An early Thursday evening and the Fellows were seated, relaxing, at the conference table. Taub and Kutner sipped at their late-afternoon coffees, while Thirteen absently moved a bottle of spring water back and forth on the table top between her hands.
Foreman was standing in the doorway, shrugging into his wool topcoat. "Really good work, guys," he nodded at Thirteen, "and girl. Unless we get a new case tomorrow, it will be clinic duty or clean up."
House stumped past him and into the room, eyes intent on the Racing Sheets he held in one hand, but he looked up briefly. "It was a good week. Genetic predisposition notwithstanding. Hereditary neurological conditions always leave me wanting to play the horses. The odds, you know." He tossed the sheets down on the table, bent over them and turned to Thirteen, "Got a quarter?"
"Of what?" she asked and he smiled shrewdly at her nodding and pointing a finger. A ghosting of suspicion danced across her face, she answered, "No."
"Munchies again, House?" Kutner asked, leaning back and fishing a quarter out of a front pocket. He tossed it to the diagnostician.
House caught the quarter and reached for the pencil behind his ear, making an elaborate show of licking the end and holding it poised over the sheets. "One dollar trifecta box betting. Means I choose three horses in any order. Thirteen, it's your odds that are going to make this thing work. Call it in the air." He tossed the coin and caught in the same hand. "Well?"
Thirteen sat silent, the water bottle stilled, both palms flat and open on the surface of the table. Her face was hard and closed, her eyes stony.
"Oh, don't be like that," House exclaimed. "C'mon, I'm just asking for a bit of your fifty/fifty odds. Help me pick some horses." He looked at her imploringly, but with a smirk.
"I don't think you're funny," she said quietly. "As a matter of fact, I think you're an ass."
Taub stood quickly and undraped his jacket from the chair back. He nodded at the room and walked to the door, stopping beside Foreman. Foreman shook his head at House. He raised his hand briefly to the other two and left with Taub.
"I don't get it," Kutner said. He looked back and forth between the two doctors, their gazes locked fiercely on each other. "Why don't I get what's happening?"
Thirteen closed her eyes slowly, breathed in, then turned to him. "House is making a bad joke at my expense. It's no big deal, not even worth explaining."
"Seems like a big deal," Kutner said, shrugging.
"Only to Thirteen apparently," House said then tossed the coin again. "She's got a genetic predisposition that is absolutely fifty percent yes or fifty percent no, so if I combine those odds with the one in two odds of the coin toss, for or against each one of these names," he jabbed at the Racing Sheets with the pencil, "combined with trifecta betting not requiring the horses to be placed in order, I'm thinking that the mathematical odds of picking three winners out of the field really will be stripped down to utter
chance. No mistakes, no partiality, no subconscious preference, no," a mock shiver directed at Thirteen, "luck. A true fifty/fifty odds."
Thirteen stood, furious. "House, you're pushing me on purpose. Why?"
"Boredom?" He flipped the coin onto the back of his hand, still covered. "Heads or tails? Heads yes? Tails no? This horse? That horse? CAG repeats?"
Kutner startled. "CAG repeats?" he asked. "Are you talking about frameshift mutations in the DNA? Degeneracy of the code?" He turned, wide-eyed to his colleague, "You do have Hunting…."
Thirteen turned on him, interrupting him with a hand motion. "Please. Leave."
"Uh, okay." He stood. "See you both tomorrow."
Slowly House straightened to his full height, the coin loose in his palm now, the pencil tossed onto the sheets. He turned his gaze on her, curious and a bit wary, bending his head down and away from the anger and hurt in her eyes. "I've been trying to get you alone for weeks now." He leered. Her face remained impassive. He lifted one broad shoulder. "Knowledge is power," he said quietly, the words laced with a kind of apology.
"Ignorance is bliss."
"Do you really believe that?"
"No. But I also don't believe that knowledge is power. What kind of power? Who wields it and over whom or what?"
"How about you wield it over your ignorance."
She smiled bitterly, looking down, and shook her head. She looked up at him again, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. With a quick movement, she was out the door.
He followed behind, watching her walk away from him with her purposeful, angry steps. He stood for a moment, admiring the feline grace of her retreat, then limped after in pursuit. He rounded the corner and slowed his pace; she was leaning against the wall, beside the janitor's closet, arms crossed, shoulders shaking, head down.
"But that doesn't interest you, does it?" His voice rang out in the empty corridor. "Wielding the power of knowledge over your ignorance. You really don't want to know. And I don't understand that."
She let her hands fall to her sides, her voice a defeated whisper. "It's that not understanding part that makes you act this way, isn't it? It makes you crazy, because you don't understand, you don't agree with my reasoning behind not wanting to know. What kind of bullshit is that, House? What gives you the right to injure me because you don't understand my motivation? We're different." She turned her wet face up towards him.
"I want to understand," he said quietly.
"There is no power in that knowledge because Huntingtons is not curable. Not curable. See? And so the knowledge you want me to gain through pre-symptomatic testing wouldn't be power it would be," she looked down at her hands, "destruction. It would be powerless."
"Powerlessness," he corrected her. She glared at him and he moved in closer. "And couldbe, not would be. Necessarily. But if there were advances, a possible treatment, tell me you would be interested in knowing. Then."
"Possibly."
He looked at her harder, under lowered brows, tilting his head down. He reached out a deliberate hand to her face and gently used his fingertips to dry beneath one eye. She stood surprised, leaning in towards him, then away.
"Okay. Yes," she said definitively, stuffing both hands into the back pockets of her slacks. "Yes, House. I don't have a death wish, if that's what you're asking. Some knowledge can be power."
"What knowledge?" His voice was soft between them. "What power?" He reached out again, with the edge of his knuckle, and followed the trail of a tear from the inside corner of her eye down the fine line of her nose and off the edge of her upper lip.
She pushed herself away from the wall and very nearly against his chest. "Are you talking about the knowledge I have about how you feel? About me?"
He stilled at once. Then pulled his hand away from her face and pressed it flat against his belly, as though he'd been hit. Neither one of them breathed out, lungs filling, mouths parsed open, eyes wide and searching.
He opened his mouth to speak and she shushed him with two fingers on his lips, shaking her head, one brow arching, a slight tugging at the corners of her own lips. "How much do you want me? How often do you dream of me? How long can you be in the same room with me before you begin imagining me in your bed?"
She had moved in closer, into his chest. Her breath brushed across his jaw, his neck, down into the open collar of his shirt. He lifted one hand to his mouth and pushed the tips of her slim fingers between his lips and sucked. She smiled, slow and seductive. Leaning up into him to whisper, "And if I know those things then what power does that knowledge give me?" She fed another finger between his lips, her eyes shuddering closed as he slipped the tip of his tongue between each one. "House?"
He glanced quickly down the corridor, then over his shoulder behind him. He looked into her face, her eyes were hooded, her lips bowed open and his spine trilled an electric current down the length of it. He bent closer to her, "I've got it on good authority that this janitorial closet is a prime rendezvous spot, although, admittedly, I've not used it for any tryst of my own."
She took his hand in hers, then turned and led them both through the door and into the dark, narrow space.
He shut the door behind him, leaned against it, cane clattering at their feet and he reached out and pulled her by the hips up against him. Hard. She gasped. But ran both her hands up, under his t-shirt, over his shoulders, over his head, helping him shrug out of the shirt and the sloppy oxford and the suit coat.
He shook his hands free of the sleeve ends of his garments. "Are we going to do this au natural, then? I mean, it is pitch black in here. Doesn't make much difference."
In the dark, her hands reached out for him, smoothing over his ribs, skimming across his belly, back up, opened palm and pinching at his nipples, eliciting a small curving groan from him, then under his arms and around his back.
"It makes a difference." She pulled herself against him and her own blouse was gone, his hands on her shoulders, she was clad only in a satin bra, the warmth of her skin matching his own heated flesh and he wrapped his arms around her. He slid his hands down her back, around to where his thumbs could brush under the perfect weight of her breasts, flat palmed down her sides, fingertips nesting into the waistband of her slacks. He grunted and she smiled against his mouth. "Let's get out of these," she whispered.
His eyes rolled heavily beneath his closed lids at the sound of the hoarseness in her voice, at the intent of the words. He felt her unclasping the metal tab on her slacks, his hands on hers, then she pushed his hands at the button fly of his jeans and he quickly petaled them open as she bent over in the dark and pulled them over his hips and pushed the material gently, gently down the long length of his thighs. The cool air on his heated cock caused another jolt to trill up and down his spine and when she used both hands to cup the hard length of him, he groaned out her name. But then her mouth was there, the wet heat of her tongue laving him, the delicious popping sound of her lips as she fellated him. He pressed his shoulders hard against the door, bending his knees around her body, holding his breath, lips curled in tight under his teeth.
He reached down for her, pulling her up into his arms, rocking her against him, holding fast, his cock nudged tightly against the sharp edge of her hipbone. He squeezed his eyes shut and mentally began listing in reverse alphabetical order treatable neuropathies. But then she had her mouth on his neck, open lipping along the strong cording of tendons and jugular, dipping with the tip of her tongue between the bow of his clavicles, up to grab and hold his earlobe between her teeth. He felt her move up on tiptoe, and she took his entire ear into her mouth, sloping her tongue down into the whorl of it and the surface of his skin goose fleshed and he moaned out.
"House," her voice was a hot liquid in his ear, "I think we're going to need some light."
Nodding in the dark, he reached over to toggle on the light switch and silently thanked hospital budgeting that the bulb was a compact fluorescent, slowly warming to a dimmed yellow, casting them both in a tawny translucent warmth. She was hurriedly clearing a space on a narrow work counter top and when she turned back to him, hiking herself up onto its surface, he saw that her pupils were shot and he moved towards her, between her open knees. He took her face in his hands and kissed her deeply, hungrily. Then he brought his right hand down and splayed his fingers wide beside her leg and leaned his full weight on that arm, supporting himself as he let her reach down between their bodies and guide him into her, scooting forward as he drove forward. She wrapped her leg around his good leg, her left hand circling his right wrist loosely, feeling the tension and strength in his forearm muscles. Her
right hand at his hip, urging, urging, urging him to her. And she dropped her head back and he was staring down into her beautiful face, into her eyes, the incredible shape of her eyes as she stared back into his. She drew her lower lip in beneath her white teeth and smiled at him. Aching, aching. He snaked his free hand around her thin waist, held her tightly across the span of her lower back, rocked her with him.
"House," she moaned.
He kissed her quiet, swallowing his name. Slowly, he eased into a rhythm that she matched, arching her back beneath his hand as he slid it upwards, fingers in the well of her spine, catching in the triangle of her shoulder blade, tangling in her dark locks, cupping her head as she let go, eyes slipping closed, mouth parsing open beneath his. His weight still on his right arm, he could feel his bicep trembling.
And he pulled her head against his collarbone, held her face tightly against his flesh, felt her hot breath escape in gasps over his heart. Thumping, thumping, thumping out her name.