Disclaimer: All Shonda's – I'm a poor college student (again). Hello graduate studies world.

Author's Note: A chapter on the longer side even after cutting just over 2000 words out. There's slightly mature-ish content towards the end, please skip if offended. Thanks for picking this up again. I really appreciate your reviews, and I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 26
"Under your spell again
I can't say no to you
Crave my heart and it's bleeding in your hand
I can't say no to you
Shouldn't let you torture me so sweetly
Now I can't let go of this dream
I can't breathe but I feel."
Good Enough – Evanescence

Meredith was sitting on a gurney in the deserted underground hallways of Seattle Grace, absently flipping through Chuck Eaton's chart. It was neither night nor day – the obscure darkness made time irrelevant. Minutes blurred and a neon light flickered pitifully to throw pale white light against the black ink. A few feet away, a vending machine rumbled insistently, asserting its presence. The yellow bulb that lit the cheap candy inside also wavered, almost as if the two were in cahoots and had decided it was time for an early Christmas.

Chuck Eaton had lung cancer and a smoking habit he could not shake. It was unlikely he would make it till Christmas.

George had kissed her last night.

She couldn't quite wrap her mind around it. She couldn't remember if she'd kissed him back. She remembered, with stark clarity, Derek lashing out at her with deep-seated anger. She remembered feeling too drained to retaliate. The next hour had found her at her father's townhouse, making small talk to the music of awkward pauses. He'd stuttered out phrases to declare his gladness about her survival and his deep regret over her mother's death. The sordid affair had ended with Thatcher Grey's tearful confession that he missed Carol. She'd swallowed the lump in her throat and bid him a tearless goodbye. Then George had kissed her.

She could almost taste it now, hesitation, tepid beer, and midnight mistakes. His clammy hands had found the indents at her waist, sitting there with reverence as his lips claimed hers. His sweet words had left a balmy cadence to their tangled tongues. "I know I'm not a world renowned surgeon. I know I'm not a national hero. I'm not any of the things you have gone for in the past. I know. But I would never leave you. I would never hurt you. And I will never stop loving you." He'd been talking about Derek because George knew. He'd been sitting quietly in the backseat, sipping latte out of a paper cup, as Izzie had grilled her about Derek's post-bomb visit days ago. "He cares about you, Meredith!" George had connected the dots of her confession to Seattle PD, Derek Shepherd's vindication and his sudden appearance in Seattle. A wry smile crossed her lips at her own realization that these three seemingly related events actually had no bearing on one another. The self-derogatory humor died quickly as she recalled the profound hurt in George's eyes when she'd pushed him away. With George's mouth slanted against hers at an angle, all she had been able to think about was Derek. Derek clad in black, standing in her hallway, breaking down her walls. Derek in a king-size bed, gazing down at her with burning hunger as his fingers found the center of her body.

"I'm sorry, George. I can't." And that reminded her of Derek in Zachary Preston's attic, his face flushed with desire, asking her why the hell not and calling her out on wanting it – wanting him. This had been different, and last night George hadn't called her out on anything. He'd taken back his hands as if he'd been burnt, then he'd turned away and left her as he had promised he wouldn't.

She closed her eyes against the memory. She had kissed George back, but then she couldn't because somewhere in her mind Derek was lurking, watching her, taunting her with non-promises and empty darkness. When she reopened her eyes, the deserted hallway was still there, untouched by time, lights blinking with soothing consistency. She liked the solitude, the shadows, the constants, the broken souls who wandered between unadorned cement walls, as if they could be fixed by the naked reality of the place.

The joy of her pseudo-solitude was short-lived. Mark Sloan shifted on the gurney beside her, reminding her of his presence – another lost soul who could not stop wandering long enough to realize his pain. The old mattress groaned, and Meredith looked up from the chart to find him peering over her shoulder, much closer than anticipated.

"This one's a goner," he remarked before turning back to his chart and scribbling his signature across a release form.

"What?"

He glanced at her briefly before picking up another chart from a short stack he balanced against the side of his thigh. "Invasive non-small-cell, history of COPD, chain smoker, you know the drill."

She sighed. "Sometimes a little sensitivity would be nice," she muttered, fingertips skimming over Chuck's complex history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Mark was right. As Chuck had eloquently phrased it earlier that morning: "I'm dying, dear."

Mark shrugged, but his gaze narrowed on her as if he was trying to understand the bite in her words. Then he leaned back and set his broad shoulders against the wall with resolve. "I have a fifteen year-old, Jake Burton, with a severe case of lionitis. Chief has called in Derek Shepherd, neurosurgeon extraordinaire," he scoffed, tearing out a page with more force than necessary. The paper succumbed to his display of violence, splitting in half along a jagged line.

She tried to swallow past her racing heart but snapped the chart in her hands closed instead, ignoring the loud clap of metal bindings. Mark looked at the chart and then back at her face tellingly. "What do you mean he called him in?" she pressed, her fingers tightening around the folder. This could not be happening.

"He's with Jake now," he answered, making a show of balling up the shards of paper. He was testing her. She could read it in the way his gaze scanned her features studiously, like he could read their history by measuring the pitch of her voice when she spoke about him.

She was afraid no facial expression could assimilate what Derek Shepherd had taken from her. Today, it was easier to understand Mark and his anger. Today, she could still feel Derek's hands around her elbows, could still smell him in her hair. His words still echoed in her mind. "Tell me, Meredith, do such coincidences happen in real life?" The little room had shuddered with his frustration. His eyes, like shards of flint, had spoken of nothing but a sense of desperate need, as if every part of him was reaching out to her but his mind wouldn't let him touch her. Cruelty had become his defense, the surefire way to keep her at arm's length while holding her close. She had found no words to say to his ruse of indifference. She couldn't pretend that having him close didn't make her wish he would pull her into him and she would cease to exist without him.

Today, she resented Derek Shepherd, and she was aching with the need to watch him through the hospital blinds.

"Meredith?"

She looked into Mark's inquisitive eyes and found apprehension. "You still hate him," she said slowly.

He turned away as if she'd slapped him. "How can I not?" he spat the bitter words through a sardonic smile.

"Every reason you've had to hate him vanished when he was vindicated."

Mark let out a chuckle that was full of his past, haunted, like he too wished he could forget. "You don't know anything, Meredith." Shaking his head, he looked away from her to stare at the wall before him, summoning apparitions she could not see. "Addison didn't just cheat on him and leave him. It wasn't over for her. She pined for him, and she suffered his cruelty for a long time before his sister shot her to death," he spoke softly, pausing to fling a stack of papers to the far end of the gurney and rake his fingers through his hair. "He might as well have shot her himself."

Her body shrank away from him, as if she wished to distance herself from his words. "She slept with you," she said quietly. "She stayed with you."

He laughed, but it was an awful sound that made her feel sick in the pit of her stomach. He was such a handsome man, irreparably broken and forever in love with a dead woman. "Meredith," he sighed. "Don't you understand? It was a cry for attention. His indifference killed her. She was a vibrant, beautiful, brilliant woman – a world-class surgeon who looked like a goddess. He didn't see her, and that killed her long before Rebecca Shepherd borrowed Daddy's revolver."

"Do you miss her?" she asked and felt incredibly sad for Mark Sloan's predicament.

Heaving in a deep breath, he averted her stare, his gaze falling on the gently rumbling vending machine. It seemed quiet in the wake of his rage. When his eyes met hers, he had already sheltered whatever wound she had exposed. "This isn't about me, babe. This is about you, and your infatuation with a man who may not be a murderer in the literal sense, but if you get stuck on him, which you clearly are, he will kill you as surely as he killed her. And, Meredith, most days you look like you need somebody to bring you to life, not bury you. Don't disappear into him. He has that effect on people. He has shadows. Don't become his shadow," he beseeched her, his hand finding the listless weight of hers on the gurney. He gave her fingers a light squeeze, holding on like he could make this mean something.

She stared into Mark Sloan's striking, solemn gaze and could only see Derek. Not quite as earnest, Derek stared back at her with his damaged soul lingering in his eyes, daring her to love him. Sliding her hand away from Mark's, she tucked it against her body. "Don't worry about me," she said and hopped off the gurney in one fluid motion.

She favored Mark with a fleeting smile. It's much too late to go back now.

"Let's just say, it's been a really, really long day," Derek said into the phone, propping the slim device between cheek and shoulder as he scribbled his signature across Jake Burton's time-of-death report. "How's Helen doing?"

"I'm sorry to hear that, hun. Helen is alright. She's been chattering nonstop about William Tray. I think she's memorized every online article she came across. It's heartbreaking," Kathleen sighed.

He echoed the sound with a deep exhale, set aside the papers and took hold of the phone again. The conversation with William Tray had been cut short by Mark Sloan bursting into the doctors' lounge to discuss Jake's condition. In any case, it hadn't been going well. William's face had gone pale as a sheet, and after a beat of silence, he'd fired a series of questions Derek couldn't remember if he tried. He had been dubious, skeptical, his dark gaze narrowing to accusatory slits of disbelief until Derek had pulled Helen's photograph out of his wallet. That had invited more silence – heavy this time around, almost breathless. Then William Tray had been furious. "He wants to meet her tomorrow," he told Kathleen now, leaving out the incredulous anger in the other man's voice.

He was met with another silence – another punctuation mark in a day that seemed to be full of them. This one was all Kathleen, heartbroken and guttural. William Tray would want custody of his daughter. He was the kind of man who needed to do the right thing – be a good parent, marry the young, foolish girl he'd impregnated. Derek both respected and resented him. He knew his sister felt it was far too soon for them to be robbed of their niece.

"Fair is fair, Kathy. He's her father," he whispered to her unspoken protests. The silence was beginning to eat at him like a persistent ache that just wouldn't fade. "How did Nancy take it?" he prodded and could hear Helen in the background, asking Kathleen for a glass of milk.

"There was cursing."

Nancy must have been furious. His eldest sister was the poster-girl for control freaks. She did not appreciate blind spots. She deplored surprises. This curveball couldn't have gone well, and that was one conversation Derek was glad he'd avoided – for now anyway. "She's mad at me," he stated matter-of-factly.

"More at Sofia actually," she said with a smile in her voice. This inordinately pleased her. Nancy especially hated being one-upped by her mother.

"Finally somebody in this family with a little sense," he teased, but the humor was heavy at best and Kathleen couldn't conjure a breath of laughter for his sake.

"We can't lose her. It's too soon."

"William won't keep her from us," he reassured her, ignoring the pangs of guilt that speared through him. He was undeniably the villain in this story – the veritable big bad. At the time, keeping Sofia's and Becky's secrets had seemed like the most important thing in the world. But that was before the three bullet holes in Addison's night-shirt. That was before the end of the world as he had known it. He wondered if Helen would later come to resent him and recognize him as the man who had isolated her from the people who would love her for the rest of her life.

"I've booked us on a flight to New York on Sunday morning," Kathleen told him, edging past his dark thoughts.

Derek pinched the bridge of his nose. Three more days of Seattle and Meredith Grey. Three more days of endless rain and raging frustration. He didn't think it was wise to make plans to return to New York before settling matters with William, but Kathleen had patients and so did he. "That's great, Kathy. We'll catch up some more when I'm back." He said goodbye to her, told her to give Helen a kiss from him and ended the call.

He started walking down the hallway towards the locker rooms. Maybe he'd go to the bar across the street and nurse a tumbler of single-malt scotch. Chief Webber, dressed in jeans and a red sweater, was heading down the stairs. He raised his hand in greeting when their eyes met. Derek waved back politely. His chest tightened with inexplicable yearning when a hassled Meredith Grey collided face-on with the Chief in her rush to scurry up the stairs. Richard caught her by the arms. Her slender arms disappeared into Richard's large hands. He tried to stop dwelling on how small she looked in Richard's shadow. Fragile. Breakable. From a distance, Derek could see Richard's lips move in a slew of mute words. She nodded dutifully like an obedient child, and he gave her arms a gentle pat before letting her go. She hurried the rest of the way, golden hair soft and loose about her slender shoulders. Oblivious to his presence and his watchful gaze, she knocked on the door to an on-call room, waited for a few seconds and then walked in, closing the door behind her.

Derek stared after her, frozen en route to the locker rooms. He should have left. He should have taken the twelve steps that would leave him at the door to his locker. But he couldn't. It was almost as if his body had a will of its own. It wanted no part of the madness in his head. It gravitated towards her with a certainty that made him feel ill. Impulse won over reason, as it often did with matters of the heart, but Derek refused to acknowledge his heart's involvement in any of this. Meredith Grey was an anomaly, and that was the only reason he sought her like an addict sought his next fix. He could barely remember the purposeful steps that left him at the door to the on-call room. He glanced up and down the empty hallway then twisted the doorknob and quietly slipped inside.

She was growing tired of the sounds of her own sadness.

Long, lonely sighs rocked her body from head to foot. The gentle rasp of her quiet sobs ricocheted against bare walls. The grimy, salty taste of her tears was revolting. The last time she had felt this way, her car had veered off the dark, rainy Seattle road and made a new home out of an old pine tree. The last time she had felt this way, she had wanted to die because she missed Carol, and she missed her mother. She hated her mother; it was her voice that kept her earth-bound. Grey women are not quitters, Meredith. But hadn't she quit? Hadn't Carol quit? Why did she have to be the one carrying the torch?

She was making a mess of things. She knew this with stark clarity as she switched on a bedside lamp in the on-call room. It was her destiny to bring suffering to everyone who deigned to love her. George was hurting. He'd emerged from the locker room this evening with his once shaggy hair sheared close to his scalp, and he wouldn't look at her. Mark was hurting, but it wasn't love for her that gnawed at his insides. It was his hatred for Derek Shepherd that festered inside him like a vicious disease that couldn't rip free. And Derek – Derek was broken. Like a shattered pane of glass, his broken pieces tore into everything around him, until he was swimming in a bloodbath of his own creation.

As if summoned by her blackest thoughts, Derek stepped into the on-call room and closed the door. He did it calmly like his sudden intrusion didn't send the world spinning drunkenly off its axis. With her heart lodged firmly in her throat, she thirstily drank in the sight of him. He was wearing dark blue scrub pants, but he had traded in the matching v-neck for a light gray polo shirt. It was disarming, that shirt, the idea that he had started to change and then gotten caught up with something more pertinent. The three buttons at the base of his throat were undone, and the soft material clung to his chest in a way that emphasized every agonizing line of muscle. The defined angles of his hard-jaw, dark with two days' worth of stubble, were cast into sharp relief by the dim golden light. His black hair had finger-trails in it, a tell-tale sign of frustration. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the scant light. When he found her, she was propped against the table, backlit in the small, empty room. He stood frozen by the door, staring at her as if she'd intruded on his private time. It looked like he didn't know quite what to make of her presence.

He confounded her. She was unable to stop herself from wanting to stare back at him, yet unable to look at him for more than a few seconds. The unspoken rolled off him in waves of accusation and crawled over her skin like venomous insects.

"Don't," she interrupted the silence with a soft-spoken syllable. She wanted to sound firm, to shield her vulnerability against him. She wished he would turn around and leave, put an end to this before it even began. She desperately wanted him to stay.

He was singing a different tune tonight. She realized this with dread as his gaze mellowed to something deceptively kind. "Don't?" he echoed and cocked his head to the side like a curious animal who didn't understand the intricacies of human complexity.

She drew in a tremulous breath, promising herself for the hundredth time that she was immune to his impenetrable façade. "Don't start, Derek. Not today," she said, her voice raw, her hands running over her face.

He contemplated her for a few breathless seconds. He smiled at her then, a familiar cynical smile that was not borne of genuine happiness but some twisted notion that happened to amuse him for a fleeting moment. "What have you done?" he wondered aloud as if he wasn't asking her but making a game of guessing her plight.

Lifting her gaze to his, she encountered deep blue eyes bearing into her with frightening intensity. He didn't try to hide the condemnation loitering behind his eyes. What have you done? Who have you betrayed today? She ignored the sharp, twisting knife buried in her chest and looked away. "I hurt someone I care about."

The declaration made him shrug nonchalantly, but he was still rooted to the spot as if he was afraid of what he would do should he foray deeper into the room. "We all hurt the people we love," he said.

She shook her head almost vehemently but couldn't bring herself to look at him again. "No, we don't. I was sad and it was unfair." And it was one in her series of wrongs that couldn't be made right.

He leaned back against the door, crossing his arms before his chest. His arms were muscular and heavy. He was beautiful and untouchable, so close yet the gaping chasm between them seemed infinite. "What did you do?" he pressed, and when he sensed her hesitation he chuckled, a low rich sound that made her mouth feel hot and dry. "You can tell me, Meredith. I'm your friend." There was a dark promise in his dancing gaze as the word rolled off his tongue silkily. Friends. It was a polished act – his voice and his countenance, the charming tilt of his dark head. He was the picture of everything she had ever wanted. He could shatter her like a worthless figurine, burn her alive, and she would still crave him like a besotted fool.

"You're not my friend," she muttered and pressed the heels of her hands against the table.

He lifted one sleek eyebrow, and she tried not to fixate on how attractive it was. "Yes, I am. I could be. I'm a very good friend." The corner of his lips curled in a suggestive smile that sent her heart slamming into her stomach.

"We can't be friends," she said with cold finality. It was absurd. He was absurd to even suggest it, cruel to taunt her with the possibility.

He knew he had unnerved her. She could tell as much from the wicked light in his eyes when she finally met his gaze. "We could be friends," he countered conversationally, for all the world as if they belonged here in this little empty room where it was dark and uncomfortably warm, and the world ceased to exist. "You'd be lucky to have me."

"How? How can we be friends?" It was easier to humor him, even if she sounded like a wounded bird.

The smile he flashed at her said he was pleased that she was playing along to his little pretense that this was perfectly natural, that they were not both hopelessly damaged beyond recognition. It was heartbreakingly short-lived – his smile – but it stole her breath. "We could hang out," he suggested, not sounding innocent in the least. His teeth had taken hold of a wound and were about to rip into it callously. "We could meet, have coffee, and discuss your relationship with Mark Sloan or Carol – whoever she is."

She swallowed tightly past all the grit in her throat. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of crying in front of him. "Right," she breathed tonelessly.

She heard him move before he loomed closer. Two short steps, sneakers swooshing against the impersonal tiles. "We could," he insisted, and despite the mocking twist to his stance, there was something fierce about this new attack. "It would be fun. I could be your friend Meredith."

He was standing too close for comfort. Her body acted out of self-preservation, shying away from the magnetic pull of his. A few steps left her standing with her back pressed to the wall beside the narrow bunk beds. It was safer here but her heart wouldn't slow its tripping rhythm. "No, we can't be friends." Her voice carried differently from this new perch where his eyes had followed her impatiently. Later she would think the move was the stupidest thing she had done.

He followed her mindlessly. She pushed back into the wall, but there was nowhere to go. One step forward and their bodies would touch. She stood very still, taunted by her lack of options, and raised her chin to peer at his looming face. Their eyes met and locked, gray and indigo, intense and cool. "Is it because you kissed that boy?" he almost sneered and brought his hands up to rest palms down against the wall on either side of her head. "The intern, George O'Malley? You could really do better you know," he said it critically like her taste was their main point of discussion. Had he heard her telling Cristina while nursing a coffee over the mezzanine's balcony? "It was just a kiss. You've done much worse with me and you thought I was a murderer. We all do terrible things."

"I didn't think you were a murderer. You know that," she said, and to her mortification, her voice had sunk to an intimate whisper. The dark room swallowed them whole, the warmth embracing them like a hazy dream she couldn't wake up from.

He smiled his cynical little smile and moved one hand to her face. She could feel the warmth of his long tapered fingers as they hovered by her cheek, not quite touching her. "For a while you didn't. Then you did again. Was it Mark Sloan?" he asked and brushed her cheek with his knuckles. He stroked the soft skin gently, watching his fingers with rapt fascination.

"I have to go," she stated and caught his hand with her own, dragging it away from her face.

His hand returned to wall beside her head. He had caged her in, and he knew it. "No you don't," he corrected, and he looked almost pained. Up close he was much easier to read. His clenched jaw ticked with irritation or frustration or both. "You just got here for a 30-minute break."

He had been watching her. It was a disconcerting thought that he should go to such lengths to corner her in an on-call room. "I want to go," she whispered with understated dignity. She stared hard at his chest as if she could will him away.

He ignored her now, and she tried not to think of how close his nose was to hers, how his rough breaths ghosted over her cheek enticingly. He smelled of scrub soap and something subtle like deodorant or commercial soap. It made her dizzy. It scared her. It made her yearn for things that were better left buried. "You know Helen wouldn't tell me anything about this Carol?" Her breath hitched at the sound of the name, and he paused to watch her face. "You flinch every time I say her name," he observed. "Carol," he repeated, and she fought a physical ache. "There, flinch."

She decided to play along a little longer. It would keep her from this desperate wanting. "Why wouldn't she tell you?" she asked and was secretly glad of the child's reticence.

"She said I should ask you," he said with wonder. His proximity was becoming unbearable. "It sounded more mature than anything going on in my head," he confessed with a self-mocking smirk.

With nothing to say, she dared to meet his piercing gaze. Let me go. She wanted to speak the words aloud, but her voice was tangled somewhere in her chest. He captivated her, absorbed her like no other man had ever done before. Later she would tell herself she hadn't seen it coming, but in that moment it was completely inevitable. With his hands resting against the wall, he lowered his head, agonizingly slow, giving her every chance for a reprieve. Their breaths sowed harshly in and out of their lungs, creating a gentle racket in the room. She was oblivious to it when his lips settled against hers. He didn't kiss her – not quite. He only brushed his lips against hers, once, twice, then he was content to rest his mouth against hers, breathing her in. He wasn't touching her anywhere else, but her body felt electrified, her blood hot and thick in her veins. Her hand lifted and nestled in the natural indent that marked the middle of his chest. Muscles, sleek and controlled, leapt under her touch, and she quivered in response. God, she would faint from the headiness of it all.

She was categorizing the different tastes and textures of him when his mouth moved against hers with an animalistic growl. Suddenly, she was being kissed thoroughly. His tongue was alive, warm, moist. It collected her breath from the seam of her lips, traced the row of her teeth until she opened her mouth, and he was inside it. He teased her own timid tongue with two flicks before exploring every corner and crevice. When he stroked the roof of her mouth, her fingers curled into his shirt, a fist that was torn between pulling him closer and pushing him away. The rest of him seemed to awaken with his kiss. His arms had coaxed her away from the wall. They were wrapped firmly around her, molding her body to his from knees to torso in one unbroken line. She could feel the hardening contours of his body. She could feel him, against her, inside her head, around her. She couldn't stop him. She didn't want to. It felt too damn good to give in to their inevitable supernova. It was only a matter of time before he destroyed her.

His lips broke away from hers. They were both breathing hard, but it didn't stop him from raining delicate, deliberate kisses across her cheeks, down her neck and back up to the point where her jaw met her ear. He licked her. He sucked at her earlobe, and she whimpered something incoherent. She couldn't think. She wanted him like this, hungry for her, feeding her own rampant obsession. Maybe she could be okay with the physical release. He didn't need to stop loathing her if he could put an end to this raging emptiness. His hands skated up her sides from her hips to the sides of her breasts. He pressed her breasts together and lowered his head to the vee of her scrub top. He rubbed his nose against her collarbone, then his lips ghosted over the cleft between her breasts, deepened by his hold. She tangled her fingers in his beautiful hair and pulled him closer. He went willingly and tongued her there for a few heart-stopping seconds, then his mouth abandoned this pursuit in search of hers. As he kissed her long and hard, he took full-palmed possession of her left breast. She moaned, but he devoured the sound hungrily, his hand weighing her through the thin flimsy bra she wore. He squeezed once then fell into a circular motion, his thumb singling out the hardening peak. Her nipple pebbled against the coercion of his nimble fingertips. And he kept kissing her, like the whole world hadn't contracted around them, around the touch of his hand against her, the taste of his persuasive mouth on hers.

He pulled away and swore extensively. She wasn't sure why, and she didn't particularly care. With her arms securely wrapped around his neck, her lips wandered along his chin. She nipped his jaw, her tongue loving the rasp of stubble as it traced a path to his ear. He was still muttering expletives and his hand had left her breast to sit on her hip. Without warning both hands slid to her buttocks and pulled her lower body tight to his, where a full, heavy erection fit snugly, perfectly in the cleft between her legs. This was wrong. This was terribly, horribly wrong. But she couldn't bring herself to stop him, couldn't stop whimpering and moaning wantonly when he thrust against her. He made a rhythm of it, like he would if they had both been naked and begging for release. She found herself responding to it, lost in the unexpected, dizzying pleasure that built inside her slowly – agonizingly slowly. He was treating her other breast to the same tireless massage, his face buried in her neck, kissing and biting and sucking. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, the hand that wasn't on her breast pressed between them. It found the flushed, throbbing mound between her legs and cupped it reverently. She gasped his name, and he nibbled her collarbone. His thumb found the little nub of flesh through the cotton of her pants almost as easily as it had sought the crown of her breast. He pressed and rolled blindly, guided by the catchy rhythm of her breathing. He lowered his head to her breast and moistened her shirt in a desperate attempt to taste her. The feeling building inside her reached an unbearable crest, lingered, held. She couldn't fall, couldn't tumble into the endless abyss of mind-numbing pleasure his broken gaze promised now as it stared down at her. He kept touching her breast, rubbing her swollen sex, watching her face, and she felt herself flush with the intensity of it all.

"Let go," he whispered in her hair, and the sound was shattered. "Give into it," he urged her and pressed closer still. She felt him against her hip, smooth, hard and unsatisfied. He let out a groan, and it could have passed for anguish. It left her undone. One minute she was still standing against that wall, and the next she had melted into a puddle of mindless, hot white elation. She made a noise that sounded nothing like her before Derek caught her in his arms and dropped onto the bed, cradling her in his lap like he wanted to protect her from something, maybe even from himself. It was a farfetched thought, but she basked in it until her limbs felt more consistent than sacks of jelly. She stirred, and he lifted his chin from the top of her head.

She left his embrace and stood up with more certainty than her body allowed. Her hands were still trembling as she looked down at him for the first time since this interlude had begun. At first he didn't meet her gaze, too busy rearranging his body to hide the immutable evidence of his desire. It was an impossible feat. Scrub pants were not exactly discreet. He gave up and lifted stark, tortured eyes to hers. His eyes were blue-black with ungratified desire.

He looked crestfallen – miserable. There were no words in his eyes, just truths that neither of them was ready to acknowledge. She took one last look at him, this broken beautiful man, who loathed her but sought her pleasure with a doggedness that left him unfulfilled.

She could not begin to comprehend this or him.

"Meredith," he said at last – slowly, heavily.

She vaguely remembered shaking her head before she turned around and fled the scene.

A/N: They're two very tortured people who can't seem to stay out of each other's hair or keep their hands off each other. They're both fun and draining to write. Dark, tortured Derek is a writer's dream - mine at the very least. Reviews are love xo