Where You Belong

35

Alone in the house, locked away in the haven of the shared bathroom, Meredith sat on the cold, hard floor. She leaned against the side of the shower, her knees tucked up to her chest, and she stared. She didn't notice the cold seeping into her skin from the hard, tiled floor. She didn't notice the numbness beginning to set in through her legs and back. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there, what time of day it was, or how soon her roommates would be getting off their shifts.

All she saw, noticed and took in were the two small white sticks she held in both hands, both saying the same thing; one with a short blue line and the other with a small 'x.'

Both were negative.

She knew she should feel relieved, grateful, disappointed, emotional...something.

Instead, she felt nothing.

She had spent the previous day and night in the hospital, with a slowly growing feeling of discomfort in her abdomen. It hadn't been until Derek, who was just coming in as she was leaving, offered to buy her breakfast before she left to head home to sleep, that she realize somewhere during her long shift she had become nauseous.

With a gentle smile, she had turned down his offer, claiming instead that she was planning on heading home for some much needed sleep. And that is exactly what she had planned to be doing right now.

But the nausea had increased tenfold as she had walked out to her car and begun the drive home. And when she had passed a drug store, she found herself turning on instinct. She would need something to settle her stomach if she wanted to get some sleep.

And, by a twist of fate, the pregnancy tests had been kept in the same aisle as the Pepto-Bismol tests. Meredith had caught sight of them on her way by, laughing as she always did at how they were kept right beside the condoms, and got almost to the end of the aisle before she stopped dead.

Abdominal pain.

Nausea.

And, come to think of it, she felt warm.

Her chest hitched painfully as she had turned to stare back down the, suddenly ominous, aisle. She was a doctor, so she would know if she was...pregnant, right? She should know. She and Derek were careful, but with her inconsistent intern schedule, the pill was difficult to use correctly, and she didn't always manage to take it around the same time every day, if at all. So they used condoms in the middle of her cycle, just to make sure. But...it had been so stressful lately, what with Burke being shot, and Izzy loosing Denny, and Meredith and Derek planning on visiting New York and their first big fight. Meredith couldn't even begin to estimate when her last period had been; a week, a month...more than a month...

But she could remember that she and Derek had definitely not used a condom at prom. And that she would have been off her pill for at least two days by then.

She had turned back around, scooped two bottle of Pepto-Bismol and a package of Gravol off the shelf and turned back around before slowly, cautiously, making her way back to the pregnancy tests. And suddenly it wasn't nearly as funny that they were beside the condoms.

There had been so many to choose from, but she had made quick work of choosing two different brands. She knew she wouldn't trust one test, regardless of the result.

And she had hurried home to pee on the two sticks.

The five minute wait had been excruciating. Time had ticked by slowly, every second feeling like a minute, and every minute an hour. She had paced the upstairs hallway nineteen times. And then the downstairs hallway eleven. She had watched an older man walking a fat Labrador retriever across the street, and was disconcerted when it only took twenty-two seconds for the pair to leave her eyesight. But, finally, the alarm on her watch went off and she hurried back up the stairs to spend another three minutes and forty-three seconds working up the nerve to look. And when she had finally looked, they had both said the same thing.