Word Count: 2166
Summary: They never say 'I love you' at the office. They don't have to, and there's too much there to lose. But sometimes: there are the moments they exist outside the world.
Author's Notes: I promised my dear Cincoflex pr0n for the morning, and I wouldn't wanna break my promises to dear Cinco. -.-;; I'd had a semi-plot idea in mind. So I merged them together: the story is pretty easy to piece together from the segments, but if you will – consider this where House's mind continues to go during the course of a situation he'd rather not be in at all. CF: hope you like this one. Everyone else? Please let me know if it worked. I'm VERY self-conscious with this one... although it was fun as hell to write.
––––––––––––––––
"Can we make this quick?" Greg House muttered as he slid his bad leg underneath the table, glancing around at the rest of the assembled members. "The making of Angelina Jolie's cleavage is on Pay-Per-View at ten."
"Fitting, Dr. House. Very fitting." The lawyer, Lovett, had teeth like a picket fence and the eyes of a sociopath: fitting, indeed. "Considering that the focus of this case seems to be on the sparklingly mature way you handle your patients. And their families."
Lisa Cuddy sat at the head of the table, her hands folded on the paperwork, looking drawn and strained and irritated.
Well, who wouldn't be? House thought bitterly, rubbing at his thigh. This is a bigger waste of time than actual work.
"Can we please try and keep this professional, Mr. Lovett?" she snapped. "As aware as I am of the reactions Dr. House seems to provoke in the general populace, he is right. Let's focus on the proceedings, thank you."
Boring. As Lovett opened one of the seemingly endless supply of folders he seemed to have brought along -- Oh goody, a Boy Scout
-- House let his eyes drift to Cuddy, taking in the power skirt, the
perfectly-pressed gray jacket... and for a moment all coherent thought
of cases and lawsuits and consequences fled his mind when he realized
she must have nipped off to freshen her lipstick. To heighten her
professional
I'm-a-woman-in-charge-so-don't-fuck-with-m
e demeanor, no doubt, but that lipstick
had
left a red smear across the denim of his jeans: a bright crimson slash
like an accusation, like a confession, like a drop of blood left at the
scene of the crime, but by the time she'd managed to work the zipper
down he hadn't given much of a shit about anything. Her hands on him,
warm and small and hungry, his jeans and shorts in a tangle
around his thighs and his elbows awkward behind him on her sofa, bad
leg sprawled in front of him and the way she was shoved in between his
knees it should have felt like an offering; but instead he felt it was him, naked and splayed and glistening, at the altar of her fear and desire and urgency. His head arched back, her hair a dark spill across his heaving chest and he wanted to tell her to
"...independent confirmation from the patient's family," the voice was saying, and House drew in a long unsteady breath. Flexing his fingers around the handle of his cane beneath the table, as if he'd rather just beat these idiots' brains in and have the damn thing done with. Shifting in his chair.
"But these are some pretty heavy allegations that are being slung here, Dr. Cuddy," Lovett said, his voice flat. "It's not like we're playing in a sandbox. The parents want Dr. House's--" nodding to House as if just now remembering that he was in the room "--license pulled. At the very least. Worst case scenario, they could level a lawsuit at this hospital that could lose you half a million dollars."
That predatory smirk, now, surfacing like a shark that's scented blood in the water. "And from what I hear, things haven't been exactly... prosperous for Princeton-Plainsboro just lately."
The jab cut deep: House could see it from the way Cuddy's mouth tightened, the way her fingers, crossed in front of her on the stack of papers she'd been perusing, flexed white-knuckled for just the briefest, fleeting moment.
And then she smiled, her best professional smile, drawing herself up in her chair and glancing around at the others. "This hospital's financial details as they may or may not stand aren't really an appropriate part of this proceeding," Cool. Icy. "Dr. House may have some... unconventional methods in diagnosing and treating patients. But from what I can tell, his treatment worked. The patient's making a full recovery. Or so I'm told."
Another deep breath, and when she leaned back to run a hand through her hair the lapels of her natty gray jacket parted just a little, in the front, and House could see the buttons of her embroidered white blouse strain to contain
her breasts a heavy weight, in his hands,
rough palms cupping heaving flesh and he groaned, rubbing a moistened
thumb over the small tender bud of one nipple while she tossed her hair
back like a goddess in the moment of revelation. Christ, he loved that:
loved the way her hair spilled in dark and tousled waves across the
perfect pale flesh of her shoulders, and he'd dropped a hand away to
grip her muscled thigh and pull her further into his lap, the heat of
her maddening through the jeans as she rubbed against his groin. Her
blouse a small forgotten pile of designer fabric discarded somewhere
along with his cane, and she was groaning, now, demanding and dominant
and riding his hips with her hands wound around the back of his neck,
his cock a white agony encased in denim, and he wanted to tell her that
it was all right, that it was going to be all right, that they'd beat
this and she didn't have to worry about losing him, wanted to tell
"...an eight-year-old girl that her parents were child molesters?" And House grunted in disgust, leaning forward to put his elbows on the edge of the table and before Cuddy could stop him he'd already opened his mouth.
"The truth isn't pretty, Mr. Lovett," he snapped, an erection beneath the table and not at all in the mood to deal with moronity, to deal with this bureaucratic bullshit at all. He did his job, did it well, and their outdated sense of tact and propriety be damned. "And the truth is, parents lie. People lie. Kids, on the other hand, don't. You want to know why?"
Leaning forward, ignoring Cuddy's desperate glare that screamed I really hope that was rhetorical.
"Because kids have less to lose by telling the truth. They're not gonna lose that big-shot job over in Manhattan. Their friends aren't gonna start a gossip party over which six-year-old was boning their little sister's boyfriend. No wives to leave them if they get a little too steppy with the stepping out. So if you want the real dope on who's screwing who, you don't go to Diddlin' Daddy. You go to the kid. And in this case, it saved her life."
He shrugged. "You wanna try and have me fired for saving someone's life? Oh--wait-- this isn't a hospital?" Palm to face in perfect mocking sincerity. "Damnit, I knew something was off about that catheter."
"Very glib, Dr. House," Lovett returned after a moment's recovery, still that snakeskin smile. "But the parents feel that you overstepped your boundaries as a physician, and they want--"
"They want someone to tell them that it's okay that they molested their only child?" Cuddy broke in smoothly, and all eyes in the room turned to her. "By law, we here at Princeton-Plainsboro are required by law to report any serious allegations of child abuse. Your clients aren't the patients in this case, Mr. Lovett. They don't have the privilege of confidentiality."
Her eyes moved to House, and he could feel that gaze on his face, could feel the tremor in her hands even from four feet away. The media had barely missed this one, and if it were to go the wrong way... well circus wouldn't have even begun to cover it. And it all seemed so vaguely surreal to House's mind – like a dream, like a nod, like the future of his career and the hospital that had allowed him to do what he did for so long weren't dangling by a single thread just below a legal sword of Damocles.
"Actions have consequences, Mr. Lovett," Cuddy was saying, and House felt himself flushing, turned his eyes to the table. "These actions in particular. And I'm sorry if your clients feel that Dr. House made their experience at this hospital more 'unpleasant', but I assure you," and Cuddy's own dangerous smile, "It would be a whole lot more unpleasant for certain parties to be notified that not only were the parents in question abusing their child, but that they then turned around to try and shift blame onto the doctor that saved their daughter's life." Opening the folder before her, sliding papers into it in the gesture House had seen a million times before: We're done here.
And in that moment he loved her completely.
"Saved their daughter's life, in fact," she finished smoothly, "From damage caused by your clients' inappropriate behavior."
Cuddy lowered her head, and a loose strand of dark hair spilled over her shoulder in stark contrast to the pure white collar of her blouse. House remembered suddenly in a sucker-punch rush that she was wearing the collar because
his teeth had closed on the tender
skin just below her jaw, closed hard as his climax rose in him, and the
sound from the back of her throat as her nails dug lines of thin pain
across his shoulders might have been pain. On her back on that sofa,
one leg flung out and shoeless and the other wrapped around his lower
back as he grunted against her ear, she was murmuring to him in
breathless tones urging him on, his name and incoherent pleading
demands as he pushed against her, into her, sweat on his hairline and
harder, Greg, oh God, muscles clenching around him and his face buried
in her neck, hips rocking to her, and the way she clung to him was like
dying. Like forever, and gone, like the shadow of an empty room with nothing left anymore to remember. The mark he'd left on her throat, rising purple after
Lovett had left, the rest of them having nodded and left to do whatever it is they did, and when it was only him and Cuddy alone in the conference room she finally paused to look up.
"You," and she shook her head, raised her hands, in that way she did so often that most often simply meant, I give up. "You're a bastard."
"And you," finding his cane, testing his leg after having been sitting for an hour and a half, two steps closer to her and his heart was thrumming in his chest, in his veins, in the tightness in his groin that was a small hot pain between his thighs, "Were worried for nothing."
Her face, then, naked and angry and frustrated all in one, and Greg House thought then that he would go through a thousand of these hearings, push every boundary extant if only to have the chance to see the Lisa Cuddy no one else ever knew: how hard she worked, and how desperately she fought to keep the things she loved.
"This time," she muttered, and turned away from him: Dean of Medicine, head of this entire hospital, with paperwork to file and phone calls to make and never in a million years would she cling desperately to Gregory House in the soft lamplit shade of her office, crying his name and closing her eyes in abandon. Not to the eyes of this world, anyway: and it was this world they inhabited now. The moments they may have outside of the machine... those were a thing apart, a thing outside.
A thing that had no place whatsoever in this boardroom, and if he wanted her now it was in the same way he always had: a distant, aching need.
Nothing more.
"Hey, Cuddy," he called to her, in that same old tone, as she shouldered the door open, hands full of papers and folders and already that harrowed look; and she turned back.
"Love the outfit."