Work Text:
Wild horses
Couldn’t drag me away
- The Rolling Stones
CH: If the offer still stands, I’ll come with the lads when the party starts and then they will go off with Tuck around 9 to a friend’s place.
MG: Yeah, of course. Pizza will be here at 8 so they should be good.
CH: Hope you ordered 20.
She’s floored by this - not so much that he’s coming by because she’s thought about this for a long time and just couldn’t come up with any reasonable excuse he’d pose to not see her tonight when neither of them is working, when most of their mutual friends will be at her place anyway. And when they haven’t seen each other over the last 10 days except for brief moments at work. And the time when that much contact would satisfy her has long passed.
A last minute New Year’s Eve gathering at her house was Bailey’s idea, agreed to by Amelia on her behalf and after the twin clusterfucks of the car crash and Hamilton’s aborted surgery before Christmas she didn’t have it in her to be the Grinch. But she’d be lying if she said that she was looking forward to a whole house of people and her children staying up late and still waking up at 6 am the next day.
Until he surprised her by accepting the invitation. Bringing the boys goes beyond surprising, right into shocking territory.
CH: What can I bring?
MG: Just yourself.
CH: Presumably you won’t toss me on the charcuterie tray and stick a toothpick in me so…
MG: Really, we’re overflowing with food.
She puts down her phone when the conversation feels like it’s finished but something still nags at her so she goes back to it, then puts it down, then lathers, rinses and repeats that cycle a couple of more times before she’s sure that yes, she really wants to send that text.
MG: You’re staying after they leave, right?
CH: Yes, I have permission to stay out late tonight.
MG: :rolleyes:
CH: You plan on doing that at midnight too?
MG: Wouldn’t you like to know?
Hayes arrives with the boys just after 7:30 and they’re thrilled to see Tuck is already there. And Ben and Bailey have become somewhat regular characters in their lives as well and Hayes can tell that the boys feel much more in place with them here. He quickly greets them and introduces the boys to Winston and Maggie before setting off to the kitchen to drop off the things he’s brought. When he only sees Meredith at the counter next to the sink, chopping knife in her hand he feels like he’s caught a lucky break.
“How many slices of lemon and lime do you think this party needs?” He asks as he approaches her at the counter and sees two small mountains of green and yellow sliced fruit.
She looks up at him from beneath the hair that frames her face and smirks.
“You’re welcome.”
“What am I supposed to be thanking you for, exactly?”
“Being invited into my home so graciously.”
“That’s what this is,” he points at a bag in his hand, then takes out a bottle of wine and the largest panettone she’s ever seen.
Her eyes scan the more attractive of the two items.
“Beaux Freres Pinot Noir. 2018. So you’re not the cheap wine sort, nice,” she says appreciatively.
“Should I put it down somewhere?”
“No, you should open it and pour me a glass,” she says in a tone that tells him she’s dead serious.
He sees the wine glasses laid out on the kitchen table behind them. He moves to pass behind her, between her and the island, where there is plenty of room, a couple of feet at least, but instead he puts his right hand on her hip and unnecessarily brushes up against her, or necessarily if you’re him and you’ve been thinking of little other than her for the last week.
He makes himself busy while she continues to cut limes, one by one.
“I went to see Hunt today,” he tells her, “he’s barking at the residents like he’s back on the battlefield, which I took as a good sign.”
“He was lucky,” she says, “not about falling down the ridge, but everything that came after.”
“If he was lucky, then I won the lottery.”
She puts down her knife and looks at him for a second.
“I’m sorry, that was insensitive of me.”
He shakes his head, silently letting her know he’s not offended.
“And the deep, dark secret you can’t talk about?” She asks, turning her attention back to the cutting board because she thinks that maybe if she’s not looking at him, he’ll find it easier to spill the beans.
“Still can’t talk about it,” he mutters, “but at least now I’m a passive participant in that I know about it but I’m not the one doing something I shouldn’t be.”
He’s been chipper the entire evening, since the moment he arrived. And even before that, his texts last week, which started back up after that fateful day, have been mostly playful. But now she again sees a burden on his shoulders again, which sag but for an instant before he seems to remind himself of where he is and what he’s doing and shakes the devil off his back.
Then he’s back by her side, holding out the glass of wine she asked (demanded) for. She stops what she’s doing and takes a sip.
“That’s really good,” she says appreciatively, “you don’t want any?”
“Sticking with beer tonight.”
“Just try it then,” she insists and passes over the glass. It’s small and stupid but still strikes him as oddly intimate to be sharing a glass with her, and it makes him feel warm and happy on the inside.
“It really is,” he agrees with her and puts the glass beside her on the counter.
He leans back against the counter, watching the party unfold and she continues to waste time with the cutting board, facing the other way.
He leans over to her ear, “It’s been nice, talking to you every day again.”
She smiles, again, because half the things he says to her make her tingle with unbridled joy and looks over at him. If there weren’t twenty or more other people milling about it would be the perfect moment to kiss him like she’s done it a hundred times.
“It’s good to have you, all three of you, here tonight.”
And his eyes light up the way they do when he looks at her and apart from being sensitive to Austin’s feelings, she thinks that she may as well have kissed him because the other people in this room aren’t blind or stupid and this is an obvious of a plot as you can get.
“So, what now?” She wonders.
With us. Between us.
“I don’t know,” he says, but the smile - that smile - is there and she’ll take it.
“Dr. Cormac!” He hears the little girl’s voice squealing behind him and turns around. It’s been a long time since he’s had miniature humans around and he crouches down to her eye level.
“Hello Ellis and Merry Christmas!”
“It’s not Christmas time anymore, we have to wait until next year,” she tells him with all the seriousness of a six-year-old.
“You are very right. Santa deserves to take a break for a bit, aye?”
“Aye!” She copies him and giggles.
“Did you get the presents you wanted?”
“I did! I gave my letter to Santa to Aunt Maggie to mail because Mommy forgets everything all the time.”
“Good thinking,” he laughs and taps her head.
“Are you going to do the voices tonight?”
He smiles, thinking back to their FaceTime conversations.
“If you’d like, just come and find me before your bedtime,” he says and she nods excitedly, then runs off to tell her brother and sister that she just got a grown up to agree to her terms on the first try.
Hayes stands up and almost jumps in surprise when he finds Meredith standing behind him with her arms crossed, watching him with a mixture of amusement and warmth.
“She really likes you,” she says.
“What’s not to like?”
“Are you trying to meet an obnoxiousness quota before the year ends or something?”
“Or something,” he tells her with a wink.
“What did I just bite into??” Bailey demands to know, her face screwing up in disgust.
They look over at her in amusement as she chews and swallows.
“Somebody put chunks of feta cheese in the guacamole!” She exclaims, whipping her head around, looking for suspects.
Meredith looks at the bowl and it does appear strangely grainy.
“You best not tell me it was you,” Bailey says to her, narrowing her eyes.
“I can assure you that I’ve done exactly zero cooking for this party.”
“The fact that you think that one cooks guacamole is all I need to know,” Bailey shoots back.
Hayes raises up his arms and shakes his head, “Wasn’t me.”
“Didn’t think it was. You probably didn’t even lay your eyes on an avocado until you came to this country.”
He laughs, although she has a point.
“I hate to have to say it, but that could be perceived as culturally insensitive,” he tells Bailey with a straight face though the corners of his eyes start to crinkle and he has to hold back his laughter.
Bailey looks them both up and down, “You’ll make a fine couple. May the Lord have mercy on the rest of us.”
She turns around on her heels to round up additional suspects muttering, “Culturally insensitive, my ass.”
He’s tried to mingle - he really has - but when he sees her standing by the fireplace with the same glass of wine in her hand, though he assumes it must be her second or third by then, watching the chaotic ravaging of the freshly-arrived pizzas, he can’t help but cross the room and assume his place right beside her.
“You’re not hungry?” He asks, motioning at the pizza with the beer bottle in his hand.
“I’m having too much fun watching the dripping grease ruin the outfit of every child under the age of 10,” she tells him with a bright smile.
“Is that your way of telling me that you need a bib?”
“And here I put on my best sparkly shirt for you…” she teases back and he takes a good, long look, focusing on the neck line longer than is acceptable in polite society.
She feels a blush rising up her cheeks and passively wonders at what age that stops happening and whether it’s just her that’s cursed since he looks cool as a cucumber a second after blatantly staring at her chest.
They stand together in a companionable silence for a while until it starts to bother her and she interjects.
“So, I’ve tried not to be nosy but it’s been over a week now and I’m at my self-control limit here. How did your appointment go?”
“With the psychologist?” He guesses.
“Yeah, you mentioned last week…and then you haven’t said anything since.”
The truth is that she’s been wondering and thinking about it probably far more than she should. She hasn’t been a woman of action generally - a lot of things in life happened to happen to her rather than her proactively seeking them out. But now she feels a sense of purpose and there’s a quiet but desperate need to know where they stand before they enter into yet another year of knowing each other.
He has a strange little smile pulling at his lips which she’d like to interpret as good news, but she’d also like to punch him in the face a little if he doesn’t start talking soon.
“You know how it goes…I’m just a boy terrified of talking to a girl that he likes. Don’t know how to do it.”
The grin that crosses his face the moment the last word is out infuriates and amuses her at the same time and she shakes her head while glaring at him sideways.
He chuckles and nudges her shoulder playfully with his own, “She gave me some tips and strategies…” he says.
“Oh?”
“Said that I shouldn’t stay the night with you for a while.”
Meredith laughs out loud, a chortle from deep in the belly to strange looks from Amelia and Kai who are standing nearby, the latter of whom doesn’t have the benefit of experience when it comes to the quirks of the host.
“Where did you find this Presumptious Penelope of a therapist again?”
“I thought you might get a kick out of that one,” he flashes a grin at her and she’s so utterly charmed by him in the moment that she’ll question, for weeks, how she didn’t thoroughly kiss him right then and there.
After moderating the third fight between her children that night, she escapes into the kitchen on the pretense of having to get something out of the fridge. There she finds herself face to face with Austin Hayes as he comes in from the hallway entrance.
“I was just looking for a Diet Coke,” he says sheepishly as if he’s been caught in the act of something much more lurid, “and the guy at the front, I think Winston he said, told me they’re in the cooler out back.”
“I’m glad that you found it,” she says, at a loss for words, having assumed that Austin would steer well clear of her the whole night and now they find themselves alone and without a buffer.
“You don’t like Coke Zero?” She asks as a way of extending this conversation past the minute mark, which in her mind seems like a significant barrier over which she has to jump. Right along with him.
“Nah, it tastes like soap.”
“I’m with you. I like Diet Coke. Give me the aspartame because I’m hooked.”
He raises his eyebrows and in that moment he looks so much like his father.
“It’s not going to kill us?” He asks.
“Not today,” she says with a quick grin.
“Can you tell my Da that?”
“I’ll think of a way to slip it in,” she promises and then makes a production looking for a knife in an effort to not stare at him or make him uncomfortable.
“Do you, uh, need help?” He asks, pointing at the panettone that she’s struggling to get out of its cellophane wrapping.
“I’ve been to Italy. I like Italy. Great place,” she tells him, “but this Christmas bread op they’ve got going on is highly suspect.”
He laughs and she wonders if it’s in spite of himself. Either way, she’ll take it.
“The easter one, the Pane di Pasqua is worse,” he opines.
“Is that the star-shaped one?”
“No, that’s a pandoro. The Easter one has eggs baked into it. But, like, after they’ve been dyed so that the bread around the egg sometimes looks green or pink or whatever.”
She looks at him like he’s sprung a second head.
“You need to stop now or I’ll never go back there.”
He grins, looking down, embarrassed and she returns to the task at hand.
“You have to peel that waxy paper, then cut it into slices.”
Maybe her strategy - whatever it is - is actually working since he’s had every opportunity to flee and instead he stayed.
“Okay, but even then it’s like a foot tall.”
“It is weird,” he agrees, “but at least Da brought the chocolate kind and not the one with the candied fruit that only old ladies like.”
“If you tell me there are raisins in there too, then we’ll know it’s the devil’s work,” she jokes but also tries to inconspicuously gauge his comfort level from the corner of her eye, not wanting to lift her head and give herself away.
“Raisins are only good in chocolate,” he says thoughtfully.
“I’ll be honest, I could pass on them even then,” she tells him.
She doesn’t quite know how to end the conversation, but he continues to linger, shuffling his weight from foot to foot, words and thoughts clearly on the tip of his tongue and she feels like she has to do whatever she can to keep him there, just a little bit longer, just until he’s said what’s on his mind. Just as she’s readying to ask something innocent, about school or the other party they’re going to tonight, he saves her.
“When we got home from skiing, Da told us that he was in a bit of a car accident, nothing too bad, just the ugly stitches on his head.”
She chuckles to herself.
“My handiwork.”
He blushes almost beet red and she wishes she’d kept her mouth shut.
“But then we saw pictures of it online. And it was bad. Like really, really bad. With all these rescue crews. And a guy died.”
She puts down the knife and the panettone and wipes her hands, then walks around the island so that she’s standing right in front of him, but with a comfortable 3 feet of personal space that she thinks she has to maintain.
“I know. But he died while driving, he had a stroke. We’re lucky that everyone made it. And your Dad is okay.”
“He could have died,” Austin says, not argumentatively but firmly nevertheless.
She toys with what to say next and decides to go with her gut.
“He could have,” she agrees, “but I’m really glad he didn’t.”
“Me too.”
She offers him a smile and really wishes that she could walk over and hug him even though she’s really not a hugger and never has been. But she has all these feelings for his father and she has her own children and knows that she’d do for them what Hayes did for his and that makes her insides coil with indecision.
“I felt bad, thinking that he could have died and I, this whole time, made him sad.”
The urge to hug him then becomes almost overwhelming but she can’t - she knows that she can’t - and she braces herself against the cold stone of the counter.
“Your Dad told me a bit about what you were dealing with,” she says, choosing her words carefully, “and he knows, we all know, it’s not something that you chose.”
He shrugs, “I just want him to be around. More than I want him not to date.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that given her own role in all this.
He tilts his head as if he’s considering and reconsidering what’s next, just like his dad does.
“Do you still like him?”
Well, THERE’S a grenade lobbed her way , she thinks as she struggles to catch it. She’s so dumbfounded by the question that she can feel herself start to overheat and sweat, fully aware of the fact that a 14-year-old kid might have just slain her.
“Because if you do, maybe you can, like, go out with him again?”
She just blinks at that, her eyes even briefly darting to the entrance to the kitchen, silently begging somebody else - anybody else - to walk through and save her from this awkwardness she feels. But at the same time…
“Just don’t tell him it was my idea, then he might think you’re just doing it as a favor or something.” He spits the words out in a hurry.
She wants to laugh, really have a good laugh about this, the idea that she’d be pity dating Hayes because his son asked her to but that seems inappropriate so she mentally slaps herself back to reality.
“I do,” she promises, “but only if and when you’re ready, okay?”
He nods. “So then could you?”
She smiles brightly, both to assure him that all is well, that she’s really in this and because she can’t help the muscles in her face that have been aching to be exercised for a long time.
“Yeah, yeah I could.”
He shuffles his feet again and sticks his hands into his pockets before braving a look right at her, eye to eye.
“I’m sorry about what I said about, you know,” he points to his forehead, “the stitches. I’m sure they’re good.”
She can’t help but smile, “I did try extra hard.”
He looks down at his shoes and she gets it - this was him moving way outside of his comfort zone. Into outer space.
“I’m going to go get some more pizza,” he says as he finally opens the escape hatch.
“Of course,” is all she manages before he’s out of the kitchen as quickly as he can but truth be told, she feels better about everything than she has in months.
She gives herself five minutes to ruminate over that conversation before she decides that she’s been figuratively unshackled from what’s been holding her bound since the end of the summer and continuing to stand there by herself is artificially and needlessly extending her (and their) suffering. So she goes in search of him and finds him sitting in the corner of one of the couches, typing away on his phone and plops down right beside him, not bothering to leave a sliver between them. He gives her a strange look and even glances down where the polite distance between their bodies should be but she just smiles and grabs a slice of pizza from the box on the coffee table.
“Today is a good day, Hayes,” she says, “a great day, even.”
She’s beaming. It’s the only fitting explanation of the way her face lights up and while he loves to see it, he can’t help but be curious at her sudden display of cheerfulness.
“Did you finish the entire bottle of wine while you were hiding out in the kitchen again?”
“A comedian in the making,” she mocks him sarcastically and takes a bite of the pizza, then shoves it right in front of his face, “have some, it’ll keep you sober longer.”
The whole scene is utterly bizarre to him but there she is, sitting so close that she may as well be right on top of him, smiling, grinning at him like they’re the only people here. And given that she’s been nothing but supportive and understanding of his situation with Austin, it’s even more strange.
He takes a bite of her slice before she snatches it away again, which is also weird because sharing food is sharing germs that people who share other things do, not people who went out once, months ago and then barely saw each other in the meantime. At the same time, he scans the room for his kids, to gauge what they know or can see but can’t find them so he assumes the teenagers have escaped into the yard or some other private place and for once, he’s relieved to have no idea where they are.
“Want to fill me in on what’s going on?”
“If Austin was okay with us dating, would you have a drink with me? Or dinner?”
He looks at her like she’s lost her mind.
“I’d do at least that much,” he says honestly.
“Most things will be closed tomorrow, so you can either come late, after the kids are in bed and we can do both of those here or you can wait until Sunday and we can go out.”
She wishes she could take a photo or bottle up this look of utter confusion on his face because it’s cute and so unlike him to look so completely lost and uncertain.
“It’s four months early for April Fools, so it can’t be that...” he muses.
“I’m serious here!”
“So am I,” he counters.
“I have it on strict orders that I’m to ask you to spend some time with me, one on one, partaking in an activity such as the sharing of food or drink, otherwise known as a date.”
He looks around him like he’s expecting somebody to jump up behind the couch and reveal that he’s been on hidden camera the entire night.
“From who??”
“Your younger offspring,” she says, casually, like it’s nothing.
He takes a good look at her, and he knows her well enough that he’s sure, without a doubt, that she would never make a joke of the situation, which leaves him with only one option, to assume that what he’s been trying to fix at glacial speed she’s managed to pull off at the drop of a hat, with a seemingly willing participant in his son, the same son who spent most of the fall scowling at him and the rest of the time in tears.
She must sense that his confusion is turning into a mixture of concern and anxiety so she steps in and throws him a life jacket.
“It’s okay,” she promises, “I think. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I think everything is…okay.”
He knows that they’ll have to talk about this in detail later, without an audience and when they have the luxury of uninterrupted time, but she seems so certain of herself, so at ease with the whole thing that he gives in to the rising tide that lifts all boats.
“I feel like I should at least buy you dinner after all…this.”
“Great, Sunday then. Let’s say 7?”
He just nods, but on the inside he’s thinking of a snow-covered mountainside, where the top layer starts to separate, one flake at time, slowly, up and down the crevice, forever and ever until it starts to pick up speed as it moves downhill and then there’s a river of snow and a cloud of ice that picks up more snow and more ice as the avalanche rushes downhill. Before he has a chance to explain all this to her, Amelia comes running over, ignoring his presence, talking a mile a minute at Meredith.
“Kai and I want to get out of here for a little while. You mind checking on Scout every once in a while? He’s conked out but he did eat a lot of crap tonight.”
“Sure, if you can cover for me on Sunday night,” Meredith barters.
“Yeah, yeah,” Amelia waves her hand in the air, likely not even having registered the commitment to which she just agreed.
“You coming back?” Meredith asks curiously.
“I really hope not,” Amelia grins excitedly, “though I do feel a bit bad about leaving you with all this mess…” Amelia says in a tone that suggests that she feels anything but guilty.
“I’ll stay after people leave and help,” Hayes volunteers, ever helpful.
“Oh I’m sure you will,” Amelia winks at him and slaps his back like he’s an old buddy. He blushes almost immediately, first the back of his neck, then spreading to his cheeks and Meredith wants to laugh at her earlier musings on the subject matter.
With that, Amelia runs off and pulls Kai along to the front door, the both of them disappearing into the winter night.
“I’d apologize for her, but I think you should probably accept that she’ll always be like this,” Meredith tells him after a patented roll of the eyes at her sister in law.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…” he says and she flashes him a smile and he smiles back. There are moments, like these, when she feels like all she does is smile but it’s not just that - it’s the calm inside her, the feeling that she got last week when life catapulted them into the same orbit again, that everything is in its right place.
“Who is Kai again?” He asks after a moment.
“The neuroscientist from Mayo.”
“Something in the water in Minnesota?” He asks in jest, but she thinks that there must be at least a bit of a sting left when his mind wanders to her and somebody else. Last week she felt her hackles rising just at the mention of moments with Megan and what she had with Nick most certainly went beyond that.
“I don’t know,” she says and lays her hand on his leg, the one further from her own, “I haven’t been there in a while.”
He glances at her and she hopes that her eyes are adequately relaying her disinterest in returning there, then picks up a tortilla chip and dips it in the guacamole.
“Bailey was right. It’s disgusting.”
He repeats the same instructions to the boys at least three times, acutely aware that he’s in danger of becoming that old parent who nags about everything, from going out with wet hair to making sure they eat enough fibre in a day.
Back by 1, take an Uber home, text him when they get to their friend’s house and when they’re leaving and eat nothing that smells strangely earthy or woody, including but not limited to brownies. They at least have the good grace to not roll their eyes at him dismissively.
“Thank you for coming with me,” he tells Austin specifically, giving his shoulder a tight squeeze.
“She’s kind of funny,” he tells his father with a shrug.
“She is, isn’t she?” Hayes responds and actively tries to minimize the beaming look on his face because he knows it’s there, because he’s helpless when it comes to her.
“Yeah…and I’m okay. Really.”
Austin must see all kinds of doubt in his Dad’s eyes because he shakes his head in frustration and repeats what he’s just said, “ Really Da.”
He’s about to say more before Bailey’s booming voice interrupts him.
“Tuck, you best be thanking Dr. Grey for having you over and feeding you,” she yells from the living room and all three boys sheepishly mutter their thanks before shuffling out. Hayes watches them walk down the front steps and down the side walks and once they’re out of his line of sight, he turns around and looks at Meredith, eyebrows raised to the very top of his forehead.
She just flashes a smile his way and throws her arms around his neck, unabashedly and unapologetically happy. The display takes him by surprise at first but he quickly responds, looping his own arms around her waist and bringing her close. He holds back from nuzzling her neck, aware of everyone else and most importantly her kids running around. They don’t seem particularly interested in what their mother is doing at the moment but he’s also not willing to, at all, tempt fate to interfere again, so he loosens his grip and tries to move back. But she holds him still and refuses to let go.
“The Earth hasn’t opened up and swallowed us alive,” she says in wonder.
“No,” he agrees with a chuckle.
“An asteroid didn’t strike and wipe out humanity.”
“Not that either.”
“We didn’t burst into flames.”
“Or that.”
Then she does pull back to look at him, the wonder he heard in her words now shifting to her gaze.
He’s talking to Winston about good local places to take the boys snowboarding when Meredith comes up behind him, touching his back with her hand. His first instinct is to freeze, for an almost imperceptibly short moment which he hopes she doesn’t sense, because to go from where they were a week ago (nowhere) to everything that’s happened tonight feels a bit like a cheetah doing 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds.
“It’s almost 11 and Ellie is nodding off on the floor and the other two are at the point where they’re ready to jam toothpicks in their eyes to stay awake so I’m going to take them up.”
“You want some help?” He volunteers immediately. In all honesty, he’s grateful for the save as neither he nor Winston have any idea about hills or snow, but he’s loath to bring up a work-related conversation outside of the hospital so it had to do for the moment.
“Only if you don’t mind,” she says, realizing that Winston is probably wondering why she hasn’t asked Maggie but she feels like she crossed the Rubicon within 5 seconds of that exchange with Austin and stepping back over it would constitute a senseless waste of time.
“I can take Ellis, I promised to do a thing for her that I did a couple of times before bedtime before.”
“Is it a secret or can I watch?”
“Not up to me, you’ll have to ask the boss,” he says.
She shakes her head at just how accurate that assessment is and goes about wrangling the kids while he waits by the stairs, then follows them up.
“Her PJs are on her bed. Make sure she brushes her teeth,” Meredith yells over her shoulder.
“I’ve done this a time or two, you know.”
“I can get dressed all by myself but I need help with taking my shirt off because it gets stuck on my neck. Bailey says it’s because I have a big head,” Ellis tells him, looking up.
He smiles at the mental image of their bickering. His two boys didn’t argue much, preferring to choose violence at the smallest slight, so this is a welcome change.
“You should tell him that means you also have a big brain,” he says, helping her out of her shirt the moment she holds her arms up.
“I knew that I was smarter than him!”
Two minutes in and he’s dug himself a hole, he thinks.
“Come on, show me the way to the bathroom where you keep your toothbrush,” he tells her and she leads him down the hall by the hand. He helps her fill up her cup and watches her as she insists that she can do the rest on her own, which inevitably results in white streaks of toothpaste and water down the front of her shirt.
She picks a book - 5 Minute Princess Stories - and he does his best to make the tale of Rapunzel as interesting as he can, switching between American, English, Irish and Scottish accents, each of which she finds funnier than the one before.
“Do you wish you had hair like Rapunzel?” She asks him thoughtfully.
“Maybe not quite that much.”
“Yeah, you would look funny,” she tells him, giggling.
“Door open or closed?” He asks when he’s ready to leave.
“Closed, so the monsters can’t come in,” she tells him, wide-eyed.
“Ah, right.”
“But can you stay until I fall asleep?”
She asks so sweetly that he can’t resist (and he couldn’t even if she’d barked it as an order) and by the looks of her heavy lids, it won’t be a long time, so he settles down on the floor beside her bed, leaning his head against the wall, knees bent.
“That’s a good spot,” she says happily and hugs a stuffed llama under the covers.
It’s where Meredith finds him 20 minutes later, his head back, eyes closed, body slack. At first she can’t tell whether he’s asleep but he doesn’t stir when she approaches and his breaths are long and steady. She lets herself watch the scene for a long time, jumbled thoughts in her head fighting for supremacy.
I should put a blanket on him.
He belongs here.
It feels like it was just yesterday I found him in this exact position in the ambulance bay.
I think I might…
She crouches in front of him and puts her hands on his knees, giving them a gentle squeeze before his neck stretches and his eyes come open, slowly. She gives him a few seconds to recognize where he is.
“I nodded off?” He guesses with a smile appearing in slow motion and she presses her lips against his until they’re both smiling and a laugh starts to percolate in his throat.
She holds her index finger against his lips, “Shhh, she’s a light sleeper,” she tells him, then stands up and helps him do the same.
He shuts the door behind them quietly while she links her fingers with those of his free hand and tugs him down the hall to her room, then closes that door as well. He experiences momentary panic that he can’t even explain except that he’s been so trained to keep a proper distance and to exercise just the right amount of self-control when it comes to her. But now she’s right there, with nobody else around, his kid’s signed off on, well maybe not this, but the PG-rated stuff and she’s looking at him like he’s a snack.
“I am not doing this with you here with two dozen people we know and work with downstairs,” he blurts out, immediately feeling the heat rise up his neck.
“Woooow,” she says theatrically, “we have ourselves an eager beaver. That therapist putting all these thoughts into your head?”
He looks at her and huffs, readying for a clever comeback, a witticism that he seems to have on hand anytime they start to banter but then if she isn’t playing fair, why should he? He crosses the distance between them, taking her face in his hands and kisses her hungrily, parting her lips, demanding entry and the surprise causes her to tumble back onto her bed, pulling him along with her.
“You were saying?” He asks, pulling back just a half an inch or so.
“Shut up and do that again,” she orders and he complies gladly.
As he kisses her senseless, she feels one of his legs come between hers, his weight shift to his left forearm and his right hand slip under her shirt and she finds herself on the brink of being undone just with those alone so she pushes up against his chest and rolls them over.
“I’m crying uncle now,” she tells him, panting, while at the same time grinding her hips against his, shamelessly torturing him before she stands up and offers him a hand. “Come on.”
“Uh,” he points at his crotch, “going to need some time here, you go down without me,” he tells her, while staring at the ceiling.
“I can just wait,” she tells him, amused to no end.
“I’m kind of going to need you to leave if my current situation is going to improve,” he admits to a bout of joyful laughter from her.
“Got it,” she says and goes to leave but not without pointing at her ensuite first, “if you need a cold shower, there’s a bathroom in there.”
“Very helpful, thanks,” he replies, sarcasm all but dripping from his voice.
“It’s the sparkly shirt, isn’t it?” She can’t help but to continue to needle him and then has to duck to avoid being hit in the head with the pillow he throws at her.
Meredith runs down the stairs feeling a hundred pounds lighter than when the evening began, before the butterfly flapped its wings on the other side of the world and put her own life in order. And fun, she’s having fun again, real fun. Not paying attention, she nearly runs right into Bailey in the hallway downstairs.
“That man up there is my friend. Come-to-my-house-eat-my-fried-chicken-and-biscuits, with gravy and mash kind of friend. That’s all I’m going to say about that. We understand each other, Grey?” Bailey’s hands are on her hips and she clearly means business.
“I’m not sure what…” Meredith bumbles, still coming off the high from what just happened upstairs.
“Do we or do we not have an understanding?” Bailey’s raised eyebrows make her position crystal clear and though she is shorter than Meredith, she may as well be Goliath when she puffs up her chest just so.
“We do.”
“Good,” Bailey nods, then points at Meredith’s head, “You might want to fix your hair.”
By the time he makes it downstairs she’s sitting around the kitchen table with Maggie and Jo, the three of them giggling and wild horses couldn’t drag him into that trap so he seidles up to Ben and forces himself to listen to a protracted discussion of this week’s NFL games and Tom Brady’s record, neither of which he could speak about intelligently if his life depended on it.
On occasion - and definitely not twice every minute - he glances over in her direction. And on occasion - and definitely not just as often as he does - she looks back up and he loses himself in those eyes and a now-familiar tingle starts to spread so that he has to look away to save himself further embarrassment. That lasts a couple of minutes and then the cycle repeats itself and leaves him wondering whether he’d be overstepping if he kicked everyone out, nicely and politely of course, with a please and a thank you very much. Then he wonders why it is that he told her that he’d take her to dinner in two days when she offered for him to come back here the very next night, in the night, where he could just pass on the pretense of breaking bread and do every single thing he’d dreamed of for months.
As the clock approaches midnight, the women get up from the table and go back to mingling while she takes their empty wine glasses to put in the dishwasher, which he sees as his opportunity.
He doesn’t really know what they are in public yet, or in private for that matter, except that she has seemed pretty undeterred from making physical contact with him all night so he decides to follow her lead.
He comes up behind her, wrapping an arm around her waist and bringing their bodies together, kissing her jaw. She jumps in surprise.
“Expecting someone else?” He jokes.
“Yeah, the shy Irishman I left upstairs,” she jokes back, then turns around in his arms.
She nods towards the rest of the group, “You okay with this being out?”
He takes a moment to think about how to best answer that question. “I think earlier on, I wouldn’t have been. I don’t like people to be in my personal business, especially with something new. But now,” he looks at her and runs his fingers through her hair, “I think it’s okay because this isn’t, I don’t know, an experiment? It’s going to work out.”
His earnestness doesn’t necessarily surprise her but his quiet confidence does take her aback in a good way.
“Yeah,” she agrees softly and, noting the time, leads him back to the living room where the TV is on and the lights are out.
This time, she puts her arm around his waist, then her hand slips into the back pocket of his jeans. He glances sideways quickly to see her grinning and mouthing the countdown. As it gets down to 1 he kisses her before the fireworks come on because goddamn if he hasn’t waited long enough.
“Happy New Year Hayes,” she says softly when they break apart a second later and he kisses her again.