"Thanks to Apollo, Rupert, and Manolo"
By Bleu
It absolutely, one hundred percent, could not be.
But it was. They both knew it, in the same instant. And they both knew they both knew it, in the same instant. How they both knew, how they both connected the exact same dots in the exact same order at the exact same time, could only be chalked up to a synchronicity of thought that two people are bound to acquire after being together for an extended period of time. Like eleven years, for instance.
"Well…this is awkward." He said first.
"Yeah…" She agreed, her mouth never quite closing all the way after the word rolled out.
They held each other's puzzled but not disappointed eyes for a longer stretch of time than was socially acceptable.
Sitting in front of him, on the glossy but scratched bar top, was a piña colada. She noticed it, thankfully, and it gave her an excuse to break the visual embrace.
"Seriously?" she asked, indicating the colorful beverage with a vague point of her clutch purse.
He laughed, heartily for a moment, but cut himself off. It sounded like a horribly uncomfortable choke.
"Yeah." He managed, trying hard, she assumed, to be as cool and aloof and detached from her and this strangely coincidental situation as McDreamy, lover of Meredith, should have been. But, like they had both known before, they both knew now that he wasn't Meredith's McDreamy. Not right at the moment, at least.
Noting this inwardly, with an awkward ticking of her eyes and a slight shift of her weight, Addison asked, "So…now what?"
Instead of answering, Derek looked at her, actually at her instead of his specialty, around her. As he did so, his eyes were twinkling, and a bit mischievous.
She didn't like what it did to her insides.
"Derek?" she asked, arching a well-shaped brow. This made him smile. Even worse for her insides, and not her intention.
"Well, since we're now civilized adults, daresay friends, and it is eight o'clock on a Friday night, and we both came here to…" he closed his mouth, for a moment, and then reopened it an instant later. "Why don't we have a drink?"
Addison's lips parted to say no. She should have. She knew. He knew. This was bad, on so many levels. And just a little twisted.
But, given the situation, a drink was certainly in order. Not even the most rational part of her could deny that.
Of course, that drink could have been somewhere, anywhere else, instead of in Joe's, with Derek.
But then, that would have required walking. And her new shoes were biting into her ankles as she stood there.
"A drink…" she began, easing herself and her new dress safely onto a creaky barstool, "Sounds like a lovely idea."
As they timidly embarked on The Strangest Evening Ever, Addison thought of what had led them there.
She realized it had begun the day before, on a Thursday. Or really, the Saturday before.
As a belated Christmas present—as most from her father were—Addison received on that Saturday a small black package from Apple Computers, containing a sleek white and silver thirty gigabyte iPod. She had sat on her bed cross legged, reading each small, white booklet that accompanied the machinery with a microscope before she even touched it.
She was an honor student, after all.
Then, she went crazy. iTunes became her best friend that she could count on twenty-four hours a day to provide her with audio stimulation she had never known before. She squawked with delight when she would search obscure songs that she was sure only she remembered and they would pop up so easily, ready to fulfill her musical needs. She would tuck the lightweight treasure in the band of her pajama pants and dance—tastefully and restrained, of course—around her bedroom with the earbuds tucked gently in her ear canal, despite the hundreds of dollars worth of stereo equipment feet away.
By Thursday, less than a week after receiving her iPod, she was up to 513 songs and an episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.
Remembering the professional, dignified persona she was trying to rebuild at Seattle Grace, she refrained from harmonizing or dancing with the iPod in front of anyone, which was only possible by stuffing it in her locker and breaking it out when she knew she would be alone.
That Thursday, she ate lunch alone in the break room. Thai noodles, an afternoon appointment's chart, and her iPod.
In addition to her iPod, lovingly dubbed Apollo (she had a thing for Greek mythology), another piece of electronic machinery she was only recently growing accustomed to, which was her Blackjack phone. Her old Blackberry had suffered a tragic death (pitched from her hotel room window into the teaming traffic below the night Mark informed her he was staying Seattle), and she only recently replaced it.
As she slurped quite ungracefully at the peanut and coconut flavored noodles and scanned Lisa Freemont's gestational progress, a familiar percussion introduction followed by a very distinct twang of a guitar filled her head, and she giggled to herself.
Reaching across the chart for her Blackjack, she listened with a goofy smile as Rupert Holmes crooned out, "I like Piña Coladas…"
Unfortunately, one thing she hadn't quite gotten around to was programming numbers in the phone.
But, gripped by the wonderful euphoria of hearing a song with such a happy memory attached, she wracked her brain for Savvy's number.
212 was a given, and she knew a 607 followed, so that much she typed in, but the rest was just out of her memory's reach.
Just when Rupert was mentioning making love in the dunes of the cape, the numbers 3053 popped into her head. So sure was she of their accuracy, she typed them in and followed them by the message:
Yes, I like piña coladas
Gettin' caught in the rain.
I'm not much into health food,
I am into champagne.
I've got to meet you by tomorrow,
And cut through all this red tape.
Then, we'll plan our escape…
With a satisfied, nostalgic chuckle, she hit Send. As she watched the phone signal the success of this action, she did so with memories of being silly, tipsy (from a bottle of Dego Red) college girls, singing the song at the top of their lungs as they ran in heels down Park Avenue at 2 am bouncing around in her head. After that, it had been somewhat of a drinking tradition for the two of them, and on one of the last trips she and Derek had taken with Savvy and Weiss, skiing in Vail, the women had gotten appropriately intoxicated and regaled the men with their rendition.
It was the last time Addison could remember Derek laughing the hearty, jarring laughter that made his blue eyes shimmer with tears.
Shaking those nostalgia wanderings from her mind, she had clicked off Apollo, collected her things, and headed out, smiling to herself as she pictured Savvy's face when she got the text message.
For Derek's part, he only remembered getting a strange text message from an unknown number.
He remembered, as he looked into her eyes at Joe's, the exact moment he received it.
He had the day off, for once. And, like he did with all of his now free—or empty, he decided, as he looked at the silk of Addison's dress slide when she crossed her legs under the bar—time, he was at Meredith's.
Again coincidentally, when he heard the jingle of his Blackberry, he had been watching Meredith set up a pink yoga mat on the floor of her living room.
"So…run this by me again." He requested, leaning far enough from his lazy recline on the couch to reach the phone on the coffee table. He didn't acknowledge the twinge of appreciation in his mind for interruption. Not then.
"Yoga, Derek." She had said with an exasperated sigh. "An Eastern practice that focuses on mental as well as physical balance and strength."
As he shuffled through the options to get to his awaiting message, he raised an eyebrow.
"So, by perfecting Downward-Facing Dog, you're going to find emotional and physical equilibrium?" he inquired. With a roll of her eyes and a toss of her bare shoulders, Meredith sighed again.
"If you would have just come to the classes with me, you wouldn't be McSkeptical right now." She said with an accusing eye.
"The outfits made me look fat." He said jokingly, eying her brief sports bra thing and skin-tight pants.
"Right. Well, when I'm at perfect balance of mind and body, you'll regret this." She assured him, proceeding to bend herself in the awkward starting position. With a shake of his head, he squinted down at the words on the screen.
"What the…" it took him a few minutes, but the strange paragraph tugged a very random and obscure memory from his cache.
In the spacious, airy living room of Meredith's house, he suddenly found himself mentally back in a cramped Range Rover, with Weiss sitting shot gun, maneuvering through the snowy night towards their rented house in the snow-capped mountains of Vail, Colorado.
They had been skiing all day, and finished it with dinner at Sweet Basil, which of course had been followed by a course of drinks. Scotch for the men and Dego Red for the women.
Since he and Weiss knew Addison to be somewhat of a lightweight, and Savvy to be nearly as bad, they had discouraged the third and fourth glasses, but when the fifth and sixth went down and they began dishing about their college days, the men had been too intrigued to interrupt.
After seven, they did cut them off, packed them into the backseat of the Range Rover, and headed home in the thick darkness of the Colorado winter night.
Radio being quite paltry, he and Weiss had settled on a "soft rock" station. Barely audible over the giggle and horseplay of the women in the backseat, Derek had decided after a few songs to just forgo it.
But as he reached for the dial, that ridiculous song about piña coladas began, and with deftness uncharacteristic of someone inebriated, Addison had leapt forward.
"No, Derek!" she exclaimed, practically sitting on his lap. She took his hand and tossed it away from the radio.
"What?" he asked, amused and slightly turned on by the flush in her cheeks, the devious light in her eyes, and the fruity warmth of her breath on his cheek.
"It's our song." Savvy lamented from the backseat, her head lolling to a side. Weiss frowned and turned to his wife.
"Our song, baby?" he asked, confused.
"No, honey." Addison assured Weiss with a sloppy kiss on the cheek. "Our song."
With a laugh, Weiss shook his head. "She was yours first, Addie."
"Damned right." Savvy echoed from the backseat, yanking Addison backwards by her dress and slinging an arm around her shoulders.
"If not for this girl, this girl right here, I'd be…I don' know…" Savvy squeezed Addison and they giggled drunkenly, only stopping when the chorus came on so they could bellow along.
He had almost driven into a snow bank from laughing so hard…
"—Derek?"
Snapping his eyes from the Blackberry screen to the hazel irises of Meredith's eyes, Derek blinked quickly, and shook off imaginary warmth.
"What?" he asked innocently, though he swore he still smelled Dego Red somewhere.
"I said, I won't be able to do dinner and drinks tomorrow night. Izzie said she's going to deposit her check and well—I think it's going to be a supportive night in." she informed him, turning her head at an angle to take a drink from her water bottle.
"That's…okay." He answered.
And, despite its many irritating qualities, he found himself humming that song the next day at work.
He didn't even know the title, or many of the words. Just the infamous piña colada reference.
As the day went on, humming progressed to singing under his breath.
He very nearly embarrassed himself in the elevator to Miranda Bailey, but he was pretty sure she thought he was crazy, anyway, so he just smiled cheekily when she eyed at him suspiciously.
When he had exited the elevator, he spotted Addison across the room.
He had a burning urge to ask her what the name of the song was so he could download it.
As he approached her, despite the neat, ironed lab coat over a black pencil-cut skirt and proper hosiery, he only saw the tousled red hair spilling over a white down ski coat as she threw her head back and belted out her declaration of love for pineapple and coconut drinks.
He was probably a foot away from her when Meredith popped in front of him.
"Hey, did you make dinner plans?" she asked easily. He watched out of his peripheral as Addison responded to a page by darting in the other direction with Karev, towards the operating rooms. With an inward shrug, he forgot about the song and focused on Meredith.
"No, I'm probably just heading back to the trailer." He replied easily with a smile, though it kind of depressed him. If he didn't have plans with her, he was what? Lonely in a trailer?
"Well, I'm taking Izzie to yoga to tire her out, so when she conks out early like usual, I'll head over." She said with an eyebrow wriggle as she strolled away. He smiled and winked in response.
But when the time had come, he hadn't gone to the trailer. He had showered at the hospital, something he rarely did, and headed over to Joe's.
He didn't expect anyone to be there. The text had been random, strange, and he couldn't imagine who could have sent it, but he did imagine whoever did had sent it to him by mistake, so he didn't expect anyone to be there.
After all, this wasn't a movie, a television show, or a song. It was real life, and things like that didn't happen.
But he ordered a piña colada anyway. It took two sips for him to decide he liked it, and then she walked in.
And somehow, he knew.
Despite both of their minds being entirely engrossed in the topic, they didn't address the how or why of them both being there all night. They didn't even discuss the fact that both of them drank only piña coladas.
Somehow, they had found other things to talk about. A great many things, with a surprising ease and lack of awkwardness.
First, it had been work. Of course. Then, it had slowly drifted into talk of past cases—still work, but it took them both to another place. A more innocent one.
And, after those lines of discourse were exhausted, it became memories. The innocent, the chaste, at first, but eventually progressing to the more personal, and intimate.
It wasn't until Joe came over to them, apprehensively, and announced last call.
With a decisive slurp, Addison sucked the last bits of crushed ice through her straw and pushed the curving glass towards Joe.
"I, will have another piña colada." She announced proudly. Derek laughed, realizing she to be pleasantly tipsy, and he as well. With a nod, he seconded the order, and Joe shuffled off to mix two more.
It was then Addison slowly and meaningfully slid her eyes and met Derek's.
"What?" he asked with a smile. She raised an eyebrow.
"You hate fruity drinks."
"So do you."
"Shows how much you know."
"Shows how much you know."
She was silent for a moment, still eyeing him suspiciously.
"Just like the song?" she asked, trapping him. Realizing it, and not caring, he nodded.
"Exactly like the song."
With that, her face creased with a wide grin and a laugh escaped.
"That night in Vail…" she said with an equally embarrassed and proud shake of her head.
"Yeah." He responded with a similar smile. They shared a small laugh, a moment, and then he watched the exact moment when her eyes when dark.
If not for the four piña coladas, this would be the point where she would change the subject. He knew this. It would also be the point where he would let her, and ignore the meaning in the change of her eye color.
But, thanks to something, this was not a usual situation.
"I never saw you laugh like that again." She said, low and throatily.
Never breaking their heated eye contact, he replied, "I haven't."
Her chin quivered slightly, and she bit her lip. He swallowed, with effort.
Joe silently slid the fresh drinks to them, backing away slowly from the bizarre sight of the ex-Shepherds' shameless display of…something.
"Why don't we…" she began softly, never taking her eyes from his.
"I was just thinking…" he began softly, moving his hand so he could lay it across hers. As he did, he registered that the chill of the ice in the glass had frozen her fingers, and as he unknowingly brought her hand towards him and sandwiched it between his two, all he could think of were those chilly nights in Vail, which he found to be best heated by silly, adoring, beautifully comfortable post-Dego Red coital activity, followed by close cuddling.
"—Derek!"
He nearly fell off the barstool.
"Meredith!" he exclaimed, shocked more in that second than ever before in his life.
"I waited at the trailer for two hours!" She replied sweetly, and he watched her crossing the bar towards them. She hadn't seen, over the remaining patrons, the hold he had on Addison's hand.
As she neared them, he turned ever so slightly to meet Addison's eyes.
Which, in those ten seconds, had changed back. Back to the tired, distinctly sad Addison of the present. Gone was the dark infatuation, the flirty twinkle, or the playful flush in her cheeks.
Gone also, was that Derek.
McDreamy took over.
But not before one last apologetic look. He didn't get to give it very long, because she slipped her hand from his and stood as Meredith came to a stop before them.
"Oh, Addison. Hi!" Meredith chirped, but with some suspicion.
"Hi, Meredith." She greeted, taking her clutch from the bar. "Derek was just…asking me about a consult."
He had to commend her on her quickness of thought.
"Oh." Meredith rolled her eyes. "He never really leaves work, does he?" she turned to Derek and pecked his cheek. "It's one thing if you can't think of anything else, but you probably put a damper on Addison's night, too."
Addison laughed, a little louder than she should have, as she edged backward.
"It was fine." She looked from Meredith to Derek, and pressed her lips together. "But uh, you should probably get on with your evenings, so I'll…" she was struggling to remain composed, and Derek's eyes softening in sympathy made it worse.
"…I'll just be going." She finished, nodding shortly and making her way as quickly and gracefully as possible to the door.
When it swung shut behind her, Meredith frowned.
"Was she drunk?"
Derek didn't respond.
"Der?"
"Oh. What? No." he replied, dragging his gaze from where he last saw her retreating back in the darkness outside. "She just started that." He commented, pointing to the barely touched piña colada on the bar top.
Meredith regarded it with raised eyebrows.
"She doesn't seem like the piña colada type."
"She likes Dego Red better.
"What?"
"Nothing." He dragged a hand over his eyes and sighed. "How was yoga?"
This? Was fun to write. So I hope you enjoyed it. Silly, dorky Addison and not-so-McDreamy Derek notwithstanding. (That just happens to be how I like them best)
Credit: "Escape" by Rupert Holmes is "the piña colada song." I also referenced him in the title.
Other title references:
Apollo, the God of Music and the name of Addison's iPod.
Manolo, of Manolo Blahnik, the maker of some super gorgeous but super painful shoes. (like, for instance, the shoes Addison wore that prevented her from walking away from Derek in this little fic)
Just thought I'd clear that up. Again, I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading (and reviewing, if you like).