ao3 merder stories& one shots

allergic or otherwise

Derek's side of the bed is warm.

Meredith is pretty used to coming home to her husband already sprawled across the left side of their bed, what with their erratic schedules as a surgical resident and head of neurosurgery respectively, and she's sure he's used to the same. She's finally able to have a bit more flexibility in her schedule, enough to try and at least have the same day off most weeks, but surgery is surgery.

An absent hand goes to comb through his mop of curls, but stops when her fingertips brush against his forehead, when she feels the heat coming off of his skin. She frowns.

"Derek?" She asks softly, pressing the back of her hand to his cheek. He gives an unintelligible grumble, leans into her touch. "Derek, are you alright? Are you sick?"

"'m fine," he says immediately, blue eyes blinking open with a bit of a daze. "I don't get sick." Her frown gets deeper.

"Okay. Let me know if it gets worse," Meredith murmurs, pushing dark hair off his sweaty forehead. She gets another grumble of acknowledgement before her husband burrows further under the covers, pulling the blanket over his head.

She goes about her—Meredith checks her watch—goes about her afternoon without much fuss, reheating dinner from the fridge and staying downstairs as much as she can to let him sleep it off. It's too early to properly turn in and too late to do anything for the evening, and all of her friends are either in surgery or on call.

Meredith starts the bathwater before closing the door behind her and padding back over to the bed, sitting against Derek's torso and reaching over to rub gently at his spine. "We have the house to ourselves," she says gently, kneading at the tension between his shoulder blades. He makes a contented sound, a congested sound, turning over to prop himself up on his elbows and look at her.

"Mere, I-" Derek begins, voice thick, clearing his throat before trying again. "Mere, I'm exhausted, I'm sorry." He sniffs and rubs at his chest with his knuckles, right where she knows his sternotomy scar is. She doesn't need to see their wastebasket half-filled with tissues, the raw, red skin rimming his nostrils, the light sheen of sweat across his features to know that he's come down with the cold being passed around the hospital. She also knows that he won't admit it until it literally knocks him on his ass.

"I started a bath," she says instead, stroking her thumb across his cheekbone, hand falling to palpate his lymph nodes. "Trying to finish off the dregs of my cold from last week." A better woman might feel guilty about infecting her husband, about the Wednesday evening spent curled up against him, wheezing and coughing through some B-list movie, his hand gently massaging Vapo-Rub across her chest. Well, until it slipped southward ever-so-accidentally and they spent the rest of the evening stressing her already-hoarse voice and getting Vapo-Rub in a lot more places than between her breasts.

But she's not a better woman, and if the virus didn't come from her, it would have come from someone else.

"Well, if it's in the name of health." Blue eyes gaze hungrily at her chest, and she knows he's thinking of the same evening.

"Are you trying to take advantage of me, Dr. Shepherd?" She asks, standing up and beginning to walk backwards with her own sultry smile.

"Absolutely I am." Derek follows her with barely a stumble, warm hands finding her hips and pulling her shirt over her head. She does the same before pulling his pants down to his ankles, the back of her thighs hitting porcelain.

She's pressed flush against his chest, his fingers tracing idle patterns above the slope of her breasts, warm water and soap relaxing into her muscles in a way she didn't realize she needed until Derek's hands were pressing into her shoulders. "Still feeling that cold, dear?" He kisses the join between her neck and back and she shivers into his laugh.