No matter where they set off from, the journey to House's flat was always quicker than Wilson anticipated, and he found that he had pulled up outside and climbed out of the car without really registering it – he was only brought to his senses by House slamming the passenger door.

The moment of clarity didn't last, though, only persisting until seconds after the flat door was safely closed behind them, and they dragged each other through the darkened corridor to House's room, bypassing the darkened lounge, the TV still burbling away to itself in the corner.

All sense of reality by then had completely dissipated, replaced by the contorted carnival colours rushing from nowhere to nowhere inside his head. As he dragged every last ounce of air he could manage into his lungs, Wilson breathed into House's ear.

"I... I..." Gulping hard, stifling the sudden tears that threatened to spring forth, he let House guess the rest.

"You always wanted it." He nodded, relieved, gasping; fighting for every breath as he felt his body succumbing to House's deceptively strong arms. The muscle was visibly running to seed with encroaching middle age... but then, Wilson was aware that he wasn't in the best of shape.

He almost found his mind wandering, contemplating whether or not the man (to say 'the man' in this position, whilst feeling himself responding in wholly unbroadcastable ways: delicious; he savoured it) ... whether or not House had ever rowed. The power and mass of his shoulders... but no. For his mind to wander was impossible. This time, he was going to anticipate and revel in every second; every thought-crushing, mind-numbing nanosecond of this. God, how many times had he lain there of an evening, face buried deep in the pillow, and recounted the garbled minutes of the last encounter, over and over, desperate to eke as many memories and sensations out of it as he could, yet finding the events distorted into a brief, heaving mass of energy and realisation and ecstasy...?

All of those tortuous hours, and he had not once allowed himself to imagine it happening again – neither to concoct fantasies as to the circumstances, nor even to entertain the possibility that such a thing could ever occur again. To imagine the unique rush as fingers scrambled through close-cropped hair, as hands reached along the smooth plane of chest below a creased shirt... how could anything he imagined even come close to describing the reality?

Hours dedicated to not permitting himself to daydream, and yet there was absolutely nothing he could do to impede the images that flooded into his head when he fell asleep. Awake, he could concentrate himself on remembering and craving the exhilaration as electrical signals ricocheted about inside him, and on feeling the twist of his stomach when pictures of House danced in his head, but his mind took over when he slept, focussing all of its attentions on the feeling of his groin pressed hard against House's warm flesh; the desperate shudders and suppressed moans that he felt and coveted in House's own lean frame even as he fought to keep his own responses under control, and then the agony – the bliss – as he had no choice but to let go, hand clawed deep into House's shoulders whilst he leaned forward to push the length of his body closer to House's and share the rush of blood and wildly-pumping heart.

On more than one occasion, he had been forced to expend an extra ten minutes, come morning, bundling the bed sheets into the washing machine, ashamed despite the certainty that there had been no-one to witness the sheer sacrilege of such a situation.



Because that was not how it had really happened: the ne time before, House had been in control, and Wilson was, as ever, happy to abandon all responsibility and to let him take over. But that was what had made the dreams so perfect: the thought that House would allow himself to be given over entirely. Christ, it sounded screwed-up, but it gave Wilson more satisfaction to believe that this man was – at last – entirely at ease in his company than it did to imagine them rolling around together on some rumpled bed or sofa. It meant more to Wilson to see House happy than to see him naked... and he knew that House would never be happy; never be comfortable... when he awoke after a night in which he saw image after image of House in a pose that he could never occupy, he would sit glaring at the window opposite the bed, speculating on just how easy it would be to push it open wide and launch himself out of it.

House's bedroom light was off, but the approaching dawn rendered this irrelevant. Not that it would have mattered, anyway – Wilson had found himself echoing precisely those movements of the unrelenting nights, as though he had been in perpetual dress rehearsal before now. Because, with scarcely a whisper, and after a hold so tight Wilson was sure he would be crushed, House had relinquished all control.

Hoarsely – incredulously – Wilson had uttered a few words.

"You trust me?" By way of reply, House had thrown a sardonic glance over his shoulder; one that was softened and distorted by the half-light into an expression that Wilson recognised with a jolt as the one with which he had noticed House casting so many furtive glances at him over the past weeks.

And that had cemented his belief.

There had been no time, though, to remember the dreams; no chance to reflect on what did and didn't constitute perfection: as much revulsion as Wilson held for physicality, all he could do was pull House as close as he dared, focussing on his lithe shoulder blades and back, and concentrate on the silent, deafening gasps and spasms of his best friend, clenching and tautening every muscle in his own body as his heart shrieked at him, until the torrent of blood coursing its way through him found its goal.

Lying spread-eagled across the bed, as he was now, with House hunched up beside him, Wilson finally dared to think again. After having watched the sun clamber up into the sky, only to be obscured by clouds, followed quickly by streaks of lightning and the delicate sound of thunder, he found his limbs trembling with exertion – with exhaustion. Shifting House's hand from where it had been resting, uncomfortably high up his thigh, he got up to draw the curtains, finally allowing the room to slip into darkness.

Still, there was no point in thinking about what had passed. Oh... god, he was thinking in euphemisms now. OK – there was no point in thinking about the fact that he had just screwed House? Uncouth, unsubtle, but it would do... anyway, there was no point thinking about it, because it was not the act which concerned him. That could be adequately described in any half-decent medical textbook, with any number of precise technical terms, or alternatively, with nauseatingly florid euphemism and metaphor – the route, of course, which he had descended; kicking and screaming, perhaps, but descended all the same. But he supposed that it was of no consequence particularly. Because the elation he felt as he picked out House's prone body on the bed – just a darker mass floating on a sea of black – was in the knowledge that House trusted him completely

And House was right, of course: dress it up how you like; make it seem as hopelessly romantic or as tragically clichéd as you can possibly bear, but in the end, it's always going to come down to sex.

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