Come and Get It: 7/?
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
It’s 2:00am when House finds himself in his bedroom doorway, leaning on his cane and staring into his own living room like it’s suddenly new to him. And it is; it’s full of new scents, new sounds and a strange, foreign shape on his sofa.
She’s curled on her side and he watches the gentle rise and fall of her chest, imagines the warm, dull thud of her heartbeat under silken skin.
But he mustn’t. Because he’s told them both no. It would never work and he’s right. He’s always right.
Just occasionally, very occasionally, he wishes he wasn’t.
He’s stood next to the end of the sofa with no recollection of getting there. Cameron continues to breathe gently in her sleep. The arm that rests on top of the blanket is ridiculously slender and he wonders vaguely if she’s always been this delicate. If this was a movie, she’d be asleep on a stone plinth, garlanded in flowers and awaiting the handsome prince. Instead she’s twisted in old blankets and it’s him gazing down at her. A knight with a sword replaced by a cripple with a stick.
Cameron stirs in her sleep and he jumps slightly, startled. It breaks him out of his reverie and he shuffles into the kitchen, telling himself it’s for a glass of water, but knowing it’s to take his mind off her.
When he returns, cool glass in hand, Cameron is sat up, looking at him. He freezes in the doorway from the kitchen, glass raised to his mouth. She sits with her knees pulled up to her chin, but the blankets are pulled up too, thankfully, covering her legs.
“I heard you in the kitchen.”
“Oh.”
“You ok?”
“Yeah.” He holds up the glass. “Wanted a drink.”
“Oh.”
He can make out the tousled shadows of her hair, framing the delicate face from which her eyes shine out at him. She makes no move to go back to sleep and he makes no move towards his room.
“Why shouldn’t I be ok?”
She shrugs.
“Thought maybe your leg hurt.”
He grasps at the opportunity to remind her why things between them are as they are, and why they will be so for the foreseeable future.
“It does. No more than usual.”
“Oh.”
It isn’t the dismissive reaction he’d hoped for. Pain and sympathy burn in her eyes and shape her face into one of compassion. He has to look at the floor, regretting he’d said it at all, and walks lopsidedly back to his room. Behind him, he’s aware of the rustling sounds of blankets and creaks of the sofa as Cameron settles back to down to sleep. He pushes the bedroom door open, setting the glass carefully down on the cabinet to one side. He turns back, reaching for the edge of the door and starts to push it closed. But something stops it.
The light from his window illuminates the greyscale shape of a hand, splayed across the door, leading to a slender arm leant against the wood. His eyes flow from her hand, up her arm, to her face. Her expression, lit by the glow of the streetlights outside, is unreadable.
“What are you doing?”
“I think you’re wrong.”
He knows instantly what she means and he hates himself because it means all his efforts to ignore have been in vain. Her voice is soft and even, and he finds himself resorting to near-whisper level as well, though self-confidence is something he cannot avoid maintaining.
“Well, I’m not.”
“This isn’t another one of your puzzles.”
It strikes a chord in him. It is a puzzle. If it isn’t, what is it?
“Everything is puzzles. Including this.”
She smiles, but continues as though she hasn’t heard him.
“I’m not one of your puzzles, either. You can’t just pick me up when you feel like it and drop me when you don’t.”
“I’m famous for solving puzzles. I’m famous for being determined to the point of obsession.”
Cameron tilts her head slightly, a smile creeping onto her mouth. The hairs in the nape of his neck prickle like static, like he’s trapped, but he can’t yet see the bars.
“So, if I’m a puzzle, does that mean you’re obsessed with me?”
Ah, there they are. The reply with which he was to shut her up for good on the subject clogs his throat. He skips a breath. Because the answer is ‘yes’. The honest truth of it is yes, utterly obsessed. Obsessed to the point where hiding his obsession becomes equally as consuming.
“No.”
It’s all he eventually manages. It’s a weak reply, made weaker by his hesitation.
“That means I’m not a puzzle. So there is something other than puzzles.”
He realises she’s leaning on the door with the confident pose of a woman who’s won. And she has, to a point.
“Maybe there is. But it’s only the puzzles I’m interested in.”
The smile vanishes and House feels he is able to breathe more easily, but the tension hasn’t fully abated.
“So that’s it, then? Puzzles or nothing?”
“Yup.”
She’s searching his face and he tries hard not to give her any foothold. Eventually, she lets go of the door and seems to concede defeat. Her gaze drops to the floor and for some reason he mirrors it.
It is a bad mistake. On the way to the floor, his eyes catch sight of her, nearly completely picked out in soft night-time light. The shirt isn’t as long as he’d hoped; it reaches about halfway down her thighs and leaves too much of her long, elegant legs on show for comfort. It is mere seconds but she must have caught his knee-high stare, because when he looks up, she’s smiling, albeit shyly. She may even be blushing.
“Anything puzzling you, Dr House?”
That’s it. That’s absolutely it. Enough.
In the hours before sleep she had been pondering him, herself and the links between them. It had led her to puzzles and his often unhealthy fascination with them, and it was this realisation that had led her to challenging him with questions in the small hours of the morning.
And that, in it’s turn, after a detour to her legs, led to him to catch her round the waist and kiss her as though there were only seconds left in the world and he wanted to spend them all with her.
It is rough; his stubble scrapes her skin but she doesn’t care, because it’s House’s stubble and he is what she wants, and overwhelmingly so. She can feel the warmth of his hands through the shirt; feel the pounding of his heart under her fingers. She struggles to free her arm that is caught between them, and he lets go of her just enough for her loop her arms around his neck, before pulling her tight against him. She thinks, in so much as she can think at all in this moment, that if he pushes her away now she’ll beat him to death with his own cane.
She’s melting under his fingers and he’s glad the bed is only mere feet away. He hates that he can’t swing her up into his arms and carry her there in some grandiose romantic gesture, but it is a small point of negativity against a tide of pleasure. Her hands slide down from his neck, over his arms to his waist and he gasps against her mouth as her fingers slip under his pyjama shirt and splay out over his stomach.
Cameron leans away from him at the sharp gasp and it is worth it, even considering the premature end of the kiss. The shape of his lips, the ruffles in his hair; his eyes focused solely on her, in all their beautiful blue intensity. She can feel the heat rising under his skin, corresponding to the pattern of her fingers, and her mind and pulse race. What happened to ‘too much too soon’? It got lost she tells herself, somewhere in the paradise ocean of his eyes, and she will just have to dive in and recover it. She pushes her hands gently against him and he takes a step back, apparently without difficulty or hesitation. Emboldened, she removes her hands from his stomach and reaches up to his shoulders, carefully pressing her way towards the bed.
House resumes his ‘not thinking’ stance of earlier. He realises, and it is a startling realisation that takes the bottom, sides and top out of his world, that for once he doesn’t need to think: He only has to feel. He lets her press him gently back towards the bed, amazed at himself for giving her this amount of control. Her fingers have returned to the hem of his shirt, and she’s attempting to lift it up and off. He pulls it quickly over his head, discarding it somewhere on the floor and returning his hands and mouth to her as the backs of his legs hit the bed.
“Are you sure about this? Because no matter how good you are, I’ll still treat you like crap at work.”
It passes his lips deeper and rougher than he’d planned. Cameron smiles and her reply, when it comes, is just on the right side of breathless.
“Incredibly.”
She doesn’t remember the details for much after their brief exchange of words. She does remember how good he looked shirtless in the moonlight and the thrill it sent through her from head to toe. How they fell into bed is a mystery to her, but the feel of cool air against her skin as he unbuttoned her borrowed shirt is vivid in her memory. The no doubt insulting comment about her lack of cleavage is mercifully forgotten and smothered in the kisses he trails from her neck to her navel.
“House…”
“Greg.” He mutters it irritably against her ear. She turns her head to look at him.
“Greg?”
“Greg. Or Gregory, if you’ve got enough breath.”
She laughs but it’s cut short by the meandering path of his thumb, which curves under her breast before skimming down to her hip. He’s looking down at her, gauging her reaction. She realises, suddenly, that she is tired of this waiting game and if she doesn’t have him now she thinks she never will. She reaches one hand over his shoulder and down his back, pulling his mouth against hers with the other. The weight of him anchoring her to the bed is strangely comforting. She finds herself shifting underneath him to match their hips together and she hears a soft, slightly growly noise against her neck. Her hand strokes over the contours of his back, fingertips fluttering over the furrow of his spine and palms massaging the smooth slopes of muscle beneath his skin. He is beautiful, she thinks, and only she knows it. Well, only you and Stacey. The thought sends icy liquid through her veins and she hopes he doesn’t notice, but it seems he’s too busy kissing her shoulder to register any change in her mood.
Stacey. The problem that was so insurmountable earlier in the evening had dissolved, but now, of all moments, it reasserts itself. If it hadn’t been for Stacey, he mightn’t have been here at all the thought reminds her. He wouldn’t have been anywhere. A personality lost to the realm of the afterlife, if you believed such things. But this makes it seem as though he owes Stacey his life, as though Cameron owes Stacey his life, and she refuses to owe him to anybody. Especially not someone who had her chance already. Cameron’s hands start to stroke over his body with a more possessive edge and the thought that circles her head like a bird of prey is; He’s mine.
‘He’s mine…’ As she strokes her fingers over his hips, sliding down the soft fabric of his pyjama trousers; inhaling the soft, involuntary moan he makes against her neck.
‘He’s mine…’ When his back arches up and her body follows, fingers scraping up his back and onto his shoulders, and she whispers his name against his ear.
‘He’s mine…’ When her name, her real name, Allison, tumbles from his lips past her neck and tangles in her hair. When Greg is all she can manage to shudder against the crook of his neck before she clings to him and the ability to think and speak deserts her.
Cameron comes back to herself to find him laying on his back next to her, one arm still under the small of her back and his face turned to look at her. The pitch darkness of winter is illuminated by the faint glow of streetlights and a full moon and she can make out the blue of his eyes and the stubbled planes of his face. His expression is neither happy nor mocking and she doesn’t know what to make of it. If anything its melancholy and she is suddenly struck by the terror that he thinks he’s made a mistake.
“What?”
It comes out soft, tired and still a little breathless. His eyes search her face but he doesn’t say a word.
“What’s wrong?”
What is wrong? Is anything wrong? He tries to read her face but all he gets is honest concern. He is waiting for the polite and apologetic good bye, the realisation on her part that this will never work; waiting for her to leave. But she doesn’t seem inclined to, apparently more concerned that he might leave her, and the hope that unfurls inside him is unbearable without certainty.
And then, oh God, she rolls closer to him, onto her side and reaches one arm across his chest, the other reaching her delicate fingers up his neck and into his hair once more. Before he can give his mind chance to think, the arm beneath her has pulled her closer, he’s rolled onto his side to lie facing her and his free hand is cradling her head against his chest. It’s done without conscious effort, without thought and he wonders vaguely if this is how most people decide to do things.
Cameron falls asleep curled up against him, but House finds he can’t sleep. He’s too busy making up for lost time on his thought processes; what will happen tomorrow? What will happen on Sunday? And what, more crucially, will happen on Monday? The only answer he can provide for any of these is to cancel question number one; the clock on his bedside table, when he leans over to read it, shines out the fact it is 4:24am. It is already tomorrow. Saturday has occurred and he knows what happened on Saturday. The catalyst of Saturday’s excitement is lying naked in his arms, in his bed, asleep and probably dreaming of ponies that fly.
He gives up on his questions, puzzles that will have to go unsolved till… later today. Instead he rests his forehead against Cameron’s and drifts to sleep, lulled by the warmth of her body against his and the gentle sound of her breathing.
(Chapter Eight)
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
It’s 2:00am when House finds himself in his bedroom doorway, leaning on his cane and staring into his own living room like it’s suddenly new to him. And it is; it’s full of new scents, new sounds and a strange, foreign shape on his sofa.
She’s curled on her side and he watches the gentle rise and fall of her chest, imagines the warm, dull thud of her heartbeat under silken skin.
But he mustn’t. Because he’s told them both no. It would never work and he’s right. He’s always right.
Just occasionally, very occasionally, he wishes he wasn’t.
He’s stood next to the end of the sofa with no recollection of getting there. Cameron continues to breathe gently in her sleep. The arm that rests on top of the blanket is ridiculously slender and he wonders vaguely if she’s always been this delicate. If this was a movie, she’d be asleep on a stone plinth, garlanded in flowers and awaiting the handsome prince. Instead she’s twisted in old blankets and it’s him gazing down at her. A knight with a sword replaced by a cripple with a stick.
Cameron stirs in her sleep and he jumps slightly, startled. It breaks him out of his reverie and he shuffles into the kitchen, telling himself it’s for a glass of water, but knowing it’s to take his mind off her.
When he returns, cool glass in hand, Cameron is sat up, looking at him. He freezes in the doorway from the kitchen, glass raised to his mouth. She sits with her knees pulled up to her chin, but the blankets are pulled up too, thankfully, covering her legs.
“I heard you in the kitchen.”
“Oh.”
“You ok?”
“Yeah.” He holds up the glass. “Wanted a drink.”
“Oh.”
He can make out the tousled shadows of her hair, framing the delicate face from which her eyes shine out at him. She makes no move to go back to sleep and he makes no move towards his room.
“Why shouldn’t I be ok?”
She shrugs.
“Thought maybe your leg hurt.”
He grasps at the opportunity to remind her why things between them are as they are, and why they will be so for the foreseeable future.
“It does. No more than usual.”
“Oh.”
It isn’t the dismissive reaction he’d hoped for. Pain and sympathy burn in her eyes and shape her face into one of compassion. He has to look at the floor, regretting he’d said it at all, and walks lopsidedly back to his room. Behind him, he’s aware of the rustling sounds of blankets and creaks of the sofa as Cameron settles back to down to sleep. He pushes the bedroom door open, setting the glass carefully down on the cabinet to one side. He turns back, reaching for the edge of the door and starts to push it closed. But something stops it.
The light from his window illuminates the greyscale shape of a hand, splayed across the door, leading to a slender arm leant against the wood. His eyes flow from her hand, up her arm, to her face. Her expression, lit by the glow of the streetlights outside, is unreadable.
“What are you doing?”
“I think you’re wrong.”
He knows instantly what she means and he hates himself because it means all his efforts to ignore have been in vain. Her voice is soft and even, and he finds himself resorting to near-whisper level as well, though self-confidence is something he cannot avoid maintaining.
“Well, I’m not.”
“This isn’t another one of your puzzles.”
It strikes a chord in him. It is a puzzle. If it isn’t, what is it?
“Everything is puzzles. Including this.”
She smiles, but continues as though she hasn’t heard him.
“I’m not one of your puzzles, either. You can’t just pick me up when you feel like it and drop me when you don’t.”
“I’m famous for solving puzzles. I’m famous for being determined to the point of obsession.”
Cameron tilts her head slightly, a smile creeping onto her mouth. The hairs in the nape of his neck prickle like static, like he’s trapped, but he can’t yet see the bars.
“So, if I’m a puzzle, does that mean you’re obsessed with me?”
Ah, there they are. The reply with which he was to shut her up for good on the subject clogs his throat. He skips a breath. Because the answer is ‘yes’. The honest truth of it is yes, utterly obsessed. Obsessed to the point where hiding his obsession becomes equally as consuming.
“No.”
It’s all he eventually manages. It’s a weak reply, made weaker by his hesitation.
“That means I’m not a puzzle. So there is something other than puzzles.”
He realises she’s leaning on the door with the confident pose of a woman who’s won. And she has, to a point.
“Maybe there is. But it’s only the puzzles I’m interested in.”
The smile vanishes and House feels he is able to breathe more easily, but the tension hasn’t fully abated.
“So that’s it, then? Puzzles or nothing?”
“Yup.”
She’s searching his face and he tries hard not to give her any foothold. Eventually, she lets go of the door and seems to concede defeat. Her gaze drops to the floor and for some reason he mirrors it.
It is a bad mistake. On the way to the floor, his eyes catch sight of her, nearly completely picked out in soft night-time light. The shirt isn’t as long as he’d hoped; it reaches about halfway down her thighs and leaves too much of her long, elegant legs on show for comfort. It is mere seconds but she must have caught his knee-high stare, because when he looks up, she’s smiling, albeit shyly. She may even be blushing.
“Anything puzzling you, Dr House?”
That’s it. That’s absolutely it. Enough.
In the hours before sleep she had been pondering him, herself and the links between them. It had led her to puzzles and his often unhealthy fascination with them, and it was this realisation that had led her to challenging him with questions in the small hours of the morning.
And that, in it’s turn, after a detour to her legs, led to him to catch her round the waist and kiss her as though there were only seconds left in the world and he wanted to spend them all with her.
It is rough; his stubble scrapes her skin but she doesn’t care, because it’s House’s stubble and he is what she wants, and overwhelmingly so. She can feel the warmth of his hands through the shirt; feel the pounding of his heart under her fingers. She struggles to free her arm that is caught between them, and he lets go of her just enough for her loop her arms around his neck, before pulling her tight against him. She thinks, in so much as she can think at all in this moment, that if he pushes her away now she’ll beat him to death with his own cane.
She’s melting under his fingers and he’s glad the bed is only mere feet away. He hates that he can’t swing her up into his arms and carry her there in some grandiose romantic gesture, but it is a small point of negativity against a tide of pleasure. Her hands slide down from his neck, over his arms to his waist and he gasps against her mouth as her fingers slip under his pyjama shirt and splay out over his stomach.
Cameron leans away from him at the sharp gasp and it is worth it, even considering the premature end of the kiss. The shape of his lips, the ruffles in his hair; his eyes focused solely on her, in all their beautiful blue intensity. She can feel the heat rising under his skin, corresponding to the pattern of her fingers, and her mind and pulse race. What happened to ‘too much too soon’? It got lost she tells herself, somewhere in the paradise ocean of his eyes, and she will just have to dive in and recover it. She pushes her hands gently against him and he takes a step back, apparently without difficulty or hesitation. Emboldened, she removes her hands from his stomach and reaches up to his shoulders, carefully pressing her way towards the bed.
House resumes his ‘not thinking’ stance of earlier. He realises, and it is a startling realisation that takes the bottom, sides and top out of his world, that for once he doesn’t need to think: He only has to feel. He lets her press him gently back towards the bed, amazed at himself for giving her this amount of control. Her fingers have returned to the hem of his shirt, and she’s attempting to lift it up and off. He pulls it quickly over his head, discarding it somewhere on the floor and returning his hands and mouth to her as the backs of his legs hit the bed.
“Are you sure about this? Because no matter how good you are, I’ll still treat you like crap at work.”
It passes his lips deeper and rougher than he’d planned. Cameron smiles and her reply, when it comes, is just on the right side of breathless.
“Incredibly.”
She doesn’t remember the details for much after their brief exchange of words. She does remember how good he looked shirtless in the moonlight and the thrill it sent through her from head to toe. How they fell into bed is a mystery to her, but the feel of cool air against her skin as he unbuttoned her borrowed shirt is vivid in her memory. The no doubt insulting comment about her lack of cleavage is mercifully forgotten and smothered in the kisses he trails from her neck to her navel.
“House…”
“Greg.” He mutters it irritably against her ear. She turns her head to look at him.
“Greg?”
“Greg. Or Gregory, if you’ve got enough breath.”
She laughs but it’s cut short by the meandering path of his thumb, which curves under her breast before skimming down to her hip. He’s looking down at her, gauging her reaction. She realises, suddenly, that she is tired of this waiting game and if she doesn’t have him now she thinks she never will. She reaches one hand over his shoulder and down his back, pulling his mouth against hers with the other. The weight of him anchoring her to the bed is strangely comforting. She finds herself shifting underneath him to match their hips together and she hears a soft, slightly growly noise against her neck. Her hand strokes over the contours of his back, fingertips fluttering over the furrow of his spine and palms massaging the smooth slopes of muscle beneath his skin. He is beautiful, she thinks, and only she knows it. Well, only you and Stacey. The thought sends icy liquid through her veins and she hopes he doesn’t notice, but it seems he’s too busy kissing her shoulder to register any change in her mood.
Stacey. The problem that was so insurmountable earlier in the evening had dissolved, but now, of all moments, it reasserts itself. If it hadn’t been for Stacey, he mightn’t have been here at all the thought reminds her. He wouldn’t have been anywhere. A personality lost to the realm of the afterlife, if you believed such things. But this makes it seem as though he owes Stacey his life, as though Cameron owes Stacey his life, and she refuses to owe him to anybody. Especially not someone who had her chance already. Cameron’s hands start to stroke over his body with a more possessive edge and the thought that circles her head like a bird of prey is; He’s mine.
‘He’s mine…’ As she strokes her fingers over his hips, sliding down the soft fabric of his pyjama trousers; inhaling the soft, involuntary moan he makes against her neck.
‘He’s mine…’ When his back arches up and her body follows, fingers scraping up his back and onto his shoulders, and she whispers his name against his ear.
‘He’s mine…’ When her name, her real name, Allison, tumbles from his lips past her neck and tangles in her hair. When Greg is all she can manage to shudder against the crook of his neck before she clings to him and the ability to think and speak deserts her.
Cameron comes back to herself to find him laying on his back next to her, one arm still under the small of her back and his face turned to look at her. The pitch darkness of winter is illuminated by the faint glow of streetlights and a full moon and she can make out the blue of his eyes and the stubbled planes of his face. His expression is neither happy nor mocking and she doesn’t know what to make of it. If anything its melancholy and she is suddenly struck by the terror that he thinks he’s made a mistake.
“What?”
It comes out soft, tired and still a little breathless. His eyes search her face but he doesn’t say a word.
“What’s wrong?”
What is wrong? Is anything wrong? He tries to read her face but all he gets is honest concern. He is waiting for the polite and apologetic good bye, the realisation on her part that this will never work; waiting for her to leave. But she doesn’t seem inclined to, apparently more concerned that he might leave her, and the hope that unfurls inside him is unbearable without certainty.
And then, oh God, she rolls closer to him, onto her side and reaches one arm across his chest, the other reaching her delicate fingers up his neck and into his hair once more. Before he can give his mind chance to think, the arm beneath her has pulled her closer, he’s rolled onto his side to lie facing her and his free hand is cradling her head against his chest. It’s done without conscious effort, without thought and he wonders vaguely if this is how most people decide to do things.
Cameron falls asleep curled up against him, but House finds he can’t sleep. He’s too busy making up for lost time on his thought processes; what will happen tomorrow? What will happen on Sunday? And what, more crucially, will happen on Monday? The only answer he can provide for any of these is to cancel question number one; the clock on his bedside table, when he leans over to read it, shines out the fact it is 4:24am. It is already tomorrow. Saturday has occurred and he knows what happened on Saturday. The catalyst of Saturday’s excitement is lying naked in his arms, in his bed, asleep and probably dreaming of ponies that fly.
He gives up on his questions, puzzles that will have to go unsolved till… later today. Instead he rests his forehead against Cameron’s and drifts to sleep, lulled by the warmth of her body against his and the gentle sound of her breathing.
(Chapter Eight)