Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or concept of the Fox show "House." No, not me.

A/N: I can't say enough good things about ColorofAngels, who has agreed to beta my stuff for me. She is awesome. Her H/C story, "I Do, I Don't" is brilliant, but you should also check out her Wilson piece, "Mr. Well-Adjusted."

If you all can hang in there for a few more days, my Twenty Questions chapter should be ready to read. Following that, you can expect some serious action. You know what I mean.

Finally, H/C fans, check out my new story, "Crazy Like a Fox." It's totally different than anything I've done, and it's funny.

One more thing: My readers are awesome about commenting. Please consider reviewing. It is so appreciated. Thanks to all who take the time to do so.


"What happens next?" House asks, trying to catch his breath after their kiss

The coffee pot gurgles.

Light from the window cuts across her face.

The refrigerator hums.

Steve McQueen scuttles along on his wheel.

In an attempt to regain his reason, he pulls away from the siren song that is Cameron's body, as if doing so could distance him from all that she has been to him, all that she could be.

What happens next?

Is it a question for Cameron, or for him? He's not sure, really, if it's even a query. Perhaps he should have saved it as a gift for Jimmy. Problem solving makes Wilson giddy, especially when it comes to his private life.

What happens next?

Why even ask? It's up to him. And he knows what to do, in spite of Wilson's coaching. The answer may be buried in his psyche, in a grave with Stacy's remains, but it's retrievable. Amid the picked over bones of what used to be – rubble that once was the two of them – lies a key to what might be if he could only let that relationship rest in peace, in the past.

Ask her out on a date. Be normal, for once. It's his inner Wilson weighing in. His friend's voice is stuck in his head like the George Martin piano solo from the Beatles' "Lovely Rita." He can't shake it.

She likes lame. She likes damaged. She likes you. Wilson's voice bounces around in his consciousness like Mike Garson's piano noodling from Bowie's song "Aladdin Sane."

Lines from a Kinks song materialize in his head. They're just as bad as Wilson:

You're a misfit
Afraid of yourself so you run away and hide
You've been a misfit all your life
Why don't you join the crowd and come inside.

Shut up, Ray Davies, he thinks.

You're forever on the outside looking in. You're always alone, segregated by your own design, your face pressed up against the glass. You lurk outside restaurants while your staff eats and talks, never able to bring yourself to go inside. You won't meet your patients, but you'll spy on them.

Wilson again. They've been friends a long time. He's embedded in House's mind like a microchip.

Shut up, Wilson.

Be normal?

Not possible.

This is what he should do – stay true to his twisted persona. It's what she wants; it's who he is.

He should bake Foreman some pot brownies because the man needs to loosen up.

He should drug Chase and hire a permanent makeup artist to give the lad's face the convenience of lip color, eyebrows and eyeliner that won't rub off, smudge or smear. The youngster is obviously a Goth (or a girl) in disguise.

He should break into Cuddy's house and leave her a blowup, anatomically correct mannequin. Her happiness is always uppermost in his mind, after all, just like his undying passion for clinic duty.

Ha. As if.

As for Cameron? He should ask her out on a date, but on his terms. Take her to see General Hospital On Ice in New York. Read to her from The National Inquirer. Challenge her to a pinball tournament. Hire her as his love slave. On second thought, no, House reasons, that's what hookers are for.

Have sex.

As she looks up at him, hair loose around her face, color staining her cheeks, her neck, her chest, his feelings are conflicted. He'd like to lift her shirt over her head with the end of his cane, to pin her against the wall, place the end of the cane between her legs, and gently apply pressure, to kiss her for hours, and then take her to bed.

He can see that she's overcome with … wanting, needing, loving … him.

What could he possibly give her?

Pain? Surely.

Pleasure? Perhaps.

Sometimes there's little difference between the two.

Despite the leg, the limp, House is an imaginative, artful lover. He knows he can please a woman in bed … or against a wall … or up on a pool table. He takes pride in the fact that even hookers leave happy.

To remedy his geekiness in high school, college, and medical school, he studied women – between the sheets, and between the covers of books like The Joy of Sex, and The Complete Kama Sutra.

He'd said it with a smile, but he wasn't joking when he reminded Stacy of the way she screamed whenever she straddled "Mount Gregory."

And with Cameron, well, he reads between her lines. There are things he already knows about her body, about her heart, things he has intuited from her past, from the way she posts against him when she's on the back of his bike, from the way she crosses her legs, from the way her pupils dilate when their fingers or their eyes touch.

He knows that with one big toe he can have her writhing on a bed, head arched back, hair a mahogany waterfall against a pillow.

He knows just how to touch her secret skin with his fingertips and tongue, how to run the back of his hand along her inner thighs, trace from her clavicle to her clit with a feather, circle her abdomen with his palm, barely touching the skin, blow gently into her belly button until she begs him…

He knows to take her nipples between his lips, flick each bud with the tip of his tongue. He knows when to take it slow, and when to throttle up. He knows when to tease her g-spot with his cock, and when to ante up and fill her fast, hard, hot. He knows when to be still, intent, and when to talk to her in short, urgent phrases.

This he knows.

He takes another step backward and lowers his eyes, looks down at his feet, and once again relives their ill-fated date. Was he wrong or right when he told Cameron that what she felt for him had nothing to do with love?

"What I am is what you need," he'd told her. "I'm damaged."

"Tell me how you feel … about me," she'd said.

What he felt then, he feels now.

Fear.

Like pain and desire, it's all encompassing.

The morning after the date, he and the team had wrapped a case. They had been treating a young man who took – and House appreciated the irony – great pleasure in pain. The patient, who had suffered a series of strokes, came equipped with a dominatrix. He was a bad, bad boy and deserved a spanking, House had thought at the time. Fulminating osteomylitis was the final diagnosis, treatable by removing part of his jaw. Asphyxiation at the hands of a dominatrix would kill him eventually. House warned him that if the strangulation continued, he would die. Seemed like a no-brainer, but some people forget to read the manual to life.

The dominatrix, Annette – and it said something about House that he could recall her name, but not the name of his patient – had said this about the sexual domination, although House hadn't asked:

"It's about being open and completely vulnerable to another person. If you can learn to be that deeply trusting, it changes you."

She could have been talking to him about Cameron.

It changes you.

That's what scares him. For Stacy, he had changed. He had opened up.

He'd ended up alone.


"What happens next?"

If only I knew, she thinks, her body still buzzing from its close proximity to his. (The way her heart is pounding, she knows her pulse is visible in her carotid artery.)

For a moment, she is silent.

A dog barks.

The kitchen clock ticks.

When she looks up at House, his eyes smolder, and she knows that if she reaches out and puts a hand on his chest, his heart will pulsate against her palm. If she places her hand lower, it will be evident at what cost he has stepped away from her.

What happens next?

She exhales, and comes up with a pithy answer:

"We eat breakfast. We play 20 Questions. You answer your phone. It's called life."

Part of her is angry with him for asking the question. What do you mean, what happens next? What happens next is this: you put the palm of your hand between my legs. With the nub of your thumb, you tease my clit; flirt with it until I beg…

And then….

And then there's a part of her that's grateful to House for ending the kiss. For not trying to get her into bed, even when it is clear she would have climbed in and onto his rock hard cock if given any encouragement. If he had treated her like a desirable woman, and not a Pollyanna, gawking at his erection like a schoolgirl, she would have been there, done that.

It is just a matter of time before one of them gives in. Once it happens, she fears it may never happen again.

"Jump him," Chase had advised her, on the day of her date with House. Tempting though it was, Cameron had decided that even if the date went well, she wouldn't go all the way to third base with her boss until they'd at least been on a few more dates. She liked House, and she had feelings for him. She wanted things to develop on a date-by-date basis.

So she didn't jump him.

It might have been prudence, it might have been self-protection, it might have had something to do with what House had said to her: "What I am is what you need: I'm damaged."

Often she ponders things she could have said to House, in response to his little soliloquy.

You think you're damaged? Who isn't? She thinks now, inches outside of the cocoon of his arms, the hardness of his body.

Everybody hurts sometimes.