Prompt(s): Four times House & Cuddy (Wilson optional) had dinner and one time they had breakfast together. -- Little little Greg. -- House wears a yarmulke.
Notes: Possible [canon] timeline errors. Forgive them. Forgive any error, I really just wanted to finish this before the flailing starts and my arms fall off. This is no prediction of 5x23, but it ends as a nice precursor.
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eventually (everything)
1. The acoustics of the cafeteria are accentuated by the high ceiling, blue and gold, Michigan colors on white. He shouldn't be here. In broader regard, he should be at Hopkins. At this moment, he should be on the fourth floor of the campus hospital doing his requisite rotation in neurology.
But he's not. He's here.
So is she, somewhere at the opposite end of the noise, the sound of thirsty twenty- somethings starving for scalpels, ready and willing to cut throats if it means scrubbing in.
It's a reception, or something, House deduces, stealing a sticky 'Hello My Name Is' tag and swaggering, the way he did with two legs twenty years ago, into line. The lecture he missed, though it wasn't easy to do, lasting an intolerable four hours.
The name tag reads 'Butch Kensington,' and at a stalemate buffet, House shuffles his feet as if the tile is homeplate and he's up to bat, because Butch sounds like a baseball player's name.
He has a whole double life as a shortstop prepared should he be interrogated, or offered a scholarship by the time anything appetizing is in front of him. Tonight it's not the usual cafeteria food, no pizza or fries or ice cream, just a lot of vegetables and other bite-size things he can't identity and would never consider ingesting.
After the agonizing wait he settles for red meat and a baked starch with sour cream, nothing green on his plate. The guest speaker and dinner had been too thoroughly advertised to ignore and his stomach too empty to care about neurology more than hunger. But he knows nobody here. The lecture had been to motivate and educate PreMed undergrads about the possibilities of a career medicine.
So he sits, not quite fitting in, with no idea his future friend and lover, his future boss, is right beside him.
The arched ceiling isn't aurally amplifying so much as distorting the voice's of her classmates. Not that she's listening. Having attended the lecture with her roommate, but alone now, she slumps over her tray, restlessly jabbing her lettuce with the protruding prong of a fork when her left elbow collides with his right.
Cuddy doesn't know it will not be their last collision.
She does know she hasn't bumped Butch. The legend shoveling steak into his mouth, uninvited and incognito, has entered her territory, trespassed for the sake of free food. This is her chance, to meet and make an impact, or flirt and make contact.
Immediately she's glad she's wearing a skirt. She looks good tonight, nubile and naive, but gorgeous most of all. Adjusting her posture, she tries to examine him peripherally. House is oblivious. His clean shaven jaw is chewing and chomping and it seems as if the nudge of her errant elbow has gone unnoticed.
Relieved, she breathes. This gives her time to think of something to say. She knows he shouldn't be here, but she can't open with that without it sounding like the scolding of an authority figure. She knows who he his, about the expulsion and all of his antics. But she doesn't want to come off as a secret admirer, or stalker, or the awkward ambitious undergrad she is.
They're both alone in a room full of people, isolated together and the same. This introduction should be easy. She's not intimidated, not insecure, just aware of the weight of her of her first words.
Swallowing what's left of the melted ice in her glass, Cuddy finally decides what to say. She turns smiling, eyes bright, lashes batting. But he's gone. And as that open sense of opportunity evaporates, she wonders if he was ever really here at all.
Fed, he fled making the highlight of the night nothing more than a missed connection in a cafeteria.
2. With the proof framed on the wall of her own office, a closet in endocrinology, Cuddy is five years from Ann Arbor and nearly ten from their
first dinner. They did eventually meet at Michigan but preoccupied with their own potentials it remained platonic, leaving both to feel like the other was the one that got away.
Now Jefferson is her home and New Jersey nothing more than the state the hospital's in. When it's suggested she attends a nearby convention on the theoretical eradication of infectious diseases, she thinks of House and commits to attending, hoping the convention is conducive to coincidence.
But House doesn't attend the debate about the extinction of his specialty.
He has his own conspiracy.
Six weeks later Jefferson holds a benefit, a charitable dinner designed to raise money for the two departments that need it: endocrinology and pediatrics.
Cuddy brings a date this time, a gray haired, gray eyed dentist.
Her teeth seem whiter, gleaming a sumptuous smile, but House still scoffs at the fact she's not here with a real doctor. Then something grips him, not jealousy or regret, but something much simpler, childish and selfish: he wants her more because he can't have her.
And he's up for the challenge, though the illusion of inaccessibility has yet to be broken. House knows he doesn't deserve her even if––if, somehow she reentered and remained in his life. He came here looking for her, not hoping so much as expecting to see how she's changed after he heard of her quick rise, the payoff of relentless pursuit (and in a cleavage enhancing dress for charity). She'll usurp this place by next year, or conquer another.
House isn't alone either. He convinced Wilson to attend and finally meet the infamous Cuddy of collegiate recollections. A bet that tonight he'll finally take home the elusive Lisa he let slip through his fingers a decade ago has House downing bourbon for bravery.
The booze does nothing for his breath when he's finally standing between the doctor and dentist.
"Cuddy," with his head hanging over her shoulder.
"Or are you going by Dr. Partypants now?"
She closes her eyes but blushes anyway.
"We went to school together," he tells her date, plucking an appetizer off of a passing tray and gnawing on the leftover toothpick.
"House. What are you doing here?"
With the question her eyes open and his heart's suddenly heavier. This isn't going to be as easy as he thought. The vaguest stirrings of a forgotten scene, not a night of stained jeans or sorority sleepovers but after, an almost, when she sat dedicated at her desk and he admired her hope, her blind ambition, with respect and restraint, without ever making a move.
Now, he could have her. He suspects this much, her body language screaming rescue me as the dentist's fingers dig into her hip. Cuddy hasn't changed. He's seeing the same sapphire eyes and porcelain complexion, naive and nineteen and plunged into the abyss of emotions that are the fall into love with a lunatic, the arrogant genius that is Greg House.
His conscience capitulates. He shakes his head and forces one foot in front of the other, making this another meal and another chance missed. They leave the benefit early and House pays Wilson for the lost bet, knowing he was right. If he had asked she would have left with him. She'd fallen hard years before. What House doesn't know is that she would keep falling for years more.
3. Wilson's second wedding won't be his last. Or so House predicts about his chronically committing friend the day before, brooding about the guest list.
Two years since they last saw each other, House was right. Cuddy is in line for an overdue promotion after being transferred to a teaching hospital. She's thirty-one now and he's been pining for eleven years, too long to admit even to himself.
Stacy's at his side the entire rehearsal dinner but all House can wonder is if Cuddy will come tomorrow. Wilson invited her at his friend's suggestion, apprehensive about what House is planning, but knowing he's too smitten with Stacy to do anything too stupid, like cheat.
The ceremony is a blur for the groom, still recovering from all the blasphemy of his bachelor party. Standing at his shoulder and intermittently scratching the yarmulke he swore he wouldn't wear (that Wilson only got to stick with the aid of adhesive) House envisions the bald spot the glue will leave while panning the crowded pews of friends and family for the woman he wants to run into, at least one last time before he does something as dumb as sign a marriage license himself.
But he can't see her so he stops looking. A glass smashed, his hand on the small of Stacy's back, they start out of the synagogue.
A formal affair follows, in a grand ballroom, with soaring ceilings like a cafeteria he can't forget and art deco chandeliers that clash architecturally and altogether with any attempt at an aesthetic. Burgundy is the color of every bridesmaid, matching the drapes, carpet and flowers. Then a shade stands out, a blue, royal, midnight, Michigan blue.
"I saw her today at the reception." The lyric's wit under his breath.
Jagger and a Jimmy and an anomalous dress, it's a perfect depiction of a favorite philosophy except there's no glass of wine in her hand.
Cuddy spills her tonic fumbling to find her seat. House watches her wipe up the carbonated puddle as he leads Stacy in the direction of the table, tossing aside the seating cards that don't have their names on them and sitting so that the lawyer is a barrier between two doctors.
A crass toast is given by the bestman diagnostician, every glass is raised and even the caterer applauds the sarcastic salute to matrimony. When Stacy has downed half a bottle of champagne she disappears to the ladies room and House finds himself hoping she gets lost in the labyrinth of stalls, at least for a little while.
He crosses the empty space between them and leans into Cuddy's distracted periphery.
"House," she says blinking. "Great speech."
"All marriages suck," he starts, slinking closer. "The fun is in the fall."
A certain experienced wisdom, almost jaded, surfaces in his conclusion. She knows House is right. In the charged silence of a progressive beat, she knows he's talking about her. Pursuing and plummeting, he finishes off his scotch, somehow still drifting in her direction. The glass hitting the table echoes into the percussion of the orchestra.
Wilson and his second wife waltz across the dance floor, having initiated the first song. More couples gradually congregate in pairs, the expensive food already forgotten on their plates. Cuddy finds herself avoiding the scrutinizing brilliance beside her and stabbing her salad with a silver fork, feeling like an undergrad again and knowing he shouldn't be here.
House knows it too; that he should stop, find Stacy or start getting Wilson so wasted that 'it'' won't work on his wedding night. Except he thrives on the gamble, the risk, the odds stacked against him. The only alternative being boredom, he can't resist. His right thigh, whole and muscular and taking it all for granted, brushes against her bare pale leg, aligning and abiding. There's static in the friction, nothing separating them but a thin synthetic layer of a rented suit, and time, so much lost time.
The temptation to slide her foot out of her shoe and scale his calf, trace his ankle with her toes, to call his bluff and raise the stakes is burning bright behind her eyes every time she blinks. Harmless, it's almost easy to play the game.
In the pause of her inaction, House analyzes his own motives. With Stacy he's content without being complacent, but still infatuated with Cuddy. His curiosity of what they could have been culminates into this, futile flirtation and the want that never went away. Is it because they never kissed? Never quenched the carnal craving? Never did more than bump elbows and trade texts, sharing an education, a few days on a timeline that led to this––
"That dress... " his voice cracks, still ogling as he sighs, because he knows he can't finish it without flattering her.
There's something more attractive about Cuddy now that he's attached. Magnetic, forbidden, wrong and right. His knee is inching the hem of her dress up, restless because he can't say what he really wants is to dance with her, a slow dance to a serenade, to a song nobody else can hear. Choreographing the motions of their souls, swaying and stepping on each other's toes; he wants his hands on those hips and her arms around his neck, requiting it all to music.
Dancing isn't adultery. He could do it––loop his fist around her wrist, leap to his feet and drag her onto the ballroom floor or into the dim and empty antechamber at the back of the room; be romantic, spontaneous, be somebody he isn't.
If he could just be with her.
But House overthinks it, reflecting too long and Stacy comes back just as his hand's about try. Cuddy's still fidgeting with the fork when he introduces them. Their eyes entangle and lament the lost liaison.
Dance, they never do, not knowing they never will.
4. "If you won't eat it, I will."
Stacy's frustration shines through her concern as she reluctantly bites into his salisbury steak. The hospital food is repulsive and as impossible as recuperation.
When she kisses him goodbye he can taste the cigarette smoke tainting her lips under the thick tasteless brown gravy and he knows today he made her miserable.
Once she's gone, he settles into the loneliness with an empty stomach. Cuddy's his attending now and he dreads letting her see him like this. He hasn't showered or shaved, since the infarction. His only source of sustenance has been a saline IV.
At the start of her shift, Cuddy comes in with a brown paper bag. It's his dinner: a reuben, cold, no pickles, a bag of chips and an energy drink because he needs motivation, even if it's caffeinated.
With eatable food in front of him, House's appetite almost returns. Almost because the tortured sorrow is still consuming her expression. More than guilt or compassion, when she looks at him he loses something, some part of himself that hates what happened, leaving only the part that knows she saved him.
She's still saving him, but with little success. He looks the way he feels. Tousled and greasy and gray at the ends, his hair's grown out. The beard's thicker, aging him by years. A crimson crescent of dried blood curves down his bottom lip, the final brushstroke in the portrait of his melancholy.
But he can't see himself, and doesn't want to, salivating as he reaches for the bag. "Uh uh," Cuddy says authoritatively, pulling it away. From the pocket of her labcoat she gets out a razor and a small can of shaving cream. She lays both down on the bed then goes into the bathroom to fill a plastic bowl with water.
"Sit up," she orders upon returning and waits as he pushes his weight up, lifting his right leg to let it hang over the edge of the bed. Shaving him and saving him, House knows what she's doing. The blinds are closed and they're face to face, and if she doesn't start crying, he might just kiss her.
Surprised he hasn't protested yet and wondering why he's letting her do this, why he hasn't said something, said anything, Cuddy wavers skeptical. Has he given up? Realized in the unfortunate wake of his failing health that he has no control over his body, his own life? Or is curiosity his only condition, does he just want to know where this is going?
Poised between his legs, assertive already, she's the boss. And he's open, unguarded, however inadvertently, with the tattered cotton doing little to conceal the swelling shadow between his thighs and his jugular about to meet a sharp blade.
His eyes focus on the ceiling even after she tucks a towel into the flimsy collar of his hospital gown. House imagines himself a defenseless victim, entirely at the mercy of the woman holding the razor, freed from the dismal circumstances so that all that matters is this: the feel of her wet fingers smearing shaving cream over his jaw, gentle on his chin, slow and tender and impossibly intimate. Her touch resurrects something, if only the recurring desire for her––his attending or his assassin–– the one, the only one willing, the only one who wants him.
Cuddy steps back and all he can hear is the glide of the razor, ascending against the grain and relaxing him into an immobility of agreeable indifference. Holding his earlobe and scraping the foam away with her thumb, she's meticulous, determined, guilty. The leg is naked, save for the dressing, a sutured rift beside her good intentions. Her right hand is against his throat, and when she feels his pulse jump, feels him flinch and swallow, trembling now and again, she knows it's because of the pain.
But as she exposes him, one fluid stroke and flick of the wrist at a time, the past starts to superimpose the present. She's not reviving him so much as revealing who he's always been,who he's always been to her.
Cuddy works at the reawakening until all that's left of the lather are linear traces on his cheekbones and along the joint of his jaw. Then she puts the razor down, falling in love with this sad face all over again, dampens a washcloth in the bowl of hot water and wipes what she's uncovered clean. The tips of her fingers smooth over his face, searching for stray stubble and House waits, with his head resting between her palms, waits until their eyes meet, to kiss her. He just wants to kiss her and break the spell of suffering.
"Lise," but it's hushed, her name always caught in his throat, lost in the breath of the vain attempt.
He sees the regret in her face but also the slow parting of her lips, the bending of a smile toward some indirection, a momentary lifting of a curtain over some cryptic passage––the footpath they forfeited, the fate they feared, withdrawing away from the possibility of this, this kiss.
But he knows that for some reason, they won't. She's slipping away even as he stares at her, not blinking, not breathing but glimpsing a prescient vision of the future, after he's pushed Stacy away, when pain and deprivation are all he can feel, the puzzle the only thrill.
Cradling his cheek, she's honesty and he's trying desperately to kindle a spark of hope from it. Her lips are quivering close to his and the proximity has House feeling the most alive he has since the nightmare began. Her breath lingers, mingling with the scent of soap. What they share and can never say, he can see her struggling to suppress. Her thumb trails down his temple, to his warm and softer skin, a nail ghosting along his neck as her warm glossed lips graze his.
Then she pulls back, before it becomes more than the intangible touch of companionless lips, more than another incompletion, another regret. Postponing the inevitable crush of catastrophe and release, reconsidering the consequences of infidelity, Cuddy tugs at the towel and wrings out the washcloth before letting him watch her walk away.
Dejected and relieved and clean shaven, House bites into the sandwich a few minutes later. He knows he wouldn't be alive if it weren't for her. He knows he can't make Stacy stay. He knows it's all falling away from him.
Fumbling for his crutches, he gets out of bed and limps to the bathroom. The faucet spits and he splashes cold water on his face, looking at himself in mirror. He's bleeding. No incision but a nick along the crease of his chin, he clogs it with a piece of toilet paper. Another scar, another scab, evidence of another life he could have had–– a cut, as close as they could ever come.
5. The sweet smell of spring seeps into his lungs. A June breeze and braid of twining honeysuckle growing on the wall of the parking garage disseminate the season as House arrives late for work. Silhouetted by the late morning sun, Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital is the last place he thought life would lead him.
Neither grateful nor humbled, a resilient youth still resides in the highlights of his somber expression. Thirty seven a week, he'd forgotten his own birthday until late that night when the messages on his answering machine reminded him. It's easy to lose time when nothing matters, when he's excluded himself and alienated everybody else.
While he waits for the elevator House scowls at the stairs. Though the adopted appendage is nicknamed 'Little little Greg,' he hates the cane, the prop that makes him an apparent patient, that redefined his identity.
Cuddy hired him out of guilt or pity, a compassionate response to the pathetic cripple. She's given him a mediocre spot in nephrology, a paycheck but not a passion. Most of his time is spent dodging clinic duty and distracting Wilson from doing his job, testing the limits of what she'll let him get away with and plotting his his coup of Lisa Cuddy.
Promoted only recently, her lowly days as a doctor haven't been forgotten amidst administrative success. Yet. She's a novice and he's not above exploiting her inexperience.
She wants him and he wants a diagnostics department.
The pieces fall into place before the end of the day.
Abrupt and abrasive he barges into her office. She's starting to get used to it. She's staring to expect it. There's more between them than there's ever been, something beyond the latent longing, perpetually unrequited, inevitably ineradicable.
"Dinner tonight, my place," he says. And it's not a question or a command just an excuse, the setting for a long overdue scene.
"I'm your boss now, House. We can't see each other outside of work," tilting her head, still confident from behind the desk.
"I cannot fraternize with my employees," she adds idly, her hand returning to the paperwork before her eyes leave his.
"Fine. Nothing friendly then, we'll just have sex."
Cuddy squints at the audacity of his sarcasm. Underneath it she knows he respects her. She wants to laugh. She wants to scream. She wants to stop resisting.
"I can't."
A beat, his last resort.
"You should really reconsider. Because I wouldn't want the board finding out you only hired me because I'm hung."
"What? I never––"
"They don't know you never."
"Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?
I already gave a job after you'd been fired from four––"
"Eight o'clock."
And he's out of her office.
-
Against her better judgment Cuddy is staring at his door. It's 8:15 and she wavered the whole way here. There's even indecision in her knock. He hollers for her to come in and she knows, this is how it all begins.
"Main course is on the kitchen counter," mumbles House with his mouth full, pointing at a carton of Chinese takeout, empty save for a single chopstick sticking out.
"There's none left," she complains with a pout, though she knew he was scheming.
"You're late," chewing. "I was hungry."
"House, why am I here?"
"Sit down."
Cuddy pushes aside a stack of medical journals and settles on the opposite cushion of the couch.
"I need you," he swallows. "I need you alone. No waitresses or nurses
distracting your decision."
"My decision about what?"
"I deserve a department."
"What? That's why you invited me here, you think I can just––"
"Do you know how many cases come through the clinic or get discharged from the ER misdiagnosed by the morons on your payroll? I'm the best doctor you have and you're wasting me on kidney stones and crotch rot," putting down what's left of his dinner.
"If," she starts and House winces, rubbing his leg and using her guilt against her, manipulating and seducing with the possibility of forgiveness.
"If I gave you an entire department, that much freedom, that much
responsibility––"
"I'll save lives."
"You'll be sued and I'll be fired before you can cure a single patient."
"Or your hospital will become one of the best in state. A Mecca for medical mysteries."
"Puzzles for you to solve."
He shrugs. That she's even considering it has him internally elated. That this is a negotiation has him considerably nonplused. Not because of the compromise but because she believes him, she trusts him.
Eluding logic, the realization that he doesn't need to do this but wants to, House leans closer. The arm that's been behind Cuddy curls around her, the subtle shift in his strategy assuaging the atmosphere of the almost argument. Only now that his ulterior agenda has been addressed, nearly resolved, does he see how beautiful she is.
But she's also his boss, blackmailed here, more delicate than she can ever admit and he's the broken bastard about to take advantage. Awkward, the way his knuckles bump her shoulder as his elbow edges away, like he hasn't done this in years, like he's afraid of what doing it will mean.
House doesn't know what he wants more, to make love or to make her leave. She makes up his mind by yawning. Pink and wet her tongue protrudes from her open mouth below exhausted eyes she can't hold open. She surrenders half- asleep against his shoulder, aware she's being held and that she's with House, but too tired to know it's all she's ever wanted.
He could get up. His leg doesn't like a snuggling Cuddy confining him to the corner of the couch. He could creep to the bedroom and sprawl across the wide empty mattress. He could. Instead he just lifts his leg onto the coffee table and props it on a pillow. Quietly pouring out a handful of vicodin and closing his eyes, he's asleep soon after he swallows.
-
Late, in the middle of the ethereal fade of twilight into the cusp of dawn, Cuddy wakes. Rested, she rubs her neck, tilting toward his a few hours too long. The sound of his snore is all she can hear, melodic and sardonic in the dim room.
Raking a few fingers through his hair then letting them drift lower, she leans in, remembering this shaven slope of his cheek, the scar on the crease of his chin, college––a moment when each of them to the other represented home, the inexperience of happiness, the capacity to hope for what lies ahead.
A shadow of what he should have been, she can't leave him. And as she strokes his sideburn in a vain attempt to separate, to stand, to leave, Cuddy doubts that he still dreams.
But he is dreaming. Of a girl who ran the same track and always kept up, who cheered in the stands of his lacrosse games, who he first met a smiling swimmer at the lake one passing summer—she impressed him, in the hospital, the classroom, until they were each other's obsessions––the unresolved piece of a shared past.
An image as enduring as nostalgia, the memory of love itself, he manifests with ephemeral fragments, a sad old yearning, until she's here, identical, alive and he can feel her with him, her hand joined in abstract marriage to his heart.
The pressure of her palm high on his chest, a slow sway forward and their mouths meet.
Cuddy wanted to kiss him, but she isn't.
He's kissing her.
The dust of narcotics is bitter on his chapped, neglected lips. She wants to be angry at him for trying this, for waiting until she trusts him and taking it for granted. Then she realizes he's not trying or taking, he's still sleeping. And it's recklessly poetic, his subconscious mind acknowledging what he never could in waking life, a wordless retaliation against what they've resisted for so long.
Borne through the provocation, or a purpose, she's framing his face between her hands and tracing her tongue along the anatomy of his mouth, drowning in the redeeming taste of a perfect kiss he'll never know exists. Her teeth sink into his bottom lip, trying to stifle an ecstatic sigh. Then the demand redoubles and she relaxes into romance of it, so slow, so deep. So real that it wakes him.
House opens his eyes to see hers closed. In a half awake haze his hands rise, bringing her to him, back against the armrest, both their bodies sinking into the leather cushions until she's lying in his lap, their drowsy indirection taking an intentional twist.
Cuddy breaks the kiss, her glistening lips lingering lithe, her forehead against his. A draft drifts into the dark room, a cooler realness that makes her shiver. His thumb is under her shirt, dragging goosebumps down her vertebrae and she feels cold and exposed and like she's completely lost control.
She pulls away and in a panic, his first impulse is to apologize. The irrational flood of emotions has him choking on 'sorry' and 'stay' and a 'please,' to not let the breathless struggle end. Everything he had to live for, torn from his grasp months before, is within his reach again––the void in his heart where she belongs and the love of his life, every crux he can cure from the position that she can give him.
Cuddy tries to stand but his arm wraps possessively around her waist, fisting the fabric of her shirt. He won't let go. Finally she quits fighting and gives in, kissing him, just kissing him.
When she goes to stand again he lets her. He can almost see her sleepy smile as she takes his hands from her hips and helps him to his feet, tugging at his tshirt then moulding here palms into the warm contours of his torso. Their clothes come off in a blur on the way to the bedroom, Cuddy leading with fierce dominance leaving him to cling in disbelief.
They stumble clumsy and tumble onto an unmade bed, tangled, caught naked in the long denied truth. Terrified of making this mistake, terrified of not––they want, more than anything, to come together before they change their minds.
The rush has her face flushed, and she lets go of the insecurity, the rising doubt, kicking the comforter away from their feet and screaming when his hands clutch her thighs, pushing down and spreading.
Desire or disaster, in an attempt to tip the scales, she straddles him. It's almost alchemic, the change, urgency into acquiescent consent and the tacit acceptance that this is who they are to each other, who they'll always be, that this had to happen eventually.
Penetration is a sloppy imperfect pivot. Pulling his hair, she blindly kisses any part of his body her lips can find, refusing to open her eyes, afraid this is all just a dream.
The sense of certain unreality is mutual.
Like a madman fallen prey to his hallucinations, House feels helpless under her. He writhes weak but not resistant, gloriously pinned and, for the first time in a long time, not in pain.
Alleviate, this almost does. A kind of chemical escape more potent than opiates; the dulled ache is keeping this real, but barely. The throe of his thigh is lost in the languid flux of her body, prostrate and grinding against him. The searing throb is intolerable as she breathes into his ear, ready but making him wait for the pulsating squeeze, the first physical response to finding that place inside her.
A slow ascent, her voice trembles, panting his name when he bucks erratic, straining, concentrating as if nothing else matters. He wants to be her best; her best doctor, her best lover, the best she'll ever have. He wants to give her everything even without the promise of reciprocation.
An erotic epiphany takes hold of him, that this is the only time he's ever experienced desire as dependency for a woman, involving the subliminal and the conscious, his body and his brain, tenderness, grief, lust and consolation, the pursuit of fleeting pleasure and eternal possession.
He thrusts, forgetting all the almosts, the frustration of every time before that they should have let this happen. Thumbs strumming the chords of her ribcage up to her breasts tease the nearest nipple into his mouth. He juts hard to make her squeal but still can't figure out when this became so much more than the long slow fuck he's fantasized about.
Reveling in the ramifications of being ridden, House feels her tighten, constricting and close and he's with her. The muscles in his stomach cramp and his pulse pounds, trying not to lose himself. But he is, plunging deeper and giving himself to her, as if the part she's already taken isn't enough and taking her, the best of her—the memory, the power, the hope, the beauty––with him.
They starting falling a forever ago. Waiting and hesitating through all the vertigo and avoidance, the levity of lust is still losing to the gravity of love.
Her face is turned away when it starts. Cuddy's coming and coming apart. The end of a long way down, this is it, the impact, the sudden stop. They shatter, the escaping heat a deep and rising rush toward fused disintegration–– finally and together in the heartstopping stillness of a fractured eruption.
With their first breath back from oblivion they're reborn. It's the difference between want and need and never being the same.
Aware after a minute of her collapsed weight, of how depleted the man beneath her must be, Cuddy goes to roll off but he won't let her budge. Glassing irony over his eyes, his lashes blink the moment before he kisses her. It's a soft, gracious kiss and if she didn't know better, she'd call it forgiveness.
Really it's what he wants her to remember, the one night he gave her everything she didn't know she needed, the only time she'll ever see this side of him. He scrapes his beard against her ear, whispering something obscene but sincere and she knows.
They'll never completely disconnect.
-
Patiently hovering just below the horizon, the rising sun paints the room in warm pastels. Stunned and sated House stretches, reaching for the crumbled sheet at the bottom of the bed and lifting it to cover both of them now that the light threatens to prove the affair an accident.
There's what sex should be and there's what sex is and they know this exceeded both. The memory of last night will sustain somehow, thirteen years, haunting and taunting until they can recover the courage and find the energy and opportunity for their starved hearts to meet this way again.
For now morning means medicine, work and waiting rooms and that they can't dissolve into the comfort and coital resolution of sleep. They lay side by side on their backs silently, considering calling in sick, or quitting–– still not considering the consequences of last night.
Half an hour passes in what seems like seconds.
House feels her hand coast down his forearm, fingers bending into the spaces between his, clasping one last time, brief and placidly compliant before her feet meet the hardwood floor.
The slow trickle down her thigh is still warm as Cuddy follows the trail of clothes out of the bedroom. The contrast of her pale bare skin and dark hair as she walks away steals something from him. He knows he'll never see it again.
Suddenly he wants to stand up and start over, to push her back up against the wall with all his injured grace and do this everyday. But doesn't even try.
All he can do is lean on one leg and limp lonely into the kitchen.
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The wait leaves him to contemplate. The spices and soy sauce from his oriental dinner have his breath stale and sharp and he can't say why she would ever want to kiss him. He washes the aftertaste away with the last few drops of orange juice, taking an extra vicodin because his bladder's brimming and he doesn't know how long Cuddy will be in the bathroom.
He tries to ignore what he's feeling and focus on food. But the empty refrigerator gives his conscience a reason to reconsider. He assures himself again.
Everybody lies, not everybody loves.
Except House has loved. He's lost. And he's sworn to never let it happen again, to never let anyone else in. He never wanted to love Cuddy. Now he knows that's what it's been all along, veiled beneath curiosity, the clue to their attraction, involuntary and irreversible.
One of his hands is disappearing into a cupboard as the other scratches the back of his heart led head. Carrying the cereal and carton of milk over to the couch, his first bite's in the back of his mouth when Cuddy comes out dressed like an administrator again, scanning the apartment for her purse and at a loss for words.
Actions speak; she sits beside him. Everything she wanted to say seems useless all of a sudden and he's equally inarticulate, offering her the box of cereal. Cuddy reaches for a handful of the dry fruity confection and they're eating breakfast like they're best friends, deflecting a while longer, the repercussions of making each other more.
The buckle of his jeans is open––the white boxbriefs candidly bulging cotton out of the corner of her eye. Juvenile. She knows he wouldn't even be wearing pants if it weren't for the scar. He'll never grow up, he'll never change and it's just another flawed perfection she loves him for. Soon Cuddy will leave for the hospital, with no time to stop at home, shower or change. She'll rein, driven authority behind a desk, reeking of the unmistakable smell of sex, the smell of him––defiant brilliance and a singular obsession. In a month he'll have a department, an office, eventually a team.
Everything he wants, even her again if––
She hands him back the box and he refills the bowl, licking the spoon as he grapples for the prize at the bottom. He winds it up and watches the cheap toy lockstep across his coffee table. Her eyes brighten above a relieved smile.
This is the aftermath, this is it.
They'll see each other later, and tomorrow and the next day, spar and banter and refine their feigned hostility. They'll spend years pretending like this never happened, like it didn't mean anything, struggling everyday they're together to never let it happen again.
But they know, it will.
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