Private Lives
All of them arrange themselves in various positions around her desk. He is closest, standing to her right while Foreman takes a seat in front of her, Chase and Taub stand behind him and Thirteen leans wearily on the chair opposite of Foreman.
He'd come to talk to her about his patient but had been interrupted when his team came knocking on her door. All four of them was usually not a good sign but he chose to ignore any bad feeling that might arise.
She had looked confused when all of them entered her office, laying down her pen and shoving her files aside, obviously knowing that little work would get accomplished.
He could tell she had braced herself for what they might all be wanting; the hope that him and his team hadn't screwed up so easy to read on her face.
Which they hadn't. Yet.
“Clearly it's not working. You have to stop the vaccine,” she tells him.
Another go around in how he should treat his patient. They never did agree and now is no different. Normally he would goad her about not being a real doctor or being out of touch with medicine because she spent more time in a boutique looking for low cut tops than in the clinic. But she was probably there more than him, so he cut her some slack today and let the jibe crack and fizzle in his mind.
“Sure, give up. Let her die on schedule,” he shoots back to her with a hint of agitation.
“It's better than speeding up the schedule. How quickly did this come on?” she asks, to him or to the room. He cannot tell.
The back and forth begins. He listens, he interjects, he turns the puzzle around and around in his head to try and figure it out. He lets the cogs work like a clock in his mind.
Inception of an idea. Realization of parts to the whole. Potential resolution.
The process repeats itself many times before it comes to a true and complete end. He stands over her and watches as his team filters out of her office, leaving her and him alone.
“That's pretty cool what I did there, right? Wanna make out?” he offers, looking down at her with a pleased expression.
When she looks up, there's a mischievous smile on her face, as if she really has contemplated taking him up on his offer.
“Go control your team,” is the response that he gets.
The response he expected all along.
-
She's somewhere between lucidity and sleep when her cell sounds on the nightstand. It lights up the night like a phosphorescent glow stick. Idly, she reaches behind her for a presence, the body that occupies space in her bed. Nothing. Only her own form in the endless rivers and ravines of sheets. Beside her, the red digits on her alarm clock burn the time and she lets out a low growl of agitation.
“It's 3 am. This better be something incredibly important,” she groggily sighs into the receiver and rolls onto her side.
“I've got day-night reversal,” he says without a hint of amusement in his voice.
“No, you don't. But after I am done with you, you might.”
“Oh, Cuddy. Say something else dirty to me.”
“I...”
“Oh, right. Lucas is probably right next to you. We need to keep this on the D.L.”
“He's not here,” she answers with a sharpness that she instantly regrets.
They don't have problems, she and Lucas. Except he's not around a lot, not at the moments she thought she'd have him. Most nights are just like this-she's alone with Rachel's steady breathing in the monitor. She scoffs slightly, realizing her personal life is day-night reversal. She operates on a different shift than the man she has chosen to share a little piece of herself with.
“So another night alone. This is really working out well for you,” he tells her from the other end of the line.
“Shut up. As if you could do any better,” she bites off to him. The words hang in the air, dead space and silence between them. She swallows and begins again. “What do you want?”
“Just letting you know about my patient and how I might be using a day pass on her. You know, let her go and then follow her to see what she does. Hey! No wonder you like the young sapling wrapping his limbs around you. He's a proxy of...”
“Leave Lucas out of this. And if you want to discharge your patient, that's your own business but I'm not paying you to run around the city all day. You're a doctor and you're paid to be in the hospital. Take a day off. Follow her. Don't follow her. How you spend it is up to you,” she scolds into the phone.
“But it's medical research.”
“So I can expect a piece submitted to the New Jersey Medical Journal in a few weeks?”
He huffs on the other end like an exasperated child. “I need the day tomorrow. Don't expect me in.”
“Yeah, that's what I thought,” she affirms. “Goodnight, House.”
She punches off her phone without even waiting for a reply.
-
The park is full of green and yellow and purple-all the hues of spring- and the clouds above are mere wisps against the sea of blue. In these, he tries to make shapes and those shapes into objects that exist all around him. Making something out of nothing but the cotton balls of the stratosphere.
“Woman with small breasts,” he calls out to no one in particular.
He turns his head to the side and picks another cloud. “Woman with medium breasts,” he nods in satisfaction.
Suddenly she blocks his view, her blue eyes staring down at him, brown locks creeping down to meet his body.
“Woman with large breasts,” he says up to her and idly thinks about wrapping his hand in her hair like a loom.
“Deja vu a little bit,” she ignores him.
“Only this time Cameron didn't send you and I won't be popping vicodin while you try to send me to lockdown.”
“Thank God we've gotten past that,” she says, closing her eyes.
He spins his legs around on the concrete table top and sits upright, putting his New Balances on the bench.
“So that poses the question: Why are you here?” he asks.
She surprises him by taking a seat on the picnic table beside him, her heels clinking on the concrete. He tries to steady his gaze on her ankles but loses the battle and travels up her well toned calves, her knees, and eventually to her thighs as her skirt falls to the side and inches up slightly.
“I was actually needing some air. I decided to take a spin around campus and found you here amongst all the happiness, miserable,” she quirks her lips a little.
“Now you're just assuming,” he says sarcastically. “I was having a nice time, imagining the finer aspects of women.”
“Ah, yes, breasts. That was it, right?”
“I remember I got to touch yours one time.”
“And then you kept talking and ruined it,” she counters.
“What happened to the old saying 'Let bygones be bygones'?” he frowns. "And I touched them before that," he reminds her.
She shakes her head and then scuffs her heel on the bench. Her face looks troubled. Like she's remembering something she'd rather not. Something that could never become a bygone, just like much of their history together. He has always hung his infarction over her head like a gray cloud and he knows, even though he's tried to hide it, she's seen Mayfield over his.
Will always see Mayfield over his.
Suddenly it doesn't feel like they've done any growing at all, except older, and that she has a stack of indiscretions against him, sitting inside of her chest, each carefully cataloged with the date and time and hurt.
Now, too much time has passed and it seems dangerous to offer apologies for the past and voice hope for second chances.
Or a three hundredth chance.
He doesn't want to vocalize that he remembers the feel of her in his palm as vivid as the moment he let his fingers wrap lightly around her; as vivid of the moment he let his fingers let her go.
But he had messed that up too.
“We're fine,” she offers again.
He lets the lie sit between them, saying nothing and floating around them on the spring air.