Unprotected, 3
Title: Unprotected, 3
Pairing, Characters: House/Cuddy established. DDX team, OCs.
Warning: Explicit content in some chapters. It is always safe to assume some angst.
Summary: A (temporary) medical issue brings up the question, what would the sharkverse House and Cuddy relationship be, (temporarily) without sex?
Comments welcome.
“Doctor Hudson. If I may ask a question.”
PPTH’s venerable chairman of the student assessment committee stopped speaking. Cuddy took one deep calming breath and cleared her face of all affect, as her residency committee and the president of the medical school appraised her expectantly.
“Since we have established that no one, including your own department, is able to make a compelling case for changing the on-call rotation policy that has held this institution in good stead for decades,” she said icily, “I’d like to know what possible reason -- other than you just being an obstructionist, argumentative dick, -- is there for us to continue this debate?” She smiled sweetly.
Eleven faces blinked dimly back at her.
“Very well,” she said. “Let’s consider that resolved, then. Now if I could have a motion to adjourn, Doctor Wilson?”
“What was that about?”
Cuddy looked indifferently up at her head of oncology as she gathered her papers, letting the rest of the committee scurry away. “What was what about?”
“Neil made a simple suggestion. Did you have to tear him a new one?”
Cuddy rolled her eyes. “As you well know, Wilson, after twenty-two minutes of discussion, nothing that starts out simple, ever stays that way.”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.”
Cuddy didn’t express her immediate reflection on what was not getting into her lately -but she did think it.
“This isn’t like you,” Wilson went on. “Townsend told me that yesterday you ‘went Biblical’ on Akers for making a beginner’s mistake. Angela is a beginner, Cuddy, and what’s more she’s my beginner. If I wanted someone to abuse my residents, I’d ask House.”
“Don’t get so wound up, Wilson,” she snapped. “If you can’t do your job properly, you’d better not complain to me when I step in and do it for you.” With a decisive smack, she swung the conference room door open and strode toward the elevator, pretending she didn’t care that he was right on her heels.
Wilson’s irritation crumpled into concern as soon as they were alone in the elevator and he got a good look at her. She was not exactly at her best. One of her nails was chipped, and she had missed a spot of stubble on her left calf when shaving. She’d found a grey hair this morning and unceremoniously snipped it off near the roots, leaving a little tuft at her forehead. There was a smudge of powdered sugar on her blouse -- not visible because she had tucked it in, but she knew it was there - and a small blister forming under the leather of her peeptoe pumps.
“What the hell is going on with you, Lisa?” he asked softly. “Is everything all right between you and House?”
Cuddy sighed, and let her head fall back against the elevator wall. “If you must know - and who are we kidding, you must; you’re as bad as House for sheer nosiness - things have been a little,” she waved her hand vaguely, “uncomfortable, lately.”
“What did he do now?”
“It’s more what he hasn’t been doing.” She frowned. “Namely, me. Possibly what he is doing, too. I’m not entirely sure but I think he’s shamu-ing me.”
For once, she’d flabbergasted Wilson into silence. Not a victory she was especially proud of.
“What?” he asked as the elevator doors opened. “Wait, I mean. What?”
“Never mind. It’s nothing, just some term I heard Townsend use. You know how that woman communicates in a language all her own sometimes. Forget I said anything.”
Cuddy came up short, and swallowed.
Across the lobby, House was leaning against the reception counter, his khakis hanging loosely around his hips, engrossed in a patient file, rubbing the peppery hair on his chin. His dress shirt - white with pewter grey pinstripes, tag removed from the neck, laundered to delightful softness, faintly redolent of fabric softener and his aftershave -- was rolled up at the cuff and open at the collar. With a nod, he withdrew a pen from his shirt pocket and clicked it with his thumb. He nudged his reading glasses up and lowered his head, and with the tip of his tongue protruding from the very corner of his mouth, began to write, his bare wrist scrolling smoothly across the page. A moment later he pulled his cell phone from his right trouser pocket, placed it on the counter next to him and began speaking as he wrote.
“Cuddy?” Wilson stared at her, staring at House.
House closed the file folder, deposited it into a slot, and plucked a red lollipop from the jar on the counter. Without pausing in his conversation he unwrapped the lollipop with one hand, wadded the cellophane up, and, pressing his lips together, tossed it into the trash can six feet away with a neat little tucking motion, shimmying his shoulders, stretching his calves. Still talking, he rolled the lollipop against his lower lip and tongued it lightly, then casually rolled the length of his body to lean against the counter, flexing his arms, crossing his feet at the ankle. Something amusing must have been said at the other end of the phone connection, for he smirked.
She may have whimpered.
“What the hell is shamu-ing?” Wilson asked.
She sighed again. “I’m losing my mind,” she told him.
“I can see that. Is there anything I can do?”
Cuddy set her teeth together. “Cover me. I’m going in.”
“You,” Cuddy pointed. The medical student who’d materialized beside House visibly paled and stepped back. “My office, now.”
House regarded his boss with an amused tilt of his head and removed the lollipop from his mouth.
“No,” he said cheerfully. Cuddy felt her pulse accelerate and her forehead bulge.
House turned to the medical student. “When the wrist was completely lax the nailbeds were level?”
“Yes, Sir.” Looking warily at Cuddy, the student thrust a set of films at House. “The fractures are barely on the growth plate.”
“HOUSE,” Cuddy said hotly.
House swiveled so that his back was to her, and held the x-rays up to the light. He squinted at them for a moment, mindless of the scorching glare Cuddy was giving his broad, straight shoulder blades.
Again, more firmly, she said, "HOUSE."
“Buddy-tape them,” he said, passing the films back to the student. “Schedule follow-up in six weeks.”
“He, um, the patient wants to know if he can play baseball.”
“Could he play baseball before?” House angled his reading glasses back into his shirt pocket, rippling tight against his pecs.
“Um… yes?”
“Well then, Idiot.”
“And these,” House gestured dismissively with the lollipop at the student’s retreating back. “Are the smart ones.”
He seemed at that moment to recall Cuddy’s presence. “Oh, good morning, Sunshine,” he pronounced regally. “How can I be of service?”
“You can explain this.” She slapped a piece of paper down on the counter at his elbow. She was close enough to see his pulse throbbing at his throat and in the veins under his clunky wristwatch.
“Hmm.” House made an elaborate show of examining the document. “It’s an employment contract, between the diagnostics department of Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital and one Katherine Stephens, MD, phD. Doesn’t seem to require much explanation. What part of it do I need to break down into smaller terms, Dean?”
“You hired one of the Kates?” Wilson asked. “Why?”
“Why not?”
“Because it will piss off Jane Redmond no end, that’s why,” Cuddy retorted. “Tell me the truth, House: how much of this is part of one of your interpersonal wars with the heads of radiology and research, and how much is you trying to undermine my authority?”
“Seventeen percent and nineteen percent respectively,” he replied instantly. “Another nine percent because Taub hit on her and she shut him down; eleven percent because she’s bored out of her mind where she is; twelve percent comes from her very impressive graduate thesis; seven percent from her hypothesis on our last case -- which while, wrong, was slightly less moronic than the one we were pursuing at the time --; and five percent from the fact that she defended said stupid hypothesis against Foreman in a most entertaining manner.”
“And the other …” Wilson calculated, “nineteen percent?”
“Twenty percent, Wilson -- and, because I have an impetuous side that will not be denied. Is that all the math for today? Because if we’re done here I’m going to lunch.”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
House smacked his lips noisily against the lollipop and gave Cuddy a long, knowing, top-to-bottom scan that brought warmth to her cheeks.
“I skipped breakfast.”
“Well, something’s changed,” Wilson admitted. “He hasn’t been this passive-aggressive, and you haven’t been this … well, aggressive-aggressive, since before you were even … Oh.”
Cuddy gave him a dour look but said nothing as the realization overtook him.
“You aren’t?” he half-whispered.
Cuddy turned toward refuge in her office. “Not … exactly, no. I mean, we sort of are, but, only… we’re being careful.”
Wilson followed as far as the threshold. His features clouded and he shook his head. “Careful?”
“With the .. with what we can do now, I tend to make noise,” she said bluntly. “We’re trying to not scare Rachel.”
“Whereas you have no compunctions at all about traumatizing me,” he said mildly, and cleared his throat nervously. “It’s understandable. You’ve been together a while, now, and the exposure poses a very significant stress. The most common causes for marital arguments are money, children, and sex. House is fine with Rachel, and you both have plenty of money, so.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea.” Cuddy slumped down into the chair behind her desk, feeling vulnerable despite its bulk. “House and I fight before sex, we fight after sex, we fight during sex. We never fight about sex.”
“Then, what’s the issue?”
“I said something stupid,” she muttered painfully. “We were discussing the … challenge -- the mutual challenge -- presented by his exposure. I was trying to reassure him that the limitations of the next few weeks would be just as much a, pardon the expression, hardship, for me as for him. And I - I swear to God, jokingly, -- said that after all, it’s difficult enough to control him at work when I am having unprotected intercourse with him. He took that the wrong way.”
Wilson gaped at her. Usually very carefully neutral, he was shocked enough to interject, incredulously, “There’s a right way to take that?”
“Apparently not,” she conceded bitterly. “For the past ten days he’s been intentionally, deliberately, frustrating me, and alternately, indulging me.”
“He’s scared,” Wilson offered reflexively. “When he gets scared, House pushes people away. Be patient.”
“His hands are visible,” she mumbled resentfully, in a voice that sounded very faraway to her own ears. “All the time, my God they’re right there., and he just flaunts them, he goes around in those shirts, knowing exactly what they’re doing to me.. He ignores me completely when I yell at him, he pretends he doesn’t even hear me when I’m sarcastic, he’s polite, he’s civil, he’s distant, and when - and only when -- I concede something at work, like letting him expand his personnel budget then he gets very,”
Wilson put his hands up, shielding his face, and looked away, grimacing elaborately. “No need to finish that sentence.”
“-- Attentive.” She blushed, squeezing her thighs together into an annoying, forbidden little surge of want. “The son of a bitch is trying to make a point.” Cuddy noticed that both of her hands were gripping a pencil and exerting pressure toward its center.
“You’re saying he’s using behavior modification techniques,”
“Trying to . Animal training techniques, actually,” Cuddy bit off angrily. “Like those perfected on Shamu the killer whale, evidently.”
“With sex. On you.” Wilson made a snorting noise. A laugh rumbled in his chest. “That must su--,”
“Finish that sentence and you’re fired.”
“-- be just awful for you,” he giggled gleefully.
“I said, he’ s trying to. Trying, being the operative word. I refuse to be manipulated even one more minute by that man,” she grumped, setting the pencil deliberately on her blotter. “Two can play this game.”
“You're an idiot! You’re in a manipulativeness competition, with House? House, who lives in mortal terror of anyone, ever, having a scintilla of control over him? House, who’s seen you in every state of undress, accumulated who knows how many very explicit memories of you and who survived with nothing but his right hand and a sock, for years? House, who once stuck a knife in an electrical outlet, nearly killing himself, in order to win an argument?” Wilson shook his head and chuckled.
“What do you suggest I do, then -- let him control how I do my job?”
“Your call,” Wilson said sagely, turning to go, “but I’d suggest you stock up on batteries.”
Of bunnies, making like.
Pairing, Characters: House/Cuddy established. DDX team, OCs.
Warning: Explicit content in some chapters. It is always safe to assume some angst.
Summary: A (temporary) medical issue brings up the question, what would the sharkverse House and Cuddy relationship be, (temporarily) without sex?
Comments welcome.
“Doctor Hudson. If I may ask a question.”
PPTH’s venerable chairman of the student assessment committee stopped speaking. Cuddy took one deep calming breath and cleared her face of all affect, as her residency committee and the president of the medical school appraised her expectantly.
“Since we have established that no one, including your own department, is able to make a compelling case for changing the on-call rotation policy that has held this institution in good stead for decades,” she said icily, “I’d like to know what possible reason -- other than you just being an obstructionist, argumentative dick, -- is there for us to continue this debate?” She smiled sweetly.
Eleven faces blinked dimly back at her.
“Very well,” she said. “Let’s consider that resolved, then. Now if I could have a motion to adjourn, Doctor Wilson?”
“What was that about?”
Cuddy looked indifferently up at her head of oncology as she gathered her papers, letting the rest of the committee scurry away. “What was what about?”
“Neil made a simple suggestion. Did you have to tear him a new one?”
Cuddy rolled her eyes. “As you well know, Wilson, after twenty-two minutes of discussion, nothing that starts out simple, ever stays that way.”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.”
Cuddy didn’t express her immediate reflection on what was not getting into her lately -but she did think it.
“This isn’t like you,” Wilson went on. “Townsend told me that yesterday you ‘went Biblical’ on Akers for making a beginner’s mistake. Angela is a beginner, Cuddy, and what’s more she’s my beginner. If I wanted someone to abuse my residents, I’d ask House.”
“Don’t get so wound up, Wilson,” she snapped. “If you can’t do your job properly, you’d better not complain to me when I step in and do it for you.” With a decisive smack, she swung the conference room door open and strode toward the elevator, pretending she didn’t care that he was right on her heels.
Wilson’s irritation crumpled into concern as soon as they were alone in the elevator and he got a good look at her. She was not exactly at her best. One of her nails was chipped, and she had missed a spot of stubble on her left calf when shaving. She’d found a grey hair this morning and unceremoniously snipped it off near the roots, leaving a little tuft at her forehead. There was a smudge of powdered sugar on her blouse -- not visible because she had tucked it in, but she knew it was there - and a small blister forming under the leather of her peeptoe pumps.
“What the hell is going on with you, Lisa?” he asked softly. “Is everything all right between you and House?”
Cuddy sighed, and let her head fall back against the elevator wall. “If you must know - and who are we kidding, you must; you’re as bad as House for sheer nosiness - things have been a little,” she waved her hand vaguely, “uncomfortable, lately.”
“What did he do now?”
“It’s more what he hasn’t been doing.” She frowned. “Namely, me. Possibly what he is doing, too. I’m not entirely sure but I think he’s shamu-ing me.”
For once, she’d flabbergasted Wilson into silence. Not a victory she was especially proud of.
“What?” he asked as the elevator doors opened. “Wait, I mean. What?”
“Never mind. It’s nothing, just some term I heard Townsend use. You know how that woman communicates in a language all her own sometimes. Forget I said anything.”
Cuddy came up short, and swallowed.
Across the lobby, House was leaning against the reception counter, his khakis hanging loosely around his hips, engrossed in a patient file, rubbing the peppery hair on his chin. His dress shirt - white with pewter grey pinstripes, tag removed from the neck, laundered to delightful softness, faintly redolent of fabric softener and his aftershave -- was rolled up at the cuff and open at the collar. With a nod, he withdrew a pen from his shirt pocket and clicked it with his thumb. He nudged his reading glasses up and lowered his head, and with the tip of his tongue protruding from the very corner of his mouth, began to write, his bare wrist scrolling smoothly across the page. A moment later he pulled his cell phone from his right trouser pocket, placed it on the counter next to him and began speaking as he wrote.
“Cuddy?” Wilson stared at her, staring at House.
House closed the file folder, deposited it into a slot, and plucked a red lollipop from the jar on the counter. Without pausing in his conversation he unwrapped the lollipop with one hand, wadded the cellophane up, and, pressing his lips together, tossed it into the trash can six feet away with a neat little tucking motion, shimmying his shoulders, stretching his calves. Still talking, he rolled the lollipop against his lower lip and tongued it lightly, then casually rolled the length of his body to lean against the counter, flexing his arms, crossing his feet at the ankle. Something amusing must have been said at the other end of the phone connection, for he smirked.
She may have whimpered.
“What the hell is shamu-ing?” Wilson asked.
She sighed again. “I’m losing my mind,” she told him.
“I can see that. Is there anything I can do?”
Cuddy set her teeth together. “Cover me. I’m going in.”
“You,” Cuddy pointed. The medical student who’d materialized beside House visibly paled and stepped back. “My office, now.”
House regarded his boss with an amused tilt of his head and removed the lollipop from his mouth.
“No,” he said cheerfully. Cuddy felt her pulse accelerate and her forehead bulge.
House turned to the medical student. “When the wrist was completely lax the nailbeds were level?”
“Yes, Sir.” Looking warily at Cuddy, the student thrust a set of films at House. “The fractures are barely on the growth plate.”
“HOUSE,” Cuddy said hotly.
House swiveled so that his back was to her, and held the x-rays up to the light. He squinted at them for a moment, mindless of the scorching glare Cuddy was giving his broad, straight shoulder blades.
Again, more firmly, she said, "HOUSE."
“Buddy-tape them,” he said, passing the films back to the student. “Schedule follow-up in six weeks.”
“He, um, the patient wants to know if he can play baseball.”
“Could he play baseball before?” House angled his reading glasses back into his shirt pocket, rippling tight against his pecs.
“Um… yes?”
“Well then, Idiot.”
“And these,” House gestured dismissively with the lollipop at the student’s retreating back. “Are the smart ones.”
He seemed at that moment to recall Cuddy’s presence. “Oh, good morning, Sunshine,” he pronounced regally. “How can I be of service?”
“You can explain this.” She slapped a piece of paper down on the counter at his elbow. She was close enough to see his pulse throbbing at his throat and in the veins under his clunky wristwatch.
“Hmm.” House made an elaborate show of examining the document. “It’s an employment contract, between the diagnostics department of Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital and one Katherine Stephens, MD, phD. Doesn’t seem to require much explanation. What part of it do I need to break down into smaller terms, Dean?”
“You hired one of the Kates?” Wilson asked. “Why?”
“Why not?”
“Because it will piss off Jane Redmond no end, that’s why,” Cuddy retorted. “Tell me the truth, House: how much of this is part of one of your interpersonal wars with the heads of radiology and research, and how much is you trying to undermine my authority?”
“Seventeen percent and nineteen percent respectively,” he replied instantly. “Another nine percent because Taub hit on her and she shut him down; eleven percent because she’s bored out of her mind where she is; twelve percent comes from her very impressive graduate thesis; seven percent from her hypothesis on our last case -- which while, wrong, was slightly less moronic than the one we were pursuing at the time --; and five percent from the fact that she defended said stupid hypothesis against Foreman in a most entertaining manner.”
“And the other …” Wilson calculated, “nineteen percent?”
“Twenty percent, Wilson -- and, because I have an impetuous side that will not be denied. Is that all the math for today? Because if we’re done here I’m going to lunch.”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
House smacked his lips noisily against the lollipop and gave Cuddy a long, knowing, top-to-bottom scan that brought warmth to her cheeks.
“I skipped breakfast.”
“Well, something’s changed,” Wilson admitted. “He hasn’t been this passive-aggressive, and you haven’t been this … well, aggressive-aggressive, since before you were even … Oh.”
Cuddy gave him a dour look but said nothing as the realization overtook him.
“You aren’t?” he half-whispered.
Cuddy turned toward refuge in her office. “Not … exactly, no. I mean, we sort of are, but, only… we’re being careful.”
Wilson followed as far as the threshold. His features clouded and he shook his head. “Careful?”
“With the .. with what we can do now, I tend to make noise,” she said bluntly. “We’re trying to not scare Rachel.”
“Whereas you have no compunctions at all about traumatizing me,” he said mildly, and cleared his throat nervously. “It’s understandable. You’ve been together a while, now, and the exposure poses a very significant stress. The most common causes for marital arguments are money, children, and sex. House is fine with Rachel, and you both have plenty of money, so.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea.” Cuddy slumped down into the chair behind her desk, feeling vulnerable despite its bulk. “House and I fight before sex, we fight after sex, we fight during sex. We never fight about sex.”
“Then, what’s the issue?”
“I said something stupid,” she muttered painfully. “We were discussing the … challenge -- the mutual challenge -- presented by his exposure. I was trying to reassure him that the limitations of the next few weeks would be just as much a, pardon the expression, hardship, for me as for him. And I - I swear to God, jokingly, -- said that after all, it’s difficult enough to control him at work when I am having unprotected intercourse with him. He took that the wrong way.”
Wilson gaped at her. Usually very carefully neutral, he was shocked enough to interject, incredulously, “There’s a right way to take that?”
“Apparently not,” she conceded bitterly. “For the past ten days he’s been intentionally, deliberately, frustrating me, and alternately, indulging me.”
“He’s scared,” Wilson offered reflexively. “When he gets scared, House pushes people away. Be patient.”
“His hands are visible,” she mumbled resentfully, in a voice that sounded very faraway to her own ears. “All the time, my God they’re right there., and he just flaunts them, he goes around in those shirts, knowing exactly what they’re doing to me.. He ignores me completely when I yell at him, he pretends he doesn’t even hear me when I’m sarcastic, he’s polite, he’s civil, he’s distant, and when - and only when -- I concede something at work, like letting him expand his personnel budget then he gets very,”
Wilson put his hands up, shielding his face, and looked away, grimacing elaborately. “No need to finish that sentence.”
“-- Attentive.” She blushed, squeezing her thighs together into an annoying, forbidden little surge of want. “The son of a bitch is trying to make a point.” Cuddy noticed that both of her hands were gripping a pencil and exerting pressure toward its center.
“You’re saying he’s using behavior modification techniques,”
“Trying to . Animal training techniques, actually,” Cuddy bit off angrily. “Like those perfected on Shamu the killer whale, evidently.”
“With sex. On you.” Wilson made a snorting noise. A laugh rumbled in his chest. “That must su--,”
“Finish that sentence and you’re fired.”
“-- be just awful for you,” he giggled gleefully.
“I said, he’ s trying to. Trying, being the operative word. I refuse to be manipulated even one more minute by that man,” she grumped, setting the pencil deliberately on her blotter. “Two can play this game.”
“You're an idiot! You’re in a manipulativeness competition, with House? House, who lives in mortal terror of anyone, ever, having a scintilla of control over him? House, who’s seen you in every state of undress, accumulated who knows how many very explicit memories of you and who survived with nothing but his right hand and a sock, for years? House, who once stuck a knife in an electrical outlet, nearly killing himself, in order to win an argument?” Wilson shook his head and chuckled.
“What do you suggest I do, then -- let him control how I do my job?”
“Your call,” Wilson said sagely, turning to go, “but I’d suggest you stock up on batteries.”
Of bunnies, making like.