Gorgeous

A Grey's Anatomy fic by Gigi

Disclaimer: I obviously do not own a single shred of Grey's Anatomy, its characters or Shonda, otherwise you would be seeing my story lines Thursdays at 9 on ABC, not on this.

Chapter 4: In a Far Off Place

A/N: So normally, I wouldn't update this out of order and so quickly, so for you excited people, thank picric drea. We have a deal that if I update this fic, she'll update Complications, which I have recently become addicted to. So that's why I'm updating so quickly, so I think you're going to enjoy it!

A/N 2: Btdubs, the post-it marriage never happened. Derek and Meredith are still just engaged in this. Besides, how the hell do you go through a post-it divorce?

In three short days, he had fallen in love with the woman resting her head on his shoulder all over again, hook, line and sinker.

Derek and Addison sat across from each other in their dimly lit private dining room at Le Bernardin, her favorite place to go for French food. Absently, he recalled that it had been in this very room that he'd decided he wanted to marry her.

Addison was intent on her menu, trying in vain to remember what her favorite dish had been so long ago. The candlelight provided just enough illumination to make the two rings on her left finger sparkle like two small stars had come to rest on her hand. Derek's eyes were fixated on those rings, itching to take them off her hand and propose to her in reality.

The very thought in itself scared Derek beyond belief. How had just three days with this woman managed to reawaken all his feelings for her enough for him to want to marry her again? How had three days erased all the hurt and problems they had toward the tail end of their marriage? How had three days been long enough for this ravishing redhead to consume all his thoughts and push aside a mousy, adorably naïve blonde?

He averted his eyes back to his menu when he saw Addison look up at him questioningly, his mind still racing. He needed to sort out his feelings for his ex-wife-slash-pretend-wife-wife and his feelings for his ex-dirty-mistress-turned-fiancée. Preferably before he opened his mouth on this date. No need to give her false hopes or unnecessarily upset her. No, he needed to figure this out and fast.

Chancing a glance at Addison, Derek was relieved to see that she still hadn't found her forgotten favorite dish. She was still biting her bottom lip in frustration and completely oblivious to anything other than the menu in front of her. He still had time.

First, Meredith. He knew he loved her, and he knew her age. Her age didn't use to upset him—it was just a number, after all—but her immaturity had been upsetting him of late. He sometimes found himself wondering whether or not she had just the slightest tendency toward bipolar disorder. Of course, as a doctor, he knew she didn't have it actually, but he couldn't stop those thoughts from sneaking up on him every once in a while.

But she was still a good person. She had a sense of humor, and she had this childlike innocence that made her want to see the good in everything and everybody. Even when he'd still been married to Addison, and he knew her friends hated his wife just for being his wife, she'd confessed Addison was all but impossible to truly hate. She'd called her "annoyingly kind" and "painfully smart," among other things. Had she been a vindictive person, as many wronged women often were, she wouldn't have found the strength to say those things.

That was true, actually. If Meredith was anything, she was strong. She'd been dealt some really crappy cards in her lifetime, and she had somehow managed to survive it. That was likely a large reason behind his love for her: they were both wounded, and he thought they'd be able to heal each other.

But he was healed, he realized. And she was well on her way to being healed herself, if she wasn't already there. Now that they didn't need to lick each other's wounds, did they need each other? Were they happy?

If he was going to be brutally honest to himself, the answer was no. Neither of them needed saving anymore, and they didn't know how to be together without tending to the other's emotional hurts. The drama that had always been in their relationship had been what kept them going.

Now, Addison. Once again, Derek's eyes flickered to the woman sitting opposite him. She was still stumped. Good.

He was stumped, too, for that matter. What did he feel for Addison?

She was beautiful, obviously. She walked into a room, and everyone knew it. The room would grow pale except for that one bright spot where she stood, and she had a confidence about her that drew people to her. She had a ready smile, despite what she'd been through in the past few years, and she still believed in soul mates and true love. She was still an idealist, throughout all her mistakes and the mistakes of other that affected her. She'd lived, and she still managed to be an optimist, even when reality so often liked to smack her in the face. After all that, just the fact that she could laugh—with a laugh that was so infectious it had you laughing right alongside her before you realized you had even smiled—amazed him.

For Addison, it wasn't just a matter of surviving the bad stuff, like it was for Meredith. Meredith had had most of the bad things in her life thrust upon her. She hadn't had a choice to but to suffer through them. There was a certain strength that came from knowing it wasn't your fault when something happened. Addison wasn't anywhere near wounded when Derek met her, and he had thought her strong back then because nothing seemed to hurt her. Her childhood full of standards and society, yet remarkably absent of loving gestures, would have scarred anyone else. But she used it to motivate herself to be better, to exceed even her parents' insurmountable expectations.

But she was flawed. Those flaws were what threw the bad things at her. Well, those flaws and his own indifference towards her in their marriage. Her own mistakes were what wounded her, what ended their marriage concretely. She had to deal with more guilt than Meredith had to, and guilt could break the strongest person. But it hadn't broken her.

But she cheated on you with your best friend, a small nagging voice in his head pointed out. She hurt you more than a woman had ever hurt you. What's to say she won't do it again?

I won't give her a reason to do it again, he growled back at the voice, realizing with a start that he'd just made his decision.

"Are you ready to order, sir?"

Derek's head whipped up from the menu at the sound of the waiter's patient voice. He already held Addison's menu in his hands and was looking at him expectantly.

"Yes, sorry," Derek excused. Glancing at the menu quickly, he picked out the first thing he saw. "I'll have the lobster."

"Okay, I'll be back with your wine shortly," the waiter announced once he'd gathered Derek's menu and written down his order.

When he left, Derek looked back at Addison. "Wine?"

Addison couldn't help the small laugh that bubbled out of her. "I ordered the cabernet we used to get all the time. You were really out of it, weren't you?" Derek nodded, going slightly red in the face. "What were you thinking about?"

Shrugging, Derek sipped his water to buy himself time. He couldn't very well tell her what he was actually thinking. "Just about how beautiful you look tonight," he answered smoothly with a smile. His smile broadened when he saw pink tinge her cheeks. "So did you finally figure out your favorite dish?"

"No," Addison pouted. "I ended up getting the calamari. That lobster you ordered sounded pretty delicious though."

"Yeah, that's because the lobster was your favorite dish," Derek recalled with a chuckle as Addison's pale blue eyes widened in disbelief.

"You knew?" she demanded. "You knew and you didn't tell me?" Derek burst out laughing when she threw a roll at him. "Jerk."

"Well, to be fair, you never actually asked me if I remembered," he pointed out, ducking as another roll flew for his head, still unable to contain his laughter, especially when he saw the telltale signs of Addison fighting her own amusement from escaping.

8D

"I had a really great time tonight, Derek," Addison declared shyly as they walked down the hallway to their room hand-in-hand.

"Good, because I did, too," he answered. "I haven't laughed like that in ages."

"Me neither." They reached the door to their hotel room, and Addison leaned her back against it to look Derek in the eye. "Derek, what are we doing?"

The question wasn't unexpected, but it still took Derek a few seconds to formulate an answer to that. "I wasn't entirely honest with you before, when you asked me what I was thinking about when we were ordering our food."

"Oh?"

"I was thinking about you and me, and I was thinking about Meredith and me," he confessed. "I needed to figure all of that out, because lately all I have been able to think about has been taking those rings off your finger and propose to you for real."

Addison's mouth dropped open. "You-you wanted to propose to me for real?" He nodded, blushing again. He hadn't blushed this much in years, either. "Derek, I've enjoyed these past few days, really, I have. But it's only been three days, and I—"

Derek cut her off. "Addison, don't worry. I'm not going to propose to you anytime soon—" she visibly relaxed at that statement. "—But the idea has been floating around in my head all day, and I want to have that possibility for us again."

She stared at him for a second before slowly asking, "So what are you saying?"

Taking a deep breath, Derek took the plunge. "I want to see you again. I want to keep seeing you. I want to be us again," he announced.

All the breath left Addison's lungs, and she couldn't form any words. Her eyes were still as wide as saucers, and they showed no sign of going back to normal anytime soon.

A/N: Gotta love a good cliffhanger, don't you? I'm not normally this nice about Meredith, but I got a review in chapter 2 that pointed out to me that I don't want to be the person who has to bash Meredith to make Derek choose Addison. So I decided I wouldn't be. But seriously, what do you think? REVIEW! (Picric drea, I better see an update soon!)