Cameron's non-relationship with House began on the night thirteen-year-old Celia came into the emergency room unable to move her arms and legs after the oversized dais chair she was sitting in had collapsed during her bat mitzvah. Celia's X-rays showed no broken bones; she seemed to have nothing more than a bruised coccyx. Cameron decided that she would call her former boss for a consult, even though he would surely find the case uninteresting.
She was half-surprised when he actually showed up.
House lifted Celia's arms, which immediately fell limp at her sides. "You," he told the girl's parents, "need to go out into the waiting room and wait."
"She's only thirteen," Celia's mother insisted. "We have every right to be here."
"Your daughter will never dance the hora again unless you leave her alone for two minutes."
"You have absolutely no bedside manner," Mom sneered.
"Then report me to the AMA's bedside manner committee!" House shouted after them as they reluctantly exited the area.
"Okay," House said, flipping through Celia's chart, "now that you think you're an adult – and I'm not referring to your bat mitzvah – I know that you, like all adults, are a liar. You told Dr. Cameron you had your last period nineteen days ago. You lied. If Dr. Cameron does a sonogram and takes a look at your uterus, what is she going to see?"
Celia looked up at the ceiling and swallowed hard.
"Celia, would you like to talk to me alone?" Cameron asked, concerned that the pregnancy House was alluding to might be the result of sexual abuse.
"No," she said.
"Are you pregnant?"
"Maybe."
"If someone hurt you, I can help," Cameron assured her.
"It's my boyfriend's," Celia said. "We'd heard about everybody else in the eighth grade getting STDs from oral sex, so we figured if we just had, you know, regular sex with a condom, we'd …"
"You're lucky you only have severe peripheral nerve damage," House told her. "I had a twelve-year-old snot like you in here once with clots so thick they were shredding her blood. Now, this level of nerve damage tells me you're at least six months pregnant. Good job hiding it. You're baby's at risk because you didn't gain enough weight. What were you going to do, send the New Jersey State Police dumpster diving?"
"I'm going to call Dr. Kishore in obstetrics and have you admitted," Cameron told her now-bawling patient.
After she asked a resident to page Sarah Kishore (an old friend from her Mayo Clinic days who would likely get out of bed for a case like Celia's), she followed House out into the hallway. "I asked for a consult, not for you to make a thirteen-year-old girl who can't move cry."
"She had to have known she was pregnant. She was going to dump that baby somewhere."
"You don't know that for sure. She was scared. She didn't –"
"I am surprised that you would still assume good faith, Dr. Cameron."
"Right." She looked up quickly. "How did you know …?"
"Gossip. Listening in on Wilson and Cuddy talking about all of you kinderlekh is better than General Hospital nowadays."
Cameron turned around. As she started to walk away, she stumbled and crashed into a wall.
House caught up to her. "You said you missed the job," he said, referencing a prior conversation. "If you were back on my team, you wouldn't have to work these eighteen-hour shifts and you wouldn't have to worry about that arrhythmia that's obviously sending your blood pressure plummeting."
His eyes betrayed genuine concern.
"I've had it for years, since my husband died." Cameron said. "It's harmless. No long QT, no prolapse, just a drop in BP when I'm under stress."
"You want me to kill him? We're in New Jersey, so I know a couple of guys."
"That's none of your business, and you should know better." But this was House, she remembered. He never knew better.
She breathed deep and her dizziness let up. "Do you want me back?"
House popped a Vicodin. "No."
"No?"
"Last time I said I wanted you back, you sexually harassed me. I need to protect my dignity."
She chuckled slightly, having expected no less from him. "I'm staying where I am."
"Dr. Lawrence in immunology is retiring next year. It'd be a lot easier for you to move up to immunology attending from diagnostics than from the ER."
He had a good point. "But you don't really want me back," she said anyway. "You just want to believe that I missed you. You have to believe the world revolves around you, and I won't play into that."
House moved closer to her, so that his nose almost touched hers. "If I told you I'd wait for you tonight at my place after your shift, what would you do?"
"Are you trying to sexually harass me now?" she challenged.
"No, Dr. Cameron, I'm simply playing into what I know you want because I need you back on my team."