Kyrie Eleison
At the end of the day he comes home to her having not said anything too terribly offensive to anyone, and he feels like he's earned her for the day but he feels mournful and unsettled, like it's not quite the truth of who he is.
He tries to bury that feeling in other things. He kisses her face, her neck, goes for her hand again and she takes it and pulls it between them, pushing him back. He looks at her.
"House," she whispers. He shakes, hearing his name, and doesn't know why. "I want... I don't want you to be nice."
This is not what he was expecting her to say. He doesn't know how to respond. He tries to kiss her again.
"House," she says, more insistently. He hangs his head, frustrated and tired. It's obvious to him that she does want him to be nice, that she wants to be with a Nice Person, that he's driven her to tears more than a few times and she's had it with that. It irritates him, more than anything else, that she can't just appreciate his efforts to please her, as doomed as they are to eventual failure.
She unlocks their hands and puts hers on his rough cheek.
"You're not...nice," she says, and it's almost encouraging how much she can make 'nice' sound like a negative trait. But he exhales hard because he doesn't know what the hell she's talking about or if even she knows what she wants from him, and if she doesn't he's not going to make it a month with her. "You're not cruel, either."
"Yes I am," he says quietly. "If you think I'm not, you're going to disappointed." Cuddy sighs. She knows he's a man of binaries, but any desperate animal will bite and she doesn't know why he thinks he's different. She's always forgiven him for the transgressions she could understand, and for those she couldn't she's just assumed there was always a reason. He's had so many reasons.
"I'm telling you what I want," she says.
"You don't know what you want," he says, and the look in his eyes is frustrated and raw.
"House, I've had about twenty years to figure this out."
"You're an idiot," he says with a face that implies that she's stupid and that he doesn't care, and it's not even halfway to his usual levels of snark but it makes her smile so wide.
"That," she says. "That, House."
He stands up a little straighter.
"Nice is boring. I want you."
He came into her office to give her a book. She knew he didn't care about valuable objects, and it was clear as he handed it to her that he didn't expect her to be terribly impressed by its antiquity. He wanted something else. She watched him watching her and she didn't know what it was.
There was something different about him, something that had slowly been changing but had just focused into something recognizably new. She didn't know what that was, either, but it was there and it was nagging her to notice, to see, to understand. She had a feeling of being close to too late.
The inscription he'd written was strangely tame and appropriate. He'd marked the book indelibly, inking another man's name next to hers in something he'd figured she'd probably consider a family artifact. She held it by the spine, imagined him writing those letters, his forearm resting on the delicate page.
The way he presented it to her, the way he'd said mature, the way he insisted she read the markings he'd left: it all seemed so juvenile and needy, yet when she looked up at him she didn't see the defiant scowl she'd expected. He was displeased, sad, but not in a way that was hidden or vengeful, and she couldn't see the manipulation in his gift, couldn't see an ulterior motive besides that the gift was thoughtful and he wanted her to know he was thoughtful about her. But she already knew that.
She'd played his game of out-hurting each other all night long but when she saw him on the bathroom floor she realized he hadn't been playing at all, and that she'd been throwing spears at his body for hours, maybe months, after he'd dropped his shield.
It's a warm night for New Jersey, even in June. It's not humid, not yet, so he has her windows open and it's extremely comfortable for them both to be naked.
She's sprawled out on her side, laying with her head propped on her hand so she can look down her body at him. He's curled around her, his cheek resting on her thigh, her knee curled behind his back and her calf pressing softly against his shoulder. Her other leg is higher, folded slightly back to give her hips an upward angle, and she rests her foot lightly on his right side while he strokes the small of her back with his hand. He's slow and relaxed, warm as the weather.
There's a baby monitor on the night table. He's explained to her that having a baby monitor for a two-year-old (is it still two? He can't really be bothered to remember) is borderline pathological, and that in Olden Tymes they would have just chained the kid to a table or put a bull-mastiff in there with her for protection, but apparently Cuddy wants nothing to do with either idea. She puts the mother in 'smother,' and he knows she's just trying to be good and he finds it kind of touching when she overdoes it, not because his parents weren't like that but because she's frequently the same with him. He'll let her overdo him, anytime.
So the monitor stays, on but (so far) silent, because it lets her relax and when she relaxes she enjoys herself a hell of a lot more.
His grey whiskers tickle her but it's nothing compared to what his lips are doing. Or his tongue. He feels her fingers skirt the uneven tips of his hair and he smiles, pressing his stubble a little harder into her skin. Ordinarily he'd say some smartass thing about interruption or distraction but tonight he's silently content to keep on keeping on: focus is a strong suit of his.
She breathes a little faster and a little shallower. He has years and years of her cataloged reactions to guide him, but he's found he never uses them anymore. He prefers the immediacy of his intuition to the success rate of calculation. He prefers to impress her by happy accident. Frequent happy accidents.
Like this one, he thinks, and he drags his tongue over her in one wide, flat lick, his lips preceding and following with their own soft heat. He feels the muscles jump in her hips and he shoves his hand under her, digging under her body and through the sheets to clamp over her hipbone and hold her in place.
Her leg is the next thing she becomes unable to control and her thigh falls trembling over his ear, making everything quiet save for the hush of his own heartbeat and her femoral pulse in both ears: stereo. She mumbles an apology, presumably for trying to crush his face, but he's told her a million times there's enough space for him between her legs. Actually he's told her there's room for the cast of Show Boat between her legs, but she never listens. He takes his hand away from its gentle work on her back and he palms her thigh instead, rubbing his thumb over what might be the gracilis or the semitendinosus until she stops trying (and failing) to keep its weight off his head. Only then does he pull gently, edging her leg down to rest closer to his shoulder.
He pushes his face against her in earnest, keeping his hand moving in irregular paths from her hip to her back to her stomach, where he can feel the deeper muscles flexing under his touch. He finds it involuntarily arousing the way she's making little sounds, the way she's pulled a pillow under her head to clutch, her fingers gripping and releasing in a rhythm that mirrors the one he's keeping with his mouth. Her nails are drawing lightning bolts on his head through his hair.
This is when he enjoys himself the most, as he feels her shaking around his shoulders and hears her moan his name guilelessly. Once he gets her here she's easy, everything's easy, and it's like he's playing a rigged game. A jibe about slot machines comes to him and he savors its acerbic efficiency but doesn't break away to share it with her because she'd probably crush his skull between her knees, even if it was the best slot-related wit he'd come up with this week.
"House," she whispers above him, muffled because she's turned her face into the pillow. He can imagine how good her neck looks with her face at that angle, and he thinks that someday he's going to have to convince her to film this so he can see everything he's missing. He can't imagine what the trade-off for that will be, but he's hoping she accepts sex as a currency because he's pretty sure he's the Euro of sexual currency, if not the Kuwaiti Dinar. "House," she insists, letting her fingers knot in his hair, "stop thinking and..." He gives her a nice little jolt of speechlessness with some artful movements of his nose.
"Hmm?" he hums deeply, letting the sound permeate, and she hums along with him.
"Go," she gasps, and he keeps up a tangible purr as he moves faster, harder. He doesn't try as hard to keep the roughness of his chin away from her skin. His hands tighten on her body, giving her the deep pressure on her ilia that she's always seemed to like. He wonders if she's figured out yet why she picks skirts that pull so tightly around her hips - it's almost not fair that he knows a secret about her that she doesn't.
"House," she says, one more time, and he knows it's the last time because he can barely hear her, and because everything about her is vibrating around him like he's put his head into a beehive. He flattens his hand over her back and becomes an immovable object, holding her. She arches and flexes and breathes with sound but he doesn't ease off, just keeps her between his hands and his lips and the pressure increases as she struggles-not to get away but to hold out for more.
She wants to see his face but she has to imagine it; all she gets is the top of his head, a hint of his closed eyes, and the acreage of his hand and arm and shoulders. His fingertips are white with force on her hip, and somehow this visual connects perfectly with what she's feeling. Her body arcs forward, a precursive tremor, and she feels him smiling wider against her, possibly even forming words, though she's never known what he says in these last moments.
Her body curls down, her abdominals on fire but unwilling to relax. She clings to his hair with both hands, trying not to pull, and though her throat is at an odd angle and her mouth is half-open she manages an achingly open tonal sound that, if he were in her, would have brought him to orgasm in seconds. Lucky for her, he's not in her. Luckier for her, he thinks, I will be. And as he thinks it he's already made the concession that he's just as lucky that she'll let him, though he might not say that out loud because it wouldn't be funny as much as it would be sincere and he doesn't want to go making himself uncomfortable for the sake of love.
For the record, the crick in his neck is a different kind of uncomfortable.
And once he stops profaning everything in the name of his disbelief in good things he'll realize that there's almost no realm of uncomfortable that he won't endure for her.
She freezes: her thighs ride hard into his neck and his face and for a few seconds he's in a vice, experiencing a slight but actual worry about exactly how strong all that yoga might have made her. But he knows what's coming and he braces through her strength, like he's launched something and he's waiting to see how it flies. He has an impeccable flight record with her.
She's smaller than him and he knows it especially when she comes. She lets go and he doesn't, and something about that makes her feel like she doesn't need to hold anything back. Her body quivers and contorts, steadied at the hips by his weight and determination. She gives him every gasping breath he's earned, most of them stalling and starting in the middle as she tells her ribs to expand and they politely decline.
There's something holding back his breath, too, something sacred about this moment that has to do with things he avoids: vulnerability, honesty, plain and infinite desire. In his head he circumvents it all as best he can, but his body understands viscerally that these things are privileges and receives them openly, whole-heartedly, gratefully. His arms are around her; he grips her and holds her and shivers with her. His good leg pulls closer so he can touch his knee to her back for one more point of contact, and he feels his size - really feels it - because that knee touches down almost between her scapulae. She arches back against it, too.
Then she disengages, loops the one leg from his shoulder and tugs his hair gently so he'll pick his head up off the other. She sits up, scoots weakly back on the bed but only to fold herself next to him, clumsily aligning herself and huddling against him so nakedly that he feels an rash of pride. He feels like he ought to put his arms around her, which he does, and she inches closer to take up the space where his arms used to be. She's mindful of his thigh, even protective; she crooks her leg over his injury like a guard.
She threads her arms under his and for a silent minute she just holds him as tightly as she can. He's firm and proud of himself, rubbing her back with one hand and letting the other softly touch the loose hair at the nape of her neck. Her head is tucked under his, resting on his bicep. She's breathing on his chest, and considering that he's still hard and ready and completely turned on, he wants her to stop or put her mouth on his skin.
"Oh my god, House," she says, not because she has to but because he eats compliments like he eats... Right, she thinks, and maybe House is warping her little by little but his ego is magnificent, if overly large, and she'll feed it any way she feels he deserves. There's something about him when he's feeling good about himself that reminds her of a racehorse, proud and shining. The thing in fulfillment of itself.
"You're incredible," she says.
"I've got something else incredible to show you," he mutters into her hair.
She just laughs.
"Laughter is a perfectly normal response to fear," he says. He gives her two miniature thrusts of his hips for emphasis, and she feels him against her stomach, solid and warm.
She pulls her head back and smiles up at him. He gives her an unwavering reproachful stare until she finally just shakes her head.
"Oh my god, House," she says again, but with a completely different tone. If he had two good legs he'd flip her on her back and see what other tones he could get out of her, but he's still learning to work with his thigh and she's been nothing but patient.
Someday he'd surprise her, but that day was not today.