Faint of Heart, Part 15
Title: Faint of Heart 15/17
Pairing: House/Cuddy established
Warnings: Some fluff, some angst, some smut.
Summary: House and Cuddy need a vacation, and they take one, but it isn't that simple.
Disclaimer: More’s the pity.
Comments welcome.
A/N: The last chapter will go up before the season 8 premiere. Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed, and particular thanks to lauriedonachy for prompting this story and then waiting forever for me to finish it.
House was splitting a box of Fruit Loops with Rachel, pontificating. Something about toucans, if Cuddy heard correctly.
She put the cardboard tray on the table and passed out the plastic utensils and cups. House, he of the insane condiment issues, looked up gratefully when she poured the sugar into his coffee, and Cuddy’s heart clenched at the tiny victory.
“They are not real,” Rachel told him.
“Are so. I’ll take you to Costa Rica sometime and prove it.”
“Prove it.” They stuck their tongues out at each other. The dye in the Fruit Loops had turned their tongues blue.
“Where's Wilson?” Cuddy asked.
“Checked out last night.”
“He didn’t tell me he was leaving.”
House shoveled some more Fruit Loops into his mouth, then reached for a bagel. “I told him he was leaving.”
"Bye, Wilson," Rachel said happily.
Cuddy must have looked shocked, because he got defensive. “It was time for him to hit the road, Cuddy. I can’t have the man holding my hand and talking me through every single normal human interaction for the rest of my life. He was upsetting Rachel.”
“You’ll let Wilson tap dance on my last nerve all he wants to and never say a word, but all Rachel has to do is pitch one temper tantrum and you send him packing? He was bothering you about April, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. But he was also getting on Rachel’s nerves.”
“You expect me to believe that you sent Wilson away, for Rachel.”
“Believe what you want.”
“I wanna hermit crab,” Rachel chirped.
“Okay,” House said. “Crabs are cool. Just make sure you get a C. clypeatus. They live longer.”
“Just a minute,” Cuddy said hastily. “You do not get to make a decision like that without clearing it with me first. And, yuck. Those things look like spiders.” She shuddered.
“You’d better get more than one,” House said to Rachel. “They’re social animals.”
“When she’s older, she can have a p-u-p-p-y.”
“No. She can’t,” he said stubbornly. “She’ll bond with it. That’s what kids do, they bond with stuff. Even when that stuff that has a life expectancy of fifteen years.” His face hardened. “Foot, down, Cuddy. You won’t force a best friend that she’s going to outlive, on her. I won’t have it.”
“Are we still talking about a crab?” Cuddy asked softly.
“I only hired April because you manipulated me into it,” House accused scornfully, “by threatening to make me take Sam. Which would have hurt Wilson, eventually.”
“House, I had to do something for Sam, after I sabotaged her Boston job. I sabotaged that job to keep Wilson at PPTH -- for you. I bend over backwards, my God, the contortions I go through.”
“--to keep me from collapsing, yeah, I know,” he mumbled bitterly.
“House. Greg...”
“Still,” he interrupted, fidgeting with his cup, “if you could rope me into taking her in order to make a point, you’re not above using her to get something else you want. How much is hiring her going to cost me?”
“That’s between you and her.” Cuddy swallowed a thick lump in her throat. “I will not, ever, hold the people you care about hostage, to extract some kind of payment or behavior from you.”
“Yeah,” he said sarcastically, his eyes narrowed, “how could I ever think you’d do something so reprehensible?”
They observed an excruciating silence.
“I’m gonna name him Gus,” Rachel said.
House tugged affectionately on her pigtail. “Good choice, Fang.”
It wasn’t even light outside yet when the godawful screeching of the alarm started. Cuddy grunted and reached across House’s body.
His leg, and some unfamiliar uncomfortable feeling about Townsend, had been nagging at him for two hours, so he was wide awake and his reflexes were primed. He grabbed her wrist with one hand and tugged at the alarm clock cord with the other.
“You know,” he said calmly, tossing the clock aside, “it’s not that you are a stone cold bitch, a power-hungry control freak, a workaholic, or a hypocrite, that bothers me. It’s not that dark bureaucratic pit that you call a heart. It’s not that humongous ass of yours. Hell, it’s not even having Ming the Merciless for a mother-in-law. It’s this morning person thing that’s going to be the deal breaker.”
She didn’t waste her breath saying anything about checkout time, packing, traffic, or getting back to work. He needed no reminding of what was waiting for him -- or of who probably was not waiting for him - in Princeton.
Cuddy could stand to learn a thing or two about avoiding responsibility from House, but they both sucked at vacationing.
“Yeah, well, I love you too,” she said impatiently.
Her pissed-off tone, as usual, was more arousing than scary. He gave her a lazy grin. “C’mere.”
“Later.” She slid off the bed and picked her away across the room, kicking his jeans in the general direction of his suitcase on her way out.
House groaned up at the ceiling. There wasn’t any point in trying to seduce her or arguing with her. The honeymoon, as it were, was officially over.
The phrase “be careful what you ask for,” ran through his mind. He’d hoped, with this break, to get all his messy, overwhelming, stupid-making feelings for her out of the way for once and for all so he could settle into some semblance of steady routine. He’d really wanted - needed -- to finally get the pursuit phase of this relationship nailed down so he could get back to doing his job and crossing lines and obsessing over people he didn’t care about, in peace.
Well, mission accomplished, Dumbass: you got your domesticity, all right. Welcome to the rest of your life. Your wife just woke up at the crack of dawn, then refused morning sex so she could go ...
What in hell was she doing?
Cuddy padded back into the room, closing the door softly behind her. She crossed the room and cracked opened the door to the patio. The scents of chlorine and salt and the sound of gull cries were carried in by a light breeze. He draped his arm over his forehead and waited for her to tell him to get his lazy ass going.
“We’ll have to make this fast,” she said, and pulled her gown off over her head. “Rachel’s asleep but probably won’t be for long. You’ve completely screwed up her biorhythms.”
Her nipples were at station two, and rosy.
House almost pinched his right leg to see if he was dreaming. “I would have thought you got all the exhibitionism out of your system,” he said warily, cocking his head toward the curtains.
“We won’t have an audience. Who else would be insane enough to be awake at this hour on a Saturday?” she asked, bemused. “That’s the idea, Dummy.”
“Wait. You set the alarm for five forty-five a.m. on our last day at the beach so we could have sex?” he asked, stupefied.
She bobbed her head. “I wanted to hear the ocean while we make love one more time. Humor me, okay?”
She was standing in front of him, completely exposed, without a trace of self-consciousness, unapologetically strong and healthy and feminine, her hair disheveled, her face bare and lax. His senses jolted, his cock twitched, and his brain kicked back into gear.
What the hell. If he was dreaming, he was going to go with it.
“That’s … both romantic, and anal,” he said, reaching his hand out carefully. “I think you may be the only woman on the planet who can pull that combination off.”
She clasped his fingers. “Do you want to analyze me, or do you want to have an orgasm?”
In answer, he exerted the slightest pull, bringing her close, and she climbed atop him, avoiding his bad leg. He made small tight circles with his fists over the small of her back, the way she liked, and she arched into him, encouraging him with soft little noises as he slid his hands up under her arms, rounding her biceps and over her shoulder blades to massage her neck, pinching and working the small, tight muscles there hard and rough. He knew by now to not be delicate, but deliberate.
She stretched, and rolled her upper body into his touch. Without breaking contact he feathered her ribcage, cupped the swell of her breast and rested his hand there, feeling her heartbeat under the edge of his thumb. She pushed his pajama bottoms down and took him in her hand, guiding him into her, hot and wet and so tight around him that it was almost painful, taking all the pressure off his legs and hips with a gentle, insistent cadence and shallow strokes.
They didn’t kiss; it wasn’t the time to be passionate or playful. She felt like nothing in his arms, like a whisper, like the beating of wings. Weightless and unresisting, she moved against him fluidly, her silken skin disappearing under the breadth of his hands.
They came together in silence and ease, and when they were sated, she settled against him peacefully, fitting so perfectly that House barely registered his body’s adjustment to her. With a contented sigh, he reached behind her for a pillow and tucked it under his head.
It was only then that she frowned. “Damn it,” she mumbled.
He caressed her hand on his chest. “You took the last one at about four.”
“I hate that I do that.”
“I know,” he chuckled. Her incessant pillow thievery annoyed him, but her consternation about it was funny.
“You could stop me.”
“And let a perfectly good neurosis go to waste? Your guilt, over something you do in your sleep, buys me a good fifteen extra minutes in bed every morning. You notice, you stole the covers, too. I’ve been shivering over here for hours. And your nails are too long. And my neck hurts, from your elbow.”
“You’re such a big baby,” she yawned. “A manipulative, opportunistic, baby. ”
“Yeah, well, I love you too,” he said. He meant to sound sarcastic, but naturally, like everything else on this wretched vacation, it didn’t come out the way he wanted it to.
Some days, it just didn’t pay to try.
Part 16