Chapter 4

"Hello?" House said when there was no response. He heard the subtle click of disconnection when she hung up. House, being House, called back.

"Hey," she said now, her voice quiet and a little hoarse.

"You kinda suck at prank phone calls," he teased. He heard her stifle a tiny laugh.

"Don't do that," she said. "Don't make me laugh." They were silent for a few moments. He was trying to get a read on her, on what this was about, without letting his heart get ahead of his brain. He needed to collect information - something for his mind to work on - to distract him from the fireworks exploding in his chest.

"Why did you call?" he asked gently, managing to get out of the tub and start haphazardly drying off. He was excited. He needed to pace.

"I don't know," she said, exhaustion in her voice.

"Why did you hang up?"

She sighed. "I don't know." He could sense that she was on the verge of being overwhelmed, but he didn't know in which direction. He thought about his conversation with Wilson – what he asked of her, what she was capable of…

"Relax, Cuddy. It's just a phone call. It's not… forgiveness." He wrapped a towel around his waist as he went to find pants, feeling strangely modest, like she was in there with him.

"It's never just a phone call with you," she complained.

"Well, okay, it's a phone call at one in the morning. But just a phone call."

He heard her suck in her breath. "A phone call… at one in the morning… from my car… parked outside your building." House dropped the handful of tee shirts he'd been shoving aside in a search for underwear and took long limping strides across his apartment to look out his living room window, not realizing until he got there that he didn't even know what kind of car she drove now.

"But just a phone call," he mumbled, eyes combing the street for some sign of life.

"I don't know why I can't just leave you in my past, why I can't just… leave you alone."

House considered the question. "You're a perfectionist. And I'm the duck that wouldn't get in the row."

"You think?" she asked, authentically entertaining theories. "You think it's all about the challenge of you?"

Now House sighed. "I don't know, Cuddy." He rubbed his hand over his face. "I've asked myself the same question."

"You also wonder why you can't get over yourself?" He heard her snicker.

"Yes. I've determined it's either my benevolence or my philanthropy work. Whatever it is, I just can't let me go." She laughed and he smiled, catching his reflection in the window and realizing how rarely he thought of himself as smiling.

"Can we just talk?" she asked. "Not about us, or Wilson, or anything important?"

"Yeah. Of course, yeah…" There was a pause. A million teasing, flirtatious lines ran through his head, but all he really wanted to do was be near her again, so instead he asked, "How was lunch with Foreman?"

"Oh, fine," she answered. "That guy just never stops thinking highly of himself, does he?"

House laughed a little. "Yeah, he's pretty proud of himself."

"I mean, he should be. He's very accomplished. But he really never misses an opportunity to let you know it."

"He does it more with authority figures," House explained. "I remember the first year he was with me…"

And so began two hours of conversation that truly didn't cover anything important, but it might have been one of the most important conversations of their relationship. They found the groove they had slipped out of the moment they became a couple, when their mutual terror over what this could do to them replaced their mutual fantasy of how good it could be. Somewhere between that dusty dawn kiss in his bathroom and the moment she walked out two days later, they had lost faith in each other. He'd seen it quickly and addressed it, and she'd swept it away as paranoid fears because she didn't want to feel that she'd doomed them to grief the moment she'd given them what they'd wanted for so long.

But it hadn't gone away, House thought now. Where they had once been conscious of each other's physical presence, raised eyebrows, sly smirks, and brushes of contact, they were then conscious of every furrowed brow and disapproving click of the tongue as a possible death omen. Where they had once confronted and hashed out and offered honest-if-painful feedback, they then avoided and lied and spent time analyzing short outbursts while staring out windows. Where they once had gone to each other – albeit in messy fumbling ways – they then ran from each other, for fear of being told it was over.

And so when she hurt him most, he didn't remember how to burst in her door and yell at her and tell her plainly how she was being illogical. He had lost the person who could take the manifestations of his anger and his logic and his pain, and love him anyway. And he was alone. He had nowhere to send the hurt.

And he knew then why he had done what he'd done. He'd wanted her to see him again, and to take the impact of his pain and anger and fucked up baggage, and love him anyway. Maybe she really was his only faith, because he remembered being pissed and indignant and powerless, and who did he go to with that shit? And there she was on the other side of the dining room window, smiling and socializing, oblivious to his need for her.

So he broke the fucking window.

He came to this realization slowly, as they talked. It was good because it allowed his mind to work on something other than manipulating her into coming upstairs. But once he'd realized it, it underscored what he'd seen when he spoke with Wilson about even the bad being better than the nothing. He needed her in his life, in whatever way possible, because somewhere along these decades she had become what made him work. It may have been incremental, but she had made him better. And it may have been combative and loud and nasty at times, but she did handle his pain and comfort him. And no one - he was positive of this - no one else could do that.

He'd pulled on jeans and a tee shirt while they'd talked, and thank goodness because now all he wanted was to get to her. He shoved his feet into sneakers discarded by the couch and went downstairs as fast he could. On the street he scanned the cars, looking for one with movement. He finally found her, parked almost at the end of the block, leaning back in her seat, her head against the window. They were still talking and so she was mid-sentence in a description of a scan that was the main source of evidence in a malpractice suit against one of her doctors, when he tapped on the glass of the passenger window.

"Shit!" she yelled, rearing up in her seat and pressing herself against the driver's side door. She saw his face in the glass and gave him a what-the-hell look and unlocked the car. He slid in and hung up his phone. He grinned at her.

"Hey."

She grinned back, still breathless from the startle. "God, you're an asshole. How would that not scare the hell out of me?"

"You shouldn't sit in your car at night," he told her. "Do you have any idea how many creepy cripples are crawling around out here."

"At least one," she said, running her hands over her hair, under her eyes. She was haphazardly grooming, he noted. They stared at each other across the car. "Why'd you come down here?" she asked him.

"I don't know," he lied.

Cuddy smirked at him. "It is good to see you." He just looked at her, letting himself take in her eyes and her steely little smirk, enjoying the proximity. She was still in work clothes - a simple gray dress under her trench and her mile-high heels.

"You can't sit in your car all night," he finally said.

"Ooooh, swoon. Does that line work on all the girls?" she teased.

"All the girls who talk to me on the phone for two hours while parked outside my building in the middle of the night."

"Maybe I was about to tell you I had to get going," she said.

"Maybe I was about to ask you not to go."

Cuddy let out a shaky breath. "House, I'm… I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but it isn't… I can't…"

"It's just a phone call, remember?" he said. "Now come in and get warm and you can have something to drink and go to sleep." She looked both tempted and hesitant. "Unless you've had some kind of drastic bladder surgery in the last years, I know you have to pee like crazy right now." She grinned a little. "I have a toiiiiileeeet…" he sang, like he was offering a child candy.

She grabbed her purse and opened her car door, and he leapt out of his side to meet her at the curb. They walked side by side toward his building door and he impulsively took her hand. She didn't even tense up, but just curled her fingers around his like it was the most natural thing to do. They walked upstairs wordlessly and entered his apartment. They stood there for a moment after he took her coat and laid it on a chair, then she giggled and kicked off her shoes and ran to the bathroom in haste.

When she emerged he was waiting at the end of the hallway, two drinks in his hand. He walked closer and handed one to her. She sipped and made a little face. "Whew. I haven't had scotch since we broke up."

"Funny," he replied, "I've had more." She mimed like she'd been socked in the gut and they smiled at each other. "So, you can have the bed. I'll take the couch cuz everyone knows I'm Mr. Hospitality."

She looked at him, her smile fading. "Will you sleep with me?" she asked him. "I mean… just sleep with me." She was leaning against the wall across from his bedroom door. He scratched the back of his head, glanced at the floor. "I'm not gonna be able to sleep anyway with you out there on the couch. It's stupid." He nodded and she turned to go into his room and she reached out for his hand this time.

They lay on the bed, facing each other, but not touching. He pulled the blanket up around them and watched her close her eyes. He ran his fingers over a lock of hair, curling it around her ear, watching her relax into the pillow.

"I did it because I missed you, Cuddy."

She opened her eyes slowly. "I know, House," she told him, as if the whole meaning of that – all that he had assembled while they talked – had been clear to her since the beginning.

He looked confused. "What do you want me to do? What are you wanting me to say?"

She reached out and cupped his face, running her thumb over his eyebrow to smooth out the tension knitted there. "I never really figured that out because I gave up thinking you were capable of it anyway."

"Why?" he asked, almost desperately.

She sighed. "You want the ends to justify the means, House. But you're so narrow in your perspective. You look at your ends, and you consider brief moments in time." She paused. "I don't mean to be cryptic. It's just… How do I explain to you what it's like to think like a different person? A person who cares about someone more than himself?"

"I care about you," he insisted.

"I know you do. I know you care about me a lot." The implication hung there.

"So, what?" he finally said, frustrated. "I'm supposed to be happier for you getting rid of me, moving on to other people, than I am sad for myself? That's nobility or morality or whatever it is you're looking for?"

"It's not… God, I don't know how to explain this. You'll know it if you ever feel it. Something like that is possible."

"In humans?" he asked, sarcastically.

"It is," she told him. "Some people will suffer pain so someone else doesn't, or will hold on to their own pain to not inflict it on another. When they love that person." He just stared at her. "Consider where you've come close," she told him. "Consider your mom. Or Wilson. Or even me. And consider what stops you from letting us come first in spite of what it does to you. You stop because you have to consider our pain." She found his hand and squeezed it. "You have a lot of hurt, House. I know this. You had a father who thought nothing of hurting you, you had a major physical trauma that will never heal… But you are so focused on your pain - or rather numbing it - that you don't have room for anyone else's. You dismiss ours because there's no way it'll ever measure up to yours. But we hurt too, House. And… and sometimes you're the one who hurts us. Which makes the dismissal worse."

He looked at her like she was speaking a foreign language. "When did you get me all figured out?" he asked, gently but with a bit of a bite.

Cuddy snorted. "I've spent a lot of money on therapy that ends up psychoanalyzing you," she teased. "I still don't have a clue about myself." She laughed. "What I'm saying might make sense to you eventually. Think about it." She grinned at him. "But you might wanna get some sleep first." Her eyes fell closed and he lay next to her, eventually falling asleep to the warmth of her body and the rhythm of her breath.

[H] [H] [H]

He woke when she startled, sitting up and looking around for a clock. He saw in her face that she had crossed over into looking at things in the harsh light of day, without the night shadows to soften the edges. And she was panicking.

"I have to go," she said when she saw him staring at her.

"Why? Where do you have to be?"

"I'm staying at Wilson's. He's probably freaking out."

"I'm sure he knows where you are."

Cuddy snorted. "Yeah, cuz I'm so fucking predictable," she said bitterly, standing up.

"Cuz we're so predictable," he clarified, trying to say that this wasn't her mistake, but rather their connection. But she was up now, smoothing her hair as she padded down the hallway, and now he was panicking. "Come on. Just call Wilson. We'll have breakfast. Or sex, if you prefer." He was trying to make her laugh, to bring back the intimate exchanges of last night. But she was undeterred, pulling her coat on already. "Cuddy."

"I can't, House. I have to go," she answered matter-of-factly. She looked at him evenly, but he could see the little cracks in her armor. She wasn't okay any more than he was.

"Why?"

She bit her lip. "Like you said. It was just a phone call. Not forgiveness."

House shook his head, overwhelmed with the thoughts streaming through it. "God, this fucking apartment!" he yelled, laughing a little. "How many times will you mend and break my heart in here?"

Cuddy froze and looked at him, tearing up a little. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, House. I shouldn't have done any of this. I shouldn't have put us through it." She turned away from him and grabbed her purse.

"Don't go, Cuddy. Please."

"I have to," she whispered, digging around in her purse, as if it contained some guidance on what to do. He caught her arm lightly and she turned back to look at him.

"Why can't you just stay? Why can't we just… try this again?"

She looked at him sadly. "Don't you see? It's because you have to ask that." And she left.