No One to Blame
He watches her out of the corner of his eye in the OR and wonders if she knows it.
When Phillip's heart rate doesn't go up again, he feels like he's lost it. He wants to punch something.
He's with Rose and he has no idea why. It's starting to make him into a madman.
When she says, "Dr. Shepherd," it almost makes him cringe. It's easy for him to say Dr. Grey. It's her. It's almost a term of endearment. But Dr. Shepherd sounds formal and detached. Dr. Shepherd was his dad in Connecticut, not him in Seattle.
He turns around and he watches her with a light in his eyes that never made its way there with Addison; that could never be there with Rose or any other girl.
He says Dr. Grey and her name sounds a little like velvet. He loves her name. Meredith sounds like silk, like water flowing smoothly from his hands.
And then she says that it was a pleasure working with him today and he wants to counter it, he really does, but there's something in the back of his brain that tells him not to. So he smiles kindly and wishes that he could kiss her, maybe once more. That would be nice.
He loves the color of her eyes. They remind him of the ocean. Or maybe the ocean, ever-changing, reminds him of her? Maybe there's something in ferryboats that was ingrained in him all along, something about Meredith Grey?
That night, he watches his ex-wife talk to his ex-girlfriend. Was Meredith even his girlfriend? He wonders if that was ever official.
Addison says something out of Zen mode, something about kicking Meredith's ass. He wishes he could do the same, to kick himself into line. Well, maybe this is a little of his fault. Maybe he was going too fast. Maybe...but the time for maybes is gone.
He loves her. That's probably his biggest fault. He loves Meredith Grey.
"Thanks, Addy," he says as the former red-head whizzes out. What happened to her hair, anyway?
"Don't thank me, talk to her," she calls behind her shoulder as the heels click up the stairs.
He knows that Addison isn't talking about Rose. But he pretends even to himself that she was talking about Rose, so that's what he does. He nabs Rose from the nurse's station as she's getting off duty and takes her out to dinner.
He feels guilty that the smell of lavender isn't wafting over the table.
But he has no one to blame but himself.
A/N: Written on a complete whim while I was looking at a response from a review I wrote, and thinking about how much Derek is screwed up but maybe doesn't realize it.
Another edit – I sort of just said "screw getting this beta'd" because it's 8:30 on the east coast and I wanted to get it up before the episode aired.