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icepixieTitle: A Beginning
Rating: G
Word Count: 3500
Characters and Pairings: Megan/Peter friendship and UST. Joan Hunt also features.
Summary: "So, does this"—she pointed the mouth of her empty beer bottle first at herself, then at him—"mean we're friends now?" Post-ep for "Society Hill."
Note: This assumes the original episode order, which has "Buried Secrets" as 1x03, "All in the Family" as 1x04, and "Society Hill" as 1x05.
* * *
All things considered, the truce dinner her mother had asked for was going rather well. Her mother had congratulated her on catching Daphne's killer; Megan had apologized for the scene at the party while also pointing out it had led, if convolutedly, to key information that helped them figure out who was behind the murder; and her mother had grudgingly admitted that while she thought her methods were flawed, her deductions were sound, and that she'd never liked Colin Lloyd very much anyway. By that point, their meals had arrived, and they switched to less controversial topics of conversation.
Less controversial, at least, until Joan said, "Tell me more about the man you were with last night. Peter, right?"
Megan's finely-honed sense of exactly what kinds of implications her mother was capable of sliding into the most innocent statements sounded an alarm. "We really do just work together, Mom."
Her mother gave her a completely gormless look that she didn't buy for a second. "Of course."
Megan pushed her salad around her plate for a moment as she debated whether to play along. Eventually, she said, "He used to be a police officer, until he got shot in the shoulder and then transferred to the ME's office. We were partnered about six months ago. He's...annoyingly cheerful. And he always seems to know what's going on in everyone's personal life, even mine, which now that I think about it is irritating as hell." She frowned. "I guess I don't know him very well, really."
Her mother dabbed at her mouth with her napkin before cocking an eyebrow. "Well, have you ever thought about getting to know him better?"
Suddenly she was sixteen again, and her mother was asking what she thought of the Wylands' son, since she was such good friends with John and Harriet, and Timmy was such a nice boy... "Mom!"
Joan picked up her fork, using it to emphasize her points. "Why not? He's certainly attractive. And aside from exercising a bit of poor judgment in helping with your little operation, he seemed like a very nice man." She stabbed her fork in her daughter's direction. "Megan, it's been five years since you and Todd divorced; don't you think it's time you started dating again?"
Megan wondered if steam was actually coming out of her ears. If she took her knife to her mother's throat, it would surely count as justifiable homicide, wouldn't it?
Joan suddenly burst into laughter. "Oh, if you could see your face right now!" She reached across the table and patted her daughter's hand. "Don't worry, darling, I'm just teasing you."
Megan closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Can we change the subject?" she gritted out.
"Of course. Have you heard from Todd recently?"
Megan reminded herself that it would be very bad for her career if her mother wound up on one of her slabs.
* * *
As the clock over the door ticked through the evening, first Ethan, then Curtis, then Bud took their leave of the J Bar. Peter remained at the table they'd staked out, ostensibly to finish the beer he'd been nursing for half the night and maybe surreptitiously admire the blonde in the corner for a few more minutes. He wasn't expecting Megan to show up, not when she'd said she was going to dinner with her mother.
Actually, that was a lie. True, he hadn't been expecting—but he had been hoping.
So it was with both surprise and gratification that he saw her walk through the door just as he swallowed the last of his drink. He watched her scan the room for a familiar face, and waved to get her attention. She waved back and headed to his table.
"Am I too late?" she asked when she arrived, putting her hand on the back of Bud's vacated chair.
He smiled. "Not at all."
She pulled out the chair, but didn't sit down. "Everyone's gone."
Feeling as if he were coaxing a scared cat into coming out from under the bed, Peter carefully shrugged. "I'm still here," he said with studied nonchalance.
Megan finally smiled back at him and took the seat. "Yes, you are."
She ordered a bottle of the same local ale he was drinking, which surprised him. He'd taken her for a vodka martini kind of person. "It was my grandfather's favorite," she explained when he said so, after ordering another for himself. "Sometimes I have to remind myself that I don't dislike every member of my family. Just the living one."
"Dinner with your mother didn't go well?"
She sighed. "It went okay, I guess. We're still speaking to each other, anyway, and both of us walked out with all our limbs attached. She just reminded me that there's a reason I don't tell her anything about my personal life. It always comes back to haunt me."
He wondered briefly what it was about her personal life that she'd told her mother. As far as he knew, she didn't really have one.
Deciding it would probably be best not to ask, he changed the subject. "What was your grandfather like?" At her quizzical look, he elaborated, "This is the second time you've mentioned him."
She took a sip of her beer, obviously contemplating how much she wanted to open up to him. He mentally crossed his fingers.
"He was my mother's father," she finally said. "Mom and Dad were always busy with work, so he looked after me a lot until I was old enough to stay home alone. He was a carpenter before he retired, and then he took up gardening. He grew a lot of his own food." A far-away look slipped over her face, perhaps enhanced by the dim lighting of the bar. "He knew every plant that grows around here. The Latin names, too. We'd go for walks in the woods near his house, and he'd teach me the names of every wildflower and tree, and whether you could eat it or use it for furniture or making ink or...any number of things people have used plants for."
Her gaze sharpened then, and she fixed it on him. "Tell me about your sisters."
For a moment, he was baffled by the non sequitur, but then he realized it followed perfectly well; obviously, having divulged something personal about herself, Megan expected the same from him. She'd just bypassed all the little follow up questions and elaborations that smoothed an exchange of information into a conversation.
"All three of them are older than me," he said, deciding to do this on her terms, at least for now. "Hermia's the oldest, then there's Viola, and Juliet's a year older than me." He watched, amused, as Megan's eyebrows arched more and more with each name. "My dad's an electrical engineer and my mom writes greeting cards, but they love Shakespeare. They met when they were both cast in a college production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The girls all go by nicknames."
"How did you escape 'Romeo' or 'Hamlet'?"
This was the moment he always dreaded when getting to know someone. Compared to other kids who'd been through the system, his years bouncing around foster homes hadn't been so bad, but it was still a part of his past he didn't much care to revisit—and people always asked for details. However, any way of answering her question that avoided it would involve telling some kind of falsehood, and he definitely didn't want to lie to her.
"I came with my own name," he said. "I went into the foster system when I was four, and my parents took me in when I was seven. They officially adopted me a few months later."
Megan nodded slowly, obviously turning the information over in her mind. "What happened?"
Long practice had allowed him to whittle the story down to the bare minimum of words required to impart the facts. "Father ran off before I was born. Mother overdosed. She didn't have any living family."
"I'm sorry," Megan murmured.
"Don't be." The words came out more harshly than he'd intended. She was only being polite, after all. He tried to soothe the sting by continuing, "The parents I grew up with were my real parents in every way that mattered. And my sisters were as good to me as you could expect teenaged girls to be to a bratty little brother."
She snickered. "You, a brat? Why does this not surprise me?"
He grinned, knowing she was thinking of all the times he'd pressed her to do something she didn't want to do, like talk about something personal, anything besides work. Since they day they met, he'd been trying to find cracks in the hard shell she'd built up around herself since...maybe her father's death, for all he knew. "Let's just say that Vi still hasn't forgiven me for the time I decided to give all of her Barbies haircuts," he said.
Megan looked pensive. "I did that to one of mine when I was six or seven. Then I used food coloring to dye it green. My mother was horrified."
The mental image of Megan with a homemade punk-rocker doll made him laugh. "You rebel."
"That was nothing compared to the time I set the canopy on fire at the debutante ball she insisted I have when I was seventeen."
He'd been about to take a sip of his beer, and wound up nearly dropping the bottle on the table. That Megan had pyromaniacal tendencies was definitely not something he'd expected to learn tonight.
She laughed at his expression. "It was an accident, although she still grounded me for the rest of the school year." She settled back against her chair, using her hands, and her bottle, to illustrate as she talked. "There were these paper lanterns hanging everywhere at the club, even inside what was basically a canvas tent—honestly, it was an disaster waiting to happen. I was trying to escape this squeaky-voiced eighth-grader who'd been asking me to dance all evening, so I ducked into a corner of the canopy, behind all the food, and pulled this huge potted palm in front of me so I could hide. Only I didn't notice that the fronds were tall enough and stiff enough to crush one of the lanterns up against the wall flap, and the candle stayed lit just long enough to set the canopy on fire." Her voice acquired a hint of smug satisfaction, despite her claim that she hadn't caused the incident deliberately. "Fortunately, the tent wasn't very big and it was set up near the pool, so several people just grabbed it and tossed it in. Fire went right out. As did the party, which was fine with me."
He'd originally been too shocked to laugh, but the image of a flaming party tent being hurled into the swimming pool at the incredibly swanky country club they'd been to last night quickly cracked him up. Only Megan would be pleased that something like that had happened at what he understood was a pretty big deal for girls in the social set she'd grown up in.
"All right, I want to hear more about this bratty kid brother thing of yours," she said when he quieted. He told her about the time when he and Jules, the most tomboyish of his sisters and his sometime companion in arms, had let handfuls of crickets loose in the room Mia and Vi shared, much to the older girls' horror and their parents' consternation. It reminded her of a jar of fireflies Lacey had collected once and then, having forgotten to close the top, accidentally let loose in the house.
With some surprise, and a flicker of pleasure, he realized he was having an actual conversation with Megan Hunt, one that wasn't about work. He hadn't been sure they would ever get to this point.
Apparently, once Megan decided she wanted to get to know someone, she pursued it with the same single-minded focus she used when figuring out how a murder victim had died. He'd known she would be good at it. They wound their way between stories of med school pranks and tales of the more outrageous criminals he'd come across in his years as a patrol officer, favorite movies and favorite ways to spend a Saturday afternoon (reading and watching a football game, respectively), and everything in between. When they wandered onto the topic of music, he found that she liked classical, which he'd guessed, and jazz, which he hadn't. "I like the big band stuff," she said with a little smile. "Back in the nineties, when there was that revival, Todd and I would go out swing dancing when we managed to clear both of our schedules enough. He's a good dancer." It was the first nice thing he'd heard her say about her ex, he realized. He'd sort of been wondering exactly why she'd married him in the first place, though he knew it was really, really not his place to speculate.
He didn't mention the fact that "two left feet" would be a charitable description of his dancing ability, and asked her what her favorite song was.
After what felt like mere minutes but was, he was astonished to find when he glanced at his watch, nearly two hours, they lapsed into silence. They had reached the last swallows of their drinks, and he caught himself staring at her hands as she twirled her beer bottle back and forth on the table. No matter what the paresthesia had done to them, her hands were still surgeon's hands: deft, precise, and always moving. He wondered what they would feel like in his. With a little swell of embarrassment, he dismissed the thought and shifted his gaze.
Abruptly, she spoke again. "So, does this"—she pointed the mouth of her empty beer bottle first at herself, then at him—"mean we're friends now?"
The question was so patently ridiculous that he didn't want to dignify it with an answer. So he turned it back on her. They did that a lot, the two of them. "You can't have forgotten what it's like to have friends."
"You'd be surprised at how few a divorce and a malpractice suit will leave you with."
She looked so sad that he suddenly wanted to take her hand, or maybe give her a hug. Would that be too...the word that came to mind was "forward," from the Jane Austen books his oldest sister loved, and which he'd secretly sort of gotten into when a high school English teacher had assigned Pride and Prejudice.
Whatever it was, it was probably too much, so he kept his hands to himself. But he did ask, "What are you doing on Saturday?"
Megan blinked. He'd obviously caught her off-guard. "Um," she said, her gaze drifting up as she looked at an imaginary calendar. "Lacey has her riding lesson in the morning, but I don't have plans for the afternoon."
"The Museum of Art has a new exhibit on American landscapes. As my friend, would you like to come to it with me?" At her incredulous expression, he rolled his eyes. "Yes, in addition to football, I also like art."
She pressed her lips together in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the grin that broke across her face. "I'd like that. Thank you, Peter."
His smile was no less ebullient. "Any time."
* * *
As she unlocked her apartment door, Megan was still smiling. She hadn't been exaggerating to Peter about how little social life she had. This had been the first night in quite some time when she'd spent time with someone to whom she was not related just for fun.
She'd never minded spending the majority of her time alone in her head, and she'd certainly been busy in the past several years, first taking all the courses and exams necessary to switch from neurosurgery to forensic pathology, then throwing herself into her new career. But she knew that much of the brain was wired for social interaction, and she was only human.
And Peter was easy to talk to. Maybe too easy; she found herself opening up to him, telling him the kinds of personal details she rarely mentioned to anyone, even when she started a conversation determined to keep him out. He always managed to find the hidden passage through the barrier she'd built around herself, spiraling like a snail's calcium carbonate shell. It had been a long time since she'd come out of that shell long enough to make a friend, a real friend, on her own. But Peter was persistent; if she wouldn't follow him out, then he'd just curl up in there with her.
She had been content, when she was married, to consider Todd's friends her friends, and hadn't taken the time to get close to anyone else. Todd was the charmer, a necessary quality in the courtroom, and he attracted invitations to drinks or dinners like moths to a porch light. She'd never bothered to learn the art of talking to people, of asking them questions and caring about the answers. Nobody gave a damn if their neurosurgeon was personable as long as she could fix what was wrong, and that suited her just fine. It was only after the dinner invitations and Christmas cards had dropped off after the divorce that she'd realized there was value in actually knowing people, instead of having relationships with them that depended entirely on someone else.
She closed her front door behind her, locking it and then setting her purse and her keys on the table in her hallway. As she walked into the kitchen to get a hangover-preventative glass of water, she recalled the happy glow Peter's eyes had acquired tonight when he talked about his sisters and parents. He was so different from her—so different from anyone she knew, really, with his big family who apparently all still liked each other, and his background on the police force rather than in a courtroom or operating room—that she found herself wanting to know more about him, to continue conversations far past the point where she would have brusquely ended them with others.
Tonight, like a greedy child, she'd asked him everything that came to mind—about his sisters, his favorite music, what he liked about Philadelphia, how he spent his weekends. She'd willingly traded her own answers to those questions, the kinds of things friends knew about each other. Usually it felt like she was giving up pieces of herself when she did that, but somehow, it didn't with Peter. She wanted him to know that she'd spent half her adolescence on the back of a horse (horses, she'd found, were easier to understand than people), that she loved detective novels even though she helped solve murders for a living, that she was an early enough riser to have a favorite breakfast place down the street from her apartment.
She was never, ever telling her mother about tonight. Joan would get entirely too much satisfaction out of it, even if Megan hadn't taken her teasing advice in the way she meant. She and Peter had been just co-workers, and now they were friends. That was plenty—that was wonderful, even. Although perhaps it wasn't completely out of the question that...
Her cheeks reddening, Megan quickly tamped down on that particular bit of late-night presumption, then blamed the fact that it had crossed her mind at all on the beer.
Eyeing the calendar on the wall of her kitchen, she grabbed a pen from her odds and ends drawer and wrote in the block for next Saturday, "Museum of Art, 1 PM. Peter."
It was the only thing written for the entire month, and seeing it there caused a giddy sort of pleasure to fizz through her veins. You are absolutely pathetic, she told herself, but she couldn't really find it in her to care. Practically humming with happiness, she headed for bed.
Rating: G
Word Count: 3500
Characters and Pairings: Megan/Peter friendship and UST. Joan Hunt also features.
Summary: "So, does this"—she pointed the mouth of her empty beer bottle first at herself, then at him—"mean we're friends now?" Post-ep for "Society Hill."
Note: This assumes the original episode order, which has "Buried Secrets" as 1x03, "All in the Family" as 1x04, and "Society Hill" as 1x05.
All things considered, the truce dinner her mother had asked for was going rather well. Her mother had congratulated her on catching Daphne's killer; Megan had apologized for the scene at the party while also pointing out it had led, if convolutedly, to key information that helped them figure out who was behind the murder; and her mother had grudgingly admitted that while she thought her methods were flawed, her deductions were sound, and that she'd never liked Colin Lloyd very much anyway. By that point, their meals had arrived, and they switched to less controversial topics of conversation.
Less controversial, at least, until Joan said, "Tell me more about the man you were with last night. Peter, right?"
Megan's finely-honed sense of exactly what kinds of implications her mother was capable of sliding into the most innocent statements sounded an alarm. "We really do just work together, Mom."
Her mother gave her a completely gormless look that she didn't buy for a second. "Of course."
Megan pushed her salad around her plate for a moment as she debated whether to play along. Eventually, she said, "He used to be a police officer, until he got shot in the shoulder and then transferred to the ME's office. We were partnered about six months ago. He's...annoyingly cheerful. And he always seems to know what's going on in everyone's personal life, even mine, which now that I think about it is irritating as hell." She frowned. "I guess I don't know him very well, really."
Her mother dabbed at her mouth with her napkin before cocking an eyebrow. "Well, have you ever thought about getting to know him better?"
Suddenly she was sixteen again, and her mother was asking what she thought of the Wylands' son, since she was such good friends with John and Harriet, and Timmy was such a nice boy... "Mom!"
Joan picked up her fork, using it to emphasize her points. "Why not? He's certainly attractive. And aside from exercising a bit of poor judgment in helping with your little operation, he seemed like a very nice man." She stabbed her fork in her daughter's direction. "Megan, it's been five years since you and Todd divorced; don't you think it's time you started dating again?"
Megan wondered if steam was actually coming out of her ears. If she took her knife to her mother's throat, it would surely count as justifiable homicide, wouldn't it?
Joan suddenly burst into laughter. "Oh, if you could see your face right now!" She reached across the table and patted her daughter's hand. "Don't worry, darling, I'm just teasing you."
Megan closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Can we change the subject?" she gritted out.
"Of course. Have you heard from Todd recently?"
Megan reminded herself that it would be very bad for her career if her mother wound up on one of her slabs.
As the clock over the door ticked through the evening, first Ethan, then Curtis, then Bud took their leave of the J Bar. Peter remained at the table they'd staked out, ostensibly to finish the beer he'd been nursing for half the night and maybe surreptitiously admire the blonde in the corner for a few more minutes. He wasn't expecting Megan to show up, not when she'd said she was going to dinner with her mother.
Actually, that was a lie. True, he hadn't been expecting—but he had been hoping.
So it was with both surprise and gratification that he saw her walk through the door just as he swallowed the last of his drink. He watched her scan the room for a familiar face, and waved to get her attention. She waved back and headed to his table.
"Am I too late?" she asked when she arrived, putting her hand on the back of Bud's vacated chair.
He smiled. "Not at all."
She pulled out the chair, but didn't sit down. "Everyone's gone."
Feeling as if he were coaxing a scared cat into coming out from under the bed, Peter carefully shrugged. "I'm still here," he said with studied nonchalance.
Megan finally smiled back at him and took the seat. "Yes, you are."
She ordered a bottle of the same local ale he was drinking, which surprised him. He'd taken her for a vodka martini kind of person. "It was my grandfather's favorite," she explained when he said so, after ordering another for himself. "Sometimes I have to remind myself that I don't dislike every member of my family. Just the living one."
"Dinner with your mother didn't go well?"
She sighed. "It went okay, I guess. We're still speaking to each other, anyway, and both of us walked out with all our limbs attached. She just reminded me that there's a reason I don't tell her anything about my personal life. It always comes back to haunt me."
He wondered briefly what it was about her personal life that she'd told her mother. As far as he knew, she didn't really have one.
Deciding it would probably be best not to ask, he changed the subject. "What was your grandfather like?" At her quizzical look, he elaborated, "This is the second time you've mentioned him."
She took a sip of her beer, obviously contemplating how much she wanted to open up to him. He mentally crossed his fingers.
"He was my mother's father," she finally said. "Mom and Dad were always busy with work, so he looked after me a lot until I was old enough to stay home alone. He was a carpenter before he retired, and then he took up gardening. He grew a lot of his own food." A far-away look slipped over her face, perhaps enhanced by the dim lighting of the bar. "He knew every plant that grows around here. The Latin names, too. We'd go for walks in the woods near his house, and he'd teach me the names of every wildflower and tree, and whether you could eat it or use it for furniture or making ink or...any number of things people have used plants for."
Her gaze sharpened then, and she fixed it on him. "Tell me about your sisters."
For a moment, he was baffled by the non sequitur, but then he realized it followed perfectly well; obviously, having divulged something personal about herself, Megan expected the same from him. She'd just bypassed all the little follow up questions and elaborations that smoothed an exchange of information into a conversation.
"All three of them are older than me," he said, deciding to do this on her terms, at least for now. "Hermia's the oldest, then there's Viola, and Juliet's a year older than me." He watched, amused, as Megan's eyebrows arched more and more with each name. "My dad's an electrical engineer and my mom writes greeting cards, but they love Shakespeare. They met when they were both cast in a college production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The girls all go by nicknames."
"How did you escape 'Romeo' or 'Hamlet'?"
This was the moment he always dreaded when getting to know someone. Compared to other kids who'd been through the system, his years bouncing around foster homes hadn't been so bad, but it was still a part of his past he didn't much care to revisit—and people always asked for details. However, any way of answering her question that avoided it would involve telling some kind of falsehood, and he definitely didn't want to lie to her.
"I came with my own name," he said. "I went into the foster system when I was four, and my parents took me in when I was seven. They officially adopted me a few months later."
Megan nodded slowly, obviously turning the information over in her mind. "What happened?"
Long practice had allowed him to whittle the story down to the bare minimum of words required to impart the facts. "Father ran off before I was born. Mother overdosed. She didn't have any living family."
"I'm sorry," Megan murmured.
"Don't be." The words came out more harshly than he'd intended. She was only being polite, after all. He tried to soothe the sting by continuing, "The parents I grew up with were my real parents in every way that mattered. And my sisters were as good to me as you could expect teenaged girls to be to a bratty little brother."
She snickered. "You, a brat? Why does this not surprise me?"
He grinned, knowing she was thinking of all the times he'd pressed her to do something she didn't want to do, like talk about something personal, anything besides work. Since they day they met, he'd been trying to find cracks in the hard shell she'd built up around herself since...maybe her father's death, for all he knew. "Let's just say that Vi still hasn't forgiven me for the time I decided to give all of her Barbies haircuts," he said.
Megan looked pensive. "I did that to one of mine when I was six or seven. Then I used food coloring to dye it green. My mother was horrified."
The mental image of Megan with a homemade punk-rocker doll made him laugh. "You rebel."
"That was nothing compared to the time I set the canopy on fire at the debutante ball she insisted I have when I was seventeen."
He'd been about to take a sip of his beer, and wound up nearly dropping the bottle on the table. That Megan had pyromaniacal tendencies was definitely not something he'd expected to learn tonight.
She laughed at his expression. "It was an accident, although she still grounded me for the rest of the school year." She settled back against her chair, using her hands, and her bottle, to illustrate as she talked. "There were these paper lanterns hanging everywhere at the club, even inside what was basically a canvas tent—honestly, it was an disaster waiting to happen. I was trying to escape this squeaky-voiced eighth-grader who'd been asking me to dance all evening, so I ducked into a corner of the canopy, behind all the food, and pulled this huge potted palm in front of me so I could hide. Only I didn't notice that the fronds were tall enough and stiff enough to crush one of the lanterns up against the wall flap, and the candle stayed lit just long enough to set the canopy on fire." Her voice acquired a hint of smug satisfaction, despite her claim that she hadn't caused the incident deliberately. "Fortunately, the tent wasn't very big and it was set up near the pool, so several people just grabbed it and tossed it in. Fire went right out. As did the party, which was fine with me."
He'd originally been too shocked to laugh, but the image of a flaming party tent being hurled into the swimming pool at the incredibly swanky country club they'd been to last night quickly cracked him up. Only Megan would be pleased that something like that had happened at what he understood was a pretty big deal for girls in the social set she'd grown up in.
"All right, I want to hear more about this bratty kid brother thing of yours," she said when he quieted. He told her about the time when he and Jules, the most tomboyish of his sisters and his sometime companion in arms, had let handfuls of crickets loose in the room Mia and Vi shared, much to the older girls' horror and their parents' consternation. It reminded her of a jar of fireflies Lacey had collected once and then, having forgotten to close the top, accidentally let loose in the house.
With some surprise, and a flicker of pleasure, he realized he was having an actual conversation with Megan Hunt, one that wasn't about work. He hadn't been sure they would ever get to this point.
Apparently, once Megan decided she wanted to get to know someone, she pursued it with the same single-minded focus she used when figuring out how a murder victim had died. He'd known she would be good at it. They wound their way between stories of med school pranks and tales of the more outrageous criminals he'd come across in his years as a patrol officer, favorite movies and favorite ways to spend a Saturday afternoon (reading and watching a football game, respectively), and everything in between. When they wandered onto the topic of music, he found that she liked classical, which he'd guessed, and jazz, which he hadn't. "I like the big band stuff," she said with a little smile. "Back in the nineties, when there was that revival, Todd and I would go out swing dancing when we managed to clear both of our schedules enough. He's a good dancer." It was the first nice thing he'd heard her say about her ex, he realized. He'd sort of been wondering exactly why she'd married him in the first place, though he knew it was really, really not his place to speculate.
He didn't mention the fact that "two left feet" would be a charitable description of his dancing ability, and asked her what her favorite song was.
After what felt like mere minutes but was, he was astonished to find when he glanced at his watch, nearly two hours, they lapsed into silence. They had reached the last swallows of their drinks, and he caught himself staring at her hands as she twirled her beer bottle back and forth on the table. No matter what the paresthesia had done to them, her hands were still surgeon's hands: deft, precise, and always moving. He wondered what they would feel like in his. With a little swell of embarrassment, he dismissed the thought and shifted his gaze.
Abruptly, she spoke again. "So, does this"—she pointed the mouth of her empty beer bottle first at herself, then at him—"mean we're friends now?"
The question was so patently ridiculous that he didn't want to dignify it with an answer. So he turned it back on her. They did that a lot, the two of them. "You can't have forgotten what it's like to have friends."
"You'd be surprised at how few a divorce and a malpractice suit will leave you with."
She looked so sad that he suddenly wanted to take her hand, or maybe give her a hug. Would that be too...the word that came to mind was "forward," from the Jane Austen books his oldest sister loved, and which he'd secretly sort of gotten into when a high school English teacher had assigned Pride and Prejudice.
Whatever it was, it was probably too much, so he kept his hands to himself. But he did ask, "What are you doing on Saturday?"
Megan blinked. He'd obviously caught her off-guard. "Um," she said, her gaze drifting up as she looked at an imaginary calendar. "Lacey has her riding lesson in the morning, but I don't have plans for the afternoon."
"The Museum of Art has a new exhibit on American landscapes. As my friend, would you like to come to it with me?" At her incredulous expression, he rolled his eyes. "Yes, in addition to football, I also like art."
She pressed her lips together in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the grin that broke across her face. "I'd like that. Thank you, Peter."
His smile was no less ebullient. "Any time."
As she unlocked her apartment door, Megan was still smiling. She hadn't been exaggerating to Peter about how little social life she had. This had been the first night in quite some time when she'd spent time with someone to whom she was not related just for fun.
She'd never minded spending the majority of her time alone in her head, and she'd certainly been busy in the past several years, first taking all the courses and exams necessary to switch from neurosurgery to forensic pathology, then throwing herself into her new career. But she knew that much of the brain was wired for social interaction, and she was only human.
And Peter was easy to talk to. Maybe too easy; she found herself opening up to him, telling him the kinds of personal details she rarely mentioned to anyone, even when she started a conversation determined to keep him out. He always managed to find the hidden passage through the barrier she'd built around herself, spiraling like a snail's calcium carbonate shell. It had been a long time since she'd come out of that shell long enough to make a friend, a real friend, on her own. But Peter was persistent; if she wouldn't follow him out, then he'd just curl up in there with her.
She had been content, when she was married, to consider Todd's friends her friends, and hadn't taken the time to get close to anyone else. Todd was the charmer, a necessary quality in the courtroom, and he attracted invitations to drinks or dinners like moths to a porch light. She'd never bothered to learn the art of talking to people, of asking them questions and caring about the answers. Nobody gave a damn if their neurosurgeon was personable as long as she could fix what was wrong, and that suited her just fine. It was only after the dinner invitations and Christmas cards had dropped off after the divorce that she'd realized there was value in actually knowing people, instead of having relationships with them that depended entirely on someone else.
She closed her front door behind her, locking it and then setting her purse and her keys on the table in her hallway. As she walked into the kitchen to get a hangover-preventative glass of water, she recalled the happy glow Peter's eyes had acquired tonight when he talked about his sisters and parents. He was so different from her—so different from anyone she knew, really, with his big family who apparently all still liked each other, and his background on the police force rather than in a courtroom or operating room—that she found herself wanting to know more about him, to continue conversations far past the point where she would have brusquely ended them with others.
Tonight, like a greedy child, she'd asked him everything that came to mind—about his sisters, his favorite music, what he liked about Philadelphia, how he spent his weekends. She'd willingly traded her own answers to those questions, the kinds of things friends knew about each other. Usually it felt like she was giving up pieces of herself when she did that, but somehow, it didn't with Peter. She wanted him to know that she'd spent half her adolescence on the back of a horse (horses, she'd found, were easier to understand than people), that she loved detective novels even though she helped solve murders for a living, that she was an early enough riser to have a favorite breakfast place down the street from her apartment.
She was never, ever telling her mother about tonight. Joan would get entirely too much satisfaction out of it, even if Megan hadn't taken her teasing advice in the way she meant. She and Peter had been just co-workers, and now they were friends. That was plenty—that was wonderful, even. Although perhaps it wasn't completely out of the question that...
Her cheeks reddening, Megan quickly tamped down on that particular bit of late-night presumption, then blamed the fact that it had crossed her mind at all on the beer.
Eyeing the calendar on the wall of her kitchen, she grabbed a pen from her odds and ends drawer and wrote in the block for next Saturday, "Museum of Art, 1 PM. Peter."
It was the only thing written for the entire month, and seeing it there caused a giddy sort of pleasure to fizz through her veins. You are absolutely pathetic, she told herself, but she couldn't really find it in her to care. Practically humming with happiness, she headed for bed.
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Date: 2011-06-05 12:22 am (UTC)Thank you so much for sharing this! I really do appreciate it!
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Date: 2011-06-05 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 01:48 am (UTC)This is such a sweet story, I love the way you write them opening up to each other and both of them putting down a few walls so the other can see inside. Megan with a green-haired Barbie, walking in the woods with her grandfather, or burning down a country club canopy are all very awesome images. And knowing he loves Jane Austen makes me love Peter just a little more, or a lot, since she's one of my favorite authors as well. This story is fantastic : )
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Date: 2011-06-05 04:29 am (UTC)For some reason, that's been part of my headcanon for Peter ever since we found out about the three sisters. (I suppose it was either that or Olga, Maria, and Irina.) I was originally thinking I would make at least one of his parents a Renaissance Lit. professor, but then we saw his old neighborhood and I figured no one would be raising four kids there on a humanities professor's salary. ;)
And knowing he loves Jane Austen makes me love Peter just a little more, or a lot, since she's one of my favorite authors as well.
Hee! I have...well, a tolerate/hate relationship with Austen, in that I sort of enjoyed Emma and don't despise P&P, but Persuasion is second only to Wuthering Heights on a list of novels I hate. But I love the idea of Peter have a secret love for them. I bet he's into a lot of things you wouldn't expect a guy to be into just because he had so many sisters.
This story is fantastic
Thank you! :)