JACKSON

There was no way she knew just how crazy she made me.

I had been stealing strawberries from April since kindergarten, waiting until she turned away to snatch one from the plastic bag on her table. My mom was allergic to them and I absolutely loved them after having them at a friend's house one day – I hadn't had the same allergy. Knowing that I couldn't have them at home just made me want them all the more, of course. That had been another lifetime ago and yet, at the same time, it felt as if nothing between us had changed. I was just some silly boy with a crush on a beautiful girl.

But there was a huge difference now. Feeding her a strawberry and having her lips brush against my finger lightly, and innocently knowing her, it's enough to send a jolt of energy straight to my crotch. There's nothing I can do to act on it but god damn, if it wasn't the hottest thing, and knowing that she didn't mean a thing by it just made it even hotter.

"Are you sure you don't want any wine? It's a rose. I thought you'd like that kind of thing." It'd been the most feminine pick that I could think of. I didn't know how it actually tasted.

"Having a real bottle of Coke is exciting enough for me." April smiled. "I know you just turned eighteen, but I don't be eighteen till the end of my first year of college. It's going to be a while before I drink."

Sometimes it's hard to remember that she's a little younger than everyone else just because she had been in my grade forever. But she hadn't gotten to pre-k like the rest of us – she'd apparently been enough of a child genius to skip through all of that and join the rest of us in kindergarten. The fact that she had a late spring birthday only made her seem even younger. Despite that, she still seemed to be more mature than most of the people in our grade. We only had one year left with the rest of them before we could go out into the rest of the world and get away from here. Really, though, we didn't need any of that. The two of us, we had a little world of our own. We can talk the night away and have it become dark before either one of us realized it.

"I should drive you home," I murmured, taking her hand and brushing my thumb across the back of her knuckles.

She had always made fun of my car. Yeah, it was a lot nicer than what most high schoolers were driving. But my mom had a lot more money than most of the other people around here. She still worked in the city, a long commute that meant I was home alone frequently. I didn't mind. It gave me more time with April, or to do whatever I wanted, really. But the way that the wind blew in her hair as we drove and she laughed as it got caught in her eyes, holding her hand over the console, that just made me like my car all the more.

"I don't want to go home," April murmured as I walked her up to the porch.

"I'd take you home with me, but I know you'd never let me," I smirked down at her. Her hips bumped against mine.

"You're right." She turned in toward me, her arms wrapping around my neck.

Dipping my head down, I shut my eyes and pressed my forehead against hers for a moment. Then, I did the thing that I had been waiting to do all night – no, the thing I had been waiting to do for years. We had been friends for our entire lives and yet I'd never kissed her, no matter how long I had waited to. Taking a deep breath, I tilted my head forward and captured her lips in a kiss. Her lips were soft and warm, still briefly before inviting me in. When April kissed me back, I deepened the kiss, hands falling on her hips and pulling her closer to me. We stood there and kissed for a long time until we completely ran out of oxygen and had to stop.

There were sparks there. Thinking that just sounded like something that she would say, not something coming from me. She read a lot and I knew she liked romance novels – she'd read parts of some outlaid to me before, but I had never picked up on them in the same way that she did. Now I got it. That feeling. She may not have been the first girl I kissed, but I wanted her to be the last one.

"I love you, April Kepner." I murmured. I meant it.

"I love you too, Jackson Avery."

It's hard to do anything other than stare at her. She had changed. She was a little thinner now, her face more angular, perhaps changed by the fact that she was using contacts now instead of the glasses that she'd always used up the bridge of her nose. Her hair was smoother, straightened and polished instead of her natural curls. Her curls weren't like mine, of course, much easier to tame though they had a lot of frizz back then. It's undeniably her, though. She had a face that I would never be able to forget, even if I wanted to.

I could feel her eyes boring a hole through me even as I refused to look up at her again, returning my gaze down to the burn that I was working on treating at the moment. I was almost done with this one. I wished that one of the patients were awake so that it would have limited the conversation that we could have had about our past. I didn't want to talk about it. I had spent years trying to scrub her from my mind and erase the effect that she had on me. Yet all it took was one look for all of it to come flooding back again. I couldn't deal with this right now. I was in a relationship. Okay, maybe that was a stretch – Sydney and I lived together, we'd been having sex for a while. She was perky. Too perky. In the beginning, though, she had reminded me of April. I knew we weren't going anywhere but it was nice to live together. She cooked and cleaned and did laundry. It was a convenient relationship.

A deep breath was sucked through my nose. Now wasn't the time to have an outburst even if it was tempting, lingering just beneath the skin. All of the feelings that I thought I had gotten rid of over the years were still there. They had just been waiting to emerge again.

"Jackson, can we talk?" She pleaded with me, her voice so soft it nearly made me weak.

"No," I answered shortly, shaking my head.

"Jackson–" April tried to whine but I didn't hesitate to cut her off.

"I said no," I repeated firmly, relieved as I finished up the burn of the patient I was working on. I pulled off my gloves quickly and loudly, tossing them into the biohazard bin. "I'll let you deal with her." A quick nod of my head toward the other unconscious patient before I walked past her without another word.

Even when I walk away from her, I can still feel her eyes on me.

Sloan was already gone and didn't see me storm out – probably a good thing given he was the last person that I wanted to explain all of this too. He was my mentor and a friend, but no one knew about my history with April. Not the full extent of it, at least. I'd told Sydney a bit of it here and there, enough details of my past to satiate her curiosity and keep her happy. She knew that I had loved April and that she had broken my heart.

Storming to the elevator, I don't know where to go. April would probably be busy there for a little while. There were other new people, I didn't know who. I didn't want to deal with Sydney. I didn't want to deal with anyone. Taking a deep breath, I hit the button for the basement and wait for the elevator to take me all the way down. It's empty. Quiet. Some kind of peace away from everything else, a chance to catch my breath, to figure out where and how to go forward. Sitting down on an empty bench, I tilted my head back against the wall and let it rest there. I couldn't avoid work forever. But I could at least take a few minutes.

I should have brought food.

But thinking of food just made me think of her, too. Even if it wasn't the foundation of our friendship or the relationship that I had wanted, but it had been a big part of it. Until about halfway through elementary school, I hadn't realized that her family didn't have as much money as mine did. The Kepners had enough to keep the lights on and food on the table without having to worry about the basics, their farm was successful, but they didn't splurge on the same excessive or luxury items that my family did. I'd had a credit card a lot younger in life, too. We would go out to eat or go to the grocery store or somewhere and grab snacks together. I'd started paying once I realized that she didn't have the same money that I did. She'd gotten me into healthier, more organic food, just because of how she grew up.

It was hard to stop thinking about her even when it was exactly what I wanted to do. She had been such a huge part of my life for pretty much the first eighteen years and to just erase that didn't feel right. But I need to stop thinking about her. It was too easy to fall for her.

Noisy chatter began to make its way down the hallway and I recognized the voices coming toward me immediately – Meredith, Alex, Cristina, Izzie. It seemed like they were just as eager as I was to try and get away from all of the crap that was going on upstairs with having so man new workers flooded into the hospital. I doubted that they had the same worry as I did. The chances of that happened to more than just me seemed next to impossible. I sighed out through my nose. So much for getting some time alone just to think.

"I don't know what any of you are worried about. It's not like we're going to lose our jobs." Cristina stated confidently.

Of course, she would be the one overflowing with confidence.

"Easy for you to say," Alex grumbled. Yeah, he could be a pain sometimes, but he wasn't overflowing with the same amount of ridiculous and arrogant confidence that Cristina had.

"You found your way down here, too?" Izzie was the first one to recognize me already sitting on one of the empty hallway beds.

"Yeah," I answered, unwilling to give any other explanation for it.

None of them seemed to care about that, fortunately. "I'm sure one of the new residents will get fired," Meredith stated with a shrug of her shoulder as she sat down, bed squeaking beneath her. "They only want five of us here. Not six." It was hard to tell if she was pulling that out of her ass or if Derek had perhaps told her something.

"Well, you already know which one of them is getting the boot," Cristina said.

"Yeah," Alex snorted. "The one who's not sucking the head of cardio's dick." He remarked crudely.

"Huh?" I spoke up, leaning forward slightly to look at them. "One of them is banging Riggs?"

"Yeah. The redhead – I didn't catch her name, the two of them are in a relationship together. They came to work together this morning," Izzie informed with a small shrug of her shoulders, clearly more on top of all of this information than I was.

What were the chances that both of the surgical residents coming over were redheads?

"It's smart," Cristina shrugged. "I hate her, but it's smart."

"You're just mad that you didn't do it first," Meredith laughed. "But he still slept with you."

My jaw tightened and I could feel my teeth grind together hearing them talk about her like that. There was no way that they weren't talking about April but it was hard to imagine her in a relationship with someone like Riggs. I hadn't thought that Riggs was a bad guy. He was a good surgeon and a decent teacher, a little quirky here and there. I couldn't have picked flaws at him as I could have with some of the other teachers in this hospital. Still, just thinking of her being with him was enough to stir nausea in my stomach. Now, to know that he had cheated on her? With Cristina? It was all rage.

"You don't have anything to worry about." Izzie's words were optimistic without being rooted in something ruder, unlike the others. She and April could have gotten along well.

"Might be better to just get rid of the both of them," Meredith remarked.

"You don't know anything about them," I finally spoke up defensively, snapping out before I could stop myself. "So maybe we should just stop talking shit." The most I could get into it without revealing more than I wanted to. Already, it was saying too much. Especially knowing the way that they liked to get into everything more than they should have.

"Someone's defensive," Alex laughed. "What, you got a crush?"

Yeah, I can't be surprised by that. "No. You guys sound like a bunch of old Republicans, bitching about new people coming in." Maybe that would get them to shut up about it a little more effectively.

"Ouch," Izzie half-chuckled.

"I'm just saying," I shrugged. "We were all new here once and no one liked us. Pretty sure that some people still don't like some of us." I glanced at Cristina and Alex. "It wouldn't hurt to try and have an open mind about this." Maybe that wasn't something I always thought, but I had a stake in this.

Shit.

Even when I wanted to distance myself and try not to take things personally regarding her, I was still doing it. People hadn't always liked her in high school because she was a little weird and smarter than everyone else. They had made fun of her because of that and I had always been the one who had to jump to her defense every time. It had been ten years since I had done that with all of the snobs that we had gone to high school with, and here I was, doing it again as if I hadn't stopped, even when she wasn't around. Especially when she wasn't around. I glanced at the ceiling, taking a deep breath. I couldn't keep doing this.

"Yeah, well, when we were new, no one was gunning for our jobs." Meredith pointed out with a look at me.

"Uh-huh," Alex agreed with her without hesitation. "It's not the same thing." Maybe he was right.

"Maybe it wouldn't hurt to be a little nicer to them," Izzie commented. She was always the mediator of the group. I wasn't sure how she managed to have such a level head. "We could give them a chance."

"Yeah, whatever," Cristina muttered. "My job's safe. I don't care."

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. All of us were good at what we did even if it was clear that Cristina was at the front of the pack. Alex or Izzie was probably at the bottom – it sounded like Alex was aware and a little insecure about it, too. Taking a deep breath, I glanced down the hallway. There was no point in being here if I wasn't going to get the time alone that I wanted. I might as well get back to work if I was going to have to deal with people.

"I gotta get back to work," I mumbled, pushing myself up from the bed.

No one said a word to try and stop me as I walked off and headed up the stairs to get back to work. I glanced down at the time of my watch. It had been enough time to excise the wound and hopefully, Sloan would have sent her on her way after that. There was no reason for him to keep her around. He was hard to open up as a teacher. I had learned that the hard way.

The emergency room was about typical in how busy it was during the day. There's enough to keep my mind off of things given that I don't have to see her anywhere. When it comes to patients, I can focus. I can treat the patient and think about nothing but their wellbeing. It makes it easier.

Surgery and love. When I had started down this career, I had wanted both. When I was younger and had been in high school, I always thought that I would have both with April. I knew that she wanted to be a doctor but after awhile in medical school, I figured that I was never going to see her again. There was plenty of medical schools and hospitals to do residencies and fellowships at, not to mention the entire world was within my scope. Now, well, it was just about surgery. Love had been buried. I'd thought maybe one day. But even I hadn't thought that I was going to see her again any time soon. The thought of it had just been cast aside.

It's enough to get me through the day without having to think too much about what things were going to be like going forward. At the moment, that was really all that I could ask for. I was going to have to go through all of this with low expectations.

"Hey!" A familiar, perky voice chirped.

Speaking of low expectations…

"Hey, Sydney." I forced a tired smile onto my face as she reached up to kiss me on the cheek.

"Everything okay?" She asked, head tilting to the side like a puppy dog.

"Yeah, I just need some coffee." No way that I'm going to tell her the truth about April. Not yet. "I'm going to head home soon, what about you?" We drove separately most of the time. It was nice to maintain some sense of independence from her given that she could be a little cling from time to time.

"No, I just got scheduled for an appy. It'll be another hour or two before I'm out of here." Sydney answered. I couldn't help but be a little grateful. I'd finally get some alone time.

"Alright," I nodded. "I'll see you at home." I leaned down, giving her a quick its on the lips.

Sydney stared up at me as I pulled away. "Jackson…" She started slowly, fluttering her lashes at me. "Are you sure that everything's alright? Something seems off with you." Even if I could be a little harsh on her, she was observant with people, intuitive about their emotions. Sometimes it was annoying. Mostly, it made me think of April. Again. Maybe I had just settled on the closest thing to a knockoff version of her that I could find.

"Just some stuff with the merger," I admitted with a slight shrug of our shoulder. "We can talk about it when you get home if you want." That would buy me some time to figure out what exactly I wanted to tell her about it.

"Okay," Sydney agreed with a nod of her head. Her pager beeped. "I'll see you later."

I stood there and watched her walk away for a brief moment, tucking my hands into the pockets of my lab coat and letting out a sigh once she was out of earshot. I didn't want to lie to her but I didn't want to be honest, either. That wasn't necessarily specific to her. I felt that way about telling anyone the truth between April and myself. It was better left buried in the past.

But I had a bad feeling things weren't going to stay that way. Things never stayed buried or quiet in this hospital no matter how people tried to cover it up. I wasn't sure if Meredith had made any effort to keep it quiet that she was sleeping with Derek, but pretty much everyone knew it with a single glance at the two of them. It had been the same with Cristina and Burke before he had left, as messy as that had been. Something about going public with actual relationships seemed to make them even messier. Things with Sydney and I weren't like that, mostly because it was far too casual for either one of us to get hurt. Or at least, too casual on my end. Maybe I was distancing myself too much, even more now that she was here, too.

That didn't bode well for April. She was a kind person and highly emotional, which could get her in trouble under a circumstance like that. Riggs wasn't, as far as I knew. Not in the same way, at least. He wouldn't care about people talking about him. They already did because of the beef between him and Owen. But this was something that would get under her skin. I still knew her better than I knew anyone else, apparently. Assuming there haven't been any drastic changes in the past ten years.

I could have been wrong to assume that, though. I didn't know.

Taking a deep breath, I headed downstairs to the locker room again so I could get changed and head home without having to think too much about anything else. I'd managed to avoid most of the other residents for the day, casual brushes with Izzie and Alex here and there in the emergency room, but I'd avoided talking too much to either one of them. That had given me a little peace of mind.

The locker room was quiet and empty when I found it, much to my appreciation. I sighed, sitting down on the bench for a moment as I kicked off my Nike's and slouched forward. It hadn't even been that hard of a day, but it certainly felt like one.

Standing up again, I grabbed the bottom of my scrub tup and pulled it off, tossing it in the bin to be sterilized with all of the other used scrubs. I stepped over to my locker, taking my time and checking my phone for a moment. No missed pages or texts. Everything was quiet. Quiet enough that I noticed immediately when someone else walked into the room and stopped suddenly, the bottom of the sneakers squeaking against the linoleum tile. I glanced over my shoulder, spotting April gawking.

"Are you going to say something, or just stare?" I commented. I watched as her cheeks ignited with a pink color and turned away from her, sticking my arms into the sleeves of my shirt and beginning to button it up without another word.

"Uh, sorry," April began to stutter out. "I didn't think that you would be in here."

"Well, it is the resident locker room…" I remarked, letting out a sigh. I grabbed my jeans and walked to the other end of the locker so I could take off my scrub pants and put them on without her seeing. Anyone else, and I wouldn't have bothered. But she had always been so modest, the entire time that I had known her. I had never seen her gawk at me like that – never caught her doing it, at least. Other girls had in high school, but she had always been the different one.

"Right." She muttered.

I tossed the light blue pants into the scrub bin and moved back over to my locker, grabbing the belt that was sitting there and looping it through my pants without looking at her. I could feel her gaze on me and she wasn't changing. She was just watching me.

"Jackson, can we please talk?" She begged me.

"Just get changed. I'm sure you have plans with Riggs." I remarked bitterly, pocketing my phone.

"Oh," April breathed out quietly. I turned around to look at her, folding my arms in front of my chest.

"Yeah, oh." I snapped back.

"I didn't realize that everyone here was going to know about that," she said as she scratched the back of her head. "It's kind of driving me mad now because everyone is making all of these assumptions about me that just aren't true. I'm here because I'm a good surgeon. Not as good as you guys, obviously, since Mercy West wasn't as good of a hospital and it seems like everyone here knows that… but I want an equal chance to prove myself. That's all that I really want and it seems like that's the last thing that I'm going to get." She rambled on. It really was just like old times again, hearing her go at it like nothing else. "Everyone's saying that I'm not going to get fired because I'm dating Riggs but it definitely feels like the opposite. Everyone's looking at me like I'm a child or just some dumb girlfriend and not like I have any potential to be a surgeon."

The breath that I was holding onto was released unintentionally. I hadn't really been thinking about what she could be going through if I was being completely honest with myself. It had to be hard for her to come over here, into a better hospital after so many of her coworkers had already been fired with the merger.

"That sucks," I muttered. "People will come around to you. A lot of the people around here have hard exteriors."

"Yeah, that's obvious," she shook her head. "It feels just like high school all over again. Petty and childish."

"That's not entirely inaccurate," I chuckled out, finally loosening up with a smile. "But you know, no one really liked you in high school at the beginning except for me. People are going to loosen up. They always do. You can take some warming up to sometimes but you're a good person. And you were the smartest person that I knew in high school. You dissected drugs and cats like no one's business. I'm sure that you're a good surgeon, too." I didn't doubt that. She had always been good at what she did, no matter what it was. She was smart and dedicated, talented and passionate. All she had to do was work at it to become good at it.

"It definitely feels different," she remarked, folding her arms nervously in front of her ribcage as if she were hugging herself, rubbing one of her own arms. "Everything does. I've been thinking about you all day, Jackson. I'm a good doctor. I am. I make checklists and I check everything off so I don't miss steps. I follow the rules and it makes me good but… I've been distracted because of you."

It was hard not to freeze at her words. I had thought of her more than I wanted to all day and even with distractions, well, she was just hard to remove from my mind. She had meant so much to me. I knew that I had meant a lot to her, too. Now I was the one pushing her out. She had left me in the past, but now I was the one putting up the wall between me and her, trying to divide our worlds. But it seemed like that wasn't going to happen, no matter what I tried. Life had shoved the two of us back together all over again and we were both going to have to learn how to deal with it and how to go forward from here.

"It took me a long time to stop thinking about you," I admitted, wetting my lips. "But I did. I stopped. It wasn't easy and you drove me crazy for years, April. I loved you. I was in love with you and you knew that, April. I know that you did." I had been clear about it.

"I loved you too, Jackson." April stepped forward. "I did. I loved you so much. You were the love of my life and I never stopped thinking of you, not for years. It wasn't fair, what happened."

"You're damn right it wasn't fair!" My voice raised higher than I expected.

How could she be the one to say that?

She was the one who left me. When I thought the two of us were just really getting started together, everything had turned around and fallen apart with the way that she had left me without another word, without so much as a note. The last time that I had seen her had been that night on her porch when we had told each other that we loved each other. And then she had proved very, very quickly that apparently wasn't the truth. Not as I knew it. No one loved someone, really loved them, then left them behind without another word. Without any answers or explanations. It was cruel and unfair. That had been her fault.

"Jackson…" April whispered out weakly, tears gleaming in her eyes.

"You left me, April!" This time, my voice cracked with the emotion that flooded through it. "I kissed you and I told you that you loved me, and you told me the same. I thought that you meant it. I thought that that was it for me, that I had found the woman that I was meant to be with. That we would go to college and med school and all of those important steps of life together, that we would be the hospital couple that people talked about. That was supposed to me and you. Not me and Sydney, or you and Riggs." Now I was the one rambling, but my words weren't frustrated. They were just angry. "You did that. You chose that. Not me. So don't act like it was unfair to me."

April stared back at me for a long moment, as if what I was saying was brand new information to her. But I knew that wasn't the case. I don't know what happened or what she had been thinking, but she'd left. Gone to some fancy boarding school for her last year of high school, then off into the rest of the world. She had gone on without me.

"Is that what you really think happened?" She questioned, looking at me with wide eyes.

My brows furrowed at her, still unable to rid myself of the rage that was inside me. I didn't want to get angry at her, but it seemed impossible in this situation. I took a deep breath to try and steady myself before I could go off at her any further, but my immediate chance to question it was taken away with a knock on the door.

"Hey, Keps, are you ready to go?" Riggs questioned, smiling, ignorant to our argument.

"I, uh…" April looked back at me, shaking her head.

"Go." I shook my head right back at her. "I know what happened. You know what else I know? That Riggs slept with Cristina while you've been together. So just go, April. Enjoy that."

"What?" April cried out.

"Avery," Riggs barked at me, stepping in with a frown. "Back off. That's my girlfriend that you're talking to, so I suggest that you watch your tone with her." His arm wrapped around her shoulders protectively and I couldn't keep the sneer off my face. April pulled away from him quickly.

"I know exactly who I'm talking to." I stared down at her.

"You don't know the truth, Jackson. I swear you don't. I didn't have a choice if you would just give me the chance to explain what happened…" April was speaking quickly but Riggs appeared as annoyed and frustrated with all of this as I was. Probably because his secret was out.

"Uh-huh. I have plans. Have fun working things out." My gaze shifted between the two of them.

Taking a deep breath, I walked out of the locker room. It's only a second before I can hear April yelling at him. He deserved that much.