Fic: Three times he left and one he didn't.
Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.
- Jonathan Safran Foer.
Muse: Lisa Cuddy
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Notes: Inspired from my constant, wonderful writing with the House to my Cuddy, katernater
"You want to kiss me, don't you."
"I always want to kiss you."
- - -
He'd left her once before and she had been ready for it, even before she broke into a sprint down the damp concrete of the college campus sidewalks and closed the distance between them with an impulsive, unapologetic defiance of gravity. There had been kisses before then but not one as warm and intrusive as this one, not for how his tongue invaded her mouth but for the way good-bye intruded upon the air around and between them, its chiding voice thick with unspoken words that should never, ever be said. She had kissed him then and he had taken her to the lonely cavern of his apartment, now stripped bare of the few personal artifacts he considered worthwhile to keep. And when they had awoken together, beneath a cool sheet and the warm blanket of dawn's light, it was still morning and he was still leaving for Chicago. He'd left her then and she'd watched him go, wearing the university sweatshirt he'd given her not because of sentiment but because he didn't want her to catch cold and sneeze as he left.
She'd kept it ever since.
- - -
The second time he left her, there was music lingering its echo like an afterimage in the air. She'd forced him (coerced, cornered him into, all of the descriptions led to the same place) to wear a tuxedo to the hospital benefit and he'd only agreed to come because he was ready to take Wilson on in a poker rematch that had been five years coming. And then there had been the boy, her patient, the chaos of a night where a diagnosis came under cover of an evening gown and the smell of cigar smoke ironically touched the downstairs hospital corridors, as if the endng of a private joke.
She had found him that night (that morning, rather; it had been coming on five a.m.) by the sound of a melody she didn't recognize but would never forget in the future. A handful of moments had passed in whch she hovered in the door frame, almost ghostlike, her hair tousled from the night's stresses and the gloss she'd smoothed across her lips long gone and faded. He led the notes in a slow, deliberate climb, hand over hand and again upwards, and she came to him a handful of seconds before the crescendo because she knew it was coming and wanted to already be there when it arrived.
He didn't leave her then, not for at least fifteen minutes more, and he'd warmed her right side while she acquiesced the same comfort to his left, the pads of her fingers strumming in a silent harmony across the velvet of her dress. She'd never tap out a rhythm when he played, that was too insulting, but she always kept delicate, even time with whatever it was he played.
When he left her there it was under the pretense of owing Wilson another showdown at the table, but when he walked through the doorway he left the music in his wake. She stayed there for fifteen minutes more to take it in.
- - -
The third time was unplanned, impossible, incoherent and desperate, a night punctuated by abrasive words and the dragging, unbearable feel of her own loss. She hadn't expected him to leave, but then she hadn't expected him to arrive, either, least of all with his fluctuating words of uncharacteristic comfort and his mouth crushing to hers as if he could break her back into the place she belonged. What she hadn't known was where she belonged, not until then.
She could have asked him to stay, but the words were gone. He had taken them with him, on his lips and out into the night, the same way she kept his (all of the things he'll never say) on her own mouth long after he'd closed the door behind him.
- - -
But there was one time he didn't leave. Maybe he didn't leave because it was his apartment and not a college campus or her corner office, her shadowed bedroom or the hospital corridors where they came together. It could have been for any number of reasons, any coherent statement placed in the proper, breathless tone of voice and capable of bringing reason to an unreasonable situation and she might have accepted it long enough to not say no.
This time, she asked the question and he gave the answer she hadn't expected - but had, admittedly, always wanted.
And this time, he didn't leave.