Disclaimer: Nope.
A/N: Forgive me. I had to write a transitional chapter to lead into the good stuff. Although, there is plenty of sexual heat in this chapter, so read on. This chapter and the next are dedicated to Kymba and Katej for a myriad of reasons.
This story will be located under the M rating from now on.
House waited for her to come as patiently as a two-year-old whose toy is in the grubby hands of a playmate. He waited with the mentality of a toddler who must have his way immediately.
I want her. I want her now.
Lolling on his bed, thumbs cramped from a Battletoads marathon, he tortured himself. What if she had second thoughts, came to her senses, and vowed not to venture anywhere near him except during differential diagnoses?
The doubt that spurred him to destroy their date pricked his consciousness.
A rock feels no pain, but there are times when pain defines me.
When it comes to Cameron, he brings hurt upon himself.
He knows what he's saying to her each time he makes a sarcastic remark or rebuffs her when she's trying to be … nice:
Get out of my House.
(Did he give her a key? Or did she steal one? He taught her all she knows about breaking and entering.)
And each time he walks away from her – because he always walks away, these words cross his mind: This time I've lost her.
Haven't I?
The Dark Queen snatches Pimple and Princess Angelica, and now they're sending distress signals to him on his hand held. With the help of Professor T. Bird, he swoops through the cosmos in The Vulture to save them before the Dark Queen banishes the duo to the lonely corners of Ragnarok's orbit, the space between the stars, infinite darkness.
Cyberspace is an unworthy adversary for a House-sized brain. Not even Battletoads can relax House or distract him from his feelings. Hurling the Game Boy across the room as if it was an oversized tennis ball and just might bounce back, House sat up in bed and swung his feet to the floor, clutching his leg.
Pain crashed like a white-capped wave upon his thigh. How long, O Lord, how long? He stretched out his arms and tilted his head like Christ on a cross.
Until she comes again.
His pain recedes in direct relation to Cameron's proximity.
Before she materialized in his office, he was ready to gnaw off his leg like a feral wolf. After hours in her presence, pain was an afterthought.
When darkness comes and pain is all around
like a bridge over troubled waters
I will lay me down.
That's Cameron.
His Cameron.
He holds her in his heart like a newborn puppy, wonderingly.
Sometimes he lingers by her in the lab as she peers through her microscope so he can smell the herbal garden of her hair, so his arm brushes her shoulder.
Sometimes he sneaks up behind her while she's looking at the menu at The Grill. He wants to pull her against him and circle her waist with his arms in full view of everyone in the cafeteria. Instead he balances his tray on her head while she rolls her eyes.
Oh, to back her up against his desk, unzip her faded jeans, and finger her clit through the lacy black of her panties while his tongue probes her sweet mouth.
When she approaches him at his desk, he wants to draw her onto his lap so she is straddling him, cradle her head in his hands, and kiss her until her lips are swollen.
His bum leg puts an end to that fantasy every time.
He is haunted by the reality of her, so close to him, as they stared each other into a state of criminal arousal at Deuces, and the reality of her, free of makeup and dwarfed by his extra long tee as she watched him in his bed.
Her eyes on his eyes.
Her eyes on his body.
Her eyes where he's hard.
The light, the heat, in her eyes.
Grabbing his cane, he limped into the living room, poured himself an inch of McCallan's from the liquor cabinet, and inserted videotape into the television.
General Hospital's theme song filled the apartment.
For House's Christmas gift, Wilson had searched eBay and unearthed old tapes of the soap, the years where Luke and Scorpio frolicked with the babes of daytime television, pursuing adventures, solving mysteries, and protecting Port Charles from shady characters like the Cassadine clan.
Remote in hand, House fast-forwarded through a scene where bland Dr. Webber and Leslie, his wife du jour, discussed a case of amnesia. And then he got to the good stuff: Scorpio and Luke zooming the Templetons, sexpot sisters played by Demi Moore and Janine Turner.
Relaxing into the couch and sipping his single-malt, House lifted his tumbler to an imaginary Wilson in gratitude. As Scorpio and Jackie argued, then segued into a passionate kiss, he remembered Stacy's crush on the Port Charles police commissioner and how he'd entertained her with his best rendition of Rogers' acting: "Scorpio here," he'd barked in a pitch-perfect Australian accent, holding a banana to his ear like a telephone.
He checked his watch. The exact time was irrelevant. It wasn't eight yet.
It was too soon for Cameron to appear.
Tapping the hardwood floor with his cane, he tinkered with the remote, played with his watchband, scratched his forearm, sighed heavily, and switched off the television, holding the device sideways like a gangsta with a handgun.
Launching himself off of the sofa, he limped over to the piano, and set the scotch on a coaster. Running his fingers up and down the keyboard like Bach composing the Goldberg Variations, he played Chopin's etudes with a Ray Manzarek twist to entertain himself, and then took Dave Brubeck's five seven five time and applied it to Beethoven's sonatas.
Turning melancholy, he played the How Long Blues, riffing off of Jimmy Yancey, and noting the irony of the tune: its tempo was a lesson in patience, while its melody and title implied the kind of yearning that demanded immediate gratification.
If there were witnesses, they would have howled at House's methods of killing time. It was tragicomic, like Beckett's masterpiece.
In high school he'd been cast to play Estragon in a production of Waiting for Godot. The director had tagged him for the part, explaining that his lugubrious demeanor would translate well on stage. Never a team player, he had amped up his performance. The rest of the cast had accused him of scenery chewing, but the audience had hooted at his antics. Some of his peers teasingly called him Estrogen after that, but it was worth it to deliver lines like this one, he'd thought:
"People are bloody ignorant apes."
Or to yawn and feign sleep while stating: "I find this really most extraordinarily interesting."
Making an anagram of his character's name, he'd come up with: O, strange.
There was one bit from Waiting for Godot that stuck in his memory:
Vladimir: What do we do now?
Estragon: Wait.
Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It would give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Any references to sex had stuck to him like adhesive during those horny adolescent years. Still did, he admitted with a shrug, as he plinked out a little ditty he'd composed on the piano.
Estragon still lurked within him, House acknowledged. Or maybe he had always been an existential anti-hero. It's what Wilson would say.
That nasal, whiny Tom Petty was right, he thought, abruptly jerking his hands from the piano. The waiting is the hardest part, unless you count my prick when I'm picturing Cameron in that little white whatsit.
Just like that a thought coasted into his consciousness like a surfer in a Dick Dale song. It was a nightmare of a visual that the dark side of him conjured up like a black magic trick:
He pictured her with Chase, but it wasn't the two of them tearing off each other's clothes in the supply closet, it was an image of her at the door to Dr. Dweeb's apartment, a tender look upon her face. When Blondie opened up, she stepped forward and kissed him on the mouth, trailing her fingers over his smooth, young face … and it was love, not just sex for convenience.
House shook his head like a retriever emerging from a lake, and rid himself of the mental picture of doom by remembering the way her mouth opened up to his as he'd kissed her in his living room earlier that day, the way her fingers trailed reluctantly down his chest as he pulled away.
Remember, she likes you.
She likes you, the voice of Wilson reminds him.
Once more, House consults his watch. It's five past eight.
She's late.
Cameron was in the free zone, the mindless place of peace she attained like a Zen state when she ran. Slap, slap, slap. Her New Balance sneakers touched down on the pavement as her thoughts floated above her like balloons.
Massive clouds called morning glories roil over the Gulf of Carpentaria. This random fact drifted through her brain and flapped away. Where it came from, she couldn't have said. The Latin name for the largest kind of dragonfly is Libellulidae Archaic knowledge she must have picked up in a science class and retained. It passed on through unfettered by analysis. The African Bullfrog exists to feed and mate, or as House would say, "It's hungry and horny!" She giggled at her line of thought as she glanced at the shops on Nassau Street, passing Muriel's Intimate Apparel. Jogging backwards she admires one of the less overt pieces on display, a lacy white see-through negligee, wondering what House would think of her in it.
Sometimes on her runs memories played like home movies. Visiting her parents during the first year of her fellowship with House, they'd gone to a Butterfly Dome. While her mother and father wandered arm and arm throughout the humid, glassed interior, she fixated on an Emerald Peacock Swallowtail as it buried its head between the petals of a yellow hibiscus, feasting on its stamen. The flower nestled in a clump of conocarpus erectus. She had nearly hyperventilated at the raw sexuality of it.
Among the orchids and the insects, she'd been overwhelmed with the pressing and immediate physical need to have House. She'd wanted skin on skin, a tangle of limbs, devilry in the dark, his face a satyr lit by a candle, House between the sheets, House between her legs.
Her mouth on his; her mouth on him.
That evening, she had stood with her parents doing what people in the Midwest do for entertainment: They'd stood around her father's Night Bloomer bushes, waiting for the tight yellow buds to let go of the leaves and uncurl.
The buds responded the way she knew her body would for House. They opened up and flowered.
The whole weekend had seemed rife with sexual metaphor, while House was inconveniently several states away. And yet he clung to her, his residue was everywhere like pollen. She couldn't shake him.
A skateboarder weaved around her like Bart Simpson, and she recognized a song by Pavement leaking from his iPod.
"Love your dreads," she shouted at his back.
Sometimes while running she was hit with the purity of pain, of deep loneliness and a sense of loss so keen that silent tears marked her face as she picked up her pace.
Later, in the lab, while watching molecules separate and cells multiply under her microscopes, she'd find that her grief was for what could be, not what had been.
It was about House.
She jumped at the rude blast of a car horn as a driver swerved to avoid hitting a cyclist who had ignored a red light. Jogging in place until the light turned green, she tried to remember the first time House had made her stomach flutter in sexual excitement.
Her body had opened up and tuned in when House had tossed his cane away and lurched forward to incubate John Henry Giles, saving the jazz musician's life. The sight of his biceps bulging as he'd leaned over the man had nearly sent her sprawling, and the intent expression on his face, the determination in his blue eyes, the sound of his voice as he gave orders, utterly confident, made her tingle inside.
Even at the conclusion of her interview, she'd felt her breath catch as House had grasped her hand – at Wilson's urging, she recalled with a smile. As she felt the lean muscles of his elegant hand close over hers, he'd looked at her as if to say, "I can see who you are." She'd met his gaze and recognized him as a man who knew things, a man who hid things in the recesses of his being, a man acquainted with pain. And in his eyes she'd also spied a man who was capable of love, a man who knew what to do in the dark.
She pictured him in the shower where she'd found him tripping on LSD and listening to Gomez, a towel thrown haphazardly around his waist, water dripping off his face, his body. Mentally, she'd kissed his mouth, twirled her tongue around his hardened nipples, licked the water off down along his taut stomach, in and out of his naval. And then she'd removed the towel.
Cameron glanced at her Nike Triax Sports watch and huffed out a lungful of air, slowing her pace to a fast walk as she approached her apartment.
She would have to hurry if she was going to shower and make a few stops before heading over to House's place. Wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, she wondered: Was this a date?
Did it matter? Not to her. Not anymore.
All she knew was this: If she hadn't gone for a run, she'd have pulled out her hair waiting to be with him again, to be close enough to run a finger along his arm, and watch his mouth and eyes as pleasure and anticipation played across his face at her slightest touch.
I want contact, she thought.
I want contact.
