** Here's an update for ya!! Since I'm a teacher, I get Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off for Thanksgiving. Hopefully I'll have lots of time to write, and you'll get some extra updates :-) I'm feeling pretty much the same way about tomorrow night's episode as I was last week's... anxious, but also some dread. I just have a feeling that House is going to do something stupid and adolescent... I wish he would just wait it out and let Cuddy and Lucas break themselves up. Cause I'm pretty sure it would just explode on its own eventually. We'll just have to see what the writers have in store for us, I guess!!
Through the next couple of weeks and his next couple of cases, House tried his very best to simultaneously avoid and annoy Cuddy equally. His team treated a patient that worked at a nursing home with a death-predicting cat, and Cuddy was sure that the patient was faking just to gain attention for the feline's alleged psychic abilities.
House, who under normal circumstances would have immediately dismissed the geriatric nurse's superstitions as asinine nonsense, took up the case like he was on some kind of a mission. Not wrongly, his team had a sneaking suspicion that his sole motivation was proving Cuddy wrong, which he did. Not much had changed, really.
By this point in the middle of March, Cuddy had been bracing herself for weeks for House's inevitable revenge on her lies. He had done everything in his power to exasperate her daily at work, many times without actually coming in contact with her at all. House being House, however, was merely doing his best to lull Cuddy into a false sense of security by not acting extremely differently than usual. This was merely the calm before the storm.
On an unseasonably warm Monday morning, March 30th to be precise, the preverbial atomic bomb exploded in the clinic at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Cuddy stalked into the building much later than expected, and the flat shoes she had recently traded in for her usual heels were not making near enough noise to suit her mood. It was already nearly 10am, and she knew he would already be there, hiding in the last place he thought she would look. House was smart, but being an old dog, he had also over-used some of his best tricks.
Cuddy angrily made her way through the doors of the clinic, and seeing that exam room 1 was without a patient, flung the door open loudly. Sure enough, there he was on the exam table, engrossed in playing his beeping PSP.
"House! My office. NOW!!" Cuddy demanded. She walked out of the room without ever making eye contact with him, enduring many inquisitive stares from both the staff and patients alike as she practically stomped to her office. Surprisingly, House follwed not far behind.
"Move along kids, nothing to see here," House said glibly as he opened the recently slammed door to Cuddy's office. "Whatever it is, we definitely know it isn't PMS!" he added to the nearby nurses in a stage whisper before he closed the door behind himself. She was waiting for him, standing impatiently with her hands on her hips and wearing a glare that showed almost as much hurt as it did indignation.
"How could you do this?" Cuddy demanded. "I don't care how bruised your ridiculously oversized ego is. This is low, even for you."
"Not quite as low as your blouse, though," House retorted easily, sneaking a peak from a safe distance. "And wow, the view's even better now that your jugs are filling with milk!"
"God, just shut up!" Cuddy yelled back at him. "You can be as big of a jerk as you want here, in the confines of the hospital, as long as you don't kill anyone. I can accept that from you. But messing around with my family? I know that you wouldn't know a boundary if you walked right into one, but my family and my personal life are definitely off limits to you, no exceptions."
"Well how was I supposed to know you hadn't told your mother the good news yet?" House asked innocently.
"You never should have been talking to my mother in the first place, obviously," Cuddy said, still agitated. The arguing was making her tired, which these days happened incredibly easily, and so she walked over to the couch and sat down. Cuddy had planned on giving House a full verbal thrashing, but she was beginning to think that she just didn't have the energy. So, she lay her head back on the couch and closed her eyes for a minute, subconsciously rubbing her belly.
House couldn't help but watch her, even though with every fiber of his being he wished he could resist. And he would never say it without the heavy veil of sexual innuendos, but there was something about Cuddy pregnant that made her even more beautiful, if that was possible. When she opened her eyes, she was surprised to find House's baby blues looking back at her with a very curious expression on his face. Temporarily forgetting their argument, Cuddy was amused.
"What?" she asked him, a small smile playing on her lips as she sat up and rested her head on a propped up hand. When he said nothing, she snapped her fingers. "Earth to House? Anybody in there?"
"Yeah," he answered, quickly composing himself. "You know, I think I must have hit my head harder than I thought when I fell off my motorcycle on Saturday… it sure would explain and therefore excuse any inexcusable behavior that I may have exhibited in the last 48 hours," House finished as he popped open his vicodin bottle and dry swallowed a couple of pills. Cuddy predictably rolled her eyes.
"Nice try, Evil Knievel," she retorted as she went to sit down at her desk. "I am still completely furious with you, and I plan on staying that way for quite awhile."
"Oh, come off it, Cuddy," House chastised as he came and leaned on the front of her desk. "I did you a favor. You've been avoiding telling your family, especially your mother, about your mystery spawn way more than I've been avoiding you. If I hadn't called your mother, she would have had a very rude shock at Chanukah this year when you showed up with a kid." At this, Cuddy suppressed a grin.
"So… now I'm confused. You told my mother I was pregnant out of spite, or you told her to relieve me of the burden of telling her myself?"
"Well, it would hardly be the first time I managed to fully satisfy your needs and my needs simultaneously, would it?" he questioned tauntingly. Before Cuddy had a chance to answer, there was a knock at the door. Kutner entered without waiting for an invitation.
"House, Taub's got the locked-in patient communicating with that computer set up. It looks like it's working," Kutner explained, a certain level of excitement detectable in his voice.
"Great. Let's go see what Helen Keller has to say," House said as he began making his way to the door.
"House, I didn't say we were finished talking," Cuddy said in a warning tone.
"Hmm, I had the distinct impression that we actually were finished talking, since I'm walking out the door and closing it behind me," he retorted as he did just that.
Cuddy was far from happy with House, but deep down a part of her believed that his act of exposing her pregnancy to her mother hadn't been entirely selfish. When her mother had called her, she had initially been furious with Cuddy for not telling her about the pregnancy right away, and her mother was even more furious that House of all people was the one to break the news. Eventually, Cuddy's mother softened upon realizing that she indeed had another grandchild on the way.
"In a way, House really did do me a favor," Cuddy thought to herself as she tried to delve into real work for the first time that day. Warped as she knew her viewpoint was, he had obviously done it to get her attention, which might mean his anger toward her was subsiding.
Since things looked like they might be getting back to normal… or as "normal" as they could ever get between the two of them, she started thinking that maybe it was time to tell him the truth. Cuddy, however, wouldn't get a chance that week. In a few short days, none other than Lawrence Kutner would turn all of Princeton-Plainsboro upside down in a way that even House could never have envisioned.