Chasing Butterflies

Chapter 7: In Which We Chase Back The Butterflies

Chapter 7: In Which We Chase Back the Butterflies

****

"You've done this before" Addison moans as she comes down from her powerful aftershocks. "So have you" Meredith smirks right back at her.

"I mean before me, before you ate me out on your desk you'd already done this before" Meredith explains as if it weren't obvious to her statement.

"I've done this before," Addison admits. "More than a few times" she adds, to be completely clear, with a laugh.

"Really?" Meredith is intrigued and she starts to think she's going to get to know something she's been wanting to know for a very long time.

"Well, my best friend Naomi and I hooked up a few times during sophomore year. I lived for those drunken nights but she just said it was because of the booze and that it wasn't as much of her thing as it was mine" Addison just says softly.

"We never told anybody because she was with Sam and I was with Derek at the time, we were young" she explained.

***

"Did Derek ever know when you were together?" Meredith asks her.

They're under the covers again, enjoying their post-sex haze and cuddling.

"Know what Grey? I think you've forgotten some nouns there. And some verbs, too." She laughs.

"Know that well you, that well you're - you know-"

Meredith does this motioning gesture with her hands and it amuses Addison to pieces because she laughs with her mouth wide open as Meredith struggles to recover from her terrible impersonation.

"No. I mean not that I ever told him I liked women. If he knew he never said anything, either way, Addison says softly.

"Did you want him to know?" asks Meredith as if she's not trying to ask Addison a much more personal question.

"Did it feel like you were hiding something from him?"

She asks because she's sort of asking if SHE should tell Derek she likes women and also she's asking because she's not sure she cares too much about Derek when she could keep holding this wonderful woman here in her arms.

"If I wanted him to know at some point it would have been for the wrong reasons, for me to make him jealous or insecure or to turn him on at the thought of me with another woman" Addison explains.

"There was never a good time," she adds.

***

"And so I'd just as rather Derek never know about me and Naomi or any of those other ex-girlfriends that had come and gone and for him to think of me as the simple vanilla pillow princess that he always thought that I was." Addison laughs.

"You are far, far from a vanilla pillow princess" Meredith smirks and Addison laughs. "But I think I knew that from the moment I met you," she adds. "It was sort of jarring to see you standing next to him all leggy and fabulous when you looked like you would be a beast to be in bed with while he was just you know, sort of McDreamy about it," she says but not with the sort of reverence she'd had previously reserved for the McDreamy naming.

"Did it make you feel like you were hiding from him?" asks Meredith sincerely, thinking that the one McTitle that they sure never did go wrong with was to call Addison McHot.