Meredith felt as if someone had clubbed her on the side of the head with a brick. The jet of hot water streaming from the shower hadn't done anything to wake her up, and she was surprised at just how dark the circles under her eyes looked. She felt as if she hadn't slept at all, but she knew she must have dozed off eventually because when the alarm went off she started awake from an uneasy dream. The house was oddly quite that morning, with everyone tiptoeing about afraid to wake Izzie. Alex had stumbled downstairs at some ungodly hour to crash on the couch, and he looked at least as exhausted as Meredith.

"We are zombies," moaned George, staggering into the kitchen. "Intern zombies." He took the pot of coffee, pouring some straight into a mug and drinking it without stirring in milk and sugar, which he always made sure to add. "Ugh…" he made a face. "I'd say I need an awesome surgery to get through today, but I'm afraid that won't be enough. I'll just fall asleep right on the operating table…get kicked out of the program." Meredith looked over and smiled at him, but didn't say anything.

Alex appeared in the doorway, still pulling on his shirt and offered a quick "Mer…phone" before disappearing again. Meredith spun around just in time to catch the wildly chirping cell phone he tossed her. She looked down at the caller id, and then glanced awkwardly over at George. He was staring morosely into his mug of coffee, so Meredith flipped open the phone answering with a hushed "hey" as she walked out of the kitchen and silently slipped outside.

"Hey Meredith." She frowned and sunk down the wall of her house until she was sitting on the ground, her knees tucked to her chest. He sounded so cheerful, so astonishingly non upset.

"Finn…umm, about last night," she began lamely. "Izzie…things were really, she needed to…"

"Is she alright," he interrupted earnestly.

"Well no, not really," said Meredith, absently tracing a finger around the hole in the knee of her jeans. "Denny, the guy who died, he was her boyfriend."

"Oh…" Finn sighed, his voice instantly understanding, and Meredith found herself remembering him telling her about his dead wife while they'd danced. "Are you alright?" he asked gently.

"I'm fine…well I, we…" but as she stammered along, trying to find the words to explain what she didn't understand herself, the front door opened. "I've gotta go," she said quickly and snapped the phone shut just as everyone came out.

-----

Meredith wished that she could avoid the hospital. She knew nothing good could come of her being there. There were too many people for her to run into. Well actually only two, she corrected herself as she walked from the parking lot towards the front entrance. And their names both end in Shepherd. But the prospect of being alone with either of them for even a minute made her want to cower forever in the locker room, hiding like a little child. From Addison because of the guilt, the guilt that came in unexpected waves, catching her off guard and making her feel ill. From Derek because well, he was Derek. She was furious with him because even though her head was pounding with guilt and her mind was telling her to avoid him at all costs, her body was aching and practically begging to just be near him again. "Meredith?" Christina's voice interrupted her thoughts, and she looked up, realizing she'd been staring intently into the back of her locker. Christina gave her a hard look before muttering "damn…you're shell shocked."

"I'm not, I'm good," protested Meredith as she bent to pull on her scrubs. "Totally fine!"

"Meredith," repeated Christina, not at all fooled by the awkward smile Meredith had plastered on her face.

"Fine…I'm totally miserable," muttered Meredith at last. "Happy now?" Christina shook her head but smiled wryly at her friend. "I've just got to avoid Shepherd now," hissed Meredith as the two of them went to join the others for rounds. The rounds were oddly quite, with everybody feeling the absence of Izzie but nobody knowing just how to comment on it. Meredith only added to the strangeness by hesitating at every corner and trying to scan all the patients' rooms as they walked by for any sign of Derek so often that George looked permanently bemused and Bailey was on her fifth chorus of "Hurry up, Grey!" when Meredith slammed right into him. She had been looking to her left, checking the hall as she walked into the room of the final patient they were rounding on, a neuro patient. And of course, there he was.

"Dr. Shepherd," said Meredith as she staggered backward, regaining her balance.

"Dr. Grey," he answered, looking down at her quizzically. Meredith blinked, trying to read his expression. His eyes seemed a deeper blue then usual, as if shadowed by worry or maybe just exhaustion. He was smiling, but it was a thin weary smile that didn't reach past his lips. Meredith wondered if he could hear her heart pounding in her chest, her pulse felt so loud that she could hear it thundering in her ears. His hand was on her arm in what seemed like a casual, concerned gesture. Just someone reaching out to steady her when she'd stumbled, except that he had not let go. His fingers were still there when they should have dropped to his side. They were lingering on her arm with nothing but the thin fabric of her lab coat separating his skin from hers. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but Christina chose that moment to clear her throat, loudly.

Meredith took a rather visible leap backwards, and Derek pulled his hand away as fast as if he'd just been burned. Wincing at the obviousness of it all, Meredith tore her eyes from Derek and turned to look around the room. She felt certain they all knew. Bailey was scowling, Christina's mouth was twitching up into a smile, even the nurse in the corner was looking over curiously. "So, who's presenting?" She looked back to Derek at the sound of his voice. She knew it was a stupid thing to do, that she was supposed to pay attention to George while he presented the patient. But Derek wasn't looking either, even as he nodded his head along to George's rambling list of a treatment plan, his eyes stayed trained on her. There was just something about his eyes. They had always gotten to Meredith, even that first night when she met him in the bar. His eyes could pierce straight through her, pull her towards him, leave her a breathless reeling mess. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands and tried to force her mind to think of clean, sterile things, medical things. But it didn't matter, because when Derek Shepherd gave Meredith Grey that look her mind became a vile thing, and all the medical jargon and curious coworkers in the world couldn't save her. Anything resembling sensible or appropriate just curled up and died, and she thought thoughts that she knew were fitting for a dirty mistress.

And so as soon as George had stopped speaking, before Derek had even finished signing the chart, Meredith hurled herself out into the hallway. She clutched the patient files for the cases she was assigned tightly to her chest, trying to let them muffle the violent beating of her heart against her breast. She breathed deeply, the bright and sterile quiet of the hall washing over her, soothing her, and finally leaving her with nothing more then the familiar, deep-seated feeling of guilt.

"Meredith," breathed Christina, as she caught up to her in the hallway. "The two of you? Need to work on your subtlety."

-----

Meredith spent the rest of the day staggering around in a haze of guilt and frustration.

By ten am she had already shared a very awkward elevator ride with Addison. Usually the two of them made civil, even friendly small talk. But now the only thing Meredith could think to say was 'I had sex with your husband last night' and so she kept her mouth shut. Addison didn't seem to mind though. She had offered Meredith a puzzled cross between a smile and a frown when the doors opened and then gone back to staring at the blank cover of the file she held in her hands. The silence was thick and made Meredith's skin crawl, so when the doors opened on the second floor to let on more passengers, Meredith slipped off even though she had pushed the button for six.

By the time she stopped for lunch at two, she had four calls from Finn and two voicemails on her phone. She didn't return any of them. She didn't know what to say, so she did what seemed easiest. She pushed delete and cleared the calls from the phone's record. And then Meredith just sat there, holding an uneaten sandwich in her hand and blinking back tears. She just sat there and stared at her phone until her pager went off, and she could get up and do without having to think.

By the time Meredith was leaving the hospital at nine pm, she had avoided Derek three times. The first time she had rounded a corner to see him standing at a nurses' station, filling in a chart. But his back had been towards her, so she'd ducked into a washroom to wait for him to leave. She had leaned against the cold tiles and tried to come up with reasons why she should love Finn instead of Derek. It wasn't hard. She had come up with a full dozen in the time it took Derek to fill out the chart and walk away. Somehow that failed to cheer her up at all. The second time, Derek had seen her. But her pager had gone off, and she had ducked away with an abrupt "gotta get this". By the third time, it just made sense to avoid him. She had shook her head at him from across the room, and let a sea of patients and bustling nurses slip between them. He had looked at her almost desperately when a frazzled intern appeared at his side, and he'd had to turn away.

Still, even though she had been on her guard all day, she hadn't expected to see him there at the hospital entrance. He was just waiting there, leaning against the door, his coat shrugged on over his shoulders. Meredith looked up at him, hesitated for a second, and then kept on walking.

"You're avoiding me," he called, moving to follow her out the door.

"Probably," muttered Meredith.

"Meredith wait." He hurried to catch up to her, his arm linking easily around hers and pulling her to face him. Meredith frowned up at him. They were close enough together that her bag was pressed against his side and she could see the thin lines of gold that ran through the blue of his eyes. His gaze was trailing over her face, winding that familiar irresistible path that led from her eyes down to her lips. Meredith breathed in sharply, realizing that she had only two choices. She was either going to give in before he even said another word, push him against the outer wall of the hospital and start kissing him in the parking lot, or she could try and control the dizzy, burning feeling inside her mind long enough to be angry. She decided to try being angry.

"Dr. Shepherd, stop it," she said, pulling away from him. When she'd realized her one night stand was her boss, when his wife showed up, when he'd chosen Addison, Meredith had called him Dr. Shepherd. It had helped somehow to throw a 'doctor' in there between them, and Meredith found that it still did. She turned easily and started walking towards her car.

"Shouldn't we talk about this?" he insisted, catching up to her yet again. "We need to talk about this."

"This?" Meredith hissed, whirling around to look at him. "Why? What's there to say? What do you want me to say?" Simoltaneously they both looked over their shoulders, scanning the parking lot to see who was around. It was a hasty furtive gesture, a bizarre shared instinct, but when they caught each other doing it Meredith laughed bitterly. "See…this is why there's nothing to say." She backed towards her car. "Where's your wife, Derek?"

Derek stopped short in his tracks at her words, still a few feet from Meredith and her car door. In the harsh yellow light from the street lamps, the lines in his face were more pronounced and she could see a shadow pass across his eyes. He sighed, running a hand through the mess of his dark hair, clearly flattened from being under a surgical cap all day. "What does this mean Meredith?" he whispered finally, his voice urgent and low. "Please Mer…what does this mean?"

"Derek, you ask me what this means one more time and I swear to God I will slap you!" Meredith didn't realize she was shouting at him until she stopped and felt the sudden contrast of utter silence. All she knew was that something within herself had snapped, something that she hadn't even realized was close to breaking. He swallowed hard, looking as if she actually had gone ahead and slapped him. But then he nodded in agreement, his eyes suddenly brimming with a look that Meredith couldn't interpret even though it made her ache from deep within herself. They stared at each other in silence for a minute, hearing the sound of other cars pulling out of the lot, but failing to actually register their presence. "I don't know," said Meredith at last, and the ache within her only worsened as she spoke because she did know what it meant, at least for her.

She couldn't look at Derek without feeling how much she still loved him like a knife through her heart. Not now with the sharpened memories of losing her underwear along with her last shred of moral highground in the exam room. Not now that he'd taken her and twisted her about again, so that everything that was safe and hardened against him had been broken open. She had been trying so hard to feel whole, and now she felt nothing but raw and vulnerable and overwhelmed. Derek was looking at her with something she thought might be love, but she felt too shattered to ask. Instead she just whispered "I don't know" for a second time as the rain started to fall. Then she got in her car and he didn't try to stop her. So Meredith drove away as her eyes blurred with tears to match the windshield, without realizing that Derek stood there in the rain watching until even the taillights of her car had vanished from sight.