Inspired by this ss_huddy prompt: A fic that has flirty, antagonistic, season 4-ish banter and smut. Something light and happy and something that ignores anything after 7x14. Nothing too kinky, though.
Notes: Tense shifts are intentional. Also, no idea what it was (maybe the writer's strike) but after rewatching season four and with the hindsight of the shark the show has since jumped, this was a really great season for this ship. Reviews are welcome. Thanks for reading!
Walls
The phone drops heavy on her nightstand. She sighs, reaching to turn the lamp out. House waking her in the middle of the night is nothing new. He's usually trying to defend some hail mary procedure or, like tonight, he's just called to remind her how he was, is and will always be right.
And the flirtatious curiosity, the intimations at an alternate intent? That's just collateral, a little light bending through the cracks of this wall he's built around himself.
Of course she can't go back to sleep. She had just started to nod off when he called. "What are you wearing?" he asked. She wants to know what he would have done if she had told him.
Some tight pink cottony thing, with frills. She closes her eyes and wonders about the day she calls his bluff. How long they've sparred, there's got to be contact eventually. Even if it is a punch in the face.
Cuddy rolls onto her side. She tries to think about anything but him––that she needs a new vacuum, that the new OB is a pervert and she has to let him go, that her sister's newborn is too adorable to be named Gilda and what will she have for lunch today.
They're all ghosts of thoughts. House's presence is intravenous and she'll never be able to pull the IV out.
The clock glows a crimson 1:45. She decides to lull herself with an innocuous fantasy, some scenario vague enough not to raise her blood pressure but comforting still to distract from their stalemate reality.
Maybe they slip into a conference room after it's been emptied and lock the door. Maybe she kneels, just to see him speechless. When he's between her lips it feels like home. A film of salt at the corners of her mouth and that aftertaste the rest of the day but he's compliant, appreciative, willing to obey at the prospect of a repeat performance.
She puts out eventually. After she's gotten him to do ten extra hours of clinic duty, when it aches to look at him and reciprocity's due.
She imagines him coming over tonight, or any night. She would greet him with a coy, throaty voice. He would push through the door intrusive, predictable. The bulwarks and brick walls between them would crumble, their kiss the first swing of an emotional wrecking ball.
A few of his fingers manage to make a tentative exploration in the direction of her cleavage. She catches his wrist, not to push him away but to bring him closer. He tugs at the hem of what she's wearing, letting her lead him to her bed. Or maybe her couch.
She imagines the impatient noise he would make in the back of his throat, the rattle of his belt buckle as she undoes his jeans.
He doesn't take them all the way off. She knows it's less out of insecurity than self-preservation. She doesn't mind it either. He'll smell her on them for days.
She grazes the tented boxerbriefs, barely and passing, with the curve of her palm. Stooping to settle between her hips, he blows warm air into her belly button to make her back tense and arch and her legs spread wider apart.
There are rituals and secret symphonies his mouth plays in combination with his nose and tongue and fingers. He grips her thighs tight, grounding her and when she's close enough to scream, he comes up to breathe. Slurs something about desperate administrative need. She counters that his performance review of her was admitting he wants to be the one to jump on her, to tell her I love you one grunted syllable at a time.
Shut up, he says then kisses her in illustration. They take their time, drawing it out to be one incredibly long night. She straddles him, his back against the headboard making it bang loud against the wall. She fusses with the buttons of his shirt just to frustrate him. Fingernails dragging across his chest, her thumb flicks one of his nipples to see him jerk slightly and blink hard. When he eases into her he hisses relief, belonging. He buries his face in her breasts, the beard rasping rough. She writhes helpless as his dry, hot lips close around her nipple, his tongue spiraling an areola. The pressure of his teeth as he bites down gentle, unsentimental spurs her to roll her hips, feel him clutch at her thighs.
House holds her gaze for as long he can. Until she leans forward, gaining a little leverage, and he sinks deeper and she can only watch as the moment becomes all that exists to him.
Her eyes flutter closed suddenly, with her face in his hands. He gleans the orgasm from her with languorous tact and sharp precision, like a surgeon yielding a scalpel, extracting it through some intangible incision. She clings to him and kisses his eyelids, his forehead and temple and chin. He thrusts hard then, lifting his hips and his leg hurts and tomorrow it will be worse but hilted, inside her, coming for what feels like forever, nothing else matters.
They would collapse together sated. He would fall asleep with his hand on her ass, cocoon himself in her sheets and definitely, inescapably not be there when she wakes up.
Morning arrives too soon with Cuddy's alarm sounding off shrill and less than half a night's sleep making it a slow crawl out of bed.
Rubbing her eyes, she ambles into the bathroom, the spray of a hot shower beckoning her to wash away the want, to give up on him.
The rap of his cane on her door a few minutes in, when she's just rinsed her hair and only shaved one leg, she half expects.
She towels her hair in a rush and flings on her robe, rationalizing the way she always does that it might be life or death.
"Why aren't you ready yet?" He asks as soon as she opens the door.
"I didn't know we had a date."
"It's okay," he tells her mock-reassuringly as he barges inside.
"If you're too ashamed to show your face to the accreditation board after failing that inspection."
"The hospital didn't fail. And that fine had nothing to do with me."
"You could have stopped me."
"You cost the hospital six figures because you were too stubborn––"
"I saved a life." "You solved a puzzle."
"I deserve that TV."
On any other day she would let herself believe that's why he came over. Today she knows better.
"You could have cost me my job and you don't even––"
"Oh my god," he interrupts.
The way House's eyes widen and the way he tries to hide it makes this, and yesterday, and everything he's cost her worth it.
"You're not wearing anything under that."
"I was in the shower."
"You," he starts as if he's just had an epiphany.
Then he's reaching for her and the May morning feels hotter. House is closing in on her and it's startling that she's letting him but she can't not.
His index finger bends into the satin knot of her robe. Cuddy doesn't flinch, doesn't catch his wrist to stop him. He loosens it, slowly exposing her cleavage so that it's barely buoyed up by the v of the collar.
Her hips cant forward when he tugs at the loop in the knot. The shiver she's suppressed since she stepped out of the shower blooms into goosebumps as his thumb dips into her bellybutton, lingering, a playful taunt like always.
House pulls back without untying it. The robe doesn't splay open. They don't make love in her foyer as the spring sun rises then drive to work and pretend it never happened. When she calls his bluff, stares him straight in face without deflecting or resisting, he turns away.
"You should wear that to work," he finishes. The words come out strained, the sting of them dilute. She can see he's scared to let this happen.
"Make both our wet dreams come true," he adds.
Cuddy closes the robe, crossing her arms, trying not to look disappointed.
"Mine and Wilson's," House clarifies. "I'm sure you're fully clothed in yours, handcuffing me to a clinic room door."
"Go do you job," she says finally, watching him walk backward out her door.
She hears him mutter something about the TV or her cleavage as she leans against the door frame.
He can't hold out forever, she tells herself.
Even walls fall down.