Author's Note: Thanks for the reviews!

Too drunk and

Still drinking

It's just the way I feel

It's all right

Is what you told me

'Cause what we had was so beautiful

Feel heavy

Like floating

At the bottom of the sea

Dean of Medicine at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, Dr. Lisa Cuddy, looked at the wine and the dying flowers on her desk. Hard, strong woman she was, she was still a sucker for a glass of Chardonnay and a dying bunch of roses. The roses had been a farewell gift from one of her many suitors—the man had moved onto another woman in another town and left her with an old batch of beat-up roses and a bottle of wine.

The flowers had arrived earlier in the day and the wine had appeared when the hospital grew dark. Three glasses had already been downed and that was not hardly enough for Cuddy.

She leaned back in her chair, letting her still-pump-clad feet lay on the desk calendar. She held her red wine in her left hand and looked at it in the darkness. The darkness distorted it and made it look darker than it was. Looking through the glass, she saw the pictures of her nieces and nephews.

Her sister had married a nice guy. She had introduced him to the family on Thanksgiving and their mother instantly fell in love with his neatly pressed slacks, Ralph Lauren shirt, and turkey tie.

"The perfect man!" She gushed to Cuddy in the privacy of the bustling, hot kitchen.

"There is no such thing," a younger Lisa shot back.

Apparently, she had been wrong, for all Krissy ever talked about was how beautiful the flowers Bobby had brought home were, how sweet he was to their kids, and how he treated her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Cuddy wanted to gag whenever they were on the phone.

They had had two kids, Katie and Kevin. Cuddy stared at their blue eyes and blonde hair thinking about how clichéd the whole situation was. Bobby and Krissy even had a golden retriever to complete the whole "nuclear family" scene. Cuddy scoffed at the idea and tilted her head back to study the ceiling.

It was true that her breast size was large and that she was unafraid to flaunt it. Women, she had discovered, always got ahead faster and farther if they were smart and had big breasts. The low-cut shirts and the sexy/messy hair were her way of not only showing off what she had been born with, but also coping with small tragedies in her life.

She liked to organize her shirts and skirts to match her moods. One section of her closet was devoted to the "in-a-relationship" stage. There were more conservative tops that did not emphasize her cleavage as much. Then, of course, there were the more daring and plunging tops—the "just-broke-up-again" tops—that she wore after another man had sent flowers and left her.

She didn't like to wear the low-cut shirts, to be honest, but they brought her a sense of worth. Everyone in the damned hospital was damaged—it was a silent disease that none of them had figured out how to treat. She herself was included in that group. When she saw a man stare at her chest for a few seconds longer than he should have, a broken piece of her heart made its way back into its appointed spot where it had been before a nameless boyfriend had crushed it.

She should be used to it by now, she thought, as she downed the Chardonnay and reached for the whole bottle, giving up on the theory of civilized drinking. Men didn't like strong women and were intimidated by them. Men were scared of beautiful and strong women. She was the latter and thus found most men cowering behind facades of maleness.

She thought about House and how no one intimidated him. He was a man, and reveled in the "peep show", but he was not intimidated. The world had cut him into strips and fed him to the lions, so it didn't matter what anyone else thought of him now. He knew it was useless to feel intimidated (or to feel any other emotion than bitterness), and she admired him for that.

Cuddy thought about turning some music on, but how would that help? Music solved nothing, she learned after listening to Christmas music when a December boyfriend had broken up with her. Music helped soothe the pain and then, when the music stopped, the pain came back, as if the music had never been on in the first place.

She took another swig of wine directly from the bottle and sighed once again. The hospital was all void except for the patients and these were the times that she became completely vulnerable. When only the stars were present to judge her, it did not matter that she was weak and teary-eyed. Nothing mattered. Here she sat, by herself, with dead red roses and a dreary bottle of cheap Chardonnay. What sins had she committed? Pride, she thought, was one and she took a drink for the wine. Gluttony? Yeah, too much wine. She took another swig. Lust? Of course, over many men. Another drink.

She went down the list. Catechism courses as a child paid off when she needed religion to give her a reason to drink. The bottle was half-empty and she kept drinking. One bottle of wine would not make her drunk and she regretted the fact. She hated drinking alone, for there was no one with whom to share the euphoric high.

As she put the empty bottle down on the table, she gazed out of her office windows. She almost screamed as she saw another human being's face through the window. The person pushed open the door and walked into her office.

"I thought I locked the door."

"You didn't. Why are you still here?"

"Same reason you are. Too many break-ups, too many lonely nights…too much paperwork."

"You finished the Chardonnay all by your lonesome?"

"Yeah, who said I couldn't hold my wine?"

"No one, but drinking alone gets you nowhere."

"And where does drinking with someone get me then? It just leaves me with less alcohol than I would have if I was drinking by myself."

"No, it gives you someone to share it with."

"Sharing is overrated."

"Dr. Cuddy, sharing is caring."

"Dr. Wilson, I don't care."

The doctors looked at each other and realized in the dark of the night that, as two broken souls, wine would help mend their wounds for a time. They both realized, though, that the wine was a temporary cure and tomorrow morning nothing would be left but the pain and the hangover. Cuddy reached underneath her desk to grab the second bottle of wine she had. She popped open the cork and poured some into the glass. She handed it to Wilson and raised the bottle in a toast.

"To the two loneliest people in the hospital," she proposed.

The glass of the bottle and of the goblet clinked and each took a swallow. Each brought their own miseries to the equation, but for now, they each took comfort in the fact that the wine would strangle their pain and that the guilt of drinking a whole bottle of wine by oneself would not emerge. Not tonight.