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Chapter 27

Sunday night was clear and slightly cooler now that the sun was down. Cameron had a light sweater on over her top and House's perpetually rumpled oxford shirt covered a brand new 'Rock Classics' t-shirt. He'd bought a matching one for Cameron but it was child-sized and fit more like a baby-doll shirt. She'd modeled it for him right after the concert. It had been a short modeling session since he'd pulled it off her after less than five minutes.

An energetic beginning had mellowed into a slower and ultimately more fulfilling experience for both of them. They'd woken up well after nine, separated by the width of the bed but facing each other across it. Cameron had decided it was an arrangement she could easily get used to.

House had expected to call room service, pack and head back to Princeton, but Cameron had announced that she'd traded sixteen hours of clinic duty for Monday off. The hours were meant to be split between herself and House, but she quickly assured him that she'd take them all. House had grumbled at the fact that Cuddy never made deals like that with him anymore. Cameron had reminded him that was probably because he always broke them.

Breakfast in bed had been followed by time on the beach, with Cameron sunning herself on a chair borrowed from the hotel and House playing Metroid Prime on his gameboy under a borrowed umbrella. His concentration was thrown by the sight of a relaxed Cameron dozing peacefully while the ocean waves provided the background noise. She wasn't wearing a bathing suit. She wasn't ready for that. But her shorts were cut just a scant two inches below her shapely bottom, and a high cut tank showed off her arms as well as certain other attributes. She'd found the shirt two days before leaving and had bought it in five different colors. She considered it fifty dollars well spent and made a mental note that adapting wasn't as impossible as she'd thought it would be.

House had finally gotten his fish sandwich for lunch, and Cameron had gorged herself on fried clams. Then they'd wandered from casino to casino making petty bets and pulling slots. House had won seventy and Cameron had lost fifty in the Showboat. At Caesars, Cameron had redeemed herself by hitting on sixteen and winding up with twenty-one and two hundred dollars in winnings. House made her blow on his dice and still only broke even at the craps tables. The Tropicana was best forgotten by both of them, but back at the Sands, Cameron had once again won at roulette and House walked away from a slot machine with a bucket full of money. That was when they decided to quit while they were ahead.

Throughout the day, House was surprised and somewhat enamoured of how animated Cameron could get. She was normally so sedate, the calming influence on the team, at least until she was pushed. Seeing her throw her hands up and cheer when the dealer announced her a winner was as refreshing as it was unusual. He failed to notice that his own snide demeanor had slipped slightly to the side as well. The crowds of people were as irritating as ever. His leg hurt just as badly as it did every day. He was still middle-aged and mad at the world. He just wasn't quite as mad at his particular corner of it at that particular moment.

A visit to the Steel Pier was his idea, but Cameron wasn't surprised. A man who salivated over monster trucks was bound to be just as child-like when it came to amusement parks. She was just glad she'd had a light dinner, because she saw multiple trips on the roller coaster in her future.

The sun went down, and the park lights went on, and there they were, wandering the park slowly, letting the crowd surge around them, and letting themselves relax in a way they couldn't seem to when they were in Princeton, whether in or out of the hospital. House's unbuttoned shirttails ruffled slightly in the light breeze, and Cameron buttoned the top button on her sweater.

"You gonna finish that?" Cameron made a swipe at House's cotton candy just as he pivoted away.

"Mine. Get your own," he accented his words by taking a large sugary bite.

Eyes narrowed and lips twitched. "I seem to remember you stealing mine the last time."

"Incorrect, Allison. It was freely given. And taken back as well. My razor sharp mind likes to ignore the cruel race to the car that followed."

Cameron laughed. "A race you won!"

"Pity win, no doubt."

"Or maybe it was the cane across the back of my knees that slowed me down." Another playful laugh.

"Sorry, I don't recall that."

"Just give me the candy, Greg." She grinned while reaching again and this time he let her grab it, holding on just a few extra seconds before releasing it.

"Fine. Don't blame me when you projectile vomit all over the guy ahead of us on this ride."

Eyes skyward and an exasperated sigh. "If I didn't throw up after the fifth time on Mouser, I'm never going to."

"Yes, but this is the tilt-a-whirl. There will be tilting and whirling."

"I got that from the name," she replied dryly.

He chuckled and stole his cotton candy back, finishing it off before throwing the paper cone in the trash as they reached the front of the line.

Two minutes later they exited the ride and staggered to a nearby bench. Cameron looked slightly green but her expression warned House against saying anything. After a few minutes of silence she tilted her head back and looked up into the sky. It was more grey than black, with the lights from the park obscuring the stars above. She could still hear the waves though, two hundred yards away and sloshing against the pier. House's eyes were on her and she could sense it. He liked to watch her when he thought she wouldn't notice. He always had.

"This has been a nice weekend," she said, still looking skyward.

"It's had its moments," House agreed, thinking of a few in particular, most involving little clothing and a lot of touching.

"Relaxing."

"I'm assuming that was your goal."

"Yes. It's different here. I feel different here."

"One of two things can happen when you take someone out of their normal routine. Either they close up or they open."

"Looks like we both opened."

"Looks like."

"I would have predicted you'd be a closer," she said, turning and squinting up at him, his head backlit by a string of blinking lights.

"Ahh, yes, but you forgot that the most predictable thing about me is that I'm unpredictable."

"True."

His arm slid around her shoulders unexpectedly and they sat and watched the people passing for a few silent minutes.

Cameron moved first; standing up and tugging House to his feet.

"Come on. We've got a few open hours left," she told him, knowing that once they hit the road back to Princeton they would inevitably slip back into their prearranged roles, though perhaps a bit more comfortable in their own skin. It wasn't a bad arrangement to go back to, but it required a lot more work. She stared into House's eyes. He looked like he was up for it.

"I'll be generous, and let you pick the next ride."

"Ferris wheel?" she cajoled.

"That's an awfully wussy, ride."

"Come on, Greg. I've been on every whiplash inducing ride in this place… twice!"

"Fine, but only if I get to give you a hickey when we're stopped at the top."

"Promises, promises," she answered coyly, and headed towards the giant wheel with an extra sway in her hips.


Monday rolled by in a bit of a blur, as House and Cameron had one last romp in the oversized bed before checking out of the hotel and proceeding to spend the rest of the day drifting from casino to casino and alternately watching the floorshows and trying their luck at the tables. Surprisingly, it held up remarkably well. By the time House pointed the Corvette north and headed out of the city, they were still up by a combined five-hundred and thirty-seven dollars.

The drive back to Princeton started out with friendly bantering and slowly dissolved into silence as the sun went down and reality crept back. When they stopped for dinner on the way, they were back to calling each other by their last names. Keeping the memory of the weekend alive, however, was House's warm hand on Cameron's thigh as they completed the journey home, and Cameron's whispered 'I love you' when he dropped her off at her apartment.

Cameron beat House to the hospital the next morning. It wasn't hard to do since she arrived at just quarter past seven. She'd woken up as dawn crept over the horizon and hadn't been able to fall back to sleep. Too many thoughts were running through her head.

Officially, she and House had been together for a month and her feelings about the relationship were still new and sometimes shaky. Dawn had brought one of those shaky times. She knew how she felt about him. She was pretty sure how he felt about her. Unfortunately life and feelings and the real world didn't always mesh well together. She knew that first hand and as idealistic as she appeared, there was a thread of cynicism that ran through her and could give House's a run for its money.

The weekend had been wonderful, but it was over now, and she didn't have any visions of 'happily ever after' occurring in the near or distant future. Friday morning she'd been more optimistic; knowing what needed to be worked on between them and viewing their problems as far from insurmountable. A night alone in her own bed had brought another list of doubts to her mind. She was already worried about her career, his career and how working together could affect them both.

That train of thought had led her down the track a ways to acknowledging that as close as they became, she would probably always be second to medicine in his heart. A hundred whispered 'I love yous' weren't going to change that. Real life wasn't like a romance novel. If it was, then she'd have size 36D breasts, and House would have a mullet instead of a limp. She liked to think that having his love at all was good enough, even if it wasn't some fireworks laden romp through the park, but honestly, she wasn't sure. It had taken her until six a.m. to decide that she was up for the challenge of finding out.

Now she sat in his chair, letter opener in hand, sorting through the mail and trying to convince herself that she enjoyed being useful, instead of admitting that she was a little annoyed to be fulfilling the role of glorified secretary. She had never really minded before, but the twenty minutes spent contemplating her career had made her question some things. Initially she'd started answering the mail because House threw it all away and they were desperate for patients. It wasn't like television, where mysterious cases just walked through the hospital every day. They did occasionally need to bring them in from other clinics and hospitals. She could have pestered Foreman and Chase into taking turns at it, but somehow it had become a little source of pride for her to be in charge of it. She was the one House went to when he needed a new challenge. She was the one who played the largest role, next to him, in deciding who they took on as a patient. At least that was the way she saw it. Her pestering thoughts had made her wonder about how he viewed it.

The sharp sound of a palm striking glass made her look up.

"In early, eh?" House pushed through his office door at seven-thirty. "That had better not be my mug you're drinking out of"

"I didn't see your name on it," she said. She knew she sounded a little abrupt, and wasn't surprised when House's left eyebrow rose.

"Bad morning already? It's not even eight."

Cameron gave herself a mental shake. Now was not the time to let her sleep-deprived brain do the talking.

"Just didn't sleep well," she replied.

He looked at her, his expression an amalgamation of caring, and not caring; as if he was trying to make it look like a completely clinical type of concern.

"No dreams," she said, answering the question that was on his tongue.

The not-caring expression grew an overtone of confusion, but he still didn't question her.

"It's nothing, House. Let it go." As if that ever worked on him.

They'd reverted to calling one another by surname on the drive back from Atlantic City, but it no longer sounded quite as normal. In two days he'd become accustomed to the sound of his first name on her lips. Yet the idea of her calling him that here would have sounded just as wrong. A firm dark line had been blurred and the edges were getting fainter all the time. It needed to be redrawn.

He reached out for the letters she'd neatly sorted. "Thanks," he muttered, letting the subject of her strange mood drop for the moment. "Cuddy tagged me on my way in. Seems we have a patient. Foreman and Chase took the history and ran the initial bloods yesterday."

"I saw the file," Cameron replied, shuffling a few papers and pulling a blue folder free. "All the symptoms point to atrial fibrillation."

"The patient's only twenty-one years old," House countered.

"And his bloodwork shows hypothyroidism, which can cause the AF."

"Not common, but true. And the rash?"

"Simple allergy to the medication his last doctor put him on."

"Ahh, an easy catch for the immunologist."

Cameron tilted her head in acceptance of the rare compliment. "There was an article about that med in NEJM about six months ago."

"Well, in the absence of any naysaying from your tardy comrades, we'll go with your diagnosis. Set up an electrocardiogram and when it comes back positive, start him on norpace and get him set up with a holter monitor so we can see if it works."

House watched as Cameron's eyes narrowed and her chin rose a fraction of an inch.

"So you'd already figured it out, eh?"

"On the elevator trip up," he admitted with a shrewd grin. "But I always like hearing how your mind works."

Another compliment, and Cameron pursed her lips and considered her next words. She didn't want to sound like she was begging for his approval, but she needed to silence the annoying voices in her head.

"So you do respect my opinion, then."

"Is that a trick question?"

"It wasn't actually a question at all."

"Is this about the coffee mug? Because we've got at least three red ones floating around here. I don't mind if you use one. I was just being annoying for the hell of it."

Cameron rolled her eyes. "No, it isn't about the coffee mug."

"Okay then," House drew out the 'o' in 'okay' as his eyebrows performed a short dance above crystalline eyes. "We're back to the 'will you still respect me in the morning' routine. How'd that happen?"

"This is why I didn't want to talk about it."

"And yet, you're the one who brought it up again," House helpfully pointed out. Cameron glared at him but the venom in her gaze seemed more self-directed than anything else.

"I make the coffee. I find the sugar. I answer the mail. I do your charting."

"Hey, I told you I'd do my own charting from now on," he interrupted, then silenced himself at her look.

"Why do you let me do those things?"

"Because then I don't have to."

A nod of acknowledgement. "Honest. That's good."

"This might be easier if you told me what the hell you're getting at, Cameron," House said, beginning to lose his patience. It occurred to him that with anyone else, that patience would have been lost and out the door thirty seconds after the conversation began.

Cameron sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose with thumb and index finger. "I'm not even sure," she said, frustrated with herself.

House hadn't spent twenty years watching people without getting damn good at reading them, and the pages that made up Cameron's mood were beginning to sort themselves into order.

"You may be questioning your past motivations, but leave mine out of it," he said, his voice slightly gentler than it had been a moment ago.

"I can't have many secrets around you, can I?" she said, lips quirked into a slight grimace.

"You're drinking coffee out of my mug, sorting my mail and in a foul mood. Doesn't take a genius to figure out you're wondering if I view you as my personal secretary. Also doesn't take a genius to figure out that part of the reason you've been the Suzy-homemaker of the office all this time because you thought it made you special. A cut above the other little ducklings. Maybe I snarked at you just as much, but you still got to answer my mail every morning, so that had to count for something. Am I getting warm?"

"Annoyingly so," she answered, the words bitten short.

"So here's where I tell you some hard truths. You're expected to make the coffee because every time someone else does it, it ends up tasting like sludge. You know where the sugar is because you're the thoughtful one around here. Sorry, but it's true. And as for the mail… I've respected your opinions on the referrals since I first saw that ridiculous girly 'G' of yours. I probably respect your opinion more than you do, half the time. That's one of your problems. You spend too much time wondering if you're right and not enough time insisting that you are. That's why you feel like you need to make your mark known in other ways. Like with forged signatures and neatly written files."

"Knowing that you can be a nice person is making it really hard to think of you as a bastard right now," Cameron said, feeling the heat of humiliation stain her cheeks.

House walked around the desk and stared down at her. "Sometimes being a bastard is the best way to be a nice person," he told her. "Now get out of my chair and go deal with our patient."

The chair squeaked and protested as she pushed herself out of it. "I'm the queen of over-compensation, aren't I?"

"You said it. Not me," House quipped as he settled himself in his still-warm chair.

"The only thing you didn't guess," she said thoughtfully, "is that I actually do enjoy doing all of those things. It isn't just for the recognition."

"Well, thank God! Otherwise I'd be living in fear of coffee by Foreman and a stack of unopened mail right now." He shot her a sarcastic smile, hoping that the situation was settled, or at least close to being settled.

"No. I wouldn't be so cruel," she said with a smirk. Her thoughts were still somewhat jumbled, but they were beginning to sort themselves out. She walked to the door, low heels clicking against the floor.

"Hey."

"What?" she asked, turning around.

"You do realize that if I didn't respect you as an intelligent, competent, capable woman, I'd never have considered…" he made some vague hand movements that Cameron easily deciphered.

"I hoped that was true," she said, watching his eyes do their usual darting dance around the room that signaled he was discussing his feelings.

"Well you can stop hoping. It's true. Looks alone don't do much for me."

A slow grin inched its way onto Cameron's face. "So even in the beginning, I was more than just the pretty artwork in the lobby."

"Much more." He was surprised at the fact that his words weren't growled out the way he usually admitted things. In fact there was a warmth to them and when he looked in Cameron's face he saw it reflected there.

"Thanks," Cameron said as one of her rare work-time smiles grew out of the shy grin that had graced her lips a second earlier.

"No problem," House replied, followed by a hasty reach for his iPod in order to distract himself from the full wattage of that smile. When he looked up again, she was disappearing down the hallway, but he could still see the smile in the way she walked and he shook his head in quiet amazement that words from him could make her walk like that.