Sometimes, he reminded her of Henry Higgins.
She was entirely familiar with the character. Growing up, she had watched My Fair Lady like her life depended on it. When, in the third grade, she contracted the chicken pox from the boy who sat next to her in class and stole her purple crayon, she stayed home for a week with the video perpetually on play. When, in high school, the boy she had a crush on mentioned that the pimple on her nose made her look like she had chicken pox, she cried to her older sister, ran home from school, and watched Eliza Doolittle sing about the rain in Spain for two hours. Later that night, when her mother yelled at her for ditching biology, she just let silently sang her own, modified version of "Just You Wait, Henry Higgins." And even in med school, when she had stayed up for hours, memorizing the details of what she no longer called chicken pox but the vericellazoster virus, she had retreated into My Fair Lady in the case of heartache.
But she had always hated the ending. She didn't think that Professor Higgins deserved Eliza; she couldn't understand why Eliza would choose a misanthropic bastard when the doting, young, affectionate, attractive Freddy was so desperately in love with her.
She was in the midst of chaos before she even saw the warning signs. She was in love with House before she realized that he was Henry Higgins; she was running back to him, running up the stairs, turning off the phonograph before she even realized that she was Eliza Doolittle. She was falling for her teacher; she was falling for an ass that was old enough to be her father; she was falling, and by the time that she realized all the reasons why it was screwed up, it was too late to stop herself.
And really, she didn't want to.
House was the professor; Wilson was Pickering; Chase was Freddy; Cuddy was Mrs. Higgins. Once she began recognizing the parallels, she was astounded by the truth in the analogy. He was a jerk to her and everyone else; she took it and almost asked for more. And, when she had left, he had begged her to return out of an intangible, unrealized need for her- he'd grown accustomed to her face. So, drawing from her vast knowledge of Lerner and Lowe musical theater-turned-film, she knew exactly what was going on, and, she prayed to the God of fairytales, butterflies, and marshmallows, exactly what was coming.
So she was happy to wait; happy to drag on, happy to run up the stairs, happy to wait in the doorway, happy to wait for those seven words, almost synonymous with her own personal happily ever after:
Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?