The morning after
He blinked his eyes that were hurting from the sting of the brightness of an early winter morning. The snow outside was reflecting the light, flooding the living room with whiteness.
At the same time as his conscience woke up his pain did so, too, and he rolled over to search through the clothes lying everywhere on the floor.
He picked up his cane from the ground and started fishing for his pants until he had found them.
With his mind still waking up he slowly remembered what had happened, feeling a smile widen on his face.
He decided he might need two Vicodins this morning and laid back closing his eyes again once he had gulped them down without any water, as usual.
Eventually he opened his left eye, peering at her from the side, finding her still asleep, lying flat on her stomach. He turned to the side and looked at her.
The picture reminded him of an angel with her pale skin being ambiented by the white sheets, her dark hair framing her face in wild curls that shimmered in the color of pomegranate seeds in the light. She seemed calm and relaxed and he smiled. Without that devil's costume of hers she was actually pretty cute.
For a long time he hesitated to disturb this perfect picture until he could no longer resist. He carefully started teasing her warm skin with the tip of his nose, kissing the edges of her shoulder blades, slowly letting his hand glide down the curve of her spine, reaching for her rear. Closing his eyes he rested his cheek against her back. She was warm and so soft.
He wasn't, though.
So she pulled a face as she felt the scratching of his stubbles on her skin and slowly turned around, opening her eyes reluctantly.
The world, the light and her mind faded in unhastily, waking her up, making her realize that all this had not been a dream.
His breath was warm in her neck as he whispered: "You really disappoint me. One night with me and you forget all your duties as the Dean of Medicine ?"
She opened her eyes in alarm and looked at him.
"Why ?"
"It's past nine. I think you missed your morning conference with the Pencil Pusher Society."
For a second her heart seemed to stop but then she let out a sigh of relief.
"No. It got canceled a while ago. And now with the snow..."
She smiled and stretched her body feeling life crawling out of every sleepy corner of it.
"I think I'm finally finding myself liking Christmas", she stated sweetly, wishing there were more days where the world stood still, taking a break from the speed that numbed their troubled minds, distracting them from the emptiness of their lives.
Because the emptiness was in a way nice after all.
"So...we still have a few minutes ?" he asked and bent over her.
"Mh...like ten minutes or so", she whispered in his ear and started kissing it softly.
Almost two hours later
It was almost like a Déjà vu when her car stopped in front of the hospital. Only today there was not an empty paper box of munchkins in his lap.
And several other things were different today.
Funny how much two lives could change in twenty-four hours.
He looked at her.
"So. I guess we shouldn't walk in together", he said, hating this just as much as she did.
The sweet arousal they had got lost in that morning was gone now. Just like the snow that was already melting in the streets, turning into a brown slurry.
She nodded.
"There's only one thing more suspicious than us coming in together and that would be you coming in earlier than I do. So you wait here", she said and got out of the car, turning around once more to look at him before she walked away towards the hospital entrance, entering reality again.
Her look was dark. Almost regretful. And House knew exactly how she felt. Things were going to get complicated. There was a reason why they hadn't done this in over fifteen years.
Because it was intoxicating and insane. And Vicodin was already enough of a bad habit.
When her petite silhouette had vanished through the glass door of the main entrance he got out of her car and followed her traces in the snow.
Later that day
"You've only had this case for four hours and you are already trying to kill him ? There's no way you are doing this!" she stomped into his office and yelled at him.
"Patient is dying", he stated, unimpressed.
"Even faster if you do the LP. He has no platelets and his ICP isn't really comforting, either", she said and the three fellows nodded their heads silently.
She looked at them in surprise, since when did they agree with her ?
"Either way the patient is dying so I might as well do the LP because that still gives the patient a chance whereas doing nothing ... ah, I don't wanna spoil it", he stopped and widened his eyes.
"Watching this should be fun. Anyone knows where to get popcorn ?" he said and got up.
Cuddy blocked his way.
"Let me do it", he said, giving her a deep look.
"It's dangerous", she insisted, returning the look with the same intensity.
House yelled. "Yeah ! I got that ! You guys sound like four broken records !"
He took a deep breath and looked around thoughtfully before his eyes met hers again.
"If I don't do this now he will die within the next 24 hours, if I do it, he might die within the next 24 minutes. Or ? He will get better. I wasn't planning on draining his whole CSF, we're talking about a few drops here ! A few drops that could save his life", he said.
Cuddy knew he was right, his patients weren't like other patients and she had to learn that again and again, with every new case he got.
His patients were practically dead on arrival which gave House free reign most of the times, because there was almost nothing to lose.
Plus, she was afraid that she might only say "No" to him to prove to herself that last night had not screwed her objective judgment.
"Ok, ", she silently agreed and saw three heads turning at her in unison, surprised, irritated.
"But see if he responds to osmotic therapy and give him some platelets first", she added, knowing he wouldn't listen to her anyway.
Cameron jumped up as if to say something but decided to hold herself back. Cuddy looked at her before she turned around and left the room, knowing very well that Cameron was right with whatever she had wanted to say.
House's eyes followed her, then he gazed at Cameron, too, and the two of them exchanged bewildered looks.
"That was too easy, wasn't it ?" he asked her and left the room to go after Cuddy.
"I have another patient with migraines. Can I amputate her head ?" he shouted down the hallway and she turned around staring at him defeatedly.
When he had approached her he leaned in towards her and snarled: "You are weak !"
"Do you really think this has anything to do with what happened between the two of us outside this hospital ?" she whispered sharply and came closer, not willing to surrender to his glare.
When she noticed that they were not alone in the hall and that it had to look a little odd that the two of them were only standing there, staring at each other, she let out a silent sigh and gave in, lowering her gaze.
"This isn't gonna work, is it ?" he finally asked, almost sounding disappointed.
She shook her head. "No."
After a pause she continued.
"It's already incredibly hard to be your boss and this isn't really making it easier."
However, there was no way she was going to discuss that here.
"Now do the LP", she finished their conversation and turned around.
On her way to the stairway she felt anger rising inside her and she hated herself for her weakness.
House was and had always been her soft spot, she had known that and she had lied to herself, thinking that it would only be physical.
She had other interests than her own to represent now, she couldn't afford any kind of weakness.
If this was just sex, she could probably handle it, but not being able to make objective decisions anymore, told her that this was more.
10 hours later
Cuddy had spent the rest of the day avoiding House, avoiding thinking about House ending up bumping twice into him and thinking about him all day.
Fortunately, his patient had made it through the LP and was already undergoing treatment even though no one knew what he was actually dying of.
Apart from that case things were really slow in the hospital, there were only few patients sick enough to leave their houses on a day like that. Even the clinic was half empty and Cuddy had taken care of that handful of patients herself.
Life went on and she had known that time wouldn't stand still only because she had broken her promise to herself never to sleep with House again.
Time could be a bitch sometimes, not allowing her a minute to take a break, to reconsider all this, not being able to turn it back, to undo all this.
But instead of thinking about undoing things she was actually thinking about doing it again.
Fifteen years ago she had managed to hold herself back because she had known that they wouldn't have had a future.
However, she had always liked him and things were different today. They had known each other for a very long time now, they had become allies, enemies, friends, partners, family.
He trusted her, he cared for her. And vice versa.
They actually had a future now, they were living in it right now.
But how could you find happiness with someone who was intentionally steering away from it?
How could you find love with someone who was so eagerly and successfully trying to make everyone hate him?
She sighed and opened the glass door to walk into his office.
He was wearing a surgical loupe leafing through what seemed to be a stamp-sized book he was holding between his fingers, turning the pages with tweezers.
When he heard her coming in he looked up at her with big goggle-eyes.
She frowned.
"I don't even want to know whose surgical loupe you stole to read this –" she started and snatched the book from him to look at it.
She could hardly read the title without a magnifying glass.
"A mini paperback of French love poems ?" she asked disbelievingly when she had finally deciphered the words.
"Un vent d'amour m'a fait perdre la tête", he quoted and she smiled, not understanding a word.
"When did you learn French ?" she asked and threw the tiny book onto his desk.
"Did my fellowship in Europe, thought you'd remember that, actually", he answered and took off the surgical loupe.
"Yes, in England, which is the country where they speak English", she retorted.
"The cool thing about Europe is, that it's so teeny-weeny with a whole bunch of crowded countries cramped onto that little bit of a continent, which kind of explains why they're all a bit cranky over there. Oxidative stress", he went on and Cuddy cut him off.
"Can we go ? Now ?" she asked impatiently and he looked at her, surprised.
"Sure", he said and nodded. "Didn't know you were in such a hurry. So...is it your place or mine ?"
"I'm driving you home and then I'll drive back to my place. Without you", she said slowly, emphasizing every word she said.
He looked a little taken aback but nodded again, eventually.
"Okay", he agreed. "Let's go then."
He reached out for his cane and got up. When he walked past her he bent down to her and said:
"You get cranky when you're sleep deprived, you know that ?"
She closed her eyes in annoyance and followed him outside.
"You had dinner already ?", he shouted at her, turning around while he was walking to the elevator.
"We'll grab something on the way home", she responded wearily and he nodded again, feeling uncomfortable about her bad mood.
Bad mood could only mean one thing: She was getting emotionally involved in all this. And that again could only mean that she would probably not sleep with him again.
And that affected his mood, so that they both ended up sitting in her car, brooding silently until she pulled over at the sight of a Chinese restaurant.
"You're fine with Chop Suey ?" she asked and didn't even wait for an answer.
Half an hour later they were sitting in his living room, silently eating their dinner out of little paper boxes.
If House had known that sex was such an effective way to shut her up he would have tried that a lot earlier.
When he had finished he put the box on the table and laid back on his couch, stretching his muscles relaxingly and watching her picking up little cubes of fried tofu with her chop sticks.
"So, you wanna talk about this ?" he offered, surprised at himself and at the same time hoping she would say 'No'.
And she did.
So he switched on the TV and started watching an old Nascar race, when she suddenly got up and took the take-away boxes with her to the kitchen.
House's kitchen was an incredible mess and for a second she thought about trying to squeeze the boxes into the overflowing garbage bin and then run away from it.
But the neat housewife inside her wouldn't allow her to follow her initial instinct, so she stayed and turned the water on.
"Have you ever considered the possibility that your dishes aren't gonna clean themselves ?" she yelled at him from the kitchen, already holding a plate in her hands, trying to scratch off the almost petrified remnants of what used to be a pizza from it.
"I was actually hoping for the primordial soup you're rinsing off this very minute to give birth to intelligent life that would clean up. Guess I was being too optimistic since intelligent life doesn't appear to add to the cleanliness of its environment", he shouted back not making the slightest move to help her with the dishes.
She shook her head, asking herself why she was doing the cleaning anyway but decided she could as well finish what she had started.
It did serve the purpose of avoiding him without having to leave him. So it was a nice compromise that managed to make her happy for a few minutes.
When she returned to the living room half an hour later she found him asleep on his couch, the Nascar race still going on. She stretched out her hand to softly brush through his curls, but pulled back before her fingers could touch his hair and closed her eyes.
No, this was not a dream, this was a bubble of illusions bouncing through the air of reality. And it would pop the minute she would wake up lying next to him again.
Her patients and the hospital were her priority, so she decided to take her coat and silently leave him as long as he was asleep.
She was already on her way to his door when she turned around to look at him, feeling all the stirred and messed up emotions she had for him running riot inside her brain.
Or inside her heart, at times it was hard to keep these two apart. A smile rose on her lips at the sight of his peaceful sleep and she reached out for her keys in her coat pocket.
It was their clinking in her hand that woke him up just when her other hand touched his shiny brass door knob.
"Didn't your Mommy teach you anything about manners ?" he asked her and she turned around, startled.
"I didn't wanna wake you up", she apologized and he narrowed his eyes, studying her face.
She seemed tense, uncomfortable and awkwardly calm, which told him that she was raging inside.
It was obvious to see that she didn't want to find herself liking him but couldn't help it at the moment. He liked her, too. And he couldn't help it either.
But they both still had their actions under control. And their words.
"I don't need your guilt. Or your pity", he finally said and she frowned, leaning back against his door.
"You really think that's what this is about ?" she asked, not believing him since she knew him better. She knew that he knew her better.
"You're an enigma", he simply replied and she smiled, shaking her head.
"No, I'm not. You're just trying to make something up so you can push me away."
"Is it working ?" he asked, hopefully raising his eyebrows at her.
"Yes."
He sat up and dragged himself to his feet, carefully heaving his right leg. When he limped towards her, he was reaching for his vial of pills in his pocket.
"So you're really leaving ?" he asked, when he finally stood in front of her and let a pill vanish in his mouth.
"Yes", she said again and opened the door.
"No, you're not", he contradicted her and shot forward closing the door with his left arm so that her fingers almost got jammed.
She looked at him acidly and he looked back, peering at her, testing her willpower.
"Yes. I am", she answered and opened the door again, this time more determinately, slamming the door behind her roughly.
He smiled. This was going to be more fun than he had thought.
Years before, and six years after House had left for his fellowship in England
"American Society of Endocrinology, 12th Renal Week", Cuddy read on the sign in the entrance hall of the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle.
She was nervous, since she had come here to represent her whole endocrinological department, probably being the youngest speaker at this conference and at this point certainly also the most nervous one.
Her career depended on this speech.
At least that's what it felt like.
Her presentation was going to be among the last ones on the program, though. Experience had taught her, that usually the last presentations had the greatest audience, since most of the people came in for the dinner afterwards. But they also got the least attention, so she was sure there wouldn't be any uncomfortable questions or complaints. People would see her, would read her name, would read the title of her presentation and that was all she wanted.
That was all that stuck on peoples' minds anyway after those conferences.
She entered the hall where the research posters got presented on fancy white boards that were neatly lined up, forming a huge maze of knowledge no one seemed to care about.
After she had adjusted to the crowd, the noise and the brightness, she proceeded to the buffet, where she grabbed a bagel and a cup of coffee and decided to enter the maze in order to keep her mind from getting too worked up about her speech.
Only fifteen minutes later she had already managed to get lost between the facts and figures of diabetic nephropathy and checked out the conference program to see where she was and where she wanted to go. But she quickly understood that there was too much to discover and too little time. So she decided to leave the maze to proceed to the lecture halls directly.
When she turned around to go back the same way she had come from she froze.
He was strolling along the poster walls, indifferently looking at them every once in a while, looking bored and annoyed.
Her lips curled into a faint smile. Before she could decide whether to approach him directly or to walk past him, pretending she hadn't seen him their eyes met and the world faded out. First he only glanced at her, not recognizing her and he looked away for a second before his eyes looked back at her, this time on purpose. People kept walking by between them but their world stood still and they got lost in each other's eyes. Suddenly a group of five older men, that were feverishly discussing a research project walked by. Slowly, too concentrated on their discussion to move any faster.
This had to be him. And he had hardly changed. At least not for the worse, she found and noticed a slight increase in the room temperature.
Their blue pierced her from the distance, and she returned the look, even smiled at him sketchily.
He nodded at her, almost invisibly, so that she wasn't sure whether he had really recognized her or not.
That finally broke the spell and Cuddy turned around, now determined to leave the poster maze in the other direction, even if that was the longer way out. But she needed to focus on her presentation. She was already nervous enough.
A few hours later
Her fingers clinged to the edges of the wooden lectern as she let her gaze wander through the intimidating audience that was sitting in front of her, hanging on her lips, soaking up every single word of her introduction. Most of them were older than she was, most of them were men and most of them wore fancy suits and serious expressions on their faces.
She realized that these people didn't look like they had come here for the free food and took a deep breath, holding it for a second when she saw someone else entering the lecture hall.
Someone who was not wearing a tie, who was coming in late and asked at least twenty people to get up for him to sit down on the last seat in the middle of the last row.
She felt getting shaky and dizzy when she realized that it was House and quickly jumped to the first page of her presentation before she would faint. When the first hands rose and questions were asked she felt getting more and more confident, almost always being able to answer the questions without hesitating. Only when suddenly his hand rose she felt the nervousness kicking back in.
She only turned around eventually during the next twenty minutes, finding out that looking at her own presentation on the front was the best way to ignore the three hundred other people in the lecture hall.
Whenever she did turn around though, she looked at him, apparently the only person who was not listening to her, instead he was peering at her through tiny holes he must have pricked into the program paper.
During the first minutes this almost drove her crazy, then it only kept on annoying her given the childishness of this behavior and in the end it actually amused her, since all the other 299 faces were staring at her, taking notes, nodding, smiling, frowning, shaking their heads, doing whatever else was an indicator of attention.
"Yes, please, Dr. House ?" she nodded at him and a few heads followed her look since she had only called five other people by their names.
"Isn't it a little manipulative to pretreat your cells with cytokines when you're examining the effect of tumor necrosis factor on the expression of - cytokines in your cells ? Sounds a little like snake biting its own tail to me. Or like lab chick biting its own cute little ass, respectively", he asked in his usual cocky tone and now a few more heads turned around to look at him.
Some people were smiling, some were even chuckling but all of them were then anxiously looking back at her, waiting for her answer.
She stayed calm though, since she knew he had never really done any experimental research, that was way too much work for him. So this was her territory.
"You are right, it may sound dubious, if you look at the experiments superficially", she answered, carefully trying to emphasize the words that would tell him the subtext of her answer: That she wasn't going to allow him to ruin one of the most important moments in her career.
She continued. "But maybe you remember my initial introduction to the study where I pointed out that both of our cell cultures were pretreated with cytokines, the ones that received tumor necrosis factor and the ones that didn't. Also, cytokines are the most effective and standardized way to pretreat cells in this experimental setting", she explained and silently thanked the next person whose hand shot into the air the moment she had finished the sentence.
There were only two minutes left and she hoped that House would need longer than that to come up with another attempt to humiliate her.
Two hours later
House was standing in front of the glass wall of the dining hall on the waterfront, his hands in his pockets, looking outside at the Pacific. A moth hit the glass of the window, not really understanding why it couldn't fly towards the promising light behind the invisible wall. House bent his head and looked at the moth, whose wings left a dusty film on the window with every flutter.
The water was only slowly, almost viscidly, breaking its waves when it reached the coastline, its whitecaps tickling the rocks whose blackness stared back at the darkness of the ocean.
The sun had set an hour ago and the lights on Bainbridge Island were now colorfully twinkling through the velvety black of the night.
Funny how animals of the night still always went for the light.
He felt a hand brushing his back tenderly as he saw the reflection of her figure next to his own in the window.
"You really didn't recognize me in the poster session this morning ?" he heard Cuddy asking and noticed that he had remembered her voice being a little higher than it actually was.
"I'm bad with faces", he responded and heard her chuckle.
"But you're good with asses", she said, which made him turn around to look at her, and at her bottom respectively.
"It's been a long time since I saw yours", he mumbled and turned around again, to continue staring out of the window.
"Judging by the insane number of times you've mentioned it in the past, I think the picture of it must have practically burned itself onto your retina", she kept insisting.
"Well, what do you expect ? Should be hard to forget something huge like that", he answered and she leaned against the handrail in front of them.
"How are you?" she asked, already knowing his answer, actually not even expecting an answer at all.
"You seem to be pretty fine. Already sucked your way up to giving speeches at conferences", he evaded her question.
"You are here, too...But not to give a speech. So what made you come here ? Free food ? The pure enjoyment of humiliating people in front of a large audience ?" she evaded his comment just as well.
"My girlfriend has a meeting in Vancouver", he replied simply and she gasped for breath at the word "girlfriend" and House noticed her surprise.
"In case you don't know, that's that city in Canada, I think it's also about the only city in Canada", he said, mocking her speechlessness. "No, wait. There was another one. Something French...Trondheim. Or was that in Norway ? Eh, I don't remember", he continued mocking her, seemingly enjoying that she was still digesting the fact that he had more of a private life than she did.
They looked at each other.
She was still as beautiful as she had been the last time he had seen her. Actually, she was even more beautiful now. She even smelled different.
Only she was sober now. And she was wearing a black fancy dress instead of a yellow one, that revealed just a little too much of her cleavage.
Enough for him to remember him covering this area with tempestuous kisses.
When this memory flashed back he cleared his throat and rubbed his ear nervously.
Her hair was longer and shinier, probably due to the expensive treatment she now could afford, and her eyes were even deeper, as if their blue had darkened like the water of the ocean had darkened after sunset. Thin lines around them told him she had worked a lot during these past six years.
He wondered who she was now. And for a second he had the feeling that he had missed something all the time that now lay between them.
When she felt his looks on her she started getting nervous and looked back into his eyes, trying to keep them from staring at her cleavage.
It scared her that his simple presence was enough to make her feel light-headed. She had never really been able to forget him, but after six years her memories had seemed to be nothing more than a dream and now it all felt so real again.
Without being able to control it she suddenly felt her hand on his.
"It's been a long time", she said. "I'm glad you're fine", she added and he nodded, understanding the message of this: That she really meant it.
But instead of retorting something sensitive that would have been appropriate in this situation he only awkwardly stared at her hand lying on hers.
"You might not like it, but I really do have a girlfriend. A very jealous one", he sneered at her and she gave him a sweet smile, not taking her hand away for another five seconds, making sure he would understand that she was not trying to hit on him.
"That's...great", she said almost sounding like a mother who looked at the doodle of her child, trying to hide that she was going to toss it into the garbage only a week later.
"Yeah. It's huge ! Like a patient with Down's syndrome starting to talk in full two word sentences at the age of five", House replied snottily and pulled a face that made her shake her head in annoyance.
"I'm sure she's wonderful", she finally said, because only a truly angelic person could seriously manage to be in a relationship with this man.
"She is", he agreed and turned away from the window, leaning his back against the handrail.
"Are you dating anyone ?" he continued the small talk, already tired of this situation since it was obviously not going to lead to anything.
"No", she said and somehow felt as naked as she always did when she admitted her lack of a social life.
"I'm dating the hospital. I want to accomplish certain things in my career before I concentrate on other things, such as a private life", she shyly delivered the little line she had prepared for situations like these.
"No need to apologize. Always knew you were gonna make it. You're not homestay-mom material. Though it's admittedly a waste of those superb genes of yours", he said looking at the crowd forming around the dessert buffet.
Why was he standing here, talking to her when Stacy was waiting for him in the room ? He finally realized that he was wasting his breath on talking the wrong woman into sleeping with him.
"Well, nice chat", he therefore suddenly ended their conversation rudely. "Gotta go. Have someone waiting for me in my hotel room", he said, straigthened up and left her standing alone, without looking at her again.
Her eyes followed him, though, as he was proceeding to the buffet, where he helped himself to an oversized portion of Mousse au chocolat and left the hall with it.
She felt confused and shivered when she felt the cold from the glass wall behind her crawling up her back.
Finally she straightened up and sat down at the table reserved for the Endocrinologists from New Jersey, trying to join the ongoing conversation but actually still thinking about her unexpected encounter with House. Not getting him, not getting why she felt so close to him, when he was actually not even a mentionable part of her life.
The next morning
Cuddy was leaving her hotel room and took the stairs down to the main lobby from where a long hallway led to the Bell Harbor Conference center adjacent to the hotel. But it was something else than the sun outside that suddenly caught her attention and made her stop on her way: House was standing outside talking to what appeared to be his girlfriend. Cuddy hesitatingly went a few steps closer to take a better look at her and was surprised to find out that she was apparently not just an angel, but also a rather pretty one. When House leant in to kiss the woman, she laid his arms around him and they hugged, which made Cuddy feel like an intrudor. She turned away ashamedly and continued walking to the Conference center, wondering what a relationship with House asked of a woman.
A quick look towards the entrance told her that the weather in Seattle was apparently better than its reputation: It was not raining.
Cuddy's eyebrow quivered when she saw the woman smiling at House. And it was a relaxed, amorous smile.
Wondering if she would ever have been able to make that commitment.
She had already completely forgotten about her observation and was chatting with someone she knew from college when she saw him again, entering the hall, immediately looking for the breakfast buffet.
She excused herself to her former friend and joined House at the buffet.
"Thought you left this morning" , she said and he flinched, almost dropping his plate on which he had already stacked a bagel and three donuts.
"What are you ? A ghost ?" he snarled at her and eyed her grumpily.
"Saw you with your girlfriend", Cuddy kept digging. "She's pretty", she added softly.
"Are you jealous ?" House looked at her again and frowned. "Or are you implying an offer to a cheerful threesome ?" he asked turning the tables, now being the aggressor in their game.
"So she left for her conference in Vancouver and made you stay here?" she persisted.
"She's coming back tonight and we'll fly home together", he impatiently replied. "Is this interrogation over now ? Or is there anything else you wanna know ? Her bra size, our flight numbers?", he offered cynically and she rolled her eyes.
"I was just interested since I would have liked to meet her", she answered coyly and he lifted his finger pointing at her.
"You are such a bad liar", he said. "But remember that it was you who turned me away, doesn't make any sense to regret that NOW."
Cuddy's jaw dropped.
"I am not pining", she defended herself. "I was just wondering – God, I'm not going to defend myself", she shrugged her shoulders. "I just thought that after six years we might actually be able to talk like grown-ups, but apparently I was wrong. You're still not a grown-up."
"And you're still annoying. Comforting, isn't it?" he replied and turned turned around to walk away from her.
"This. You and me. It would never have worked, would it ?" she suddenly asked after a pause and he turned around, visibly taken aback, his eyes widened in surprise.
"No", he shook his head and knew he was lying. "Also comforting, huh ?"
She swallowed and nodded, feeling stripped, remembering that she only felt like that around him. Remembering many other things about him that had made her turn him away.
And at the same time thinking about the things that had made her feel so attracted to him and still did.
He was the only one who always managed to walk through the invisible wall guarding her as if he didn't even see or feel it.
He was the only one who touched her, who reached her, who was able to hurt her. Who challenged her for exactly these reasons.
He was right. It wouldn't have worked.
As incredible as the attraction between them was, the force of repulsion seemed to be just as strong. This just wasn't meant to be. Nothing had changed. She smiled. It was comforting. Because there was nothing to expect, nothing to get disappointed in. It was genuine.