By Lauren S
Valentine's Day has arrived, that most infamous of holidays that people either celebrate in an over-the-top fashion or go out of their way to insist they don't care about. Or, here at the hospital, some actively try to ignore it. In that category we have Owen and Cristina; he's not just ignoring Valentine's Day, but ignoring his wife altogether. She finally gears herself up to tell him she deserves to be back on Teddy's service again and is shocked when he agrees to it almost immediately, though it seems that might be because he finds that preferable to having to carry on an actual conversation with her. As she starts to walk away, a van plows into the ER (a flower delivery van, no less) and Owen instinctively dives across its path to push Cristina out of the way. Once he establishes that she is okay, though, he goes back to not talking to her until he, Teddy and Cristina have to perform a surgery together. It's about as uncomfortable as you'd imagine. Things get even worse afterward, though, when he and Cristina have to ride the elevator together and he tells her that he's moving out. You can actually see her heart break and the effort it takes her not to completely fall apart at the news. Afterward, he tries to talk to Teddy because if nothing else he needs a friend, but she turns on him and yells at him that she wishes he had died instead of Henry, and that they will never, ever be friends again. Later, she complains to Cristina about him, wondering how he could possibly expect her not to hate him. It winds up being sadly parallel to what is going on with Cristina and Owen, and at the end of the night Cristina finds Owen having some quiet time standing over the air duct. She swallows all of her pride and pleads with him not to hate her, and he at least doesn't yell at her or kick her out of the room, so it's a start of sorts.
All of the patients of the week are Valentine-related, and the cutest is a little girl brought in with a horrible peanut allergy -- she ate a chocolate from the boy who likes her that she didn't realize had nuts in it. The boy's mom is the one to bring her to the hospital and she and her son wait there until the girl's mom arrives, and the son has the little girl hold his hand and squeeze it any time she needs to. When her mom arrives she flips out and completely blames the other mom for what happened, and creates quite a scene yelling at them to go. The little boy refuses, so Alex tells him that he will be there when the girl wakes up and will tell her whatever message the boy wants to give. He winds up sweetly reading a note that the boy had dictated, that ends romantically by saying that he doesn't care which of them gave the other head lice since at least they had it together. (No, seriously, it's actually extremely cute.)
Callie has a surprise planned for Arizona but with all the hints she drops about it, Arizona thinks they are going camping and she's dreading it. However, she wants time alone with Callie no matter what so she tries to get Mark to babysit. Eventually the two play rock-paper-scissors to see who has to watch Sofia. Mark loses, but it's just as well since Julia winds up having to cancel on him because of work and he and Lexie wind up eating the chocolates he bought while hanging out at the hospital. Later, Lexie has a revelation after watching a patient die that she wants to at least admit her feelings to Mark. She packs up Zola and takes her over to his apartment, but when she arrives it turns out Jackson has beaten her there. He bribes Mark with steak and good wine to help him study for his Boards. When Lexie sees him she tries to backtrack but Mark has her come in and join them, so she winds up spending her Valentine's night with both of her exes and two babies. The night turns out great for Arizona and Callie, though -- Callie fakes Arizona out by taking her up to Derek's trailer and acting like they really are just camping. But it turns out she's set up the inside like a love nest complete with tons of candles, wine, scarves draped everywhere, and even some fancy jeweled light fixture over the bed, and she points out to Arizona that she knows she hates actual camping. The two of them then get down to business and I just hope they don't knock over any of those candles.
Meredith and Derek are having an issue of their own, which is that Meredith sees Zola everywhere in the house and it's killing The Mood for her. She and Derek run around like giggling teenagers trying to find a spot in the house where they can get down to getting it on, but they are thwarted at every turn. Once Meredith goes to work she and Bailey get totally absorbed with a patient who has been having seizures -- they figure that she has to have some particular type of tumor and eventually figure out it must be on one of her ovaries. Unfortunately for the woman, they have to take out an ovary and have it tested to see if the tumor is there, and this runs a pretty decent risk of them just sterilizing the poor girl for no reason. After lots of waiting, though, it turns out that they were right, and there was much celebrating throughout the land. Because it was such a tricky case, though, it took all day and into the evening and Bailey had to keep pushing her dinner plans with Ben. He tells her he can move the time around because he's got "connections," but she ends up busy until well past dinnertime. She's saved from being any later by Richard, who went home to celebrate his anniversary with his wife but when he got there, she didn't recognize him. They had dinner anyway and she seemed quite interested in getting to know him better, but he decided just to head back to work instead and he takes a surgery from Bailey so that she can finally meet up with Ben.
She runs into him in the hospital, seemingly looking for her, and immediately gets defensive that she's been saving lives and he can't get mad about that keeping her late, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Finally, she realizes he's still dressed for a date, and he leads her into the cafeteria which he has set up with a gorgeous, fancy, romantic dinner for two complete with smiling waiter to pour them champagne. He tells her sweetly that he knows her well enough to realize that she was never going to be able to make a dinner reservation, so he started planning weeks before to bring the romantic dinner to her. And while they are enjoying that romantic dinner, Mere and Derek make it home and manage to run upstairs and fit in some lovin' before all of the baby toys kill the mood again.