Chapter 3 of 4
Thank you all for the comments. Specially the guests (I can't thank them personally).
BabalooBlue made the revision. Go check her stories :)
III
House opened the door to his apartment and entered.
"Make yourself comfortable. I'm going to prepare something for us to eat. Are you still a veggie?"
Cuddy said yes while she closed the door and stepped inside the living room.
"An omelette, then." House's voice came from the kitchen.
Cuddy looked around her. The living room was furnished almost like House's living room at 221 B but with fewer things. The new apartment was smaller. The piano was in a corner, near the window. She didn't see the guitars. A big sword was displayed, in a prominent position, on one of the walls. The same sword House once used to open a champagne bottle. He couldn't do it and the bottle had smashed between his fingers, splashing champagne all over the place. She could still hear themselves laughing. The sound echoed in her memory. Ghost of a former time.
There were medical journals scattered around the couch and sheet music on the floor and on top of the piano. Cuddy picked one up, out of curiosity. On the top of the page a word was written – "To" – but the space next to it was empty. The sheet was filled with annotations. She smiled inwardly noting House's handwriting. Tall, lean and shooting in different directions, like the man himself.
The evening light was coming through the window, filtered by curtains of a thin white fabric. There were no photographs anywhere. It was a strange, surreal atmosphere. Like visiting the past but at the same time not.
Why did he hang that sword?, thought Cuddy. I shouldn't have come.
"The food is on the table." She heard House shout.
xxx
They ate in silence in the beginning, both of them feeling uncomfortable.
"And how is the little fan of pirate cartoons? Is she in college? Don't tell me she's married already," asked House more to say something than because of any real curiosity. Talking about kids was a safe subject. All mothers like to talk about their children.
"Rachel is five, House. She is very well. Loves to play. Always doing something, never staying still for a second. Tall, you wouldn't believe it. She stayed with my mother."
"Ah, the old Jewish walrus. Such fun we had together."
At that moment House's cell phone rang. He looked at it.
"Hold on to what you're thinking and were not going to say," he remarked while he walked out of the kitchen to pick up the call.
Cuddy listened to him talking in the living room but she couldn't discern what he was saying. After a couple of minutes, House came back.
As soon as he sat down, he asked abruptly:
"Are you seeing someone?"
Cuddy had been waiting for that question since the beginning of the meal, but its suddenness still took her by surprise. House's timing was different from everyone else's.
"Yes."
"Do you love him?"
Cuddy dropped her eyes to the omelette leftovers on her plate. "It's so difficult to find love, you know," she said, softly.
"Poor guy."
"Fuck you." He had managed to make her angry.
"Sorry. My bad. I shouldn't have said anything. If you want to leave I understand completely."
Cuddy thought about it. She was more than ready to go, but she didn't because she knew that was what he wanted, what he was expecting. Instead, she asked:
"No dessert for your guest of honour?"
House's mouth stretched into a knowing smile.
"Mais oui, madame." He rose and limped towards the fridge. "But I must warn you, I didn't go shopping so don't count on anything too sophisticated." He opened the door and looked inside. "You can choose between jelly and canned peaches," he said and turned his head to Cuddy.
Cuddy picked the first one and House brought two plastic cups with jelly to the table. Through the half-opened door Cuddy had seen that the fridge was almost empty.
She wanted to help him clean up but House didn't let her. It was he who removed the dishes and fetched the spoons. The bottle of wine they had been drinking, however, remained in the same place.
Again, silence fell in the kitchen, only interspersed by the muffled tic-tac of an old alarm clock. House watched Cuddy eat. He observed the elegant way she handled the spoon, how her lips parted and curved slightly, the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, the way her hair framed her face and flowed in waves over and down her shoulders. He had always admired her hair. He remembered the pleasure he felt whenever he dived in that thick mass, its slim slippery threads covering his fingers like dark seaweeds, its perfume filling him inside. That pleasure was now reserved for another. His leg was hurting again.
After dessert, coffee. A nice smell spread throughout the air. Cuddy observed House while he put the cups on the table, took the coffee pot from the stove, picked up the sugar. He moved effortlessly, almost automatically, as if he was performing a ritual. Cuddy liked to see him move, to see his muscles distend and contract, to discern the shape of his back and chest underneath the t-shirt's fabric, to look at his long hands touching things. Cuddy imagined him making those same gestures every day. Alone… or maybe not. She tried not to think about that last possibility.
The coffee tasted good.
"And did you do it? Reinvent yourself, I mean," Cuddy asked, at last.
House became serious. "I'm still a cripple. I'm still in pain. I'm still on Vicodin. I'm still alone. But I recovered my music. I play now every day. I compose songs for me and for others. I give consults, unofficially. I see some patients. Not the kind of patients who feel comfortable going to a hospital."
Cuddy gave him a look.
"Hey, I already broke the law... A life is a life. Who they are, what they do, that never made any difference to me." He paused momentarily. "I rediscovered the pleasure of travelling. I'm rarely at home nowadays. If I changed? The man I once was still lives inside me, somewhere. You cannot truly change who you are, deep down. I'm not happy, if that is what you really want to know. I tried to be in the past and that almost destroyed me. I will not make the same mistake again. I feel free. At least as free as a man like me can be." He glanced at his leg. "I live day by day. I try to be more patient with life's little inconveniences, its small hiccups. Every day something unexpected happens. You, today, for instance. I stopped searching for meaning and maybe because of that I sometimes find it in what is around me. Ironic, isn't it? Life is chaos, we are chaos. I learned to live with the chaos that I am."
And House never looked more beautiful to Cuddy as in that moment.
