Title: Particle Physics
Author: Morgan72uk
Summary: She isn't anything like the women he marries.
Pairing: House / Cuddy /Wilson
Rating: T
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, please don't sue
A/N - so I'm not exactly sure where this came from - but I figured after wandering in the House & Cuddy direction I needed to write something complicated - and complicated means Wilson / Cuddy / House
Particle Physics
She isn't anything like the women he marries. They are sweet and soft and clingy – which is what he likes about them, whereas she is all hard angles and brisk, powerful manoeuvrings.
His wives do lunch and charity work, while she moves around the hospital - seeing and hearing everything, passing through departments, including his, in a bustle of high heels and tight skirts. She leaves praise and scorn in her wake – and the scent of flowers lingers in the corridors she has passed through. But it's difficult to concentrate on her omniscience when her hair slithers seductively down her back and all he can think about is what it will feel like wrapped around his hands or sliding over his chest.
He is nothing like the men who court her. They are powerful corporate types, brimming with self-importance. They buzz around her like moths to a flame until she dismisses them with careless gestures the moment they demand more of her then she can give, the moment they threaten to distract her from running the hospital.
It would be easier if she were a bitch, if she were only a bitch. But for all the times he's seen her face down someone unwise enough to get in her way, there are also all the times he's seen her upset over the loss of a patient, all the times when a colleague has gone to her with their problems and received advice as well as sympathy. It would be easier if he didn't know that sometimes she cares too much.
He knows he wants her, knows that his many fantasies about her are because she represents something dangerous that he can't predict or control, something he doesn't want to be able to control. But he is too astute not to acknowledge that might not be the only reason. It might just be that he wants her because House does too.
He doesn't believe his friend's denials, doesn't believe that the line between love and hate, or lust and hate at least, is a heavily guarded border crossing. He has watched House watch her and he doesn't think all that interest is purely academic. There are levels of competition in their friendship, they bet on sports, sometimes on patients – but they don't bet about her. Still, just once he'd like to be the one who has something House covets.
He knows things about her House does not. His role as her sometime co-conspirator gives him access to her in the smoky, late night quiet. They have spent many an evening together, ensconced in her office, plotting and planning and there are even times when the subject of their scheming is not a wayward diagnostician. He's seen her low and vulnerable and tried to persuade her to let him pick up the pieces, put her back together. One night too much maudlin conversation, washed down with very good scotch found them sprawled on her couch, sharing heated, urgent kisses – before a modicum of sense returned and one of them remembered who they were and why this was a bad idea.
When he lies in bed not making love to his wife he thinks about that night; about the heat of her mouth, about the way she felt arching beneath him, about the curve of her breast against his palm. And in the morning he goes to work, where he watches her out of the corner of his eye and wonders if she ever regrets that she stopped him.