Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye
Title: Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Rating: M
Part 2/3
Summary: They met in a crowed hotel bar.
Two strangers, one night. AU.
Notes: Title from a Rolling Stones song again. Think I could be making a theme of it. This is AU but alludes to many canonical events and gradually becomes a what if --- fic.
Also an attempt at smut turned sentimental.
Thanks for reading. Comments are appreciated.
Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye
What he put in her hand was his room key, the magnetic strip facing up; she turned it over to see his room number. 1009. Nine floors from what she needed, Cuddy sipped her second drink, alone again, trying to breathe even. The thrill of what just happened, wordless and indescribable, coursed through her unabated by the alcohol. Now she had a choice.
She should have been reluctant to shed her scruples, and ignore logic. The zipless fuck is a fantasy, unattainable. She told herself no one night is without consequences, completely devoid of guilt or remorse, or worse, hope. Another part of her psyche was determined to argue the counterpoint, telling her he might be the perfect stranger and reminding that her flight didn’t leave till noon the next day.
After a few minutes of tearing her conscience in two, Cuddy shouldered her purse and stood, feeling sixteen and tipsy and still holding his key. Her doubts rose in the elevator, on the way to his room. The stakes were inexorably set. Anonymity, brevity, a single desperate attempt at ecstasy could cost her everything.
The scope of the risk didn’t near the weight of what she already regretted. For too long she’d demoted connections and affection, sacrificed pleasure for success. She had to change, she had to change something.
a sin and a lie
The numbers on the doors descended until she found his. A nervous knock, she closed her eyes and held her breath. A beat and she remembered she had the key. She was about to unlock it when the door opened, slowly revealing the man she met downstairs. Lips parted, eyes wide, she froze.
Reading her reluctance, he stepped aside. Cuddy’s stomach fluttered, empty except for the liquor landing acrid and all at once. She let herself in, crossing a line and not knowing if she could ever go back.
The room was brighter than the bar and she could see his expression etched with the same impressed disbelief as hers. His eyes were honest, discerning. He looked more curious than seductive. It took every ounce of self restraint to not start a conversation.
They were standing close after he locked the door. He was about to sardonically ask whether he should hang the Do Not Disturb sign when she closed the space between them and kissed him. The impulse was clumsy, she stepped on his toes, pressed her palm against his chest hard, as if she were trying to hold on and push away at the same time.
Seconds into the kiss he opened his eyes. Cuddy was lost. Her mouth opened gradually under his, and her hands rose tentatively, remembering, as if this was her first kiss in so long that she’d forgotten what desire tasted like on someone else’s lips.
He knew she wasn’t the type to do this. The tailored jacket, the conservative pencil skirt, the expensive perfume. She was gorgeous, but the aura of inexperience with such casual encounters was unmistakable. He knew he didn’t deserve her and, sliding his hand down her back, wondered if she knew it too.
When their lips parted he was still holding her. Cuddy was daunted by herself, all confidence and indiscretion, breathless. They kissed again, soft and deeper and unexpectedly intimate. A strong arm wrapped around her waist, lifting her off her feet and out of her shoes. Like dancers confusing their choreography they moved with each other, clasped hands and closed eyes and too determined to disconnect.
Barefoot, stumbling backwards, she combed her fingers through his touseled hair and bit his lip when her ankles met the bed frame. The absolute vertigo of her want pulled her down. She couldn’t gauge his arousal, except from the damp diamond on the center of his tshirt she felt as he leaned in, his hands ringing around and behind her neck to unhook her necklace. A muffled encouraging hint in her ear and she lay back on the bed.
The dimmer switch was just out of reach and they both felt a dangerous sort of loneliness when he stepped away to adjust it, leaving enough light so that Cuddy could see a grey blue halo gaussian around his silhouette.
Returning, he gently surrounded her. Braced on his elbows, his heaving chest crushed her breasts with every labored breath. She could feel his heart pounding as he scored porcelain with the scrape of stubble. His mouth was on her temple, her chin, her neck. When she finally kissed him he opened his eyes and she realized that despite every reason she shouldn’t, she trusted this stranger.
It was an epiphany against all odds. The nameless fear that precedes all emotions, like a roll of thunder before a midsummer storm, was missing. The portent of imminent shame, of things never being the same, never came. There was only the warmth of his body dissolving into hers, and the burning exploration reminiscent of amorous adolescents too eager to talk or take their time.
His tongue in her mouth smoldered and turned liquid and all Cuddy could think was that there was too much between them. Her pleading consent was a noise caught in the back of her throat and he reacted by unbuttoning her blouse, impatient, the sharp grind of pelvises the perfect kind of painful.
Exposed, she whimpered at first contact, his abrasive grin grazing her cleavage. He used his teeth to slip the straps from her shoulder and when the bra was off their next kiss was a question. He gave her one last chance to change her mind. She answered by rolling her hips against the hard swell of denim to hear him sigh relieved by the unlikely balance of lust and luck. Buried in the crevice between breasts, his tongue swam, skidding to trace each nipple. Even her sweat was sweet. He wanted to say it, but the silence was too perfect to break. His kisses trailed down, mapping her ribs, relaxing the knot in her stomach. She gasped when he reached her skirt, unzipping it carefully and tugging it away.
Satin or silk, her panties were sophisticated and he smiled, less than surprised as he slid them off. With the last shred of discretion thrown into the corner of the room, she sank deeper into the moment and the minutes, glimpsing a smattering of dark blonde hair on his chest as her nameless accomplice in this overdue crime took off his tshirt.
Calculatingly, he spread her dripping lips, pausing a beat to blow cold air across the firm nub of flesh at the apex of Cuddy's legs. The long thorough kiss he pressed to her clit ended with a flick of his tongue. She shuddered, stiffened, waited.
The force jarred her when he sucked it into his mouth, the pressure so right it seemed unreal. Half involuntary, she began to buck against his face, her hands balling into fists. He had fingers inside her, more presence than probing, but it was his mouth making her melt. She tried to shift, because he was a fraction of an inch from making her come apart completely but he was too stubborn to budge and after another minute of not moving she was keening. How could a stranger know her better than she knows herself? She could do little more than writhe helpless beneath him, her arms draped above her head, knowing that if she reached out and touched him she’d never let go.
When she was at the cusp, he held her there--she knew it because the room was reduced to his curling knuckles, his scorching breath every time his mouth balked and the culminating tension dangerously close to uncoiling.
Then the world was collapsing and fragmenting and she wanted to scream but whose name does she cry out and before she could piece together enough consonants to ask him, fluid gushed and trickled down the thin bare slant of her thigh. He was doused in the bittersweetness, tupelo and tang, from nose to chin and even after she stopped moving he still strummed her like an instrument, pulling the last dregs of spasms out of her because he could.
The slope of his cheekbone rested against the inside of her knee a moment, letting her come back to him. The afterglow gleamed diffuse and he stood, taking off his jeans and settling on his back beside her. Once she caught her breath, Cuddy craned her neck to kiss him. He brushed her damp tendrils behind an ear. The August twilight fading through venetian blinds shone below his brow. She saw some great pain barricaded behind his eyes and didn’t know if this was him severing his hand to rid himself of the hurt he was holding onto.
Turning on her side to face him, her nail drew a line down his chest, part consolation, part temptation--a teasing palm hung at the waistband of his boxerbriefs. She let it drift lower, massaging subtle but enough to elicit a hiss that had him shoving them off his hips.
A beat. Motionless, he faced her. It was easy to want this. Terrifying to want it this badly. He wanted to disintegrate in her arms, die and be reborn and not remember what a mess he’d made of this life in the next. The earnest friction as his hand glided down her spine seemed to convey how receptive he was to a reversal of fortune.
Tactfully lingering, he lifted her leg over his, and rolled to mount her missionary, more than ready to plunge in furious and forget everything else. But before he could, she turned with surprising strength and straddled him. The arrhythmia she induced made him seep and Cuddy felt it, the leaking heat a guarantee that she was still stellar at more than administration.
For an instant she hoped he had a condom, or maybe she didn’t. How long had it been since it was skin against skin. And he was primed, pulsing incessant with the promise of penetration.
They held their breath paralyzed that way, trying to synchronize their suffocation from pleasure. She shifted, spreading the pool of lust between their bodies. Then she lifted herself, graceful, and eased him in unbearably slow, wanting it to be perfect because she needed him to be there forever. He jutted accidentally, like a reflex and bumped her cervix. The impulse to apologize was smothered by the searing clench as her muscles fluttered and seized him. His hands gripped her hips and stilled her because if she made one false move it was over, and all he wanted was for this to last.
Summer flickered, caroming from the corner of the window sill to the
edge of the headboard and bled into their shadows, cast dim against the beige wall. The physiology of passion--all the chemicals coursing through their blood, heart rate and blood pressure and synapses, constriction and dilation--every ounce of trite biology--transmuted into palpable want.
Cuddy rose and fell experimentally and his sharp intake of air warned her, so she relented, lowering herself languid astride him. The tenderness was overwhelming when his hand caressed across her shoulderblade, resting at the small of her back. The absolute sense of possession was a lie. Her tongue split the line of his lips before she kissed him rough and desperate to know the truth.
How easy the emptiness vanished. The vacancy inside her, having never found the one, the hollow chasm since he lost the one, and this unlikely connection as closure let the urgency evaporate. She was stroking his jaw and he was seeing through her and neither knew how instant gratification had become slow release only that one night would leave it incomplete.
The pivot of his hips punctured her pause button and Cuddy met each blunt thrust, driving him so deep the thought of separating seemed impossible. The length of him stretching her was redemption; even if this meant nothing, it meant everything.
Letting her have control, his head sank into the pillow while she covered him with sloppy wet kisses, setting a pace. Slow and deliberate she rocked, arching her back to let him lap at her breasts and pirouetting once to hear him sigh sharp, inching closer to the precipice.
The physics of carnal momentum meant that climax was the finish line, inescapably followed by sudden deceleration--overdrive to slamming on the brakes. Neither wanted this to end so they fought, fisting sheets and pulling hair, resisting becoming two people again.
A wash of haze in the rushing night, their bodies swayed defiant, melding into the mattress in a vain struggle for permanence. Sweat beaded and ran down his face and Cuddy wiped it away, kissing his closed eyes and neck, sinking her teeth into his shoulder, holding on and being held until each shallow thrust became enough.
When they finally let go into the cathartic suffusion, her squeezing, him spilling, the simultaneity never stopped. He bucked erratic, ricocheting bright hot oblivion and she clung to him, moaning gratitude for the torrent of fleeting emotions, all consuming and unstoppable, the chase after a last chance captured.
Echoes of her orgasm had her trembling; the memory of it would always make her weak. They savored the aftermath, lying tangled and sticky and spent. Cuddy tried to roll off, but his arms were locked. She should have panicked. Instead her body sighed in relief and soon he drowsed off, still clutching her tenaciously.
Cuddy woke when the sky was the color of his eyes; the moon had yet to set. He was behind her with his arm slung heavy across her hip and his breath cool against her ear. He throbbed, wedged solid in the space between them. Was he awake, she wondered, or insatiable even asleep? She considered crawling down between his legs and waking him so that the first thing he saw this morning would be her mouth engulfing him entirely.
Except she liked the embrace, it had been too long since she shared a bed. And the sooner she woke him the sooner this inadvertent comfort would end. The AC had her bare feet cold, so she slid them between his, trying to ignore the blisters, the consequences, the approaching end of this tryst. She had been walking since she got here, from lecture to luncheon, all business and never pleasure until now. Cuddy yawned, yearning to stay this way. She wanted to be with him again and knew she wasn’t supposed to want it. She had to get back to her room, pack and checkout, catch her flight. So she stood, seeing all the scarlet blotches her lipstick had painted over his body, and stifled some garbled sound, wanting to laugh and cry at the sight.
He woke later, stretching his hand out listlessly over the bedspread and finding only the imprint where she had slept. It was still warm. The soft murmur of voices in the adjacent room, newlyweds he deduced, reminded him what he’d never have and already missed.
There was no goodbye, no goodbye kiss.
---
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Rating: M
Part 2/3
Summary: They met in a crowed hotel bar.
Two strangers, one night. AU.
Notes: Title from a Rolling Stones song again. Think I could be making a theme of it. This is AU but alludes to many canonical events and gradually becomes a what if --- fic.
Also an attempt at smut turned sentimental.
Thanks for reading. Comments are appreciated.
Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye
What he put in her hand was his room key, the magnetic strip facing up; she turned it over to see his room number. 1009. Nine floors from what she needed, Cuddy sipped her second drink, alone again, trying to breathe even. The thrill of what just happened, wordless and indescribable, coursed through her unabated by the alcohol. Now she had a choice.
She should have been reluctant to shed her scruples, and ignore logic. The zipless fuck is a fantasy, unattainable. She told herself no one night is without consequences, completely devoid of guilt or remorse, or worse, hope. Another part of her psyche was determined to argue the counterpoint, telling her he might be the perfect stranger and reminding that her flight didn’t leave till noon the next day.
After a few minutes of tearing her conscience in two, Cuddy shouldered her purse and stood, feeling sixteen and tipsy and still holding his key. Her doubts rose in the elevator, on the way to his room. The stakes were inexorably set. Anonymity, brevity, a single desperate attempt at ecstasy could cost her everything.
The scope of the risk didn’t near the weight of what she already regretted. For too long she’d demoted connections and affection, sacrificed pleasure for success. She had to change, she had to change something.
a sin and a lie
The numbers on the doors descended until she found his. A nervous knock, she closed her eyes and held her breath. A beat and she remembered she had the key. She was about to unlock it when the door opened, slowly revealing the man she met downstairs. Lips parted, eyes wide, she froze.
Reading her reluctance, he stepped aside. Cuddy’s stomach fluttered, empty except for the liquor landing acrid and all at once. She let herself in, crossing a line and not knowing if she could ever go back.
The room was brighter than the bar and she could see his expression etched with the same impressed disbelief as hers. His eyes were honest, discerning. He looked more curious than seductive. It took every ounce of self restraint to not start a conversation.
They were standing close after he locked the door. He was about to sardonically ask whether he should hang the Do Not Disturb sign when she closed the space between them and kissed him. The impulse was clumsy, she stepped on his toes, pressed her palm against his chest hard, as if she were trying to hold on and push away at the same time.
Seconds into the kiss he opened his eyes. Cuddy was lost. Her mouth opened gradually under his, and her hands rose tentatively, remembering, as if this was her first kiss in so long that she’d forgotten what desire tasted like on someone else’s lips.
He knew she wasn’t the type to do this. The tailored jacket, the conservative pencil skirt, the expensive perfume. She was gorgeous, but the aura of inexperience with such casual encounters was unmistakable. He knew he didn’t deserve her and, sliding his hand down her back, wondered if she knew it too.
When their lips parted he was still holding her. Cuddy was daunted by herself, all confidence and indiscretion, breathless. They kissed again, soft and deeper and unexpectedly intimate. A strong arm wrapped around her waist, lifting her off her feet and out of her shoes. Like dancers confusing their choreography they moved with each other, clasped hands and closed eyes and too determined to disconnect.
Barefoot, stumbling backwards, she combed her fingers through his touseled hair and bit his lip when her ankles met the bed frame. The absolute vertigo of her want pulled her down. She couldn’t gauge his arousal, except from the damp diamond on the center of his tshirt she felt as he leaned in, his hands ringing around and behind her neck to unhook her necklace. A muffled encouraging hint in her ear and she lay back on the bed.
The dimmer switch was just out of reach and they both felt a dangerous sort of loneliness when he stepped away to adjust it, leaving enough light so that Cuddy could see a grey blue halo gaussian around his silhouette.
Returning, he gently surrounded her. Braced on his elbows, his heaving chest crushed her breasts with every labored breath. She could feel his heart pounding as he scored porcelain with the scrape of stubble. His mouth was on her temple, her chin, her neck. When she finally kissed him he opened his eyes and she realized that despite every reason she shouldn’t, she trusted this stranger.
It was an epiphany against all odds. The nameless fear that precedes all emotions, like a roll of thunder before a midsummer storm, was missing. The portent of imminent shame, of things never being the same, never came. There was only the warmth of his body dissolving into hers, and the burning exploration reminiscent of amorous adolescents too eager to talk or take their time.
His tongue in her mouth smoldered and turned liquid and all Cuddy could think was that there was too much between them. Her pleading consent was a noise caught in the back of her throat and he reacted by unbuttoning her blouse, impatient, the sharp grind of pelvises the perfect kind of painful.
Exposed, she whimpered at first contact, his abrasive grin grazing her cleavage. He used his teeth to slip the straps from her shoulder and when the bra was off their next kiss was a question. He gave her one last chance to change her mind. She answered by rolling her hips against the hard swell of denim to hear him sigh relieved by the unlikely balance of lust and luck. Buried in the crevice between breasts, his tongue swam, skidding to trace each nipple. Even her sweat was sweet. He wanted to say it, but the silence was too perfect to break. His kisses trailed down, mapping her ribs, relaxing the knot in her stomach. She gasped when he reached her skirt, unzipping it carefully and tugging it away.
Satin or silk, her panties were sophisticated and he smiled, less than surprised as he slid them off. With the last shred of discretion thrown into the corner of the room, she sank deeper into the moment and the minutes, glimpsing a smattering of dark blonde hair on his chest as her nameless accomplice in this overdue crime took off his tshirt.
Calculatingly, he spread her dripping lips, pausing a beat to blow cold air across the firm nub of flesh at the apex of Cuddy's legs. The long thorough kiss he pressed to her clit ended with a flick of his tongue. She shuddered, stiffened, waited.
The force jarred her when he sucked it into his mouth, the pressure so right it seemed unreal. Half involuntary, she began to buck against his face, her hands balling into fists. He had fingers inside her, more presence than probing, but it was his mouth making her melt. She tried to shift, because he was a fraction of an inch from making her come apart completely but he was too stubborn to budge and after another minute of not moving she was keening. How could a stranger know her better than she knows herself? She could do little more than writhe helpless beneath him, her arms draped above her head, knowing that if she reached out and touched him she’d never let go.
When she was at the cusp, he held her there--she knew it because the room was reduced to his curling knuckles, his scorching breath every time his mouth balked and the culminating tension dangerously close to uncoiling.
Then the world was collapsing and fragmenting and she wanted to scream but whose name does she cry out and before she could piece together enough consonants to ask him, fluid gushed and trickled down the thin bare slant of her thigh. He was doused in the bittersweetness, tupelo and tang, from nose to chin and even after she stopped moving he still strummed her like an instrument, pulling the last dregs of spasms out of her because he could.
The slope of his cheekbone rested against the inside of her knee a moment, letting her come back to him. The afterglow gleamed diffuse and he stood, taking off his jeans and settling on his back beside her. Once she caught her breath, Cuddy craned her neck to kiss him. He brushed her damp tendrils behind an ear. The August twilight fading through venetian blinds shone below his brow. She saw some great pain barricaded behind his eyes and didn’t know if this was him severing his hand to rid himself of the hurt he was holding onto.
Turning on her side to face him, her nail drew a line down his chest, part consolation, part temptation--a teasing palm hung at the waistband of his boxerbriefs. She let it drift lower, massaging subtle but enough to elicit a hiss that had him shoving them off his hips.
A beat. Motionless, he faced her. It was easy to want this. Terrifying to want it this badly. He wanted to disintegrate in her arms, die and be reborn and not remember what a mess he’d made of this life in the next. The earnest friction as his hand glided down her spine seemed to convey how receptive he was to a reversal of fortune.
Tactfully lingering, he lifted her leg over his, and rolled to mount her missionary, more than ready to plunge in furious and forget everything else. But before he could, she turned with surprising strength and straddled him. The arrhythmia she induced made him seep and Cuddy felt it, the leaking heat a guarantee that she was still stellar at more than administration.
For an instant she hoped he had a condom, or maybe she didn’t. How long had it been since it was skin against skin. And he was primed, pulsing incessant with the promise of penetration.
They held their breath paralyzed that way, trying to synchronize their suffocation from pleasure. She shifted, spreading the pool of lust between their bodies. Then she lifted herself, graceful, and eased him in unbearably slow, wanting it to be perfect because she needed him to be there forever. He jutted accidentally, like a reflex and bumped her cervix. The impulse to apologize was smothered by the searing clench as her muscles fluttered and seized him. His hands gripped her hips and stilled her because if she made one false move it was over, and all he wanted was for this to last.
Summer flickered, caroming from the corner of the window sill to the
edge of the headboard and bled into their shadows, cast dim against the beige wall. The physiology of passion--all the chemicals coursing through their blood, heart rate and blood pressure and synapses, constriction and dilation--every ounce of trite biology--transmuted into palpable want.
Cuddy rose and fell experimentally and his sharp intake of air warned her, so she relented, lowering herself languid astride him. The tenderness was overwhelming when his hand caressed across her shoulderblade, resting at the small of her back. The absolute sense of possession was a lie. Her tongue split the line of his lips before she kissed him rough and desperate to know the truth.
How easy the emptiness vanished. The vacancy inside her, having never found the one, the hollow chasm since he lost the one, and this unlikely connection as closure let the urgency evaporate. She was stroking his jaw and he was seeing through her and neither knew how instant gratification had become slow release only that one night would leave it incomplete.
The pivot of his hips punctured her pause button and Cuddy met each blunt thrust, driving him so deep the thought of separating seemed impossible. The length of him stretching her was redemption; even if this meant nothing, it meant everything.
Letting her have control, his head sank into the pillow while she covered him with sloppy wet kisses, setting a pace. Slow and deliberate she rocked, arching her back to let him lap at her breasts and pirouetting once to hear him sigh sharp, inching closer to the precipice.
The physics of carnal momentum meant that climax was the finish line, inescapably followed by sudden deceleration--overdrive to slamming on the brakes. Neither wanted this to end so they fought, fisting sheets and pulling hair, resisting becoming two people again.
A wash of haze in the rushing night, their bodies swayed defiant, melding into the mattress in a vain struggle for permanence. Sweat beaded and ran down his face and Cuddy wiped it away, kissing his closed eyes and neck, sinking her teeth into his shoulder, holding on and being held until each shallow thrust became enough.
When they finally let go into the cathartic suffusion, her squeezing, him spilling, the simultaneity never stopped. He bucked erratic, ricocheting bright hot oblivion and she clung to him, moaning gratitude for the torrent of fleeting emotions, all consuming and unstoppable, the chase after a last chance captured.
Echoes of her orgasm had her trembling; the memory of it would always make her weak. They savored the aftermath, lying tangled and sticky and spent. Cuddy tried to roll off, but his arms were locked. She should have panicked. Instead her body sighed in relief and soon he drowsed off, still clutching her tenaciously.
Cuddy woke when the sky was the color of his eyes; the moon had yet to set. He was behind her with his arm slung heavy across her hip and his breath cool against her ear. He throbbed, wedged solid in the space between them. Was he awake, she wondered, or insatiable even asleep? She considered crawling down between his legs and waking him so that the first thing he saw this morning would be her mouth engulfing him entirely.
Except she liked the embrace, it had been too long since she shared a bed. And the sooner she woke him the sooner this inadvertent comfort would end. The AC had her bare feet cold, so she slid them between his, trying to ignore the blisters, the consequences, the approaching end of this tryst. She had been walking since she got here, from lecture to luncheon, all business and never pleasure until now. Cuddy yawned, yearning to stay this way. She wanted to be with him again and knew she wasn’t supposed to want it. She had to get back to her room, pack and checkout, catch her flight. So she stood, seeing all the scarlet blotches her lipstick had painted over his body, and stifled some garbled sound, wanting to laugh and cry at the sight.
He woke later, stretching his hand out listlessly over the bedspread and finding only the imprint where she had slept. It was still warm. The soft murmur of voices in the adjacent room, newlyweds he deduced, reminded him what he’d never have and already missed.
There was no goodbye, no goodbye kiss.
---