Author's note: Sorry, folks. The first few chapters were written before Known Unknowns was aired, and I'm not changing them any more.
Chapter 2
"I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow." [Pride and Prejudice Ch. 6]
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, one month later
Someone was flicking paper pellets at Lisa Cuddy. She stiffened slightly as one hit the back of her neck and willed herself not to look around at the perpetrator. There could only be one person in the endocrinology class who'd waste his time shooting pellets instead of taking notes, and she was determined to take no notice of him whatsoever. Cuddy glanced down instinctively at her own notes and noticed that the last bit didn't make sense. Bother! The barrage of pellets had distracted her sufficiently to make her miss some of the salient points of the lecture.
Irritated by her own lack of concentration she scanned the room for a familiar face so that she could ask to borrow their notes to copy later, but she drew a complete blank. She was the only undergraduate in the class, having wheedled her way in with a lot of charm and even more determination. As a result she knew absolutely no one here personally. Greg House didn't count – she'd never talked to him. Besides, he obviously didn't take notes or, if he did, he converted them into pellets straightaway.
Cuddy brought her attention back to the lecturer, a post-graduate standing in for an absentee professor, and tried to make sense of what he was saying. Until the present day, she'd had the impression that she was coping well with a class that was advanced by her standards, but at the moment she felt out of her depth. Was the fellow botching up the lecture or was she stupid and incompetent?
She caught a movement at the end of her row in the corner of her eye. House had left his seat in the back row and was moving down her row towards her. She'd put her bag on the seat beside her, a subconscious act of self-defense when she was amongst strangers, but the message was lost on him. Reaching out, he dumped the bag unceremoniously onto the ground and plonked himself onto the seat next to hers. It took all her will power to ignore him and stare straight ahead while she slowly counted till ten. Only then did she deign to turn her head and fix him with a chilling look, saying, "That bag was there for a reason."
Blue-gray eyes returned her stare with an expression of mock dismay. She felt a queer tingling up her spine and the word 'mesmerizing' floated inconsequentially through her mind. She gave herself a mental shake and added lamely, "You might have asked first."
"Why ask, if one mightn't like the answer?"
She broke eye contact first, returning her attention to the lecture and the business of taking notes. His presence might be enervating, but he needn't know that, so she scribbled, jotted and underlined as if her life depended on it.
She could sense him mustering her before he too turned his eyes to the front. His hands, however, were restless, fingering the contents of his pockets, playing with his buttons, and finally beating a tattoo on the desk. Another inconsequential thought popped into her mind, "a pianist's hands", and to chastise herself for the direction her thoughts were taking she turned to him with a show of impatience.
"What?" she asked.
"I've run out of paper," he said meekly, giving her a spaniel stare of devotion. She snorted, but tore a page from her pad and handed it to him.
"Thank you, teacher."
She ignored the jibe and returned to her notes, cursing herself for giving in to him so quickly.
Three minutes later she gave up all pretense of listening to the lecture. She had manfully ignored the sound of tearing paper, she had not so much as cast an eye at the process that had converted harmless strips of pulped wood into deadly missiles, and she had closed her ears to the mutterings that had accompanied that process, but his next words jerked her rudely into the here and now of Housianism.
"I'll bet you five dollars that I can flick this into her cleavage."
He had a pellet balanced on the palm of his left hand, and his right hand was poised to propel the pellet into the amply exposed cleavage of a female student sitting three rows in front of them.
"Don't!" she hissed sharply, slapping her hand down instinctively onto his palm to imprison the pellet. She regretted the contact immediately. A few heads in the row in front of them turned, causing her to flush with mortification. She removed her hand quickly, brushing the pellet from his palm onto the floor as she did so.
"Aw, teacher," he complained as he bent down to retrieve it. He froze in mid-movement, however, his gaze focusing suddenly and his face intent, then he straightened up slowly, the inane grin replaced by a set line of concentration. It took Cuddy a moment to realize that it was not she who had provoked this metamorphosis, but the hapless lecturer. Something he had just said had caught House's attention.
House's voice cut through the room. "All the symptoms you just listed could just as well have been caused by a viral infection or an auto-immune disease. You can't diagnose a hormonal imbalance on the basis of those symptoms."
What symptoms? Cuddy asked herself, scanning her notes. She had listed no symptoms, had obviously seen, heard and understood nothing of the lecture these past five minutes. House, on the other hand, had managed to fabricate and flick pellets, carry on a sotto voce conversation with her and attend to the lecture, all at the same time. He was now reciting a list of diagnostic tests that could confirm or exclude potential causes of the disorder in question, while the lecturer sought refuge in his notes. Cuddy felt sorry for him – standing in for a professor at short notice was probably harrowing even without know-it-alls like House in the audience.
"Yes, well, maybe we can discuss this in detail tomorrow," the lecturer suggested with the air of a drowning man clutching at a straw.
"You've made a completely erroneous statement, and now you want to leave it hanging in the air?" House said disgustedly.
A ripple of amusement went through the benches while the lecturer thumbed his notes in despair.
"Aw, leave off, House, he's just a stand in," a good-natured voice from the front interposed.
House leaned forward, clearly intending to object further, but Cuddy instinctively put a restraining hand on his arm. He turned to her, momentarily diverted and clearly surprised, but she held his gaze steadily, cursing herself for getting involved, but unable to allow the lecture to descend into a spiral of chaos without intervening. His gaze moved questioningly to her hand, but she just raised an eyebrow and increased the pressure slightly.
The lecturer grasped the opportunity, "We'll continue, shall we?" and embarked into a long flow of technicalities.
Once the lecture was well under way again, Cuddy removed her hand and continued taking notes as though nothing had happened. She could feel House's gaze on her, while his fingers resumed their nervous drumming.
The drumming suddenly ceased, and she couldn't refrain from turning her head to see what had caught his attention this time. He was staring at a spot two inches beside her head.
"Wanna go out with me?" His eyes met hers for a short moment before sliding away once more to contemplate empty space. It took her a moment to grasp that he'd asked her for a date. Had there been a tentative note in his voice? Wishful thinking, she admonished herself. A few heads in the row in front of them swiveled around at his question, so she quickly got a grip on herself. There was, in her opinion, enough gossip about her, her drive, her workaholism, her geekiness, so there was no need to fuel it by becoming House's … House's what?
Precisely, she told herself, House's heaven-knows-what, because he certainly wasn't the type for a steady girl-friend.
"You are interpreting too much into a simple gesture," she said coolly, one eyebrow slightly raised.
He shrugged casually. "I take it that's a 'no'," he said carelessly, his seeming indifference belied by the fact that he studiously avoided eye-contact, studying the tips of his sneakers instead.
Interesting, she thought. Is he shy or did he regret the invitation the moment he made it?
The question nagged at her till the end of the lecture, but she was too inexperienced in dealing with males in the mating mode to take up the issue with him. When the lecture ended, she gathered up her things and departed almost at a gallop.
She was barely out of earshot when the heads in the row in front of him turned again to survey House.
"House, you aren't seriously trying to date Lisa Cuddy, are you?"
He averted his gaze from her departing form and swung his feet onto the desk, a study in nonchalance and indifference that would have fooled more percipient men than the ones before him. "Why not?"
"She's all work and no play, that's why."
"She's obsessed with her career."
"She doesn't date losers."
"What a pity," House sighed in mock melancholy. "She's got such nice funbags."
