three days
The memory is more a mirage when the wake up call shrieks shrill the next morning. Liquid consolation from the night before is a migraine. A hungover House's arm dangles over the edge of the hotel bed, an empty bourbon bottle still in his gradually awakening grasp.
The layover is over after today. Despondent, he stands and struggles to the bathroom where he decides not to shave. A austere fear radiates in his chest as
he checks out of the hotel; cane and carryon and another interview at another hospital––
His flight doesn't leave until tomorrow morning but this dawns on him only after he's back inside PPTH, with no real conception of where he'll go from here.
A strange nostalgia stalks him in these halls. He's only been here once but they feel familiar, as if he's already deciphered their secrets, called the corridors home, like it's an old haunt more than an ordinary ivy league teaching hospital.
Cuddy's office is empty when he veers in the wrong direction, through pediatrics, past oncology and into endocrinology. The blue mailbox has become a nameplate, the ordinary girl next door an extraordinary woman, a respected doctor.
Head of a department and he thinks she can't be thirty––her coup is coming still.
Something else, or rather somebody else is making these new halls seem an abstract memory lane. Neck-tied and wing-tipped at a kiosk stands a familiar face. House steps closer and angles his head over the unsuspecting man's shoulder, lurking.
"Jimmy Wilson, boy wonder oncologist. Still living down that ten years bad luck?
Wilson winces, grinning as he recognizes the voice and remembers the bar's broken antique mirror.
"...with the agony of alimony?" House finishes, reminded of manila guised legality
and his divorce deduction.
"Two, actually. What are you doing here House?"
"Interview with Nephrology."
"I thought they were only hiring instructors."
House nods.
"And how did you hear about it so fast? Human resources hasn't even started accepting resumes yet."
"I know the head of endocrinology."
Wilson squints, tilting his head incredulously.
"You know Cuddy?"
There's something more Wilson wants to ask, or tell him. Nephrology isn't the only department hiring, half the hospital is being replaced. But he's holding up the line, and too polite to let an interrogation ensue.
"Well, good luck," he says paying for his coffee and excited for House's potential at Princeton Plainsboro.
Fifteen minutes later, House shakes hands with the Chief of Medicine of the second hospital of his second interview during his short stay in the garden state. He smiles and nods, is obediently hypocritical. In the middle of justifying his last three dismissals, he deduces that the rather pompous, rather senile chief has already chosen his nephew, the newborn nephrologist whose article on the evolution, advances and future of dialysis is framed and centered behind uncle dean, to be heir to the department.
Despite an old friend's good intentions he never had a chance. Anger swells, punctuated in his expression by the frustration of the futility.
Maybe he thinks he doesn't deserve to be happy. Maybe, as much as he wants it, he's afraid of staying. House knows this opportunity is a grenade in his hand. Not pulling the pin is impossible.
By the time Wilson bites into his lunch, House is supinr and still unemployed on a bench outside, staring at the September sky.
An engine soars overhead and he thinks he'll be on a plane soon, stuck mobile in the bleak blue universe. He's thinking he should have shut up and that she'll be better off without him. And he's thinking he needs a drink.
So he finds a bar, and another. When the third cuts him off, he finds a phonebook.
Cuddy, L––925 Market St.
He hails a cab and heads into the suburbs, wanting this lifelong layover to end,to find a way, a reason to stay (or at least to get laid).
one night
Incessant pounding at her front door forces Cuddy from a comfortable spot curled up in her favorite chair, in front of the first crackling fire of the season. She rushes toward the noise expecting an emergency, an accident––her neighbors all know she's a doctor.
The door opens and she's surprised to see House, for an instant, before he falls forward and she catches him. Except she's not just catching him, she's kissing him. Or he's kissing her, the weight of him a relief, the collision a kind of accidental completion. The response of her mouth to his isn't tentative or hungry but accustomed somehow, as if they'd done this a hundred times instead of once.
"God I missed you."
He's murmuring on the reciprocated exhalation, not letting go. Stuck ecstatic at the unexpected, Cuddy moans into his mouth. Another minute lapses, lost.
"House," she protests finally. But the name gets lost in the frisson of their lips and she lets it.
"House!"
She pulls back, breathing. She can still feel his tongue in her mouth when she says his name.
She'll always feel it.
"What are you doing here?"
"Interview didn't go so well," he says, all his air escaping with a thoroughly liquored yawn.
"It's Wilson's fault," House whines. "He's a lousy reference."
His eyes fix on the open slit in her robe, gooseflesh spreading above the cleft of her cleavage.
"Wow. The labcoat and pencil skirts don't do you justice."
Cuddy blushes, in spite of his brazen, albeit inebriated nerve. She gazes at him with a smile of melancholy recognition and understanding. She'll always see the boy, scarred and bleeding and abrasively sincere. His face is flushed, his knuckles calloused and curled around the cane, eyes the same indescribable blue. This is just another scene lit by that same tragic beauty.
"Sit down," she says, sighing away her shock and elation.
"I'll get you some coffee."
Cuddy goes toward the kitchen and he watches the backs of her ankles, bare above pink slippers. The shape of her calves is the last thing he sees.
Somnolence dissolves into sleep. Jetlagged and discouraged, House is passed out, slumped drunk on her couch by the time she comes back. So she sets the coffee down and watches him sleep. There's an ineffable dissonance in seeing a childhood friend years later. Or there should be. Some incongruity, some altered or unrecognizable aspect.
Except there's not.
The hair at the crown of his head is thinning, the shadow of a beard has spots of gray. Sitting sound asleep in a leather jacket, tshirt and jeans is the same person, the same presence she loved then and loves, quite possibly, even more now.
On an almost involuntary whim, she goes to her attic, digs and searches and dusts off an old box. Then she returns to the living room and recurls till she's comfortable in the chair beside him.
-
They're together in every faded polaroid, the only ones she kept, sacred and secret. She can't say how they ended up here or why her love for him has always been a heresy, a transgression; angst ridden and inexpressible. Printed ballpoint, her confessions are another heartrending reminder.
Friendship––she wrote at fourteen, was proof of something stronger than ideology, science or religion. Cuddy sips, soaking in the strange truth. She owes him more than a caffeinated nightcap. An alliance was made outside a grocery store. Alliance and attraction, his return she can't waste.
She's leafing through an old notebook, a spiralbound relic from her first biology class––her first labs and scalpels and amphibian cadavers––when she feels him begin to rouse conscious.
"Sorry," House says, something close to sober. A beat later he opens his eyes.
The album's in her lap. A moat of stray snapshots surrounds her and steam is billowing from the mug in her hand. The fire's warm, the aura welcoming and when she says "Don't be," he believes her. She elaborates her consolation:
"I've thought of you."
Too. Often. Cuddy knows it's less revelation than confirmation.
"How have you been? Hopkins hired you, right?"
"Hired, fired. Followed by four more."
She nods a nod that's neither surprised nor judgmental.
"Do you want me to call you a cab?"
He motions yes because it's logical and the dark stupor obscuring his folly is slowly being lifted. Cuddy leaves the room and makes the call. Returning,
"Where are you calling home these days?"
A girlish anxiousness resonates in her voice. She's not curious about the leg, the limp, the succession of terminations. She wants to know if she'll see him again. She wants to know where to find him if she needs him. Or, if he needs her.
In this life she'll never see him die though, never save his life. Not yet.
He shrugs. Most of his stuff is still in Florida. But he hasn't been there in weeks. He's an exile, an itinerant more now than ever.
"What about family? Wife and kids?"
House shakes his head but it's Cuddy who mourns his denial of domesticity––the hearth, the home, the happiness she's suspected he'd never have.
"What about you?" House starts, the panic imperceptible.
She wasn't wearing a ring yesterday and his eyes dart across the room scanning for clues, a family portrait on the mantle, men's boots by the door––anything. The knot in his stomach shoots to his heart, twisting. He finally asks.
"Married?"
Cuddy pauses. It would be all too easy to spill her despair. She was married; miscarried, divorced. She wants to tell him, to tell someone but she doesn't want to seem a weak cliché. She was married, past tense.
"No," is the only syllable she lets herself say.
Something's conveyed in the silence though. And seconds later Cuddy stands, picking up the box and sinking back down on the couch and close to him. House hesitates, wanting to put his arm around her but reaching in and rotating a few pictures instead.
"The summer I let my hair grow out," he huffs to himself, almost embarrassed.
Then he sees the diary and picks it up, blinking with an envious appreciation that she recorded their love story when it was pure; untainted by the future, by failures and infarctions.
"Today I had tennis practice," he starts, reciting from a random page near the end.
"After, we had to go pick Lindsey up from summer school somewhere close to Cincinnati. I was exhausted when we finally made it home. All I wanted to do was take a shower but mom sent me to the store first. I got on my bike and peddled and an obnoxious noise was following. When I stopped to see why, what I found was that the jerk nextdoor House had cut straws to half the spokes' length and glued them to both wheels, so that I couldn't go anywhere without the annoying clack..."
He starts laughing, amused as relieved that she managed to collate the sentimental antics of that summer. Cuddy keeps a straight face, remembering the harmless hell he put her through, the torment of every ride and return. Then her glower gives way and she beams, a hand running along his leg in some pithy admixture of affection and affectation.
"Did I really pick on you that much?"
"You terrorized me."
The flecks in her eyes, black and white in his mind for too long, shine. House leans in, wanting to discern the exact color. Gray green against the incandescently furled flame of the fireplace. There's a pull, more than magnetic, like a compass needle turning toward deliverance, that draws him closer. He'd kiss her if her face weren't bowed. Instead he looks down to see what tangibly untouchable memory it is she's looking at.
The fourth of July.
"I thought I fell in love with you that day," escapes his lips softly sincere. A weight's lifted. Like a cannonball chained to his soul, he's carried her with him all these years.
"I watched you that night."
Cuddy smiles, shutting her eyes as he waxes wistful.
"I was there, stooping shy behind the willow tree."
"It was a chestnut."
House struggles with the memory then agrees, brooding a few moments with two thoughts. First, how they'd overcome the hopeless impossibility of reconciling what different people remember about the same event, and secondly that in a unexpectedly overwhelming way, Cuddy moves him as a woman the same way she had moved him as a girl.
Then he realizes the unacknowledged and unconscious objective of the entire adolescent adventure wasn't seduction or possession but the puzzle––platonic as it was, innocent and incomplete. Now this, a junction where destiny merges with happenstance, could mean nothing.
Or it could be his last chance with the love of his life.
As if he's startled by her final materialization, by the proximity of what's been so far away for so long, he slants away. Something silver and metallic in her palm,catches his eye.
The bottle opener.
"My dad wanted to kill me when he found out I gave you that book," she says, letting the bar blade fall back into the box. "And that you were gone."
Forever. She thinks, and again.
"I missed you too, House."
They know the circularity of the conversation signals an end. More than anything, Cuddy wants to close the space between them, to kiss him and cauterize the wound of want, of waiting. But tomorrow he'll be a ghost again, and she knows one night won't be enough.
House cocks his head, eyes lucid bright. A confused beat then Cuddy stands. Decided, she moves her empty mug and stretches across him for his.
When she does, his hands rise to each side of her hips. The belt of her robe is too easy to undo.
Standing in front of him, she shivers, cradling his head as he lifts the sheer satin separating them. Bringing his lips to her stomach, bare and beautiful and quivering:
"I never stopped loving you, Lise."
He holds her like that, holding his breath, as if the essence of her, fixed immutable in his memory––tonight incarnate––might vanish if he lets go.
An ache's reawakened and Cuddy acquiesces. The pale line of her throat descending, she straddles his lap; a slow collapse into his arms and embracing the past. She's trembling, and he's trying not to. His hold tightens, his thigh tense. The beard burns from her cheek to her chest, making her toes curl as they lift off the floor, out of slippers, shifting her weight to his left leg.
Her lips finally find his and it's all that he wants, all that he is; a reflection in her eyes, a second first kiss.
Cloying, electric the taste he's gravitating toward is familiar––it wasn't coffee she was drinking tonight but hot chocolate, the sweetness of yesterday lingering evocative.
A honk, sonorous, abrupt, they try to ignore.
The cab she called. Another and they're plunged back into the reality of leaving.
House refuses to open his eyes, burying his face in the linear shadow down her body that the fireplace casts.
Between the pounding and honking the neighbors are awake. And, timid or guilty or coming to her senses, Cuddy pulls away, kissing his temple as her bare feet are grounded cold and his eyes open.
"I should go," he says, the arousal of an amorous adolescent, denim-confined and bulging, slowing his stance.
Groping for his cane, he can't look at her. He just pushes his weight on the pine appendage and limps toward the door, away from her another last time.
Indecision drums loud in her ears. It's panic and pain and regret and she can't watch––
She turns away, a desultory reach finds a stack of snapshots but she drops them. The scattered days of summer spread a memory mosaic. House opens the door. On the threshold he hears her holler his name.
"Wait," walking over to him.
Fighting tears, Cuddy stands helpless as she did watching the first snow of their last season. The fourth of July photo, bending in her closed palm, she puts in his open hand.
"Keep it."
With her lips half-parted and a clouded look in her eyes, Cuddy arches tiptoe to kiss him goodbye this time, brushing the shadowed slant of his cheek with hers.
House budges. Any certainty he had about the situation capsizes. His boarding pass ceases to exist. His hands frame her face and they're kissing and nothing else matters.
The door slams shut with her back up against it.
They stop thinking with an almost painful relief, stop seeing. Her hand flattens against his chest then fists to clutch his shirt. The cane and carryon are thrown to the floor.
It feels like her last breath when the circle of his arms closes around her, never tight enough. Fallen prey to some wild upheaval of his heart, House is lifting her off her feet, a soundless resuscitation bringing them both back to life.
The cab driver catches on and pulls away, eventually
A lamps shatters, sneakers stomp, knuckles and palms punch every wall that isn't a door. The cacophony of kismet, and then a refrain.
Leaning, twisting, leading and tripping, they make their way to the bedroom. House kicks his shoes off and his pants follow, making him lose his balance and land half off the bottom of the bed. The leather jacket lands a vestige and she's clinging to him again as he pulls her down onto his lap.
They fall back together, smiling.
The silk robe's shed, each thin strap of her nightgown slips from Cuddy's shoulders. More immaculate than ever, she's bear, and he's almost bashful, exuding the exploratory inexperience of an eager virgin.
Cuddy initiates confident. Concentrating on his jugular, she laves his griseled chin, tasting autumn and aftershave and staying there until she can't resist tugging his shirt up and away, bending in again, chest to chest, their two hearts bound and pounding into a singular pulse.
Then it's only a matter time––making up for all they lost, making out with the fury and enthusiasm they never exhausted on each other as teenagers. They're only tongues and teeth and lips and goosebump-raising moans, with no existence outside the kiss.
He palms her breast, feeling the burn of her blushing cheeks. Neither of them is a novice, still there's a thrill in the newness of the simplest touch. Even if it stops here, it would be the most memorable, most meaningful, mind blowing––
It doesn't stop. Her nipple is a bud in his mouth, taut and sweet, and his erection, still hampered by cotton, swells between her tense thighs.
House strains toward her but she's pulling away. This is when he sees it. Nearly forgotten is the mole, lonesomely punctuating her shoulderblade, the long ago admired anomaly of her anatomy. He wants to dote on it. Study it. Worship it. In an instant he wavers with regret: one night will never be enough.
Regressing with the same regret, Cuddy laments that they weren't each other's firsts, that this experience isn't arbitrarily significant. Maybe this is better, she rationalizes with her obstinate optimism. There's no fumbling with bra clasps, no blood or tears or maladroit minutes after. They don't want their innocence back.
They want the pleasure of losing it again.
The effort to recapitulate eases the tension as she grinds against him. She kisses his chest, his stomach, tickling his navel with a long manicured fingernail. She deliberately avoids the obvious at first, reaching to remove his socks, and he mutters something pornographically puerile, trying to veil his vulnerability.
Her thumb's still curving along the arch of his foot while she tugs his tented boxerbriefs down to his ankles, letting gravity complete the striptease that's making him squirm.
She kisses his knee, his hip and he hopes he can ignore it, that he can close his eyes and forget that the scar's there––if her lips are over it. Then he feels her fingers trace the imperfect ridges, the moisture of her mouth grazing the hollow rift in between.
House doesn't cringe or flinch. He relaxes into her touch. For first time since that excruciating afternoon on the fairway of the eighth hole, since the surgical intervention that ended three undiagnosed days––for the first time in a long time, he's comfortable in his own skin.
Cuddy's bottom lip drags against the grain of hair on his left thigh. She takes him in her mouth, almost. House grabs her wrist, pulling impatient. It isn't that he doesn't want it, or that she doesn't want it. Three coeds have performed the lascivious deed for the deformed and undeserving doctor in the last twelve months and he can't demote her to that, those banal numb nights. This is a new chapter of his life. It could be.
Sex before Stacy was loveless, impulsive. Since the infarction it's been awkward and insignificant. Painful. But this, this is different and he can't taint it, can't adulterate or diminish the absolute perfection.
There's a moment as she rises, when time's transcended, disbelief suspended and reality washes over him.
House is naked beneath her and a little astonished at the finality of it. This is really, definitely happening. The strangeness of the scenario, of consensual intimacy added to the fact that she will, in some way, always be thirteen to him, makes him suddenly aware of the consequences, fearing the lackthereof.
Silence stretches between them. Pushing herself up, Cuddy kneels, spreading her legs wider so that they're only a fraction of an inch from fusing. She stares at him, searching until his blue-eyed, misunderstood melancholia meets her gray green desire to save him, if only from himself.
Tenderly, she presses her lips to the silhouette of stubble along his neck, as if trying to kiss the gray away. As she leans in to cover his lips with hers, she settles slowly. His hips pivot.
An echo of ecstasy in the slow smooth stroke, a transitory glimpse of their next time, then denouement.
Or déja vu.
With the ease of penetration comes an inexplicable sense of premeditation. This is unplanned and unexpected. But they've waited so long that their visions of the actual act are identical. There's no need to extemporize.
They lay still a warm quiet while, the reconnection palpably assuasive, replacing anxious vertigo with breathless relief. When Cuddy does start to move, it's tentative. She tries to shift subtle, away from the scar; tries to suppress her unbearably urgent need to ride relentless the exquisite solidity of him inside her and finally feel the viscid heat breaking in waves against her womb.
The first fluid thrust would be benediction, if either of them believed in god. They know, there is just this: the glide, gentle and focused and all the way in; his name soft and honest falling from her curved lips closed over his open mouth; his breath searing her skin when she arches back, passing over her like quicksilver.
His hands drift up the sides of her body. She undulates above him then comes down, prostrate panting, motionless. The heathen holds his last hope knowing that if heaven exists it could never compare to this, this consummate bliss.
House bucks encouragement erratic until her gasps become girlish giggles, and can't help but squeeze the dimples at the base of her spine. He pulls down heedlessly and hard to hear her choke down a whimpered scream when he bumps her cervix and she contracts.
He's the first man she's been with since the divorce. She's tight and receptive, and with his next collision kiss a wire's tripped and Cuddy realizes just how long, how much she's wanted this.
The unattainable and unrequited, lost and missed and remembered writhes willing and whole and helpless under her. His chest's heaving, his hand steady where he's touching her. They're making love like it's their last time, like it's the only thing they were ever meant to do.
Her hand splays across the pillow then rakes through his hair, pulling. The stubborn strength of his arms and the persuasion of his jaw perseveringly parting hers have Cuddy keening. House is pumping into her like he never wants to stop. She bites his lips when his fingers dig into her hips, a warning. He's close.
"Stay with me," she shudders, a plea for simultaneity, an invitation whispered weak that neither knows means everything.
House stalls, his thrusts idled and buried.
The pleasure suffusing his body, though threatening to short circuit his thought process completely, induces an epiphany: all the plane rides and highways, the decades of detours–– it's all led them not just to each other, but to this very moment.
A lifetime melts away, and it's more than carnal catharsis. Tonight is the antithesis of every empty, doomed-tragic ending. This is a beginning, it's their beginning.
An afterthought. She's moving again, languid and clenching and he's lost.
Somewhere between oblivion and rebirth House comes––long and deep and taking her with him.
The flood––adrenaline, neurons––nostalgia most of all––forces all the fragments of their split psyches to come together, the way they are in the ephemerally vast release. The endless evanescence of pleasure, like the last paradox–– passion and pain, as fleeting as forever.
Spent, House closes his eyes. He's waited his entire life to feel this way, wanted and welcome and loved without lies. He can't let go and she won't either. They breathe deep and finally, together. He kisses her forehead, her eyes, still inside her, and drifts into a dream before the kiss can die.
-
Late, she wakes to kiss him goodbye, afraid, petrified he won't be here in the morning. Cuddy watches him sleep, with her, on the side of the bed that's been empty for years ; watches him swim to the surface of consciousness and dive back down again. The cadence of his breathing slows and she's still listening, her head resting against the rise and fall of his chest until they're just synchrony, asleep.
time (after time)
They must disconnect in the night because House wakes with his face hidden in the warm darkness of her throat, tucked behind the fanned shade and flora of mussed hair. His arm is draped diagonal shoulder to hip, pinning her. He sighs placid in her ear and opens his eyes to have his homesickness healed. The cure: the September sun rising outside her window, a new day with his first love––the sky's hue recurrent, vivid––raw blue verging on violet.
Then he's kissing her, wanting to repeat and refuse, to never separate. Behind then on top of her, he's got Cuddy trembling breathless before she's even awake.
Throbbing, imperfect but rejuvenated, his kisses trail from her temple to her clavicle, cherishing the crease of her chin and finally finding her open mouth; open because she's talking.
"What time is it?"
He can tell from the clarity of her words that they're not kissing anymore. He doesn't remember ever stopping. He doesn't want to.
"Early."
He's nuzzling between her breasts when he answers, his beard scratching linear along her collarbone, his sensual voice nonplussed. Her head turns away, searching for the time. House relents his affection, scraping his chin high on her shoulder and hoping that their last kiss wasn't their last.
"I have a board meeting in an hour," she says, an adult all of a sudden as she reaches for the alarm clock she forgot to set last night.
His heart sinks. Hers is too driven to be anchored by the anticlimatic fact that they're still time's captives, tethered to ticking hands, measuring mechanical. She rolls over and sits up, undoing the knot they thought they'd tied, torn in two by the thought.
A choice, dismal as inevitable, Cuddy makes. Getting out of bed, she's dressed in a flash until she's somebody else––nobody he recognizes. In the room then out, downstairs and back up, he listens to her heels, the snap of a pearl necklace clasped closed, the drip of a coffee pot.
"My flight doesn't leave until eleven," he reluctantly reminds, interrupting her hurried routine.
"Don't let me rush you," putting her earrings in.
"Take your time, eat. There's fresh fruit in the crisper and coffee still brewing. The spare key's under the front door mat, just lock it on your way out."
He nods, displaced, and bracing himself for the fatal blow of being alone indefinitely.
"It was nice seeing you again, House."
The door slams shut. Then another. Her car starts, and all he can do this morning after is listen. On the edge of the bed, he falls back, sprawled naked and abandoned on sheets that smell like her, like them.
Except he knows there is no them.
The stoicism he wore as a shield, moving and losing and letting go his entire life, House never outgrew. So he stands, slips into his boxerbriefs and decides to investigate.
Or snoop, really.
There's the bedside nightstand. The drawers' contents are boring; no condoms or vibrators or crimson penned journal detailing her sexual exploits. No birth control either. House makes a mental note to check her medicine cabinet (but never does).
Continuing to canvas the bedroom, the first interesting thing he finds is an anthology of expensive and newer photo albums in the back of her closet. Wedding portraits and honeymoon souvenirs, candid holidays and day trips, it's the ordinary stuff House could never understand, or compile.
On top is the undergraduate album, leading into a med school and graduation volume. "Partypants" is scribbled on the back of an incriminatingly self-explanatory loose snapshot, dated springbreak '84. Never has he yearned more
to have known Cuddy the coed.
At the back of the last album, the one that's less than half full, he turns every empty page, not knowing what he'll uncover, but suspecting it will be the answer to the end of a marriage.
Then he finds it. A sonogram. Cuddy carried to eighteen weeks. Still, what he feels isn't sympathy but self loathing. He could have been more, he could have been her second chance.
He digs for more skeletons in the closet but can only find her ex-husband's flannel robe and, instead of adjusting the thermostat, puts it on. The irony doesn't escape him: it fits.
In her kitchen he scours the cupboards and pantry to find something that doesn't promise to lower his cholesterol or shrink his dress size after one bowl. And he does––find a pint of chocolate ice cream frosted in the farthest reaches of her freezer.
After breakfast, still coping with the photographic revelations, and wearing a stranger's plaid, House changes. He's considered and reconsidered. It would be easy to stay, to miss his flight again, surprise her by being here when she comes back, by being someone he isn't.
But it's a promise he'll inevitably break; the priority has become the puzzle, and even if she does fill the empty space, no matter how happy she makes him he's afraid he'll never change. He'll never be able to make her happy.
House leaves late, locking the door, sliding the key under the welcome mat and not looking back.
(her) time aside: election
In a vain attempt to conceal her mixed emotions, a smiling Lisa Cuddy spills her latté on the table at the center of this long anticipated board meeting. Youth doesn't last and maturity rarely brings rewards. It has been long, cruel, crippling lesson for them both. But she's not prepared to submit to the terror of giving up hope.
If only––
She thinks, then pushes the thought down deep. She doesn't stand a chance. She's young, too young, and a woman in the misogyny of medicine. If only she had more control. Or less discretion.
She could have stayed with him, she could have finally run away. She still could. Quit. Speed to the airport and, in the spirit of romantic rebellion, buy a one way ticket. Leave. Live with him until her undying love sets her free or her better judgment sends her home.
Cuddy's heart teeters, heavier now on the scale her brain has always outweighed.
The grown up inside her is still dueling with the lovelorn little girl.
It's the old hypnotism of his intelligence that haunts her the most. Three days ago he diagnosed an entire waiting room, he caught the rare and the unremarkable. He's the best and she knows it. She's always known it. It was the senile dean's mistake not to hire him.
She looks at her watch. It's been less than an hour and she already misses him.
"Cuddy."
A voice declares and she blinks, torn from her girlish grievance by what seems like role call at the beginning of class.
"Cuddy," another voice affirms.
A hierarchy of voices is voting. The entire committee, and she can only look on in disbelief.
"Congratulations," grins Wilson minutes later, reaching to shake her hand. Then Cuddy realizes she'd been so caught up in the loss, and House, that she missed the moment she inherited a hospital.
Youngest Dean of Medicine, first female Chief at PPTH, one of the few in the country, and the accomplishment means less than the control. This is her chance, contingent, defyingly unlikely––her chance to change everything.
(his) time aside: terminal
House trips over the curb arriving on time at the airport, unusually unattentive and bruising his ankle.
Inside he shakes his head from side to side. He's completely his cynical self again, still trying digest the experience of this short stay. For three days he's lived like a madman in two worlds at once. He has been a boy of fifteen and a man of thirty-five, indissolubly and hopelessly the same.
Now, like then his fears have come in threes. Strange but true. All his unplanned plans have fallen through. The sum of seventy two hours is a one night stand, leaving them isolated again–– a jaded divorcée and functioning addict; pouring pills into his hand.
It betrayed his nihilism to believe that the convoluted confluence of their lives led them back to each other. He convinced himself it made sense, that it might work. But denial is a disease, chronic, ineradicable, terminally hopeful.
There is no such thing as security, or love, really, he muses miserable. Not the kind of love that lasts, with the woman he wants; who, the very thought of kissing makes him salivate. It hurts in a way opiates will never abate, knowing he will never have her again.
On a people mover, House is stuck. Involuntarily mobile, he stands solemn as lost luggage in baggage claim. A terminal awaits him, the panel lit with departures and delays. The fourth of July photo is still in his pocket and he holds it, keeping it there, knowing there's no choice but to stumble blindly forward, repeating history.
time after time, regained
Newark Liberty International Airport is a forty mile drive from Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. If she were going the speed limit, Cuddy would make it there fifteen minutes too late. The fifth grade equation spurs her. She accelerates, resolved to defy mathematics if necessary.
This is about more than a lost love, or best friend or the professional possession of a preeminent diagnostician. What they've retained, no matter the distance or the days between them, is a fidelity that's given unity to two lives that would have otherwise shattered into thousands of success-obsessed impressions.
The car's still running when Cuddy vaults out of it, racing inside before security can stop her. Reading the departure board, she scans destinations and times and gate numbers, begging fate for repeated respite.
Then she runs, for her life and his.
Limping crooked, with his backpack slung over his shoulder, House starts toward the gate leading to the plane that will take him away. Away. Not home, because he hasn't had one since Baker Street.
A line forms behind him, a convex crowd of other restless transients. He yawns, putting the headphones of his walkman over his ears and trying to tune out the reality of returning.
The back of his head is bobbing to whatever crooning-Jagger ballad is blaring philosophy while he waits for other people's tickets to be torn. Cuddy shuffles through the stagnant stream of strangers, yelling, panicked.
"House!"
He's so close but inching away though, reaching for his boarding pass. He can't hear her.
"House!
House–– Stay!" The fear and panic make it a slurred, piercingly desperate cry.
The terminal falls silent. The cause, at the center, turns around and ambles uneven in her direction, away from his life, that twenty year interim between kissing her.
"You can stay. You have a job here."
Catching her breath (and him):
"I'm Dean now."
They're closer. The unreality of propinquity, permanent, and the unfamiliar stability of standing still, starts House walking. He wants to put his arm around her, to kiss her, coerce her into giving him a department. He wants to make love to her for hours and every night, or here in the middle of Newark Liberty International's airside terminal; on the counter of the bookstore, in the corner of a Starbucks. He wants everything, all the dashed dreams and dowsed desires, everything all at once. Knowing he can't always get what he wants, he only beams speechless–– in love, home at last.
He has what he needs.
As they approach the exit, they know the first step outside is a start. House doesn't say a word and he doesn't have to. All his belongings in one bag, a constant recaptured, he holds the handicap accessible door open for her.
Cuddy looks back at him, an elated expression shining. They're side by side again, relieved that it's where they'll remain, aware that it's where they were always meant to be.
It's fall. They found each other. By the first snow they'll be bantering, breaking rules and beating odds, calling each other's bluffs and only deeper in love. Nikes lift off the crimson and auburn and yellow leaf-graced cement and into her still idling car. The door closes. As she shifts into drive, House knows they're done looking back. He makes her laugh by shattering the silence.
"Does this mean you're my boss now?"
Then, in this life, they finally move forward.
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