The weeks that followed almost made House a believer in Carolyn's live-in-the-Now philosophy. He spent his days at PPTH, where the caseload was light but interesting, and his nights at the farmhouse, where he had already acquired a favorite chair and even made his peace with Idiot Dog, whom he tried to remember to call Greta. Carolyn, always an easygoing companion, had become even more so over the years. If he was late getting there in the evening, she put his dinner in a microwaveable dish and went to the barn to fuss over her horses; when the phone rang in the middle of the night, she bid him a safe trip and went back to sleep.

She handled his occasional bad moods the same way she dealt with them in college; by declining to take them seriously.

"Let me ask you something," House demanded on a morning when he didn't feel like going to work and needed to pick a fight, "do you own any clothing that doesn't come from LL Bean or the Dover catalog?"

Carolyn paused and thought it over. "My underwear is from KMart," she said, and went back to buttoning her dress.

"Let's talk about your underwear," House persisted. "These granny pants you wear—"

"They're high-cuts!"

"Why don't you wear something more inspirational—like a thong?"

"You wear a thong," said Carolyn. "I want my clothes to cover my ass, not merge with it."

When he returned to the farmhouse that evening, Carolyn produced a shopping bag from one of the better department stores and rattled the contents at him enticingly. Humming an old bump-and-grind number, she dipped into the bag and revealed, first one strap, then another, and finally the entirety of a hot-pink thong with black lace trim.

"This one's for me," she said seductively, holding it at waist level and vamping.

"And this one is for you." She produced a blue and white man's thong, and tossed it to him.

House held it by the tips of two fingers and threw her an outraged look. Carolyn stood firm.

"Terms of the deal," she grinned. "I'll wear one if you wear one."

Later, as they got ready for bed, House stripped down to his boxers and paused dramatically, waiting for her full attention. When he got it, he dropped the boxers and stood before her in his new undergarment.

Carolyn shrieked and collapsed onto the bed laughing.

"Not the reaction I was going for," House said with injured dignity, "but now it's your turn. A deal's a deal."

She pulled herself together and fetched her thong from the dresser. Turning her back on him, she reached under her beige linen shirtdress and tugged and wriggled; a moment later a pair of white nylon panties fell to the floor around her ankles. She stepped away from them, turned, and put the thong on her head.

House shouted in protest.

"You didn't say how I had to wear it," she gloated.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her onto the bed. They wrestled briefly, laughing, until Carolyn suddenly gasped. "Ow! My arm!"

House sat up, horrified.

"Fake out!" Carolyn chortled, and snapped his waistband. Baring his teeth, House tickled her until she gasped out a transparently insincere apology. The wrestling match grew less competitive and turned into something else entirely.

Later, Carolyn began to sing, "The thong is over..."

"Stop," House said sternly. "You will not ruin the Who for me."

She giggled. "How about The Thong Remains the Thame? Annie's Thong? Life'th a Long Thong?" She sang, "Thing, thing a thong--"

"Thut up."

"I love being in bed with you," she told him drowzily. "I always end up laughing."

"That's just what a man wants to hear," he remarked.

"You know what I mean." She was fading fast.

"I love...being in bed with you, too," he said huskily, but Carolyn seemed to be asleep.

On nice evenings they sat on the porch, talking or just listening to the birds.

"You know what's happening, don't you?" House asked one night. "We're turning into old farts. In 30 years we'll still be settin' here, gumming our supper and waving to passing cars." He slumped in his chair, hitched his waistband higher, and turned a toothless, vacant smile toward the road.

"People who do that kind of thing look pretty happy," said Carolyn.

"It's the complacency that bothers me," said House. "Is this where all the pain and anguish and struggles of a lifetime are supposed to lead us? Elderly pensioners, spending our remaining days tending our own little garden?"

"Not if you don't want to," said Carolyn. "You could join the Peace Corps, or build houses for Habitat for Humanity, or teach. But let's give this porch thing a fair trial first. Oh, look; here comes a car. We can practice." She waved.

There were bad moments. He could not completely ignore the cold, rational voice in his head that seized on the negative details in an otherwise pleasant scene. He and Carolyn were out in the yard arguing happily over the merits of grass versus lawn cover when they heard the scree of a red-tailed hawk and looked up to see the bird floating above them, rising and falling on a thermal updraft.

"Look how happy he is," said Carolyn, shading her eyes.

Sentimental, sneered the voice. Anthropomorphizing. Probably thinks the world would be a better place if we could just live in harmony with nature, like the animals. Conveniently overlooks the part where the hawk catches the bunny rabbit and starts tearing the flesh from its still-living breast.

"Dad has a big collection of bird feeders," Carolyn added, with relish, "and he says the hawks around his place use them like the drive-through windows at McDonald's. He'll be watching a group of birds feeding, and all of a sudden, BAM—a hawk shoots through and nails one, feathers everywhere. So much for the peaceful kingdom!"

Even when he managed to still the critical voice, the analytical voice clamored on. What was the nature of his relationship with Carolyn? What drew him to the farmhouse night after night? It wasn't just sex; after the initial frenzy, there were times when they simply went to sleep, even times when Carolyn turned in early and he stayed up reading or watching TV, often with Greta draped over him like a dogskin rug. When he did turn in on those nights, he would stand for a moment watching Carolyn sleep and wonder why it didn't feel strange to be getting into bed with her. When they made love, the experience was at once tantalizingly new and comfortingly familiar—a homecoming, as best he understood the word, never having felt at home anywhere in his life.

"God, you are so in love," Wilson smirked, after House hung up from a pedestrian conversation with Carolyn about a plumbing problem in her upstairs bathroom. He longed to pursue the topic—Why do you think that? I wasn't talking in a funny voice or calling her pet names, so what tipped you off? Can you quantify it?—but that would be lending credibility to Wilson's opinion, and House wasn't ready to do that. The word seemed at once too banal and too loaded for what was happening. Banal, because what he felt when he was with Carolyn was such a variety of emotions, with so many shadings, that one word seemed inadequate; loaded, because in his experience, love led to pain as surely as heavy drinking led to hangovers, and he was sick of pain in all of its forms, tired of planning his life around avoiding it, weary of procuring, hoarding, and swallowing pills in an effort to stay one step ahead of it.

Carolyn agreed with Cameron that his problems with Dr. Loud were best addressed by respectfully negotiating a mutually satisfactory resolution.

"Win-win?" snarked House.

"Of course."

"What if he won't parley?"

"Well," she said judiciously, "in that case you'll have no other recourse than to sign him up for every piece of spam in the universe."

House put Carolyn's strategy into action after a particularly bad morning in which Dr. Loud shared the results of his colonoscopy with everyone on his speed dial. At the first lull, he hurried to his neighbor's door and knocked.

Dr. Loud proved to be of middling height and solid build, blond and crew-cut, with light blue eyes that appeared to be popping out of his head and a bluff, hearty manner that contrasted weirdly with his telephone persona. House labeled him as trouble: a blow-hard bully boy of the type that prowls every schoolyard; mysteriously popular, able to rally mobs of slow thinkers against anyone who crossed him, an inventor of nicknames that stuck and hurt.

"I'm Greg House," he said, offering his hand. "Dr. House. Next office over."

"Oh, yeah, yeah! I been meaning to come over and say hi. Howya doin, I'm Dick Loudon, proctologist."

House looked around the office for a moment while he digested that information. The picture of Dr. Loudon and the vice president was no longer hanging on the wall; it was propped up on a bookshelf, and House went to take a closer look. The crash landings hadn't done the piece any favors. The frame was chipped and the glass was cracked.

He turned to peer closely at Dr. Loudon, whom he had mentally re-christened Dr. Dick. The proctologist looked back at him inquiringly.

"Sorry," said House. "I couldn't help looking to see if you've been peppered." He nodded toward the picture.

"Naw, never been invited on a hunt," said Dr. Dick. "That was from a grip-and-grin for volunteers who helped put him and the president over the top in Ohio. My wife tried to get him to sign it, 'From One Dick to Another,' but he wouldn't do it for some reason. Anyway, what's on your mind?"

House gently bounced his cane, trying to compose himself. "I don't know if you've noticed, but the walls here are kind of thin—"

"Noticed! See that crack? That fucking picture came down three times in two days, just because the fucking bus stops outside my window! This whole hospital is made of crap! Crap materials, crap construction! Well, shit, Jersey is the land of the Mob, right? They only use real concrete when they're making shoes."

House cleared his throat. "Anyway, I don't think you realize I can hear every word you say when you're on the phone, and I came over to see if you could tone it down a little."

"I gotta tell ya, that's not gonna happen," said Dr. Dick. "I got a lot of calls to make, and I like to make sure the other guy can hear me. If I was you, I'd get some earplugs."

House nodded—"Just checking"—and withdrew. In the hallway, his face lit up with bad intent. Ethically, he felt, he was cleared for action.

-0-

By the next afternoon, Dr. Dick's phone calls centered around the waves of triple-X rated spam flooding his email In box. He would indignantly read the subject heads out loud to his conversational partners, which everyone found very amusing, at least for the first hour or so.

-0-

Cameron went to Ohio and came back a member of the Jay Silberstein Fan Club. Chase spent more and more time with Syd Lowenstein, discussing procedural streamlining. Foreman seemed more preoccupied than usual, glancing at House once in awhile as if expecting him to say something.

-0-

The riding lessons continued, and House was cleared to canter. He did fine going from a walk to a jog, or a jog to a lope, but deceleration was a problem; he kept getting thrown forward, and almost went off over Cherokee's shoulder once or twice.

"You collapse in the middle," Carolyn said, in the impersonal, clinical tone she used in the riding ring. "You need to build up your core strength—your abs and back muscles. The best thing for that is crunches." House made a face. "Okay, push-ups, then. Pull-ups. Tricep dips. You have the equipment at the hospital, right?"

House fiddled with Cherokee's mane. "What about leg work?"

"It wouldn't hurt. Just standing backwards on the edge of a step and letting your heels drop will lengthen those tendons and help you get your heels down. But the main thing is to strengthen your core; it'll help stabilize you overall, and that'll help with your balance."

The exercise equipment was in the physical therapy department at the hospital. Using it meant risking exposure to Physical Therapists, or, in House's private parlance, the Pain and Torture crowd. But he began to sneak down there during the slow hours, and was gratified to find that with a little modification, he could do most of the upper-body and abdominal work. Progress in one area made him hungry for success in another, and he began to put in a little time on a slow treadmill every now and then. He felt that things were definitely looking up.