Three women, standing in the dark, a spotlight on each. Accentuating the lines of their faces, the shadows beneath their breasts, the planes and hollows of their bodies. I study each of them. Take my time in choosing.
The first is a little like Cuddy in build - tall, taller still in her three-inch red heels. Long legs, strong thighs, short black skirt. Long, dark hair.
The second is petite. Slender. A redhead. So delicate that it would be easy to break her with rough handling.
The third is curvy, buxom, with ebony skin. Eyes that dare you to climb on top of her. Boobs that would jiggle like jellies when you rode her.
I can't seem to decide. I study their faces closely. Run a hand over the hip of the redhead. Get down to my knees so that I can smell the arousal of the curvy one.
All the time I monitor the reaction in my crotch.
I'm disappointed.
This isn't working. I need to be...
In the clinic. On a Saturday. No case - I'm bored. I'm playing with Hotwheels cars.
A girl walks in. Barely some states. Definitely legal in Britain.
Blonde hair, angel face, large eyes. Breasts that are just deciding how big they want to be, gathered into a Minnie mouse t-shirt, just a little too tight. No bra.
Generous hips, slim waist, pale skin. Arms a little too long. Legs a little too expressive mouth, wet 's wearing white shorts, and her legs are shaved. Inexpertly - there is a cut just above her right knee from a Ladyshave razor.
Perfect.
'What seems to be the problem?'
She sits on the exam table without invitation, and blushes from her chest to her forehead.
"I...'
'What?' I feign impatience. I could distract myself forever with the look of her brand new breasts, her air of self-conscious sexuality.
'I asked for a woman doctor,' she says, swinging her legs, half nonchalantly, half nervously. She is wearing scuffed blue sneakers and short white socks. Her voice trembles.
'Want me to go back out and put on a wig?' I lean against the cabinets opposite the exam table. I am already hardening in my pants. I don't attempt to hide it, as she's not looking at me.
'It's embarrassing,' she says. 'Personal.'
She bites her lip. Now she looks at me. Her gaze lingers briefly at my crotch before skipping upward to my eyes. I can see curiosity there. .
'Don't you worry,' I say. 'You can trust me. I'm here for you. It'll all be okay. The sun'll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun.'
She looks surprised. Indignant. Perhaps a little impressed.
'Feel ready to tell me what the problem is now,' I ask, 'or should I go on with the meaningless platitudes?'
Her shoulders hunch. Her upper lip is sweating.
'You haven't got a tampon stuck somewhere, have you?'
'No,' she says. 'I've been using tampons for years. I'm not a child.'The fact that she feels compelled to say this might disprove it.
'Then by all means, bare your pubescent soul to me.'
Now she looks me directly in the eyes.
'I'm having problems. When I... You know. When I try to...'
'...Try to?'
'You know. By myself.'
Oh.
'How old are you?'
'Eighteen.'
She is eighteen. I believe her. Probably. Possibly. She is.
She might not be.
No. She is.
She looks down shyly but meaningfully at her 'below parts.'
I don't make a crude comment. The hesitancy and hedging is appealing.
'The thing is,' she says, 'is that I want to. But I'm not sure... I've never been sure...'
I feel myself grow harder. My palms begin to tingle. Grow hot.
'Where to find an instruction manual?' I ask. I wet my own lips.
She nods.
'I've tried,' she says. 'It feels good.' She draws in a shaky breath. 'It feels okay. But I'm sure I'm not doing it right. At the end... Well. I guess there is no end. I feel like there should be something at the end. But I can never get there. I feel like I'm missing something. Something that I should've figured out by now.'
'Does it bother you, talking to an older man about this?' My voice is lower than I intend it.
She looks at her feet.
'You're a doctor,' she says, softly.
'But I probably remind you of your father.'
She is silent for a moment.
'Yes,' she says, at last. 'You do.'
'And you want me to...'
'...Show me. Show me how to touch myself.'
Dammit.
This isn't working.
It's tried and tested. Maybe I've tried and tested it a few too many times. I use different girls, sometimes. This young blonde's a fairly new invention.
The Minnie Mouse t-shirt used to thrill me to the core. The scenario's losing its lustre. I need to be...
In my apartment. Late on a Tuesday through a bottle of Macallan, all the way through a large sized pizza, sated with food and drink. Waiting on the hooker that I called half an hour ago.
When she gets there, I open the door to her, and spend a long while just looking at her.
She is an amalgam of my three favourite hookers. Real people. I chop them up and sew them together like Frankenstein until I make myself the perfect mate.
Boobs and eyes from Cherry - fake breasts, but they look real. Blue eyes, mischievous, non-committal. Hips from her, too. Hips you can dig your fingers into. She told me once that she killed her husband (self-defence during abuse – she didn't even get jail time), but doesn't talk much, usually. I take this trait, too.
Legs from Barbie, long but curvaceous, and her oddly appealing asymmetrical smile.
Enthusiasm and willingness from Lacey, who's not quite as jaded as the others. Fairly new to , but not annoyingly 'll let you do it in either orifice.
My Perfect Hooker has a little black bag, and I know she's brought what I asked for. Not a filthy costume. Nothing to tie her up with or beat her to strap to her hips and roger me with.
Strange enough though, in its own way.
She is tall. Wearing a pencil skirt and a white blouse .Glasses, as I requested. Now and again I find glasses oddly appealing.
I take her straight to the bedroom. Point to the armchair, where she drops the bag. I get onto the bed, on my back, pull my pants and underwear down, take out my cock, begin to tug at it. Nod to the bag, and she reaches for it, popping open the clasp at the top.
'Take it out,' I say. 'Take it out and bring it over here. But don't...'
This is not working.
I've taken too much Vicodin. I'm not even sure I'm in the mood. But I'll never sleep. I'll never sleep, if I don't do this.
I am... I am...
Christ, I am...
Back in that bar with my first again. Underage drinking, drunk underage, my head swimming with Martini - it seemed like the thing to drink at seventeen - underwater in a sea of gin and vermouth, my nose and eyes filled with it, her round, translucent baby face bobbing and undulating before me like a jellyfish. Laughing. The sharp painful desperate feeling in my pants that I'll never feel again, quite that sharply or painfully. My erection straining upward inside my jeans to touch the underside of the table. Dragging her by her clammy hand to the toilets, the faint sound of Tom Petty trickling in through the crack in the door, in the cubicle, her hand unzipping me, taking hold of me, the sweat on her fingers, looking down at the head of my cock, leaking steadily, strings of fluid stretching, growing too heavy and snapping, the look of mild disgust on her face, the feeling of exposed, elated mortification, the...
This isn't working.
I'm on my stomach, on my bed, and my head is between Cuddy's legs. She sits propped against the headboard, and she is dressed like this: white shirt, open all the way down, red bra, undone at the back but still hanging there, still covering her breasts, still teasing me. Hair mussed. Nothing on the bottom half.
I am between her legs, and they are spread wide. My palms rest against her inner thighs. I am peripherally aware that somewhere above me, she is moaning, she is squirming, she is humming low in her throat with the pleasure I'm giving her. I don't care. This is incidental. I am doing this for me.
I am aware, acutely and amazingly, of her cunt.
Of every small detail of it.
Of the vinegar and maple syrup smell of it. Of the sharp, sweet, rich, foul, delicious, tempting, stomach-churning taste of it. The slippery, filthy, leaking moisture of it. The fact that the left labia minora is slightly larger, slightly more ragged-edged than the right.
She is shaved. Entirely. Though she must have shaved this morning, for her skin stands up in the tiniest and subtlest of bumps, just the suggestion of burgeoning hair follicles ready to birth stubble. And in fact, there is a patch of stubble, in the crease of her right thigh, where she hasn't shaved quite as closely. The size of a postage stamp. Rough like sandpaper, and a little red-raw.
She's a raw, ripe red. Sun blush, I think, on the Dulux colour chart.
I am eating her. Messily. A kid with his head in a dirty ice cream bowl. She is all over my face, slick on my cheeks and chin, I am soaked in her smell, my fingers are sticky - I don't know if I'll ever be clean again.
I suck the taste of her from my bottom lip, press my right thumb just above the hood of her clitoris. And out pops her clit, swollen and glistening, the size of a pine nut, flushed an embarrassed pink. I stiffen my tongue into a point, lick at it ever so carefully. Moisten my tongue, and do it again.
Somewhere above me she keens. I don't care.
I trace a path with my tongue from her clit down to her hole, and I know I'll find it freshly wet with more for me to lick, more for me to turn my face into, spread across my cheeks, dip my nose into.
I've done this. Though this is not a memory. I can take this wherever I want.
If I want to open my mouth and kiss her like I'd kiss her mouth, I can. If I want to focus tightly on her clit for several moments, circling it firmly and purposefully with my tongue-tip, I can. If I want to then abandon it and push my face into her, opening my mouth, pressing the flat of my tongue against the whole of her, bathing, wallowing in sex smell, then I can.
And I think I am enjoying this. I think I might just finish this way.
Until suddenly, before I know it...
...I'm standing on the upper level of the hospital, looking down at the main concourse - the pulse of people coming and going.
I unzip my trousers and push them to my knees, take out my prick from my underwear and begin to pull on it, right there, where everyone can see.
It takes a few moments for the first people to notice me, but then the murmur of excitement and shock reverberates quickly through the crowd, echoes, bounces back and forth like sonic waves until the entire concourse is looking at me.
I feel their eyes on me. Their horror, their indignation, their disgust, their arousal washes over me, musky and hot, like the smell of a woman's crotch, and I tug on myself harder.
I'm stiff, rigid and hot. I don't know why. But I am. The air conditioners breathe gently, coolly, onto my damp, circumcised glans.
I run my thumb over the tip of it, and shiver.
And somewhere down in the crowd, though I have closed my eyes, I know there is Wilson.
Horrified, indignant, disgusted and of my for at my behaviour. On the verge of charging up the stairs and stopping me. But he doesn't.
He just stands and watches.
And then...
We are in Wilson's hotel room.
The smell of Chinese takeaway suffocating on the floor with our backs to the sofa. Legs stretched out in front of us, my right leg propped up on a cushion. He is crunching on a fortune cookie. The hard floor is hurting the bones beneath my buttocks.
He changes the channel to XXX Babes Uncensored.
'She would get it,' says Wilson.'The dark-haired one. With the good dental work and D-sized boobs.' He is relaxed. Limp with beer and scotch, his tongue loose. We can say things like this to each other, in moments like these.
'Yeah,' I say. 'Yeah.I'd give her one.'And I would. I know he would. I know that no one has touched Wilson for as long as no one has touched me. I know because we are spending all of our nights together, like it was just after he started working at Princeton. Like it was after Stacey left. Like it has been, in between the wives and the dying women and the random conquests. We are in each other's space every free minute, at work, at his place or mine.
We are under each others' skin again.
'Don't start masturbating on my couch, House,' he says, his voice thick and ominous.
'I'm not on your couch,' I say.
...
The clinic girl pulls down her white shorts and panties, hoisting up her buttocks from the exam table, making the green paper rustle and crunch. I wheel my chair forward until Minnie mouse stares me in the face.
'Show me how you've been doing it, then,' I say.
Slowly, she spreads her legs. I watch her labia peel apart like a wound in the wake of a scalpel. Inside she is almost red as blood. Fresh as meat just slaughtered. And her smell, too, is fresh. Not clean - pungent. The smell of something strong and delicious just cracked open, before the intensity dissipates and the air begins to oxidise it. Like a jar of olives with the lid just popped. Or a clove of garlic just crushed.
'Dr. House...' she says, and just the sound of my name, my qualification, in that young, terrified tone is enough to make my breath grow laboured, my face feel hot.
She puts her fingers down there, and uses the index fingers to spread herself even wider, and then she draws her middle finger carefully up from her opening towards the apex of her crack. She stops, though, before she reaches her clitoris.
'Am I doing it wrong?' she asks.
'Somewhat,' I reply.
Wilson walks in without knocking. His expression is more astonished than I have ever seen it. I should be amused, but I am not.
'Oh my God. Oh my God. House,' he says. He takes in the scene. The girl with her legs spread, her hands on herself. My flushed face.
My mouth is watering.
'What?' I ask impatiently.
'What in the hell are you doing?' he says.
I can't explain myself. Instead I ask, just as angrily,
'What in the hell are YOU doing here?'
He doesn't seem to know.
...
He swallows the fortune cookie and looks intently at the TV screen. I can hear his laboured breath in the darkness, even over the laboured breath of the writhing men and women on the screen.
'Are you turned on?' he asks. He is so close to me. Leaning back against the front of the couch, right beside me. He is still wearing his work shirt. The warmth of his right arm radiates through the cotton where it touches my left elbow.
'Yeah,' I reply, softly.
'Yeah,' he says, distractedly. 'Me too.'I look at him. His profile illuminated by the filth glowing in front of us. 'Oh Christ, House,' he says. 'If I touched myself right now, would you kill me?'
...
I am balls deep in the curvy woman. Her breasts are jiggling like jelly as I ram into her. She is moaning continuously, her pitch rising as I push forward and dropping as I pull back. She sounds like an ambulance siren. Our skin slaps together with wet, unclean smacks. I press my face into her damp cleavage. She squeezes her boobs to press against my ears, which I find momentarily comforting. I pull back and just look at her breasts - their fullness, their ripeness, their fat, healthy, burgeoning bulk. I take handfuls of them. Dig in my fingers repeatedly, squeezing and relaxing. Feel her nipples jab by palms. I bend forward and suckle on the left one. Drawing on her nipple with long, hungry tugs, until it touches the back of my palate, way back, towards my idea of nub of her atop that large tight globe of a and like a raspberry, sweet and substantial in my mouth. And I want to suck on it, because I remember how it felt - that deep-buried, hardwired human instinct to attach your lips to the teat of your...
'Good baby,' she croons. 'Good baby. Good boy.'
...
My face is so slick with Cuddy's wetness that I am growing wonderfully uncomfortable - just below my nose, beneath my chin, it begins to dry - I feel it crack as I open my mouth wider.
I pull back, so that I can say it - so that it feels real.
'Mm. God you've got a beautiful cunt.'
And I lurch up and kiss her mouth, rub the wetness from my bristles onto her smooth cheeks with relish.
...
Wilson's fist flies like lightning over his cock. It glistens wet in the low light. His legs are splayed apart on the floor, the right knee bent. He cants his hips up into his hand. His face is twisted into a grimace of ecstasy.
His eyes are closed, but he radiates embarrassment. It seems to wrestle with his lack of control, his hand slowing and speeding, his movements alternately tense and abandoned.
'House,' he says, 'Ah.' He lets out a strange, choked sound. He is sweating. I can see it. I can smell it. 'If I asked you to... Would you kill me if I... Asked you to help me?'
...
The hooker climbs onto the bed between my knees.
'That's it,' I say, pulling her towards me with my hands on her hips.
'How do you want me to do this?'
'Just... Hold it against my temple,' I say, as I pull her down on top of me and slide inside of her in one smooth motion. She isn't tight, but she isn't too loose, either. She just sheathes me, holds me like a loose fist, as she presses the cool barrel of the gun to my left temple. It isn't a real gun. At least, I don't think it is. I'm not one-hundred percent sure.
I imagine. I imagine a bullet sinking into the soft moist matter of my brain, as I begin to move inside her soft moist centre. Lodging in intruding. Crashing the party and creating all sorts of havoc. Not. be there.
...
I am buried inside Wilson. Buried deep inside of him, and he is making sounds so deep and so desperate that I worry for him. His heat and his tightness and the odd, thick, unpleasant, intoxicating smell of the activity are so awful, so novel, so bad. I pull out a little, and we make an obscene sucking noise between us, where am sunk inside of him. It thrills me, and I push back in. Soon I am pistoning in and out of him with abandon. He grunts, and so do I. 'Oh House,' he says, unromantically. Angrily. Amazedly. As I clutch at his hair and then his shoulder and draw my fingers hard through the sweat on his back down to the cleft of his buttocks, where I press my thumb, hard, drawing tiny rough circles on the flesh there.
...
'You want to touch just a little higher - here,' I say. I lick the pad of my right thumb and lie it against her clitoris, and she mewls, full of awe as I begin to move my thumb in slow, deliberate circles. I can see her small, hard nipples peak behind Minnie Mouse's eyes.
'Oh,' she says, 'Oh, oh. Oh.'
'House, you're insane,' says Wilson, but he takes a seat and watches.
I lick my thumb again and put it back on her. She is flushed, glowing, amazed. I suck my other thumb into my mouth and then slowly slide it inside of her crack, revolving it gently, in slow circles, opposite to those I make on her clit with my other thumb. I watch her genitals engorge and the pad of my thumb – the thumb I have inside her – grow wrinkled with moisture.I look at her face - her wide eyes, the revelation of pleasure. I rub in smaller, tighter circles with a little more pleasure, and at last, her head snaps forward, her chin hitting her chest with some force, a loud, astonished breath of air exploding from her, almost like a sneeze.
Wilson puts a hand on my shoulder.
'You're insane, House,' he says.
...
I have finally lost it. All sense of reality, all semblance of civility, all ability to relate to my peers, friends, acquaintances, strangers.
There is no need for self-control, any more.
My hands are trapped before me in one white sleeve, strapped to the back of the jumpsuit. My palms cup my elbows. One large, anonymous man holds each of my biceps, and they manhandle me down a sterile corridor, as I scratch and bite, struggle and kick, laugh and scream.
They throw me into a small room – the walls are all cushioned. I fall down onto the cushioned floor – I'm never going to sit again. Sitting is for sissies. I can do whatever I want. I shout my throat hoarse, and then laugh uproariously for a while. A song worms its way into my head – something by Tom Waits, and I sing it. I toss myself onto my front and rub myself against the floor until I'm hard, and I think of whatever I want to think of. men. Inanimate objects. I simply don't care anymore, and it simply doesn't matter. I can come to whatever I God damn want to.
...
'House,' he asks, as I feel myself close to coming. 'Have you ever talked dirty to anyone?'
'Does the Pope shit in the woods?' I ask.
'No,' says Wilson, breathless, his voice almost inaudible, from where his chin is tucked against his chest, his head almost hitting the television cabinet with each of my hard, insistent thrusts. 'I don't think he does.'
I don't know if I can find the breath to speak.
'What do you want me to say?' I ask.
'Something – I don't know,' he says, and I see his left hand disappear beneath him to tug on himself. 'Something about what we're doing.'
'You're touching yourself, aren't you?' I ask.
'Yes,' he says. 'Yes – like that.' Though I hadn't meant the remark as dirty talk – it was simply an observation.
'You're touching yourself,' I say again, 'and I'm fucking you.'
'Ahh,' he says – a little sound of revelation, a sound of pleasure racheting up one notch.
'You're touching yourself,' I say, thoughtfully, 'I'm fucking you and you're so fucking tight.'
'Is this... one of those memory games? What did Grandma buy at the shops? She bought... a tin of beans and some cat food... What did Grandma buy at the shops? She bought a tin of beans, some cat food... and some hair rollers.'
'Shut the fuck up. You're... you're so fucking... tight. You're so fucking tight and I'm so fucking... hard.'
'Ahh. Christ.'
'You're such a... such a pansy.'
'So are you,' he says, very quietly.
'No,' I say. 'No. I just want to fuck you.'
I slap him once on the left ass cheek.
...
My ass is naked – just my ass. I am bent over the edge of a woodwork table. The handle of a vice is digging into my stomach. The sweet smell of sawdust is making my nose itch. I am face-to-face with a newly-carved chair leg, the wood just turned, raw and freshly wounded.
My backside is laced with strips of fire.
He is talking, remarkably calmly, about a transgression at school – a fight with a boy from seventh grade. He asks me to explain myself, though gives me no opportunity. My cock is chafing against the underside of the woodwork table, and I worry I'll get splinters.
At once, I twist in his grip – he was holding me firmly, but I take him by surprise, and before he can gather himself, I have wrested the belt from his hand.
I scramble for the chair leg and clock him upside the head with it. While he is dazed, I move behind him and push him down over the woodwork table. I tear open his belt and pull down his pants and underwear, and take a swing.
My pants are still around my knees. The sound of the crack surprises my naked cock to attention.
...
'Wilson,' I say.
'House,' Wilson says.
...
'Good boy,' says Curvy.
...
'Dr. House,' says Minnie Mouse.
...
'Kiss me again,' says Cuddy.
...
'It's loaded,' says the Ideal Hooker.
...
'Patient 12 needs another shot of Haldol,' says a voice from outside the padded door.
...
'You know,' I say to Dad, 'you bring this on yourself.'
...
'House,' says Wilson.
'Wilson,' I say. 'Wilson. '
...
And thank Christ, that's the end of it.
I can finally sleep.