Disclaimer: I own nothing having to do with House, except the questionable idea for this story.
A/N: It's been a long time since I last updated. Life threw me one gigantic curveball several months ago and I have spent most of my time and energy since then dealing with it. I think about this story everyday, though, and have even woken up at four in the morning to jot down ideas. I now have the outline fixed and the other chapters are simmering. Since it's summer break (a perk of teaching) and I have no papers to grade (thank God), I might actually be able to finish this before school starts again.
BTW,perfectcrime,keep your eyes open for the Cheeseheads! (If you don't know what that means, watch a Packers game some Sunday this fall.)
I had a little trouble downloading this sorry if something got screwed up.
Please give me feedback. I really appreciate it. Thanks! L
OOOO
House's staff were gathered in the conference room without a whole heck of a lot to occupy their time. Much to Allison Cameron's dismay, the time had turned into the "Let's Talk about Allison Show." More specifically, let's talk about Allison and her boyfriend.
"You're going to a movie?" Chase's voice was disbelieving.
"What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing. Not a thing if you like going to the movies every single Friday night for the past month." Chase ended the comment with a snicker and a pat on Cameron's back as he circled the conference table.
"Now wait a minute," chimed in Foreman. Allison knew that she wouldn't be getting help no matter how scolding Foreman's voice sounded. She'd been hearing about this same subject – well, different variations of the same subject – for a while now. She took a breath and waited for the punch line.
"Movies aren't cheap. Man must be a big spender. What's he gettin' in return?" Foreman grinned over his newspaper at Cameron who was staring daggers at him but blushing at the same time.
"I don't recalled asking either of you to keep track of my relationship with Brad," Cameron muttered with as much dignity as she could.
Another voice chimed in, "That was an incredibly lame come-back." A cane poked her shoulder blade. "As the reigning king of slams, I think I'm going to have to give Foreman the blue ribbon this time." House bowed his head slightly at Foreman and sneered at Chase.
"What did I do?" asked the blond doctor with a slight whine.
"Nothing. Just getting a head start on the day." House sat at the head of the conference table in the seat that was closest to the white board. "Now, back to the matter at hand."
"Which is?" prompted Foreman.
House exaggerated a look of complete disbelief. "How can you ask?" He tsked and then looked directly at Cameron. "Just what is our little Miss Cameron putting out when our venerable hospital's counsel puts out the cash for Milk Duds and a large slushie?"
"What? No popcorn?" Wilson walked in and added his two cents to the mix. He seemed to enjoy messing with Cameron just as much as the other three.
House looked at Cameron intently. "No. Too much chance of getting stuff caught between her teeth. That comes later when…"
He was cut off in mid-dirty joke by Cameron. "That's enough. You're all a bunch of annoying little boys. Maybe if you'd find yourselves social lives you wouldn't be so interested in mine."
House nodded, pseudo-seriously. "You're right. Wilson, for instance, could speed up this divorce thing and marry someone else he can cheat on. I know that would certainly distract me from your intensely boring Friday night dates."
"Hey. She cheated on me. Remember?"
"Yeah. And you were a boy scout the whole time. Sure." House turned toward Foreman. "You have been in a long-term deal for a while now, which is boring in a whole different way." He pointed his cane toward Chase. "And the only time you get any is when your co-workers are trashed off their asses and don't know any better."
Chase started to protest, but House waved him off. "Which brings us back to you, Dr. Cameron. What exactly are you doing at end of the evening that makes Attorney Sampson satisfied with a movie at the beginning?"
"Well, we're not talking about you," Cameron started.
House interrupted. "Another sad comeback. Can't you do any better?"
Cameron continued as she pretended to ignore him. "You know, though, maybe we should talk about you a little. Maybe we should discuss an appropriate way to thank you for being the reason we got together in the first place." Cameron grinned at him. "Yep. I think that is exactly what we should do tonight. In fact, I think we'll drink a toast to you, after the movie of course. A toast to the man who made my normal, pleasant, sane relationship with a normal, pleasant, sane man possible." She picked up her coffee cup and saluted her boss. "To Greg House, Cupid in disguise."
She smiled charmingly at her boss as the other three men silently declared Cameron the winner.
OOOO
A month or so earlier…
Cameron loved her parents. She really did. She loved her brothers, too. And their wives. And their children. One boy, one girl each. Wisconsin was a great place. Pretty. Bucolic. Lots of cows. Growing up on a farm had been great. Lots of freedom.
Of course, there was the fact that her mother still hadn't forgiven her for running off and getting married to a dying guy while she was still in college. Allison had never been sure if it had been the time in her life she had chosen to get married or the fact that he had been dead six months later that really torqued her mother off. Either way, "elope" was a word that no one dared mention in the general vicinity of her mother's hearing.
Her father still wasn't quite sure why Allison had chosen to be a human doctor instead of an animal doctor. Every time she saw or talked to him, he seemed to have just paid a vet bill for the breech birth of a calf, no matter what time of year it was. One time she asked him if he thought she would have delivered the calf for free – only half joking. He had not been amused.
If her parents didn't manage to drive her over the edge, her brothers and their families did. They had done the right thing. They had stayed in Wisconsin, married, and made babies. They talked about work, complained about money, and wore giant foam pieces of cheese on their heads in the fall. They were decent people, but they just flat out ignored Allison's career choice and, well, her life in general. As far as they were concerned, she was still playing doctor with her dolls and stuffed animals. And she knew they figured she get over the doctor thing eventually.
It wasn't as if Allison didn't know that she wasn't an unusual person. Everybody had issues with their families and still managed to love them. She just couldn't do it in the same time zone.
That was why she was sitting on her suitcase in front of the Newark, New Jersey airport waiting for either Foreman or Chase to pick her up. They were late, but she wasn't angry because she wasn't in Wisconsin.
She sighed and looked at her watch again. Okay, so maybe she was getting a little impatient. Her flight had not been smooth and the woman in front of her had dropped the back of her seat just as the flight attendant had placed Allison's soda on the tray table. The woman in the seat next to her had been quiet, which was a good thing, but she had worn a lot of a very strong perfume. So now in addition to a dark stain on her jeans in a semi-embarrassing place, Allison also had a headache that throbbed through her sinuses and temples.
But she wasn't in Wisconsin.
It'd be really nice if one of her "colleagues" would manage to make it here sometime this week, though. Maybe Wilson. She'd even take Cuddy at this point.
She heard someone call her name. Not a voice she recognized immediately.
She turned her head and saw Brad Sampson, the hospital's new counsel heading in her direction. He'd work too, she thought.
She stood and smiled. "Hi there. Please tell me you're not traveling yourself."
He was blown away for just a second. The same way he had been the first time he had seen her. God, she was gorgeous, and there was something about her standing in front of him in jeans and a t-shirt that made her even more appealing than she was in her lab coat. He managed answer her without sounding like a complete moron.
"No. I'm here to pick you up."
"What happened to Foreman and Chase?" she asked. Then she added, "Not that I'm not grateful to you."
He grabbed hold of her wheeled suitcase and started to lead her toward parking. "Your department got a case yesterday. House didn't think he could spare either of them. He suggested to Cuddy that I go instead."
She laughed. "Wow. You're really good at that whole tactful thing, aren't you? Let me translate: House and I didn't exactly part on great terms last week so he decided to make it as hard as he could for me to get home. He probably didn't suggest that you come to get me, he probably made some comment about you needing to work for your lawyer salary…"
"…instead of sharpening Cuddy's pencils." He finished. "Yeah, that's about it." He looked down at her. "Pretty good at reading your boss, aren't you?"
"You have to be if you want to survive him," she said flippantly, hoping that he would change the subject. She hated talking about House like this.
"Why do you stay with him?"
Her least favorite question. "He's brilliant."
"A good learning experience, I imagine." He responded. "Did you eat anything on the plane?"
He changed the subject, she thought. Thank God. "I ate something, but I'm not sure it qualified as food."
"Well, why don't we stop and get something to eat before we go back? Your colleagues seem to be handling things pretty well."
She smiled in agreement and looked up at the man pulling her suitcase along the sidewalk. Nice guy. She'd have to be sure to thank House.
OOOO
Back in the present…
Now that Allison had managed to thank House for unwittingly setting her up with Brad, she was reaping the rewards. She sighed and shifted the really heavy guide to pediatric medicine to the side and reached for one of the AMA journals she had pulled from the hospital's medical library.
House had originally come into the conference room to introduce their new case to them – a three year-old with high fever, rash, increased heart rate, and no discernable allergies – when he overheard the conversation about her dating life. Her comments had earned her several minutes of snark about her inability to deal well with dying children and their families, as well as the punishment of doing the book research.
So the guys were off doing histories and labs while she sat checking and cross checking the child's symptoms with the ideas House had scribbled on the white board.
Her pen ran dead in the middle of one of her notes about a specific heart condition. She shook it, sighed again, and walked to her desk. Nothing. No pens to be had. Her supplies seemed to find their way to House's desk more often than not. She glared in that general direction and marched toward through the door, not paying a bit of mind to the drawn blinds.
She stopped short on her scavenger hunt when she realized that House sitting at his desk tossing the magic eight ball that she hadn't seen in quite some time up and down. His legs were up on the desk and he was leaned back in his chair as far as possible before it would fall backward.
She hesitated for a split second before squaring her shoulders and heading in her original direction. She had nothing whatsoever to be embarrassed or wary about.
She started shifting through the mess on his desk. Surely, he would have one stupid pen somewhere here.
"What the hell are you doing?" He kept tossing the black ball and didn't look at her.
"You stole all my pens from my desk. I need one." She lifted a motorcycle accessory catalogue and shoved a prescription pad to the side. "Besides, I'm the one who'll end up cleaning up this mess anyway."
He caught the ball with one hand and slammed his other hand on top of hers. "Stop it."
"I need a pen."
"Leave my desk alone."
"Fine. Answer your own mail. File your own reports." She pulled her hands out from under his and turned to leave, but she was stopped by House's voice raised in a pseudo-eerie chant.
"Oh, Magic Eight Ball, what does Cameron see in her wimpy lawyer boyfriend?" He shook the ball dramatically while he gave her a wild-eyed look. He stopped suddenly and jerked his eyes around to the little window on the toy. "It says it needs more information."
"Really? What does it say about psychotic diagnostic specialists? Does it recommend any particular mental hospital?" She turned to go again.
"So, tell me. Since I'm supposedly to blame for all your current boring bliss, what exactly is it that attracts you to this guy?"
Why did she do this to herself? Why didn't she just turn and walk out the door? A normal person would. Not her, though. She faced him and answered, "He's nice."
House groaned. "Yeah, yeah. He's nice. We can all see that." He swung his legs around, put the eight ball down, and folded his hands on the desk top. "That's not what I'm talking about."
"House…" she started exasperatedly.
"What's wrong with him?"
"Oh, God. Are you going to start with that again?"
"As one of the chosen few, I think I deserve to know." He put on a sad puppy face. "What's wrong with him that's not wrong with me?"
"There's nothing wrong with him." She barely kept from shouting.
"Has to be something, otherwise why would you be interested? TB? Brain tumor? Infarction? Or have you been hopped up on meth for the past month?" He could see her trying hard not to loose it with him. He could almost swear she was actually biting her tongue.
She threw her hands up. "He wears glasses. Is that good enough for you?"
"I know what it is." He picked up the eight ball again. "He's boring as hell." He shook the ball a couple of times. "It says, 'No Kidding.' I didn't know it could be sarcastic, did you?"
"Oh for Christ's sake. Would you stop?" Now she was yelling.
"Movies every Friday. Please tell me you do better things on Saturdays." He supposed it was sick and wrong of him, but it had been a long time since he had had a good blowout with Cameron. He was amused by the pink in her cheeks that would probably turning red soon if he didn't back down.
"You know, it's really none of your business."
"Have you slept with him yet?"
"Definitely none of your business." She made it all the way to the door this time.
"Definitely a 'no' I'd say."
"Again, none of your business."
"Why are you so unwilling to talk about your lawyer boyfriend?"
"Why are you so interested?"
"I'm experienced with the hospital's counsel slash doctor relationship. Just curious." Damn, he thought, that may have been a tactical error. He tried to cover it up by raising his eyebrow an obnoxious way that only he could manage.
It didn't work, though. Allison caught the change in the tenor of the questions. "Are you worried that he'll dump me when I catch a cold?" she asked more calmly.
"It was hardly a cold."
"I don't really think it would have mattered. Do you?"
He glared at her.
She raised her eyebrow back at him, then turned to leave.
"Where are you going?"
"I still need a pen."
"Here." He pulled one – one of hers – out of his desk drawer and threw it to her. "Go figure out what's wrong with the kids before the Bobbsey twins beat you to it." He turned, swung his left leg back up on the desk and lifted his right up next to it. He leaned his head back on the chair and closed his eyes.
Cameron shook her head and headed back to the conference room and the piles of books waiting for her. She sat still for a second thinking about Brad. Nice guy. Yes. Boring? Well, he certainly wasn't beating people with a cane, but he wasn't boring.
Movies were fun.
She liked movies.
Of course she did.
Who didn't like movies?
No one.
Right?