I am SO SORRY for not posting on time but this past week my life turned into a big ol' ball of stress so add that to a small case of writer's block and you get a delayed update. So I apologize for not being on time. I once again have a busy week this week but I have a long weekend so I will hopefully be able to write then so expect to see the next update on Saturday OR Sunday. I really hope you guys this chapter as it's the catalyst for the next chapter; it may have been a bit difficult to write but I really enjoyed writing it. So I'm sure you've had enough of my rambling so without further ado, here's the next chapter.

Chapter Five

Sitting on the exam table in one of the exam rooms in the ortho department, my legs hanging over the edge of the table I can't help but feel extremely embarrassed. Calliope is sitting less than a foot away from me inspecting my leg that had caused me to almost fall over. I couldn't help but be thankful that I had remembered and had gotten the opportunity to shave this morning when she had rolled up my scrub pants leg earlier.

"So, good news, it's definitely not a break or fracture. But the bad news is that it is a sever sprain. So you're not going to be able to be in the OR for about a week and for sure no Heelys for about two weeks,"

"Are you serious?" I say, looking at her with a slight puppy pout on my face; it was an old habit that I haven't been able to fully break yet.

"Don't go pouting at me," She says, looking up at me with a chuckle. "I'm not the one who wasn't watching where they were going. And I wasn't finished by the way."

"That's not all the consequences of my clumsiness?" My voice reflects my current sense of embarrassment.

"Well no," She says with a sympathetic smile as she stands up from her stool, "you're going to have to use crutches for around a week."

"Crutches?" I can't help but squint my eyes into some sort of glare.

"Yup, crutches." Calliope stands up and heads for a supply closest attached to the exam room.

"I've manage to stay off crutch my entire life and now, the most busiest week of my life happens and now I'm stuck on crutches. It's some sort of cosmic joke or punishment for using the Heelys to please my patient for my own personal life." I shake my head, "You've got to be kidding me?"

"I'm sorry, Arizona." She says exiting the supply closet, "I'm not kidding." She holds out the crutches only making me wish even more I hadn't been so stupid enough to put myself in the situation where Heelys were necessary.

"Well I guess it has it perks." I say, as I realize I could possibly get something out of this.

"And those perks would be?" She says as she puts the crutches in my outstretched hands.

"That I get to spend more time with you today," I smile almost embarrassedly, blush creeping across my cheeks. "If you want that is." I quickly add.

"Well, I can't think of anything else I have to do today." She says with a nonchalant shoulder shrug. I open my mouth to say something but I'm cut off by a chuckle I had quickly grown fond of. "Just kidding, I like the sound of that." She smiles widely and the butterflies I've also grown slightly used to flutter in my stomach.

"So do you want me to come to see the Chief with you then you can go get changed and we can go to Joe's alright?" She says with a smirk.

"I think that sounds perfect."

"So what's your Joe's story?" Calliope says as we exit the hospital; she had been polite enough to carry my messenger bag as well as her own so that I wouldn't constantly have to fix it while I was using my crutches.

"What? I don't get what you mean." I say with a confused smirk, glancing her way careful not to lose focus on using the crutches.

"A Joe's story, everybody's got one. Take mine for example, I went to Joe's every night for at least a week to wallow in self-pity when my last relationship ended and Joe knew exactly what to do. Me and Mark spend a lot of time at Joe's playing darts so Joe knows us pretty well, I've been going there for at least two and a half years." She says, her voice surprisingly doesn't reflect the pain she likely feeling over Erica Hahn; it was likely replaced with the pleasant memories of jokes being told over a jug of beer and dart with Sloan.

"Hmm, my Joe's story," I say, my voice barely overpowering the clinking sound of my crutches hitting the ground as we walked. "Now, that's a tough one. As I've only been there once since I've moved here."

"Well then that should make it easy then shouldn't it?" She chuckles heartily.

"Well not exactly," I say, blush creeping up across my cheeks making my embarrassment definitely more than slightly obvious.

"What? It can't be that bad I'm sure." She grins before checking to see if there are any cars coming so I can take my time crossing the road, rather than hurrying and likely falling flat on my face all over again.

""Well," I say my mind travelling back to the only other time I had ever been to the infamous Joe's Emerald City Bar.

"Arizona? Hello! Anyone home in there?" I'm shaken out of my reverie-like state by a voice in my ear and a few consistent set of pokes in the shoulder.

"Sorry, what?" I say, tearing my eyes away from the object of my attention; my face turning an obvious shade of pink as I realize I had been spoken to but I was too busy off in my own world, filled with a certain someone, to realize I was being spoken to.

"Shellie asked how long have you lived in Seattle." The strawberry blonde, Karrie, who had been kind enough to go out with her and some other women from the hospital, says.

"But you were too busy ogling over Sloan the 'ex'" Heather, a scrub nurse cuts in, she uses the same type of air quotes you'd see from a ten year old around the word ex, "boy-toy."

I can't help but smirk internally at how wrong she is; I may have been ogling but my eyes were focused about a foot to the right at the beautiful Latina I had let slip from my grasp. She was focusing intently on her second glass of Cuba Libre since she had walked into the bar no less than forty five minutes ago.

"He's off the market if you're curios." Shellie, the brunette scrub nurse who occasionally works in peds, says.

I chuckle automatically without even thinking what I'm doing and say that he's not my type.

"Then why are you ogling so much?" She giggles, "And you still haven't answered my initial question."

"I've only been in Seattle for close to two weeks." I reply, hoping to avoid the topic of my ogling, and who it was aimed at.

"And?" She quirks her eyebrow at me curiously, obviously noticing my lack of response when it came to Mark Sloan.

"And what?" I say, taking a shot of tequila in which I had opted for rather then my usual Long Island Ice Tea.

"Why are you ogling over Mark Sloan if he's not your t-" Karrie stops in midsentence at her realization, looking extremely embarrassed, "Oh." Blush begins to creep across her cheeks as she takes a sip of her wine cooler, obviously not knowing what to say.

"Can someone please tell me what the heck is going on here?" Shellie looks to me then to Karrie and back to me with a look of utmost confusion on her face.

I take a deep breath and open my mouth to speak but Karrie cuts me off before I'm even able to get out a simple single word. "She wasn't staring at Sloan, Shellie." She says with a smirk that makes me feel a hundred times better about this situation, considering how much I know it could've ended in a catastrophe.

"Then who were you," She pauses for a second as the realization hits her as well. "Well I don't blame you there," She giggles "Dr. Torres is quite the looker."

I quickly give a glance back over in Calliope's direction just in time enough to see her throw her last dart straight into the bull's-eye. A wide smile beams across her face as she turns to Mark, this obviously must have been her winning shot because she points to him and I can see her lips form words that seem like "In your face."

And I can't help but smirk, "That she is, that she is."

"That?" Calliope says, blush creeping up across her face. "That was your Joe's story. It's not bad." She chuckles.

"It's embarrassing." I say as blush flushes across my own face as well.

As we begin to cross the road, I feel her hand on the small of my back. "Well I think it's sweet."

Any doubt that I had about Calliope's intentions and how angry she was at me still had being to wither away at the intimate gesture. "Well I'm glad you think so, if I was you I would've found it creepy and slightly overbearing. But I'm glad you thought it wasn't."

"Creepy, sweet, what's the difference?" She chuckles. I pause for a quick moment to look at her with a look of shock on my face before continuing on across the empty street," I'm kidding, Arizona, it's endearing. But you've got to quit being so gullible and take everything I say so seriously."

"And this comes from the woman who got mad at me for being an idiot and tried to treat it like it wasn't a big deal when it really was." I say with slight tone of sarcasm in my voice.

"Sorry about that." She gives me a sympathetic smile.

"You're not the one that should be sorry, but I really hope you get what I was trying to explain earlier." I saying need reassurance of what had been said in the hospital lobby.

"I get it, but I'm just the type to, to-" She pauses for a second, "Sorry I don't know how to explain it."

"It's okay, you don't have to. Just as long as you're okay, as long we, if you and I could be considered some sort of we but just as long as you and I, well we, are okay then,"

"Arizona!" She cuts me off, causing me to stop speaking and look at her, careful not to fall while continuing to walk. "You're rambling."

"Sorry, I-"

"There's no need to be sorry, you and I, we," She stops to give me a completely genuine wide smile, "we're okay."

Did you always wan to be a peds surgeon, or a surgeon at all for that matter, when you were younger?" Calliope asks before taking a sip of her second drink of since we've been here; the usual Cuba Libre on the rocks.

We had been in continuous discussion over since we sat down at a booth in the back of Joe's about an hour and a half prior.

"No, I knew from a young age that I wanted a job in the medical field, nothing to do with the military like the rest of my family, but I wasn't sure what it was I wanted. I actually applied for more than just surgical residencies." I say.

She looks at me with a look of what could be called surprise on her face, "So you weren't always dedicated to peds?" She asks almost as if she couldn't see me doing anything else but peds.

"Nope," I say with a look of slight astonishment on my own face. I had been impressed by Calliope's curiosity; no woman I had dated had been so interested about why I was so invested in my job as a pediatric surgeon within the first four times I went out with them, let alone on the first date. I mentally slap myself in the back of the head at the realization that she and I had already been on a 'date' in my memory, just not in hers.

"I wasn't always so hardcore about peds. I had been accepted for a neurology residency and a surgical residency at Johns Hopkins. I actually took the neuro residency but I was there for a week and found that it just wasn't for me and managed to transfer to the surgical program."

I really wouldn't have pegged you for the neuro type, Robbins." She says with a slight chuckle. "So where did the whole ped's thing come from then? Because I know that people are either born to be in ped's or they're just not, that's from personal observation of course."

I nod my head in agreement, after seeing numerous pediatric fellows and surgeons who didn't chose their specialty for their love of children and enjoying their time with the patients and simply chose it because they thought that peds was just a way to have a challenge due to it's patients variety of cases and their usually small stature.

"I surprisingly wasn't put on my first pediatric case until I was a second year resident. At Hopkins it wasn't unusual for attendings, and senior residents for that matter, to play favorites so I didn't get the opportunity to be on a peds case until then as the cardio attending always the resident who was in charge of me when I was an intern and me to scrub in on their surgeries. She reminded me a lot of the resident who's always with Meredith Grey, Dr. Yang, actually." I attempt to cover up the fact I was already exactly Cristina was before continuing my story but Calliope cuts in.

"She's my roommate actually," She smirks. "So I can just imagine why you had never been on a peds case, Cristina is definitely not a peds person." She stops to laugh once again, "I can tell you that right now."

"I'd agree with you on that point. But one day we were short a resident so the cardio attending, relunctantly, told the peds attending he could have me. After the first case of the day I was hooked."

Listening to Arizona talk about why she loved peds in such detail it was impossible not to feel as if my insides were turning all warm and gooey. From the way she talked about how the concept of explaining to a child what was going on and how they were going to fix it by using analogies along with other things without all the things children would find gross and scary to the way she described how she had felt after she had preformed her first solo surgery on a ten year old boy who had needed a splenectomy after falling out of his tree house, Arizona had me thinking about whether I had been wrong to judge her for avoiding me.

She was an interesting, intelligent, sweet, good person; she was simply a good person who had bitten off more than she could chew that day when she had agreed she could handle whatever it was I was about to say. Wasn't she? Who was I to judge her?

These thoughts and questions were rushing through my mind but it was still possible for me to hang on every single word Arizona said and every facial expression she made; there was something astoundingly familiar about the blue shade of her eyes and how it seems to lighten when she smiles and the almost invisible small patch of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

"What about you? I'm sure that you didn't grow up wanting to re-break and put bones back in joint growing up, did you?" She asks as she lets out a giggle that sounds like it belonged to a child rather than a fully grown woman.

"Uh, no. I did not grow up wanting to break bones for a living." I chuckle.

"Then what did you want to do?" She asks giving me of curiosity; something else that seemed like it belonged to that of a child but somehow managed to suit her extremely well and looked extremely endearing.

"Hm," I pause trying to think of what it was I had wanted to do when I was a kid or back in high school. "That's a tough one because after I had joined the Peace Corps and went to Botswana anything but being a doctor slipped away to the back of my consciousness."

"The Peace Corps? Botswana?" She looks at me with her eyes wide in what some would consider awe. "I definitely thought you were hardcore, given the whole ortho thing, but now you are definitely bad ass."

I can't help but chuckle at the compliment, given in the strange form in which it came. "Thank you.'

"What made you want to do that?" She says with a small dimpled smile that somehow I'm sure makes my heart skip a beat.

"Why aren't any of your questions easy ones?" I ask with a humorous glare.

"In that case I'll let you consider you answer while I take a quick jaunt to the ladies room." She says, giving me a quick smile before putting her hands on the edge of the booth table and pushing herself up out of the seat.

Normally, this would be completely fine. I notice Arizona crutches propped up against the wall next the booth, "Arizona!" I say as I jump out of my own seat.

It isn't until she takes a step that an important detail she had forgotten becomes completely evident to her as her legs crumple beneath her causing her to begin to fall.

To her and my surprise both, I manage to wrap my arms around her and catch her just before her knees hit the ground. "Don't worry I got you." I say as help her back up, tightening my hold around her waist to support her weight.

"Thank you." She says with slight tears from the obvious pain she was feeling spurring in her eyes as she surprisingly wraps her arms around my neck.

"Don't mention it," I say in shock as I sit her up on a bar stool, my body feeling as if someone had pumped me full of endorphins and adrenaline.

The close proximity of our bodies had obviously not been overlooked by Arizona, her pupils were wide and I could feel slightly clammy feeling on her hands that were still on the back of my neck.

Before I know it, I feel a set of sweet, warm lips against my own causing my heart to pound in my chest. My mind begins to race as I realize that this was too was familiar. The feeling of her lips against mine was something I had definitely felt before causing me to pull away slightly. The necessary need to inhale causes the sweet scent of grapefruit and mint to flood my mind. No matter how much I wanted to feel the rapture of her lips once again I force myself to pull away.

I somehow manage to look her straight in the face as realization crosses my own. The look of guilt that crosses her face is even to know that the conclusion that my mind has raced to is right.

"You," The word falls out of my mouth without any intentions of speaking as I pull her arms off me and back away.

She looks at me with those big blue eyes of hers, tainted with guilt but somehow I can't help but find them stunning. "I can explain, Ca-"

"No," I cut her off before she gets a chance to say my name because if she does I know I'll be a goner.

"You, it was you." are the last words I say before I dig my hands into my pockets and pull out a ten dollar bill and throw it on the table to cover my drinks and hurry out of Joe's like I'm running from everything that could ever swallow me.