Unprotected, 2
Title: Unprotected, 2
Pairing, Characters: House/Cuddy established. DDX team, OCs.
Warning: Explicit content in some chapters. It is always safe to assume some angst.
Summary: This one asks the question, what would the sharkverse House and Cuddy relationship be, without sex?
Comments welcome.
A/N: Sorry for the lateness in updating and responding to comments. Jury duty.
“HOUSE!” Cuddy pulled a pair of pajamas out of Rachel’s dresser drawer and kicked off her shoes on her way into the bathroom. “HOUSE!” she yelled over her shoulder. “GET ME A CLEAN TOWEL OUT OF THE DRYER!”
“Ya vol, meine frau!” he called out from the den.
House was learning German. He’d been listening to tapes, watching dubbed movies, reading vocabulary books, and practicing pronunciations all week - and Cuddy did mean, all week.
The coffee table was cluttered with stacks of German-language magazines, comic books, and a dictionary; the old tape player in his car and his portable cd player were being put to almost constant use; at work he was racking up outrageous download charges for services that Cuddy didn’t dare examine, driving his fellows crazy by reading foreign medical journals aloud and hurling insults they couldn’t understand. This morning he’d woken her up - 7 am on a Saturday, for the love of God -- with a rousing rendition of “You Can Call Me Al” in German, thereby reaching a whole new level of annoying. Cuddy couldn’t make sense of the lyrics to “You Can Call Me Al” even when they were in English.
For the last hour he’d been in the den, just sitting there looking fantastic in that deep green shirt, learning German, while she tried to get the house presentable, make sure Rachel was bathed and pajamaed, and figure out what the hell she was going to wear. It helped not at all that every time she asked him for an opinion, House said something in German that she hoped meant “You look lovely in everything” - which would have been flattering, if also completely worthless -- but probably translated to “I am too busy screwing around and learning German to care.”
The bathroom door cracked open, and a towel flew in her direction before it slammed closed again. Cuddy caught it in one hand, and looked at her harried expression in the mirror.
The doorbell rang.
“HOUSE!”
“Chillen der vay outzen, Cuddy,” she heard through the door. He was probably on the bed, his sneakered feet crossed at the ankle, his hands interlocked behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. “It’s just the babysitters, and I gave them a key.”
She ran a brush through her hair as Rachel toweled off. “I thought Wilson was the babysitter.”
“Wilson bailed at the last minute. Taking Kristen to a B&B.”
“Seriously?” Her reflection was quizzical as she applied her lipstick.
House’s tone was exasperated: “Your assistant is, and I quote, ‘a perfectly extraordinary woman, and she is breaking Wilson’s heart.’”
“Whereas a perfectly ordinary woman would break his neck,” Cuddy muttered, opening her mascara. “Could you please get Rachel’s dinner out of the oven while I finish making myself fabulous?”
A mere fifteen frantic minutes later, she’d executed a flawless set of smoky eyes, pulled on a pair of slimming dark slacks and a blue cashmere sweater, and was feeling, not fabulous exactly, but as close to it as a maxed-out credit card, the perfect haircut, and mad cosmetician skills could bring her.
April Townsend, wearing a pair of skinny jeans and a maroon t-shirt that fell almost to her knees, was sitting on the sofa, her laptop satchel beside her, a ball of leaf-green yarn and a set of knitting needles in her lap.
“Cool,” she said, tucking her little stick legs up under her. “Roadrunner’s on.”
Note to self, Cuddy thought dismally: wear nothing with thighs, ever again. She scrolled through the directory on her phone, and found a pen and notepad on the writing desk.
“Ja. Wait, is that the t-shirt? Oh, mein Gott, it is." House took off his reading glasses, the German translation of Jack Cannon, Boy Detective on his lap forgotten momentarily, and turned his head to his new PA, who was standing behind the couch looking out of place. “You know they won’t win another football game for the rest of the season, now. The sports team t-shirt curse is almost as bad as the rock band t-shirt curse.”
“I know. She has issues.” Fizzou shrugged. “But she is hot.”
“Ain’t that always the way.”
Cuddy didn’t pursue this. Conventional wisdom would tell her to ignore an employee’s annoying behaviors while subtly encouraging, and then rewarding, in increasing increments, his desirable ones. In House’s case that would mean deleting without comment the “team of four groveling minions” stipulation he’d sneakily written into his contract, and giving him small perks every time he did his job or bypassed a chance to abuse a subordinate, until finally, he made appropriate hires and managed them well.
Conventional wisdom knew nothing about training Gregory House. Ignore his demand for groveling minions, and he’d hire five snarky miscreants instead. Encourage him to take a medical student, he’d gladly find a way to have the medical student implicated in a felony. Reward him for delegating something or for not picking on Taub, and he’d delegate the picking on of Taub to Foreman. Offer him an assistant as a reward for using the new computer system, and he’d coopt another department head’s assistant. Ignore that, and he’d bully said assistant into doing something that would crash the hard drives.
Subtly encourage him to get his own assistant, and he’d hire an enigmatic hulk who never used his own name and preferred to be paid in cash.
“Which episode is this?” April asked, watching the television as she did something mysterious with the knitting.
House studied the screen for a moment. “Run over by a train, struck by lightning, drops a baby grand piano on himself. “ He went back to learning German. Shaking her head, Cuddy finished writing up instructions on Rachel’s bedtime routine and the emergency contact numbers of her neighbor and her sister.
“You can’t tell roadrunner episodes apart!” Rachel exclaimed, popping up excitedly. “They’re all alike!”
“The show does have a certain gestalt, I guess,” April considered.
“What I can’t figure out is why Wile E keeps ordering his murder materials from the same crappy company,” Fizzou mused. “He’s gotta know the people at Acme are just screwing with him, by now.”
“Well, you could make the case that he secretly wants to have things blow up in his face,” April suggested, as if psychoanalyzing a cartoon character was a natural thing for her. “But I think Acme holds the monopoly. It is very nihilist, in a third-grade kind of way.”
“You were a nihilist in third grade?” House inquired.
She nodded and continued knitting. “I’ve always thought that whole ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger’ thing, actually came from an elementary school gym teacher.”
House opened his wallet and peeled off a twenty. “Good news, Fang,” he said, handing it over to Fizzou. “I burned up the disgustingly healthy dinner your mom was planning to leave for you.”
“Yay, pizza!”
He took Cuddy’s arm. “Don’t touch the piano.”
“Not my first choice, Dude.”
House’s source of conventional wisdom, who went by the name of Wilson, advised compromise, so Cuddy picked the movie, and House picked the restaurant. Surprisingly, she chose a flick that did not drown him in estrogen, and didn’t blink when he took her to a barely-glorified truck stop, where he looked forward to feasting on ribs that had been simmering all day and a plate of extra-crunchy onion rings.
House was trying to be open and vulnerable about his fear and pain - conventional wisdom also said that women just loved that vulnerable shit - and discuss with his wife her personal hopes, dreams, and aspirations, relating to her as a woman, a friend, an equal partner. He was not going to be intense. He was not going to be complicated and difficult. He was not under any circumstances going to think of her as a sex object or as his workaholic boss. He was not going to argue with her or challenge her authority or hit on her or push her to be rational or make her mad or do any of the other things he was really quite good at. No, conventional wisdom said he was supposed to sit here and be charming and present and supportive and date her, and that was, by God, what he was going to do.
“So. Wilson and Kristen, again?” she said into the brittle quiet. They were being really careful with each other lately, and House didn’t know what to do about it.
“Kristen saw a mouse in her kitchen.”
She put her menu down and gave him a curious look.
“Wilson has a cat,” he explained.
“Oh, so she borrowed his cat, and one thing led to another?”
“If by ‘one thing’, you mean Wilson’s wuss cat climbed into a heating vent to get away from the mouse -- which in fact was Kristen’s neighbor’s kid’s escaped hamster -- and by ‘another’, you mean, Wilson got stuck in a crawlspace trying to retrieve the cat, and the landlord had to come and pull him out by the ass, then, yeah, that’s precisely what happened.”
When she laughed, it was really difficult to not think of her as a sex object. “That’s adorable.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“This is good,” she said, very unconvincingly. “Stress reducing.”
She meant, of course, the lack of sex.
She was, of course, full of crap. It wasn’t stress reducing at all. Sex never stressed him out.
Well, except for that one time two weeks ago, right after his exposure, when he was sick from the meds and tired and trying to deal with her stupid and totally pointless anxieties. Except for that one completely justified and understandable time, sex never caused him even a little bit of stress. Except for that one time, which they were never ever ever going to talk about, House actually found seeing Cuddy naked to be extremely stress-reducing.
“Right,” he said.
“Couples,” she said, “should face problems together.”
“Yep.”
“You don’t have a problem, I don’t have a problem, we have a problem. And we will work on those problems, together, when we know exactly what they are or, probably, aren’t. In the meantime it’s not a good idea to, you know, complicate the problems any further.”
House had already had this conversation in his head about a hundred times in the last ten days, so he knew where it was headed; he just didn’t know how long it would take to get there. Cuddy was looking at him and breathing, her chest moving in a way that made it hard to concentrate.
“Complicate?” he asked. “So you think this no-sex thing should continue for the next three weeks? That’s a terrible idea, Cuddy. One of your worst ever.”
“House, I just think that sex is not good for us in this circumstance.”
“I think sex is good in all circumstances. I want to be sure you understand that.”
Cuddy rolled her eyes. “Trust me, your position on that matter is crystal clear. But right now, with the uncertainty, and with what … happened, I think that, a short stretch of abstinence is healthier for us.”
“I don’t know when you started thinking about making us healthy, but I wish you wouldn’t. Really, Cuddy, just stop it. We were both perfectly content being dysfunctional, until.” House cut off the sentence, because it was veering toward that one time, and they were never ever going to talk about that one time. Ever.
“It’s just three weeks, House. Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with, and we can … proceed accordingly.”
He wanted to argue with her some more but there was no point to it. He knew could wear her down in the long run, but he didn’t want it to be a concession or an obligation.
She gave him an impish, feminine smile. “Anticipation could be fun.”
“No, it can’t. I anticipated you for years. It was not fun,” he insisted instantly. “Not at all.”
“Liar.” She laughed again, and his heart was throttled. “Yes, it was - and that was even before you knew how it would end.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but he was too confounded to think of a single response.
The waitress sashayed by, with a pot of coffee in her hand. “Where’s your little buckaroo, Doc?”
“Who?” Cuddy gave him a quizzical look.
“I bring Rachel here sometimes,” House admitted quietly.
“Without me?”
“We don’t want to wake you.”
“At night?” Her eyes flew open wider. “On school nights?”
He braced himself for the inevitable lecture on responsible parenting. “Unclench, Cuddy. Rachel and I come here to talk and eat donuts sometimes, that’s all. “
“What do you talk about?” She bit her lip. “Does she talk about her school problems with you?”
“That’s between me and Rachel.”
“Here?! In this neighborhood? At night?”
“She’s safe,” he groaned. “They make their own donuts and brew a great cup of coffee. There are more patrolmen here on any given morning than at police headquarters. ”
“Morning? You bring my six year old here after midnight?”
“Our six year old,” he dared her. “Because we’re a couple and we have joint problems - like Rachel’s ‘aggression issues’ at school. Right?”
She scowled. “Right.”
“How goes the Coleman problem?” he asked as he signed the check. To hell with the no-work-topics rules; conventional wisdom didn’t know Cuddy as well as he did.
Nan Coleman had been driving her and the rest of the hospital staff batty for a year, at least, with her little power trips about everything from copier toner to petty cash reimbursements. Cuddy was nothing if not fiercely loyal to her employees, and refused to fire a competent underling simply because she pissed everyone off - this was one of her personality flaws that made her most unhappy, but it was a very, very good thing for House -- and had been doing her best to soothe all the ruffled feathers and mediate the personality conflicts without taking sides. The last House had heard Sparkman was inciting one of his classic bitchbellions over the issuance of nursing uniforms.
She sighed, but her eyes were sparking for the first time all evening. “Jeffrey’s right, which only means I’d like to kill him five minutes after I kill Nan. I have a little triage thing going on with ‘fairness’ right now, and a shortage of pink extra-long scrub pants hasn’t made it into the waiting room yet. It’s still out in the parking lot, behind Donald Trump having to pay more taxes.”
House made a sympathetic face and took a long swallow of water. He was doing everything he could to offset the side effects of the meds; he had enough pain in his life without kidney stones.
“I hate them,” he declared. “I hope they die.”
“What?”
“That’s what Rachel says her very best friend Emma says when Isabella and Claire are being mean to her. ‘I hate them, I hope they die.’ According to Rachel it is very supportive.”
“You’re taking relationship advice from Rachel?” Cuddy’s expression indicated that this was one of those things that House did and most other people did not.
“You made me promise not to take it from Wilson anymore,” he reminded her.
Cuddy chose to change the subject. “Why German?”
“Why not?”
She laid her left hand over his; their rings touched. “You’re always learning, aren’t you?” she asked admiringly. “You really never do stop soaking things in.”
The jukebox music changed, to Bonnie Raitt.
There were only a few things House missed from his youth more than running, and one of them was something he’d never done when he had the use of both legs: dance with Lisa Cuddy. He’d been a good dancer -- his mother had seen to that -- and relied on his grace on the floor to make up for his social awkwardness and general failings as a date.
Cuddy’s thumb traced over his knuckles, caressed his fingernails. That he’d never know what it was like to cha-cha or foxtrot or tango with this woman, to spin her, laughing, around with one hand, to feel her arch her body, her lithe, tough little body, into his, his outstretched palms across her narrow back and muscular shoulder blades …
House winced, and Cuddy, saw it. The furrows in her forehead, caused no doubt by him, deepened. “House? Is the pain getting worse, now that --- ? Are you trying to distract yourself?”
“Come on, Beautiful, let's go home,” he said gloomily, dropping his napkin onto the table with a few bills for the tip. She'd made it clear what she wanted, and House was proceeding accordingly.
If it killed him.
Part 3: Of whales, killer.
Pairing, Characters: House/Cuddy established. DDX team, OCs.
Warning: Explicit content in some chapters. It is always safe to assume some angst.
Summary: This one asks the question, what would the sharkverse House and Cuddy relationship be, without sex?
Comments welcome.
A/N: Sorry for the lateness in updating and responding to comments. Jury duty.
“HOUSE!” Cuddy pulled a pair of pajamas out of Rachel’s dresser drawer and kicked off her shoes on her way into the bathroom. “HOUSE!” she yelled over her shoulder. “GET ME A CLEAN TOWEL OUT OF THE DRYER!”
“Ya vol, meine frau!” he called out from the den.
House was learning German. He’d been listening to tapes, watching dubbed movies, reading vocabulary books, and practicing pronunciations all week - and Cuddy did mean, all week.
The coffee table was cluttered with stacks of German-language magazines, comic books, and a dictionary; the old tape player in his car and his portable cd player were being put to almost constant use; at work he was racking up outrageous download charges for services that Cuddy didn’t dare examine, driving his fellows crazy by reading foreign medical journals aloud and hurling insults they couldn’t understand. This morning he’d woken her up - 7 am on a Saturday, for the love of God -- with a rousing rendition of “You Can Call Me Al” in German, thereby reaching a whole new level of annoying. Cuddy couldn’t make sense of the lyrics to “You Can Call Me Al” even when they were in English.
For the last hour he’d been in the den, just sitting there looking fantastic in that deep green shirt, learning German, while she tried to get the house presentable, make sure Rachel was bathed and pajamaed, and figure out what the hell she was going to wear. It helped not at all that every time she asked him for an opinion, House said something in German that she hoped meant “You look lovely in everything” - which would have been flattering, if also completely worthless -- but probably translated to “I am too busy screwing around and learning German to care.”
The bathroom door cracked open, and a towel flew in her direction before it slammed closed again. Cuddy caught it in one hand, and looked at her harried expression in the mirror.
The doorbell rang.
“HOUSE!”
“Chillen der vay outzen, Cuddy,” she heard through the door. He was probably on the bed, his sneakered feet crossed at the ankle, his hands interlocked behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. “It’s just the babysitters, and I gave them a key.”
She ran a brush through her hair as Rachel toweled off. “I thought Wilson was the babysitter.”
“Wilson bailed at the last minute. Taking Kristen to a B&B.”
“Seriously?” Her reflection was quizzical as she applied her lipstick.
House’s tone was exasperated: “Your assistant is, and I quote, ‘a perfectly extraordinary woman, and she is breaking Wilson’s heart.’”
“Whereas a perfectly ordinary woman would break his neck,” Cuddy muttered, opening her mascara. “Could you please get Rachel’s dinner out of the oven while I finish making myself fabulous?”
A mere fifteen frantic minutes later, she’d executed a flawless set of smoky eyes, pulled on a pair of slimming dark slacks and a blue cashmere sweater, and was feeling, not fabulous exactly, but as close to it as a maxed-out credit card, the perfect haircut, and mad cosmetician skills could bring her.
April Townsend, wearing a pair of skinny jeans and a maroon t-shirt that fell almost to her knees, was sitting on the sofa, her laptop satchel beside her, a ball of leaf-green yarn and a set of knitting needles in her lap.
“Cool,” she said, tucking her little stick legs up under her. “Roadrunner’s on.”
Note to self, Cuddy thought dismally: wear nothing with thighs, ever again. She scrolled through the directory on her phone, and found a pen and notepad on the writing desk.
“Ja. Wait, is that the t-shirt? Oh, mein Gott, it is." House took off his reading glasses, the German translation of Jack Cannon, Boy Detective on his lap forgotten momentarily, and turned his head to his new PA, who was standing behind the couch looking out of place. “You know they won’t win another football game for the rest of the season, now. The sports team t-shirt curse is almost as bad as the rock band t-shirt curse.”
“I know. She has issues.” Fizzou shrugged. “But she is hot.”
“Ain’t that always the way.”
Cuddy didn’t pursue this. Conventional wisdom would tell her to ignore an employee’s annoying behaviors while subtly encouraging, and then rewarding, in increasing increments, his desirable ones. In House’s case that would mean deleting without comment the “team of four groveling minions” stipulation he’d sneakily written into his contract, and giving him small perks every time he did his job or bypassed a chance to abuse a subordinate, until finally, he made appropriate hires and managed them well.
Conventional wisdom knew nothing about training Gregory House. Ignore his demand for groveling minions, and he’d hire five snarky miscreants instead. Encourage him to take a medical student, he’d gladly find a way to have the medical student implicated in a felony. Reward him for delegating something or for not picking on Taub, and he’d delegate the picking on of Taub to Foreman. Offer him an assistant as a reward for using the new computer system, and he’d coopt another department head’s assistant. Ignore that, and he’d bully said assistant into doing something that would crash the hard drives.
Subtly encourage him to get his own assistant, and he’d hire an enigmatic hulk who never used his own name and preferred to be paid in cash.
“Which episode is this?” April asked, watching the television as she did something mysterious with the knitting.
House studied the screen for a moment. “Run over by a train, struck by lightning, drops a baby grand piano on himself. “ He went back to learning German. Shaking her head, Cuddy finished writing up instructions on Rachel’s bedtime routine and the emergency contact numbers of her neighbor and her sister.
“You can’t tell roadrunner episodes apart!” Rachel exclaimed, popping up excitedly. “They’re all alike!”
“The show does have a certain gestalt, I guess,” April considered.
“What I can’t figure out is why Wile E keeps ordering his murder materials from the same crappy company,” Fizzou mused. “He’s gotta know the people at Acme are just screwing with him, by now.”
“Well, you could make the case that he secretly wants to have things blow up in his face,” April suggested, as if psychoanalyzing a cartoon character was a natural thing for her. “But I think Acme holds the monopoly. It is very nihilist, in a third-grade kind of way.”
“You were a nihilist in third grade?” House inquired.
She nodded and continued knitting. “I’ve always thought that whole ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger’ thing, actually came from an elementary school gym teacher.”
House opened his wallet and peeled off a twenty. “Good news, Fang,” he said, handing it over to Fizzou. “I burned up the disgustingly healthy dinner your mom was planning to leave for you.”
“Yay, pizza!”
He took Cuddy’s arm. “Don’t touch the piano.”
“Not my first choice, Dude.”
House’s source of conventional wisdom, who went by the name of Wilson, advised compromise, so Cuddy picked the movie, and House picked the restaurant. Surprisingly, she chose a flick that did not drown him in estrogen, and didn’t blink when he took her to a barely-glorified truck stop, where he looked forward to feasting on ribs that had been simmering all day and a plate of extra-crunchy onion rings.
House was trying to be open and vulnerable about his fear and pain - conventional wisdom also said that women just loved that vulnerable shit - and discuss with his wife her personal hopes, dreams, and aspirations, relating to her as a woman, a friend, an equal partner. He was not going to be intense. He was not going to be complicated and difficult. He was not under any circumstances going to think of her as a sex object or as his workaholic boss. He was not going to argue with her or challenge her authority or hit on her or push her to be rational or make her mad or do any of the other things he was really quite good at. No, conventional wisdom said he was supposed to sit here and be charming and present and supportive and date her, and that was, by God, what he was going to do.
“So. Wilson and Kristen, again?” she said into the brittle quiet. They were being really careful with each other lately, and House didn’t know what to do about it.
“Kristen saw a mouse in her kitchen.”
She put her menu down and gave him a curious look.
“Wilson has a cat,” he explained.
“Oh, so she borrowed his cat, and one thing led to another?”
“If by ‘one thing’, you mean Wilson’s wuss cat climbed into a heating vent to get away from the mouse -- which in fact was Kristen’s neighbor’s kid’s escaped hamster -- and by ‘another’, you mean, Wilson got stuck in a crawlspace trying to retrieve the cat, and the landlord had to come and pull him out by the ass, then, yeah, that’s precisely what happened.”
When she laughed, it was really difficult to not think of her as a sex object. “That’s adorable.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“This is good,” she said, very unconvincingly. “Stress reducing.”
She meant, of course, the lack of sex.
She was, of course, full of crap. It wasn’t stress reducing at all. Sex never stressed him out.
Well, except for that one time two weeks ago, right after his exposure, when he was sick from the meds and tired and trying to deal with her stupid and totally pointless anxieties. Except for that one completely justified and understandable time, sex never caused him even a little bit of stress. Except for that one time, which they were never ever ever going to talk about, House actually found seeing Cuddy naked to be extremely stress-reducing.
“Right,” he said.
“Couples,” she said, “should face problems together.”
“Yep.”
“You don’t have a problem, I don’t have a problem, we have a problem. And we will work on those problems, together, when we know exactly what they are or, probably, aren’t. In the meantime it’s not a good idea to, you know, complicate the problems any further.”
House had already had this conversation in his head about a hundred times in the last ten days, so he knew where it was headed; he just didn’t know how long it would take to get there. Cuddy was looking at him and breathing, her chest moving in a way that made it hard to concentrate.
“Complicate?” he asked. “So you think this no-sex thing should continue for the next three weeks? That’s a terrible idea, Cuddy. One of your worst ever.”
“House, I just think that sex is not good for us in this circumstance.”
“I think sex is good in all circumstances. I want to be sure you understand that.”
Cuddy rolled her eyes. “Trust me, your position on that matter is crystal clear. But right now, with the uncertainty, and with what … happened, I think that, a short stretch of abstinence is healthier for us.”
“I don’t know when you started thinking about making us healthy, but I wish you wouldn’t. Really, Cuddy, just stop it. We were both perfectly content being dysfunctional, until.” House cut off the sentence, because it was veering toward that one time, and they were never ever going to talk about that one time. Ever.
“It’s just three weeks, House. Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with, and we can … proceed accordingly.”
He wanted to argue with her some more but there was no point to it. He knew could wear her down in the long run, but he didn’t want it to be a concession or an obligation.
She gave him an impish, feminine smile. “Anticipation could be fun.”
“No, it can’t. I anticipated you for years. It was not fun,” he insisted instantly. “Not at all.”
“Liar.” She laughed again, and his heart was throttled. “Yes, it was - and that was even before you knew how it would end.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but he was too confounded to think of a single response.
The waitress sashayed by, with a pot of coffee in her hand. “Where’s your little buckaroo, Doc?”
“Who?” Cuddy gave him a quizzical look.
“I bring Rachel here sometimes,” House admitted quietly.
“Without me?”
“We don’t want to wake you.”
“At night?” Her eyes flew open wider. “On school nights?”
He braced himself for the inevitable lecture on responsible parenting. “Unclench, Cuddy. Rachel and I come here to talk and eat donuts sometimes, that’s all. “
“What do you talk about?” She bit her lip. “Does she talk about her school problems with you?”
“That’s between me and Rachel.”
“Here?! In this neighborhood? At night?”
“She’s safe,” he groaned. “They make their own donuts and brew a great cup of coffee. There are more patrolmen here on any given morning than at police headquarters. ”
“Morning? You bring my six year old here after midnight?”
“Our six year old,” he dared her. “Because we’re a couple and we have joint problems - like Rachel’s ‘aggression issues’ at school. Right?”
She scowled. “Right.”
“How goes the Coleman problem?” he asked as he signed the check. To hell with the no-work-topics rules; conventional wisdom didn’t know Cuddy as well as he did.
Nan Coleman had been driving her and the rest of the hospital staff batty for a year, at least, with her little power trips about everything from copier toner to petty cash reimbursements. Cuddy was nothing if not fiercely loyal to her employees, and refused to fire a competent underling simply because she pissed everyone off - this was one of her personality flaws that made her most unhappy, but it was a very, very good thing for House -- and had been doing her best to soothe all the ruffled feathers and mediate the personality conflicts without taking sides. The last House had heard Sparkman was inciting one of his classic bitchbellions over the issuance of nursing uniforms.
She sighed, but her eyes were sparking for the first time all evening. “Jeffrey’s right, which only means I’d like to kill him five minutes after I kill Nan. I have a little triage thing going on with ‘fairness’ right now, and a shortage of pink extra-long scrub pants hasn’t made it into the waiting room yet. It’s still out in the parking lot, behind Donald Trump having to pay more taxes.”
House made a sympathetic face and took a long swallow of water. He was doing everything he could to offset the side effects of the meds; he had enough pain in his life without kidney stones.
“I hate them,” he declared. “I hope they die.”
“What?”
“That’s what Rachel says her very best friend Emma says when Isabella and Claire are being mean to her. ‘I hate them, I hope they die.’ According to Rachel it is very supportive.”
“You’re taking relationship advice from Rachel?” Cuddy’s expression indicated that this was one of those things that House did and most other people did not.
“You made me promise not to take it from Wilson anymore,” he reminded her.
Cuddy chose to change the subject. “Why German?”
“Why not?”
She laid her left hand over his; their rings touched. “You’re always learning, aren’t you?” she asked admiringly. “You really never do stop soaking things in.”
The jukebox music changed, to Bonnie Raitt.
There were only a few things House missed from his youth more than running, and one of them was something he’d never done when he had the use of both legs: dance with Lisa Cuddy. He’d been a good dancer -- his mother had seen to that -- and relied on his grace on the floor to make up for his social awkwardness and general failings as a date.
Cuddy’s thumb traced over his knuckles, caressed his fingernails. That he’d never know what it was like to cha-cha or foxtrot or tango with this woman, to spin her, laughing, around with one hand, to feel her arch her body, her lithe, tough little body, into his, his outstretched palms across her narrow back and muscular shoulder blades …
House winced, and Cuddy, saw it. The furrows in her forehead, caused no doubt by him, deepened. “House? Is the pain getting worse, now that --- ? Are you trying to distract yourself?”
“Come on, Beautiful, let's go home,” he said gloomily, dropping his napkin onto the table with a few bills for the tip. She'd made it clear what she wanted, and House was proceeding accordingly.
If it killed him.
Part 3: Of whales, killer.