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She brought her hand back down hard, clanking her fourth shot down against the wooden bar top. She looked at Jackson with her chin slightly tilted up, a close mouthed smile at him.
"So," she said, putting her hands on the top of her knees. "Tell me about your day. What was it like being all doctor-y?" she asked.
He shook his head, looking away from her. "It's a lot of boring hospital things, you don't want to know about it." His lips tilted downward in half a grimace and half a frown, as if to just brush off the topic.
He took in a large inhale, throwing on a smile and pointing at her with both hands open. "Let's talk about you, about your new job, about getting your Ph.D, about not telling me you were moving here until you needed someone to pick you up from the damn airport this morning right before I had to be at work for my rounds."
His eyes widened with humor and his head tilted from side to side as he teased her for the last minute news bomb on him for that morning. He moved closer to her for emphasis on his teasing.
She scrunched her lips together in a failing effort to refrain from smiling. Choosing to ignore his comments and pushing his face away, she insisted, "But I do, so tell me."
He squinted for a second as he took up her challenge. "Fine," he surrendered, leaning back from her.
"Well, after I was almost late to work because I had to drop you and your million suit cases off at your apartment, our former Chief of Surgery stepped down and is now a regular surgeon, our famous Dr. McDreamy is now our Interim Chief of Surgery, some of the Seattle Grace residents I'm almost friends with were implying he was going to go after us Mercy Westers in his quest to bring the hospital back to its former glory, and McDreamy gave April her job back." There was a momentary silence before he added, "Oh, and one of my almost friends' formerly cancerous surgeon wife was back very briefly, we all had a talk about if we would choose surgery or love, then she left again."
He watched her face as she took in the information, her eyes widening and face scrunching during some parts of the story, especially the one about his almost friends and the formerly cancerous surgeon wife.
"This feels like when you were trying to help me study for my pre-calc final," she blurted out.
He chuckled. "We're never talking about my work again."
"What?"
"You failed that math final."
She scowled at him and said in a high-pitched, mocking voice, "you failed that math final." In her normal voice with a deadpan she added, "Maybe you were just a bad teacher. And can we rewind a bit here, what the hell is a Dr. McDreamy and April got fired?!"
"She got re-hired!"
He laughed at her reaction, the way her eyes squinted in confusion at Derek's nickname or practically bugged out at the news about April.
Emerald City Bar was beginning to clear out a bit, and she checked the time to see it was almost 2 in the morning.
"We should probably head out," she said, grabbing her bag from the counter next to her and putting it on her shoulder. "Do you work tomorrow?"
"Surprisingly, it is my day off," he informed her, grabbing his jacket and starting to put that on.
"Those are so rare," she laughed, and they both got off of their stools and started walking out together.
Jackson kept a hand hovering near her back but not touching her as they weaved past chairs and through the door into the cold Seattle night. She, however, had stuck a hand behind her to grab onto a small piece of his jacket, pinching it between her thumb and her closed fist so that she knew he was still right behind her.
Of the six shots she had bought for the both of them, she drank more than he had. She had a higher tolerance than most, though, and other than the rose on her cheeks, she looked fine.
Either way, there was no way she was walking home. Even if she hadn't drank, there was no way Jackson was letting her walk home. But she gave him a small wave anyways, about to walk off without him.
"This way," he said, grabbing her elbow softly and using his head to usher her to where he had parked his car.
He thought she was crazy if she really believed he was going to let her walk around Seattle alone in the dark.
˚ʚ♡ɞ˚
He found street parking in front of her apartment building, backing his car into the spot.
She turned to him abruptly, the way she did when she came up with her entire monologue in her head and needed to blurt it out before she lost the words.
"Do you wanna crash on the couch? Break the new apartment in with me?" she asked, speaking a hundred words a minute, but he had learned to do what Blair liked to call and "listen faster" through the years. "'Cause, yanno, it's almost three now, and I know your apartment is far from here, and you're tired. I can see it in your under-eye bags that you are tired."
He must have seen the glint in her eyes because, as he swung his door open, he said, "You need me to move your furniture around in the morning, don't you?"
She got out as well, grabbing her purse from the floor. Flashing her best innocent smile at him, she said, "The movers didn't put them where I wanted, and I was too scared to speak up."
"Never bring up my under-eye bags and make me breakfast in the morning, and you have yourself a deal," he told her, shaking his head since he knew it was coming.
The two of them walked up the steps to the main entrance of the apartment building, which needed a code to be able to open the door.
"So, what did you choose?" she asked her as they stood in the elevator.
"Choose for what?"
"In the conversation with your kinda friends about love or surgery?"
"Oh," he said, glancing over at her to see her staring at the floor numbers on the elevator wall as they changed with each floor they past. "I said I wanted both."
She blinked a few times as she heard his response, a laugh escaping through her nose that it sounded more like an exhale. She smiled softly, "Good."
"And you?" he asked, brushing his shoulder with hers so she'd look up at him., She finally met his eyes, tilting her head up to look into them and not at his shoulders. "If you had to pick between writing or love?"
Without hesitation, she said with a small shake of her head, "There's no writing without love."
"What about all the people who write about heartbreak?" he asked her.
"There's no heartbreak without love," she responded without missing a beat.
"And the environment? What about the environmental critic writers?" he challenged, wanting to see if he could find a flaw in her statement.
"They love the Earth, Avery."
"Hm," he finally nodded, and the elevator opened on the thirteenth floor. "That's totally not bad luck."
"Lucky number thirteen," she practically sang the words, peering over her shoulder at him with a smug grin.
He followed her down the hall a few doors, standing behind her as she unlocked her door. He had been in such a rush that morning that not only did he have no time to really question her about the move and the decisions, but he also could only drop her off in front of the apartment building.
"This is a nice apartment," he commented when she opened the door and let him in first.
"It's small, carpeted all over the place, and has no in unit washer and dryer," she refuted, closing the door and locking it behind it, putting on the chain. "I will be scared of eating food or drinking anything here for the rest of my life."
"You won't be holed up in this apartment the rest of your life," he said, putting his shoulder bag down on the circular dining table she had in the space between her kitchen and her living room. "And you sound like your mom with your first concern being cleaning. Why would you buy throw pillows?"
"You take that back!" she whacked his arm.
Her apartment layout was like an L. You entered straight away into the kitchen, then the dining room, then the living room, and to the left of the living room was a small almost-hallway that split off to the bathroom to the left and bedroom to the right.
He ignored her. "Well," he said, going over to her window to open the blinds. "At least you have this view."
Outside the window, you could see other buildings with their lights lighting up her view, and a little past some of them, you could make out water in the background. A silence fell before them as they both looked out at her view. It looked beautiful in the daytime, but she loved to see the twinkling lights of other people's windows that kind of just reminded her that she was this speck in the grand scheme of things.
"I can't believe you're really here," Jackson said finally, turning around to watch as she came to stand next to him.
The pair looked out on the city.
"I can," she said, looking into his green eyes and smiling. "Where else would I have ever ended up if not right here?"
He looked down at her with his lips slightly parted, a smile on his face as he tried to think of something to say in response to that. Was it really that inevitable to her, was there really no way she could have ended up anywhere else but there? And where exactly was "there?" Seattle, or next to him?
Her cheeks did this thing when she smiled where they pushed up into her eyes, making them sometimes look like downward crescent moons. "We should get ready for bed, I'm exhausted."
"Y-yeah," he said, and he watched as she went to one of the boxes left unpacked next to her sofa, rummaging through it before pulling a pair of sweats out.
"Aha!"
"Why am I not surprised you have my clothes here?" he asked as she threw it at him.
"I was gonna give them back to you, but since you're here, might as well just use them," she shrugged. "Do you need a shirt?"
"I can just wear this one?"
"Whatever, if you wanna smell like booze," she shrugged, taking the few steps from the living room into the bathroom to grab an extra toothbrush. She stepped out to jangle it in the air, catching Jackson's attention. "Imma brush my teeth, this will be on the counter for you."
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"You always get like this," Jackson said, laying down on the couch with a blanket pulled up to his chest, but she was sitting on the other end of the couch talking his ear off about a book she had read on the plane. "You claim to be tired, but after brushing your teeth and washing your face, you're wide awake again. It's almost four in the morning."
"Are you telling me to leave my own living room?"
"To let me sleep? Yes," he nodded enthusiastically.
"Fine," she grumbled, pulling the blanket off of him as she did and leaving it a mess on the other side of the couch, stalking off to her bedroom.
"Wait," he called, and she turned happily expecting him to tell her they could talk some more.
"The light."
She glared at him, before turning the light in the living room off and shutting her door.