Coming To Terms, Chapter 6A
Swallowing a terrified shriek, she jerked back, her shoulder blades colliding squarely with the doorframe. Her body tensed, instinctively moving between the threat and the bedroom down the hall, where Rachel was - finally -- sleeping.
“House,” she panted, as the shadowed form sprawled on her bed became recognizable.
The arousal of fear in her throat became anger. She listened for a startled wail from Rachel, but in contrast to the pounding in her chest, her daughter remained quiet.
“That list of ways you can screw this relationship up. Where does climbing in through my bedroom window at eleven o’clock at night and scaring the shit out of me, fall on it?” For someone who’d just come very close to wetting herself, she thought she sounded remarkably calm.
“It’s not on that list,” House said placidly. He was reading a journal of some kind, and it was hard to tell which aggravated her more: that he was so damned calm after nearly giving her a heart attack, or that he looked so good lying on her bed wearing reading glasses that she wanted him to give her a completely different kind of heart attack. “It is number 46 on my list of ways to piss you off.”
“You mean there are 45 things more infuriating than this? What are you doing here?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Not without the help of controlled substances, anyway. Would you mind if I used your Jacuzzi?”
“You broke into my house, invaded my bedroom, almost put me into cardiac arrest, and now you’re asking to use my bathtub?” She was outraged, and yet, she had no idea why this should surprise her.
“Please.” He tried to look needy and repentant. It came out looking creepy.
She sank onto the bed and tried to get control of her heart rate and her temper. “Out,” she pointed. “Go. Now.”
“You’re telling me no?” As if this were an alien concept to him.
“Go outside, close the door behind you, and ring the front doorbell like a civilized human being. Then, if that doesn’t wake up Rachel - in which case you’ll have to die immediately -- we’ll negotiate.”
Making a huge demonstration of it and acting as if she were being totally unreasonable, he pulled himself off the bed. She noticed the heaviness of his steps and the way his knuckles were white where he gripped his cane, and decided against making him walk all the way out to the street.
She stared at her ceiling and counted to ten after the bell rang. By six, she’d resumed breathing normally and resolved to let him live. Not that she ought to: the man needed serious, immediate, psycho-therapeutic intervention. If she were even halfway normal, she’d have him arrested.
He didn’t look exactly contrite when she let him in, but some of the edges of his cantankerousness were worn down.
“You have terrible security here, too,” he said by way of greeting. “I’m detecting a trend in your life, Lisa, and frankly, it concerns me.”
“And you have no comprehension of boundaries. Here.” Without ceremony, she pressed a key into his open hand.
He looked down at it with a disconcerted, bordering on fearful, expression. “Are you sure? You don’t want to talk about this?”
“In case you didn’t overhear me putting Rachel to bed for the last hour, I just read Go Dog Go twenty consecutive times. My conversational standards aren’t that high right now. It’s yours. You’re welcome. Now, go soak your leg. And your head, for all I care. I’m going to bed.”
He stood completely still in the foyer, watching her.
“What!?” she demanded, whirling around.
“Just congratulating myself on my great good fortune.”
“Don’t even try to sell me that, Romeo. You were congratulating yourself on my ass.”
Without even bothering to hide his shameless grin, he advanced past her toward the bedroom and adjoining master bath. “Can’t get much by you, can I, Juliet?”
She resisted the urge to slam the bathroom door after him, and a competing urge to go in and join him in the whirlpool tub, and started to undress for bed.
She pulled on a nightgown and crossed the room to close the window. She stared blindly out through a crack in the curtains, trying to remember if the forecast had called for rain tonight. She hoped so; she always slept better and felt more secure when it was raining. She relished the feeling of safety and warmth it gave her to snuggle under the blankets as the world outside raved and ranted and drenched and thundered.
House had confided in her once that his leg hurt more when it rained, or was about to. She wondered when the last time he’d felt safe and secure had been.
She pushed the sash down forcefully and twisted the window lock. So much for the quiet, risk-free life she’d been taught to aspire to. House was not filed on her rolodex under “suburban husband material.” He belonged under “danger to self and others.”
At least she could almost make some sense of the sex. He just would be good at that part. He was a perfectionist who made a living paying attention to details and reading subtle cues, he had absolutely no shame, and he had been obsessing about her body for years. He brought all of those things, along with unshakeable confidence and that perverse imagination of his, to bed, becoming so focused, so intense, so thorough and completely present and unpredictable, that she completely forgot herself. Or possibly, found herself; it was sometimes hard to keep even that part of it straight.
The scent of her favorite bubble bath reached her senses, as in the bathroom, House, completely oblivious to the chaos he was introducing into her thoughts, started to sing. Asking herself when her perfectly respectable, enviable, long-planned-for and hard-won life had gotten so weird and stupid, she followed the sound and fragrance.
He was soaking in bubbly water up to his chest, his upper body so developed and his features so masculine that he looked more sensually vulnerable than comical in the steam, and his grizzled face relaxed when he saw her. Although she was pretty sure he was going to cause her to regret not drowning him when she had the chance, she sat on the wide tiled edge of the Jacuzzi beside him. He curved his neck toward her when she leaned forward, and gave her one of those brain-melting kisses of his.
They’d been talking on the phone, long, easy-flowing and tangential conversations, and exchanging emails several times a day for the past couple of weeks. She’d heard his treatise on the spirituality of The Bourne Identity; he knew her greatest fear about growing old. He’d taken to sending her random bits of culture, works by Natalie Merchant or Scott Simon or interesting - and he had the broadest and most exacting definition of ‘interesting’ she’d ever conceived of - articles and factoids, for no discernible reason other than he thought she ought to know them.
Sitting at her desk, she’d see his name on the screen, and wait five minutes or ten before even opening the file, knowing that if contained something especially irreverent or evocative or meaningful to him, he’d be at her office door soon enough, standing on, but not broaching, the threshold, with a soft, patient expression on his face, just in time to drink in her reaction as she read it.
And she’d made him laugh - a full laugh, not his usual grudging chuckle - twice.
So they were, after their own peculiar fashion, getting naked together on an almost constant basis.
Yet, these face to face moments were always just a little too intimate, at first.
“Hi,” he said, almost shyly.
“Hi,” she said, as if she were the intruder, weren’t entering her own bathroom in her own house. He had that effect.
The cell phone on top of his pile of clothing on the floor began to ring obnoxiously.
“That’s Wilson,” he said. “Ignore it.”
“Oh, that’s mature,” she said.
“Don’t start that again,” he said. He swiped a handful of bubbles and blew on it.
She felt tangled up between them again. Every time she had tried to persuade herself that House was unreachable, that his inability to trust was not exciting but only frustrating, that the man was incapable of love - every single time she’d even come close to selling herself on the idea that her cowardice was not cowardice, but self-preservation - something she called the Wilson Factor shot those arguments down.
Because House, for all his self-destructive recklessness and isolation, undeniably loved Wilson, and not just enough to die for him: enough to stay alive for him. Not that Wilson, with his dark moods and his secrecy and his sanctimony, deserved to be loved -- House would never say something so sentimental or indemonstrable --; Wilson existed to be loved. That there was at least one human being on Earth capable and worthy of House’s devotion, had both given her hope, that House could love her only half as well, and terrified her, that someday he might.
“Tell him,” she ordered in the I-am-the-dean, discussion-ending, tone that intimidated everyone but him.
“Tell him what? We aren’t exactly dating, we aren’t just friends, we aren’t just having sex, we aren’t shacking up, we sure as hell aren’t getting married and settling down. At the risk of sounding shallow, what are we? What’s the word for this?”
“That doesn’t sound shallow.”
He in fact sounded astonishingly like a normal man with normal insecurities, and it was disconcerting as hell. Somehow nothing he ever said seemed shallow; a lifetime of being smarter and more intuitive than anybody else in the shop had granted him a weird sort of confidence that could make even “bite me” seem a carefully examined, just and sober expression of thought. Even adjusting for his essential House-ness, though, there was something touching even frightening, about his uncertainty, his shyness and hesitancy. He was not easy that way: it gave his delicacy with her a kind of credibility and worth that more covert sentiments could not claim. He was, she understood powerfully, trying very, very hard to not hurt her.
“I’m not sure this,” she said, meaning the intense blend of love, respect, acceptance, exasperation, and fascination that defined their every interaction, “has a word.”
She knew, even as she said it, that he’d hate that answer. He hated mysteries and unanswerable questions with an unsurpassed passion.
“I hate that answer. I hate this,” he said, all male helplessness. He put a finger on her collarbone, and traced down her cleavage, trailing water down her chest and making her sloppy and warm and disheveled inside and out, and his eyes widened in mock horror. “Oh my God, are we going steady?”
She laughed and flicked some soap bubbles up at him. “Nothing about us is ever going to be steady.”
Chapter 6 (part B) Chapter 7