What do men want?
The answer is not as obvious as we are led to believe—or so it seemed to Allison Cameron. Granted, she had less experience in this area than most attractive women her age. But if the answer really were as simple as good sex and good food, her lover ought to be very happy with her. And it was becoming painfully clear that he was not.
Even worse, Cameron was beginning to think that she wasn't very happy, either. This seemed too terrible a defeat to contemplate. Hadn't she strived for 18 months, doing everything in her power to make this man love her? And now, after surviving rejection and waiting out the Stacy Warner months, she finally had him by her side. Cameron was accustomed to working hard, getting what she wanted, and being more than satisfied with the results. Even medical school, which had almost killed her, had been as exhilarating as it had been terrifying. It was unthinkable that being with House could be one part wonderful to four parts aggravation, loneliness, and tension, but every week she was finding it harder not to think the unthinkable.
Cameron had grimly barred the mental door against the realization that there was a certain amount of sheer dislike of House in the mix, too. But subconsciously she sensed the thought standing on the doorstep, waiting.
She wondered briefly if Chase might be right; she was too young for House. But she felt in her gut that it was an unsatisfactory explanation. Her husband had been much older than her, too, and he hadn't cared that she didn't know who the Queen of Soul was, or that she hadn't watched the first moonwalk as it happened. Wait: did House really care? He would grumble a brief, unilluminating explanation, or suggest that she Google it, but he usually had something more compelling on his mind to begin with.
Did House really care about anything having to do with her? There: she'd let that thought in at last. He could be gentle. At times he seemed anxious not to hurt her (at other times the thought that he might be trampling her feelings didn't seem to occur to him). But Cameron had seen him with Stacy, had watched him engage with her in a way she'd never seen happen with anyone else. When Stacy came into the room, House lost that air of abstraction and focused on her alone. Even when they quarreled, there was an intimacy to the moment that Cameron had not come close to achieving with House. On the contrary: they seemed to bounce off of one another, touching but never connecting. The fact was, he never seemed to be more than 50 percent with her, even in bed.
Cameron played with a long lock of hair and looked unhappily around the livingroom. It was after eleven. She'd been there since ten, when her meeting ended. It was possible House was somewhere with Wilson, or had gone to the movies by himself. He was a night owl, prone to prowl after dark. He hadn't expected her to come over. Why did she feel such a sense of foreboding as the minutes ticked by?
All right, time to get a grip. Instead of brooding over what went wrong, wouldn't it be more productive to figure out how to make things right? What was the hallmark of a successful relationship? Shared interests. They had medicine, but apparently that wasn't enough.
Her eye fell on the boxes of sports memoribilia. "Stacy likes baseball and basketball," she heard House say to Wilson once, "but her religion is football. No talking from Saturday afternoon till Monday night. You could have sex with her if you wanted, but she had to be facing the TV." Cameron shuddered a little at the vision this inspired, hoped it was another one of House's gross (in every sense of the word) exaggerations, but forced herself to consider the implications of what he'd said. House's tone was admiring; he respected Stacy's singleminded devotion to the stupid game. It was one of the things he loved about her.
If we're not connecting it's at least half my fault, she thought. I expect him to want to know everything about me, but I don't make much of an effort to know anything about him—at least, none of the things he thinks are important.
With a sudden burst of energy, she went to the bookshelf and took down the box closest to her end. It was marked "Yankees Stats: 1964 to 1985."
This is going to be a pretty dry read, she thought, smiling, but at least it's a start.
House arrived twenty minutes later to find Cameron sitting at his kitchen table, a banker's box on the chair next to her and an open bottle of Vicodin in front of her.
His first thought—"Busted!"—was immediately replaced by another: Cameron had barely registered his entrance, seemed listless and dazed. Her face was red and streaked with tears. House shoved the box off the chair and sat down, turning her head so he could check her eyes. The pupils were shrunken, her breathing slow, her skin damp. She made wavering eye contact with him and tried a smile.
"I know why you like this stuff so much," she enunciated.
"How many did you take? Cameron? CAMERON. How many?"
She made an effort to focus. "Two."
House swore violently. Two 10-milligram tabs was a stiff dose even for him, and Cameron had less than half his body weight and none of the tolerance that comes from six years of daily use. It probably wouldn't kill her, but it wouldn't hurt to get it out of her system, either.
Fifteen minutes later they were huddled over the toilet, a half-empty glass of salt water on the bathroom counter. House held back her hair as Cameron retched. There wasn't much coming up, but after awhile House was satisfied that they'd gotten most of it and let her come up for air. He wiped her face with a cold washcloth and checked her eyes again; they were starting to look better, and as she recovered from the vomiting fit, her breathing normalized as well.
They crouched together on the bathroom floor like two penitents at a shrine, holding onto one another's shoulders. The pose had the odd effect of creating space between them rather than bringing them together. Cameron began to weep.
"You said you quit."
"You said I quit," House reminded her, but softly.
"Why do you need that stuff when you have me to make you happy?"
"I think you should lie down now. Here, rinse your mouth; good. Let's go."
He led her into his room and pulled back the covers. She obediently kicked off her shoes and climbed in. House tucked the bedclothes up around her chin, turned on a low light near the window, and went to the door, intending to get a chair and a book.
"Do you love me?"
The question exploded like a shot in the dark. House paused.
"Do you?" she insisted. "I have to know. I have a right to know."
"Go to sleep, Cameron. We'll talk in the morning."
"Allison," she whispered. "My name is Allison…"
House went into the kitchen and set the bankers box upright. He scooped up the assorted junk on the floor and dumped it back in. Then he took the pill bottle over to the kitchen sink. He removed one pill and swallowed it with water—his throat was too dry to even think of taking it without—put the cap back on, and set the bottle on the shelf above the sink, where anyone could see it. Time to be more upfront about everything, he thought. Might as well start here.
Then he put the bankers box back on its shelf, picked up a chair and the new Lancet, and hopped awkwardly back to the bedroom to begin his vigil.
