About the time that Wilson started looking more than tipsy, Cuddy gave Stacy a disgusted look, and a frustrated sigh. "I think it's time we got this nightmare home," she cautioned, "before he starts singing."
Stacy raised an amused eyebrow. "Does that happen often?" She asked. "I think I'd like to stay and watch."
"Trust me," Cuddy replied, shaking her head vigorously, "You wouldn't. You've heard him humming around with his office radio, that's bad enough. This is worse, and no matter how secure you are, it's ten times more embarrassing in public."
Stacy bid them both goodnights as she watched Cuddy escorting a slightly precarious Wilson towards her car, which was parked outside in the "Princeton Plainsboro Staff Only" courtesy parking. She heard the tires squeal as they drove away, and turned to her remaining seatmate, shrugging her shoulders. "I don't think I want you taking the motorcycle home right now."
They walked out together to the parking lot, and set on a bench in front of the bar, House wrapping his arms around his own shoulders as he shuddered involuntarily. "It's cold," he started, but Stacy shook her head. Frustrated, he muttered something incomprehensible about her having lived in New York, and crossed his long legs over one another, blinking out towards the quieting street. "I have to back to the hospital to pick up some files," he said. "You should come with me. It's probably not a good idea for me to leave you out here alone, and if something happened to you, everyone would try their best to make me feel responsible."
Stacy led him back across deserted sidewalks, listening to the uneven tapping of his cane alongside her as they went. "The gentlemanly thing to do," he started, "would be to offer you my oat. Lucky for me I'm not a gentleman."
"Heaven forbid," agreed Stacy, rolling her eyes. "That would be off-putting."
"Takes one who knows you to understand you," House acknowledged, and Stacy stopped, turning to watch him as he shuddered again in the streetlights. "I mean," he continued, "if I felt the need to give you my jacket, I'd be even more freezing than I am now, and it's just embarrassing to die of frostbite on the steps of your own hospital. Is there a doctor in the house?"
"What files?" Stacy asked, as they ascended the steps to Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. "A new case that they can't crack, left to the brilliant but apparently masochistic Doctor House?"
"No," admitted House, as they crossed the hall to the elevator, "Just the credit card bills and the list of thank-you notes that I have to make sure not to write."
They rode up together in the elevator, Stacy leaning against the wall as the floor numbers blinked by above her. Fatigue hit her in a wave, and she blinked blearily at the elevator doors as they slid open to admit herself and House. House immediately started down the hallway towards his office. "You should get a jacket," she admonished him. "Or a sweatshirt to go under your coat. You must have something lying around in there."
Receiving no response, she followed him into the office. The lights were all off when she entered, and she could see his shadow slouching over his desk, rifling through the papers on his desk, some of them swishing off the table and drifting down to the floor as he flung them aside.
"Greg?" Stacy called to him, crossing the room to meet him. "Why don't you turn the lights on in here, might make things a little easier." She stepped over to the light switch, and flicked the tab downward with one finger, blinking as the office was abruptly lit from above by the single rectangular overhead lamp.
"Thanks," House muttered. Looking up at him in the newly brightened room, Stacy saw the lines etched into his face, the tautness of his body as he wrenched himself slowly forward and away from the desk. "Greg," she suggested quietly, "Why don't you sit down for a few minutes."
"It's cold in here, and I want to go home," he replied. Stacy reached out one arm, clasping his wrist in her hand.
"Just a moment," she insisted. "I'm not going to keep you very long." She didn't say what she wanted to, that he looked like he could use a rest, that she was worried about him. There was no doubt that House would go up in arms immediately about his precious rejection of "dependency," about how her sympathy was pity, and pity was the last thing he'd ever want or need. Instead, she led him over to the couch, and pushed him into it, watching him slump, disgruntled, against the armrest.
"So, what have you been up to?" House asked, almost interested, his eyes on her nervous hands. "Living the single, high life, checking in and out of hotels, making arrangements with hot, single friends, having mad, wild parties at the hospital's expense."
"You got it all right up until that last part," she said, rolling her eyes. "That's all it's been, high times and sexy games, just me, myself, and the mirror. And occasionally Cuddy, who's had the courtesy to at least check in on me now and again. I can't decide if she's being sympathetic, or just genuinely doesn't know what to make of me anymore."
"That makes two of us," House agreed, grunting as he shifted his leg against the side of the couch. "Join the club, we've got t-shirts."
He rubbed one temple with one long finger, muttering soundlessly to himself as he blinked frustratedly across the room, at nothing. Stacy slid herself into the seat beside him, her hand groping for his on the seat cushion beside her. She felt his hand tense in hers as she wrapped her fingers around his frozen ones, and then watched as he slowly, carefully relaxed his hand into hers.
She held the contact there for a moment, trying to maintain her composure as the thrill of that simple, yet intimate contact shot through her. She could feel House shivering beside her, and entertained the temporary notion that it was because of her proximity, and not at all because of the cold. She herself felt warm, drowsy from sleep and a couple of drinks, and yet on edge with the tenseness of the very comfort that she was afraid to experience in the prescence of a man who had himself admitted he could not, would not change for her.
There are some things, she thought, that are never good for us, that we do in an almost passive aggressive way, just to make the point. Then there are other things, dangerous more to the soul than to the body itself, which we do because we love, and when we love, we're reckless, not from lack of understanding, but from lack of care that everything will ultimately come falling down around us. There was nothing precise about it, nothing calculated or controlled about the way her fingers twined with his, the way his breath on the back of her neck made her own breathing just that much more forced as she struggled to remember that inhaling and exhaling was the key to making it through the next few minutes.
"Woe is me," House murmured, "for I am undone."
Stacy looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "I didn't ever think of you as a spiritual man," she commented, trying not to meet his eyes with her own, now wide and searching in the electric lighting.
House snorted, almost derisively. "That's the thing," he agreed, "I'm not."
It happened in a moment, when she found him twining his one free arm around her waist, his muscular shoulder scraping hers in his sudden desire to get closer to her. He extracted his other arm from where it rested beneath him on the sofa, and brought it around, his fingers brushing against her face with a gentleness that one would not have expected of a man of his usual disposition. He stroked her cheek with one long finger before leaning in, gently tipping her face into his as his lips met hers, caressing them slowly at first, then with a taut, yet tender urgency. Stacy closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss, her own hands finding his shoulders as she pulled herself against him. Her knee brushed against his injured leg as she swung one leg up around his waist, and he let out a grunt of pain.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, gently extracting her leg from his. "I'll be careful."
House shook his head. "It's fine," he said, "I'll forgive you this time."