There Will Be No Divorce Chapter 7
"I've got you
You've got whatever's left of me to get
Our conversations are like minefields
No one's found a safe way through one yet."
Southwood Plantation Road, The Mountain Goats
It would be so easy to apologize.
The smart thing to do would be to tell her just why he needed the extra Vicodin, to explain clearly and explicitly how much pain he was in. Cuddy had always been sympathetic in the past. In fact, she continued to believe in him even after Wilson had given up.
She was watching him from the opposite corner of the bed, the expanse of cream-colored sheets between them stretching out like no-man's-land. The bottle of medication lay like an abandoned landmine. Her knuckles were white as she clutched the cotton around her naked body, a sure sign that this was no throwaway pillow talk to her.
House felt cornered, the taste of adrenaline tinny under his tongue. This was one of those 'boyfriend' situations he'd been successfully avoiding since Stacy left. It was bad enough he constantly disappointed himself and his parents when they were around. Though he let Cuddy down when it came to discipline at work, that was always a calculated risk on both their parts. This was different - and far too much drama for his liking.
"House? What's going on?"
The note of irritation in her voice got his hackles up, even as he attempted to tell himself to stay calm and just laugh the whole thing off.
"The pain isn't manageable; it isn't being managed. I'm barely sleeping, not to mention that servicing your every sexual whim is putting some additional strain on the old muscles. So I decided to treat myself to a little top-up. Being able to actually get up in the morning is a bonus."
Her expression was so sad as she took in his explanation that he felt a dull ache in his chest. Cuddy had heard all of this before.
"You've been doing so well."
It was part plea, part accusation. He knew the defenses she had built up over the years, for her to trust him enough to have sex with him in the first place was pretty monumental. To believe that he would change, that he could get better was tantamount to asking her to finally give in to that stupid, naïve side of her that she had tried so hard to ignore.
"It isn't working, I'm not sure it ever was. I hurt more than ever, and I'm less able to cope with it."
He'd always been able to sound so reasonable, so plausible. It was why he'd gotten away with excessive behavior for so long: crippling agony was pretty hard to argue with. Unfortunately he was up against one of the best verbal combatants he'd ever encountered, and Cuddy wouldn't be swayed by a little pity party.
"Oh bullshit."
That stunned him. He hadn't expected such venom from her.
Swallowing nervously, House hugged the pillow reflexively, a worthless defense against someone quite so fierce as Cuddy. His skin felt cool and clammy, almost uncomfortable as he awaited her shot.
"You got bored. Or it's too hard, and you don't want to try anymore. But don't blame this on the program. It's the best in the country."
He couldn't help but snort at her arrogance. It was okay for him to suffer, but not to blame her precious hospital for it.
"Oh for God's sake, you're not writing a brochure! Do you remember med school at all? No treatment has a 100% success rate, not even the ones handpicked by the great Lisa Cuddy."
She pulled the sheet tighter around her, frown deepening as she considered his excuse. Knowing that rationalization wasn't exactly his friend here, he continued before Cuddy could start arguing statistics. He looked past her to the carefully arranged trinkets on her dressing table, suddenly fascinated by the arrangement of her sparse photos and ornaments.
"Besides, this isn't about a little extra pain medication. This is about the same two things that have always been your problem: your unrealistic expectations, and your pathological need to control everything around you."
That did it. He may as well have slapped her. If he squinted in the soft light of the bedroom, the flush that had risen in her cheeks almost looked like the marks left by an errant hand. House hadn't checked recently, but it might well be that he did in fact have a death wish.
"This is not about me. This is about what it's always about: you refusing to try. Don't you dare try and blame our sex life for your addiction problems. I deserve better."
She let the sheet pool around her waist, her hands liberated to join the argument. Cuddy always talked with her hands, especially when she was particularly worked up. It was one of his favorite things, and part of the reason he provoked her into debates so often. Gathering steam, she ploughed on.
"I never expected anything of you, I never asked you to change. You did all of it, voluntarily."
Although he knew that she wasn't the reason he'd signed up, or at least not the only reason, House had no intention of letting Cuddy off the hook that easily. Being wrong had never stopped him fighting his corner before.
"You pushed me for years; I just decided to give in eventually."
Cuddy ran her fingers through her hair in frustration, and House couldn't help but admire the additional perkiness that it suddenly gave to her breasts. It was verging on annoying that he still had the hots for her so badly. Surely the novelty should have worn off by now. If she sensed his appreciation, it made no difference to her stance.
"Again, bullshit."
The night that had seemed so promising turned to crap pretty quickly. He'd had music, sex and finally enough pills to take the edge off, and now he had a tension headache and a cranky pregnant woman who looked perilously close to throttling him. The fire he currently saw in her eyes had been such a positive thing these past few months, although their workday squabbling had continued without interruption. That passion had become a force for good in their personal lives, and House was beginning to rue the moment he'd chosen to poke the bear.
"God, I have done everything I can think of to make this easy on you. I didn't tell you I was pregnant right away because I knew you would flip. When I did tell you, I gave you a get-out-of-jail-free card and told you that I wasn't pressuring you to get involved."
House flashed instantly on that night three months ago, the discarded First Response box in the trash tipping him off long before Cuddy could work up the courage to break the news. The feeling of his stomach trying to bounce off his kneecaps might have been physically impossible, but he could feel it all over again just by thinking about that moment.
"You didn't have to pressure me. That little speech about how it may be unexpected but you truly believed I'd make a great father and have a chance to undo my own dad's mistakes was like putting a gun to my temple."
In truth, she'd convinced him with that argument. Not that he hadn't joked around—demanded a paternity test and staged a call to the FBI about a possible alien impregnation—but from about two minutes after the news sank in, he'd had no notion of skipping out on Cuddy and the strange phenomenon of his kid.
"You've never had a problem saying no to me in the past."
"Saying no in the first place would have avoided this whole mess. Besides, this is different. I may be a jerk but I wouldn't knock someone up and run for the hills. I think I deserve a little more credit than that."
He thought he saw the ghost of a smile twitch at Cuddy's lips, but nothing came of it.
"Really? Someone who, after eight months, won't even acknowledge me as anything other than 'my boss that I'm screwing around with' is suddenly Mr. Reliable? This was an accident, but I've done everything I could think of to stop you getting spooked."
"Spooked? I'm not a horse."
There it was, the patented Lisa Cuddy eye-scrunch of 'stop being a moron'. He normally got that expression a lot earlier in the conversation, but he was glad to see it nonetheless. The eye-scrunch meant they were on familiar ground, or at least he hoped they were.
"You know what I mean. You walk around like love's last great martyr, too scared to even have a proper date since Stacy. Well guess what, House? You had five good years and it didn't work out. Nobody would want to go through what you did, but you made the decision to push her away. In fact, you did it twice, and I am tired of overcompensating for that."
It was hard not to react to the mention of Stacy. Even after all these years, House could still blink and be back there with her, memories refusing to fade even as age and bourbon took the scythe to increasing numbers of his brain cells. He'd made every effort to keep her out of this thing with Cuddy, and it was pretty unfair to bring her up out of the blue.
Besides, it wasn't like she was the only reason for his various issues, and it pissed him off that Cuddy was simplifying things to score cheap points.
"I never asked you to. You knew what I was like when you got into this. And before I could screw it up by myself, you suddenly get pregnant. Right before the honeymoon period usually wears off, suddenly I'm locked in."
Perhaps a little harsh, but House could never believe in coincidences. Cuddy gets laid for the first time in eons and 'accidentally' gets knocked up like she always wanted? He'd trust the woman with his life, but he trusted no woman when it came to sex. As expected, his dig at her honesty only served to ratchet up her pissiness.
"You're saying I got pregnant on purpose? I didn't even think I still could."
She'd given up on IVF because it hadn't worked, and she'd taken the pill as religiously as usual, until the disruption of spending nights at his apartment had wreaked havoc on her ultra-organized existence. They could have been more careful, but with blood tests proclaiming a clean bill of health it seemed only natural that they occasionally forget the condom. Of course, they should have known better, but a lot of common sense had gone out of the window in the face of their almost uncontrollable attraction.
"Forgive me if this doesn't sound original, but this is bullshit. You had every egg counted. Not to mention that most guys hear about their accidental offspring and know they might actually have options. What chance did I have with someone as baby-crazed as you?"
"So what, you're saying you'd have bailed out on this by now if not for the baby? Because not so long ago you still seemed pretty into the idea of 'us'."
God, she really was magnificent when provoked like this. It was hardly appropriate, but the only thing sexier than an angry Cuddy was an angry and sex-mussed Cuddy. It made it pretty much impossible to deny the charge she was leveling at him.
"Man enjoys sex. Hold the front pages."
Naturally, his eyes were drawn directly to her exposed breasts at the mention of sex. Catching the direction of his gaze, Cuddy groaned at his predictability and stood to retrieve her robe from the back of the door. She was tying the belt with an especially tight knot when she spoke to him again.
"It hasn't been just sex. You made promises, in your own way. You've been talking to the baby."
"It's called humoring you."
They both knew it was more than that. He'd actually gotten quite into the idea, at least while it was still theory. House was cursing Cuddy's need to define everything, they could have been ready for a second round by now if she hadn't gone picking up the damn clothes.
"You don't want this baby at all, do you?"
Did she really think he was that cold? Fine.
"I think I'd make a pretty crappy dad, no matter how many Hallmark platitudes you come up with. And the last thing I thought would happen to me at this stage in my life was having a rugrat on the way. But I figured there would be an upside."
He smirked at his own argument, though he got nothing but steely gray in return. This wasn't like their usual banter, not their usual light jabs. It was beginning to feel more like a round of Russian Roulette, a round played with an automatic pistol.
"You thought you could just keep having sex with me until I got too whale-like and then bolt?"
The accusations had escalated from minor infractions to outright character assassination, and House was getting tired of it. If she thought so damn little of him, why not add fuel to the fire? He ignored the first shimmer of tears that he could see threatening to spill.
"There is that. Also, even when you've withdrawn my all-access pass, you're still going to need a gopher. It'll be easy to hold you to ransom over clinic duty when Junior here needs to be taken to soccer practice and Mommy's too busy throwing herself at every rich man in Jersey to fund the hospital she spends all her time at."
Cuddy had been pacing as he ranted, but his final words did the trick. Suddenly her hands were wrapped around the black iron that formed the bottom of the bed, her body tensed as though any moment she'd vault on to the mattress and finally kill him like everyone half-expected.
"So not only are you here against your will, but you thought it was a good time to point out that I'll be a crappy mother? You're a real bastard sometimes, you know that?"
"I'm a real bastard pretty much all the time."
Stating the obvious was beneath her. What happened to all the fun arguments they used to have? Hell, it was practically the only way they'd communicated for the past 20 years.
"Get out."
House hadn't expected that.
Usually when he made a crack about his lack of commitment, she countered that she was only using him for his sperm, or some other snippy comeback that was the preserve of the Cuddy he knew and loved. Actually, finally pointing that out he did love her would have been another quick way of heading off this little fiasco. Still, why start picking the easy road now?
His fatal mistake had been not to factor in the killer combination of hyperactive hormones and post-coital sappiness. Instead of the cuddling she usually demanded and that he usually participated in gladly but with feigned irritation, she was getting bedroom warfare and there was no way for them to come out of that intact. It had been a serious miscalculation on his part, but pride had come into play.
He wasn't going to apologize after all this; worst of all, they both knew it. With an exaggerated exhalation, he extricated his sluggish body from the comfortable cocoon he'd made for himself and limped towards the pile of his clothes that Cuddy had dumped on the chair.
He dressed as quickly as he could, the tension of the room making him fumble in his haste to leave. Part of him still hoped that Cuddy would change her mind, that she'd locate her House-English dictionary and realize that once again he'd taken it farther than he meant to for the love of the fight.
With a last-ditch attempt at smoothing things over, he actually stepped across to kiss her goodbye. All he got for his trouble was a slap that probably hurt her more than him, especially with stubble factored in.
"I don't want to see you anymore, House. You can't speak to me that way and expect it to blow over by morning, do you understand?"
There was a perfect calmness to her tone, one House recognized from some of their worst arguments in the past.
"Yeah, yeah Cuddy. I'll try to forget you said that when you show up at my place in three days for a booty call."
She had always loved his arrogance, the parting shot would surely set them on the road to recovery. House began to panic when Cuddy's face remained impassive.
"I mean it, House."
She made a gesture with her hands. "This is over. I can't believe I was stupid enough to get involved in the first place."
Stunned, House had no comeback to offer. Feeling something that was suspiciously like moisture in his eyeball area, he stumbled away from the bed and made his way down the hall.
With every step, every corresponding bounce of his cane against the wooden floor, he strained to hear her calling him back. When none came, he jerked the front door open and headed for his bike, slamming the door with all the force he could muster.
He revved the bike obnoxiously for a full three minutes, but it didn't garner so much as a twitch of the curtains from Cuddy's window. It did bring her snooty neighbors to theirs though, and so he pulled on his helmet and accepted defeat.
After all, he thought, he'd lasted months longer than anyone could ever have expected. So what if he'd blown it now?