Afterglow

I'm dabbling again... This story is a little temporal and will soon be totally AU, but in the meantime, please enjoy!

Disclaimer: Once again, I find myself not in possession of the characters I write about—clearly I'm just going to have to start writing about my own…

House stared at the blank white ceiling of the tasteful mauve room and sighed. The sex had been good. All right, great.

Actually, it'd been phenomenal; he'd forgotten how terrifying it was to hold on to a woman not obligated to let you. He'd forgotten how the fear hit the stomach with little bolts of electricity that heightened every sensation—the smell of her hair, the taste of her skin, her goose bumps under his fingertips—and sent every firing neuron into overdrive. The pain faded away for a few brief minutes, banished by force of concentration and the prospect of ecstasy.

And then it returned; it always did—the deep dull pain throbbing where there should be nothing to throb. He wanted a Vicodin—he always wanted a Vicodin—but finding the bottle in his jacket pocket would require waking Cuddy to ask where she'd tossed it in their rush to the bedroom, and he wasn't ready to do that yet. For one, he didn't like to invite questions and criticisms about his drug use, particularly while they were both still slightly buzzed on afterglow. Girls tended to frown on that sort of thing, and women with multiple degrees and oodles of protocols on narcotics tended to lecture and threaten to withhold sex. Either way, he wasn't ready to risk waking her.

There was another reason. Eventually she was going to wake up—people do that, major design flaw, in his opinion—and she was going to notice one of two things. The first would be that she'd spent the night with her leg wrapped over his hip and her arm across his chest. The second would be that he hadn't even closed his eyes. The two events would be irrevocably linked in her mind, even though he'd spent thousands of nights memorizing various ceilings the world over and only one deriving guilty pleasure from her soft weight against him. He would never enjoy insomnia again, and she would tell him it was all for his own good. The hell with that. His own good was laying half on top of him cutting off circulation at his hips and making his foot fall asleep, and he liked it that way, damn it.

He sighed and kissed her forehead lightly before resting his cheek against the top of her head. This thing with Cuddy was not going to be easy; it wasn't always going to be fun, either. He was going to drive her away, and she was going to do her best to drive him insane, and somewhere between the two there would be a lot of sex, practical jokes, and Wilson counseling. But above all else, it would be interesting. And he'd spent years pursuing the interesting.

A baby cried in the next room over, causing Cuddy to stir groggily.

"Rachel?" She raised her head, eyes foggy with sleep interrupted, hair partially stuck to her forehead.

House considered the ceiling one last time before sliding out from under her and sitting up on the side of the bed.

"I've got this one. Go back to sleep." He reached for his boxers and pants at the side of the bed and tried not to swear as he pulled them on.

"House?" She woke up a little more as her blurry eyes made out his naked frame hunched on the edge of her bed, memories of the night's activities gradually seeping into her sleep addled brain.

"Yeah. Don't worry, I'm going. Go back to bed—it suits you."

"House," she said sternly, definitely more alert than before, "I can take care of my daughter, you know."

"I know. But tonight, you don't have to. Just don't get used to it." He stood tentatively, wincing as the pain reclaimed its position at the center of his attention. "First things first—do you remember where my jacket ended up in your rush to have your wicked way with me?"

Cuddy thought for a moment, sinking back into the pillows. "Hall table, maybe? Maybe the living room floor? If memory serves, I wasn't the only one in a rush—try to find my bra while you're out there. It's the only front hook I have."

He turned to look at her smile in the diffused moonlight. He face was dark, but she thought she could feel his returning smirk.

"I think I missed that little detail in all the excitement."

She grinned, stretching a little and not bothering to hold on to her sheet. He stepped closer, into the light, his eyes wide. "All the more reason for you to find it, then," she whispered, laughing softly as his eyes narrowed and fixed on her with a look she liked to think of as Satan stoking the fires of hell. Heat practically wafted in the air between them. House was having second thoughts about getting out of bed when Rachel cried again.

Cuddy sighed. "I'll get it."

House shook his head. "No. This one's on me. You get the bra."

Cuddy watched him limp toward the door, bracing himself against the wall as he went.

"I guess I'll get the Vicodin, too."

She heard his muffled voice calling back down the hall. "You are an exceptional woman, Lisa Cuddy, don't ever let me tell you otherwise."

"Like I can stop you," she muttered, easing herself out of bed to pull on a night gown. He would say whatever he damn well pleased, and she would have to do her best to cope with it. On the other hand, there wasn't much he could say that would surprise her now. That wasn't exactly true; he was constantly surprising her, for better and for worse. That was the point, really. She no longer felt surprised to be surprised—she expected it. His unpredictability had become one of the few things she depended on.

House reached the yellow nursery and stepped forward to look into the crib. He had some experience with kids. After med school he'd done a short rotation at a pediatric hospital until he and the hospital director came to the understanding that his talents were best suited elsewhere. It wasn't the kids he'd had a problem with. Surprisingly enough, the kids didn't mind him—a lot of them thought he was one of the funniest doctors they'd ever met. His gruff demeanor and outright abrasiveness apparently had no effect on the little demons who spent so much time in their own realities that they could spot a fellow pretender a mile away. Their parents, on the other hand…

He reached for Rachel and cradled her into his side, rocking her slowly and letting his thoughts wander. The woman he'd slept with—the woman he wanted to continue to sleep with—was a mother. He'd known that before tonight, too, but it seemed much more relevant now that he was holding the spawn to his bare chest.

She breathed quietly, meeting his gaze and making little sucking motions with her mouth. She stuck out a hand, grabbing onto hair in the absence of his shirt and yanking harder than he thought a girl of her age could. He winced slightly, and disentangled her fingers, only to find his finger in her grip instead.

He stopped breathing for a moment—remembering the last baby to grip his finger. Joy: the one that got away.

And now there was Rachel, pulling his finger into her mouth in the hopes of finding what he'd obviously forgotten to offer. He grinned down at her, impressed by her already innate ability to make her desires known and demand they be met. Clearly her mother's daughter.

He turned to head to the kitchen, only to find Cuddy smiling softly in the doorway.

He quickly tucked his own smile away, and scowled to cover his embarrassment. "I think she's hungry."

Cuddy nodded and held out a bottle to him. "Good thing we had the Head of Diagnostics here—I don't know how we'd figure it out."

His scowled deepened. "Well, when the patient only has three functions—"

"And couldn't lie, even if she wanted to."

"It's not hard to deduce the appropriate course of action." He slipped his finger away from her grasp and substituted the bottle in its place, amazed by the ferocity with which she attacked the meal.

"Is she always this hungry?"

"She's pretty much all stomach at this point," said Cuddy, walking over to kiss her daughter's downy head. "She knows what she wants."

Their eyes met over the baby, and House felt the terror creeping back in—the terror of stepping into Cuddy's prefabricated life, with so much already decided and no turning back, and the terror that just when he reached the threshold she'd slam the door right back into his face. It could be painful—very painful. It could be catastrophic and ruin the lives they'd spent years carefully constructing.

But if nothing else, it would be interesting. Interesting got him every time.

"Do you want to hold her?" he asked, breaking the silent tension.

Cuddy smiled and shook her head. "Next time, I will. You two should bond."

"I'm not a bonding kind of guy—bondage we can negotiate, but bonding, no."

She laughed. "Well, when you're done doing whatever you were doing when I came in, I'll be next door—just me, the front-hook, and the Vicodin—in that order. And we can negotiate—bonding."

I won't even pretend to understand the House/Cuddy dynamic or the direction their relationship is taking, but with the current tenor of things, I needed a little fluff. I hope you enjoyed my first romp through House territory, and if you did,you know how to tell me--Review! Thank you :)