Venn Diagrams (House, House/Cuddy)
Title: Venn Diagrams
Author: blithers
Fandom: House
Pairing/Character: House/Cuddy
Category: collegefic
Rating: R
Spoilers: none
Word Count: 3893
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, not mine. (Three times the charm.)
Also Posted At: AO3
Summary: They drift in and out of each other's lives.
She meets him at a party. The first thing she notices about him is his face.
It is clever and angled but really only handsome when animated; otherwise, it stretches long from high cheekbones to end awkwardly in a flattened, rectangular chin. His eyes are sharp and tend to lock on people, without blinking, for long seconds. There is something about the set of his shoulders, hunched slightly forward, that she finds defensively young (in all her worldly wisdom). The shoulders give an odd contrast to his hands, which are tapping rhythmically and surely on the side of the table he is leaning against. His fingers are long and do not miss a beat, and their sureness makes her feel he is more mature than the rest of him lets on to, like a puppy still growing into his paws.
Later in the evening, after the people she is talking with have slowly merged in that amoebic way of parties into the group he was talking to, she listens cautiously and with a little amazement to the shit he's saying. She finds herself vaguely annoyed with the multitude of opinions he professes to hold, and listens carefully for loopholes and inconsistencies, searching through the data for order the same way she likes to attack her homework.
She ends up leaving quietly, though, grabbing her coat on the way out and heading out into the cool, calming night air.
Then, one day soon after that, she learns his name.
"I'm Greg House," he says, and sticks out a hand for her to shake. She looks up at him, a little annoyed at being sidetracked from the train of thought she's been painstakingly piecing together from the textbook in front of her. But she knows how to behave, so she shakes his hand briskly and says "Lisa Cuddy." She even gives him a small smile.
---
She sees him on occasion after that, drifting in and out of her vision as groups of acquaintances overlap and then separate like indecisive Venn diagrams. Occasionally he'll catch her eye during a moment of heated conversation and give her a sly, conspiratorial smile, as if to say, can you believe this? She tends to cock an eyebrow back as if to say, deal with it yourself, genius.
He's a popular source of gossip, providing easy drama with minimal impact to the people discussing him. When she's in a good mood she finds it funny. When she's in a bad mood she finds it tiresome, and has to keep herself from snapping at the girls with their "Greg House this" and "Greg House that." She wants to tell them that building a legend based on an inability to censor himself from saying the things that everybody thinks (but most people are too smart to say) is kind of ridiculous. She settles for rolling her eyes, and changing the subject.
---
She sees him one night at a bar, drunk and animated, amplifying his statements to a larger than normal crowd with expansive hand gestures. The group is surrounding an upright piano, and when she hears a dancy, ragtime tune start playing, she turns to see it's House standing in front of the piano. He catches her staring, and gives her a embarrassing large-scale wink and starts to do a little mocking jig in time with the music.
After the song, he makes his way over to her, sliding into the seat next to her like he just left for a moment. It's been months since the last time they talked. He stares at her for a few long seconds before saying, "Nice breasts."
She resists the urge to adjust her going-out-on-a-Friday-night sweater and say, dryly, "Thanks." And then, "I didn't know you could play the piano."
"I'm full of surprises."
"Sure you are," she responds, taking care to say this with no special inflection, as if she didn't expect anything less.
"Drinking alone?"
"Waiting for friends."
He looks around the bar consideringly. "Exactly how old are you?" He already knows the answer to that, not precisely maybe, but she's sure he can guess with a reasonable probability.
"It's just a coke." She toasts her glass slightly in his direction.
"Well that will never do," he says, and goes to the bar to order two shots, and brings one back for her to tip into her drink.
---
She enjoys pulling his arguments apart during any sort of debate, holding them between her hands like taffy and tugging them this way and that, searching for the rip in the smooth, elastic surface. House makes her feel quicker on the ball than she really is, and though she suspects he's playing the long game with any conversation he has, her short term victories feel sweet and well-earned, and make her feel quick and witty - an ability underused with her methodical approach to schoolwork and the pains she takes to depend on preparedness and repetition as her strengths in the classroom.
Most of the time, he calls her Cuddy. She likes the mock tone of formality to her last name, like recognition of equals in a duel, and soon after she takes to calling him House. When he slips one time and calls her Lisa it makes her pause for a second, despite the fact that it's the name everybody else on earth calls her - it makes her realise how oddly breathy and intimate her name sounds, all lll's and hissing breath.
---
He flirts with her, but then again he flirts with everybody. She tries not to take it personally.
There's this one time. She is in a booth at a restaurant, tucked into the corner with the arm of a recent boyfriend curled in a comma around her waist. She is with a group, crowded into the seats, and House is sitting across from her.
Boyfriend is laughing at the other side of the table's conversation; House is giving her shit for being beat out from the top grade in the latest organic chem test. It's a sore spot. But she shakes off the blows and comes back swinging and something, maybe the alcohol, maybe the closeness of bodies and the arm curved protectively around her waist, makes her feel daring. It starts slowly - instead of brushing off his comments like she normally would, ignoring them to get to the meat of what he is actually saying, she leans forward (she knows her tits look great tonight) and throws his remarks back at him, laughing.
She pours all her focus into pulling the next one over on House, and she laughs and leans forward with an inward tilt of the shoulders and, god help her, she can't stop looking at him. Adrenaline and hormones are pounding through her body and she can't ever remember feeling this turned on and horny.
When the night ends the arm around her waist is pulling her out of the booth, and she leaves with her boyfriend, still tethered to House with a connection that vibrates and plays on her nerves.
As soon as she turns the corner away from the bar she starts to kiss her date and he pushes her up against a wall and while they are making out he pushes a hand in her pants and she comes so hard it is like the lightheaded feeling she gets from breathing the air on a cold winter night when the sky is so crisp and clear it feels like nothing is holding her to the earth.
They break up soon afterwards.
The next time she sees House, they barely even talk, he just pulls up a chair next to her in the library and she spends the evening studying while House reads medical journals with his feet on the table.
---
She's smart enough to see that people are drawn into his orbit craving the voyeuristic way he can dissect them. But she likes him the most when he's talking about medicine, really talking about a problem he finds difficult and interesting. His focus and intelligence layer on top of the sarcasm and bite that make him so frustrating and let her see glimpses of the man he could be, of the man he is under the self-effacing juvenility and barbed one-liners. She thinks that to bring that side of him out is a worthwhile goal.
---
This one time, she sleeps with him.
It's kind of not on purpose.
It goes like this. It's almost the end of the school year, and she is tired and blurry-eyed from studying her ass off night after night. When a weekend comes with no pressing deadlines she declares Saturday a holiday and spends the morning doing inconsequential chores while watching television, the afternoon in a deep sleep, and in the evening goes to meet up with some friends at a party for a rare night out. She is freshly showered with skin cool and clean, jeans, and a jaggedly bright red top.
Of course, he shows up. It's so predictable she almost rolls his eyes. He walks by and muses her hair like a child. She glares at him with as much disapproval as she can summon and asks, pointedly, "How's the job search?"
He sneers and says, "Brilliant" and she smiles blandly back.
As the night wears on, he turns back to talk to her again, and then again, and as the night wears on he's talking only to her. He spends a while doing impressions of faculty. His mocking summaries of their personality quirks are uncomfortably cutting, almost cruel, but she laughs because she's had a couple of beers and because he has this sly grin at the corner of his mouth as her hilarity encourages him.
She feels peaceful and a little blurry, treading water lazily in the warm atmosphere of the bar, the people around her murmuring indistinctly in her ear like the ocean at a distance.
When she finally looks at the clock and makes her excuses to head home, he says he needs to leave too and offers to walk with her part of the way. She agrees happily and they carry the conversation from the bar over as they meander down the sidewalk, bumping gently into each other, talking and laughing. The sky is darkening blue and cloudless and dusted with bits of stars. She puts on her U of M sweater because it's cold out. He blows into his hands once, but otherwise keeps them shoved into the pockets of his jeans.
He's lean and tall, and the hands in his pockets cause his shoulders to hunch over, and she thinks the rare look of ease about his features suits him. It softens the sharp lines of his mouth and eyes.
When they come to the intersection where his path diverges from hers, she gazes at him fondly and thinks, he's a good guy. The simpleness of the thought takes on an echoing truth in her soul, out of proportion with the moment, a revelation born of tipsiness. She leans forward on her toes and kisses him once, brushingly, on the mouth.
He goes very still. His eyes sharpen again as he stares at her - she can almost see the intelligence flood back into them as he regards her closely and the silence drags, flat-footed, to the instant just before she would start to feel really uncomfortable, and then he kisses her back. It's the same way she kissed him - fleeting, light, on the mouth. He has to drop his head a little to do this. Then he pulls back and stares at her again, waiting.
She gets it. So she grabs his hand, and says, "I've never seen where you live."
---
His apartment is shabby and worn, but clean. The blankets on the couch are thin and soft, and the couch cushions sag gently into their places with the earned ease of age. The colors are dark and muted - blues and wood and grays. There is a keyboard in the far corner with sheet music spilling out from it. His bookshelves have titles crammed haphazardly into the open spaces, vertical and horizontal and jointed like a crossword.
He offers her his couch, goes to get two large glasses of water, and talks with her as they both lean into the cushions and discuss careers. When she thinks back to this night later, she finds this part kind of annoying. She realized soon after that he wasn't really interested in continuing the conversation, could give a shit less about jobs after graduation (as his future record proves). She realized, in retrospect, that he was just waiting for her to sober up.
The generous part of her points out that this is a pretty gentlemanly thing to do. The part of her that finds House obnoxious and heavy-handed points out that he is always deciding how a situation should be handled and carrying out his plan, manipulating her to go along with it, without consulting her first.
But right now, she is laughing and over-eager in discussing her ambitious career plans after medical school. They talk for about an hour, and then, during a break in the conversation, she finds herself staring at her empty water glass, circling the rim with her thumb and feeling the slick friction set up vibrations in the glass and hum, low, just outside the range of her hearing.
She doesn't notice House leaning in until he kisses her.
It's different this time. It's not tentative, although it is still gentle, the opening gambit of a connection protocol, waiting for a response. She pushes back a little, tilts her face, and bites down on his lower lip, a little too hard in her eagerness.
She's not sure how it gets out of hand so quickly. He starts to push her into the couch, so she shoves back and climbs on top of him, and then somehow they are both standing and she is being slammed up against a wall. They are both breathless and she thinks she might actually pass out from lack of oxygen.
He kisses like he argues, intently and focused and almost mean. She fights back because it's what she does.
He unbuttons her jeans and attempts to push the material down past her hips; she hops and trips on the ends as she shakes the last bit of denim off of her legs. He takes off his shirt so fast she wants to laugh, but then he slams back into her and his mouth is warm and overwhelming and his body is pressed tightly all down the front of her.
She breaks free for a second and gasps, "Condom?"
He starts to kiss her neck as he shoves a hand into his back pocket to get his wallet and extracts a red wrapper from the folds. He waves it in front of her field of vision, like a magician showing he has nothing up his sleeve, or a bullfighter flashing red.
He is biting and sucking on her neck too hard - it hurts and she knows she will be bruised in the morning, but she can't think how to say the word 'stop'. So she bites his shoulder, hard, and he says "Fuck," in a tight, strained whisper and draws back a little. As his mouth breaks contact she crosses her arms and pulls her shirt quickly up over her head and throws it to the side.
He kneels down and hooks his finger in the band of her underwear but she puts a hand over his and says "Wait." There was something she wanted to do or say first, but her thoughts are slow and she can't seem to remember what it was. House is looking up at her, awkwardly caught in the moment, gaping a little, and since she can't leave him like that she pushes him backward onto the floor. She straddles him and kisses him and when her mouths connects she pushes his skull back against the floor with a hollow noise.
She thinks that she should probably apologize but before she can House is flipping her, and the floor slams into her back. His jeans are already loose, and she lifts her hips up and hooks her toes onto the thick fabric at the waistband and uses her legs to push them off. He rips open the condom wrapper with his teeth.
Then he is kissing her again, and his forearm is over her temple and his fingers curled down the side of her head like an electroshock restraint as he fumbles one, twice, and then pushes into her all at once. She isn't quite ready and she stiffens, but he doesn't seem to notice - his eyes are closed and she can hear him breathing shallowly. She bites her lip and thinks about relaxing.
He starts to move, picking up tempo, and she feels herself moving with him. The feeling of him inside of her begins to warm and crowd out any other thoughts from her head, and her observable world narrows to the boundaries of her skin.
Her head moves against the wooden floor. She arches, and he kisses her deeply and whispers things in her mouth, and she starts to feel like she might die if she doesn't have more of him so she pulls the nails of her hand down his back. He bites her lip then and uses one hand to hold her down against the floor, and she thinks she will have bruises on her hip tomorrow.
He reaches an almost frantic rhythm, quickly, too quickly, and she knows he's going to come, and she wants to scream not-without-me-not-without-me, but he does. She's only had a moment to wonder what next before he reaches a hand down between them to find her clit and bring her along with him. She pulls her hand through his hair in appreciation, and he groans as she orgasms around what's left of him.
He rolls over and onto his back so they are both staring up at the ceiling, panting, oddly naked.
"Well," he says, "that was hot." He drawls out the last word, in a mix of mockery and honesty.
"Shut up," she says, fearing she sounds more fond than she means to.
Her suspicions are confirmed when he lifts himself to one elbow, eyes her for a second and then asks, "Want some pancakes?"
He drizzles the pancakes in looping patterns like DNA, the batter crisping on the edges of the lacy pattern. They eat and when they kiss this time, it's slow and decadent and he tastes like maple syrup.
They have sex again, a little kinder, with room for improvisation. They move to the bedroom and House cracks a few jokes and slaps her ass and makes some sort of sexist demand starting with the word "Woman!" She rolls her eyes at him, but smiles because she can't help it, and makes him pay by bringing him to his knees, gasping. He returns the favor, and when she comes she closes her eyes and bites the side of her mouth to make sure she won't say anything she'll regret later.
---
He wakes her up in the middle of the night and makes love to her. There's no other word for it. She wakes up to the feeling of his hands moving up and over her hips, ghosting over her skin. When she stirs he pulls her a little closer and begins to kiss the back of her ear and neck. She can hear his breath and feel the path the currents trace across her skin as he exhales.
He kisses her and the world reduces to a pinpoint in the dark, bounded only by the soft noises they both make. They have sex with him behind - it's shallow and slow and when she comes it actually takes her by surprise.
---
She wakes up the next morning with her legs curled up in House's. She can feel him breathing rhythmically on the back of her neck. He hasn't woken up yet. She closes her eyes again and tries to keep her breathing even, despite her suddenly racing heartbeat.
She moves slowly out of bed, and dresses quietly. At one point, she feels that House is watching her - she has a sense down her spine that says she is not alone, but when she looks at the bed, he hasn't moved and his eyes are still shut.
She slips quietly out the front door, and walks home on empty sidewalks.
---
She don't call him, and he doesn't call her. It's what she wanted, but the lack of contact still makes her nervous and irritable. She feels like House is lurking around the corners at school, waiting for the most humiliating opportunity to jump out and compliment her on her vaginal upkeep, while winking to the nearest dean that, yes, he does indeed know.
When she finally sees him again, it's surprisingly anticlimactic.
She spies him at a faculty mixer for overachieving students, hovering by the buffet table. He is wearing a sweater and seems ill at ease, shoving his hands into his pockets and staring intently and calculatingly at a bowl of punch. She almost shies off immediately - the door is so close, she can just slip back out and nobody needs to know - but instead she stiffens her spine and walks forward.
House notices her as she approaches the opposite end of the buffet, and goes still as he watches her walk the line of finger food, raiding the vegetable platter. When she reaches the end of the table, she stops next to him. They stand, not speaking, not facing, watching the hustle of the room in front of them for a few long moments.
She turns to House finally and asks, "Baby carrot?"
He stares at the vegetable in her hand for a moment before reaching forward and saying, "Yeah." A pause, and then, "Thanks."
They both crunch nosily on their carrots, and House's hand sneaks up to grab another one from her plate, dipping this one in ranch. She feels something companionable in their mutual snaps. "Celery?" she offers, and he gives her such a look of disdain that she surrenders the last of the baby carrots willingly.
When her plate is clear, she tosses it in the trash and turns to face him. She lifts herself to her toes, leans forward, and brushes a kiss against his cheek. She can smell the remnants of his aftershave and the lighter, clean smell of his soap.
"Thanks, House," she says quietly, and comes back onto her heels to gaze up at him, as calmly as she can.
Some sort of a grin quirks at the corner of his mouth, and, with the barest sarcastic hint to his voice, he says, "Any time, Cuddy."
She raises an eyebrow at him, feels a genuine smile growing on her face. She backs up a few steps, and turns, taking a deep breath, moving purposefully into a sea of professors and students, deans and college donors, social contacts and mingling opportunities.
She doesn't look back at House - she can feel him watching her, and she curves her hips out perhaps a little more than necessary as she walks, but she doesn't look back.
She has things to do.
Author: blithers
Fandom: House
Pairing/Character: House/Cuddy
Category: collegefic
Rating: R
Spoilers: none
Word Count: 3893
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, not mine. (Three times the charm.)
Also Posted At: AO3
Summary: They drift in and out of each other's lives.
She meets him at a party. The first thing she notices about him is his face.
It is clever and angled but really only handsome when animated; otherwise, it stretches long from high cheekbones to end awkwardly in a flattened, rectangular chin. His eyes are sharp and tend to lock on people, without blinking, for long seconds. There is something about the set of his shoulders, hunched slightly forward, that she finds defensively young (in all her worldly wisdom). The shoulders give an odd contrast to his hands, which are tapping rhythmically and surely on the side of the table he is leaning against. His fingers are long and do not miss a beat, and their sureness makes her feel he is more mature than the rest of him lets on to, like a puppy still growing into his paws.
Later in the evening, after the people she is talking with have slowly merged in that amoebic way of parties into the group he was talking to, she listens cautiously and with a little amazement to the shit he's saying. She finds herself vaguely annoyed with the multitude of opinions he professes to hold, and listens carefully for loopholes and inconsistencies, searching through the data for order the same way she likes to attack her homework.
She ends up leaving quietly, though, grabbing her coat on the way out and heading out into the cool, calming night air.
Then, one day soon after that, she learns his name.
"I'm Greg House," he says, and sticks out a hand for her to shake. She looks up at him, a little annoyed at being sidetracked from the train of thought she's been painstakingly piecing together from the textbook in front of her. But she knows how to behave, so she shakes his hand briskly and says "Lisa Cuddy." She even gives him a small smile.
---
She sees him on occasion after that, drifting in and out of her vision as groups of acquaintances overlap and then separate like indecisive Venn diagrams. Occasionally he'll catch her eye during a moment of heated conversation and give her a sly, conspiratorial smile, as if to say, can you believe this? She tends to cock an eyebrow back as if to say, deal with it yourself, genius.
He's a popular source of gossip, providing easy drama with minimal impact to the people discussing him. When she's in a good mood she finds it funny. When she's in a bad mood she finds it tiresome, and has to keep herself from snapping at the girls with their "Greg House this" and "Greg House that." She wants to tell them that building a legend based on an inability to censor himself from saying the things that everybody thinks (but most people are too smart to say) is kind of ridiculous. She settles for rolling her eyes, and changing the subject.
---
She sees him one night at a bar, drunk and animated, amplifying his statements to a larger than normal crowd with expansive hand gestures. The group is surrounding an upright piano, and when she hears a dancy, ragtime tune start playing, she turns to see it's House standing in front of the piano. He catches her staring, and gives her a embarrassing large-scale wink and starts to do a little mocking jig in time with the music.
After the song, he makes his way over to her, sliding into the seat next to her like he just left for a moment. It's been months since the last time they talked. He stares at her for a few long seconds before saying, "Nice breasts."
She resists the urge to adjust her going-out-on-a-Friday-night sweater and say, dryly, "Thanks." And then, "I didn't know you could play the piano."
"I'm full of surprises."
"Sure you are," she responds, taking care to say this with no special inflection, as if she didn't expect anything less.
"Drinking alone?"
"Waiting for friends."
He looks around the bar consideringly. "Exactly how old are you?" He already knows the answer to that, not precisely maybe, but she's sure he can guess with a reasonable probability.
"It's just a coke." She toasts her glass slightly in his direction.
"Well that will never do," he says, and goes to the bar to order two shots, and brings one back for her to tip into her drink.
---
She enjoys pulling his arguments apart during any sort of debate, holding them between her hands like taffy and tugging them this way and that, searching for the rip in the smooth, elastic surface. House makes her feel quicker on the ball than she really is, and though she suspects he's playing the long game with any conversation he has, her short term victories feel sweet and well-earned, and make her feel quick and witty - an ability underused with her methodical approach to schoolwork and the pains she takes to depend on preparedness and repetition as her strengths in the classroom.
Most of the time, he calls her Cuddy. She likes the mock tone of formality to her last name, like recognition of equals in a duel, and soon after she takes to calling him House. When he slips one time and calls her Lisa it makes her pause for a second, despite the fact that it's the name everybody else on earth calls her - it makes her realise how oddly breathy and intimate her name sounds, all lll's and hissing breath.
---
He flirts with her, but then again he flirts with everybody. She tries not to take it personally.
There's this one time. She is in a booth at a restaurant, tucked into the corner with the arm of a recent boyfriend curled in a comma around her waist. She is with a group, crowded into the seats, and House is sitting across from her.
Boyfriend is laughing at the other side of the table's conversation; House is giving her shit for being beat out from the top grade in the latest organic chem test. It's a sore spot. But she shakes off the blows and comes back swinging and something, maybe the alcohol, maybe the closeness of bodies and the arm curved protectively around her waist, makes her feel daring. It starts slowly - instead of brushing off his comments like she normally would, ignoring them to get to the meat of what he is actually saying, she leans forward (she knows her tits look great tonight) and throws his remarks back at him, laughing.
She pours all her focus into pulling the next one over on House, and she laughs and leans forward with an inward tilt of the shoulders and, god help her, she can't stop looking at him. Adrenaline and hormones are pounding through her body and she can't ever remember feeling this turned on and horny.
When the night ends the arm around her waist is pulling her out of the booth, and she leaves with her boyfriend, still tethered to House with a connection that vibrates and plays on her nerves.
As soon as she turns the corner away from the bar she starts to kiss her date and he pushes her up against a wall and while they are making out he pushes a hand in her pants and she comes so hard it is like the lightheaded feeling she gets from breathing the air on a cold winter night when the sky is so crisp and clear it feels like nothing is holding her to the earth.
They break up soon afterwards.
The next time she sees House, they barely even talk, he just pulls up a chair next to her in the library and she spends the evening studying while House reads medical journals with his feet on the table.
---
She's smart enough to see that people are drawn into his orbit craving the voyeuristic way he can dissect them. But she likes him the most when he's talking about medicine, really talking about a problem he finds difficult and interesting. His focus and intelligence layer on top of the sarcasm and bite that make him so frustrating and let her see glimpses of the man he could be, of the man he is under the self-effacing juvenility and barbed one-liners. She thinks that to bring that side of him out is a worthwhile goal.
---
This one time, she sleeps with him.
It's kind of not on purpose.
It goes like this. It's almost the end of the school year, and she is tired and blurry-eyed from studying her ass off night after night. When a weekend comes with no pressing deadlines she declares Saturday a holiday and spends the morning doing inconsequential chores while watching television, the afternoon in a deep sleep, and in the evening goes to meet up with some friends at a party for a rare night out. She is freshly showered with skin cool and clean, jeans, and a jaggedly bright red top.
Of course, he shows up. It's so predictable she almost rolls his eyes. He walks by and muses her hair like a child. She glares at him with as much disapproval as she can summon and asks, pointedly, "How's the job search?"
He sneers and says, "Brilliant" and she smiles blandly back.
As the night wears on, he turns back to talk to her again, and then again, and as the night wears on he's talking only to her. He spends a while doing impressions of faculty. His mocking summaries of their personality quirks are uncomfortably cutting, almost cruel, but she laughs because she's had a couple of beers and because he has this sly grin at the corner of his mouth as her hilarity encourages him.
She feels peaceful and a little blurry, treading water lazily in the warm atmosphere of the bar, the people around her murmuring indistinctly in her ear like the ocean at a distance.
When she finally looks at the clock and makes her excuses to head home, he says he needs to leave too and offers to walk with her part of the way. She agrees happily and they carry the conversation from the bar over as they meander down the sidewalk, bumping gently into each other, talking and laughing. The sky is darkening blue and cloudless and dusted with bits of stars. She puts on her U of M sweater because it's cold out. He blows into his hands once, but otherwise keeps them shoved into the pockets of his jeans.
He's lean and tall, and the hands in his pockets cause his shoulders to hunch over, and she thinks the rare look of ease about his features suits him. It softens the sharp lines of his mouth and eyes.
When they come to the intersection where his path diverges from hers, she gazes at him fondly and thinks, he's a good guy. The simpleness of the thought takes on an echoing truth in her soul, out of proportion with the moment, a revelation born of tipsiness. She leans forward on her toes and kisses him once, brushingly, on the mouth.
He goes very still. His eyes sharpen again as he stares at her - she can almost see the intelligence flood back into them as he regards her closely and the silence drags, flat-footed, to the instant just before she would start to feel really uncomfortable, and then he kisses her back. It's the same way she kissed him - fleeting, light, on the mouth. He has to drop his head a little to do this. Then he pulls back and stares at her again, waiting.
She gets it. So she grabs his hand, and says, "I've never seen where you live."
---
His apartment is shabby and worn, but clean. The blankets on the couch are thin and soft, and the couch cushions sag gently into their places with the earned ease of age. The colors are dark and muted - blues and wood and grays. There is a keyboard in the far corner with sheet music spilling out from it. His bookshelves have titles crammed haphazardly into the open spaces, vertical and horizontal and jointed like a crossword.
He offers her his couch, goes to get two large glasses of water, and talks with her as they both lean into the cushions and discuss careers. When she thinks back to this night later, she finds this part kind of annoying. She realized soon after that he wasn't really interested in continuing the conversation, could give a shit less about jobs after graduation (as his future record proves). She realized, in retrospect, that he was just waiting for her to sober up.
The generous part of her points out that this is a pretty gentlemanly thing to do. The part of her that finds House obnoxious and heavy-handed points out that he is always deciding how a situation should be handled and carrying out his plan, manipulating her to go along with it, without consulting her first.
But right now, she is laughing and over-eager in discussing her ambitious career plans after medical school. They talk for about an hour, and then, during a break in the conversation, she finds herself staring at her empty water glass, circling the rim with her thumb and feeling the slick friction set up vibrations in the glass and hum, low, just outside the range of her hearing.
She doesn't notice House leaning in until he kisses her.
It's different this time. It's not tentative, although it is still gentle, the opening gambit of a connection protocol, waiting for a response. She pushes back a little, tilts her face, and bites down on his lower lip, a little too hard in her eagerness.
She's not sure how it gets out of hand so quickly. He starts to push her into the couch, so she shoves back and climbs on top of him, and then somehow they are both standing and she is being slammed up against a wall. They are both breathless and she thinks she might actually pass out from lack of oxygen.
He kisses like he argues, intently and focused and almost mean. She fights back because it's what she does.
He unbuttons her jeans and attempts to push the material down past her hips; she hops and trips on the ends as she shakes the last bit of denim off of her legs. He takes off his shirt so fast she wants to laugh, but then he slams back into her and his mouth is warm and overwhelming and his body is pressed tightly all down the front of her.
She breaks free for a second and gasps, "Condom?"
He starts to kiss her neck as he shoves a hand into his back pocket to get his wallet and extracts a red wrapper from the folds. He waves it in front of her field of vision, like a magician showing he has nothing up his sleeve, or a bullfighter flashing red.
He is biting and sucking on her neck too hard - it hurts and she knows she will be bruised in the morning, but she can't think how to say the word 'stop'. So she bites his shoulder, hard, and he says "Fuck," in a tight, strained whisper and draws back a little. As his mouth breaks contact she crosses her arms and pulls her shirt quickly up over her head and throws it to the side.
He kneels down and hooks his finger in the band of her underwear but she puts a hand over his and says "Wait." There was something she wanted to do or say first, but her thoughts are slow and she can't seem to remember what it was. House is looking up at her, awkwardly caught in the moment, gaping a little, and since she can't leave him like that she pushes him backward onto the floor. She straddles him and kisses him and when her mouths connects she pushes his skull back against the floor with a hollow noise.
She thinks that she should probably apologize but before she can House is flipping her, and the floor slams into her back. His jeans are already loose, and she lifts her hips up and hooks her toes onto the thick fabric at the waistband and uses her legs to push them off. He rips open the condom wrapper with his teeth.
Then he is kissing her again, and his forearm is over her temple and his fingers curled down the side of her head like an electroshock restraint as he fumbles one, twice, and then pushes into her all at once. She isn't quite ready and she stiffens, but he doesn't seem to notice - his eyes are closed and she can hear him breathing shallowly. She bites her lip and thinks about relaxing.
He starts to move, picking up tempo, and she feels herself moving with him. The feeling of him inside of her begins to warm and crowd out any other thoughts from her head, and her observable world narrows to the boundaries of her skin.
Her head moves against the wooden floor. She arches, and he kisses her deeply and whispers things in her mouth, and she starts to feel like she might die if she doesn't have more of him so she pulls the nails of her hand down his back. He bites her lip then and uses one hand to hold her down against the floor, and she thinks she will have bruises on her hip tomorrow.
He reaches an almost frantic rhythm, quickly, too quickly, and she knows he's going to come, and she wants to scream not-without-me-not-without-me, but he does. She's only had a moment to wonder what next before he reaches a hand down between them to find her clit and bring her along with him. She pulls her hand through his hair in appreciation, and he groans as she orgasms around what's left of him.
He rolls over and onto his back so they are both staring up at the ceiling, panting, oddly naked.
"Well," he says, "that was hot." He drawls out the last word, in a mix of mockery and honesty.
"Shut up," she says, fearing she sounds more fond than she means to.
Her suspicions are confirmed when he lifts himself to one elbow, eyes her for a second and then asks, "Want some pancakes?"
He drizzles the pancakes in looping patterns like DNA, the batter crisping on the edges of the lacy pattern. They eat and when they kiss this time, it's slow and decadent and he tastes like maple syrup.
They have sex again, a little kinder, with room for improvisation. They move to the bedroom and House cracks a few jokes and slaps her ass and makes some sort of sexist demand starting with the word "Woman!" She rolls her eyes at him, but smiles because she can't help it, and makes him pay by bringing him to his knees, gasping. He returns the favor, and when she comes she closes her eyes and bites the side of her mouth to make sure she won't say anything she'll regret later.
---
He wakes her up in the middle of the night and makes love to her. There's no other word for it. She wakes up to the feeling of his hands moving up and over her hips, ghosting over her skin. When she stirs he pulls her a little closer and begins to kiss the back of her ear and neck. She can hear his breath and feel the path the currents trace across her skin as he exhales.
He kisses her and the world reduces to a pinpoint in the dark, bounded only by the soft noises they both make. They have sex with him behind - it's shallow and slow and when she comes it actually takes her by surprise.
---
She wakes up the next morning with her legs curled up in House's. She can feel him breathing rhythmically on the back of her neck. He hasn't woken up yet. She closes her eyes again and tries to keep her breathing even, despite her suddenly racing heartbeat.
She moves slowly out of bed, and dresses quietly. At one point, she feels that House is watching her - she has a sense down her spine that says she is not alone, but when she looks at the bed, he hasn't moved and his eyes are still shut.
She slips quietly out the front door, and walks home on empty sidewalks.
---
She don't call him, and he doesn't call her. It's what she wanted, but the lack of contact still makes her nervous and irritable. She feels like House is lurking around the corners at school, waiting for the most humiliating opportunity to jump out and compliment her on her vaginal upkeep, while winking to the nearest dean that, yes, he does indeed know.
When she finally sees him again, it's surprisingly anticlimactic.
She spies him at a faculty mixer for overachieving students, hovering by the buffet table. He is wearing a sweater and seems ill at ease, shoving his hands into his pockets and staring intently and calculatingly at a bowl of punch. She almost shies off immediately - the door is so close, she can just slip back out and nobody needs to know - but instead she stiffens her spine and walks forward.
House notices her as she approaches the opposite end of the buffet, and goes still as he watches her walk the line of finger food, raiding the vegetable platter. When she reaches the end of the table, she stops next to him. They stand, not speaking, not facing, watching the hustle of the room in front of them for a few long moments.
She turns to House finally and asks, "Baby carrot?"
He stares at the vegetable in her hand for a moment before reaching forward and saying, "Yeah." A pause, and then, "Thanks."
They both crunch nosily on their carrots, and House's hand sneaks up to grab another one from her plate, dipping this one in ranch. She feels something companionable in their mutual snaps. "Celery?" she offers, and he gives her such a look of disdain that she surrenders the last of the baby carrots willingly.
When her plate is clear, she tosses it in the trash and turns to face him. She lifts herself to her toes, leans forward, and brushes a kiss against his cheek. She can smell the remnants of his aftershave and the lighter, clean smell of his soap.
"Thanks, House," she says quietly, and comes back onto her heels to gaze up at him, as calmly as she can.
Some sort of a grin quirks at the corner of his mouth, and, with the barest sarcastic hint to his voice, he says, "Any time, Cuddy."
She raises an eyebrow at him, feels a genuine smile growing on her face. She backs up a few steps, and turns, taking a deep breath, moving purposefully into a sea of professors and students, deans and college donors, social contacts and mingling opportunities.
She doesn't look back at House - she can feel him watching her, and she curves her hips out perhaps a little more than necessary as she walks, but she doesn't look back.
She has things to do.