A quarter of a century later, the girl who flipped him off was a middle-aged mother with a very sick child. And instead of telling him to go to hell, she leaned her head against his shoulder and said just having him there was comforting.

Had she forgotten that scene in the library? Had she forgiven? How? House never forgot a slight, was capable of waiting decades for an opportunity for revenge, never forgave anything--and what he'd done to Carolyn that night struck him as one of the most unforgivable thing he'd ever done. Even given that she needed his expertise and connections right now, how could she put that aside to the point of giving him a very warm, very sincere hug?

His mind drifted back to that first summer together. The sublet was a rathole, they had no money to speak of, but between them they had a fantastic stereo system and more records than the college radio station. Carolyn always gravitated to the same few albums, and one of her favorites was the Stones Sticky Fingers, especially "Wild Horses." She would sing along:

"No sweeping exits/or offstage lines, Could make me feel bitter/or treat you unkind. Wild horses couldn't drag me away, Wild, wild horses, We'll ride them someday…"

The instrumental solo playing in his head, the pain in his leg finally quieted, House fell asleep.

-0-

For someone who spent half the night brooding over lost love and the other half sleeping in a chair, House awoke the next morning feeling strangely optimistic. The sun was shining, the pain was gone, and he was miraculously free of the granular eyelids and acid stomach that usually accompany troubled rest. The apartment was so quiet that he forgot, for a moment, that he didn't have it to himself.

Grasping his cane, House hobbled to the bathroom to begin the morning ritual. He was halfway through the first step when he remembered that Cameron had spent the night. Finishing, he conscientiously lowered the toilet seat and padded into the kitchen to wash his hands.

House was supposed to start every morning with an Elavil and an 8-ounce glass of skim milk ("Men need calcium, too"), but he kept forgetting to fill the prescription, and he loathed dairy in all its forms except cheese on pizza and sandwiches. He went to the refrigerator, took out the gallon of milk Cameron bought for him every week, and silently poured a glassful down the drain. He remembered that he hadn't had his milk the day before, either, so he poured a second helping into the sink, just to keep the level right. Then he put the white-coated glass in a conspicuous spot on the counter and drank a Coke while he waited for the coffee to drip.

He was in the shower when Cameron woke up. Don't come in, he mentally implored her, but Cameron was not a mind reader and joined him in the stall. It was too small for two people, and they knocked heads and knees as they jockeyed for space under the weak dribble from the water-saver shower head she had insisted on installing.

"You let me sleep too late," she accused him.

"We both needed our rest," he said. Cameron chose to interpret this as a reference to the night before and smiled wickedly. Damn, she was a pretty woman.

Her good mood reinforced his, carrying them through breakfast and their arrival--albeit in separate cars--at the hospital. It lasted until Foreman arrived, late, for the morning staff meeting, falling heavily into a chair.

"Lupus Boy is going home," he said, and braced himself.

To save time, House summarized his reaction in one word: "Bullshit."

"They did the ANA this morning," Foreman said wearily. "It was positive. But his protein was down, so he wasn't meeting enough of the criteria to confirm lupus. And when his parents heard what the treatment is, they freaked. So Ettinger suggested that they take him home and see what happens."

"Is this our patient?" Cameron asked.

"Of course his protein was down!" House roared. "The flare started more than a week ago-- it's over now!"

Foreman raised his hands in a familiar gesture: Yes, it's a stupid call, patients are idiots, doctors are incompetent, what else is new?

"So this kid will go home and wait for his kidneys to rot so Ettinger doesn't have to do any guesswork," House fumed. "Nice medicine. Sit around for a week flapping your hands and then opt for the conservative approach so you can make your tee time at Stonybrook. Why waste a few minutes trying to figure out what's wrong and treat it, when there's a good chance the kid will eventually get so sick you can't miss the diagnosis? No wonder people hate doctors."

Cameron was still waiting for an answer. "Are we consulting?"

House lunged to his feet and disappeared down the hall.

"Apparently we are," said Chase. "Whether Ettinger likes it or not."

Seeing House flash past his office, Wilson merged into the corridor and jogged alongside him.

"Cameron was in yesterday," he remarked.

"A doctor in a hospital. Now I've heard everything," said House.

"She seemed a little down."

"She was a little hungover."

"There were some feelings of neglect, too, I think."

"Shouldn't you be busy scouting the next Mrs. Wilson?"

"House." Wilson put a braking hand on his friend. "You've been down this road before. Learn from your mistakes before you lose her, too."

"Coming from a three-time loser in the marital sweepstakes, that means a lot."

"Promise me you'll think about it?"

"I promise I'll have her surgically attached to my hip as soon as I find a vintage t-shirt big enough for the two of us," said House. "Am I dismissed, Doctor Phil?"

Wilson sighed. "You're going to screw this one up, too, aren't you?"

"I don't want to spoil the ending for you."

House escaped into an elevator. He was feeling unfairly attacked. If you thought about it, this whole thing with Cameron was Wilson's idea, aided and abetted by Cuddy. House had been perfectly happy to play misanthropic Henry Higgins to her spirited Eliza Doolittle, enjoying her hero worship, taking her occasional woman-scorned browbeatings as the price he paid for keeping her safely at arm's length, where he could enjoy her beauty and brains without getting entangled in her plans for the future. He liked her, and cared about her, but he felt at gut level that he was too old, too jaded, and too self-absorbed to accommodate his life to such an unworldly young woman--and that she was much too enamored of her vision of an ideal world to accommodate an imperfect specimen like him.

But Cameron's arrival coincided with a period in his life when everyone around him felt he needed to make some changes. Not just about the doping, although that was an issue, and even House was aware at some level that he could not expect to go on subjecting his liver to near-toxic levels of acetaminophen and hydrocodone forever. The consensus seemed to be that he was stuck in a cycle of misery and self-loathing, and that it was beginning to affect his professional life.

If it had just been friends and family riding him, House could have ignored them. But increasingly, the message was coming from strangers who barely knew who he was: patients, their loved ones, nuns, six-year-old children. At one point he half expected people to start coming in off the street to tell Dr. House a thing or two for his own spiritual health. It was hard to escape the suspicion that the universe was trying to get his attention.

The low point came shortly after the stupid, unnecessary disaster that was Stacy's return to Princeton. To this day, House wasn't sure what he'd been trying to achieve during those six months: a full-blown reconciliation complete with happy ending, or revenge for not trusting his judgement, making him a cripple, then declining to hang around until he finished punishing her for it. He dealt with the ambiguity in his usual fashion: by lobbing a hand grenade that effectively destroyed any chance of a mutually satisfying resolution. Then he drowned the anguish of his self-inflicted wounds in a freewheeling binge of drugs, booze, and (almost) anonymous sex, until he was drawn up short by a particularly underhanded (and wholely admirable) ploy by Cuddy.

When he came to, there was Cameron, still with the provocative glances, the meaningful silences, the occasional lingering touch. And there were Wilson and Cuddy, urging him to try doing something healthy and wholesome and normal for a change. They pointed out, rightly, that he wasn't doing a very good job of running his show by himself. Everything conspired to push him toward that night in his office when Cameron decided to go for broke.

"Kiss me," she challenged him.

As an 8-year-old, House once announced to a skeptical band of 10-year-olds that he was going to jump off the high diving board at the community pool. You weren't allowed to until you were 12, but the other boys had been teasing him and he felt the need to redeem himself in a big way. Ascertaining that the mothers had dozed off and the lifeguard was busy flirting with the concession stand clerk, House climbed the impossibly high ladder, his heart pounding, and crept to the edge of the board. It dipped and swayed beneath him in a sickening way. The water looked to be thousands of feet below. But he could see his jeering audience quite clearly, and he knew there was no way to go back without becoming their punching bag for the rest of the summer.

Looking down into Cameron's face, House had a sinking vision of the two of them together: the grizzled old gimp and the pretty young woman, one past the apex of his career, the other just embarking on hers, the tired old warrior and the lovely young thing who would redeem him, give him back his youthful outlook and his hope for the future; all the hoary old cliches that sent film audiences fumbling for their Kleenex and made him squirm in his seat with impatient embarrassment for the old fool.

"If you're not prepared to look stupid, then nothing great is ever going to happen, right?" said Henry, the patient whose inability to say no to his ex-wife almost killed him. The ex-wife had been there by Henry's side when he awoke from surgery...

Taking a breath, closing his eyes, House took the plunge.

Only now, three months later, did he remember the other half of Henry's equation: "On the other hand, I guess your testicles aren't gonna explode either." House did not worry about the explosive potential of his own equipment, but he was beginning to feel that in taking a chance on love, he'd put them in a vise--and it was beginning, ever so slightly, to pinch.