fic: Five Ways Dr. James Wilson Didn't Cheat on His Wife
Title: Five Ways Dr. James Wilson Didn't Cheat on His Wife
Author: fallen_arazil
Pairing(s):Wilson/Stacy, Wilson/Cuddy, Wilson/Chase, Wilson/Cameron, Wilson/House, in that order
Rating: Teen
Warnings: het, slash, slight sacrilege (a rosary is destroyed)
Summary: Five short tales of affairs that might have been.
Disclaimer: Characters are copyright to Fox, David Shore etc and I am making no claims to them nor deriving any profit from them.
Five Ways Dr. James Wilson Didn't Cheat on His Wife
By Djinn
1: Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other. --Euripides
It's raining, and Stacy is soaking wet.
Corinne is in Tampa, visiting her sister, so Wilson is home alone when she shows up on his doorstep. She looks as if she walked the entire distance, exhausted, and the rain doesn't disguise the fact that she's been crying. Wilson gets one of his wife's enormous, fluffy beach towels and throws it around her shoulders and she clutches at it, wrapping herself up in it. He knows that this is bad, because Stacy isn't the sort to cry over little things, or over big things, or over anything at all. She is a strong woman, and Wilson has always admired her for that.
"I'm losing him." She chokes out, when Wilson does not ask what's wrong, and Wilson thinks, you've lost him. She'd lost him the moment a scalpel bit into his damaged leg, and she had to have known that. She is a cool, logical woman-- she had to have weighed his life against his love for her, and decided which she valued more.
"He needs you." Wilson says, because he still believes it. House needs her and he hates her and he loves her, and he doesn't know which will win out in the end, but he can't see House ever truly forgiving her.
"He won't look at me, he won't let me touch him." Stacy gasps. Her hair drips wet on his shoulder as she curls into his arms, alarmingly broken, vulnerable, needy. "He's like a stranger. I don't know him anymore."
"What did you expect?" He asks. She saved him, and she destroyed him.
"I had to do what I did." She insists, hands digging into his shoulders, nails denting his skin. She sounds as if she is seeking absolution. "Would you have done any different?"
"It wasn't my choice." It wasn't her choice, either, though she was the one who made it. Wilson loves House as much as she does, values his life just as much, but he likes to think he would have made a different choice. Then again, he hadn't been there until after. He hadn't seen his closest friend writhing in pain--he hadn't watched his heart stop beating. Perhaps, sometimes, there are no right choices, only different sorts of wrong.
"I saved his life," Stacy says, sounding dead, "but I destroyed everything else."
The kiss is like punishment, and Stacy tastes like rain and cigarettes. Her nails bite into his skin, viciously, but she only pulls him closer.
2: Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. --H.L. Mencken
House's first week back has been hard on the entire hospital, and Wilson is exhausted, but home is the last place that he wants to be, so when Cuddy asks, flatly, for a ride home--her car was broken into recently, and is at the shop having a new window put in--he accedes graciously. He is a great believer in inter-office politics, but he has never played such games with Lisa Cuddy. She sees him, most of the time, as an extension of House, and that does not bother him. There are worse things that he could be.
Cuddy eyes the rosary hanging from his rear-view mirror skeptically as she slides into his car, and raises an eyebrow at him. "Is this some sort of internalized anti-Semitic sentiment, Dr. Wilson?" She asks, amused, and he blushes slightly as he pulls out of the garage.
"Julie put it there." He says, because of course she would, for the same reason that she puts out Christmas lights every year, and banishes his menorah to the formal sitting room. It is not that she minds that he is Jewish, it is only that she isn't, and therefore, she doesn't care.
"Does she use this car?" Cuddy asks, and when Wilson shakes his head, she reaches up and pulls it off with one sharp tug. Red, oval beads scatter across the floor of the car, and Wilson can't stop the sharp laugh that escapes him, or the uncomfortable sense of vindication. Cuddy tips the cheap plastic and thin twine out of her hand and onto the carpet with a wry look. "I hope this doesn't mean that we're going to hell."
Wilson has to laugh again at that, and he glances at her out of the corner of his eye. "I've probably destroyed things more sacred than a two-dollar plastic necklace."
"Like marriage vows?" Cuddy jibes, no real heat in the accusation, and there is something so familiar about that comment, so completely something House might say, that it doesn't cut him at all. If anything, it feels strangely comfortable, and it doesn't occur to him how strange it is that something that reminds him of House should put him so at ease. Cuddy watches him for a moment, as if waiting for a reaction, but when none comes, she turns her gaze out the window, and the rest of the ride passes in silence.
He can never remember later if he was invited in, or if he invited himself, but he discovers that Cuddy makes excellent margaritas, and that tequila makes her eyes slightly glassy and her cheeks flush pink. The alcohol makes her strangely pliable, strips away the politico and the bureaucrat, leaving behind a woman he's not certain he even knows.
"I've destroyed things, too." She tells him, seriously, her nails tickling the hairs at the back of his neck. He thinks of House limping down the hallway that evening, his right leg seeming like a dead weight. "We're more alike than you think."
She leaves dark red lipstick on his collar and the smell of sweat and sex all over him, and when he passes by her in the clinic the next day, she smiles as if she barely knows his name.
3: Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. --Iris Murdoch
There are plenty of new-guy welcoming rituals that Princeton-Plainsboro staff kept alive, but most of these were the purview of the respective department heads. Wilson tried to at least have lunch with all of his new staff, to try to prepare them for the enormous stress of working in Oncology. The Diagnostics Department, however, did not have such a considerate head, and did not have a large enough staff that the obligation might fall to another staff member. The first week, Wilson told himself that it was none of his business.
At the end of the second week, he stuck his head inside the Diagnostics conference room and took pity on the Australian that was studiously chewing on the cap of a blue pen. "How are you settling in?" He asked, lightly, and the boy practically jumped, absorbed in the New York Times crossword.
"Er ... all right." He answered, uncertainly, too-long blonde hair falling across his eyes. "Dr. Wilson, right?"
Wilson smiled, engagingly, and stepped into the conference room, offering the younger man his hand. "James Wilson. I'm the head of Oncology."
He dropped his pen and shook the offered hand. "Robert Chase."
Wilson knew that--he'd been the one who reviewed Chase's resume and drafted the acceptance letter that he'd been sent. The only thing he hadn't done was field the call from Rowan Chase that ensured his employment. Wilson thought he probably knew a great deal more about Robert Chase than the man who hired him did. "Come on, Robert," he said, brightly, "I'll buy you a drink."
Two beers was nowhere near enough to get Chase drunk, but it was enough to make his accent slightly thicker and his demeanor a bit more friendly. He hadn't been in America very long, and when Wilson asked the inevitable question, why here, why a teaching hospital in New Jersey, the answer was one he should have expected.
"I wanted to be somewhere where I could be my own man." Chase told him, seriously, and Wilson nodded. "Besides, Dr. House is famous. It's a good opportunity."
"You're not bored?" House hadn't had a single patient during Chase's two weeks at Princeton-Plainsboro.
He shrugged. "I don't mind being bored." Wilson silently applauded this--it was an excellent quality for a fellow of the Diagnostics Department to possess. "If you don't mind me saying so," Chase said after a pause, "shouldn't Dr. House be the one trying to make me feel comfortable around here?"
Wilson laughed. "Dr. House ... doesn't have much patience for other people." He said. "Let me buy you another beer."
A week later, Chase asked Wilson to help him move some new furniture into his apartment, and Wilson realized with some surprise that this was because he was the only person Chase really knew in New Jersey. Wilson had seen him flirting with nurses during his clinic hours, but he was the only fellow in Diagnostics, and his job hadn't brought him into contact with many other people. He'd probably spoken more with Wilson than he had with House.
Moving a couch, two armchairs and a big-screen tv turned into a few beers, which turned into lunch the next day, and Wilson knew that for all Chase's posturing, he was likely only spending time with Wilson because he didn't want to be alone. Wilson wasn't sure if being turned to as the only option should bother him.
House made a few snide comments about Wilson adopting his puppy, but not much else. It was three weeks later, after Chase finished up on his third case ever as a member of diagnostics, that he and Chase started sleeping together. It wasn't love and it wasn't exactly just sex--Wilson thought that, maybe, it was connection. Chase was a stranger in a strange land, and somehow, for Wilson, this is what comfort always lead to, whether he intended it or not.
This continued for almost three months until one day, without any warning, House appeared leaning in the doorway of his office and asked, with a raised eyebrow, "Am I going to have to tell Chase to stay away from my boyfriend?"
"I wasn't aware you had one." Wilson muttered in response, but when he went over to Chase's apartment that night, he left after the second beer, and declined the next three invitations. House announced that he'd hired another fellow, and when he showed the picture to Wilson, he told him that she'd be nice to look at. If Wilson detected the meaning, 'She'll keep Chase's eyes off you', it was easy to pretend he imagined it.
4: Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. --Robert Frost
Wilson was attracted to Allison Cameron the moment that they met, which was not that surprising. She was, after all, a beautiful woman. Beautiful, passionate, and kind. She was the sort of doctor who legitimately studied medicine in the hopes that she could save lives, and for no other reason. Wilson's first impression of her, after the beauty, was that she was in the absolute wrong department. Here was a woman who thought that the patient was the most important thing, who lived in the belief that if she tried hard enough, she could make the world a better place. He hoped that working here wouldn't break her.
At least, not any more than she was already broken.
Three weeks into her fellowship, Wilson came into the conference room looking for House and found Cameron doing his mail. When he flashed a questioning glance at Chase, the Australian smiled around the coffee stirrer he was chewing on and gestured to her brightly, saying, "She pulled Dr. House's consult requests out of the trash."
Cameron turned at the comment, glasses sliding down her nose, and gave them a disapproving look. "It doesn't bother you that he just throws them away?" She demanded, and Wilson was sure that the blank look on his face more or less matched the one on Chase's.
Wilson recovered first, and gave her a sincere smile. "Dr. House is very selective." He told her, ignoring Chase's snickering. "Leave it for now. Let me buy you lunch."
Cameron spent the entire lunch outlining her many frustrations with House, and it was when he was about halfway through his pasta that he realized that Cameron had a crush on House. It was a vain, fruitless thing--she was far too sweet, too needy, too naive to ever really appeal to House. Nonetheless, there was something about the realization that ... bothered him. Something about Cameron thinking she could fix House, trying to fix House, bothered him.
"Tell me if I'm being to forward ..." she started, when the conversation lulled, "... but why are you friends with Dr. House?" At the surprised look he gave her, she back-pedaled quickly. "It's only, you seem so nice, and he's such a ..."
"Asshole?"
Cameron giggled, more from surprise than amusement. "Well, yes. I guess that would be one way of putting it."
He guessed that this was the part where he was supposed to tell her that House wasn't as bad as he seemed--that beneath his misanthropic exterior there was a soft, cuddly center, that you could reach out to if you only tried hard enough. She probably would even believe it, and he supposed that showed just how naive she was.
"I'm used to the way House is." He told her, as simple as that, and changed the subject.
He had five more lunches with Allison before he invited himself over to her apartment for dinner one night, with the promise of home-made lasagna. Two glasses of red wine had the familiar topic of House's many flaws coming up again, this time Cameron seeming a little more passionate about them. When he kissed her, she slapped him. Hard. It was about what he expected.
When she offered him a slightly ambivalent invitation for a second dinner three days later, that was about what he expected, as well. She only had one glass of red wine, and had the temerity to act surprised when they ended up in the bedroom, sprawled across her canary-yellow bedspread.
"Aren't you married?" She gasped at one point, and he replied, without a thought, "Does it matter?"
"I get it now," she murmured, as he was leaving. She was still nude, yellow sheets drawn up to conceal herself, hair spread out across the pillows. "You're friends with House because, deep down, you're an asshole, too."
He glanced back at her at that, tucking his tie into a jacket pocket. "House is never going to fall in love with you, you know." He replied, and shut the bedroom door behind him.
5: Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual. --Octavio Paz
When Wilson had imagined it, (and he will admit that he has, frequently, because there are things about himself that he pretends not to recognize, but this is not one of them) he had always pictured House being the one to finally draw it out into the open, because House is the observant one, and he had to catch on sooner or later. He hadn't imagined romance, precisely, because he knows House, and while he is capable of flowers and platitudes, they are not who he is. What he imagined was this:
He and House would be relaxing somewhere--House's apartment, one of their offices, hiding from Cuddy in an exam room--and House would look over at him and ask, What are we doing, Jimmy?
(In his mind, House calls him 'Jimmy', because he has never heard House call him 'James', and he cannot picture it. It is a childish nickname, but House is a childish man, so it fits.)
He imagines that he would know right away what House meant, but play otherwise, too uncertain to let himself believe, and he pictures himself replying, We're watching tv.
House will see through him of course, and immediately respond, You know that's not what I meant. Sometimes he imagines that House sounds annoyed and impatient, and at other times, he imagines that he just sounds tired. He knows House will say something about his marriages, about how he has been looking for something in all those women because he can't admit that it was right in front of him all along.
The imaginings varied after that, sometimes becoming little more than that, a calm acknowledgment of what lies between them, and at other times becoming something entirely different--sticky, sweaty fantasies that leave him flushed and panting, looking for any chance to be alone.
What actually happened was this:
House came back from his date with Cameron tightly strung and just slightly buzzed from the red wine, tie already shoved into one of his pockets, and the top two buttons of his collar undone. Wilson watched his lips as he complained about something, telling himself that he wasn't looking for the tell-tale trace of lipstick, then changed his mind and told himself that he was, because perhaps that was slightly less self-incriminating.
House brought two beers back from the kitchen and they sat there in silence for some time, watching a re-run of the O.C., until House finally looked at Wilson out of the corner of his eye and asked, "Don't you want to know how it went?"
Wilson took another long pull on his beer, and considered the question seriously. Cameron thought that she loved House, and more than that, she thought that she could make House love her in return. No part of that would have made this date a wonderful, life-affirming experience for House. A part of him was absolutely certain that House was much happier sitting there, drinking a beer with him than he would be on any date with Cameron. He'd never been so certain of where he stood with House before in his life, and the realization made him suddenly bold.
"You can tell me tomorrow." He said, and reached across to take House's beer from his hand, setting it on the coffee table. House's perplexed expression melted into something else entirely when Wilson all but crawled on top of him to kiss him.
As first kisses go, it wasn't exceptional. The angle wasn't perfect, and Wilson was far too worried about House's bad leg to put as much of his weight into it as he might like. House's hands were freezing cold and slightly damp from the beer, but when they came up to Wilson's shoulders, it was to pull him closer, not push him away.
They necked on the couch like teenagers, twisting in an effort to remove clothes but finding themselves entirely too tangled together to manage any sort of success, and when they finally broke apart, both of them gasping for air, they were laughing.
"Why, Jimmy," House said, grinning, "what would your wife say?"
"I didn't know you were planning on letting her watch." Wilson replied without skipping a beat. "Then again, you've always been an exhibitionist."
"That video was Stacy's idea." He defended, and then pulled Wilson back with a hand on the back of his neck to kiss him again, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and perhaps it was. You could, after all, only fight this sort of thing for so long.
"If you say 'I love you'," House panted when they were halfway between the living room and the bedroom, while working furiously on the buttons of Wilson's shirt, "I'm kicking you out."
Wilson just smiled and kissed him again, shrugging out of the shirt. He didn't have to say the words for them to be true.
FIN
Author: fallen_arazil
Pairing(s):Wilson/Stacy, Wilson/Cuddy, Wilson/Chase, Wilson/Cameron, Wilson/House, in that order
Rating: Teen
Warnings: het, slash, slight sacrilege (a rosary is destroyed)
Summary: Five short tales of affairs that might have been.
Disclaimer: Characters are copyright to Fox, David Shore etc and I am making no claims to them nor deriving any profit from them.
Five Ways Dr. James Wilson Didn't Cheat on His Wife
By Djinn
1: Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other. --Euripides
It's raining, and Stacy is soaking wet.
Corinne is in Tampa, visiting her sister, so Wilson is home alone when she shows up on his doorstep. She looks as if she walked the entire distance, exhausted, and the rain doesn't disguise the fact that she's been crying. Wilson gets one of his wife's enormous, fluffy beach towels and throws it around her shoulders and she clutches at it, wrapping herself up in it. He knows that this is bad, because Stacy isn't the sort to cry over little things, or over big things, or over anything at all. She is a strong woman, and Wilson has always admired her for that.
"I'm losing him." She chokes out, when Wilson does not ask what's wrong, and Wilson thinks, you've lost him. She'd lost him the moment a scalpel bit into his damaged leg, and she had to have known that. She is a cool, logical woman-- she had to have weighed his life against his love for her, and decided which she valued more.
"He needs you." Wilson says, because he still believes it. House needs her and he hates her and he loves her, and he doesn't know which will win out in the end, but he can't see House ever truly forgiving her.
"He won't look at me, he won't let me touch him." Stacy gasps. Her hair drips wet on his shoulder as she curls into his arms, alarmingly broken, vulnerable, needy. "He's like a stranger. I don't know him anymore."
"What did you expect?" He asks. She saved him, and she destroyed him.
"I had to do what I did." She insists, hands digging into his shoulders, nails denting his skin. She sounds as if she is seeking absolution. "Would you have done any different?"
"It wasn't my choice." It wasn't her choice, either, though she was the one who made it. Wilson loves House as much as she does, values his life just as much, but he likes to think he would have made a different choice. Then again, he hadn't been there until after. He hadn't seen his closest friend writhing in pain--he hadn't watched his heart stop beating. Perhaps, sometimes, there are no right choices, only different sorts of wrong.
"I saved his life," Stacy says, sounding dead, "but I destroyed everything else."
The kiss is like punishment, and Stacy tastes like rain and cigarettes. Her nails bite into his skin, viciously, but she only pulls him closer.
2: Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. --H.L. Mencken
House's first week back has been hard on the entire hospital, and Wilson is exhausted, but home is the last place that he wants to be, so when Cuddy asks, flatly, for a ride home--her car was broken into recently, and is at the shop having a new window put in--he accedes graciously. He is a great believer in inter-office politics, but he has never played such games with Lisa Cuddy. She sees him, most of the time, as an extension of House, and that does not bother him. There are worse things that he could be.
Cuddy eyes the rosary hanging from his rear-view mirror skeptically as she slides into his car, and raises an eyebrow at him. "Is this some sort of internalized anti-Semitic sentiment, Dr. Wilson?" She asks, amused, and he blushes slightly as he pulls out of the garage.
"Julie put it there." He says, because of course she would, for the same reason that she puts out Christmas lights every year, and banishes his menorah to the formal sitting room. It is not that she minds that he is Jewish, it is only that she isn't, and therefore, she doesn't care.
"Does she use this car?" Cuddy asks, and when Wilson shakes his head, she reaches up and pulls it off with one sharp tug. Red, oval beads scatter across the floor of the car, and Wilson can't stop the sharp laugh that escapes him, or the uncomfortable sense of vindication. Cuddy tips the cheap plastic and thin twine out of her hand and onto the carpet with a wry look. "I hope this doesn't mean that we're going to hell."
Wilson has to laugh again at that, and he glances at her out of the corner of his eye. "I've probably destroyed things more sacred than a two-dollar plastic necklace."
"Like marriage vows?" Cuddy jibes, no real heat in the accusation, and there is something so familiar about that comment, so completely something House might say, that it doesn't cut him at all. If anything, it feels strangely comfortable, and it doesn't occur to him how strange it is that something that reminds him of House should put him so at ease. Cuddy watches him for a moment, as if waiting for a reaction, but when none comes, she turns her gaze out the window, and the rest of the ride passes in silence.
He can never remember later if he was invited in, or if he invited himself, but he discovers that Cuddy makes excellent margaritas, and that tequila makes her eyes slightly glassy and her cheeks flush pink. The alcohol makes her strangely pliable, strips away the politico and the bureaucrat, leaving behind a woman he's not certain he even knows.
"I've destroyed things, too." She tells him, seriously, her nails tickling the hairs at the back of his neck. He thinks of House limping down the hallway that evening, his right leg seeming like a dead weight. "We're more alike than you think."
She leaves dark red lipstick on his collar and the smell of sweat and sex all over him, and when he passes by her in the clinic the next day, she smiles as if she barely knows his name.
3: Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. --Iris Murdoch
There are plenty of new-guy welcoming rituals that Princeton-Plainsboro staff kept alive, but most of these were the purview of the respective department heads. Wilson tried to at least have lunch with all of his new staff, to try to prepare them for the enormous stress of working in Oncology. The Diagnostics Department, however, did not have such a considerate head, and did not have a large enough staff that the obligation might fall to another staff member. The first week, Wilson told himself that it was none of his business.
At the end of the second week, he stuck his head inside the Diagnostics conference room and took pity on the Australian that was studiously chewing on the cap of a blue pen. "How are you settling in?" He asked, lightly, and the boy practically jumped, absorbed in the New York Times crossword.
"Er ... all right." He answered, uncertainly, too-long blonde hair falling across his eyes. "Dr. Wilson, right?"
Wilson smiled, engagingly, and stepped into the conference room, offering the younger man his hand. "James Wilson. I'm the head of Oncology."
He dropped his pen and shook the offered hand. "Robert Chase."
Wilson knew that--he'd been the one who reviewed Chase's resume and drafted the acceptance letter that he'd been sent. The only thing he hadn't done was field the call from Rowan Chase that ensured his employment. Wilson thought he probably knew a great deal more about Robert Chase than the man who hired him did. "Come on, Robert," he said, brightly, "I'll buy you a drink."
Two beers was nowhere near enough to get Chase drunk, but it was enough to make his accent slightly thicker and his demeanor a bit more friendly. He hadn't been in America very long, and when Wilson asked the inevitable question, why here, why a teaching hospital in New Jersey, the answer was one he should have expected.
"I wanted to be somewhere where I could be my own man." Chase told him, seriously, and Wilson nodded. "Besides, Dr. House is famous. It's a good opportunity."
"You're not bored?" House hadn't had a single patient during Chase's two weeks at Princeton-Plainsboro.
He shrugged. "I don't mind being bored." Wilson silently applauded this--it was an excellent quality for a fellow of the Diagnostics Department to possess. "If you don't mind me saying so," Chase said after a pause, "shouldn't Dr. House be the one trying to make me feel comfortable around here?"
Wilson laughed. "Dr. House ... doesn't have much patience for other people." He said. "Let me buy you another beer."
A week later, Chase asked Wilson to help him move some new furniture into his apartment, and Wilson realized with some surprise that this was because he was the only person Chase really knew in New Jersey. Wilson had seen him flirting with nurses during his clinic hours, but he was the only fellow in Diagnostics, and his job hadn't brought him into contact with many other people. He'd probably spoken more with Wilson than he had with House.
Moving a couch, two armchairs and a big-screen tv turned into a few beers, which turned into lunch the next day, and Wilson knew that for all Chase's posturing, he was likely only spending time with Wilson because he didn't want to be alone. Wilson wasn't sure if being turned to as the only option should bother him.
House made a few snide comments about Wilson adopting his puppy, but not much else. It was three weeks later, after Chase finished up on his third case ever as a member of diagnostics, that he and Chase started sleeping together. It wasn't love and it wasn't exactly just sex--Wilson thought that, maybe, it was connection. Chase was a stranger in a strange land, and somehow, for Wilson, this is what comfort always lead to, whether he intended it or not.
This continued for almost three months until one day, without any warning, House appeared leaning in the doorway of his office and asked, with a raised eyebrow, "Am I going to have to tell Chase to stay away from my boyfriend?"
"I wasn't aware you had one." Wilson muttered in response, but when he went over to Chase's apartment that night, he left after the second beer, and declined the next three invitations. House announced that he'd hired another fellow, and when he showed the picture to Wilson, he told him that she'd be nice to look at. If Wilson detected the meaning, 'She'll keep Chase's eyes off you', it was easy to pretend he imagined it.
4: Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. --Robert Frost
Wilson was attracted to Allison Cameron the moment that they met, which was not that surprising. She was, after all, a beautiful woman. Beautiful, passionate, and kind. She was the sort of doctor who legitimately studied medicine in the hopes that she could save lives, and for no other reason. Wilson's first impression of her, after the beauty, was that she was in the absolute wrong department. Here was a woman who thought that the patient was the most important thing, who lived in the belief that if she tried hard enough, she could make the world a better place. He hoped that working here wouldn't break her.
At least, not any more than she was already broken.
Three weeks into her fellowship, Wilson came into the conference room looking for House and found Cameron doing his mail. When he flashed a questioning glance at Chase, the Australian smiled around the coffee stirrer he was chewing on and gestured to her brightly, saying, "She pulled Dr. House's consult requests out of the trash."
Cameron turned at the comment, glasses sliding down her nose, and gave them a disapproving look. "It doesn't bother you that he just throws them away?" She demanded, and Wilson was sure that the blank look on his face more or less matched the one on Chase's.
Wilson recovered first, and gave her a sincere smile. "Dr. House is very selective." He told her, ignoring Chase's snickering. "Leave it for now. Let me buy you lunch."
Cameron spent the entire lunch outlining her many frustrations with House, and it was when he was about halfway through his pasta that he realized that Cameron had a crush on House. It was a vain, fruitless thing--she was far too sweet, too needy, too naive to ever really appeal to House. Nonetheless, there was something about the realization that ... bothered him. Something about Cameron thinking she could fix House, trying to fix House, bothered him.
"Tell me if I'm being to forward ..." she started, when the conversation lulled, "... but why are you friends with Dr. House?" At the surprised look he gave her, she back-pedaled quickly. "It's only, you seem so nice, and he's such a ..."
"Asshole?"
Cameron giggled, more from surprise than amusement. "Well, yes. I guess that would be one way of putting it."
He guessed that this was the part where he was supposed to tell her that House wasn't as bad as he seemed--that beneath his misanthropic exterior there was a soft, cuddly center, that you could reach out to if you only tried hard enough. She probably would even believe it, and he supposed that showed just how naive she was.
"I'm used to the way House is." He told her, as simple as that, and changed the subject.
He had five more lunches with Allison before he invited himself over to her apartment for dinner one night, with the promise of home-made lasagna. Two glasses of red wine had the familiar topic of House's many flaws coming up again, this time Cameron seeming a little more passionate about them. When he kissed her, she slapped him. Hard. It was about what he expected.
When she offered him a slightly ambivalent invitation for a second dinner three days later, that was about what he expected, as well. She only had one glass of red wine, and had the temerity to act surprised when they ended up in the bedroom, sprawled across her canary-yellow bedspread.
"Aren't you married?" She gasped at one point, and he replied, without a thought, "Does it matter?"
"I get it now," she murmured, as he was leaving. She was still nude, yellow sheets drawn up to conceal herself, hair spread out across the pillows. "You're friends with House because, deep down, you're an asshole, too."
He glanced back at her at that, tucking his tie into a jacket pocket. "House is never going to fall in love with you, you know." He replied, and shut the bedroom door behind him.
5: Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual. --Octavio Paz
When Wilson had imagined it, (and he will admit that he has, frequently, because there are things about himself that he pretends not to recognize, but this is not one of them) he had always pictured House being the one to finally draw it out into the open, because House is the observant one, and he had to catch on sooner or later. He hadn't imagined romance, precisely, because he knows House, and while he is capable of flowers and platitudes, they are not who he is. What he imagined was this:
He and House would be relaxing somewhere--House's apartment, one of their offices, hiding from Cuddy in an exam room--and House would look over at him and ask, What are we doing, Jimmy?
(In his mind, House calls him 'Jimmy', because he has never heard House call him 'James', and he cannot picture it. It is a childish nickname, but House is a childish man, so it fits.)
He imagines that he would know right away what House meant, but play otherwise, too uncertain to let himself believe, and he pictures himself replying, We're watching tv.
House will see through him of course, and immediately respond, You know that's not what I meant. Sometimes he imagines that House sounds annoyed and impatient, and at other times, he imagines that he just sounds tired. He knows House will say something about his marriages, about how he has been looking for something in all those women because he can't admit that it was right in front of him all along.
The imaginings varied after that, sometimes becoming little more than that, a calm acknowledgment of what lies between them, and at other times becoming something entirely different--sticky, sweaty fantasies that leave him flushed and panting, looking for any chance to be alone.
What actually happened was this:
House came back from his date with Cameron tightly strung and just slightly buzzed from the red wine, tie already shoved into one of his pockets, and the top two buttons of his collar undone. Wilson watched his lips as he complained about something, telling himself that he wasn't looking for the tell-tale trace of lipstick, then changed his mind and told himself that he was, because perhaps that was slightly less self-incriminating.
House brought two beers back from the kitchen and they sat there in silence for some time, watching a re-run of the O.C., until House finally looked at Wilson out of the corner of his eye and asked, "Don't you want to know how it went?"
Wilson took another long pull on his beer, and considered the question seriously. Cameron thought that she loved House, and more than that, she thought that she could make House love her in return. No part of that would have made this date a wonderful, life-affirming experience for House. A part of him was absolutely certain that House was much happier sitting there, drinking a beer with him than he would be on any date with Cameron. He'd never been so certain of where he stood with House before in his life, and the realization made him suddenly bold.
"You can tell me tomorrow." He said, and reached across to take House's beer from his hand, setting it on the coffee table. House's perplexed expression melted into something else entirely when Wilson all but crawled on top of him to kiss him.
As first kisses go, it wasn't exceptional. The angle wasn't perfect, and Wilson was far too worried about House's bad leg to put as much of his weight into it as he might like. House's hands were freezing cold and slightly damp from the beer, but when they came up to Wilson's shoulders, it was to pull him closer, not push him away.
They necked on the couch like teenagers, twisting in an effort to remove clothes but finding themselves entirely too tangled together to manage any sort of success, and when they finally broke apart, both of them gasping for air, they were laughing.
"Why, Jimmy," House said, grinning, "what would your wife say?"
"I didn't know you were planning on letting her watch." Wilson replied without skipping a beat. "Then again, you've always been an exhibitionist."
"That video was Stacy's idea." He defended, and then pulled Wilson back with a hand on the back of his neck to kiss him again, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and perhaps it was. You could, after all, only fight this sort of thing for so long.
"If you say 'I love you'," House panted when they were halfway between the living room and the bedroom, while working furiously on the buttons of Wilson's shirt, "I'm kicking you out."
Wilson just smiled and kissed him again, shrugging out of the shirt. He didn't have to say the words for them to be true.
FIN