Author's Note: Hello again! I can't really tell you how guilty I feel about my terrible lack of update. I actually would think about this story and cringe because it had been so long. My apology comes in the form of a new chapter, which I really hope you like. So, without further ado...

"Tell me everything."

"From the beginning?"

"From the beginning."

Cristina took a sip of her coffee. "It started off as just sex. Secret sex." She looked up at Owen, trying to ask him if he minded hearing this sort of thing.

He ate a piece of the muffin they were sharing and leaned closer to her across the cafeteria table. "Don't skip things out to make me feel better. You were engaged, so I assumed you'd had sex. I understand that."

"I…" She looked down at the table, twisting her hands. She hadn't told him the details of her relationship with Burke before, but she knew he needed to know if they were going to move forward. "I got pregnant."

She heard his intake of breath but didn't look at him. She was jiggling one knee nervously, trying to avoid looking at him. This was a lot harder than she had imagined.

"What…happened?" His voice was so quiet, it was almost a whisper.

"I miscarried."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"It never came up. I don't know."

"Oh, so in all the months that we dated, you didn't once think it would be a good idea to tell me that he got you pregnant? Not even when he arrived in this hospital?" He sat back in his chair and threw his hands up in frustration.

Cristina looked at the man sitting across from her, the man she loved more than she understood. He had given Cristina Yang a heart, and she'd practically handed it back, severely bruised, and said 'I don't want it'. And yet he was still there, still waiting for her, still in love with her.

But no matter how much he loved her, no matter how much she loved him, he could still make her angry. He could still hurt her. And right now, he was doing that. Perhaps she didn't have the right to feel this way after what she had done to him, but Cristina did not often do what she was supposed to. She very often did things she had no right to do, and it very often got her into trouble. But that part of her personality hadn't changed, not yet; and so, she snapped.

"Have you maybe considered that it's painful for me to talk about? I was going to get an abortion, Burke broke up with me, I was alone and pregnant and an intern. Oh, and then it happens to be an ectopic pregnancy and my fallopian tube burst. Yes, that sounds like great dinner conversation. Should provide a good laugh." Cristina shook her head and looked away from Owen. She hadn't talked about that period of her life for so long and she hated the feeling of tears in her eyes. She knew, despite her anger, that Owen hadn't meant to be insensitive, but that didn't stop her from resenting his words. He knew how careful she was with her emotions, especially pain, so he should have understood that this was not something she would want to talk about.

He hadn't said anything yet, but she supposed that was to be expected.

She felt Owen take her hand in his. She looked towards their entwined fingers and then up to his face. She realised just how long it had been since they had held hands purely because they could rather than as a form of comfort. Owen brushed the back of his knuckles against her cheek and cupped her cheek with his hand.

"I'm sorry."

And there: he made her fall in love with him just one more time. He made her feel bad for speaking – well, almost yelling – that way.

"I know," she said.

"That doesn't make it better."

Cristina shrugged. "I understand. I forgive you."

Owen sighed and she could see pain in his eyes. "I hate that I couldn't be there for you." He stroked his thumb across her cheek a little. "I hate the idea of you being in pain like that."

She smiled a smile that was more like a grimace and placed her hand over his where it held her cheek. "Don't. It's over now. It still hurts when I think of it, but I try to avoid that. I don't want to live in the past all the time."

He nodded. "We don't have to talk about him any more if you don't want to. I don't want to put you through pain just to satisfy my own curiosity."

"Maybe we'll continue tomorrow? If you're willing to have coffee with me again."

"We could eat lunch together?" His tone was apprehensive – they hadn't eaten lunch together since before…

"Are you sure you want to?"

He squeezed her fingers. "It's just one step up from coffee, I'm sure we can manage it. People will talk, but it's not like that matters."

"I'll tell Meredith to eat with Derek."

Owen nodded and the two of them stood. There was a moment of awkwardness when neither knew quite what to do, then Owen leaned forward and pressed his lips to Cristina's cheek, barely touching it at all. He released her hand, nodded again, and began to turn from her, but she grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

"I'm sorry I reacted that way; you didn't deserve it."

He stepped towards her, closer than he had in far too long, and took hold of both her hands. They stood like that for a few moments, just watching each other. Cristina felt the need to memorise the exact colour of Owen's eyes, even though she already knew it. Not being with him had forced her to take whatever she could and hold onto it, and she had felt a little emptier every time he had walked away from her or broken eye contact with her over the few days since they had each promised to wait for the other to heal. Now, even though she knew him perfectly, she stared at him with something like hunger, making sure she noted every fleck of green within the blue, every hint of brown at the edge of the iris, and every flash of silvery grey when the light was angled just so. She had done this countless times, but none had been urgent like this. She used to feel they had all the time in the world when they were together, hundreds of thousands of moments for making memories, but he was so much more precious to her now she knew what it was like without him. All their time was shorter. Seconds were not as long as they once were. Minutes barely even happened for them. Hours: never. She only had him occasionally, and that made her uncontrollably nervous.

Owen finally spoke, shortening their time again. "You were harsh, but you needed to be. I said exactly what I shouldn't have, acted in exactly the wrong way, and you know that I'm sorry for that."

"And I'm sorry that I—"

Owen put a finger to her lips. "No. Do not apologise. It is painful for you, and emotions are always harder to control when there's pain." He paused for a second, removing his finger from her lips to trace it across her cheekbone and around the shell of her ear. "I should know."

Cristina tried not to shiver as he trailed his fingertip around her ear to her earlobe, but she couldn't stop herself. She closed her eyes, amazed by the effect this man had on her. Just as she began to lean her head towards Owen's hand, he pulled away.

He cleared his throat gently before he spoke. "I'll see you at lunchtime."

Throughout the next week, they ate lunch together four times; the other days, they had surgeries they couldn't miss. When together, they always began the conversation with something about Burke, as this was the main point of the meetings, but soon Owen would interrupt and they would become sidetracked. They started to have real conversations, just as they used to, and only sometimes would the topic stray back to the painful things. They once discussed Owen's mother's death, even though he had been reluctant at first. He had organised a small funeral for her a few days after her death, which Cristina attended.

Despite the conversation tangents, Cristina did manage to tell Owen everything about her relationship with Burke during that week. She didn't leave out anything because she didn't need to. This was Owen, and he would not judge her for her past; it would be entirely too hypocritical. She wasn't sure if he trusted her completely yet, but she knew that she trusted him.

"What are we now?"

Cristina looked up at Owen from her seat next to him in the cafeteria on Saturday, wondering what he meant by that. "What do you mean?"

"Well," he set down his fork, "we aren't seeing other people, but we don't seem to be together, so what exactly are we?"

"Does it matter?"

Owen just continued to watch her until she spoke again.

"I'd say we're in love, if you agree with that. In love but…estranged. Temporarily."

He nodded, starting to eat again. "I don't like the idea of being estranged from you. It makes me nervous."

"I feel that, too. But I don't think we can just jump back into a relationship."

"But did we ever leave a relationship?"

Owen was frowning at her, and Cristina could understand why: they had never specifically broken up, but she had been pretty certain that was what Owen had intended. "No, we didn't say that it was…over. But I always assumed that—"

"I never intended to end it. I certainly wanted to, but I knew I couldn't, despite what you did. You know that I can't be without you. So would you still consider yourself my girlfriend?"

"Well, that name makes us sound like we're teenagers. But I don't know what I'd say I am in relation to you. To be honest, we are acting like friends right now. Friends who hold hands a lot."

Owen actually laughed a little at that, taking Cristina's hand to illustrate her point and running his thumb across her fingers. "Sometimes I feel like a teenager; I just want to kiss you and it reminds me of being sixteen."

Neither of them was bothering to eat any more, and they were staring at each other instead.

"I don't think," Cristina said, "that you should kiss me yet. I don't want you to regret it."

"We kissed in my car last week."

She cracked a smile. "Now we really do sound like teenagers. But I don't know if it would be a good idea to start kissing again, because kissing leads to more kissing, which leads to sex, which leads to you regretting reviving our relationship so soon."

"I could never regret being with you."

Cristina had to admit, it was very difficult not to kiss him when he said things like that. "I still think it's a bad idea."

Owen groaned and leaned back in his chair, making Cristina notice that they had leaned towards each other as they were speaking. He kept their fingers entwined, though. "You sound like Dr Wyatt."

"That's because I'm right."

He rolled his eyes. "Surely if I want to kiss you and I feel ready too kiss you, I should be able to."

"Feeling ready and being over it are two different things."

"It's not something you just get over, Cristina," he snapped.

She pulled her hand away from his. "And that, that right there, is why I'm not kissing you yet. It would just hurt us both."

His jaw was tense and was looking away from her, but after a few moments he let out a sigh, his muscles relaxing as he did so. "You're right." He looked at her. "Why are you right so much?"

She grinned at him. "I'm a surgeon, that's my job."

Author's Note: So things are looking up a little! I would love it if you would tell me what you think in a review. They really do make my day.