Girl on the Beach.
There had been this insistence, on the train, about 'knowing' and about 'being nice'. House had been veering between two sides of the sanity coin in his impression of her and this had almost had him smiling and nodding, placating the crazy lady on the train. But there was something that kept him talking, had him smiling and playing along with her chatter.
It had all been so out of character for the new and improved drug-free him. He'd been impulsive, reckless and these were all adjectives he wouldn't normally now ascribe to himself. You know, if anyone had asked .
Still there was something healing about the beach on a cold day. From his childhood, it had been a place of refuge and thought; a place to commune with his inner hippy and not to feel the burden of social expectation crushing him from every side.
He had never particularly got on with other people but there was something making him think of the strange woman he'd met on the beach, something keeping her in the front of his mind and he couldn't help but think he had in fact, fallen in love with her like some terrible cliché in some terrible film.
She had been too close, too much and that still hadn't sent him slinking back to his apartment alone. She'd sat next to him as if they had known each other for years. She'd held his palm and turned it over and over in her own hands as if she was re-examining it for the details she already knew she would find.
And all the time he'd felt the bruise she had put there, playfully, on his shoulder, throbbing and growing under his skin, making itself known – this won't leave you unmarked, this you cannot ignore. And still, he hadn't minded and he hadn't run away from this contact.
So she had ridden up front in the passenger seat and she had turned her head toward him as she slept and he couldn't help but think that this was some sort of indicator of the implicit trust she seemed to have in him.
He had known her for only a matter of hours and already she had stamped her personality all over him – just like sweat, viscous and sticky, hard to get rid of.
There had been a huge boat sailing slowly along the horizon when they had lain side by side on the sand. Like a pin on a map, it had marked the curve of the earth and he'd desperately needed that fixed point in the universe as he had tumbled into her orbit, gravity and propulsion working in harmony.