Week Ten: Don't Know What You Got 'Til You Lose it
"You're quiet," Julia commented. Cuddy had informed herself that she might very well strike her sister if she dared to follow it up with a quip about "too quiet."
"I'm thinking about a lot," Cuddy replied. Her voice seemed adrift in the air, not at all the confident and competent voice that had taken down so many foes to reign victorious at Princeton-Plainsboro. But confidence, even to the Nth degree, couldn't have fixed this.
"By which you mean," Julia said, seeming to not even try hiding the disgust in her voice, "You're thinking about House."
"There's a lot to think about with House," Cuddy replied dryly. "The man…" She trailed off with a sigh. She couldn't really divulge House's confidential medical information, even though she wasn't his doctor. She had talked about House so many times before, with Wilson or the others, but somehow, this was different. This was something she needed to keep to herself. Instead, she followed, "He got somebody pregnant."
Julia's eyes went wide.
"My condolences to …. It isn't you he got pregnant, is it?"
Cuddy shook her head. "I can safely say that it wasn't."
"Was he cheating on you?" Julia pressed. "Is that what you broke up over? I had a friend, such a dear, she found out her husband had gotten another woman pregnant, only after she accidentally opened a bill in his mail and saw that it was for a carseat and baby formula. Poor girl had never even seen it coming."
Cuddy sighed.
"You just feel the need to sensationalize everything, don't you? No, this… whole situation began after the two of us broke up. No cheating."
"Well, then, he still moved on pretty quickly after you. Considering, after all, that he drove his car into your living room and could have killed you! After he was done with that, I guess he figured he was all ready to move on…"
"Julia…" Cuddy reached forward to try and grab her sister's hand, to calm her down. Because the more riled up she was getting, the less control Cuddy was beginning to feel she had in any of this damned, cursed situation. Cameron was having House's baby that she didn't even want, for such a far-fetched reason as this.
"Why do you even care whether someone is having House's baby or not?" Julia continued on. "I mean, it's not exactly like he was bursting with paternal instinct before."
"Because I love him." Cuddy had certainly not meant to say the words, or even to think them, and she regretted them with gut-crunching urgency the second she realized that they had escaped unbidden from her mouth. She realized with those words that some part of it, some part of it had to be jealousy. But jealousy for what? About what? What part of this bizarre screwed up situation was enviable in the least?
The words echoed over and over in Cuddy's mind. Nothing about that sentence meant anything good. It wasn't as if it was a new sentence; she had told House that she had loved him… for the first time, that first time that had gotten them together and then somehow it had turned into being all downhill from there, one problem after another… but if it had been only problems, if it had all been a trainwreck, well, Cuddy had had enough of those kind of relationships. Those were the easy ones to forget. House would never be easy to forget.
Cameron was awoken to the rumble of her cell phone. She had set it to vibrate at some point in the night, and there it was, rat-tat-tat-ing against the desk she had left it on. She groaned. It had gotten harder to sleep, recently, much harder, and whoever was calling, she knew that she resented them for the simple offense of interrupting that precious slumber.
And when she fished up the little hard piece of plastic and saw that not only was it Chase, but that she had four missed calls from him, she resented him even more.
She could not deal with him right now. After all, hadn't he been the reason that she had left in the first place? Hadn't he been the reason that she had left it all behind, left House behind? If she'd never gotten caught up with Chase, never fallen for Chase, then…
Well, what would it be? Would she still be pregnant now, somehow, under different circumstances, ones not nearly so conflicted, not nearly so screwed up? She was finding that which side was up was becoming a new and difficult concept. It was bad enough to feel like crap, as she slowly realized she was, but to be so utterly confused…
No one had ever told her that it would be like this. She hadn't been sure of anything ever in her life, but she was even less sure of it now. When she had married her first husband, she had naively thought… what had she thought? Could she even remember it, now, or was it all some fantasy she had woven together these days to look back and say that things were easier when she was younger? Or had she always been adrift, always clinging to the nearest thing with any faint hope of rescue?
Why had she chosen House? She hadn't chosen Chase so much – that had been an accident, a flight of fancy that got out of hand and somehow turned into something that resembled a fucked-up version of love. How did that work? Why was it all twisted in her head now? She knew the events but the reasons, the motives, they were all screwed up and wrong like a screwed-up game of connect-the-dots where someone hadn't followed the grid at all.
Maybe when her baby was a little older, it would play connect the dots game.
If it was ever even born. Maybe it didn't even exist except in Cameron's mind. Maybe she'd imagined it all.
She put a hand over her stomach and considered that. She'd seen enough movies like that. Movies where it was all in their heads. Where in the end, that was the twist. That none of it was even real and somehow that was supposed to make it all make sense. At the time, she hadn't understood it. What was the point, then, if none of it was real?
But now… Now, she was finding that just because it was real didn't mean that it made any sense either. Maybe one of the days coming up would bring a clue.