He's using her, he knows. He just can't stand to be alone. "Still running in circles around all the women in your life," as Nancy had described him.
He chased his sisters around the house when they were young. He chased after Melissa in high school. When Melissa dumped him after their first Thanksgiving away at college, he chased the pain with Gillian. He chased after Addison in med school. To soothe the burn of Addison's betrayal, he chased it with Meredith.
Now he's following Meredith up with Rose, like a drug addict looking for his next high without the crash.
It's different this time, though. He knows that too. His high peaked with Meredith and everything afterwards is just coming down from it. This time, he'll be forced to deal.
But first, he tries to distract himself with a dinner date. Rose orders a steak, medium-well to his disgust, before he orders one himself. Rare. The way Meredith likes it, too.
When the food arrives, he watches her cut herself a large chunk of meat and place it in her mouth. The thing must be damn near solid, he thinks, and she'll be chewing for half an hour. Inelegantly. It does, however, save him from making more small talk.
Meredith would first cut the steak into a hundred little cubes before consuming them one at a time. She'd make little noises, showing her enjoyment. Throw a small smile his way. He'd probably try to feel her up under the table – punishment for daring to encourage him. She'd let him.
He keeps the evidence of his thoughts off his face. He's had a lot of practice with pretending he's not thinking about Meredith.
He wonders if he could do it. If he could date Rose and marry her. Build a house with her. If he could have children with her. He'd have to erase the huge jacuzzi tub in the master bath from the house plans because shared baths were his and Meredith's and he doesn't want to taint that memory. But the rest of it, the marriage and the children, were never his and Meredith's. Meredith knew what it was like to be a child to a surgical resident and he didn't have to ask to know she wasn't interested in the idea of reversing that position. She wanted to be a mother, he knew, but not until she knew she could give it her all. It was just a distant dream he had.
The promise of the possibility would have been enough to satisfy him. He would have been a first-time father in his late 40s but he would have been okay with it if he could just get the promise.
Instead, he got games. Double-speak and reading between the lines. He wanted to play but she was always changing the rules. He was always changing the rules. The rules were always changing and neither knew how to play anymore.
A waiter comes by and takes their empty plates, leaving them with the dessert menu. Rose asks him if he'd like to share anything but Derek politely declines and tells her to go ahead.
She orders the triple chocolate cake and it's all he can do to fight his gag reflex. Meredith would order strawberry cheesecake and push her plate to the middle of the table, knowing that Derek's hatred of all things sugary has a large exception for strawberry cheesecake.
He wonders if it'll always be like this. If every date for the rest of his life, every moment in the rest of his life, will be related back to Meredith in his head.
He drives with Rose to the hospital in his silver Mercedes because she has to get her car. She leans over the parking brake and kisses him on the lips. He tries to get into it. He knows he was the one who asked her out so he should at least be able to hide his moroseness and kiss her back.
She says she had a good time and he's pleased with the fact that he can hold moderately stimulating conversations using only half his brain. She doesn't invite him to her apartment or wherever she lives. It's probably for the best, he thinks. He's never had better than Meredith and he knows that will never change. Rose gets up from the passenger seat and he remembers fucking Meredith there, parked on the street outside her house. She was drunk and he took advantage that time, he can admit.
He wonders if someday down the road, they'll have secret trysts; weekend rendezvous behind the backs of whoever is stupid enough to marry either one of them. He committed adultery with Meredith once, and he doesn't think he would need too much persuasion to do it again.
Down that path lies trouble, but he's always been on shaky moral ground in her regard. The attending and the intern, the secretly married man and the girlfriend, the publicly married man and the mistress, the guy who dates other people and the girl he meets in on-call rooms. Their all-encompassing, passionate thing – because it was more than simply love and he doesn't think there's a word that can do it justice – knew no bounds until now. At least Rose knows part of the story, but Derek can't help but respect her a little less for being remotely willing to go along with it.
He drives around to Meredith's normal parking spot after watching Rose drive away and notices her Jeep is still parked there. Before he can really analyze his actions, he pulls his car into the empty spot beside hers and enters the hospital. He never intended to hurt Addison with his feelings for Meredith. He satisfied his cravings for Meredith without much guilt, but he never did it to get back at Addison. For some reason, though, all he wants to do right now is find Meredith so that she can smell the steakhouse on his clothes. She'll ask him where he was and he'll tell her he was on a date.
He wants to hurt her. He wants her to react, to see what she's losing.
He finds her in the same place she was when he left, in the ICU with Bailey's baby boy. She has her back to Derek and he watches as she gently gives the baby a post-op checkup while Bailey sleeps on a cot on the other side of the room. He stands in one place for a few moments while Meredith soothes Tuck by brushing her fingers over his head and Derek imagines her whispering silly little things to the child.
It's enough to make him fall in love with her all over again. It's enough to make him revise his plan to hurt her. It's not enough to fix their relationship, though, so he turns around and walks back down the hall, down the stairs, to his car.
He looks out at the shrinking lights of the city from the ferry boat across Puget Sound and wonders where he'll take Rose for their next date. Chinese, maybe. It's one of the few things that has no connection to Meredith in his mind.
At home, he buries his nose into the pillow that still smells like lavender from the last time she stayed over and dreams of how his life would have been if he hadn't chosen Addison.