Disclaimer: You know the drill. Blah blah not mine, don't own blah blah.
Author's note: I'm sure this story has been done about six thousand times. And done better and done worse. But when it's 4:30 in the morning and it's too hot to sleep and you've seen Hugh Laurie In The Actor's Studio and the House episode 'Clueless' in the span of a couple of days and you've recently read Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller (recently, but much before it's mention on I.T.A.S. by the way)... Well, your mind wanders around and you really don't care about anything because it's too damn hot to sleep. Originally Written: The 2nd of August, 2006.
Oh, and one other note: This is in House's point of view, if you weren't sure. Yep, that's it.
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"Nnghmmmh." I said, authoritatively.
And I meant it.
You see, I hadn't exactly woken up yet, by which I mean that I was awake, but I hadn't yet opened my eyes. It was all part of my daily ritual of "Where am I and how did I get here?" It's a kind of game. It's good for the memory.
Though usually the answer is "In bed at home. Because I went to sleep." or sometimes "On the couch. Because I may or may not have passed out."
But today the answer was not usual. Judging from all the familiar stimuli, I was indeed, "In bed at home." but in conjunction with that intriguing prepositional phrase "With someone else."
Okay, so it's actually more a means of preventing embarrassment rather than a game to stimulate neural activity. Because you don't want to wake up saying "Hello... you." Well maybe you do. But I don't. I have appearances to keep up.
So here I was, "In bed at home with someone else. Because..."
Well, you do the math.
And let me know what you got. Because I keep coming up with 13.6 and that doesn't tell me who this is or what we probably did last night.
But I haven't given up. No, I'm not much of a quitter, you might say.
As it were, I already had several clues as to the identity of my mystery guest.
My face was nuzzled in their hair, after all. And I nuzzled it a little more, just to make it clear that there was nuzzling going on. None of this ambiguity business from Gregory House.
Hair can tell you a lot. Too much of this in the body, not enough of that. Someone's not a natural blonde. And someone else should be a natural grey.
This hair... this hair had a familiar smell. Fragrance, I should say. "Smell" lends itself to being read as "stench". Yes, I knew this fragrance. I'd know it anywhere.
Expensive shampoo.
That's what the "mmm" in "Nnghmmmh." meant earlier. "Mmm" directly translates into "expensive shampoo". ...So this narrows it down to... Cameron. Cuddy. Any of my colleagues, really. My ex-wife. And whores.
I'm sorry, they call themselves prostitutes these days, don't they. I'd hate to be politically incorrect. So, what next?
Move down the list, down the body. Whichever you prefer. And I prefer the body.
Which is clad in silk pajamas.
Which is the "h" at the end of "Nnghmmmh." "Is this silk?"
The "Nngh" is just a formality, really.
So I could just open my eyes and roll with the punches since I'm not getting any real help from the long fingers entwined with mine or the faint smell of men's aftershave on us both. Roll with the punches. Possibly roll with getting punched.
But opening your eyes is cheating. Like waiting for your patient to die so you can just do the autopsy to find out what was wrong with them. You just don't do that.
And besides, this is exactly where a man wants to be in the morning.
With someone else. In bed. Comfortable. Semi-conscious. Semi-arous-
"House, I sincerely hope that's your cane in the small of my back."
Now that was a mood killer.
Though it wasn't so much the tone of voice.
Which was serious. Skeptical. Pro cane. Anti a-different-hard-staff.
No, not so much the tone as the voice itself.
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Because the voice belonged to James Wilson.