” But if they’re meant to be talking about finding and losing the magic, it seems the perfect story to tell.
~~~~
“Dereeeeek!”
The additional five syllables she had managed to insert into his name as she hurtled off the bar stool into his arms alerted him to his girlfriend’s state of drunkenness. Perhaps leaving it until this late to arrive at her birthday party had been a mistake, but what had been meant to be a five minute phone call to his mother to let her know he was still alive had turned into a two hour rundown of everything he’d eaten in the past month, and he’d thought that Naomi would be here. Well he hadn’t been wrong on the last count; she was here in the bar, just on the other side of it, getting her face eaten by Sam Bennett. Which had left Addison with only the thoroughly bored-looking barman and his extensive range of drinks for company. He supposed he should at least be grateful that she seemed to be a happy drunk.
“You gonna buy me a drink?” She slurred now, toppling unsteadily back onto her barstool. “This is Steve, Steve makes drinks! Steve knows how to make EVERYTHING! He’s my new friend!”
From the grim smile which Steve gave Derek at this, he wasn’t sure that the man was exactly thrilled about being Addison’s new friend. Nor was he sure that his girlfriend should be allowed anything more to drink, but apparently that decision was not his to make, as she was already ordering tequila slammers for the pair of them.
“Addie, I don’t…” like tequila, he was about to finish, when that particular problem was eliminated as she downed his slammer as well as her own, nose scrunching at the taste.
“I thought you weren’t gonna come!” She accused, gesticulating wildly and almost falling face first onto the floor. By the time she had righted herself (with more than a little help from Derek’s stabilizing arm) she was giggling hysterically, all traces of accusation forgotten. “But it’s OK, because I got drunk! And I’m a WASP, so that is not an easy thing to do!” This declaration was made without the slightest hint of irony, as if it wasn’t obvious to everyone else in the bar that Addison Forbes Montgomery was, in fact, plastered.
“I’m sorry I’m so late.” He explained anyway, although he already knew that his excuse was pretty pathetic. “It’s just I hadn’t phoned home in weeks and then just as I was about to leave Kathleen called me and gave me some psychobabble about empty nest syndrome, which is ridiculous because it’s not like Mom even has an empty nest, and the way Amy behaves sometimes she probably wishes she does, but anyway I figured I’d better call, and I thought I could make it quick but you know what moms are like…”
He trailed off lamely, hoping that Addison was drunk enough to find the crap that he’d just spouted amusing. Instead, she seemed to have crumpled.
“Yeah, I guess.” She muttered in a small voice, staring hard at her empty shot glass. Oh crap. This was not the way he’d imagined this evening panning out.
“Addie?” He tilted her chin up, noting with horror the tears pooling in the startlingly blue eyes. Perhaps telling her he’d ditched her for his family hadn’t been the smartest of ideas. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to upset you…”
“It’s not you.” She wrenched herself away from him, hands waving wildly as she began to rant drunkenly at him. “It’s just, what are moms like? Because I’m actually not sure if I know. I guess they’re meant to call you on your birthday, aren’t they? And if they don’t, and you end up calling them first, then you might expect them to wish you a happy birthday, rather than asking you why you’re calling because they really don’t have the time right now? And then, when you tell them what day it is, they probably aren’t meant to say…”at this she put on an exaggeratedly affected tone “…well we had a gift sent over darling, what more do you expect?”
Tears were streaming unchecked down her cheeks by now, and Derek reached out a hand to comfort her but she turned on him, tone accusatory once again.
“Well? Would your mother say that?”
Derek just shook his head mutely, because no, his mother would never do anything like that. Even Mark’s parents, who were the closest thing to neglectful he had ever known, had never done anything quite that bad. He now felt even worse for having turned up two hours late.
By now Addison was crying in earnest, her face in her hands, and this time when Derek put his arm around her, she didn’t shrug him off. “I’m so sorry Addie.” He murmured, rubbing soothing circles on her back, and he wasn’t really even talking about his lateness anymore. “What can I do?”
“Take me home?” The voice was so quiet, so choked with sobs, that he almost didn’t hear it, and for once he was grateful for having grown up with four sisters. Twenty four years of deciphering girl flip-out could finally be put to good use.
Dumping the contents of his wallet on the bar (he didn’t know how much Addison had already paid Steve, but he probably deserved it), he scooped his girlfriend up in his arms and made for the exit. In an instant, her arms were around his neck and her face was buried in his shirt, leaving mascara stains that he would never be able to get out, but he probably deserved that too.
Half an hour later he was lowering Addison onto the bed in the small apartment she shared with Naomi. Somewhere between him realizing that he had given Steve his taxi money and his arms falling asleep, she had cried herself out and she was half-asleep herself as he kissed her and turned to go. It was pure luck that made him turn in the doorway, just in time to see her reach sleepily for him.
“Addie? You want me to stay?” They’d been dating a few months now, but sleepovers were definitely not something they did.
“Do you mind?” Her voice was even smaller than before, and she seemed to be on the verge of tears again. “It’s just…I don’t think Naomi’s coming back tonight and I really don’t want to be on my own and…”
“I’ll stay.” He cut her off, something in his chest aching at the vulnerability in her tone, and the way she cuddled into him as soon as he slid into bed beside her, like she was afraid he was about to disappear. She was quirky, and neurotic, and downright annoying at times, but she was Addison, and no-one should be allowed to make her cry like that.
“I love you Derek.” She mumbled into his chest as she dropped off, and he grinned sleepily.
“I love you too.” He whispered into the darkened room, even though he knew that she was no longer able to hear him. Because if there was one thing that tonight had shown him, it was that he did.
~~~~
Chapter 4 – The Accidental Triple Date
“I am picking the story tonight.” Addison says firmly, plonking two large bags of Chinese food down on the counter in the trailer. “And it is not going to be one that embarrasses me like the last one. Or one that prompts the therapist to start asking about my ‘unresolved childhood issues’. If I wanted that I would go to a regular therapist, not a couples’ therapist. The couples’ therapist is meant to deal with our problems as a couple!”
“Sure.” Derek replies distractedly, far more interested in the contents of the bags than his wife’s girl flip-out. “If you brought Chinese food, you can tell whatever stories you like.” He shoots her a sly look, before adding. “The therapist was right though. You definitely have unresolved childhood issues.”
As he continues to pull the tops off the foil containers and empty the food onto both their plates, she sits cross-legged, scowling at him. Finally he looks up and immediately bursts out laughing at the expression on her face.
“Sorry honey, but you know I’m right.”
“Don’t call me honey!” She snaps, feeling a pang as she remembers him saying almost exactly the same words to her the day after she arrived in Seattle. She snatches up her chopsticks, and begins to eat without looking at him, only to glance up when she hears him snort with laughter once again.
“Wha-?” She starts, ready to berate him for teasing her about her issues when she realises why he’s laughing. A chunk of chicken has made a bid for freedom, leaving a sticky orange trail down the front of his white shirt.
“Honestly Derek,” she reprimands playfully, her former bad mood forgotten. “You’re a brain surgeon. How can you be so hopeless at using chopsticks?”
He shrugs sheepishly, spearing the next piece of chicken on his chopstick so it can’t escape. “They’re difficult! Anyway, what was this story you wanted to tell me? The one that won’t lead to a conversation about your issues?”
“Well,” she begins, ignoring the jibe as she twirls a noodle around her own chopsticks.”Do you remember the first time we ate Chinese food together?” And though her fingers are occupied, under the table she crosses her toes.
~~~~
“No way, Naomi!” Addison shouted through the closed bathroom door. This was always her best friend’s way, to tell her about her latest brilliant plan when she was a captive audience, or at the very least when she couldn’t reach her to strangle her.
“But Addie…” Naomi pleaded, and though she couldn’t see her face, Addison could imagine the puppy dog eyes. “It’ll be fun. And besides, you’ve been dating Derek for nearly a year now and I’ve barely met him.”
“That is so not true!” Addison fired back, mentally admonishing herself for the childish retort. “You have classes together all the time.”
“Classes aren’t the same!” Naomi whined, childishness apparently being the name of the game today. “I don’t get to talk to him properly there! And you and Sam talk all the time, so it’s only fair that Derek and I should be friends too.” She took a deep breath, clearly gearing up for a long speech. Addison looked at her watch. A long speech was definitely not something which she had time for today.
“Alright!” She relented, opening the door and rolling her eyes when her best friend almost fell into the bathroom. “But seriously? A double date? Does that really sound like fun to you?”
The grin on her friend’s face confirmed her worst fears.
~~~~
If a double date had sounded like torture to Addison, a triple date was equivalent to public execution. And when the third couple included Mark Sloan? Well, to say that she was hating it was an understatement. But, unfortunately for her, Derek had not only thought that this was a good idea, but he had proved to be almost as good as Naomi at making puppy dog eyes (although she wasn’t sure if it was the date itself he liked the idea of or just the opportunity to make her squirm. Sometimes, Derek could be as childish as his best friend).
However, it was her who was being proved right, not that she was enjoying the opportunity to gloat. This date was the dictionary definition of a disaster, from the dreadful food, to awkward silences, to the fact that Mark Sloan was living up to his nature and was eating his date rather than the food on his plate. Add to this the fact that Sam seemed to have developed a virulent dislike for Derek and was shooting daggers at him every time he opened his mouth to speak and it was completely understandable that Addison had spent more time in the bathroom than at the table.
“So, do we want dessert?” Naomi asked, studying the menu. Derek was reaching out to take a menu himself, an interested expression on his face, when Addison seized her moment. She kicked out under her table, the pointed toe of her shoe connecting with his shin. He grimaced, and glared at her, and she motioned towards the door with her eyes. As far as she was concerned, this was make or break for them. If he could read the signals and get her out of there, then he was a keeper.
Luckily, he took the bait. “You know what guys, I think I’m going to have to bail.” He said, massaging his temples. “I’ve got a killer headache, it just came on, so here…” He took out his wallet and tossed a few bills onto the table. “…this should cover our share. Addie, do you want to come back with me?”
She didn’t need to be asked twice.
~~~~
Three hours later they were sprawled across his bed, surrounded by empty Chinese cartons. Derek had passed the test with flying colours, not only getting Addison out of there, but also picking up on the fact that she’d barely eaten anything at dinner and buying her Chinese takeout on the way home. He’d then proved to be endearingly hopeless at using chopsticks and more than amenable to her teaching, at which point the food had been forgotten. Now, entwined together sleepily, the terrible date seemed a million years ago.
“Promise me something?” Derek murmured into Addison’s hair.
“What is it?” She asked sleepily.
“That we never go along with your best friend’s harebrained schemes again?”
“Alright.” She responded. “If we never go on a date with your best friend again.”
“Deal.”
~~~~
Chapter 5 – The Seduction
After the mini-breakthrough, which Addison thinks was mainly caused by the Chinese food anyway, they are back to sulking and silence for weeks. Addison thinks it was the inclusion of Mark in her story that did it, and reprimands herself severely. She tries everything to get him to speak to her again (although she’s tried everything three times over, and truth be told she’s getting a little tired of being the only one working at this marriage), but in the end it’s the couples’ therapist who gets them talking again. She doesn’t know what he says, just that one day Derek goes alone to couples’ therapy and that evening he’s different. Not much different, but a little less of a sulky child (which is good, because if there’s one thing she’s more tired of than being the only one working at her marriage, it’s being married to someone with the emotional capacity of a three year-old). And the next night he has a new memory for her.
~~~~
It was getting to be ridiculous. He knew he’d said he was happy to wait, and he was because he loved her (and besides, yet another happy side-effect of growing up with four sisters was that he was far too much of a gentleman to press the issue). But he was still a man, and having this gorgeous, sexy woman in his life, in his room, sometimes even in his bed, without anything else going on, was getting to be more than he can stand.
Which is why he was pleased, if a little surprised, when he returned from a tutor meeting late one night to find his girlfriend half-naked in his bed.
“Addie?” He asked, and then cussed under his breath, because if there was a correct way to handle this situation then that certainly was not it.
“Of course.” She replied, a mock-offended expression on her face. “How many other girls do you bring in here?”
“Well technically,” he laughed, leaning down to kiss her. “I didn’t bring you in here. I’m guessing Mark let you in?”
She nodded. “And he guessed what we were going to do, which was really embarrassing. Did you tell him we hadn’t done it yet?”
“No!” He defended quickly. “I think he knows though. He’s got a sixth sense for all things sexual.”
She giggled a little at that, before biting her bottom lip, suddenly insecure. “Are you mad at me for making you wait this long?”
“Of course not!” He reassured, and he really wasn’t, not now that she was here, not now that this was finally going to happen. And then, because he was still too much of a gentleman for his own good. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
In reply, she simply sat up, letting the covers slide off her body and land in a forlorn-looking pile on the floor. Then she kissed him, hard and passionately. He could taste red wine and vanilla and her, and it was so perfect that he would have punched the air had he still been a sixteen year-old virgin (but luckily Mark had warned him off that particular habit).
“Does that answer your question?” She laughed, tugging insistently at the bottom of his shirt until he pulled it over his head and threw it onto the floor beside the abandoned duvet. “Don’t worry, I’m ready. I’ve had my Dutch courage and everything.”
“How much?” He asked, lowering himself onto the bed, as she fiddled with his belt. She didn’t seem drunk, but it was another of those things that he just had to check.
“Honestly?” She chewed on her lip again, fingers never leaving his belt. “Three glasses of wine. But Naomi had a whole bottle before her first time with Sam and she still remembered it.” She froze, clapping a hand to her mouth in horror. “And I did not just tell you that!”
“You did not just tell me that.” He repeated soothingly, as his girlfriend paused in her undressing of him to fret about the information that she had just divulged. Or maybe it was more than that. “Hey.” He reached out to rub her arm. “Are you nervous?”
“Maybe a little.” She admitted, teeth still working a groove into her lower lip. “It’s just…I haven’t done this much before and, well, it hasn’t exactly been great.”
He just smiled reassuringly. “Relax, Addie. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to…but trust me, you and me? We will be great.”
The smile that she gave him was still a little timid, but she returned her hands to his waist, slipping off his belt and motioning that it was time for his jeans to join the pile on the floor. He pressed his lips against hers, kissing her gently at first and then with increasing urgency, his fingers groping for the clasp of her bra. And then his lips were moving down her neck to her breasts (not exactly unchartered territory, but tonight, with her breathing slowing as his mouth closed around her nipple and her fingers delving into his boxers with newfound confidence, it all felt new and different).
The kisses trailed quickly down her stomach, her skin feeling hot and fevered under his lips as her hand curled tighter around his penis, the fingers of her other hand tangled in his hair. He paused momentarily with his hand on the waistband of her panties, before her moan of impatience told him all that he needed to know. It all went quickly after that, shamefully so, as he thrusted, and she failed to suppress a scream of delight, and the headboard rattled against the wall (and if Mark hadn’t known before what they were planning on doing, then he definitely knew now).
“So,” he murmured, as she curled into his chest, silent and sated. “Was that good?”
“No.” She replied, lifting her head to laugh at the expression on his face. “It was great. Just like you promised.”
~~~~
Chapter 6 – The Parting
When you’re trying to rekindle a burnt-out flame of a marriage, there are good days and bad days. Today is definitely not one the good days. And for once, she can’t even blame it on Derek. He may be as sullen and un-communicative as ever, but she hasn’t caught him staring in Meredith’s direction in over a week, and that alone is proof that he’s trying. No, today the problem is all Addison.
Or, from her perspective, the problem is all Seattle. She hates the city, with its gossiping interns, and its lack of skyscrapers, and its constant miserable rain. Leaving New York to live here, and especially to live in a trailer (which some people may have been able to be content with, but not people who had spent the past ten years living in ten million dollar townhouses), just seems like some sick cosmic joke. And to add insult to injury the ferryboat that Derek just loves taking to work every morning makes her feel nauseous. It’s all a little too much to take at times, and every day that her marriage fails to work she gets one step closer to packing it all in and returning to New York.
There’s one thing though that never fails to keep her going, and that’s her concerns about how others perceive her. She’s a Forbes Montgomery after all, and if there’s one thing she’s taken from her upbringing, it’s an acute, almost paralysing fear of being seen as weak. Showing even the tiniest glimpse of your emotions makes you weak and giving up, well giving up is off the radar. So when the therapist fixes them with his stern look, the one that says ‘you’re not working at this’, it’s her who feels guilty. Derek, who spends his days actively not working at fixing their marriage, just glowers at the therapist with the air of a schoolboy in the principal’s office. But Addison, who has done nothing but work since she arrived in this hellhole, averts her eyes and flushes, reverting to her own schoolgirl state.
That night, she tosses and turns in the tangled sheets while Derek snores contentedly beside her. Finally, as shafts of sunlight stream through the gaps in the blinds, she rolls over and pinches him.
“I shouldn’t be the only one feeling guilty.” She gripes, daring him to complain that he’s tired when he’s got at least six hours of sleep on her. “But apparently I am, and besides it’s my turn, so this is me working at this.”
~~~~
The familiar buzzing of the alarm clock filled Derek’s tiny bedroom, shortly followed the thud of Mark’s fist connecting with the partition wall and a disembodied voice shouting “Derek, turn the damn thing off!” Addison reached over her boyfriend’s still-sleeping form to slap the snooze button, suppressing a sigh as she did so. It was a routine so familiar that it felt like it was burned into her brain, but it was all about to change. Because that alarm was not summoning them to lectures or classes, or anything remotely academic. It was a reminder that they had to get up because in just a few hours Addison would be boarding a plane to Connecticut, flying home for the summer. And she had absolutely no desire to go.
“Addie?” Derek stirred beside her. “What time is it? Late…flight…can’t miss…”
“Shhh!” She laughed, leaning in to kiss him good morning. “We’re not late, we’re fine. And you shouldn’t try to think without coffee inside you! I’ll go make some.”
Dressed in nothing more than his oversized college shirt, she padded out into the hallway. Normally she might have put up more of a fight over whose turn it was to make coffee, but she’d been awake for hours already, and besides she needed a moment to collect her emotions. If she wasn’t careful she’d end up crying all over him, and that was not a memory she wanted to leave him with.
“Morning.” Mark raised his coffee mug sleepily in her direction as she entered the kitchen. Horrified, she stopped in her tracks, trying to will back the tears that had been beginning to force their way out. Of all the days that Mark could have chosen to surface before noon, it would have to have been today. Explaining her out-of-control emotions to her boyfriend’s ass of a best friend was going to make her terrible day that little bit worse.
To his credit though, Mark was actually showing something resembling sensitivity, averting his gaze as she swiped the back of her hand underneath her watering eyes. “Coffee?” He asked when she appeared to have composed herself.
She nodded, raising her eyebrows as he filled a dubiously clean mug from the pot on the table. “I need one for Derek too; I’m going to take it in to him….” Her voice trailed off as the tears threatened again. An uncomfortable expression passed across Mark’s face as he studied her, but he patted the kitchen bench beside him. “Sit down a sec. Prince Charming can wait five minutes for his coffee.”
She surprised herself by complying, normally there were at least fifteen things that she’d rather do than spend time alone with Mark, but he seemed to be behaving like a normal human being for once, and she needed a caffeine hit to be able to control herself (which was ridiculous, because Forbes Montgomerys should be able to control themselves with or without coffee, but right now she didn’t feel much like a Forbes Montgomery).
“So….” Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat as she took a long gulp of coffee. “You’re going home today, right?” He inhaled tentatively, sounding much less sure of himself than usual. “Is that the problem?”
Addison nearly dropped her mug in shock. She hadn’t thought that there was a sensitive bone in Mark’s body and here he was sensing her problems without her having to say a single word? She had to be dreaming. But, just as she was about to pinch herself, she remembered a conversation she’d had with Derek a few months ago, as she complained about Mark’s, well, Mark-ness, and he attempted to defend his best friend. “I know he’s an ass,” she remembered him saying, “but he has his reasons. His family aren’t great; they never taught him to connect like a normal person.” Maybe Mark understood her reasons for not wanting to go home better than anyone.
So she just cleared her throat and nodded, not volunteering any information, simply hoping that he understood. From the expression of increased discomfort, she guessed that he did.
“Look, Addison,” he began awkwardly. “I know you and I aren’t exactly friends, and any advice I give you you’re probably going to ignore, but here goes nothing. I’m the ass, not Derek; he’s actually pretty good at this emotional crap. So just tell him you’re upset and you’re going to miss him. If you don’t he won’t work it out, because he might not be me but he’s still a man, but if you do he’ll appreciate it. And it won’t scare him away. He’s got four sisters.” He added, sounding more like his usual self. “No amount of emotional crap could scare him away. I’m starting to think he might actually like it.”
Addison swallowed hard, not quite managing to make it past the lump in her throat. “Thanks Mark,” she choked out, picking up Derek’s mug of coffee from the table. “And, you know, we can be friends. If you want?”
He gave nothing more than a grunt in reply, emotional quota apparently having been filled for the year, but she thought it was an affirmative grunt. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.
“Took you long enough.” Derek teased, as she set the mug down on his desk. But his teasing grin faded as she turned and flung herself at him, burying herself in his chest. “Addie? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to go home!” She sniffled into his shirt. “I’ll miss you too much! And anyway, you’ve turned me into this pathetic cry-baby; I’ll never survive back among the WASPs!”
“You are not a cry-baby!” He defended, stroking her hair. “I’m sure you’ll be fine among the WASPs, you might just need a while to settle in. But I’ll miss you too. In fact, I was thinking…” He paused for a fraction longer than necessary, and she raised her head from his chest to look at him.
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking…how would you like to come and visit me during the summer? Give you something to look forward to?”
Try as she might, Addison couldn’t suppress a squeal of delight. She just hoped that Mark’s new-found sensitivity would last long enough for him not to tease her about it later.
~~~~
Chapter 7 – The Visit Part 1
“Your mother called.” Addison says as soon as Derek walks through the door. It sounds like an accusation and he is not in the mood for accusations.
“And?” He asks, daring her to continue this. He should know better. When it comes to his mother, Addison is not known for her ability to let it go.
“And she hates me.” Addison scowls, holding up a hand to silence him when he starts to protest. “Don’t you dare start denying it; she’s hated me since the moment she laid eyes on me!”
Derek opens his mouth to argue, then closes it again. He’s not even sure why he’s been lying about this for so long, and he’s especially not sure why he’s lying about it now. Why does she deserve protecting?
“You see!” She accuses now, seizing on the moment of hesitation. “You’re not denying it because you know I’m right!”
“No I’m not denying it because you told me not to…” He trails off, throwing his hands in the air in frustration. “You know what, forget it! She hates you, always has, always will! Are you happy now?” He’s expecting another outburst from her, maybe even tears (it wouldn’t be the first time when they got onto the topic of his mother) but instead she just swallows, as if literally digesting the information and then looks at him with a calm, measured expression.
“Alright, thank you.”He can see the hurt in her eyes, because this wasn’t the news she wanted even if it was what she expected. But she’s plowing on bravely (or perhaps just stubbornly) regardless. “And now I want you to tell me the truth about that first visit.”
“Addie…” He doesn’t know why she’s insisting on digging all of this up, it’s only going to hurt her and he doesn’t know if he has it in him to comfort her right now. But the hand’s up again, silencing him for a second time, although she’s not talking over him this time. Instead she’s letting her eyes do the talking. “You owe me this, Derek,” they’re saying. And he’s not sure he owes her anything, but he never could resist those eyes, so he gives in.
~~~~
“Derek wait, can we run through this one more time?” Addison fretted, fidgeting in the passenger seat of the car. Quickly weighing up the risks of crashing the car versus those of Addison’s head exploding, Derek decided that the latter was the most likely to occur and removed a hand from the wheel to place it on his girlfriend’s knee.
“Addie, relax. My sisters are going to love you, regardless of whether you can remember their birthdays, specialties, and favourite childhood toys, alright?”
Addison failed to laugh at this admittedly pathetic attempt to rally her, and instead moved on to her next worry. “And your mom? You’re her only son; she’s bound to hate me. She’ll be testing me, trying to find out if I’ll make a good wife for you. And I’m a WASP, Derek, I don’t cook and I don’t clean. You’ve seen me in the kitchen; I burn toast, for Christ’s sake!”
“Breathe.” He reminded her, having noticed a distinct lack of that particular activity from her in the duration of her rant. “Relax, be yourself, and try not to give yourself an ulcer. You’re not on trial here, and you’d win them over even if you were.”
He turned into his driveway, glancing sideways at his girlfriend. “We’re here. Now please tell me you’re not about to throw up, because that may not make for the best of first impressions. Not to mention what it’d do to the upholstery.”
She took a deep breath, clasping her hands together in a futile attempt to keep them from trembling. “I’m not about to throw up.” Another deep breath. “At least I hope I’m not.”
At that moment, the door to the house opened and a girl emerged in a blur of dark hair and teenage limbs. She made for the car at a sprint, and had her hand on the door handle when Derek’s mother’s voice sounded angrily from within the house.
“Amy! Amelia Shepherd you get back inside this instant! Is running around the yard like a Tasmanian devil any way to greet a guest?”
“I was just trying to be welcoming.” Derek heard his youngest sister say sulkily, but she turned around and traipsed back to the doorway, where Carolyn Shepherd had just appeared, flanked on both sides by Derek’s three other sisters.
“You’re definitely not going to throw up?” Derek checked, waiting for the affirming nod before jumping out of the car and moving round to the passenger side to let his girlfriend out. “Then it’s time to meet the monsters.”
Trying not to feel like he was throwing her to the wolves, especially when he saw the grimace on his mother’s face as he hauled the expensively branded luggage out of the trunk, he took Addison by the hand and half-led, half-dragged her over to his waiting family.
“So,” he announced, clearing his throat nervously (because this hadn’t seemed like a big deal before but all of a sudden it really did). “Everyone, this is Addison. And Addison, this is my mom, Carolyn, and my sisters Kathleen, Nancy, Joanna, and Amelia.” He cleared his throat again and gave his best boyish grin, pleading with his family with his eyes. Unfortunately, Addison chose this moment to do the one thing guaranteed to irritate his mother: unleash the WASP full-force.
“Addison Forbes Montgomery.” She said stiffly, reminding him with a jolt of the day they first met. She stuck out an arm that might as well have been made of cardboard. “Pleased to meet you Mrs. Shepherd.”
Derek winced at the expression that crossed his mother’s face before she collected herself and held out her own hand. “Please dear, call me Carolyn,” she offered, although her tone lacked its usual warmth. Derek resisted the urge to hit his head hard against the wall, suppressing a sigh of relief when his sisters ignored Addison’s attempts to be formal, instead throwing themselves on her with their usual exuberance. Addison looked shocked for a moment but then a slow smile lit up her face and she relaxed into the embrace (at least as much as you can relax when surrounded on all sides by hyperactive Shepherd women).
“So Addison,” Derek’s mother disturbed the peace, smiling an unusually calculating smile. “I was thinking that you could help me with the dinner. I’m making Derek’s favourite.”
Once the women had disappeared inside the house, Addison throwing pleading looks over her shoulder, Derek gave into the head-hitting urge. It might have killed brain cells, but in this situation it was sorely necessary.
~~~~
Chapter 8 – The Visit Part 2
“You’ve been avoiding me for days.” Derek accuses, easing himself between the sheets beside his wife. “Now I don’t want to suggest that I’m not grateful for the respite in trailer-related complaints, but shouldn’t we talk about this?”
“I’m tired.” Addison replies, her voice muffled through a mouthful of pillow. She isn’t, not really, but she doesn’t want to tell him how she’s really feeling, that she’s still stinging from his admission. She might have pushed it out of him, and she might have suspected it, but eleven years of suspecting that somebody hates you still doesn’t prepare you for the reality of that fact. And, more than anything, that reality makes her concerned for the future. Their future. If his family hates her, what chance do they have of making this work?
“Addison…” He puts a hand on her back, rubbing at the spot on the nape of her neck where the tension always gathers. A year ago she might have melted at the touch, but now the action just feels hollow and meaningless, and she shrugs away from his touch, voicing her concerns for the first time.
“Derek, will you just leave me be? How do you expect me to feel? I’ve just found out that not only do you hate me but your entire family does too!” Her voice wavers on the last few words and she’s grateful for the darkness in the room, allowing her to hide her emotions.
“Addison…” He says again, and her voice is gentle. “I don’t hate you, I might have a funny way of showing it sometimes, but I don’t. My mother doesn’t hate you either. I know I said she did before, but I was angry and I was sick of defending her to you and you to her. But she doesn’t hate you, she might not love you the way you want her to, but she does not hate you. And my sisters most definitely do not hate you, they never have. Do you not remember the rest of that visit?”
She nods into the pillow, not quite ready to test the strength of her voice, but he’s not letting this one go.
“You made a demand of me a couple of nights ago, and now I’m making one of you. I want you to tell me about the rest of your visit. I want you to remember that my sisters love you, so much that it’s irritating at times, but they definitely love you.”
“OK.” Addison nods into the pillow again, a small smile breaking through. “I’ll tell you.”
~~~~
In all of her nightmares about how badly this could have gone, Addison had definitely not imagined this. Less than half an hour into dinner and she was locked in the bathroom in tears. But then, when Derek had told her stories about his mother, he had painted a picture of a warm, kind woman who would go out of her way to welcome anyone new into her home. So far, Addison had not seen many signs of that. Carolyn Shepherd was doing her best to trip her up at every hurdle, and hurdles had never exactly been Addison’s area of expertise. Who knew that you could slice carrots in the wrong way? Or that greaseproof paper produced so much smoke when you set fire to it? And did Carolyn really have to be so mean about all of it?
Blowing her nose hard, splashing cold water on her cheeks, she unlocked the door. She wasn’t sure that she was really ready to face them yet, but she supposed she’d have to be. Leaving the table for long periods of time was only going to give Carolyn more reasons to hate her, as if she didn’t have enough already.
As she stepped out into the hall, she almost tripped over a pair of long legs blocking her exit. She stumbled, caught herself just in time and grinned sheepishly at Amelia, the youngest of the Shepherd girls. Amelia grinned back, a conspiratorial grin.
“Don’t let her get you down.” She said. “Mom, I mean. I know you think she hates you, and you’re probably right, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Addison spluttered, perilously close to tears once again. “You just admitted to me that my boyfriend’s mother probably hates me and you say it doesn’t matter?”
Amelia patted the ground beside her with another grin, and Addison sank down gratefully, leaning against the wall. “It doesn’t. She has behaved like this with every one of my sisters’ boyfriends, no matter how nice they are. And she was bound to be worse with Derek, he’s the boy.”
“What about Derek’s other girlfriends?” Addison asked, relishing the opportunity to get all of the questions out. The only person she knew who knew Derek was Mark and she was not about to start asking him for personal details. Not if she wanted to live it down.
Amelia giggled, an infectious giggle that made Addison forget she’d wanted to cry just a moment before. “What other girlfriends? He’s never brought one home before. In fact, we were starting to worry about him if you know what I mean?” She winked, and Addison couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
“You see?” Amelia encouraged. “It doesn’t matter! My mom may not be head over heels in love with you, but my brother sure is. And by the looks of things, you’re winning my sisters over pretty well too.”
“What about you?” Addison wasn’t quite sure why that had slipped out, or why she was feeling quite so nervous about the response. She just had a feeling that winning Amelia Shepherd over was one hurdle that she couldn’t afford to trip up on.
“Hmmm…” Amelia pursed her lips in a mock-thoughtful expression, studying Addison carefully. “I don’t know…. C’mon does my sharing my pearls of wisdom not make the answer clear enough to ya?” She giggled again at Addison’s still-anxious expression. “The way I see it, if you’re this upset about pleasing my mom, my brother must be really important to you, which can only be a good thing. So sure, I like you.”
Addison’s grin grew to match that of the girl sitting next to her. “Well thanks for the vote of confidence Amelia, but I’d better get back down there and work on the matriarch. You coming?”
Amelia shook her head, nose wrinkled in distaste. “I’ll be down in a bit. And Addison? You can call me Amy.”
Later that night, when Addison was collapsed against Derek’s chest, exhausted from trying to please the unpleasable woman, she related this exchange to him. “I think I won her over.” She confided, smiling into his chest. “Amy, that is, not your mom.”
Derek grinned, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. “Honey, if she’s letting you call her Amy then you definitely won her over.”
Addison still didn’t know why she felt that that was important, but something in his voice confirmed it to her, and against all the odds, she fell asleep with a smile on her face.
~~~~
Chapter 9 – The Christmas Season
There are some words that you regret saying the second they’re out of your mouth. And there are some that you don’t regret until later, when you realise the full extent of the damage you’ve caused. These are some of those words. At first, it just feels like a weight off his chest, and the feeling of relief offsets the guilt. The trouble is, as time passes, he realises he’s in the exact same situation he was before, with one crucial difference. Instead of sitting here listening to his wife chatter non-stop about how much she loves Christmas, he’s sitting in silence, watching her clutch her glass until her knuckles grow white in an attempt to keep the hurt from breaking through the mask. Then he doesn’t feel relieved. He just feels like an ass.
It’s just that sometimes, when he’s wrapped up in his own ego, he forgets that Addison isn’t as poised and polished and perfect as she likes people to think. He forgets how close to the surface the insecurities bubble.
Although he can’t take the words back (and the sentiment would still be there even if he could), he does his best to repent for them. Anything to assuage the guilt he feels when he wakes in the night to the sound of sobs being stifled into the pillow. In an attempt to make up for his earlier reluctance, he now throws himself into their season, buying the biggest turkey he can find, poring over gift catalogues, even proving his new nature skills and chopping down a tree. (Alright, part of a tree. And the rest of the tree may have already been on the ground). But it isn’t enough. His words have cut too deep.
After a Christmas day of watching Addison take miniscule bites of turkey and drink all the alcohol in the trailer, he comes up with one more potential solution. It means admitting that there may be such a thing as ‘recapturing the magic’, but if it breaks through the frosty veneer that his wife is currently putting up, then maybe it’s worth conceding one point to the therapist.
“No more.” He says, as she reaches for the Scotch bottle to refill her empty glass. She just shoots a glare in his direction, ignoring the instruction completely until he places a hand on her arm.
“What?” She snaps, the unspoken ‘you are not seriously withholding alcohol from me’ clear in her tone.
“I was thinking we could…talk.”
“Talk?” She repeats warily, her tone now more resigned.
“Don’t worry.” He reassures. “You might actually like this conversation. Do you remember when Christmas became our season?”
He smiles at the spark of recognition in her eyes.
~~~~
Christmas had always been an important event in the Shepherd family, perhaps more important even than Thanksgiving. His mother blamed their Irish heritage, but if the truth were known it was more to do with the fact that Christmas meant presents. But whatever the reason, Christmas was a big deal for Derek, and being away from home made no difference to this. Through college his had been known as the room to avoid during the Christmas season, unless you wanted to be humming Christmas carols for the next week. And this had shown no signs of changing once he had arrived at med school.
“So Addison,” Mark chuckled, as the three of them stood outside a lecture theatre, stomping their feet against the cold and waiting for Sam and Naomi to return with the coffee they’d gone in search of. “Do you like Christmas?”
“Christmas?” Addison stopped blowing on her frozen fingertips for a moment and frowned at him in confusion. “I guess. But the holidays aren’t for another couple of weeks.”
Mark rolled his eyes. “The holidays may not be here yet, but I can guarantee you Derek will be getting into the Christmas spirit before much longer. I really hope you like Christmas, otherwise you are not going to enjoy being around him!” He ducked to avoid the textbook which Derek was attempting to swing at the back of his head. “Sorry man, but you know it’s true.”
Derek grinned sheepishly at his girlfriend. “Well, it is true that I love Christmas. But you are definitely going to enjoy it.”
If rescuing his girlfriend from the disastrous triple date had been Derek’s test, then this was Addison’s. But, just as he had done, she passed with flying colours, reacting with childlike wonder to the ice-skating, the mulled wine, the Christmas shopping. She said nothing, but celebrating Christmas properly was clearly another thing that WASPs just didn’t do, and the novelty of everything made her all the more enthusiastic. For his part, he was thoroughly enjoying having someone to share his pre-Christmas excitement with.
“Oh God, it’s the Christmas twins!” Mark groaned, making fake vomiting noises as he found the two of them curled up on the couch watching ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. “Seriously, do you two ever stop?”
“But we love Christmas.” Addison smiled at Mark, a sleepy, mulled wine-fuelled smile. She knew that the constant Christmas cheer irritated Mark no end, and wasted no opportunity to annoy him further. “It’s our season.”
~~~~
Chapter 10 – The New Year’s Party
He might be doing his best to atone for it, but Addison isn’t planning on letting Derek’s admission that he fell in love with Meredith Grey slide anytime soon. ….. However, there is one good thing that’s come out of this whole sorry mess, that as part of his atonement, Derek is actually showing some commitment to working at this marriage. So when they squint to watch the ball drop on the tiny television in the trailer and a memory pops into her head, she just starts talking. It’s not like it can make anything worse.
~~~~
“Addison?” Derek’s voice, or what she could hear of it down the crackly phone line, was excited.
“I’m here.” She practically beamed into the phone. It had only been a week, but she was missing him like crazy and just the sound of his voice made the prospect of another two weeks with her family seem a little more bearable.
“You’ll never guess what!” Then silence. He wasn’t seriously expecting her to guess, was he?
“Derek.” She affected her best world-weary tone. “That game requires patience, which is something that I do not have very much of at the moment. I suggest you just tell me.”
“Alright.” He sighed, laughing at her irritability. “What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?”
“Not sure.” She shrugged into the phone. “Some dreadful party no doubt, filled with dreadful men who are all what Bizzy would call perfect husband material.”
“Can you get away?” He asked, and she could picture his raised eyebrows as vividly as if he were standing in front of her. “Because Mark has somehow, do not ask me how, got us tickets to the New Year’s party in Times Square!”
He trailed off into an excited half-squeal, and in the background Addison heard one of his sisters (almost certainly Amy) giggling and mocking him. But if she wasn’t a Forbes Montgomery (or, more importantly, if her mother wasn’t in earshot) she’d let out a squeal of her own, because he’d just given her a ticket out of WASP-ville.
~~~~
“Well, that was fun.” Addison muttered sarcastically. Of course, watching the ball drop had been fun, in an ‘I’m doing something so unbelievably tacky my mother would have a fit if she knew’ kind of way, but having spent the evening in closer proximity to her friends than she ever wanted to be again was a high price to pay for the experience. Mark had, unsurprisingly, disappeared with the first girl to smile in his direction the second the countdown had finished, and Sam and Naomi were also nowhere to be seen. Which left her and Derek alone, not that she was complaining about this turn of events.
“Sorry about that.” Derek apologised. “I suppose I expected it to be…”
“…more fun?” She finished for him. “Don’t worry. I didn’t have to talk to anyone who knew me in high school, which makes it instantly better than any Connecticut party.”
“Good.” Derek flashed her the lopsided grin that never failed to make her melt. “I know I enjoyed the company, if nothing else.”
They were just leaning in for their second (ok, fourth) kiss of the New Year, when a high pitched squeal interrupted them. Glancing over her shoulder in confusion, she saw her best friend practically flying down the street, waving her hands in the air and continuing to scream at the top of her lungs.
“Nae?” Addison reached out for her friend as she skidded to a halt in front of them. “What’s happening?”
Thankfully, Naomi had stopped screaming, but the power of speech still seemed to be beyond her. Instead she thrust her left hand into Addison’s face, revealing a glimmering diamond on the ring finger. Addison’s eyes widened.
“Sam proposed? Ohmigod Nae that’s amazing, I’m so happy for you!” She threw her arms around her best friend. “Uh, where is Sam anyway?”
The elated expression faded from Naomi’s face. “He was back there. He may have given himself an asthma attack trying to chase after me. We should probably go see if he’s OK.”
“Probably.” Addison agreed, more to Derek than to Naomi, given that her best friend had just taken off back towards where she’d appeared from. Eventful was now another word that could be used to describe this particular New Year’s Eve.
~~~~
Chapter 11 – The Big Move
He’s waiting for it to get better, but it just keeps getting worse. With each passing day it gets harder to work at this, harder to believe he made the right decision.
It’s pure stubbornness that keeps him from admitting this. Instead, he perseveres, clinging obstinately to the same foolish hopes. Maybe it will pass. Maybe he’ll wake up one day and not wish that it could be Meredith lying next to him in his wife’s place. Or maybe, if he waits long enough, she’ll give up first.
Although he does at least have the decency to be a little ashamed of this thought, this is currently the outcome which he’s hoping for most. It’s looking increasingly likely too, a combination of his emotional distance, the Seattle weather, and the trailer is taking its toll on her (and if he can see that, when he’s spending most of his time trying to pretend she doesn’t exist, then it must be pretty obvious). Actually, he thinks it’s mostly the trailer. Her family home may have its own ZIP code, but she’s a city girl at heart, and even if she can tolerate the countryside, she definitely does not rough it. At first she grinned and bore it, no doubt believing they’d be back in New York within the month, but now she’s taken to leaving the property listings open on the table, and their telephone message pad bears the distinctive imprint of a doodle of the trailer exploding. One more trout incident and he thinks she might lose it entirely.
However, when he comes home one night to find an envelope on his pillow, he realises that he’s severely underestimated her. It’s the first night that he’s slept in his own bed in over a week (and he’s only sleeping there tonight because he knows she’s on call), so he’s half-expecting it to be an admission of defeat, but again he’s mistaken.
“The Next Memory”, it says on the front, in the loopy script that she could never bring herself to adapt into a classic doctor’s scrawl, and on the back, across the flap, “Remember when we lived somewhere with solid walls?” He has to laugh at that and, even though therapy is another thing that he’s all but given up on, he feels compelled to read the memory. If she’s not ready to quit, then neither is he.
~~~~
The summer of Derek and Addison’s third year at Columbia brought, as ever, exams, stress, and a complete lack of time for anything other than studying. The day after their final exam, the five of them piled into a car and headed for Addison’s family home in the Hamptons where, giddy on freedom and lack of sleep, they proceeded to drink themselves silly.
Unsurprisingly, Naomi was the first to be affected, and she proceeded to give her customary explanation that as a non-WASP, she was unable to drink like one. Seeing as previous attempts to explain to her that actually, Addison was the only one of them who was a WASP, had invariably proved fruitless, they decided to let her continue in this vein until she grew bored of the topic. Unfortunately, her next topic of choice was how excited she was that she and Sam would be moving in together next year.
Silence fell. Addison looked shocked, Sam looked uncomfortable, and Naomi just looked confused. “Whassamatter?” She slurred, looking from Sam to Addison and back again several times before realisation finally dawned. “Oh.” She then launched into a long, rambling, and largely incomprehensible explanation of how they’d been meaning to talk to her about it , but they’d only just made the decision, and of course they’d wait until she found somewhere else, they’d help her find it, she could even live with the two of them if she wanted to. It was then that Addison cut her off.
“It’s fine.” She stated emotionlessly, taking a large gulp of wine. “You’re getting married; of course you want to live together. I’ve been expecting it for ages.”
But it was clear from the way her fingers tightened around the stem of her wine glass that she had been expecting anything but.
~~~~
Much later, when the others had disappeared into their respective rooms, Derek found Addison outside, wine glass still in hand. (He hadn’t seen her put in down all night, and he was starting to wonder if her fingers were melded to the stem). Her shoulders were set squarely, and he knew he would have to tread carefully to avoid a confrontation.
“Aren’t you cold?” He asked, sitting down beside her. She shrugged, giving him a half-smile that came out more like a grimace. “I think I’m drunk enough not to feel it.”
He inched closer to her, relieved when she didn’t move away. Maybe the excessive amounts of alcohol were good for more than just warmth.
“I really don’t mind.” She said softly into the loaded silence. “It makes sense that they want to live together. It was just a shock, that’s all.” Derek didn’t know which of them she was trying to convince.
“You know what I was just talking to Mark about?” He asked her. “Other than whether puke stains come out of antique rugs? Living arrangements. He’s been complaining forever that I cramp his style, so we agreed that he can move out, get his own bachelor pad, and you can have his room. Or,” he added, seeing his girlfriend’s nose wrinkle ever so slightly, “we could look for our own place.”
Addison did smile slightly at that, but her eyes were still wary. “Are you sure? This isn’t just some drunken chivalric offer that you’re going to regret in the morning?”
Derek shot her a mock-offended look. “Addie! I’m making a romantic gesture here and you’re doubting my sincerity?” This is a real offer.” He paused for a moment. “Mark’s may have been more drunken chivalry than anything else though.”
“Hmm.” Addison pursed her lips, considering how much she cared about upsetting her boyfriend’s best friend. “Mark owes me one. Puke stains definitely do not come out of antique rugs.”
~~~~
Chapter 12 – The Fight
Derek wasn’t wrong in assuming that Addison’s on the verge of giving up. Going home to a trailer every night is bad enough, but going home to a cold, empty bed in a trailer is verging on unbearable. All that’s changed since New York is that they’ve acknowledged that their marriage is broken, and that no longer feels like a step towards fixing it.
The other thing that’s changed since she arrived in Seattle is that she no longer feels like the guilty party. She may have done a dreadful thing, but in the face of her husband’s neglect, it no longer feels so unforgivable. (A little voice inside her head tells her that it was this kind of self-indulgent thinking that led to their separation in the first place, but she ignores that voice. There’s no need to make herself even more miserable).
After two weeks of sleeping alone, she decides to tackle his avoidance head-on. The letter, she thought, was a stroke of genius, but although she knows that he read it (she found it crumpled in the wastepaper basket the next morning), he refuses to acknowledge that fact. Her next plan involves deception, which she’s never been particularly good at, but with Richard’s help she manages to convince her husband that she’s in surgery long enough to get him home.
Her mistake is pushing too hard. She should just be happy to have someone to sleep beside, even if he does moan when she slides between the sheets, and not in a good way, but somehow she can’t leave it at that. It’s taken her nearly three weeks just to get him here; she’s not wasting the opportunity to talk.
“Derek?” She whispers softly into the darkened room, and he moans again, rolling over so that she can see nothing but the thick waves of hair on the back of his head.
“Derek!” She says again, more insistently, reaching out to touch his shoulder. His skin feels foreign beneath her fingers, and he quickly shrugs her off, rolling back over to face her with a weary expression in his eyes.
“I am trying to sleep.” He says through gritted teeth. “What do you want?”
“To talk?” She says hesitantly, hating his ability to strip her of her confidence, but hating that he’s broken every promise he ever made to her even more.
A sigh of exasperation escapes Derek’s lips. “Talking isn’t working though, is it?” It’s not a question. “Why won’t you let this go?”
This angers her, the way he always manages to twist things, to make everything her fault, and the anger gives her renewed confidence. “No!” She snaps. “If you wanted our marriage to be over you should have signed the divorce papers! You chose to work at this, so damn it, you are going to work!”
“Fine!” He fires back, sounding like a petulant child. “We’ll talk! But do not blame me if you don’t like what we talk about!”
~~~~
She had expected it to be easier than this. Somehow, when she had imagined moving in with a boyfriend (back in the days of band camp and braces, when the boyfriend of her daydreams had born a striking resemblance to the high school quarterback), her thoughts had been of paint samples, and matching kitchenware, and the view from the bedroom window. She had never given much thought to how the actual living part would work.
For a start she couldn’t cook. This hadn’t been a problem when they’d been living in separate apartments, and really, it shouldn’t have been one now. Thanks to his mother’s refusal to treat her son any differently from her daughters (at least as far as household chores were concerned), Derek was an excellent cook, and had more than enough self-preservation to keep Addison far away from the kitchen. By all rights, she should have been relieved, grateful even. But instead she was a bundle of insecurities, worried that Derek would leave her for a Michelin-starred chef, and more than that (seeing as, in reality, the chances of Derek even meeting a Michelin-starred chef were fairly slim) worried that his mother would find out and hate her even more than she did already.
In an attempt to quieten these insecurities, she was in all other ways behaving as the perfect housewife (which, given that she wasn’t even engaged yet, seemed slightly unfair), which apparently included picking up everything her boyfriend dropped on the floor. And unfortunately, though he was a good cook, he was still a man, and seemed to be labouring under the delusion that his possessions belonged on the floor. And amidst all the stress, and the insecurities, and the worrying, a boyfriend who used the floor as his own personal closet was not something that she was equipped to cope with.
“Does it live there?” She asked pointedly one evening, as he pulled off his t-shirt and flung it casually into the corner of the room. He stopped in his tracks and stared at her, a puzzled expression on his face.
“Does it what?”
“The shirt!” She snatched up the offending article and waved it in his face. “Does it live on the floor? Because you seem to think it does.”
Not seeming to realise the severity of the situation, Derek burst out laughing. “You sound like my mother.” He spluttered. Addison just glared.
“I feel like your mother! Are you incapable of doing anything for yourself? Is it too much to ask for you not to leave everything on the god-damned floor?”
Derek still looked a little bewildered, but he did seem to have registered that he was being scolded, and he had never reacted well to scolding. He grabbed the shirt from her hands and tossed it angrily in the direction of the laundry basket.
“If you don’t want to pick my things up,” he shouted. “Then just don’t pick them up. I am capable of doing things for myself, unlike some people I could mention. How do you survive when the maids aren’t there to cook for you?”
This double-jibe at both her upbringing and her cooking skills was more than Addison could take. Fighting back tears, she grabbed a pillow and a blanket from the bed and stormed out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Derek shouted after her, unwilling to give up the fight now that he’d been goaded into it. “So you just get to shout at me and walk away, is that it?”
“I’m sleeping on the couch.” Addison shouted back, willing her voice not to wobble. “We both need to sleep on this; we can talk about it in the morning.”
There was no response, but a moment later Derek’s hand reached out to flip the light-switch and darkness fell over the flat.
Addison lay rigid on the too-small sofa, too hurt to think, too angry to cry. How dare he say those things to her? How dare he imply she was incapable? Didn’t he know how bad she’d been feeling?
No, whispered a nagging voice in the back of her head. You didn’t tell him. All you did was shout at him for being a slob. How did you expect him to react?
“Shut up!” She whispered fiercely, pressing her fingers into her ears and hiding her face in the pillow, like a child having a tantrum. “This isn’t my fault, it isn’t!” But no amount of whispering or evading could convince her, and so she lay for what felt like hours, listening to the seconds tick by on her watch, willing morning to come.
Eventually, after what actually had been hours of silent brooding, she knew what she had to do. Swinging her legs hesitantly off the sofa (which they were going to have to replace if they were going to fight like this often, it just was not made to be slept on) she padded into the bedroom. Derek was lying on his back, and even through the darkness she could see his eyes tracking her every move.
“You’re not asleep?” She whispered, knowing she was stating the obvious, but wanting to delay what she was about to say for as long as possible.
“Couldn’t.” He replied shortly, his tone gruff but thankfully not as angry as it had been previously.
“Me neither.” She sat cross-legged on the bed beside him, folding her hands nervously in her lap. Then the words all tumbled out in a rush. “I’m sorry I was snappy earlier, I just feel so bad about not being able to cook that I feel like I have to clean up after you, but I hate doing it, hate hate, and it just makes me miserable, but this is what couples are supposed to do, so maybe if I can’t do it we should…” She trailed off, too afraid even to articulate her last thought lest he should take her up on the offer.
“Break up?” He asked, and her heart leapt into her throat. “That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”
She nodded mutely, unable to bring herself to look at him. “Is that what you want?”
“Is it what you want?” He deflected. “Just because you can’t cook and I leave my clothes all over the floor? Because if you ask me, that’s a pretty crappy reason for a break-up. But you know what does cause relationships to fail, don’t you? Lack of communication. This fight wasn’t about either of our domestic skills; it was about you not telling me that you had a problem. You just need to talk to me, that’s all.”
“So that’s a no?” Addison asked in a tiny voice, still staring at her hands. “To the breaking up, I mean?”
A snort of answer preceded Derek’s reply. “It is indeed a no to the breaking up.”
~~~~
Chapter 13 – The Sick Day
Derek slips into the trailer as quietly as he can, feeling a twinge of guilt in his stomach. Through the open door to the bedroom he can see Addison sprawled out across the bed, hair fanned across the pillow, cheeks unnaturally pale. The pang of guilt intensifies. Yes, she may be an adulterous whore, and a home-wrecker, and the current bane of his life, but overhearing a slightly awed-sounding Alex Karev telling anyone who would listen that “Dr Montgomery-Shepherd just upchucked. Like, in the middle of surgery. And she still got the twins out afterwards!” probably shouldn’t have been the first indication that his wife was sick. Especially not given their history (and damn the couples therapy for making him remember things because that just made him feel even more guilty).
Trying to assuage the guilt pang (that had grown to feeling like something was eating his stomach lining when he had felt the heat radiating off her forehead), Derek climbs onto the bed beside his wife, smiling a little as she curls automatically into his side. A moment later though, she stirs, whimpering.
“Derek?” She opens her eyes in confusion, before screwing them shut and burying her face in his sweater. “Derek I don’t feel good.”
“Shhh Addie.” He soothes, running his fingers gently through her hair. “I know. I’m here.”
“Really here? Like you used to be?” She asks, and he winces at the raw vulnerability in her tone. For once he’s confronted with the reality of what he’s done to her, and he hates it. Really hates it, and he wants to tell her so. But now isn’t the time for a long heartfelt confession, so he just continues to stroke her hair, hoping that she can trust him, and that she’s remembering the same moment as he is.
“Really here.” He promises, as she snuggles further into his chest. “Like I used to be.”
~~~~
“Addison, time to get up!” Derek pulled the covers off his sleeping girlfriend, and she whined in protest, curling into a tighter ball. Normally he found this morning ritual endearing, but today they really were late, and if they were going to get to the hospital in time they had to leave…about five minutes ago. And, being in the middle of their fourth year placement, late was not something that they were allowed to be.
“Addison!” He shook her insistently. “It’s 5AM!”
Her blue eyes snapped open. “Crap!” She cursed, her voice a little croaky. “I’m up, I swear.” And a few seconds later she was, throwing on the nearest clothes she could find, raking a comb through her hair, stifling a sneeze into her shoulder… Derek paused in the middle of attempting to tame his unruly hair.
“Addie? You OK?”
“Fine,” she replied distractedly, her voice still slightly hoarse (except that now he was on alert, it seemed like more of a problem). “Why wouldn’t I be?”
With that she was off in the direction of the door, Derek trailing behind her, pulling on his shoes.
“Well I’m not being funny, but we’ve been together three years and I’ve never seen you sneeze before. I thought maybe it was something WASPs didn’t do, like showing emotion.”
His lame attempt at humour failed to make her smile. Instead she just shot him a look (the one that in his head he’d nicknamed Passive Aggressiva Number 4). “People sneeze, Derek. It happens. Now, do you want to be even later than we are already?”
Conversation closed then.
~~~~
By the time he got home that evening, Derek had almost forgotten about the morning’s events. That was, until he stepped into their apartment to find his girlfriend curled into a tight ball on the sofa, shivering despite the blanket draped over her.
As quietly as possible, he crouched down beside her and pressed a hand lightly to her forehead, the warmth confirming his suspicions. She gave a little moan as he withdrew his hand, and shifted slightly, but didn’t wake. Sighing, he got up and went into the bedroom to call his mother. He had a feeling that he was going to be in need of her chicken soup recipe.
While he was throwing ingredients into the pan, and cursing the fact that their kitchen was so poorly stocked, Addison joined him in the kitchen, blanket thrown haphazardly around her shoulders.
“What are you doing?” She asked, her voice congested and even hoarser than it had been that morning. She almost fell into the chair that Derek pulled out for her, kneading her forehead with the heel of her hand.
“I’m cooking.” Derek teased, squinting to read his scribbled recipe notes. “I know the idea’s completely alien to you, but some people don’t live on a diet of take-out.” Eyeing the expression on her face, he decided that teasing was perhaps not the best option tonight. “I’m making you my mom’s chicken soup. It’s the best sick food ever.”
“I’m not…” Addison started to protest, but was cut off by a sudden sneeze. “Alright, I may be a little sick. But you don’t need to make me soup.”
“I know I don’t need to make you soup.” Derek grinned. “I want to make you soup. You know, like a good boyfriend?”
Addison didn’t return his smile. “I haven’t been a good girlfriend though.” She argued feebly. “I don’t deserve for you to be nice to me.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.” Derek replied, abandoning the soup for a moment and sitting down next to his girlfriend. “Besides, you’re sick, you get to be as cranky as you want and everyone still waits on you hand and foot.”
To his dismay, even this failed to get a smile out of her. “Maybe in your family.” She muttered, avoiding his eyes.
Raking a hand through his hair, Derek reflected that he really should learn not to make WASP jokes. They invariably ended up hitting too close to home. “Addie, you know that I was only joking earlier, right?” He asked gently. “You’re allowed to get sick, and when you do, you’re allowed to make unreasonable demands and complain that you’re dying. It gives me the chance to prove what a catch I am with my pampering skills.”
She looked up at that, her blue eyes watery. “Really? Even if I’m gross?”
“That could never happen.” He promised, hoping that she recognised the sincerity of his words. “But yes, really. Providing that you do the same for me next time I’m sick. I don’t want to hear any more man flu jokes, OK?”
Finally, she cracked a small smile, dropping her head onto his shoulder. “Deal.”
~~~~
Chapter 14 – The Proposal
Takeout food has always been an important part of Addison and Derek’s relationship. In some families, a home-cooked meal might be able to make all the same gestures in a more sophisticated manner, but when you’re as culinarily-challenged as Addison, you make do with what you can get. Thus, takeout has healed rifts and closed wounds, helped to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and even Thanksgivings, and provided much needed comfort in times of sadness. But tonight, the food (and it’s pizza, so really it’s not even feigning sophistication) is meant as a thank you to Derek, for finally realigning his priorities.
Their marriage is nowhere near fixed, Addison knows that. But as she pulls anchovies off her slice with an exaggerated squeal of disgust and flicks them at her husband, as she lets him wipe a sauce splatter from her cheek, she can’t help feeling hopeful. For the first time in weeks they seem to be moving in the right direction.
There are many signs of this, but the fact that they’re actually talking is the most obvious. It’s not forced, it’s not aggressive, every sentence isn’t loaded with hidden meanings and poorly-disguised digs. And when they slip into memories accidentally, without the customary “whose turn is it?” debate, they both know that things have changed.
~~~~
“Doesn’t she look beautiful?” Addison squealed, in a very un-Addison-like voice, waving a glossy photograph under Derek’s nose. Gingerly, he took it from her and studied it. “Well?” Addison demanded impatiently from behind it. “Doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” Derek laughed, bemused that his girlfriend had worked herself up into quite such a state of excitement over a photograph. “She looks stunning. But we knew that already, we were at the wedding.”
“That’s not the point!” Addison pouted; already rifling through the huge stack of photographs on the table in front of them (really, he could have killed Naomi for offering to have a second set printed). “And doesn’t Sam look handsome? And look at the bridesmaids, see how cute they are!”
Derek reached out to extract a photo from the pile. “This is my favourite. We could get this one framed you know, put it on the bookcase?”
Addison nearly dropped the rest of the prints in shock at the sincerity in his voice. Then she realised which picture he was holding and burst into giggles (also a very uncharacteristic action, clearly weddings had a strange effect on her). “Derek! Don’t you think that if we’re getting one framed then it should at least have Naomi and Sam in it? It was their wedding after all.”
“I don’t think they’ll mind.” Derek insisted, keeping hold of the photo. “In fact they’ll probably agree that it was the best photo taken all night.”
Addison shook her head, still laughing. “I’m not sure they’ll share your opinion, flattered as I am by it.”
“Flattered?” Derek leaned in to kiss her. “You’re my girlfriend, I’m meant to think the best pictures are the ones of you.”
~~~~
Two weeks later the picture was, as promised, in pride of place on their bookshelf. Addison and Derek had just returned from a very romantic dinner at a tiny restaurant in Little Italy and had returned, elated and tipsy, to their apartment. With a happy sigh, Addison collapsed backwards onto the couch.
“It is a good photo.” She murmured, running a critical eye over it. “Even though I still think that one that actually showed the bride and groom would have been better.”
“Well,” Derek slid slowly down onto the floor, resting his back against the couch. “We’ll just have to make sure Naomi looks fantastic at our wedding and then she and Sam can do the same thing. That way, they won’t be able to complain.”
Addison gave an appreciative chuckle before fully processing his words. “Wait…did you just say at our wedding?”
Derek twisted on the rug to face her, grinning boyishly. “I did indeed. I was going to ask you earlier, I had it all planned out actually. The romantic setting, the quiet table, the ring in the champagne glass. But then I thought, every girl in Manhattan has that proposal, nearly every girl in the world probably. This way, when people ask you how I proposed, you’ll have a different story to tell.”
“What, that I was proposed to while lying on a couch?” Addison snorted. “Very romantic.”
“We can have a do-over, if you want?” Derek offered. “You haven’t said yes yet.”
“Technically you haven’t asked me yet.” Addison countered. “You’ve just talked about our wedding like you’re certain it’s going to happen. Arrogant, if you ask me.”
“Fine.” Derek slid the ring box out of his pocket, repositioning himself so that he was on one knee (some clichés just had to be fulfilled, after all). “I hope you don’t need me to tell you how I feel about you, because I’d like to think that you already know. But just in case you need a reminder, I love you, so much that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Addison Adrienne Forbes Montgomery, will you marry me?” Then, because he just couldn’t resist, he added. “Still want a do-over?”
“No.” Addison whispered. “I mean yes. I mean, I want to marry you…even if that was the most confusing proposal ever.”
And with that she tumbled off the couch and into his arms.
~~~~
Chapter 15 – The Montgomerys
Unfortunately, even though things are going better, couple’s therapy is still a requirement. They might be committed to fixing their marriage now, but there are a lot of holes to be mended, and sometimes a third party is required.
Like today, for example.
“We are not talking about this, Derek!” Addison huffs, folding her arms across her chest and glaring stubbornly out of the window. “It’s tedious, and it’s hurtful, and it’s not even relevant!”
“Of course it’s relevant!” Derek fires back. “This is about how our marriage fell apart, which was at least partly because you don’t know what a healthy relationship is, which is because of your parents.” He slaps his palm against the arm of his chair to emphasize his point, before turning to the therapist. “Isn’t that right?”
“This isn’t about right or wrong.” The man replies gently. “But if you feel that this is relevant, then certainly we should discuss it. And afterwards,” he continues quickly, as Addison opens her mouth to protest. “We can talk about why you don’t see this as relevant.”
Addison slumps back in her chair, scowling. Derek grins triumphantly. The therapist sighs. Sometimes, he wonders whether he’s dealing with adults or children.
~~~~
“I’m going to ask you something.” Derek said, cornering Addison as soon as she got in from the hospital. “And you have to promise not to get mad.”
“Get mad?” Addison looked at him, expression caught somewhere between confusion and fear. “What are you going to ask me?”
“Well, I was thinking,” Derek started, a touch of nervousness in his voice. “You know my family. You know them really really well. You’ve spent Christmas, and Thanksgiving and two weeks of every holiday with them, they love you and you love them.” Seeing her open her mouth to protest that his mother most definitely did not love her, he held up a silencing hand and ploughed on. “But I’ve never met your family. I know that you have your problems with them, so I haven’t pushed before, but we’re going to get married. So I know that it’ll be awkward at any time, but don’t you think that it’ll be ten times more awkward if the first time we meet is on our wedding day?”
Addison was silent for a long time, and when she finally spoke it was in a very small voice. “What makes you think they’ll come to the wedding?”
The terrible part was, he genuinely didn’t think that she was joking.
~~~~
Regardless of the drama surrounding the announcement that he wanted to meet her parents, three weeks later she had arranged for it to happen. As he stepped off the plane onto the tarmac in Connecticut he understood how she’d felt three years earlier pulling into his driveway. He felt sick to his stomach, and throwing up was a definite possibility. And, just like her, he was by no means guaranteed a warm reception.
When the car (which was driven by the Montgomery family chauffeur, as if he had needed a reason to feel even more inadequate) pulled up outside the house, an expensively-suited man was waiting on the steps to greet them. Addison’s face lit up. “Archie!” She grinned, launching herself at him and hugging hard. Then she broke away, and smiled shyly. “Archer, this is Derek. Derek, this is my brother Archer.”
Archer put out his hand to shake Derek’s and Derek grasped it eagerly. But the man’s smile didn’t extend to his eyes, and Derek already knew that this was going to be a very difficult week.
Inside, the situation was improved only by the large glass of whiskey which had been pressed into Derek’s hand by yet another member of staff. Even when Derek was rich (which he did intend to become, and without the help of Addison’s trust fund either), he was never going to have staff. They made him nervous. But nowhere near as nervous as Addison’s parents, conversation with whom was more an interrogation than an exchange of pleasantries.
“Derek Shepherd.” The Captain mused, studying his future son-in-law with a critical eye. “Middle names?”
“Christopher, sir.” Derek said, suppressing a sudden urge to giggle. Amy’s voice had just popped into his head, telling him to salute. Trust her to cause trouble even from thousands of miles away.
“Christopher.” The Captain seemed to contemplate this for a moment, but still didn’t crack a smile. In the background, Addison’s mother hovered, martini in hand. Derek had known that this would be strange, but really, strange didn’t even begin to cover it.
Beside him, Addison squirmed uncomfortably, as if she were the one being scrutinized by her father. And in a way she was. She had chosen to marry Derek, and if he didn’t meet her parents standards, the blame would surely be laid on her shoulders just as much as on his.
~~~~
“I hate them.” Addison sobbed into Derek’s chest on the plane home. “I really, really hate them, you know? Why can’t they just be happy for me?”
Derek was silent for a moment, stroking her hair soothingly and trying desperately to think of an answer. To say that the visit had been a disaster would be an understatement. It had been seven long days of interrogation, awkward silences, and patent disapproval. He had never felt more aware of his lack of money and family connections, and if he hadn’t been expecting this kind of reaction from her family, then he would have felt even more disheartened. As it was, he was more concerned with comforting his girlfriend than with his own bruised ego.
“It’s because they love you.” He soothed. “They just don’t think that anyone’s good enough for you, that’s all.”
He only wished that he could believe his own words.
~~~~
Chapter 16 – The First Day
“What are we going to talk about today, Addison?” The therapist probes gently.
“My insecurities.” Addison replies sulkily, hating every minute of this. But Derek has done his bit; he’s put aside his feelings for Meredith and actually begun to make a go of this. Much as she rails against the idea, she supposes that if this is something that he wants her to confront, she should at least show willing.
“Good.” The therapist smiles, appearing to visibly relax. Sometimes Addison wonders if all his patients are as difficult as they are. Maybe $300 an hour is actually less than he deserves.
~~~~
The first day of internship is stressful for everyone. But when you’re both highly competitive and extremely insecure, it’s pretty much your worse nightmare.
“Derek!” Addison griped the second she opened her eyes. “The phone is ringing.”
“I can hear that.” He mumbled sleepily. “It’s closer to you, you get it!”
Muttering under her breath about lazy inconsiderate men and the even more inconsiderate people who phone their friends at 5AM, Addison reached for the phone. “Hello?” She grumbled into the receiver.
“Oh I’m sorry, did I wake you?” The unmistakeable voice of Derek’s mother, in the tone which she reserved for speaking to Addison, sounded in her ear. “I was just calling to wish Derek luck on his first day….And you too of course.” She added after a moment’s hesitation. “Is my son there?”
In an even worse mood than before, Addison practically threw the phone at her fiancé. “It’s your mother.” She growled. “And as I’m now awake, I’ll go and make coffee.” She stormed out of the bedroom into the kitchen, and set about making coffee as violently as possible, all the while maintaining a whispered tirade directed at one particular woman. At least if she was mad, she couldn’t be nervous.
“No, Mom.” Derek’s voice floated in from the bedroom. “Yes, Mom. I love you too, Mom. Bye, Mom.” A second later, he appeared in the doorway to their bedroom, yawning widely and dressed in nothing more than his boxers. “Mom says good luck for today.”
“I’m sure she does.” Addison muttered sarcastically, stirring sugar into her coffee with more vigour than was strictly necessary. Derek crossed the kitchen in three strides and removed the mug from her hands. “You wouldn’t want to scald yourself, now would you?” He reprimanded playfully. “Ruin your surgeon’s hands?”
“I do not have surgeon’s hands.” Addison snapped, turning the offending body parts over to stare venomously at her cuticles. “They’re just…hands.”
“You’re freaking out.” Derek noted, taking her hands in his before she decided to do some damage to them. “You’re freaking out about your first day so you’re taking it out on my mother for daring to call on your first day.”
“Maybe I just don’t like your mother.” Addison muttered childishly, continuing to stare at their intertwined fingers. Derek was right, and she knew it, but she wasn’t going to admit it a moment before she had to.
“Well I know that!” Derek laughed. “But I also know that you…” He released one of her hands and raised her chin so that she was looking him directly in the eyes. “…are freaking about your first day. Completely unnecessarily, by the way, because you’re going to be incredible.”
“I’m not.” Addison mumbled, trying to wriggle out of his grip. “I can’t remember anything. What am I going to do if one of the residents asks me a question? I won’t be able to answer, and I’ll embarrass myself in front of everyone, and…” She wrenched her hands from his grip and began to pace frantically, running her fingers through her hair.
“Addison!” Derek made another grab for her arms, holding on more tightly this time. “Look at me. You have not forgotten everything. It might feel like you have, but as soon as you step inside that hospital you’ll remember you were born to do this. You were the best student in our class at Columbia, and I know that because I tried my hardest to knock you out of that top spot! So I’m dragging you into that hospital kicking and screaming if I have to, but after today I won’t be doing any dragging, because you’ll realise that I’m right. You were born to do this. OK?”
“OK.” She repeated tentatively. “Can I get a hug now?”
“You can get as many hugs as you want.” He promised, wrapping her up in his arms and kissing her forehead. “Maybe tonight, when you’ve seen that I was right, you’ll even get something more.”
She snorted at that, before pulling away from him in horror, staring at the clock. “Crap, Derek, we’re late! We have twenty minutes to get ready and get to the hospital!”
~~~~
Chapter 17 – The Pregnancy
If there’s one thing that this whole experience has taught Derek, it’s that he really, really hates therapists. He didn’t like them much to begin with, their particular brand of medicine just never felt much like medicine. But he’s always assumed that he was just being biased, that neurology and therapy were just conflicting disciplines, and that they were probably very nice people under all of that psycho-babble. Now he knows differently.
Possibly he’s still being unfair, branding all therapists as useless just because he hates the man sitting opposite him. But right now, when he’s working so hard at so many things, he feels he’s allowed a moment of childishness.
The therapist leans forward in his chair, smiling invitingly. “What are you thinking, Derek?”
What Derek is really thinking is that he would really like to punch the man sitting opposite him, but he doesn’t feel that it would be quite appropriate to voice this thought, so instead he grits his teeth and works through the anger. “I was thinking about the next memory that I’d like to share.” He lies. At least it’ll get the man off his back for however long it takes to tell the story.
~~~~
When he discovered the test, nestled in the bottom of Addison’s bag, still in its cardboard packaging, his first instinct was not to say anything. She obviously hadn’t taken it yet anyway, so it wasn’t like there was anything to ask (well, not beyond “what have you bought a pregnancy test for?” and that seemed to have a fairly simple answer). There was a part of him that liked to bury his head in the sand, that believed that if he avoided problems then they would somehow cease to exist. It wasn’t even as if this was definitely a problem (or even a situation, because a baby probably shouldn’t be described as a problem before its conception has even been confirmed), so there was no reason for him to worry about it yet.
Except that he was.
And the more he worried, and the more he stared at that innocuous-looking box in his hand, the more he thought that maybe she had wanted him to find it. She had asked him to look through her bag after all, to find her a hair band as her hands were currently occupied holding her ponytail into place. She must have known the test was in there; Addison wasn’t the type of person who forgot things, so maybe it had been intentional. It would be just like his girlfriend to make him as the question, so that she didn’t have to be the one causing the confrontation. So maybe he just wouldn’t say anything. Two could play at this game.
“Derek?” Addison’s head appeared around the locker door, a teasing smile on her lips. “Can’t you find them? Oh…” The smile faded as she saw the small box still clutches in Derek’s fingers. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
“No?” Derek retorted, suddenly angry. “Then it isn’t a pregnancy test? Because I don’t know what else it could be?”
Addison blushed slightly, the colour highlighting her cheekbones. “Well, yes, of course it’s a pregnancy test. But it’s not for me. It’s for Naomi. She wanted me to get it for her, to avoid, well, a situation like this.” She shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed, but not guilty-looking. Derek didn’t know what to say. This, he was sure, was the reason why men did not carry handbags. Or buy sensitive items for their friends. Or have wombs.
“I…uh…” He stuttered, dropping the test as if it were on fire. But Addison was laughing.
“Your face!” She giggled, leaning on the lockers for support. “I think you just aged ten years! At least I
know the baby discussion isn’t one we’ll be having any time soon.”
“Don’t tempt fate.” Derek muttered darkly, still glaring at the box. Pregnancy tests, he had decided, were his new least favourite item in existence.
~~~~
Later that week, as they toasted Naomi and Sam’s ‘surprising’ news over ginger ale (apparently if the expectant mother wasn’t allowed to drink then neither were the rest of them), Derek started thinking more rationally about babies. Of course, finding the test had terrified him, but that had been mostly due to the surprise. Now that he wasn’t about to become one, the idea of being a father didn’t seem so bad. He liked babies, he always had. And if Addison was going to be a baby doctor, then she had to like babies too.
Except…she had said she didn’t want to have the baby discussion, hadn’t she?
That night, when she was lying curled into his chest, he broached the subject. Hesitantly at first, because he didn’t want to scare her away. He didn’t want kids just yet either. It was just that somehow he couldn’t get the thought of them out of his head, and he just wanted to know if she wanted to have them at all.
He wasn’t exactly reassured when she burst out laughing, in much the same way as she had after he’d found the test.
“Isn’t it women who are supposed to get broody?” She asked, faintly incredulously. “Of course I want kids. But not yet. It’s not that I’m not happy for Naomi and Sam, and I am definitely going to be that child’s favourite Aunt Addie, but a kid during residency? They must be mad!”
“Mad.” He agreed softly, kissing the top of her head. Of course she was right. Residency was going to be stressful enough without factoring a baby into the mix. It was a ridiculous idea.
There would be plenty of time for baby talk later.
~~~~
Chapter 18 – The First Juju
It’s been one of those days. One of those long, hard, painful days in which everything just seems to go wrong. First it was the preemie that didn’t make it through the night, then the triplets she just couldn’t save, and now the mother bleeding out during a relatively simple procedure. She keeps repeating to herself that it’s not really her fault, that she’s still the best damn neonatal surgeon in this hospital, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to believe it. The words sound hollow, empty, and it’s getting to the point where she just wants to find a corner and cry it out. She cannot be in this day any longer.
Ironically, it’s him that breaks her. Well, that’s not the ironic part, he’s broken her plenty of times before, but usually it’s with his neglect, with that phone call to say he won’t be home tonight, or the failure to meet her eyes and smile as she passes him in the hallway. But today, and this is where the irony comes in, he breaks her with kindness.
She’s leaning against the desk, staring blankly at the board (and hoping to God that her name won’t be appearing on it again before the end of her shift) and then suddenly he’s there, blocking her view of it. He’s smiling at her, tenderly, a pre-Seattle smile, and he’s got a cardboard cup in his hand. Smile still in place he slides it across the desk. “I heard about the surgeries.” He says. “Thought you could use some juju.” And it’s then that she loses it completely.
Well, not quite then, because it may have been a rough day but she’s still Addison Forbes Montgomery (the addition of her married name being irrelevant here) and she simply does not break down on the surgical floor, but she feels the tears flooding the backs of her eyes, feels her throat constricting, and she only just makes it to the on-call room before she makes a spectacle of herself.
Spectacle wouldn’t even cover it by the time the door opens again, but she’s not worried, because although the tears are blurring her vision she knows it’s him. She hears the reassuring scrape of the chair legs against the floor as he drags it over to jam the door shut, as he did every time she got upset as an intern (and sometimes for more pleasant reasons too). Then the bed shifts as he sits down beside her, and she melts into him. In a routine well-practiced if long-forgotten, her head finds the hollow under his chin, his arms fold around her, and his fingers tangle in her hair as she shudders against him. He rocks, and shushes, and makes soothing noises until the sobs subside, and then reassures her as she scrubs tear tracks off her face in embarrassment.
“Do you remember the first time you gave me juju?” She asks later, when they’re back in the trailer, and she’s smiling again, the last traces of the bad day soothed away with the help of Derek’s expert fingers. He just nods, grinning as she presses grateful kisses to his jawbone. “Tell me about it.”
~~~~
Having spent four years of medical school longing to be an intern, Addison was now spending intern year longing for it to be over. She knew that this was the case for everyone, given that locker room conversation was focused on two things: how tired they all were, and how much it sucked to be at the bottom of the food chain. But by this point she was starting to wonder if it was intern year that she wanted to be over, or her entire medical career.
She was a good doctor. She knew that (and her pride was too great for her to deny it no matter how down she was feelings), but on days like this, it didn’t help. Because the problem wasn’t her competence, it was the fact that not even the most talented of doctors could save every patient. And this was her stumbling block; she found it incredibly difficult to get over the ones she couldn’t save.
Since she’d started working on OB GYN it was getting worse. Not only did the deaths seem to affect her more, but the fact that they were affecting her panicked her. There was no way that she could choose this as her specialty if every death reduced her to a blubbering mess.
She’d been talking to Derek about this, a lot, and she knew it was worrying him. She also knew that he was trying to help her, in any way he could, but the fact was that he was barely managing to keep her afloat. She was treading water, perilously close to drowning, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Until one day, when she was sitting in the cafeteria, mourning yet another dead baby (and not even one that she’d been treating this time, just one that had been there in the NICU last night when she left, and not there in the morning when she came in), and she felt his arm around her shoulders. She looked up at him, blinking back the tears she hadn’t yet allowed to fall, and saw that he was grinning at her.
“I’ve got something for you.” He grinned, and produced a cardboard cup of steaming liquid.
“Not cafeteria coffee, Derek!” She protested. “It’s disgusting!”
“I know.” He shushed her. “But this isn’t cafeteria coffee. Try it.”
Hesitantly, she put the cup to her lips, surprised at the taste of hot chocolate flooding her mouth, sweet and creamy and astonishingly good. After a long gulp she put the cup down, a small smile touching the corners of her mouth.
“That is good. Thank you.”
“It’s juju.” Derek replied, the grin still plastered onto his face.
“Ju-what?” She asked, brow wrinkling in confusion.
“Juju.” He repeated. “Like, good karma. Now that you’ve drunk that, you’re going to have a good day. And, if it doesn’t work, at least the hot chocolate’ll make you feel better. It always worked for my sisters and I. Mom used to tell us it had magical healing properties.”
She suppressed a snort at that, imagine an entire family of doctors thinking that hot chocolate was magical. But, as the rest of her day went that little bit better, she couldn’t help thinking that maybe there was some truth in it.
~~~~
Chapter 19 – The Incident
The changes in their relationship are becoming more noticeable with each passing day, and there are times now when he believes that things are actually better than they were in New York, at the very least better than they were in the end. There are times when he can tell how she’s feeling from a single glance; sometimes he even thinks he can tell what she’s thinking. Which is why he knows when he comes home to find her staring out of the window not just that she’s upset, but that she’s feeling guilty.
She looks up as he comes in, giving him a sad little smile.
“I did a bad thing, Derek.” She says quietly, and for a moment he thinks she’s done it again. He hates himself for the distrust, but at the same time he knows that it’s justified. Her betrayal has set a precedent, it could always happen again.
“What did you do honey?” He asks as gently as he can, desperately hoping that his fears are unfounded.
“Izzie Stevens.” She says; her speech broken and difficult to follow. “She was too involved, too involved just like I was. I had to do it. Richard agreed, he said we’re here to teach, not to make friends. So I let her think she’d killed that baby, even though I knew what it would do to her.”
She trails off, and Derek wraps his arms around her, relief coursing through his veins. “It’s alright, honey, she’ll understand one day. She’ll forgive you.”
Whether or not it’s true, it’s what she needs to hear. But, remembering how broken Addison was when Richard did the same to her, he really hopes that Izzie Stevens has someone to be there for her tonight.
~~~~
“Man, have you got any food in here?” Mark asked, already rifling through Derek’s locker. “I’m starved!”
“Nope.” Derek replied, hastily stuffing the last of his sandwich into his mouth in case his best friend decided to wrestle him for it. “Hey, get out of there!”
His warning went unheeded, however, as Mark slammed the door to Derek’s locker shut and moved on to Addison’s, stealing an apple and biting into it with a satisfying crunch. “Do you still want me to give it back?” He asked, spraying juice across the locker room.
“Gross!” Derek raised a hand to shield his face. “Of course not. But I’d eat it quickly if I were you, Addison’s been in the NICU all night, she might not react particularly rationally.”
As if on cue, Addison stormed into the locker room, stony-faced and silent. Derek swept her up and down with his eyes, trying to work out what to say, but was distracted by Mark erupting into a coughing fit, spraying chunks of apple across the floor. Apparently trying to swallow the fruit whole hadn’t worked out too well for him.
“Was that my apple?” Addison asked, her voice cold and distant-sounding, as Derek slapped his friend hard on the back while trying to suppress gales of laughter. She held up a finger as Mark opened his mouth to speak. “No, I do not want it back. I have been up for forty-eight hours straight, and I want to go home and sleep!”
In one swift movement, she ripped off her scrub top and threw it into the open locker, pulling on a black turtle-neck in its place. Repeating the action with her pants, and for once failing to reprimand Mark for staring, she swung the locker door closed with a resounding slam and strode out of the room, leaving Derek and Mark scrambling to collect their possessions and hurry after her.
“Duuuuude.” Mark raised an eyebrow at Derek in their trademark ‘girl flip-out’ look, a look which Derek failed to return. Usually he was the first to snigger with his best friend behind his girlfriend’s back (a habit which he really ought to stop because it invariably worsened her mood), but something told him that this was more than a girl flip-out. More even than an overtired girl flip-out, and those were always the worst. By now he liked to think that he knew Addison better than anyone and he recognised the unnatural brightness of her eyes, the defeated tilt of her head, the way her jaw was clenched in an effort to keep the emotion inside where she thought it belonged. She was one catalyst away from a total meltdown, and he was not going to be responsible for it happening on hospital property.
They had reached the hospital parking lot now, but rather than climbing into one of the waiting taxis, Addison was still marching towards the exit.
“I’m walking.” She called over her shoulder without breaking stride.
“But honey, it’s forty blocks.” Derek attempted to protest, receiving nothing but the clacking of her heels on the sidewalk in reply. “Get a cab.” He told Mark, who was staring at Addison’s departing back in confusion and disbelief. “I got this.”
“Is she gonna be OK?” Mark asked, already reaching for the door handle.
“I hope so.” Derek responded, waving to his friend as he set off after his fiancée. After a couple of blocks, he caught up with her (she may have been able to walk fast in heels, but they were still hindering her progress somewhat), but the hand that he attempted to place on her arm was rapidly shaken off.
“Honey, what happened?” He asked gently, trying to look her in the eye.
“Not now.” She answered, her tone still cold and distant, but now with a slight hitch at the end. And then she spoke again. “Please just not yet.”
Her voice was so defeated that Derek ached to reach out and touch her, but he couldn’t, not when she’d just almost begged him to leave her be. Sidewalk breakdown was only one level below hospital breakdown in the embarrassment stakes.
They walked in silence, Addison’s heels still clacking purposefully as Derek struggled to keep stride. Twenty blocks, thirty, forty. As their building came into sight, Addison broke into a run, making it inside and up the three flights of stairs in under a minute. Derek caught up with her at the door, where she was toggling the key frantically in the lock, lips pressed together in a thin line. She didn’t speak when Derek removed the key from her shaking fingers, fiddling with the temperamental lock until the door finally swung open. He motioned for her to go in first, waiting until she had stumbled over the threshold and collapsed onto their sofa, head in her hands, before stepping inside himself and pushing the door closed. Then he moved over to sit on the sofa beside her, placing a hand on her back and asking for the second time that day.
“Honey, what happened?”
“I…I can’t…” She choked out, before giving up on the attempt to speak and pushing a fist to her mouth as tears began to leak from behind her closed eyelids. Derek rubbed her back in silence, watching the tears stream thicker and faster until finally she turned and buried her face in his chest.
“It’s OK.” He murmured, wrapping his arms tight around her. “Just let it all out.”
And then she was shaking, and sobbing more and more violently, burrowing further into his chest and grabbing fistfuls of his shirt like if she could only get close enough to him, he might erase the pain. For a while he was concerned that she might asphyxiate or something, because surely no-one could cry this violently and still be able to breathe, but to his relief she started to calm down, until she was lying with her head in his lap, with only the dampness on her cheeks and the occasional sniffle as a reminder of the outburst of emotion.
“Can you tell me now, Addie?” He asked softly, running his fingers through her long red locks, because he knew she’d try to bury it now, but if it had got her this upset then it really needed to be talked about.
“It was Amanda.” She said, speaking so quietly that only his knees could hear her clearly. Her voice broke on the name and she sucked in an unsteady breath. “The baby in the NICU. I sat up with her all night, I was exhausted but I didn’t mind, because he told me that if I kept her alive she could have surgery in the morning. But he lied to me!” Her voice cracked again, and this time a tiny sob escaped. “He made me think I’d killed her when he knew she’d never survive the night!”
“Webber?” He asked, although he didn’t really need her confirmation. As her resident, he’d been telling her for weeks that she needed not to get so attached to the preemies; this was obviously his way of testing her.
She just nodded, crying in earnest again. “I’m never speaking to him again!”
Had it been anyone else, Derek would have told them they were being childish. But with Addison’s tears saturating the leg of his pants, and the sound of her sobs tearing through his heart, he wasn’t sure that he’d ever be speaking to Webber again either.
~~~~
Chapter 20 – The Bachelorette Party
An unspoken agreement seems to have been reached that their wedding day will be the last memory. Derek is more attentive than he has been in years, Addison knows that he sees no reason to continue wasting their money on therapy. And really, she should agree. But when they raise this with the therapist, and he shakes his head, ‘gently recommending’ a few more sessions, she feels an inexplicable sense of relief. Almost immediately afterwards, she feels guilty, especially when the session throws Derek into a sulk that only four hours of solitary fishing will cure, but the relief is still there.
She can’t understand it though, so like all things that bemuse and unnerve her, she buries it. A year ago she had a broken marriage that she was desperate to fix, there’s no point in trying to break it again now it’s finally working. And she’s sure that these feelings, if she let them out, could only have a detrimental effect on the all too fragile recovery.
So when Derek returns, bearing a proud cargo of dead fish, she doesn’t squeal or shudder or complain that they’re looking at her (even though they are definitely looking at her). Instead she smiles brightly, thanks him for not bringing the slimy creatures inside the trailer (that rule he has at least respected) and focuses hard on the next memory. Inside her head though, the same thought is whirling around on repeat: if this is what she’s been waiting for, then why isn’t it making her happy?
~~~~
“Addison, we are leaving now! Right now!” Naomi was on the verge of exploding. “You cannot be late to your own bachelorette party!”
“Of course I can.” Addison pouted, taking an inordinate amount of time to apply her lipstick. “I’m the bride to be. My tardiness is practically a given!” She studied herself critically in the mirror. “Do you think this colour suits me? Maybe I should have gone with the black dress…”
Naomi made a lunge for her best friend as she attempted to pull the dress over her head. “Once you’re wearing a sash, and fairy wings, and a tiara no-one, and I mean no-one, is going to care whether or not your dress suits you. Which it does, by the way, because you look stunning in everything.” She nudged Addison in the ribs. “Now, come on! I’ve planned a fantastic evening’s entertainment for you, and it does not include twirling in front of the mirror for hours. Save that for your actual wedding day.”
She attempted to drag her friend out of the door, but Addison dug her heels (eight inch Jimmy Choos) stubbornly into the carpet. In the same moment, the sound of the doorbell echoed through the apartment. Addison’s face lit up. Naomi, on the other hand, groaned in realisation.
“Guys?” She yelled, as the sound of cheering and hooting filled the apartment. “Addison’s trying to spy on your bachelor party!” Immediately there were sounds of discontent from the assembled group of men, and a moment later Mark came running into the room, already dressed in a Viking helmet and a pair of comedy breasts.
“Sorry ladies,” he said, sounding decidedly unapologetic. “But unless you’re planning on stripping, there is no place for you here tonight.” And with that he flung Addison over his shoulder and carried her, literally kicking and screaming, from the room. Naomi dashed after them, pausing to blow Sam, who was also wearing a pair of comedy breasts and was already halfway through his first beer, a goodbye kiss. Only when they were safely on the other side of the door, Mark having relieved Addison of her keys and waved cheerily as Naomi restrained her, did Naomi breathe a sigh of relief.
“Let’s go.” She commanded; linking arms with Addison and half-leading, half-dragging her down the corridor, ignoring her grumbled protests. “And stop sulking; you’re going to enjoy it!”
Addison muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “strippers”, and wrenched her arm free.
~~~~
Three hours and innumerable martinis later, Addison had to admit that she was actually having. A combination of the strange alcoholic concoction which her friends had forced down her throat on arrival in the bar, the pulsing music, and the fact that Savvy had just succeeded in removing some unfortunate gentleman’s toupee and was now waving it around like a trophy, meant that whatever Mark had planned for her fiancé’s bachelor party no longer seemed to matter.
“Nae!” She called, dragging her best friend’s attention away from the latest round of ‘Dare or Dare’ (‘Truth or Dare’ having been branded to reminiscent of high school sleepovers). “I would like a stripper.”
Naomi gaped at her best friend, amazed more by the fact that she was for once the sober (or at least more sober) one than by the strange request. “You’d like a what now?”
“A stripper!” Addison repeated, waving her hands wildly in an attempt to illustrate exactly what a stripper was. “You know, like a person who strips. Derek gets one, why don’t I?”
“Derek won’t necessarily…” Naomi began, before remembering exactly who was in charge of Derek’s bachelor party and letting the sentence hang unfinished. “I’m sorry Addie, I didn’t book one. I didn’t think it was really your scene.”
“Well nor did I.” Addison pouted. “But I was thinking about it and now I want one! Why should men have all the fun?” She paused, scanning the room, before pointing decisively at an attractive-looking man in the corner. “Will you ask him to be my stripper?”
“No.” Naomi replied, without hesitation. “I love you sweetie, but not that much.”
“I’ll do it!” Savvy cried, having been listening to their conversation. “And I’ll make him wear this toupee while he strips.” She waved her prize in the air, ignoring the filthy glares which she was receiving from its owner and his friends.
“Savvy…” Naomi began to protest, but it was too late. The blonde had already leapt over the back of the sofa and was making her way purposefully over to Addison’s chosen stripper. A few minutes of conversation (complete with wild, toupee-aided gestures) followed, while the other women watched with bated breath, and then they saw the man nod and smile. However, just as he reached their table, Addison spoke again.
“You know, I don’t want a stripper anymore.” She announced brightly. “I want to go dancing. Or to puke. I’m not really sure which.”
Her first request was ignored as Naomi hastily steered her in the direction of the bathrooms.
~~~~
Chapter 21 – The Wedding
“Is there a problem here?” The therapist asks, glancing warily between his two clients.
“Nothing,” Derek grins, reaching over to take Addison’s hand. She smiles at him, although he notices that it looks tight, almost forced. Obviously she hates therapy as much as he does. “In fact, there are so few problems here, that we don’t need therapy any more. So, as we discussed, today will be our last session. We only have one more memory to talk over. We’ve already found the magic.” His mouth twists over the clichéd words, but he manages to keep the grin firmly in place.
“Dr. Shepherd.” The therapist fidgets with his pen, looking like he’s contemplating hurling it at the wall.
“I’m happy for the pair of you, really I am, but I believe you’ve missed the point of the exercise. You were meant not just to recapture the magic, but to work out where you lost it. As far as I’m concerned, our work here is only half done.”
Derek smiles confidently at the man sitting opposite him, squeezing his wife’s hand. “We appreciate your concern,” he says, using his best professional voice. “But honestly, we really don’t feel that any more therapy is necessary. Right, honey?”
He glances over at Addison when she fails to answer, and she snaps to attention. “Right. Yes. Of course.” She replies distractedly, sliding her hand out of his and gripping nervously at the armrest. The therapist watches the pair of them with an unreadable expression.
“Why don’t we listen to your last memory?” He proposes. “And then we’ll see if that raises any further questions?”
Derek sighs, rapidly losing his patience. “Fine.” He concedes. “But I really don’t see what more we have to talk about.”
~~~~
“Are you sure you have them?” Derek asked for what felt like the millionth time that day. Beside him, Mark sighed impatiently.
“Yes.” He replied, more an exhalation than a word. “Believe it or not, I am actually capable of looking after a pair of rings. I did manage to get into medical school you know.”
“And the guitar?” Derek asked, moving on to the next item on his mental checklist rather than infuriating his best friend further by asking to see the rings. If he wasn’t careful, he could see Mark throwing them out of the window out of sheer annoyance.
Mark’s face split into a wide grin at this question. “Of course. Are you definitely going to play the song? That’s too cool, man!”
Derek struggled to return the grin. Never in his wildest dreams had he expected getting married to be quite this stressful. But then, before he met Addison, he hadn’t expected to marry someone with two last names. When your wedding costs more than your family home, it isn’t difficult to feel inferior.
“Are you two ready?” His sister Nancy interrupted his thoughts, crossing the threshold of the room. “You want to get to the church before the bride, don’t you?”
Derek nodded, following his sister out of the room. There was no turning back now.
~~~~
The church was, as expected, packed with friends, family, and people he was sure that he was supposed to know (or, more likely, that Addison was supposed to know). Seeing the crowd did nothing to calm his nerves, and Mark searching through his pockets in feigned panic every few minutes wasn’t helping either.
“Will you stop doing that?” He hissed furiously, seeing his future mother-in-law fix them with a suspicious gaze. In the opposite pew, his mother had already started with the waterworks, and was dabbing carefully at her eyes. His sisters, all of them except Amy who had been chosen to be a bridesmaid, were also in position, fidgeting and twisting in their seats to get a better view of the rear door. Kathleen caught his eye and grinned, pulling a face as she rifled through her purse for fresh tissues for their mother. Perhaps he could do this after all.
The sound of the music changing drew his attention to the door. His youngest sister was already making her way down the aisle, a hint of mirth in her eyes as she smiled in his direction.
“Nervous?” She mouthed, as she reached the front, and winked when he swallowed and nodded. By this time Naomi had joined them at the front, but he barely noticed, as Addison had just stepped through the door on her father’s arm. He drew in a breath, nerves not dissipating, but resolve strengthened by the sight of her. This was why he was here. The church might as well have been empty, because none of the rest of them mattered.
Behind him, Mark shifted and coughed nervously. “Uh, Derek?” He whispered. “Don’t get mad, but I think I might actually have lost the rings.”
~~~~
In the event, everything went smoothly. The rings were retrieved from the lining of Mark’s pants with a little help from Amy’s deft fingers (and if she had enjoyed herself a little too much doing the retrieving, well that was between the two of them), the vows made everyone (especially Carolyn) cry, there was no awkward bumping of noses during the kiss, and so far, married life was going blissfully well. That could be about to change though, as the speeches were nearly over and it was time for his party piece. He had contemplated giving up on the song idea, but he had a feeling that despite being in disgrace, Mark wouldn’t let him leave the reception without singing the song. Sure enough, as his best friend finished his speech (in which he had managed to simultaneously hit on every woman in the room), he produced the guitar from under the table. A confused murmur spread around the room, and Sam, who had been consulted on a few of the lines, choked on his mouthful of champagne, spluttering noisily into his napkin.
When silence had descended, Mark spoke again. “Now, as many of you know, Derek didn’t propose in the most romantic of settings. Ever since, he’s been trying to think of a way to make up for this, and eventually he came up with this idea. Ladies, and gentleman, the groom!”
As the confused applause faded, Mark handed the guitar to Derek, who began to strum awkwardly. He just hoped that this didn’t kill his marriage before it was even a day old.
“Our eyes met over the cadaver.” He began hesitantly, painfully aware that he was no rock star. “And I knew I had to have her…”
Having managed the first line, he dared to glance around the room, relieved to find that no rotten fruit appeared to be incoming. This could actually have been one of his better ideas.
“Had his mitral valve gotten too thick?” He continued, voice stronger now that he was no longer panicking. “Is that what made the cadaver so sick?”
On the strength of the laughter which was currently rippling around the room (whether because of his wit or his poor rhyming it was hard to say), he launched into the chorus, motioning for Mark to join him.
“Addison Montgomery,
I met her in the summer she,
Was cutting up a very dead body,
And in her eyes I saw my life,
I knew that she would be my wife,
And she would breathe the life back into me,
From every day until eternity,
Or until I’d be as dead as that body.”
Finally the song came to an end, to a volley of applause from the guests. Unsurprisingly, Addison’s parents did not look impressed, but they were about the only people in the room who didn’t. Handing the guitar back to Mark, Derek slid gratefully into his seat. His wife (two words which he was sure he would never get used to hearing, at least not it that particular context) was smiling radiantly at him. She leaned over, pressing her lips to his ear.
“If that’s your idea of a romantic gesture,” she whispered, giggling, “then I’m glad you decided to keep the proposal low-key.”
~~~~
“And there you have it.” Derek finishes triumphantly. “Now can we please leave?”
The therapist purses his lips. “Not quite yet,” he murmurs, his gaze fixed on Addison, who has just covered her face with her hands and begun to cry.
~~~~
Chapter 22 – The Deterioration
Now this is embarrassing. Dimly, through the pain, and the anguish, and the sobs which are threatening to rip her chest apart, Addison recognizes this. She’ll have time to feel embarrassed later though, so for now she just focuses on the pain. This, she supposes, is the uneasy feeling which she’s been keeping bottled up since Derek suggested giving up on therapy. She only wishes it could have stayed bottled.
She neither knows nor cares what the therapist is thinking (the words smug, sanctimonious, and bastard spring to mind), but she is worried about Derek. Though she can’t bring herself to lift her face from her hands to check, she thinks that he’s crouched on the floor in front of her. Certainly, his hand is on her back, and he’s talking to her in a low soothing voice, asking what’s wrong, telling her to talk to him.
“It was so perfect.” She blurts out. “And I ruined it!” This is the crux of the matter. Their marriage ended because of her. She slept with her husband’s best friend. How can she expect him to forgive her for that, when she can barely forgive herself?
Derek is still attempting to comfort her, telling her she didn’t ruin anything, that he loves her, that he wants to be with her and only her, but she can’t bring herself to believe it.
“I destroy things.” She chokes out, around a sob. “I get scared, and I get lonely, and I destroy things. Maybe I’m the one who needs therapy, maybe I’m just not capable of being in a relationship!” She trails off again, unable to put words to the emotions raging inside her.
For a long moment, Derek is silent, and she thinks that she’s finally managed to convince him, that he’s about to go and have his happily ever after with his precious intern. But while she’s trying to work out whether this makes her feel worse or better (and honestly, though it’s no less than she deserves, she’s verging towards worse), he speaks again.
“That’s not the whole story though, is it?” He asks gently, and she knows without looking up that he’s exchanging glances with the therapist. “This is what we haven’t talked about. You may think you destroyed our marriage, and for a while I thought so too, but it was hardly perfect before, was it?”
She inhales shakily, remembering. These are the other memories which she was trying to block out, not just the adultery, but the time before it. The weeks, months, possibly even years of distance, the aching loneliness which led to her falling into bed with Mark. “No.” She replies quietly, voice muffled against her hands. “No it wasn’t.”
“We need to talk about it, don’t we?” He asks hesitantly, and she can tell that the question isn’t addressed to her. “You need to tell me what it was like for you.”
The last thing she wants to do is talk about it, she’s not even sure if she can, but as he’s finally acknowledged his own role in the breakdown of their marriage she feels that she owes it to him to try.
~~~~
The first night that he didn’t bother coming home, she didn’t even notice, or at least she didn’t find it strange. She was used to sleeping without him, used to surgeries, patients, and everything else hospital-related taking priority over their married life, and although she slept better with his warm body to curl up against, its absence never concerned her.
It was when the absences became more frequent, the excuses less believable, that she started to worry. She had always felt that she didn’t deserve him, the memories of her high school self too hard to shake off, and without him there to reassure her, the insecurities returned with a vengeance. It had to be her fault; she had to have done something wrong. Or maybe she hadn’t done anything, maybe he had just woken up one day and realised that he’d married the wrong woman.
As she racked her brains, trying desperately to find the reason for her failing marriage, she could think of only one thing: the baby issue. Derek wanted a child, she wanted a career. Other than their respective families, it had been the only thing they’d ever fought about. But that wasn’t something that she could fix when he was never home, and on the rare occasions when he did make it make to the brownstone, he evaded her attempts to talk about anything that wasn’t work-related.
“Not tonight, Addison.” He would say, as if he were talking to a small child. “I’m tired. We can discuss it tomorrow.”
But of course, when tomorrow came, he wasn’t there to discuss it. And so the cycle continued.
It was Thanksgiving when everything came to a head. Addison had driven to Derek’s family home that morning, feeling cheerful despite the prospect of spending a weekend with her mother-in-law. Mark had gone with her, ostensibly to visit his own family although she knew that he would spend most of the weekend with the Shepherds, and he was surprisingly good company, keeping her entertained on the long drive. Derek was driving out later, once he had finished surgery, and she was hopeful that this weekend she might actually get to talk to him properly, to iron everything out.
Then the phone call came. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t even to her. Instead, his mother came into the living room around midday looking gloomy, and explained that there had been complications in surgery and that Derek had no choice but to stay and monitor his patient.
“Didn’t he ask to speak to me?” Addison asked, dreading hearing the answer.
“I’m sorry dear.” Carolyn replied, and through the haze of pain Addison noticed that her tone sounded genuinely apologetic. Under any other circumstances, this would have been considered a victory. “He said he had to get back to the patient. But he sent his love.”
Something told Addison that this last sentence was a lie, and she quickly retreated upstairs, feigning a headache. As she lay on the bed, letting the tears stream freely down her cheeks, she heard the door creak open. She sat up quickly, sniffling and rubbing her wet cheeks. Mark stood in the doorway, regarding her sympathetically.
“I just wanted to see if you were OK.” He mumbled awkwardly. “I can go if you want.”
“No, don’t.” She begged, suddenly desperate not to be alone. “I’ll be OK in a minute. Just…don’t leave me alone?”
She hated how pathetic she was being, and in front of Mark of all people, but he seemed unconcerned. Sitting next to her on the bed, he pulled her into a hug and let her cry against his chest until her tears faded to embarrassed sniffles.
“I’m sorry.” She apologised, trying to wriggle out of his embrace. “It’s just…” She trailed off, unsure of how much she ought to be telling her husband’s best friend. But to her surprise, he finished her sentence for her.
“He’s never home, and you were hoping that this weekend you might get some time alone with him?” He smiled at her little squeak of surprise. “I have noticed, you know. And for what it’s worth, I think he’s a fool. If I had a woman like you I wouldn’t treat her like anything less than a princess.”
Had he caught her at a less vulnerable time, she would have laughed, because since when did Mark Sloan treat women like princesses? But he was there, when Derek hadn’t been in weeks, and he was being so kind, and she was so lonely, so she found herself leaning up and touching her lips to his.
The kiss lasted no more than a few seconds before the door opened yet again and the pair sprang apart. Eyebrows rocketing into her hairline, Derek’s youngest sister pushed the door shut and leaned against it, arms folded across her chest.
“Amy.” Addison stuttered, berating herself internally for being so stupid. If there was a way to fix her marriage, then this was definitely not it. “This isn’t what it looks like, I swear.”
“It’s fine.” Amy replied, her tone cooler than Addison had ever heard it. “I can understand, and I won’t tell anyone. I love my brother, but I know he’s not exactly husband of the year right now. But if you want to keep your affair secret, might I suggest not doing it in this house? Or at least locking the door?”
“It’s not an affair!” Addison began to protest, but Amy was already gone. In the silence that followed her departure, Addison and Mark stared at each other in horror and confusion. While she knew that Amy would be good to her word and keep their secret, Addison was more concerned that there was a secret that needed keeping. The fact that she had felt compelled to kiss another man, and her husband’s best friend at that, only served to remind her that there was something very wrong with her marriage.
~~~~
Epilogue
Over the next year, things change. Not all of the changes are sudden or earth-shattering, but they’re all important in moving them forward. They might not have healed entirely from everything that happened in New York, and maybe they never will, but they’ve learned to live with this fact, and they’d like to think it’s made them stronger.
The first hint that change is in the air is Derek deciding, of his own accord, that it’s time to move out of the trailer. They discuss leaving Seattle entirely, but returning to New York no longer feels like an option, and they’ve both learnt that running away from your problems never helped to solve them. After months of searching (because although Addison wants to get out of the trailer as quickly as possible, she also wants to have the perfect house to move into) they find an old Victorian place, far enough away that Derek can still indulge his love of ferry boats, but close enough to the city that the proximity to nature no longer brings Addison out in a rash. They decorate it together, which isn’t exactly a change as they did the same with the brownstone many years ago, but it’s so far removed from anything they’ve done in the past few years that it feels like one.
Another thing that’s changed is that they listen to each other more now. They’re back to being that couple, the one that irritated the crap out of the rest of the hospital staff because they knew each other so well. Addison is painfully aware of the glares thrown her way by the interns (who aren’t even interns any more, but in her mind Meredith Grey will never be anything else), and tries to tone it down in front of them, but sometimes she’s gripped by the sheer overwhelming happiness of having something to tone down. And although Derek still comes home late, and sometimes even spends the night in on-call rooms, he always lets her know what he’s doing. For her part, she tells him what she’s feeling, sometimes in a little too much detail. It’s better than shutting him out.
Of course, it’s not completely perfect, and not all of the changes are for the better. The worst change is a change in expectations, when Addison decides to give Derek what he’s always wanted and discovers that she can’t. This, she is sure, will spell the end of their relationship, and she agonizes for days before telling him the truth: there will be no children. It isn’t until she voices the words that she realises how much she wanted them too, and she thinks that it’s this genuine sentiment that saves them. She still hurts, and she still feels guilty, but it helps to know that for the first time in a long time they’re in this together.
Their families will always be a stumbling block as well, more so now that Derek’s finally admitted the truth he’s been denying for years. Her first Shepherd family event following their reunion is awkward to say the least, and she dismisses all notion of visiting her own family (had it not have been for Archer, her parents would never even have known about their separation), telling him that he is all the family she needs. He deflects the sentiment, telling her that his sisters have to be part of the equation too (especially Amy, who after a brief period as a teenage tearaway is now back on track and following in her brother’s footsteps), but she can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s touched by her words.
Surprisingly, the one thing which fails to throw a spanner in the works is Mark Sloan’s transfer to Seattle Grace. It takes a few weeks for Derek to stop clenching his jaw every time he has to be in a room with his former best friend, but as time passes, and it becomes clear that Mark is going nowhere near his friend’s wife (having shacked up, in a singularly bizarre turn of events, with Meredith’s half sister), they start to rebuild their friendship. Addison can only guess as to what they talk about (and she really hopes that it has nothing to do with the Grey women) as they renew their bond over fishing trips and beer, this is one relationship which she’s determined to stay out of. The stakes are just too high.
By some strange twist of fate, a year to the day after their last therapy session they run into their former therapist in the elevator. No words are exchanged, but Derek slides his arm protectively around Addison’s waist, and the other man smiles. Everything’s OK, the gesture says. And it is. It really is.
Please leave feedback for this author HERE
Author(s): shafeferi
Fandom(s): Grey’s Anatomy (with cameos from a few Private Practice characters).
Pairing(s): Derek/Addison
Word Count: 27,659
Rating/Warnings: NC-17 (Rating given purely for one sex scene – the rest of the fic is pretty tame, really. Nothing dark.)
Beta: My incredible friend Cat. She’s not on LJ, but she knows who she is.
Summary: During their couples' therapy, Derek and Addison are told to remember how their marriage began in order to regain the magic. Can they do it before it's too late, and are the memories enough to keep their marriage alive?
Author's notes: Both my beta and myself are British, so apologies for any use of British slang/spellings etc, I have tried to keep them to a minimum as this is an American fandom. Also, I’ve taken events mentioned in both Grey’s and PP into account as much as possible, but at times for the sake of the story I’ve felt it necessary to ignore them. Hopefully that won’t affect anyone’s enjoyment too much!
Chapter 1 – The First Meeting
It’s as if they’ve forgotten how to talk. They call it talking, but it’s all snide comments, raised voices, hurt glances, and distance. Distance so great it’s about to swallow them into the void.
The couples’ therapist has noticed (which is good, because they’re not paying him $300 an hour not to notice) and has practically ordered them to talk. Talk about something, talk about anything, talk about when they were happy, talk about when they lost the magic. Unfortunately, deciding what to talk about has turned into another argument.
“I think it’s a ridiculous idea.” Derek gripes, stabbing at his pasta as if it’s done him a personal injustice. He doesn’t need to talk to find out when they lost the magic, he already knows. It disappeared the moment he walked into his bedroom and discovered his wife straddling his best friend.
“Well I think that living in a trailer is a ridiculous idea.” Addison mumbles; her automatic defence whenever her feelings are hurt. Not that he’d notice. He’s far too wrapped up in the pain she’s caused him to notice any he’s causing her in return.
But although he hasn’t noticed the pain he’s inflicting, he does recognise the trailer comment as the prelude to an argument, and tonight it’s an argument that he’s not willing to have.
“Alright.” He sighs, pushing away his practically untouched plate. “What about the day we met?”
~~~~
Not for the first time in the history of their friendship, Derek was seriously regretting the day he met Mark Sloan. It wasn’t that he was a bad friend, in fact he was very supportive when he wanted to be; he just always seemed to get the pair of them into trouble. Like today, for example, when he’d managed to make them both half an hour late to class, warranting a full-scale bawling out from the professor, and he just found it funny. In fact, he seemed determined to get them into even more trouble by attempting to trade partners with Derek when they’d been explicitly told to get on opposite sides of the room and stay there.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Sloan?” The professor asked icily, eying the two of them in a way that suggested that she was Not Amused.
Mark opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again; evidently deciding at the last minute that ‘Derek’s partner is hotter’ would not go down too well, and shuffling off in the direction of his cadaver. Moving quickly before the professor noticed him again, Derek made his way towards his own partner. He wasn’t sure how Mark could judge her hot without even seeing her face, but if this was going to make his best friend jealous, he was sure as hell going to make the most of it.
“I’m Derek Shepherd.” He grinned, raking a hand through his already unruly hair and grinning, a grin which froze in place when his partner turned to look at him. Mark must have had a sixth sense when it came to hot women, because this girl was smoking. And also, he noticed with a sinking feeling, about as impressed-looking as the angry professor.
“Addison Forbes Montgomery.” She replied curtly, turning back to the cadaver, and in any other circumstances he would have mocked her for the rich-sounding name, but he was literally speechless. This was ridiculous, he needed to pull himself together, because oh GodMark had noticed and he was not going to hear the end of this later. But all he could think as he struggled to pull himself together long enough to do something useful was damn she was hot.
Derek stumbled through the rest of the class somehow, focusing on making it to the end without tripping over either his words or his feet (the latter having actually happened once, in front of his high school crush. It had been Chemistry class. He’d been carrying a bottle of hydrochloric acid. Sometimes he still had nightmares about it).
He’d learned a trick or two since high school (growing into his nose had helped), most of them tried and tested in the sleazy bars which Mark insisted upon dragging them to, but this girl seemed impervious to all of them. Perhaps, he mused, thinking back to the thoroughly unwanted lecture which his sisters had once decided to deliver on how to woo a woman, now was the time to just man up and ask her out. Now was certainly the time to do something, given that everyone else was now preparing to leave while he was standing there like a gormless idiot.
“What are you doing this weekend?” He blurted. (Smooth, Derek, real smooth, a voice in his head, which sounded suspiciously like his sister Nancy, chided. It’s meant to be an enquiry, not an interrogation.)
“Studying?” She squeaked, eyeing him nervously (as well she might, he had just for all intents and purposes demanded to know what she was doing with her free time), before throwing her bag over her shoulder and scurrying off. So much for the seduction of the century.
“Well she looked like she’d been shot out of a cannon.” Mark laughed, breezing over. “You didn’t trip over your feet again, did you?” He paused in his tracks, seeing the dejected look on his friend’s face. “Look, man, I wouldn’t worry about her. She looks a bit high maintenance if you ask me. Nice ass though.”
This last came almost as an afterthought, and Derek couldn’t help but chuckle. Mark really did never stop. And, much as he knew it was a bad thing to do, slagging off the latest girl to break his heart never failed to help.
“Did you know she had two last names?”He asked his best friend, allowing incredulity to take over from shame. And that was the last he expected to think about Addison Forbes Montgomery.
~~~~
Chapter 2 – The Awkward First Coffee
Addison’s smiling when she comes into the bedroom, actually smiling, and not in a smug “I just got one over you and your dirty mistress” kind of way. Derek would comment on it, but he knows that it’d just lead to another fight, because her response would be that Seattle doesn’t make her feel much like smiling, and then he would have to retort that it was her who drove him out here in the first place, her and his man-whore of a best friend, and then, well it wouldn’t end pleasantly. So he sidesteps that particular train of thought, and instead opts for asking her who was on the phone, even though he already knows. At least it shouldn’t end in an argument.
“It was Nae.” She grins, flopping down on the bed beside him. “I told her what we were doing, and she said that if we were talking about how we got together then she should get a special mention.”
“Oh?” Derek snorts, remembering just how ‘helpful’ Naomi had been in that respect. “What, for being utterly terrifying?”
“Addison giggles, flipping open her phone. “I’m telling her you said that!”
“You’re stalling.” Derek accuses, making a grab for the phone in her hand.
“Stalling?” Addison arches an eyebrow. “And why would I be stalling?”
“Because you don’t want to remember that dreadful coffee date, which Naomi is totally responsible for by the way!”
“It wasn’t the coffee date that was awful, it was your invitation!” She shoots back, but relents, snapping her phone shut. “Alright Nae, this is for you!”
~~~~
In retrospect it had been pretty dreadful, but then when a date interrupts a marathon study session, it can hardly be expected to be great. Addison was entrenched in the library, surrounded by stacks of textbooks and piles of hastily scribbled notes and utterly convinced that she was about the fail everything and be sent home to Connecticut in disgrace, when she heard someone clearing their throat behind her. She turned around, fully prepared to tell the inconsiderate somebody to either get some cough drops or get out because couldn’t they see that some people were busy having meltdowns here, but then she realised that it was her hot lab partner from Gross Anatomy class. At this she froze, because although her reflection might have said different, in her head she was still sixteen years old with braces and an ‘I Love Band’ t-shirt, and talking to a guy, especially a hot guy, was just about the scariest thing in the world.
Hot Lab Partner Guy (whose name, if she remembered correctly from all of the other millions of facts that she was currently trying to cram into her brain, was Derek) was also looking decidedly uncomfortable, which helped, although only a little.
“Um, hi.” He muttered, addressing his greeting to somewhere around Addison’s left elbow. “I’m Derek. You know, we were lab partners.”
She just nodded, the power of speech not having yet been restored to her. Failing all of her exams and getting sent back to Connecticut was looking more and more attractive.
“So, I was wondering.” Derek ploughed on. “You look like you’ve been studying for a long time, I mean, you have a lot of notes, which would suggest you’ve been here a while. So I guess you must be tired. And coffee helps, if you’re tired that is, so I was wondering, would you like to get some? Some coffee, I mean?”
A long pause ensued.
“With you?” Addison finally squeaked, then cursed herself. Of course he meant with him, he wasn’t going to be just suggesting she get coffee on her own (although by now he might be wishing he had).
“With me.” Derek confirmed, and then added quickly. “I mean, you could go with someone else, but then your scary friend might kill me.”
Addison was shocked out of her muteness by this. “My scary friend?”
Derek froze, his expression stranded somewhere between horror and acute embarrassment. Addison smiled. Watching Derek bumble his way awkwardly through his invitation was making her feel a little less awkward herself.
“Her name’s Naomi.” She offered. “And she can be pretty scary when she wants to be. It’s generally best to do as she says.”
A more relaxed grin spread across Derek’s face. “I guess you’d better accept my offer then. After all, you wouldn’t want to incite her wrath. C’mon…” He added, seeing the nervous look that she gave her pile of notes. “You’ve studied more than everyone else in this entire library. I think you deserve a break.”
She wasn’t sure if it was the grin, or the hair, or (as she would tell everyone who enquired about their first date) the fact that she just really wanted a coffee, but she caved in then, and let Derek lead her out of the library. Suddenly failure didn’t seem quite so important.
~~~~
Chapter 3 – The Birthday Party
“Is that Nae again?” Derek asks, raising his eyebrows at Addison as she sprawls across the bed, phone pressed to her ear.
“It is.” Addison replies, shooting him a look. It’s a look he knows well, the “I wouldn’t have to spend three hours on the phone/buy $900 shoes/stalk around the hospital terrorizing interns if you hadn’t decided to move to Seattle and live in a trailer” look. He has a feeling though that it’s about to be replaced by an even less impressed look, when she hears what he has to say.
“Can I give her a message?”
Addison’s brow furrows in confusion, as well it might. Derek and Naomi speak about twice a year, when Derek calls to ask Naomi what Addison wants for Christmas, and when Derek calls to ask Naomi what Addison wants for her birthday. As neither of those dates is approaching, he has no reason for wanting to talk to her.
“Tell her she wasn’t the only one who brought us together.”
“Oh?” The frown of confusion deepens.
“She only got us over the first hurdle. What really set the ball rolling was tequila.”
The look that his wife gives him as she shuts the bedroom door in his face is painfully clear. “Conversation closed.” It says. “You are not telling that story!” But if they’re meant to be talking about finding and losing the magic, it seems the perfect story to tell.
~~~~
“Dereeeeek!”
The additional five syllables she had managed to insert into his name as she hurtled off the bar stool into his arms alerted him to his girlfriend’s state of drunkenness. Perhaps leaving it until this late to arrive at her birthday party had been a mistake, but what had been meant to be a five minute phone call to his mother to let her know he was still alive had turned into a two hour rundown of everything he’d eaten in the past month, and he’d thought that Naomi would be here. Well he hadn’t been wrong on the last count; she was here in the bar, just on the other side of it, getting her face eaten by Sam Bennett. Which had left Addison with only the thoroughly bored-looking barman and his extensive range of drinks for company. He supposed he should at least be grateful that she seemed to be a happy drunk.
“You gonna buy me a drink?” She slurred now, toppling unsteadily back onto her barstool. “This is Steve, Steve makes drinks! Steve knows how to make EVERYTHING! He’s my new friend!”
From the grim smile which Steve gave Derek at this, he wasn’t sure that the man was exactly thrilled about being Addison’s new friend. Nor was he sure that his girlfriend should be allowed anything more to drink, but apparently that decision was not his to make, as she was already ordering tequila slammers for the pair of them.
“Addie, I don’t…” like tequila, he was about to finish, when that particular problem was eliminated as she downed his slammer as well as her own, nose scrunching at the taste.
“I thought you weren’t gonna come!” She accused, gesticulating wildly and almost falling face first onto the floor. By the time she had righted herself (with more than a little help from Derek’s stabilizing arm) she was giggling hysterically, all traces of accusation forgotten. “But it’s OK, because I got drunk! And I’m a WASP, so that is not an easy thing to do!” This declaration was made without the slightest hint of irony, as if it wasn’t obvious to everyone else in the bar that Addison Forbes Montgomery was, in fact, plastered.
“I’m sorry I’m so late.” He explained anyway, although he already knew that his excuse was pretty pathetic. “It’s just I hadn’t phoned home in weeks and then just as I was about to leave Kathleen called me and gave me some psychobabble about empty nest syndrome, which is ridiculous because it’s not like Mom even has an empty nest, and the way Amy behaves sometimes she probably wishes she does, but anyway I figured I’d better call, and I thought I could make it quick but you know what moms are like…”
He trailed off lamely, hoping that Addison was drunk enough to find the crap that he’d just spouted amusing. Instead, she seemed to have crumpled.
“Yeah, I guess.” She muttered in a small voice, staring hard at her empty shot glass. Oh crap. This was not the way he’d imagined this evening panning out.
“Addie?” He tilted her chin up, noting with horror the tears pooling in the startlingly blue eyes. Perhaps telling her he’d ditched her for his family hadn’t been the smartest of ideas. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to upset you…”
“It’s not you.” She wrenched herself away from him, hands waving wildly as she began to rant drunkenly at him. “It’s just, what are moms like? Because I’m actually not sure if I know. I guess they’re meant to call you on your birthday, aren’t they? And if they don’t, and you end up calling them first, then you might expect them to wish you a happy birthday, rather than asking you why you’re calling because they really don’t have the time right now? And then, when you tell them what day it is, they probably aren’t meant to say…”at this she put on an exaggeratedly affected tone “…well we had a gift sent over darling, what more do you expect?”
Tears were streaming unchecked down her cheeks by now, and Derek reached out a hand to comfort her but she turned on him, tone accusatory once again.
“Well? Would your mother say that?”
Derek just shook his head mutely, because no, his mother would never do anything like that. Even Mark’s parents, who were the closest thing to neglectful he had ever known, had never done anything quite that bad. He now felt even worse for having turned up two hours late.
By now Addison was crying in earnest, her face in her hands, and this time when Derek put his arm around her, she didn’t shrug him off. “I’m so sorry Addie.” He murmured, rubbing soothing circles on her back, and he wasn’t really even talking about his lateness anymore. “What can I do?”
“Take me home?” The voice was so quiet, so choked with sobs, that he almost didn’t hear it, and for once he was grateful for having grown up with four sisters. Twenty four years of deciphering girl flip-out could finally be put to good use.
Dumping the contents of his wallet on the bar (he didn’t know how much Addison had already paid Steve, but he probably deserved it), he scooped his girlfriend up in his arms and made for the exit. In an instant, her arms were around his neck and her face was buried in his shirt, leaving mascara stains that he would never be able to get out, but he probably deserved that too.
Half an hour later he was lowering Addison onto the bed in the small apartment she shared with Naomi. Somewhere between him realizing that he had given Steve his taxi money and his arms falling asleep, she had cried herself out and she was half-asleep herself as he kissed her and turned to go. It was pure luck that made him turn in the doorway, just in time to see her reach sleepily for him.
“Addie? You want me to stay?” They’d been dating a few months now, but sleepovers were definitely not something they did.
“Do you mind?” Her voice was even smaller than before, and she seemed to be on the verge of tears again. “It’s just…I don’t think Naomi’s coming back tonight and I really don’t want to be on my own and…”
“I’ll stay.” He cut her off, something in his chest aching at the vulnerability in her tone, and the way she cuddled into him as soon as he slid into bed beside her, like she was afraid he was about to disappear. She was quirky, and neurotic, and downright annoying at times, but she was Addison, and no-one should be allowed to make her cry like that.
“I love you Derek.” She mumbled into his chest as she dropped off, and he grinned sleepily.
“I love you too.” He whispered into the darkened room, even though he knew that she was no longer able to hear him. Because if there was one thing that tonight had shown him, it was that he did.
~~~~
Chapter 4 – The Accidental Triple Date
“I am picking the story tonight.” Addison says firmly, plonking two large bags of Chinese food down on the counter in the trailer. “And it is not going to be one that embarrasses me like the last one. Or one that prompts the therapist to start asking about my ‘unresolved childhood issues’. If I wanted that I would go to a regular therapist, not a couples’ therapist. The couples’ therapist is meant to deal with our problems as a couple!”
“Sure.” Derek replies distractedly, far more interested in the contents of the bags than his wife’s girl flip-out. “If you brought Chinese food, you can tell whatever stories you like.” He shoots her a sly look, before adding. “The therapist was right though. You definitely have unresolved childhood issues.”
As he continues to pull the tops off the foil containers and empty the food onto both their plates, she sits cross-legged, scowling at him. Finally he looks up and immediately bursts out laughing at the expression on her face.
“Sorry honey, but you know I’m right.”
“Don’t call me honey!” She snaps, feeling a pang as she remembers him saying almost exactly the same words to her the day after she arrived in Seattle. She snatches up her chopsticks, and begins to eat without looking at him, only to glance up when she hears him snort with laughter once again.
“Wha-?” She starts, ready to berate him for teasing her about her issues when she realises why he’s laughing. A chunk of chicken has made a bid for freedom, leaving a sticky orange trail down the front of his white shirt.
“Honestly Derek,” she reprimands playfully, her former bad mood forgotten. “You’re a brain surgeon. How can you be so hopeless at using chopsticks?”
He shrugs sheepishly, spearing the next piece of chicken on his chopstick so it can’t escape. “They’re difficult! Anyway, what was this story you wanted to tell me? The one that won’t lead to a conversation about your issues?”
“Well,” she begins, ignoring the jibe as she twirls a noodle around her own chopsticks.”Do you remember the first time we ate Chinese food together?” And though her fingers are occupied, under the table she crosses her toes.
~~~~
“No way, Naomi!” Addison shouted through the closed bathroom door. This was always her best friend’s way, to tell her about her latest brilliant plan when she was a captive audience, or at the very least when she couldn’t reach her to strangle her.
“But Addie…” Naomi pleaded, and though she couldn’t see her face, Addison could imagine the puppy dog eyes. “It’ll be fun. And besides, you’ve been dating Derek for nearly a year now and I’ve barely met him.”
“That is so not true!” Addison fired back, mentally admonishing herself for the childish retort. “You have classes together all the time.”
“Classes aren’t the same!” Naomi whined, childishness apparently being the name of the game today. “I don’t get to talk to him properly there! And you and Sam talk all the time, so it’s only fair that Derek and I should be friends too.” She took a deep breath, clearly gearing up for a long speech. Addison looked at her watch. A long speech was definitely not something which she had time for today.
“Alright!” She relented, opening the door and rolling her eyes when her best friend almost fell into the bathroom. “But seriously? A double date? Does that really sound like fun to you?”
The grin on her friend’s face confirmed her worst fears.
~~~~
If a double date had sounded like torture to Addison, a triple date was equivalent to public execution. And when the third couple included Mark Sloan? Well, to say that she was hating it was an understatement. But, unfortunately for her, Derek had not only thought that this was a good idea, but he had proved to be almost as good as Naomi at making puppy dog eyes (although she wasn’t sure if it was the date itself he liked the idea of or just the opportunity to make her squirm. Sometimes, Derek could be as childish as his best friend).
However, it was her who was being proved right, not that she was enjoying the opportunity to gloat. This date was the dictionary definition of a disaster, from the dreadful food, to awkward silences, to the fact that Mark Sloan was living up to his nature and was eating his date rather than the food on his plate. Add to this the fact that Sam seemed to have developed a virulent dislike for Derek and was shooting daggers at him every time he opened his mouth to speak and it was completely understandable that Addison had spent more time in the bathroom than at the table.
“So, do we want dessert?” Naomi asked, studying the menu. Derek was reaching out to take a menu himself, an interested expression on his face, when Addison seized her moment. She kicked out under her table, the pointed toe of her shoe connecting with his shin. He grimaced, and glared at her, and she motioned towards the door with her eyes. As far as she was concerned, this was make or break for them. If he could read the signals and get her out of there, then he was a keeper.
Luckily, he took the bait. “You know what guys, I think I’m going to have to bail.” He said, massaging his temples. “I’ve got a killer headache, it just came on, so here…” He took out his wallet and tossed a few bills onto the table. “…this should cover our share. Addie, do you want to come back with me?”
She didn’t need to be asked twice.
~~~~
Three hours later they were sprawled across his bed, surrounded by empty Chinese cartons. Derek had passed the test with flying colours, not only getting Addison out of there, but also picking up on the fact that she’d barely eaten anything at dinner and buying her Chinese takeout on the way home. He’d then proved to be endearingly hopeless at using chopsticks and more than amenable to her teaching, at which point the food had been forgotten. Now, entwined together sleepily, the terrible date seemed a million years ago.
“Promise me something?” Derek murmured into Addison’s hair.
“What is it?” She asked sleepily.
“That we never go along with your best friend’s harebrained schemes again?”
“Alright.” She responded. “If we never go on a date with your best friend again.”
“Deal.”
~~~~
Chapter 5 – The Seduction
After the mini-breakthrough, which Addison thinks was mainly caused by the Chinese food anyway, they are back to sulking and silence for weeks. Addison thinks it was the inclusion of Mark in her story that did it, and reprimands herself severely. She tries everything to get him to speak to her again (although she’s tried everything three times over, and truth be told she’s getting a little tired of being the only one working at this marriage), but in the end it’s the couples’ therapist who gets them talking again. She doesn’t know what he says, just that one day Derek goes alone to couples’ therapy and that evening he’s different. Not much different, but a little less of a sulky child (which is good, because if there’s one thing she’s more tired of than being the only one working at her marriage, it’s being married to someone with the emotional capacity of a three year-old). And the next night he has a new memory for her.
~~~~
It was getting to be ridiculous. He knew he’d said he was happy to wait, and he was because he loved her (and besides, yet another happy side-effect of growing up with four sisters was that he was far too much of a gentleman to press the issue). But he was still a man, and having this gorgeous, sexy woman in his life, in his room, sometimes even in his bed, without anything else going on, was getting to be more than he can stand.
Which is why he was pleased, if a little surprised, when he returned from a tutor meeting late one night to find his girlfriend half-naked in his bed.
“Addie?” He asked, and then cussed under his breath, because if there was a correct way to handle this situation then that certainly was not it.
“Of course.” She replied, a mock-offended expression on her face. “How many other girls do you bring in here?”
“Well technically,” he laughed, leaning down to kiss her. “I didn’t bring you in here. I’m guessing Mark let you in?”
She nodded. “And he guessed what we were going to do, which was really embarrassing. Did you tell him we hadn’t done it yet?”
“No!” He defended quickly. “I think he knows though. He’s got a sixth sense for all things sexual.”
She giggled a little at that, before biting her bottom lip, suddenly insecure. “Are you mad at me for making you wait this long?”
“Of course not!” He reassured, and he really wasn’t, not now that she was here, not now that this was finally going to happen. And then, because he was still too much of a gentleman for his own good. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
In reply, she simply sat up, letting the covers slide off her body and land in a forlorn-looking pile on the floor. Then she kissed him, hard and passionately. He could taste red wine and vanilla and her, and it was so perfect that he would have punched the air had he still been a sixteen year-old virgin (but luckily Mark had warned him off that particular habit).
“Does that answer your question?” She laughed, tugging insistently at the bottom of his shirt until he pulled it over his head and threw it onto the floor beside the abandoned duvet. “Don’t worry, I’m ready. I’ve had my Dutch courage and everything.”
“How much?” He asked, lowering himself onto the bed, as she fiddled with his belt. She didn’t seem drunk, but it was another of those things that he just had to check.
“Honestly?” She chewed on her lip again, fingers never leaving his belt. “Three glasses of wine. But Naomi had a whole bottle before her first time with Sam and she still remembered it.” She froze, clapping a hand to her mouth in horror. “And I did not just tell you that!”
“You did not just tell me that.” He repeated soothingly, as his girlfriend paused in her undressing of him to fret about the information that she had just divulged. Or maybe it was more than that. “Hey.” He reached out to rub her arm. “Are you nervous?”
“Maybe a little.” She admitted, teeth still working a groove into her lower lip. “It’s just…I haven’t done this much before and, well, it hasn’t exactly been great.”
He just smiled reassuringly. “Relax, Addie. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to…but trust me, you and me? We will be great.”
The smile that she gave him was still a little timid, but she returned her hands to his waist, slipping off his belt and motioning that it was time for his jeans to join the pile on the floor. He pressed his lips against hers, kissing her gently at first and then with increasing urgency, his fingers groping for the clasp of her bra. And then his lips were moving down her neck to her breasts (not exactly unchartered territory, but tonight, with her breathing slowing as his mouth closed around her nipple and her fingers delving into his boxers with newfound confidence, it all felt new and different).
The kisses trailed quickly down her stomach, her skin feeling hot and fevered under his lips as her hand curled tighter around his penis, the fingers of her other hand tangled in his hair. He paused momentarily with his hand on the waistband of her panties, before her moan of impatience told him all that he needed to know. It all went quickly after that, shamefully so, as he thrusted, and she failed to suppress a scream of delight, and the headboard rattled against the wall (and if Mark hadn’t known before what they were planning on doing, then he definitely knew now).
“So,” he murmured, as she curled into his chest, silent and sated. “Was that good?”
“No.” She replied, lifting her head to laugh at the expression on his face. “It was great. Just like you promised.”
~~~~
Chapter 6 – The Parting
When you’re trying to rekindle a burnt-out flame of a marriage, there are good days and bad days. Today is definitely not one the good days. And for once, she can’t even blame it on Derek. He may be as sullen and un-communicative as ever, but she hasn’t caught him staring in Meredith’s direction in over a week, and that alone is proof that he’s trying. No, today the problem is all Addison.
Or, from her perspective, the problem is all Seattle. She hates the city, with its gossiping interns, and its lack of skyscrapers, and its constant miserable rain. Leaving New York to live here, and especially to live in a trailer (which some people may have been able to be content with, but not people who had spent the past ten years living in ten million dollar townhouses), just seems like some sick cosmic joke. And to add insult to injury the ferryboat that Derek just loves taking to work every morning makes her feel nauseous. It’s all a little too much to take at times, and every day that her marriage fails to work she gets one step closer to packing it all in and returning to New York.
There’s one thing though that never fails to keep her going, and that’s her concerns about how others perceive her. She’s a Forbes Montgomery after all, and if there’s one thing she’s taken from her upbringing, it’s an acute, almost paralysing fear of being seen as weak. Showing even the tiniest glimpse of your emotions makes you weak and giving up, well giving up is off the radar. So when the therapist fixes them with his stern look, the one that says ‘you’re not working at this’, it’s her who feels guilty. Derek, who spends his days actively not working at fixing their marriage, just glowers at the therapist with the air of a schoolboy in the principal’s office. But Addison, who has done nothing but work since she arrived in this hellhole, averts her eyes and flushes, reverting to her own schoolgirl state.
That night, she tosses and turns in the tangled sheets while Derek snores contentedly beside her. Finally, as shafts of sunlight stream through the gaps in the blinds, she rolls over and pinches him.
“I shouldn’t be the only one feeling guilty.” She gripes, daring him to complain that he’s tired when he’s got at least six hours of sleep on her. “But apparently I am, and besides it’s my turn, so this is me working at this.”
~~~~
The familiar buzzing of the alarm clock filled Derek’s tiny bedroom, shortly followed the thud of Mark’s fist connecting with the partition wall and a disembodied voice shouting “Derek, turn the damn thing off!” Addison reached over her boyfriend’s still-sleeping form to slap the snooze button, suppressing a sigh as she did so. It was a routine so familiar that it felt like it was burned into her brain, but it was all about to change. Because that alarm was not summoning them to lectures or classes, or anything remotely academic. It was a reminder that they had to get up because in just a few hours Addison would be boarding a plane to Connecticut, flying home for the summer. And she had absolutely no desire to go.
“Addie?” Derek stirred beside her. “What time is it? Late…flight…can’t miss…”
“Shhh!” She laughed, leaning in to kiss him good morning. “We’re not late, we’re fine. And you shouldn’t try to think without coffee inside you! I’ll go make some.”
Dressed in nothing more than his oversized college shirt, she padded out into the hallway. Normally she might have put up more of a fight over whose turn it was to make coffee, but she’d been awake for hours already, and besides she needed a moment to collect her emotions. If she wasn’t careful she’d end up crying all over him, and that was not a memory she wanted to leave him with.
“Morning.” Mark raised his coffee mug sleepily in her direction as she entered the kitchen. Horrified, she stopped in her tracks, trying to will back the tears that had been beginning to force their way out. Of all the days that Mark could have chosen to surface before noon, it would have to have been today. Explaining her out-of-control emotions to her boyfriend’s ass of a best friend was going to make her terrible day that little bit worse.
To his credit though, Mark was actually showing something resembling sensitivity, averting his gaze as she swiped the back of her hand underneath her watering eyes. “Coffee?” He asked when she appeared to have composed herself.
She nodded, raising her eyebrows as he filled a dubiously clean mug from the pot on the table. “I need one for Derek too; I’m going to take it in to him….” Her voice trailed off as the tears threatened again. An uncomfortable expression passed across Mark’s face as he studied her, but he patted the kitchen bench beside him. “Sit down a sec. Prince Charming can wait five minutes for his coffee.”
She surprised herself by complying, normally there were at least fifteen things that she’d rather do than spend time alone with Mark, but he seemed to be behaving like a normal human being for once, and she needed a caffeine hit to be able to control herself (which was ridiculous, because Forbes Montgomerys should be able to control themselves with or without coffee, but right now she didn’t feel much like a Forbes Montgomery).
“So….” Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat as she took a long gulp of coffee. “You’re going home today, right?” He inhaled tentatively, sounding much less sure of himself than usual. “Is that the problem?”
Addison nearly dropped her mug in shock. She hadn’t thought that there was a sensitive bone in Mark’s body and here he was sensing her problems without her having to say a single word? She had to be dreaming. But, just as she was about to pinch herself, she remembered a conversation she’d had with Derek a few months ago, as she complained about Mark’s, well, Mark-ness, and he attempted to defend his best friend. “I know he’s an ass,” she remembered him saying, “but he has his reasons. His family aren’t great; they never taught him to connect like a normal person.” Maybe Mark understood her reasons for not wanting to go home better than anyone.
So she just cleared her throat and nodded, not volunteering any information, simply hoping that he understood. From the expression of increased discomfort, she guessed that he did.
“Look, Addison,” he began awkwardly. “I know you and I aren’t exactly friends, and any advice I give you you’re probably going to ignore, but here goes nothing. I’m the ass, not Derek; he’s actually pretty good at this emotional crap. So just tell him you’re upset and you’re going to miss him. If you don’t he won’t work it out, because he might not be me but he’s still a man, but if you do he’ll appreciate it. And it won’t scare him away. He’s got four sisters.” He added, sounding more like his usual self. “No amount of emotional crap could scare him away. I’m starting to think he might actually like it.”
Addison swallowed hard, not quite managing to make it past the lump in her throat. “Thanks Mark,” she choked out, picking up Derek’s mug of coffee from the table. “And, you know, we can be friends. If you want?”
He gave nothing more than a grunt in reply, emotional quota apparently having been filled for the year, but she thought it was an affirmative grunt. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.
“Took you long enough.” Derek teased, as she set the mug down on his desk. But his teasing grin faded as she turned and flung herself at him, burying herself in his chest. “Addie? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to go home!” She sniffled into his shirt. “I’ll miss you too much! And anyway, you’ve turned me into this pathetic cry-baby; I’ll never survive back among the WASPs!”
“You are not a cry-baby!” He defended, stroking her hair. “I’m sure you’ll be fine among the WASPs, you might just need a while to settle in. But I’ll miss you too. In fact, I was thinking…” He paused for a fraction longer than necessary, and she raised her head from his chest to look at him.
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking…how would you like to come and visit me during the summer? Give you something to look forward to?”
Try as she might, Addison couldn’t suppress a squeal of delight. She just hoped that Mark’s new-found sensitivity would last long enough for him not to tease her about it later.
~~~~
Chapter 7 – The Visit Part 1
“Your mother called.” Addison says as soon as Derek walks through the door. It sounds like an accusation and he is not in the mood for accusations.
“And?” He asks, daring her to continue this. He should know better. When it comes to his mother, Addison is not known for her ability to let it go.
“And she hates me.” Addison scowls, holding up a hand to silence him when he starts to protest. “Don’t you dare start denying it; she’s hated me since the moment she laid eyes on me!”
Derek opens his mouth to argue, then closes it again. He’s not even sure why he’s been lying about this for so long, and he’s especially not sure why he’s lying about it now. Why does she deserve protecting?
“You see!” She accuses now, seizing on the moment of hesitation. “You’re not denying it because you know I’m right!”
“No I’m not denying it because you told me not to…” He trails off, throwing his hands in the air in frustration. “You know what, forget it! She hates you, always has, always will! Are you happy now?” He’s expecting another outburst from her, maybe even tears (it wouldn’t be the first time when they got onto the topic of his mother) but instead she just swallows, as if literally digesting the information and then looks at him with a calm, measured expression.
“Alright, thank you.”He can see the hurt in her eyes, because this wasn’t the news she wanted even if it was what she expected. But she’s plowing on bravely (or perhaps just stubbornly) regardless. “And now I want you to tell me the truth about that first visit.”
“Addie…” He doesn’t know why she’s insisting on digging all of this up, it’s only going to hurt her and he doesn’t know if he has it in him to comfort her right now. But the hand’s up again, silencing him for a second time, although she’s not talking over him this time. Instead she’s letting her eyes do the talking. “You owe me this, Derek,” they’re saying. And he’s not sure he owes her anything, but he never could resist those eyes, so he gives in.
~~~~
“Derek wait, can we run through this one more time?” Addison fretted, fidgeting in the passenger seat of the car. Quickly weighing up the risks of crashing the car versus those of Addison’s head exploding, Derek decided that the latter was the most likely to occur and removed a hand from the wheel to place it on his girlfriend’s knee.
“Addie, relax. My sisters are going to love you, regardless of whether you can remember their birthdays, specialties, and favourite childhood toys, alright?”
Addison failed to laugh at this admittedly pathetic attempt to rally her, and instead moved on to her next worry. “And your mom? You’re her only son; she’s bound to hate me. She’ll be testing me, trying to find out if I’ll make a good wife for you. And I’m a WASP, Derek, I don’t cook and I don’t clean. You’ve seen me in the kitchen; I burn toast, for Christ’s sake!”
“Breathe.” He reminded her, having noticed a distinct lack of that particular activity from her in the duration of her rant. “Relax, be yourself, and try not to give yourself an ulcer. You’re not on trial here, and you’d win them over even if you were.”
He turned into his driveway, glancing sideways at his girlfriend. “We’re here. Now please tell me you’re not about to throw up, because that may not make for the best of first impressions. Not to mention what it’d do to the upholstery.”
She took a deep breath, clasping her hands together in a futile attempt to keep them from trembling. “I’m not about to throw up.” Another deep breath. “At least I hope I’m not.”
At that moment, the door to the house opened and a girl emerged in a blur of dark hair and teenage limbs. She made for the car at a sprint, and had her hand on the door handle when Derek’s mother’s voice sounded angrily from within the house.
“Amy! Amelia Shepherd you get back inside this instant! Is running around the yard like a Tasmanian devil any way to greet a guest?”
“I was just trying to be welcoming.” Derek heard his youngest sister say sulkily, but she turned around and traipsed back to the doorway, where Carolyn Shepherd had just appeared, flanked on both sides by Derek’s three other sisters.
“You’re definitely not going to throw up?” Derek checked, waiting for the affirming nod before jumping out of the car and moving round to the passenger side to let his girlfriend out. “Then it’s time to meet the monsters.”
Trying not to feel like he was throwing her to the wolves, especially when he saw the grimace on his mother’s face as he hauled the expensively branded luggage out of the trunk, he took Addison by the hand and half-led, half-dragged her over to his waiting family.
“So,” he announced, clearing his throat nervously (because this hadn’t seemed like a big deal before but all of a sudden it really did). “Everyone, this is Addison. And Addison, this is my mom, Carolyn, and my sisters Kathleen, Nancy, Joanna, and Amelia.” He cleared his throat again and gave his best boyish grin, pleading with his family with his eyes. Unfortunately, Addison chose this moment to do the one thing guaranteed to irritate his mother: unleash the WASP full-force.
“Addison Forbes Montgomery.” She said stiffly, reminding him with a jolt of the day they first met. She stuck out an arm that might as well have been made of cardboard. “Pleased to meet you Mrs. Shepherd.”
Derek winced at the expression that crossed his mother’s face before she collected herself and held out her own hand. “Please dear, call me Carolyn,” she offered, although her tone lacked its usual warmth. Derek resisted the urge to hit his head hard against the wall, suppressing a sigh of relief when his sisters ignored Addison’s attempts to be formal, instead throwing themselves on her with their usual exuberance. Addison looked shocked for a moment but then a slow smile lit up her face and she relaxed into the embrace (at least as much as you can relax when surrounded on all sides by hyperactive Shepherd women).
“So Addison,” Derek’s mother disturbed the peace, smiling an unusually calculating smile. “I was thinking that you could help me with the dinner. I’m making Derek’s favourite.”
Once the women had disappeared inside the house, Addison throwing pleading looks over her shoulder, Derek gave into the head-hitting urge. It might have killed brain cells, but in this situation it was sorely necessary.
~~~~
Chapter 8 – The Visit Part 2
“You’ve been avoiding me for days.” Derek accuses, easing himself between the sheets beside his wife. “Now I don’t want to suggest that I’m not grateful for the respite in trailer-related complaints, but shouldn’t we talk about this?”
“I’m tired.” Addison replies, her voice muffled through a mouthful of pillow. She isn’t, not really, but she doesn’t want to tell him how she’s really feeling, that she’s still stinging from his admission. She might have pushed it out of him, and she might have suspected it, but eleven years of suspecting that somebody hates you still doesn’t prepare you for the reality of that fact. And, more than anything, that reality makes her concerned for the future. Their future. If his family hates her, what chance do they have of making this work?
“Addison…” He puts a hand on her back, rubbing at the spot on the nape of her neck where the tension always gathers. A year ago she might have melted at the touch, but now the action just feels hollow and meaningless, and she shrugs away from his touch, voicing her concerns for the first time.
“Derek, will you just leave me be? How do you expect me to feel? I’ve just found out that not only do you hate me but your entire family does too!” Her voice wavers on the last few words and she’s grateful for the darkness in the room, allowing her to hide her emotions.
“Addison…” He says again, and her voice is gentle. “I don’t hate you, I might have a funny way of showing it sometimes, but I don’t. My mother doesn’t hate you either. I know I said she did before, but I was angry and I was sick of defending her to you and you to her. But she doesn’t hate you, she might not love you the way you want her to, but she does not hate you. And my sisters most definitely do not hate you, they never have. Do you not remember the rest of that visit?”
She nods into the pillow, not quite ready to test the strength of her voice, but he’s not letting this one go.
“You made a demand of me a couple of nights ago, and now I’m making one of you. I want you to tell me about the rest of your visit. I want you to remember that my sisters love you, so much that it’s irritating at times, but they definitely love you.”
“OK.” Addison nods into the pillow again, a small smile breaking through. “I’ll tell you.”
~~~~
In all of her nightmares about how badly this could have gone, Addison had definitely not imagined this. Less than half an hour into dinner and she was locked in the bathroom in tears. But then, when Derek had told her stories about his mother, he had painted a picture of a warm, kind woman who would go out of her way to welcome anyone new into her home. So far, Addison had not seen many signs of that. Carolyn Shepherd was doing her best to trip her up at every hurdle, and hurdles had never exactly been Addison’s area of expertise. Who knew that you could slice carrots in the wrong way? Or that greaseproof paper produced so much smoke when you set fire to it? And did Carolyn really have to be so mean about all of it?
Blowing her nose hard, splashing cold water on her cheeks, she unlocked the door. She wasn’t sure that she was really ready to face them yet, but she supposed she’d have to be. Leaving the table for long periods of time was only going to give Carolyn more reasons to hate her, as if she didn’t have enough already.
As she stepped out into the hall, she almost tripped over a pair of long legs blocking her exit. She stumbled, caught herself just in time and grinned sheepishly at Amelia, the youngest of the Shepherd girls. Amelia grinned back, a conspiratorial grin.
“Don’t let her get you down.” She said. “Mom, I mean. I know you think she hates you, and you’re probably right, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Addison spluttered, perilously close to tears once again. “You just admitted to me that my boyfriend’s mother probably hates me and you say it doesn’t matter?”
Amelia patted the ground beside her with another grin, and Addison sank down gratefully, leaning against the wall. “It doesn’t. She has behaved like this with every one of my sisters’ boyfriends, no matter how nice they are. And she was bound to be worse with Derek, he’s the boy.”
“What about Derek’s other girlfriends?” Addison asked, relishing the opportunity to get all of the questions out. The only person she knew who knew Derek was Mark and she was not about to start asking him for personal details. Not if she wanted to live it down.
Amelia giggled, an infectious giggle that made Addison forget she’d wanted to cry just a moment before. “What other girlfriends? He’s never brought one home before. In fact, we were starting to worry about him if you know what I mean?” She winked, and Addison couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
“You see?” Amelia encouraged. “It doesn’t matter! My mom may not be head over heels in love with you, but my brother sure is. And by the looks of things, you’re winning my sisters over pretty well too.”
“What about you?” Addison wasn’t quite sure why that had slipped out, or why she was feeling quite so nervous about the response. She just had a feeling that winning Amelia Shepherd over was one hurdle that she couldn’t afford to trip up on.
“Hmmm…” Amelia pursed her lips in a mock-thoughtful expression, studying Addison carefully. “I don’t know…. C’mon does my sharing my pearls of wisdom not make the answer clear enough to ya?” She giggled again at Addison’s still-anxious expression. “The way I see it, if you’re this upset about pleasing my mom, my brother must be really important to you, which can only be a good thing. So sure, I like you.”
Addison’s grin grew to match that of the girl sitting next to her. “Well thanks for the vote of confidence Amelia, but I’d better get back down there and work on the matriarch. You coming?”
Amelia shook her head, nose wrinkled in distaste. “I’ll be down in a bit. And Addison? You can call me Amy.”
Later that night, when Addison was collapsed against Derek’s chest, exhausted from trying to please the unpleasable woman, she related this exchange to him. “I think I won her over.” She confided, smiling into his chest. “Amy, that is, not your mom.”
Derek grinned, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. “Honey, if she’s letting you call her Amy then you definitely won her over.”
Addison still didn’t know why she felt that that was important, but something in his voice confirmed it to her, and against all the odds, she fell asleep with a smile on her face.
~~~~
Chapter 9 – The Christmas Season
There are some words that you regret saying the second they’re out of your mouth. And there are some that you don’t regret until later, when you realise the full extent of the damage you’ve caused. These are some of those words. At first, it just feels like a weight off his chest, and the feeling of relief offsets the guilt. The trouble is, as time passes, he realises he’s in the exact same situation he was before, with one crucial difference. Instead of sitting here listening to his wife chatter non-stop about how much she loves Christmas, he’s sitting in silence, watching her clutch her glass until her knuckles grow white in an attempt to keep the hurt from breaking through the mask. Then he doesn’t feel relieved. He just feels like an ass.
It’s just that sometimes, when he’s wrapped up in his own ego, he forgets that Addison isn’t as poised and polished and perfect as she likes people to think. He forgets how close to the surface the insecurities bubble.
Although he can’t take the words back (and the sentiment would still be there even if he could), he does his best to repent for them. Anything to assuage the guilt he feels when he wakes in the night to the sound of sobs being stifled into the pillow. In an attempt to make up for his earlier reluctance, he now throws himself into their season, buying the biggest turkey he can find, poring over gift catalogues, even proving his new nature skills and chopping down a tree. (Alright, part of a tree. And the rest of the tree may have already been on the ground). But it isn’t enough. His words have cut too deep.
After a Christmas day of watching Addison take miniscule bites of turkey and drink all the alcohol in the trailer, he comes up with one more potential solution. It means admitting that there may be such a thing as ‘recapturing the magic’, but if it breaks through the frosty veneer that his wife is currently putting up, then maybe it’s worth conceding one point to the therapist.
“No more.” He says, as she reaches for the Scotch bottle to refill her empty glass. She just shoots a glare in his direction, ignoring the instruction completely until he places a hand on her arm.
“What?” She snaps, the unspoken ‘you are not seriously withholding alcohol from me’ clear in her tone.
“I was thinking we could…talk.”
“Talk?” She repeats warily, her tone now more resigned.
“Don’t worry.” He reassures. “You might actually like this conversation. Do you remember when Christmas became our season?”
He smiles at the spark of recognition in her eyes.
~~~~
Christmas had always been an important event in the Shepherd family, perhaps more important even than Thanksgiving. His mother blamed their Irish heritage, but if the truth were known it was more to do with the fact that Christmas meant presents. But whatever the reason, Christmas was a big deal for Derek, and being away from home made no difference to this. Through college his had been known as the room to avoid during the Christmas season, unless you wanted to be humming Christmas carols for the next week. And this had shown no signs of changing once he had arrived at med school.
“So Addison,” Mark chuckled, as the three of them stood outside a lecture theatre, stomping their feet against the cold and waiting for Sam and Naomi to return with the coffee they’d gone in search of. “Do you like Christmas?”
“Christmas?” Addison stopped blowing on her frozen fingertips for a moment and frowned at him in confusion. “I guess. But the holidays aren’t for another couple of weeks.”
Mark rolled his eyes. “The holidays may not be here yet, but I can guarantee you Derek will be getting into the Christmas spirit before much longer. I really hope you like Christmas, otherwise you are not going to enjoy being around him!” He ducked to avoid the textbook which Derek was attempting to swing at the back of his head. “Sorry man, but you know it’s true.”
Derek grinned sheepishly at his girlfriend. “Well, it is true that I love Christmas. But you are definitely going to enjoy it.”
If rescuing his girlfriend from the disastrous triple date had been Derek’s test, then this was Addison’s. But, just as he had done, she passed with flying colours, reacting with childlike wonder to the ice-skating, the mulled wine, the Christmas shopping. She said nothing, but celebrating Christmas properly was clearly another thing that WASPs just didn’t do, and the novelty of everything made her all the more enthusiastic. For his part, he was thoroughly enjoying having someone to share his pre-Christmas excitement with.
“Oh God, it’s the Christmas twins!” Mark groaned, making fake vomiting noises as he found the two of them curled up on the couch watching ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. “Seriously, do you two ever stop?”
“But we love Christmas.” Addison smiled at Mark, a sleepy, mulled wine-fuelled smile. She knew that the constant Christmas cheer irritated Mark no end, and wasted no opportunity to annoy him further. “It’s our season.”
~~~~
Chapter 10 – The New Year’s Party
He might be doing his best to atone for it, but Addison isn’t planning on letting Derek’s admission that he fell in love with Meredith Grey slide anytime soon. ….. However, there is one good thing that’s come out of this whole sorry mess, that as part of his atonement, Derek is actually showing some commitment to working at this marriage. So when they squint to watch the ball drop on the tiny television in the trailer and a memory pops into her head, she just starts talking. It’s not like it can make anything worse.
~~~~
“Addison?” Derek’s voice, or what she could hear of it down the crackly phone line, was excited.
“I’m here.” She practically beamed into the phone. It had only been a week, but she was missing him like crazy and just the sound of his voice made the prospect of another two weeks with her family seem a little more bearable.
“You’ll never guess what!” Then silence. He wasn’t seriously expecting her to guess, was he?
“Derek.” She affected her best world-weary tone. “That game requires patience, which is something that I do not have very much of at the moment. I suggest you just tell me.”
“Alright.” He sighed, laughing at her irritability. “What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?”
“Not sure.” She shrugged into the phone. “Some dreadful party no doubt, filled with dreadful men who are all what Bizzy would call perfect husband material.”
“Can you get away?” He asked, and she could picture his raised eyebrows as vividly as if he were standing in front of her. “Because Mark has somehow, do not ask me how, got us tickets to the New Year’s party in Times Square!”
He trailed off into an excited half-squeal, and in the background Addison heard one of his sisters (almost certainly Amy) giggling and mocking him. But if she wasn’t a Forbes Montgomery (or, more importantly, if her mother wasn’t in earshot) she’d let out a squeal of her own, because he’d just given her a ticket out of WASP-ville.
~~~~
“Well, that was fun.” Addison muttered sarcastically. Of course, watching the ball drop had been fun, in an ‘I’m doing something so unbelievably tacky my mother would have a fit if she knew’ kind of way, but having spent the evening in closer proximity to her friends than she ever wanted to be again was a high price to pay for the experience. Mark had, unsurprisingly, disappeared with the first girl to smile in his direction the second the countdown had finished, and Sam and Naomi were also nowhere to be seen. Which left her and Derek alone, not that she was complaining about this turn of events.
“Sorry about that.” Derek apologised. “I suppose I expected it to be…”
“…more fun?” She finished for him. “Don’t worry. I didn’t have to talk to anyone who knew me in high school, which makes it instantly better than any Connecticut party.”
“Good.” Derek flashed her the lopsided grin that never failed to make her melt. “I know I enjoyed the company, if nothing else.”
They were just leaning in for their second (ok, fourth) kiss of the New Year, when a high pitched squeal interrupted them. Glancing over her shoulder in confusion, she saw her best friend practically flying down the street, waving her hands in the air and continuing to scream at the top of her lungs.
“Nae?” Addison reached out for her friend as she skidded to a halt in front of them. “What’s happening?”
Thankfully, Naomi had stopped screaming, but the power of speech still seemed to be beyond her. Instead she thrust her left hand into Addison’s face, revealing a glimmering diamond on the ring finger. Addison’s eyes widened.
“Sam proposed? Ohmigod Nae that’s amazing, I’m so happy for you!” She threw her arms around her best friend. “Uh, where is Sam anyway?”
The elated expression faded from Naomi’s face. “He was back there. He may have given himself an asthma attack trying to chase after me. We should probably go see if he’s OK.”
“Probably.” Addison agreed, more to Derek than to Naomi, given that her best friend had just taken off back towards where she’d appeared from. Eventful was now another word that could be used to describe this particular New Year’s Eve.
~~~~
Chapter 11 – The Big Move
He’s waiting for it to get better, but it just keeps getting worse. With each passing day it gets harder to work at this, harder to believe he made the right decision.
It’s pure stubbornness that keeps him from admitting this. Instead, he perseveres, clinging obstinately to the same foolish hopes. Maybe it will pass. Maybe he’ll wake up one day and not wish that it could be Meredith lying next to him in his wife’s place. Or maybe, if he waits long enough, she’ll give up first.
Although he does at least have the decency to be a little ashamed of this thought, this is currently the outcome which he’s hoping for most. It’s looking increasingly likely too, a combination of his emotional distance, the Seattle weather, and the trailer is taking its toll on her (and if he can see that, when he’s spending most of his time trying to pretend she doesn’t exist, then it must be pretty obvious). Actually, he thinks it’s mostly the trailer. Her family home may have its own ZIP code, but she’s a city girl at heart, and even if she can tolerate the countryside, she definitely does not rough it. At first she grinned and bore it, no doubt believing they’d be back in New York within the month, but now she’s taken to leaving the property listings open on the table, and their telephone message pad bears the distinctive imprint of a doodle of the trailer exploding. One more trout incident and he thinks she might lose it entirely.
However, when he comes home one night to find an envelope on his pillow, he realises that he’s severely underestimated her. It’s the first night that he’s slept in his own bed in over a week (and he’s only sleeping there tonight because he knows she’s on call), so he’s half-expecting it to be an admission of defeat, but again he’s mistaken.
“The Next Memory”, it says on the front, in the loopy script that she could never bring herself to adapt into a classic doctor’s scrawl, and on the back, across the flap, “Remember when we lived somewhere with solid walls?” He has to laugh at that and, even though therapy is another thing that he’s all but given up on, he feels compelled to read the memory. If she’s not ready to quit, then neither is he.
~~~~
The summer of Derek and Addison’s third year at Columbia brought, as ever, exams, stress, and a complete lack of time for anything other than studying. The day after their final exam, the five of them piled into a car and headed for Addison’s family home in the Hamptons where, giddy on freedom and lack of sleep, they proceeded to drink themselves silly.
Unsurprisingly, Naomi was the first to be affected, and she proceeded to give her customary explanation that as a non-WASP, she was unable to drink like one. Seeing as previous attempts to explain to her that actually, Addison was the only one of them who was a WASP, had invariably proved fruitless, they decided to let her continue in this vein until she grew bored of the topic. Unfortunately, her next topic of choice was how excited she was that she and Sam would be moving in together next year.
Silence fell. Addison looked shocked, Sam looked uncomfortable, and Naomi just looked confused. “Whassamatter?” She slurred, looking from Sam to Addison and back again several times before realisation finally dawned. “Oh.” She then launched into a long, rambling, and largely incomprehensible explanation of how they’d been meaning to talk to her about it , but they’d only just made the decision, and of course they’d wait until she found somewhere else, they’d help her find it, she could even live with the two of them if she wanted to. It was then that Addison cut her off.
“It’s fine.” She stated emotionlessly, taking a large gulp of wine. “You’re getting married; of course you want to live together. I’ve been expecting it for ages.”
But it was clear from the way her fingers tightened around the stem of her wine glass that she had been expecting anything but.
~~~~
Much later, when the others had disappeared into their respective rooms, Derek found Addison outside, wine glass still in hand. (He hadn’t seen her put in down all night, and he was starting to wonder if her fingers were melded to the stem). Her shoulders were set squarely, and he knew he would have to tread carefully to avoid a confrontation.
“Aren’t you cold?” He asked, sitting down beside her. She shrugged, giving him a half-smile that came out more like a grimace. “I think I’m drunk enough not to feel it.”
He inched closer to her, relieved when she didn’t move away. Maybe the excessive amounts of alcohol were good for more than just warmth.
“I really don’t mind.” She said softly into the loaded silence. “It makes sense that they want to live together. It was just a shock, that’s all.” Derek didn’t know which of them she was trying to convince.
“You know what I was just talking to Mark about?” He asked her. “Other than whether puke stains come out of antique rugs? Living arrangements. He’s been complaining forever that I cramp his style, so we agreed that he can move out, get his own bachelor pad, and you can have his room. Or,” he added, seeing his girlfriend’s nose wrinkle ever so slightly, “we could look for our own place.”
Addison did smile slightly at that, but her eyes were still wary. “Are you sure? This isn’t just some drunken chivalric offer that you’re going to regret in the morning?”
Derek shot her a mock-offended look. “Addie! I’m making a romantic gesture here and you’re doubting my sincerity?” This is a real offer.” He paused for a moment. “Mark’s may have been more drunken chivalry than anything else though.”
“Hmm.” Addison pursed her lips, considering how much she cared about upsetting her boyfriend’s best friend. “Mark owes me one. Puke stains definitely do not come out of antique rugs.”
~~~~
Chapter 12 – The Fight
Derek wasn’t wrong in assuming that Addison’s on the verge of giving up. Going home to a trailer every night is bad enough, but going home to a cold, empty bed in a trailer is verging on unbearable. All that’s changed since New York is that they’ve acknowledged that their marriage is broken, and that no longer feels like a step towards fixing it.
The other thing that’s changed since she arrived in Seattle is that she no longer feels like the guilty party. She may have done a dreadful thing, but in the face of her husband’s neglect, it no longer feels so unforgivable. (A little voice inside her head tells her that it was this kind of self-indulgent thinking that led to their separation in the first place, but she ignores that voice. There’s no need to make herself even more miserable).
After two weeks of sleeping alone, she decides to tackle his avoidance head-on. The letter, she thought, was a stroke of genius, but although she knows that he read it (she found it crumpled in the wastepaper basket the next morning), he refuses to acknowledge that fact. Her next plan involves deception, which she’s never been particularly good at, but with Richard’s help she manages to convince her husband that she’s in surgery long enough to get him home.
Her mistake is pushing too hard. She should just be happy to have someone to sleep beside, even if he does moan when she slides between the sheets, and not in a good way, but somehow she can’t leave it at that. It’s taken her nearly three weeks just to get him here; she’s not wasting the opportunity to talk.
“Derek?” She whispers softly into the darkened room, and he moans again, rolling over so that she can see nothing but the thick waves of hair on the back of his head.
“Derek!” She says again, more insistently, reaching out to touch his shoulder. His skin feels foreign beneath her fingers, and he quickly shrugs her off, rolling back over to face her with a weary expression in his eyes.
“I am trying to sleep.” He says through gritted teeth. “What do you want?”
“To talk?” She says hesitantly, hating his ability to strip her of her confidence, but hating that he’s broken every promise he ever made to her even more.
A sigh of exasperation escapes Derek’s lips. “Talking isn’t working though, is it?” It’s not a question. “Why won’t you let this go?”
This angers her, the way he always manages to twist things, to make everything her fault, and the anger gives her renewed confidence. “No!” She snaps. “If you wanted our marriage to be over you should have signed the divorce papers! You chose to work at this, so damn it, you are going to work!”
“Fine!” He fires back, sounding like a petulant child. “We’ll talk! But do not blame me if you don’t like what we talk about!”
~~~~
She had expected it to be easier than this. Somehow, when she had imagined moving in with a boyfriend (back in the days of band camp and braces, when the boyfriend of her daydreams had born a striking resemblance to the high school quarterback), her thoughts had been of paint samples, and matching kitchenware, and the view from the bedroom window. She had never given much thought to how the actual living part would work.
For a start she couldn’t cook. This hadn’t been a problem when they’d been living in separate apartments, and really, it shouldn’t have been one now. Thanks to his mother’s refusal to treat her son any differently from her daughters (at least as far as household chores were concerned), Derek was an excellent cook, and had more than enough self-preservation to keep Addison far away from the kitchen. By all rights, she should have been relieved, grateful even. But instead she was a bundle of insecurities, worried that Derek would leave her for a Michelin-starred chef, and more than that (seeing as, in reality, the chances of Derek even meeting a Michelin-starred chef were fairly slim) worried that his mother would find out and hate her even more than she did already.
In an attempt to quieten these insecurities, she was in all other ways behaving as the perfect housewife (which, given that she wasn’t even engaged yet, seemed slightly unfair), which apparently included picking up everything her boyfriend dropped on the floor. And unfortunately, though he was a good cook, he was still a man, and seemed to be labouring under the delusion that his possessions belonged on the floor. And amidst all the stress, and the insecurities, and the worrying, a boyfriend who used the floor as his own personal closet was not something that she was equipped to cope with.
“Does it live there?” She asked pointedly one evening, as he pulled off his t-shirt and flung it casually into the corner of the room. He stopped in his tracks and stared at her, a puzzled expression on his face.
“Does it what?”
“The shirt!” She snatched up the offending article and waved it in his face. “Does it live on the floor? Because you seem to think it does.”
Not seeming to realise the severity of the situation, Derek burst out laughing. “You sound like my mother.” He spluttered. Addison just glared.
“I feel like your mother! Are you incapable of doing anything for yourself? Is it too much to ask for you not to leave everything on the god-damned floor?”
Derek still looked a little bewildered, but he did seem to have registered that he was being scolded, and he had never reacted well to scolding. He grabbed the shirt from her hands and tossed it angrily in the direction of the laundry basket.
“If you don’t want to pick my things up,” he shouted. “Then just don’t pick them up. I am capable of doing things for myself, unlike some people I could mention. How do you survive when the maids aren’t there to cook for you?”
This double-jibe at both her upbringing and her cooking skills was more than Addison could take. Fighting back tears, she grabbed a pillow and a blanket from the bed and stormed out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Derek shouted after her, unwilling to give up the fight now that he’d been goaded into it. “So you just get to shout at me and walk away, is that it?”
“I’m sleeping on the couch.” Addison shouted back, willing her voice not to wobble. “We both need to sleep on this; we can talk about it in the morning.”
There was no response, but a moment later Derek’s hand reached out to flip the light-switch and darkness fell over the flat.
Addison lay rigid on the too-small sofa, too hurt to think, too angry to cry. How dare he say those things to her? How dare he imply she was incapable? Didn’t he know how bad she’d been feeling?
No, whispered a nagging voice in the back of her head. You didn’t tell him. All you did was shout at him for being a slob. How did you expect him to react?
“Shut up!” She whispered fiercely, pressing her fingers into her ears and hiding her face in the pillow, like a child having a tantrum. “This isn’t my fault, it isn’t!” But no amount of whispering or evading could convince her, and so she lay for what felt like hours, listening to the seconds tick by on her watch, willing morning to come.
Eventually, after what actually had been hours of silent brooding, she knew what she had to do. Swinging her legs hesitantly off the sofa (which they were going to have to replace if they were going to fight like this often, it just was not made to be slept on) she padded into the bedroom. Derek was lying on his back, and even through the darkness she could see his eyes tracking her every move.
“You’re not asleep?” She whispered, knowing she was stating the obvious, but wanting to delay what she was about to say for as long as possible.
“Couldn’t.” He replied shortly, his tone gruff but thankfully not as angry as it had been previously.
“Me neither.” She sat cross-legged on the bed beside him, folding her hands nervously in her lap. Then the words all tumbled out in a rush. “I’m sorry I was snappy earlier, I just feel so bad about not being able to cook that I feel like I have to clean up after you, but I hate doing it, hate hate, and it just makes me miserable, but this is what couples are supposed to do, so maybe if I can’t do it we should…” She trailed off, too afraid even to articulate her last thought lest he should take her up on the offer.
“Break up?” He asked, and her heart leapt into her throat. “That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”
She nodded mutely, unable to bring herself to look at him. “Is that what you want?”
“Is it what you want?” He deflected. “Just because you can’t cook and I leave my clothes all over the floor? Because if you ask me, that’s a pretty crappy reason for a break-up. But you know what does cause relationships to fail, don’t you? Lack of communication. This fight wasn’t about either of our domestic skills; it was about you not telling me that you had a problem. You just need to talk to me, that’s all.”
“So that’s a no?” Addison asked in a tiny voice, still staring at her hands. “To the breaking up, I mean?”
A snort of answer preceded Derek’s reply. “It is indeed a no to the breaking up.”
~~~~
Chapter 13 – The Sick Day
Derek slips into the trailer as quietly as he can, feeling a twinge of guilt in his stomach. Through the open door to the bedroom he can see Addison sprawled out across the bed, hair fanned across the pillow, cheeks unnaturally pale. The pang of guilt intensifies. Yes, she may be an adulterous whore, and a home-wrecker, and the current bane of his life, but overhearing a slightly awed-sounding Alex Karev telling anyone who would listen that “Dr Montgomery-Shepherd just upchucked. Like, in the middle of surgery. And she still got the twins out afterwards!” probably shouldn’t have been the first indication that his wife was sick. Especially not given their history (and damn the couples therapy for making him remember things because that just made him feel even more guilty).
Trying to assuage the guilt pang (that had grown to feeling like something was eating his stomach lining when he had felt the heat radiating off her forehead), Derek climbs onto the bed beside his wife, smiling a little as she curls automatically into his side. A moment later though, she stirs, whimpering.
“Derek?” She opens her eyes in confusion, before screwing them shut and burying her face in his sweater. “Derek I don’t feel good.”
“Shhh Addie.” He soothes, running his fingers gently through her hair. “I know. I’m here.”
“Really here? Like you used to be?” She asks, and he winces at the raw vulnerability in her tone. For once he’s confronted with the reality of what he’s done to her, and he hates it. Really hates it, and he wants to tell her so. But now isn’t the time for a long heartfelt confession, so he just continues to stroke her hair, hoping that she can trust him, and that she’s remembering the same moment as he is.
“Really here.” He promises, as she snuggles further into his chest. “Like I used to be.”
~~~~
“Addison, time to get up!” Derek pulled the covers off his sleeping girlfriend, and she whined in protest, curling into a tighter ball. Normally he found this morning ritual endearing, but today they really were late, and if they were going to get to the hospital in time they had to leave…about five minutes ago. And, being in the middle of their fourth year placement, late was not something that they were allowed to be.
“Addison!” He shook her insistently. “It’s 5AM!”
Her blue eyes snapped open. “Crap!” She cursed, her voice a little croaky. “I’m up, I swear.” And a few seconds later she was, throwing on the nearest clothes she could find, raking a comb through her hair, stifling a sneeze into her shoulder… Derek paused in the middle of attempting to tame his unruly hair.
“Addie? You OK?”
“Fine,” she replied distractedly, her voice still slightly hoarse (except that now he was on alert, it seemed like more of a problem). “Why wouldn’t I be?”
With that she was off in the direction of the door, Derek trailing behind her, pulling on his shoes.
“Well I’m not being funny, but we’ve been together three years and I’ve never seen you sneeze before. I thought maybe it was something WASPs didn’t do, like showing emotion.”
His lame attempt at humour failed to make her smile. Instead she just shot him a look (the one that in his head he’d nicknamed Passive Aggressiva Number 4). “People sneeze, Derek. It happens. Now, do you want to be even later than we are already?”
Conversation closed then.
~~~~
By the time he got home that evening, Derek had almost forgotten about the morning’s events. That was, until he stepped into their apartment to find his girlfriend curled into a tight ball on the sofa, shivering despite the blanket draped over her.
As quietly as possible, he crouched down beside her and pressed a hand lightly to her forehead, the warmth confirming his suspicions. She gave a little moan as he withdrew his hand, and shifted slightly, but didn’t wake. Sighing, he got up and went into the bedroom to call his mother. He had a feeling that he was going to be in need of her chicken soup recipe.
While he was throwing ingredients into the pan, and cursing the fact that their kitchen was so poorly stocked, Addison joined him in the kitchen, blanket thrown haphazardly around her shoulders.
“What are you doing?” She asked, her voice congested and even hoarser than it had been that morning. She almost fell into the chair that Derek pulled out for her, kneading her forehead with the heel of her hand.
“I’m cooking.” Derek teased, squinting to read his scribbled recipe notes. “I know the idea’s completely alien to you, but some people don’t live on a diet of take-out.” Eyeing the expression on her face, he decided that teasing was perhaps not the best option tonight. “I’m making you my mom’s chicken soup. It’s the best sick food ever.”
“I’m not…” Addison started to protest, but was cut off by a sudden sneeze. “Alright, I may be a little sick. But you don’t need to make me soup.”
“I know I don’t need to make you soup.” Derek grinned. “I want to make you soup. You know, like a good boyfriend?”
Addison didn’t return his smile. “I haven’t been a good girlfriend though.” She argued feebly. “I don’t deserve for you to be nice to me.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.” Derek replied, abandoning the soup for a moment and sitting down next to his girlfriend. “Besides, you’re sick, you get to be as cranky as you want and everyone still waits on you hand and foot.”
To his dismay, even this failed to get a smile out of her. “Maybe in your family.” She muttered, avoiding his eyes.
Raking a hand through his hair, Derek reflected that he really should learn not to make WASP jokes. They invariably ended up hitting too close to home. “Addie, you know that I was only joking earlier, right?” He asked gently. “You’re allowed to get sick, and when you do, you’re allowed to make unreasonable demands and complain that you’re dying. It gives me the chance to prove what a catch I am with my pampering skills.”
She looked up at that, her blue eyes watery. “Really? Even if I’m gross?”
“That could never happen.” He promised, hoping that she recognised the sincerity of his words. “But yes, really. Providing that you do the same for me next time I’m sick. I don’t want to hear any more man flu jokes, OK?”
Finally, she cracked a small smile, dropping her head onto his shoulder. “Deal.”
~~~~
Chapter 14 – The Proposal
Takeout food has always been an important part of Addison and Derek’s relationship. In some families, a home-cooked meal might be able to make all the same gestures in a more sophisticated manner, but when you’re as culinarily-challenged as Addison, you make do with what you can get. Thus, takeout has healed rifts and closed wounds, helped to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and even Thanksgivings, and provided much needed comfort in times of sadness. But tonight, the food (and it’s pizza, so really it’s not even feigning sophistication) is meant as a thank you to Derek, for finally realigning his priorities.
Their marriage is nowhere near fixed, Addison knows that. But as she pulls anchovies off her slice with an exaggerated squeal of disgust and flicks them at her husband, as she lets him wipe a sauce splatter from her cheek, she can’t help feeling hopeful. For the first time in weeks they seem to be moving in the right direction.
There are many signs of this, but the fact that they’re actually talking is the most obvious. It’s not forced, it’s not aggressive, every sentence isn’t loaded with hidden meanings and poorly-disguised digs. And when they slip into memories accidentally, without the customary “whose turn is it?” debate, they both know that things have changed.
~~~~
“Doesn’t she look beautiful?” Addison squealed, in a very un-Addison-like voice, waving a glossy photograph under Derek’s nose. Gingerly, he took it from her and studied it. “Well?” Addison demanded impatiently from behind it. “Doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” Derek laughed, bemused that his girlfriend had worked herself up into quite such a state of excitement over a photograph. “She looks stunning. But we knew that already, we were at the wedding.”
“That’s not the point!” Addison pouted; already rifling through the huge stack of photographs on the table in front of them (really, he could have killed Naomi for offering to have a second set printed). “And doesn’t Sam look handsome? And look at the bridesmaids, see how cute they are!”
Derek reached out to extract a photo from the pile. “This is my favourite. We could get this one framed you know, put it on the bookcase?”
Addison nearly dropped the rest of the prints in shock at the sincerity in his voice. Then she realised which picture he was holding and burst into giggles (also a very uncharacteristic action, clearly weddings had a strange effect on her). “Derek! Don’t you think that if we’re getting one framed then it should at least have Naomi and Sam in it? It was their wedding after all.”
“I don’t think they’ll mind.” Derek insisted, keeping hold of the photo. “In fact they’ll probably agree that it was the best photo taken all night.”
Addison shook her head, still laughing. “I’m not sure they’ll share your opinion, flattered as I am by it.”
“Flattered?” Derek leaned in to kiss her. “You’re my girlfriend, I’m meant to think the best pictures are the ones of you.”
~~~~
Two weeks later the picture was, as promised, in pride of place on their bookshelf. Addison and Derek had just returned from a very romantic dinner at a tiny restaurant in Little Italy and had returned, elated and tipsy, to their apartment. With a happy sigh, Addison collapsed backwards onto the couch.
“It is a good photo.” She murmured, running a critical eye over it. “Even though I still think that one that actually showed the bride and groom would have been better.”
“Well,” Derek slid slowly down onto the floor, resting his back against the couch. “We’ll just have to make sure Naomi looks fantastic at our wedding and then she and Sam can do the same thing. That way, they won’t be able to complain.”
Addison gave an appreciative chuckle before fully processing his words. “Wait…did you just say at our wedding?”
Derek twisted on the rug to face her, grinning boyishly. “I did indeed. I was going to ask you earlier, I had it all planned out actually. The romantic setting, the quiet table, the ring in the champagne glass. But then I thought, every girl in Manhattan has that proposal, nearly every girl in the world probably. This way, when people ask you how I proposed, you’ll have a different story to tell.”
“What, that I was proposed to while lying on a couch?” Addison snorted. “Very romantic.”
“We can have a do-over, if you want?” Derek offered. “You haven’t said yes yet.”
“Technically you haven’t asked me yet.” Addison countered. “You’ve just talked about our wedding like you’re certain it’s going to happen. Arrogant, if you ask me.”
“Fine.” Derek slid the ring box out of his pocket, repositioning himself so that he was on one knee (some clichés just had to be fulfilled, after all). “I hope you don’t need me to tell you how I feel about you, because I’d like to think that you already know. But just in case you need a reminder, I love you, so much that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Addison Adrienne Forbes Montgomery, will you marry me?” Then, because he just couldn’t resist, he added. “Still want a do-over?”
“No.” Addison whispered. “I mean yes. I mean, I want to marry you…even if that was the most confusing proposal ever.”
And with that she tumbled off the couch and into his arms.
~~~~
Chapter 15 – The Montgomerys
Unfortunately, even though things are going better, couple’s therapy is still a requirement. They might be committed to fixing their marriage now, but there are a lot of holes to be mended, and sometimes a third party is required.
Like today, for example.
“We are not talking about this, Derek!” Addison huffs, folding her arms across her chest and glaring stubbornly out of the window. “It’s tedious, and it’s hurtful, and it’s not even relevant!”
“Of course it’s relevant!” Derek fires back. “This is about how our marriage fell apart, which was at least partly because you don’t know what a healthy relationship is, which is because of your parents.” He slaps his palm against the arm of his chair to emphasize his point, before turning to the therapist. “Isn’t that right?”
“This isn’t about right or wrong.” The man replies gently. “But if you feel that this is relevant, then certainly we should discuss it. And afterwards,” he continues quickly, as Addison opens her mouth to protest. “We can talk about why you don’t see this as relevant.”
Addison slumps back in her chair, scowling. Derek grins triumphantly. The therapist sighs. Sometimes, he wonders whether he’s dealing with adults or children.
~~~~
“I’m going to ask you something.” Derek said, cornering Addison as soon as she got in from the hospital. “And you have to promise not to get mad.”
“Get mad?” Addison looked at him, expression caught somewhere between confusion and fear. “What are you going to ask me?”
“Well, I was thinking,” Derek started, a touch of nervousness in his voice. “You know my family. You know them really really well. You’ve spent Christmas, and Thanksgiving and two weeks of every holiday with them, they love you and you love them.” Seeing her open her mouth to protest that his mother most definitely did not love her, he held up a silencing hand and ploughed on. “But I’ve never met your family. I know that you have your problems with them, so I haven’t pushed before, but we’re going to get married. So I know that it’ll be awkward at any time, but don’t you think that it’ll be ten times more awkward if the first time we meet is on our wedding day?”
Addison was silent for a long time, and when she finally spoke it was in a very small voice. “What makes you think they’ll come to the wedding?”
The terrible part was, he genuinely didn’t think that she was joking.
~~~~
Regardless of the drama surrounding the announcement that he wanted to meet her parents, three weeks later she had arranged for it to happen. As he stepped off the plane onto the tarmac in Connecticut he understood how she’d felt three years earlier pulling into his driveway. He felt sick to his stomach, and throwing up was a definite possibility. And, just like her, he was by no means guaranteed a warm reception.
When the car (which was driven by the Montgomery family chauffeur, as if he had needed a reason to feel even more inadequate) pulled up outside the house, an expensively-suited man was waiting on the steps to greet them. Addison’s face lit up. “Archie!” She grinned, launching herself at him and hugging hard. Then she broke away, and smiled shyly. “Archer, this is Derek. Derek, this is my brother Archer.”
Archer put out his hand to shake Derek’s and Derek grasped it eagerly. But the man’s smile didn’t extend to his eyes, and Derek already knew that this was going to be a very difficult week.
Inside, the situation was improved only by the large glass of whiskey which had been pressed into Derek’s hand by yet another member of staff. Even when Derek was rich (which he did intend to become, and without the help of Addison’s trust fund either), he was never going to have staff. They made him nervous. But nowhere near as nervous as Addison’s parents, conversation with whom was more an interrogation than an exchange of pleasantries.
“Derek Shepherd.” The Captain mused, studying his future son-in-law with a critical eye. “Middle names?”
“Christopher, sir.” Derek said, suppressing a sudden urge to giggle. Amy’s voice had just popped into his head, telling him to salute. Trust her to cause trouble even from thousands of miles away.
“Christopher.” The Captain seemed to contemplate this for a moment, but still didn’t crack a smile. In the background, Addison’s mother hovered, martini in hand. Derek had known that this would be strange, but really, strange didn’t even begin to cover it.
Beside him, Addison squirmed uncomfortably, as if she were the one being scrutinized by her father. And in a way she was. She had chosen to marry Derek, and if he didn’t meet her parents standards, the blame would surely be laid on her shoulders just as much as on his.
~~~~
“I hate them.” Addison sobbed into Derek’s chest on the plane home. “I really, really hate them, you know? Why can’t they just be happy for me?”
Derek was silent for a moment, stroking her hair soothingly and trying desperately to think of an answer. To say that the visit had been a disaster would be an understatement. It had been seven long days of interrogation, awkward silences, and patent disapproval. He had never felt more aware of his lack of money and family connections, and if he hadn’t been expecting this kind of reaction from her family, then he would have felt even more disheartened. As it was, he was more concerned with comforting his girlfriend than with his own bruised ego.
“It’s because they love you.” He soothed. “They just don’t think that anyone’s good enough for you, that’s all.”
He only wished that he could believe his own words.
~~~~
Chapter 16 – The First Day
“What are we going to talk about today, Addison?” The therapist probes gently.
“My insecurities.” Addison replies sulkily, hating every minute of this. But Derek has done his bit; he’s put aside his feelings for Meredith and actually begun to make a go of this. Much as she rails against the idea, she supposes that if this is something that he wants her to confront, she should at least show willing.
“Good.” The therapist smiles, appearing to visibly relax. Sometimes Addison wonders if all his patients are as difficult as they are. Maybe $300 an hour is actually less than he deserves.
~~~~
The first day of internship is stressful for everyone. But when you’re both highly competitive and extremely insecure, it’s pretty much your worse nightmare.
“Derek!” Addison griped the second she opened her eyes. “The phone is ringing.”
“I can hear that.” He mumbled sleepily. “It’s closer to you, you get it!”
Muttering under her breath about lazy inconsiderate men and the even more inconsiderate people who phone their friends at 5AM, Addison reached for the phone. “Hello?” She grumbled into the receiver.
“Oh I’m sorry, did I wake you?” The unmistakeable voice of Derek’s mother, in the tone which she reserved for speaking to Addison, sounded in her ear. “I was just calling to wish Derek luck on his first day….And you too of course.” She added after a moment’s hesitation. “Is my son there?”
In an even worse mood than before, Addison practically threw the phone at her fiancé. “It’s your mother.” She growled. “And as I’m now awake, I’ll go and make coffee.” She stormed out of the bedroom into the kitchen, and set about making coffee as violently as possible, all the while maintaining a whispered tirade directed at one particular woman. At least if she was mad, she couldn’t be nervous.
“No, Mom.” Derek’s voice floated in from the bedroom. “Yes, Mom. I love you too, Mom. Bye, Mom.” A second later, he appeared in the doorway to their bedroom, yawning widely and dressed in nothing more than his boxers. “Mom says good luck for today.”
“I’m sure she does.” Addison muttered sarcastically, stirring sugar into her coffee with more vigour than was strictly necessary. Derek crossed the kitchen in three strides and removed the mug from her hands. “You wouldn’t want to scald yourself, now would you?” He reprimanded playfully. “Ruin your surgeon’s hands?”
“I do not have surgeon’s hands.” Addison snapped, turning the offending body parts over to stare venomously at her cuticles. “They’re just…hands.”
“You’re freaking out.” Derek noted, taking her hands in his before she decided to do some damage to them. “You’re freaking out about your first day so you’re taking it out on my mother for daring to call on your first day.”
“Maybe I just don’t like your mother.” Addison muttered childishly, continuing to stare at their intertwined fingers. Derek was right, and she knew it, but she wasn’t going to admit it a moment before she had to.
“Well I know that!” Derek laughed. “But I also know that you…” He released one of her hands and raised her chin so that she was looking him directly in the eyes. “…are freaking about your first day. Completely unnecessarily, by the way, because you’re going to be incredible.”
“I’m not.” Addison mumbled, trying to wriggle out of his grip. “I can’t remember anything. What am I going to do if one of the residents asks me a question? I won’t be able to answer, and I’ll embarrass myself in front of everyone, and…” She wrenched her hands from his grip and began to pace frantically, running her fingers through her hair.
“Addison!” Derek made another grab for her arms, holding on more tightly this time. “Look at me. You have not forgotten everything. It might feel like you have, but as soon as you step inside that hospital you’ll remember you were born to do this. You were the best student in our class at Columbia, and I know that because I tried my hardest to knock you out of that top spot! So I’m dragging you into that hospital kicking and screaming if I have to, but after today I won’t be doing any dragging, because you’ll realise that I’m right. You were born to do this. OK?”
“OK.” She repeated tentatively. “Can I get a hug now?”
“You can get as many hugs as you want.” He promised, wrapping her up in his arms and kissing her forehead. “Maybe tonight, when you’ve seen that I was right, you’ll even get something more.”
She snorted at that, before pulling away from him in horror, staring at the clock. “Crap, Derek, we’re late! We have twenty minutes to get ready and get to the hospital!”
~~~~
Chapter 17 – The Pregnancy
If there’s one thing that this whole experience has taught Derek, it’s that he really, really hates therapists. He didn’t like them much to begin with, their particular brand of medicine just never felt much like medicine. But he’s always assumed that he was just being biased, that neurology and therapy were just conflicting disciplines, and that they were probably very nice people under all of that psycho-babble. Now he knows differently.
Possibly he’s still being unfair, branding all therapists as useless just because he hates the man sitting opposite him. But right now, when he’s working so hard at so many things, he feels he’s allowed a moment of childishness.
The therapist leans forward in his chair, smiling invitingly. “What are you thinking, Derek?”
What Derek is really thinking is that he would really like to punch the man sitting opposite him, but he doesn’t feel that it would be quite appropriate to voice this thought, so instead he grits his teeth and works through the anger. “I was thinking about the next memory that I’d like to share.” He lies. At least it’ll get the man off his back for however long it takes to tell the story.
~~~~
When he discovered the test, nestled in the bottom of Addison’s bag, still in its cardboard packaging, his first instinct was not to say anything. She obviously hadn’t taken it yet anyway, so it wasn’t like there was anything to ask (well, not beyond “what have you bought a pregnancy test for?” and that seemed to have a fairly simple answer). There was a part of him that liked to bury his head in the sand, that believed that if he avoided problems then they would somehow cease to exist. It wasn’t even as if this was definitely a problem (or even a situation, because a baby probably shouldn’t be described as a problem before its conception has even been confirmed), so there was no reason for him to worry about it yet.
Except that he was.
And the more he worried, and the more he stared at that innocuous-looking box in his hand, the more he thought that maybe she had wanted him to find it. She had asked him to look through her bag after all, to find her a hair band as her hands were currently occupied holding her ponytail into place. She must have known the test was in there; Addison wasn’t the type of person who forgot things, so maybe it had been intentional. It would be just like his girlfriend to make him as the question, so that she didn’t have to be the one causing the confrontation. So maybe he just wouldn’t say anything. Two could play at this game.
“Derek?” Addison’s head appeared around the locker door, a teasing smile on her lips. “Can’t you find them? Oh…” The smile faded as she saw the small box still clutches in Derek’s fingers. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
“No?” Derek retorted, suddenly angry. “Then it isn’t a pregnancy test? Because I don’t know what else it could be?”
Addison blushed slightly, the colour highlighting her cheekbones. “Well, yes, of course it’s a pregnancy test. But it’s not for me. It’s for Naomi. She wanted me to get it for her, to avoid, well, a situation like this.” She shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed, but not guilty-looking. Derek didn’t know what to say. This, he was sure, was the reason why men did not carry handbags. Or buy sensitive items for their friends. Or have wombs.
“I…uh…” He stuttered, dropping the test as if it were on fire. But Addison was laughing.
“Your face!” She giggled, leaning on the lockers for support. “I think you just aged ten years! At least I
know the baby discussion isn’t one we’ll be having any time soon.”
“Don’t tempt fate.” Derek muttered darkly, still glaring at the box. Pregnancy tests, he had decided, were his new least favourite item in existence.
~~~~
Later that week, as they toasted Naomi and Sam’s ‘surprising’ news over ginger ale (apparently if the expectant mother wasn’t allowed to drink then neither were the rest of them), Derek started thinking more rationally about babies. Of course, finding the test had terrified him, but that had been mostly due to the surprise. Now that he wasn’t about to become one, the idea of being a father didn’t seem so bad. He liked babies, he always had. And if Addison was going to be a baby doctor, then she had to like babies too.
Except…she had said she didn’t want to have the baby discussion, hadn’t she?
That night, when she was lying curled into his chest, he broached the subject. Hesitantly at first, because he didn’t want to scare her away. He didn’t want kids just yet either. It was just that somehow he couldn’t get the thought of them out of his head, and he just wanted to know if she wanted to have them at all.
He wasn’t exactly reassured when she burst out laughing, in much the same way as she had after he’d found the test.
“Isn’t it women who are supposed to get broody?” She asked, faintly incredulously. “Of course I want kids. But not yet. It’s not that I’m not happy for Naomi and Sam, and I am definitely going to be that child’s favourite Aunt Addie, but a kid during residency? They must be mad!”
“Mad.” He agreed softly, kissing the top of her head. Of course she was right. Residency was going to be stressful enough without factoring a baby into the mix. It was a ridiculous idea.
There would be plenty of time for baby talk later.
~~~~
Chapter 18 – The First Juju
It’s been one of those days. One of those long, hard, painful days in which everything just seems to go wrong. First it was the preemie that didn’t make it through the night, then the triplets she just couldn’t save, and now the mother bleeding out during a relatively simple procedure. She keeps repeating to herself that it’s not really her fault, that she’s still the best damn neonatal surgeon in this hospital, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to believe it. The words sound hollow, empty, and it’s getting to the point where she just wants to find a corner and cry it out. She cannot be in this day any longer.
Ironically, it’s him that breaks her. Well, that’s not the ironic part, he’s broken her plenty of times before, but usually it’s with his neglect, with that phone call to say he won’t be home tonight, or the failure to meet her eyes and smile as she passes him in the hallway. But today, and this is where the irony comes in, he breaks her with kindness.
She’s leaning against the desk, staring blankly at the board (and hoping to God that her name won’t be appearing on it again before the end of her shift) and then suddenly he’s there, blocking her view of it. He’s smiling at her, tenderly, a pre-Seattle smile, and he’s got a cardboard cup in his hand. Smile still in place he slides it across the desk. “I heard about the surgeries.” He says. “Thought you could use some juju.” And it’s then that she loses it completely.
Well, not quite then, because it may have been a rough day but she’s still Addison Forbes Montgomery (the addition of her married name being irrelevant here) and she simply does not break down on the surgical floor, but she feels the tears flooding the backs of her eyes, feels her throat constricting, and she only just makes it to the on-call room before she makes a spectacle of herself.
Spectacle wouldn’t even cover it by the time the door opens again, but she’s not worried, because although the tears are blurring her vision she knows it’s him. She hears the reassuring scrape of the chair legs against the floor as he drags it over to jam the door shut, as he did every time she got upset as an intern (and sometimes for more pleasant reasons too). Then the bed shifts as he sits down beside her, and she melts into him. In a routine well-practiced if long-forgotten, her head finds the hollow under his chin, his arms fold around her, and his fingers tangle in her hair as she shudders against him. He rocks, and shushes, and makes soothing noises until the sobs subside, and then reassures her as she scrubs tear tracks off her face in embarrassment.
“Do you remember the first time you gave me juju?” She asks later, when they’re back in the trailer, and she’s smiling again, the last traces of the bad day soothed away with the help of Derek’s expert fingers. He just nods, grinning as she presses grateful kisses to his jawbone. “Tell me about it.”
~~~~
Having spent four years of medical school longing to be an intern, Addison was now spending intern year longing for it to be over. She knew that this was the case for everyone, given that locker room conversation was focused on two things: how tired they all were, and how much it sucked to be at the bottom of the food chain. But by this point she was starting to wonder if it was intern year that she wanted to be over, or her entire medical career.
She was a good doctor. She knew that (and her pride was too great for her to deny it no matter how down she was feelings), but on days like this, it didn’t help. Because the problem wasn’t her competence, it was the fact that not even the most talented of doctors could save every patient. And this was her stumbling block; she found it incredibly difficult to get over the ones she couldn’t save.
Since she’d started working on OB GYN it was getting worse. Not only did the deaths seem to affect her more, but the fact that they were affecting her panicked her. There was no way that she could choose this as her specialty if every death reduced her to a blubbering mess.
She’d been talking to Derek about this, a lot, and she knew it was worrying him. She also knew that he was trying to help her, in any way he could, but the fact was that he was barely managing to keep her afloat. She was treading water, perilously close to drowning, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Until one day, when she was sitting in the cafeteria, mourning yet another dead baby (and not even one that she’d been treating this time, just one that had been there in the NICU last night when she left, and not there in the morning when she came in), and she felt his arm around her shoulders. She looked up at him, blinking back the tears she hadn’t yet allowed to fall, and saw that he was grinning at her.
“I’ve got something for you.” He grinned, and produced a cardboard cup of steaming liquid.
“Not cafeteria coffee, Derek!” She protested. “It’s disgusting!”
“I know.” He shushed her. “But this isn’t cafeteria coffee. Try it.”
Hesitantly, she put the cup to her lips, surprised at the taste of hot chocolate flooding her mouth, sweet and creamy and astonishingly good. After a long gulp she put the cup down, a small smile touching the corners of her mouth.
“That is good. Thank you.”
“It’s juju.” Derek replied, the grin still plastered onto his face.
“Ju-what?” She asked, brow wrinkling in confusion.
“Juju.” He repeated. “Like, good karma. Now that you’ve drunk that, you’re going to have a good day. And, if it doesn’t work, at least the hot chocolate’ll make you feel better. It always worked for my sisters and I. Mom used to tell us it had magical healing properties.”
She suppressed a snort at that, imagine an entire family of doctors thinking that hot chocolate was magical. But, as the rest of her day went that little bit better, she couldn’t help thinking that maybe there was some truth in it.
~~~~
Chapter 19 – The Incident
The changes in their relationship are becoming more noticeable with each passing day, and there are times now when he believes that things are actually better than they were in New York, at the very least better than they were in the end. There are times when he can tell how she’s feeling from a single glance; sometimes he even thinks he can tell what she’s thinking. Which is why he knows when he comes home to find her staring out of the window not just that she’s upset, but that she’s feeling guilty.
She looks up as he comes in, giving him a sad little smile.
“I did a bad thing, Derek.” She says quietly, and for a moment he thinks she’s done it again. He hates himself for the distrust, but at the same time he knows that it’s justified. Her betrayal has set a precedent, it could always happen again.
“What did you do honey?” He asks as gently as he can, desperately hoping that his fears are unfounded.
“Izzie Stevens.” She says; her speech broken and difficult to follow. “She was too involved, too involved just like I was. I had to do it. Richard agreed, he said we’re here to teach, not to make friends. So I let her think she’d killed that baby, even though I knew what it would do to her.”
She trails off, and Derek wraps his arms around her, relief coursing through his veins. “It’s alright, honey, she’ll understand one day. She’ll forgive you.”
Whether or not it’s true, it’s what she needs to hear. But, remembering how broken Addison was when Richard did the same to her, he really hopes that Izzie Stevens has someone to be there for her tonight.
~~~~
“Man, have you got any food in here?” Mark asked, already rifling through Derek’s locker. “I’m starved!”
“Nope.” Derek replied, hastily stuffing the last of his sandwich into his mouth in case his best friend decided to wrestle him for it. “Hey, get out of there!”
His warning went unheeded, however, as Mark slammed the door to Derek’s locker shut and moved on to Addison’s, stealing an apple and biting into it with a satisfying crunch. “Do you still want me to give it back?” He asked, spraying juice across the locker room.
“Gross!” Derek raised a hand to shield his face. “Of course not. But I’d eat it quickly if I were you, Addison’s been in the NICU all night, she might not react particularly rationally.”
As if on cue, Addison stormed into the locker room, stony-faced and silent. Derek swept her up and down with his eyes, trying to work out what to say, but was distracted by Mark erupting into a coughing fit, spraying chunks of apple across the floor. Apparently trying to swallow the fruit whole hadn’t worked out too well for him.
“Was that my apple?” Addison asked, her voice cold and distant-sounding, as Derek slapped his friend hard on the back while trying to suppress gales of laughter. She held up a finger as Mark opened his mouth to speak. “No, I do not want it back. I have been up for forty-eight hours straight, and I want to go home and sleep!”
In one swift movement, she ripped off her scrub top and threw it into the open locker, pulling on a black turtle-neck in its place. Repeating the action with her pants, and for once failing to reprimand Mark for staring, she swung the locker door closed with a resounding slam and strode out of the room, leaving Derek and Mark scrambling to collect their possessions and hurry after her.
“Duuuuude.” Mark raised an eyebrow at Derek in their trademark ‘girl flip-out’ look, a look which Derek failed to return. Usually he was the first to snigger with his best friend behind his girlfriend’s back (a habit which he really ought to stop because it invariably worsened her mood), but something told him that this was more than a girl flip-out. More even than an overtired girl flip-out, and those were always the worst. By now he liked to think that he knew Addison better than anyone and he recognised the unnatural brightness of her eyes, the defeated tilt of her head, the way her jaw was clenched in an effort to keep the emotion inside where she thought it belonged. She was one catalyst away from a total meltdown, and he was not going to be responsible for it happening on hospital property.
They had reached the hospital parking lot now, but rather than climbing into one of the waiting taxis, Addison was still marching towards the exit.
“I’m walking.” She called over her shoulder without breaking stride.
“But honey, it’s forty blocks.” Derek attempted to protest, receiving nothing but the clacking of her heels on the sidewalk in reply. “Get a cab.” He told Mark, who was staring at Addison’s departing back in confusion and disbelief. “I got this.”
“Is she gonna be OK?” Mark asked, already reaching for the door handle.
“I hope so.” Derek responded, waving to his friend as he set off after his fiancée. After a couple of blocks, he caught up with her (she may have been able to walk fast in heels, but they were still hindering her progress somewhat), but the hand that he attempted to place on her arm was rapidly shaken off.
“Honey, what happened?” He asked gently, trying to look her in the eye.
“Not now.” She answered, her tone still cold and distant, but now with a slight hitch at the end. And then she spoke again. “Please just not yet.”
Her voice was so defeated that Derek ached to reach out and touch her, but he couldn’t, not when she’d just almost begged him to leave her be. Sidewalk breakdown was only one level below hospital breakdown in the embarrassment stakes.
They walked in silence, Addison’s heels still clacking purposefully as Derek struggled to keep stride. Twenty blocks, thirty, forty. As their building came into sight, Addison broke into a run, making it inside and up the three flights of stairs in under a minute. Derek caught up with her at the door, where she was toggling the key frantically in the lock, lips pressed together in a thin line. She didn’t speak when Derek removed the key from her shaking fingers, fiddling with the temperamental lock until the door finally swung open. He motioned for her to go in first, waiting until she had stumbled over the threshold and collapsed onto their sofa, head in her hands, before stepping inside himself and pushing the door closed. Then he moved over to sit on the sofa beside her, placing a hand on her back and asking for the second time that day.
“Honey, what happened?”
“I…I can’t…” She choked out, before giving up on the attempt to speak and pushing a fist to her mouth as tears began to leak from behind her closed eyelids. Derek rubbed her back in silence, watching the tears stream thicker and faster until finally she turned and buried her face in his chest.
“It’s OK.” He murmured, wrapping his arms tight around her. “Just let it all out.”
And then she was shaking, and sobbing more and more violently, burrowing further into his chest and grabbing fistfuls of his shirt like if she could only get close enough to him, he might erase the pain. For a while he was concerned that she might asphyxiate or something, because surely no-one could cry this violently and still be able to breathe, but to his relief she started to calm down, until she was lying with her head in his lap, with only the dampness on her cheeks and the occasional sniffle as a reminder of the outburst of emotion.
“Can you tell me now, Addie?” He asked softly, running his fingers through her long red locks, because he knew she’d try to bury it now, but if it had got her this upset then it really needed to be talked about.
“It was Amanda.” She said, speaking so quietly that only his knees could hear her clearly. Her voice broke on the name and she sucked in an unsteady breath. “The baby in the NICU. I sat up with her all night, I was exhausted but I didn’t mind, because he told me that if I kept her alive she could have surgery in the morning. But he lied to me!” Her voice cracked again, and this time a tiny sob escaped. “He made me think I’d killed her when he knew she’d never survive the night!”
“Webber?” He asked, although he didn’t really need her confirmation. As her resident, he’d been telling her for weeks that she needed not to get so attached to the preemies; this was obviously his way of testing her.
She just nodded, crying in earnest again. “I’m never speaking to him again!”
Had it been anyone else, Derek would have told them they were being childish. But with Addison’s tears saturating the leg of his pants, and the sound of her sobs tearing through his heart, he wasn’t sure that he’d ever be speaking to Webber again either.
~~~~
Chapter 20 – The Bachelorette Party
An unspoken agreement seems to have been reached that their wedding day will be the last memory. Derek is more attentive than he has been in years, Addison knows that he sees no reason to continue wasting their money on therapy. And really, she should agree. But when they raise this with the therapist, and he shakes his head, ‘gently recommending’ a few more sessions, she feels an inexplicable sense of relief. Almost immediately afterwards, she feels guilty, especially when the session throws Derek into a sulk that only four hours of solitary fishing will cure, but the relief is still there.
She can’t understand it though, so like all things that bemuse and unnerve her, she buries it. A year ago she had a broken marriage that she was desperate to fix, there’s no point in trying to break it again now it’s finally working. And she’s sure that these feelings, if she let them out, could only have a detrimental effect on the all too fragile recovery.
So when Derek returns, bearing a proud cargo of dead fish, she doesn’t squeal or shudder or complain that they’re looking at her (even though they are definitely looking at her). Instead she smiles brightly, thanks him for not bringing the slimy creatures inside the trailer (that rule he has at least respected) and focuses hard on the next memory. Inside her head though, the same thought is whirling around on repeat: if this is what she’s been waiting for, then why isn’t it making her happy?
~~~~
“Addison, we are leaving now! Right now!” Naomi was on the verge of exploding. “You cannot be late to your own bachelorette party!”
“Of course I can.” Addison pouted, taking an inordinate amount of time to apply her lipstick. “I’m the bride to be. My tardiness is practically a given!” She studied herself critically in the mirror. “Do you think this colour suits me? Maybe I should have gone with the black dress…”
Naomi made a lunge for her best friend as she attempted to pull the dress over her head. “Once you’re wearing a sash, and fairy wings, and a tiara no-one, and I mean no-one, is going to care whether or not your dress suits you. Which it does, by the way, because you look stunning in everything.” She nudged Addison in the ribs. “Now, come on! I’ve planned a fantastic evening’s entertainment for you, and it does not include twirling in front of the mirror for hours. Save that for your actual wedding day.”
She attempted to drag her friend out of the door, but Addison dug her heels (eight inch Jimmy Choos) stubbornly into the carpet. In the same moment, the sound of the doorbell echoed through the apartment. Addison’s face lit up. Naomi, on the other hand, groaned in realisation.
“Guys?” She yelled, as the sound of cheering and hooting filled the apartment. “Addison’s trying to spy on your bachelor party!” Immediately there were sounds of discontent from the assembled group of men, and a moment later Mark came running into the room, already dressed in a Viking helmet and a pair of comedy breasts.
“Sorry ladies,” he said, sounding decidedly unapologetic. “But unless you’re planning on stripping, there is no place for you here tonight.” And with that he flung Addison over his shoulder and carried her, literally kicking and screaming, from the room. Naomi dashed after them, pausing to blow Sam, who was also wearing a pair of comedy breasts and was already halfway through his first beer, a goodbye kiss. Only when they were safely on the other side of the door, Mark having relieved Addison of her keys and waved cheerily as Naomi restrained her, did Naomi breathe a sigh of relief.
“Let’s go.” She commanded; linking arms with Addison and half-leading, half-dragging her down the corridor, ignoring her grumbled protests. “And stop sulking; you’re going to enjoy it!”
Addison muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “strippers”, and wrenched her arm free.
~~~~
Three hours and innumerable martinis later, Addison had to admit that she was actually having. A combination of the strange alcoholic concoction which her friends had forced down her throat on arrival in the bar, the pulsing music, and the fact that Savvy had just succeeded in removing some unfortunate gentleman’s toupee and was now waving it around like a trophy, meant that whatever Mark had planned for her fiancé’s bachelor party no longer seemed to matter.
“Nae!” She called, dragging her best friend’s attention away from the latest round of ‘Dare or Dare’ (‘Truth or Dare’ having been branded to reminiscent of high school sleepovers). “I would like a stripper.”
Naomi gaped at her best friend, amazed more by the fact that she was for once the sober (or at least more sober) one than by the strange request. “You’d like a what now?”
“A stripper!” Addison repeated, waving her hands wildly in an attempt to illustrate exactly what a stripper was. “You know, like a person who strips. Derek gets one, why don’t I?”
“Derek won’t necessarily…” Naomi began, before remembering exactly who was in charge of Derek’s bachelor party and letting the sentence hang unfinished. “I’m sorry Addie, I didn’t book one. I didn’t think it was really your scene.”
“Well nor did I.” Addison pouted. “But I was thinking about it and now I want one! Why should men have all the fun?” She paused, scanning the room, before pointing decisively at an attractive-looking man in the corner. “Will you ask him to be my stripper?”
“No.” Naomi replied, without hesitation. “I love you sweetie, but not that much.”
“I’ll do it!” Savvy cried, having been listening to their conversation. “And I’ll make him wear this toupee while he strips.” She waved her prize in the air, ignoring the filthy glares which she was receiving from its owner and his friends.
“Savvy…” Naomi began to protest, but it was too late. The blonde had already leapt over the back of the sofa and was making her way purposefully over to Addison’s chosen stripper. A few minutes of conversation (complete with wild, toupee-aided gestures) followed, while the other women watched with bated breath, and then they saw the man nod and smile. However, just as he reached their table, Addison spoke again.
“You know, I don’t want a stripper anymore.” She announced brightly. “I want to go dancing. Or to puke. I’m not really sure which.”
Her first request was ignored as Naomi hastily steered her in the direction of the bathrooms.
~~~~
Chapter 21 – The Wedding
“Is there a problem here?” The therapist asks, glancing warily between his two clients.
“Nothing,” Derek grins, reaching over to take Addison’s hand. She smiles at him, although he notices that it looks tight, almost forced. Obviously she hates therapy as much as he does. “In fact, there are so few problems here, that we don’t need therapy any more. So, as we discussed, today will be our last session. We only have one more memory to talk over. We’ve already found the magic.” His mouth twists over the clichéd words, but he manages to keep the grin firmly in place.
“Dr. Shepherd.” The therapist fidgets with his pen, looking like he’s contemplating hurling it at the wall.
“I’m happy for the pair of you, really I am, but I believe you’ve missed the point of the exercise. You were meant not just to recapture the magic, but to work out where you lost it. As far as I’m concerned, our work here is only half done.”
Derek smiles confidently at the man sitting opposite him, squeezing his wife’s hand. “We appreciate your concern,” he says, using his best professional voice. “But honestly, we really don’t feel that any more therapy is necessary. Right, honey?”
He glances over at Addison when she fails to answer, and she snaps to attention. “Right. Yes. Of course.” She replies distractedly, sliding her hand out of his and gripping nervously at the armrest. The therapist watches the pair of them with an unreadable expression.
“Why don’t we listen to your last memory?” He proposes. “And then we’ll see if that raises any further questions?”
Derek sighs, rapidly losing his patience. “Fine.” He concedes. “But I really don’t see what more we have to talk about.”
~~~~
“Are you sure you have them?” Derek asked for what felt like the millionth time that day. Beside him, Mark sighed impatiently.
“Yes.” He replied, more an exhalation than a word. “Believe it or not, I am actually capable of looking after a pair of rings. I did manage to get into medical school you know.”
“And the guitar?” Derek asked, moving on to the next item on his mental checklist rather than infuriating his best friend further by asking to see the rings. If he wasn’t careful, he could see Mark throwing them out of the window out of sheer annoyance.
Mark’s face split into a wide grin at this question. “Of course. Are you definitely going to play the song? That’s too cool, man!”
Derek struggled to return the grin. Never in his wildest dreams had he expected getting married to be quite this stressful. But then, before he met Addison, he hadn’t expected to marry someone with two last names. When your wedding costs more than your family home, it isn’t difficult to feel inferior.
“Are you two ready?” His sister Nancy interrupted his thoughts, crossing the threshold of the room. “You want to get to the church before the bride, don’t you?”
Derek nodded, following his sister out of the room. There was no turning back now.
~~~~
The church was, as expected, packed with friends, family, and people he was sure that he was supposed to know (or, more likely, that Addison was supposed to know). Seeing the crowd did nothing to calm his nerves, and Mark searching through his pockets in feigned panic every few minutes wasn’t helping either.
“Will you stop doing that?” He hissed furiously, seeing his future mother-in-law fix them with a suspicious gaze. In the opposite pew, his mother had already started with the waterworks, and was dabbing carefully at her eyes. His sisters, all of them except Amy who had been chosen to be a bridesmaid, were also in position, fidgeting and twisting in their seats to get a better view of the rear door. Kathleen caught his eye and grinned, pulling a face as she rifled through her purse for fresh tissues for their mother. Perhaps he could do this after all.
The sound of the music changing drew his attention to the door. His youngest sister was already making her way down the aisle, a hint of mirth in her eyes as she smiled in his direction.
“Nervous?” She mouthed, as she reached the front, and winked when he swallowed and nodded. By this time Naomi had joined them at the front, but he barely noticed, as Addison had just stepped through the door on her father’s arm. He drew in a breath, nerves not dissipating, but resolve strengthened by the sight of her. This was why he was here. The church might as well have been empty, because none of the rest of them mattered.
Behind him, Mark shifted and coughed nervously. “Uh, Derek?” He whispered. “Don’t get mad, but I think I might actually have lost the rings.”
~~~~
In the event, everything went smoothly. The rings were retrieved from the lining of Mark’s pants with a little help from Amy’s deft fingers (and if she had enjoyed herself a little too much doing the retrieving, well that was between the two of them), the vows made everyone (especially Carolyn) cry, there was no awkward bumping of noses during the kiss, and so far, married life was going blissfully well. That could be about to change though, as the speeches were nearly over and it was time for his party piece. He had contemplated giving up on the song idea, but he had a feeling that despite being in disgrace, Mark wouldn’t let him leave the reception without singing the song. Sure enough, as his best friend finished his speech (in which he had managed to simultaneously hit on every woman in the room), he produced the guitar from under the table. A confused murmur spread around the room, and Sam, who had been consulted on a few of the lines, choked on his mouthful of champagne, spluttering noisily into his napkin.
When silence had descended, Mark spoke again. “Now, as many of you know, Derek didn’t propose in the most romantic of settings. Ever since, he’s been trying to think of a way to make up for this, and eventually he came up with this idea. Ladies, and gentleman, the groom!”
As the confused applause faded, Mark handed the guitar to Derek, who began to strum awkwardly. He just hoped that this didn’t kill his marriage before it was even a day old.
“Our eyes met over the cadaver.” He began hesitantly, painfully aware that he was no rock star. “And I knew I had to have her…”
Having managed the first line, he dared to glance around the room, relieved to find that no rotten fruit appeared to be incoming. This could actually have been one of his better ideas.
“Had his mitral valve gotten too thick?” He continued, voice stronger now that he was no longer panicking. “Is that what made the cadaver so sick?”
On the strength of the laughter which was currently rippling around the room (whether because of his wit or his poor rhyming it was hard to say), he launched into the chorus, motioning for Mark to join him.
“Addison Montgomery,
I met her in the summer she,
Was cutting up a very dead body,
And in her eyes I saw my life,
I knew that she would be my wife,
And she would breathe the life back into me,
From every day until eternity,
Or until I’d be as dead as that body.”
Finally the song came to an end, to a volley of applause from the guests. Unsurprisingly, Addison’s parents did not look impressed, but they were about the only people in the room who didn’t. Handing the guitar back to Mark, Derek slid gratefully into his seat. His wife (two words which he was sure he would never get used to hearing, at least not it that particular context) was smiling radiantly at him. She leaned over, pressing her lips to his ear.
“If that’s your idea of a romantic gesture,” she whispered, giggling, “then I’m glad you decided to keep the proposal low-key.”
~~~~
“And there you have it.” Derek finishes triumphantly. “Now can we please leave?”
The therapist purses his lips. “Not quite yet,” he murmurs, his gaze fixed on Addison, who has just covered her face with her hands and begun to cry.
~~~~
Chapter 22 – The Deterioration
Now this is embarrassing. Dimly, through the pain, and the anguish, and the sobs which are threatening to rip her chest apart, Addison recognizes this. She’ll have time to feel embarrassed later though, so for now she just focuses on the pain. This, she supposes, is the uneasy feeling which she’s been keeping bottled up since Derek suggested giving up on therapy. She only wishes it could have stayed bottled.
She neither knows nor cares what the therapist is thinking (the words smug, sanctimonious, and bastard spring to mind), but she is worried about Derek. Though she can’t bring herself to lift her face from her hands to check, she thinks that he’s crouched on the floor in front of her. Certainly, his hand is on her back, and he’s talking to her in a low soothing voice, asking what’s wrong, telling her to talk to him.
“It was so perfect.” She blurts out. “And I ruined it!” This is the crux of the matter. Their marriage ended because of her. She slept with her husband’s best friend. How can she expect him to forgive her for that, when she can barely forgive herself?
Derek is still attempting to comfort her, telling her she didn’t ruin anything, that he loves her, that he wants to be with her and only her, but she can’t bring herself to believe it.
“I destroy things.” She chokes out, around a sob. “I get scared, and I get lonely, and I destroy things. Maybe I’m the one who needs therapy, maybe I’m just not capable of being in a relationship!” She trails off again, unable to put words to the emotions raging inside her.
For a long moment, Derek is silent, and she thinks that she’s finally managed to convince him, that he’s about to go and have his happily ever after with his precious intern. But while she’s trying to work out whether this makes her feel worse or better (and honestly, though it’s no less than she deserves, she’s verging towards worse), he speaks again.
“That’s not the whole story though, is it?” He asks gently, and she knows without looking up that he’s exchanging glances with the therapist. “This is what we haven’t talked about. You may think you destroyed our marriage, and for a while I thought so too, but it was hardly perfect before, was it?”
She inhales shakily, remembering. These are the other memories which she was trying to block out, not just the adultery, but the time before it. The weeks, months, possibly even years of distance, the aching loneliness which led to her falling into bed with Mark. “No.” She replies quietly, voice muffled against her hands. “No it wasn’t.”
“We need to talk about it, don’t we?” He asks hesitantly, and she can tell that the question isn’t addressed to her. “You need to tell me what it was like for you.”
The last thing she wants to do is talk about it, she’s not even sure if she can, but as he’s finally acknowledged his own role in the breakdown of their marriage she feels that she owes it to him to try.
~~~~
The first night that he didn’t bother coming home, she didn’t even notice, or at least she didn’t find it strange. She was used to sleeping without him, used to surgeries, patients, and everything else hospital-related taking priority over their married life, and although she slept better with his warm body to curl up against, its absence never concerned her.
It was when the absences became more frequent, the excuses less believable, that she started to worry. She had always felt that she didn’t deserve him, the memories of her high school self too hard to shake off, and without him there to reassure her, the insecurities returned with a vengeance. It had to be her fault; she had to have done something wrong. Or maybe she hadn’t done anything, maybe he had just woken up one day and realised that he’d married the wrong woman.
As she racked her brains, trying desperately to find the reason for her failing marriage, she could think of only one thing: the baby issue. Derek wanted a child, she wanted a career. Other than their respective families, it had been the only thing they’d ever fought about. But that wasn’t something that she could fix when he was never home, and on the rare occasions when he did make it make to the brownstone, he evaded her attempts to talk about anything that wasn’t work-related.
“Not tonight, Addison.” He would say, as if he were talking to a small child. “I’m tired. We can discuss it tomorrow.”
But of course, when tomorrow came, he wasn’t there to discuss it. And so the cycle continued.
It was Thanksgiving when everything came to a head. Addison had driven to Derek’s family home that morning, feeling cheerful despite the prospect of spending a weekend with her mother-in-law. Mark had gone with her, ostensibly to visit his own family although she knew that he would spend most of the weekend with the Shepherds, and he was surprisingly good company, keeping her entertained on the long drive. Derek was driving out later, once he had finished surgery, and she was hopeful that this weekend she might actually get to talk to him properly, to iron everything out.
Then the phone call came. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t even to her. Instead, his mother came into the living room around midday looking gloomy, and explained that there had been complications in surgery and that Derek had no choice but to stay and monitor his patient.
“Didn’t he ask to speak to me?” Addison asked, dreading hearing the answer.
“I’m sorry dear.” Carolyn replied, and through the haze of pain Addison noticed that her tone sounded genuinely apologetic. Under any other circumstances, this would have been considered a victory. “He said he had to get back to the patient. But he sent his love.”
Something told Addison that this last sentence was a lie, and she quickly retreated upstairs, feigning a headache. As she lay on the bed, letting the tears stream freely down her cheeks, she heard the door creak open. She sat up quickly, sniffling and rubbing her wet cheeks. Mark stood in the doorway, regarding her sympathetically.
“I just wanted to see if you were OK.” He mumbled awkwardly. “I can go if you want.”
“No, don’t.” She begged, suddenly desperate not to be alone. “I’ll be OK in a minute. Just…don’t leave me alone?”
She hated how pathetic she was being, and in front of Mark of all people, but he seemed unconcerned. Sitting next to her on the bed, he pulled her into a hug and let her cry against his chest until her tears faded to embarrassed sniffles.
“I’m sorry.” She apologised, trying to wriggle out of his embrace. “It’s just…” She trailed off, unsure of how much she ought to be telling her husband’s best friend. But to her surprise, he finished her sentence for her.
“He’s never home, and you were hoping that this weekend you might get some time alone with him?” He smiled at her little squeak of surprise. “I have noticed, you know. And for what it’s worth, I think he’s a fool. If I had a woman like you I wouldn’t treat her like anything less than a princess.”
Had he caught her at a less vulnerable time, she would have laughed, because since when did Mark Sloan treat women like princesses? But he was there, when Derek hadn’t been in weeks, and he was being so kind, and she was so lonely, so she found herself leaning up and touching her lips to his.
The kiss lasted no more than a few seconds before the door opened yet again and the pair sprang apart. Eyebrows rocketing into her hairline, Derek’s youngest sister pushed the door shut and leaned against it, arms folded across her chest.
“Amy.” Addison stuttered, berating herself internally for being so stupid. If there was a way to fix her marriage, then this was definitely not it. “This isn’t what it looks like, I swear.”
“It’s fine.” Amy replied, her tone cooler than Addison had ever heard it. “I can understand, and I won’t tell anyone. I love my brother, but I know he’s not exactly husband of the year right now. But if you want to keep your affair secret, might I suggest not doing it in this house? Or at least locking the door?”
“It’s not an affair!” Addison began to protest, but Amy was already gone. In the silence that followed her departure, Addison and Mark stared at each other in horror and confusion. While she knew that Amy would be good to her word and keep their secret, Addison was more concerned that there was a secret that needed keeping. The fact that she had felt compelled to kiss another man, and her husband’s best friend at that, only served to remind her that there was something very wrong with her marriage.
~~~~
Epilogue
Over the next year, things change. Not all of the changes are sudden or earth-shattering, but they’re all important in moving them forward. They might not have healed entirely from everything that happened in New York, and maybe they never will, but they’ve learned to live with this fact, and they’d like to think it’s made them stronger.
The first hint that change is in the air is Derek deciding, of his own accord, that it’s time to move out of the trailer. They discuss leaving Seattle entirely, but returning to New York no longer feels like an option, and they’ve both learnt that running away from your problems never helped to solve them. After months of searching (because although Addison wants to get out of the trailer as quickly as possible, she also wants to have the perfect house to move into) they find an old Victorian place, far enough away that Derek can still indulge his love of ferry boats, but close enough to the city that the proximity to nature no longer brings Addison out in a rash. They decorate it together, which isn’t exactly a change as they did the same with the brownstone many years ago, but it’s so far removed from anything they’ve done in the past few years that it feels like one.
Another thing that’s changed is that they listen to each other more now. They’re back to being that couple, the one that irritated the crap out of the rest of the hospital staff because they knew each other so well. Addison is painfully aware of the glares thrown her way by the interns (who aren’t even interns any more, but in her mind Meredith Grey will never be anything else), and tries to tone it down in front of them, but sometimes she’s gripped by the sheer overwhelming happiness of having something to tone down. And although Derek still comes home late, and sometimes even spends the night in on-call rooms, he always lets her know what he’s doing. For her part, she tells him what she’s feeling, sometimes in a little too much detail. It’s better than shutting him out.
Of course, it’s not completely perfect, and not all of the changes are for the better. The worst change is a change in expectations, when Addison decides to give Derek what he’s always wanted and discovers that she can’t. This, she is sure, will spell the end of their relationship, and she agonizes for days before telling him the truth: there will be no children. It isn’t until she voices the words that she realises how much she wanted them too, and she thinks that it’s this genuine sentiment that saves them. She still hurts, and she still feels guilty, but it helps to know that for the first time in a long time they’re in this together.
Their families will always be a stumbling block as well, more so now that Derek’s finally admitted the truth he’s been denying for years. Her first Shepherd family event following their reunion is awkward to say the least, and she dismisses all notion of visiting her own family (had it not have been for Archer, her parents would never even have known about their separation), telling him that he is all the family she needs. He deflects the sentiment, telling her that his sisters have to be part of the equation too (especially Amy, who after a brief period as a teenage tearaway is now back on track and following in her brother’s footsteps), but she can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s touched by her words.
Surprisingly, the one thing which fails to throw a spanner in the works is Mark Sloan’s transfer to Seattle Grace. It takes a few weeks for Derek to stop clenching his jaw every time he has to be in a room with his former best friend, but as time passes, and it becomes clear that Mark is going nowhere near his friend’s wife (having shacked up, in a singularly bizarre turn of events, with Meredith’s half sister), they start to rebuild their friendship. Addison can only guess as to what they talk about (and she really hopes that it has nothing to do with the Grey women) as they renew their bond over fishing trips and beer, this is one relationship which she’s determined to stay out of. The stakes are just too high.
By some strange twist of fate, a year to the day after their last therapy session they run into their former therapist in the elevator. No words are exchanged, but Derek slides his arm protectively around Addison’s waist, and the other man smiles. Everything’s OK, the gesture says. And it is. It really is.
Please leave feedback for this author HERE