Lisa Cuddy's lips tingle as they dry. She can still feel his teeth scraping across her lower lip, sucking it briefly into his mouth before retreating. She can taste his mouth on hers.
The door shuts. She winces.
With a sigh, she heads to bed.
Lisa Cuddy's fingertips are oversensitive as they skim over her nipples, hard with frustration of every sort she can imagine. The touch is familiar, practiced, the weight of years behind it, and behind her thoughts.
She always thinks of House.
No, that's not true. Sometimes she imagines House and Wilson, or House and Amber, or House, Amber, and Wilson. Once, it was Thirteen. Stacy and House both, a few times, when House and Stacy were a couple and she was frustrated on the sidelines (she's pretty sure that Stacy knew how she felt, and is profoundly grateful it was never brought up). But it's almost always House, in some form, and has been since she was twenty and naïve. She feels old thinking of things like that, more than twice the age when she met him, so she ignores the thought and concentrates on her breasts instead.
He kissed her. It wasn't the first time.
The first time Greg House kissed Lisa Cuddy, she was only twenty-one, a recent graduate, and not particularly experienced. He said he was impressed that she had gotten into medical school so easily, since she was clearly dumb as rocks and all heart, and kissed her. He had been gentler, then (physically—he had never, as far as she knew, been gentle emotionally). His hands skimmed over her breasts and down to her skirt.
She slides her own hands over her breasts and down to her pajama pants. Quickly, she has them off—almost as quickly as he had her skirt off. Her knickers are practical, now, cotton and plain. At twenty-one, she wasn't wearing any knickers at all.
He had liked that, an appreciative noise escaping his throat, and leaned forward to brush her clit with his thumb, like she does now. The angle is different, all wrong to recreate events from half a lifetime ago, but it will do for now. He probably doesn't fuck like that anymore, anyway. He kisses differently.
It doesn't take long, everything familiar and safe and lonely, to come. Lonely.
Lisa Cuddy's cheeks are not tearstained on Monday when she arrives at work. She considers this to be a great triumph, as she has spent the weekend crying, unable to stop after coming, alone in her bed and with the taste of House's mouth still on her lips. Nothing is how she planned or hoped when she was twenty. She had imagined a partner, a child, back then. Both have been taken from her this weekend.
Greg House had left Lisa Cuddy the next morning, with protests that he had to go, despite her naked state. She nodded, pretending to understand. He said it couldn't work. Something about her being too smart to be held back by a relationship, how she needed to be able to concentrate on her career without distractions. He pretended not to notice as she cried, sitting on the toilet, but the look he gave her when she came out of the bathroom (despite washing her face and ridding all evidence, she was sure) told her all she needed to know.
House doesn't look at her when he comes into work a few hours later, though she's just on the other side of the clinic doors and staring at him, trying to be covert and failing miserably. She sighs, and decides it's a good thing. He could always tell when she had been crying.