Fic: Seduction, In Six Courses (3/3) House/Cuddy
Title: Seduction, In Six Courses (Part 3 of 3)
Word Count: 2700 ish
Rating: Still PG 13 (sadly, but there's always the sequel!)
Spoilers: Up to and including 'Epic Fail'
Disclaimer: I do not own these gorgeous creatures.
Summary: House invites Cuddy over for dinner.
A/N: I really liked foodie!House. Foodie!House really likes Cuddy. You know how this goes.
A/N 2: More Puccini-thievery, the odd pop-music reference, and hopefully I haven't bastardised the plot of Laura Esquivel's Like Water For Chocolate too terribly. The book is like four feet away from me right now, but I can't bring myself to get up and fact-check. Oh well.
The table is set simply, most of it Wilson’s doing; white linen, a vase of pale pink peonies, glittering silverware set at an elegant sentry in two designated places, at a close right angle on one corner of the table. There’s no way in hell he’s sitting four feet away across a table top from her tonight, and she barely even seems to notice the off-kilter arrangement as she slips silently into the chair beneath the open window. It is only when he sets the technicolour plate before her that she wrenches her eyes away from his face, and he is free to breathe once more.
They eat, as Cavaradossi is marched before Scarpia’s firing squad, and with the very first bite of the very first course he knows he’s got her.
It’s the way her eyes close, and stay that way. It’s the way the corners of her pretty mouth twitch and twist and dance with the tartness of the preserved lemon, the zing of the ginger and the cool fragrance of the mint, and it’s the most singularly erotic response to calorific intake he has ever seen in his entire life. She’s blissed out, exactly how he wanted her, and he can’t seem to stop grinning and staring and neither of them is paying the slightest bit of attention as Floria throws herself over the battlements.
“Good?”
She nods, slowly, eyes still pressed tight shut, and he could touch her, now, so easily; he could reach out a hand and sweep the filament strands of hair back from her forehead, he could graze the velvet of her cheek with the back of his fingers and she wouldn’t realize, she wouldn’t even know, right now. She grins, and finally, those eyes open once more.
“Amazing. Just… amazing.”
He’s smiling, grinning like a fool, and shovels a forkful of his creation into his mouth to cover his immense lack of cool.
It is good.
They eat, and he tells her about the Vivaldi and the way the idea for each dish just assembled organically in his mind under power of the strings. He even goes so far as to tell her how he arranged each course to align with the seasons, each aria of flavour an evocation of the music, of nature itself. She listens, and she is unquestionably spellbound, and when the stereo automatically clicks over to Madame Butterfly they don’t even notice. He tells her he won’t play the Vivaldi for her now, while they’re eating; the purpose of the music was to aid in the design of each dish, and to listen to it now would serve to effectively disassemble all of his hard work. He wants her to sense each creation as a whole, to let the distinctness of each individual ingredient disappear into the harmony of the finished dish. He tells her this, and if she were anyone else in the world, even Wilson, she’d probably have him shipped right back to Mayfield straight away, but she isn’t anyone else, and so she listens, carefully, those beautiful, indescribable eyes never leaving his face. They eat, and when he serves her the penultimate main, the chocolate and chilli dish he made up from the faintest ghost of an idea, she collapses in on herself in a fit of near-hysterical giggles. It’s like nothing he’s ever seen before, and he couldn’t even begin to explain it if he tried.
“Somethin’ funny, Cuddles?”
Through the veil of silver-streaked tears, her eyes are bright with mirth and something that could quite possibly be pure, unadulterated happiness, and he feels his own laughter begin to bubble within him like a cauldronful of Felix Felicis. She hiccoughs, and reaches for her water, and shakes her head in an impossibly, distractingly cute way.
“I… I think it’s the chilli. It just… makes me laugh…” She manages, sipping quickly at the water, and tucking a thick lock of hair back into safety behind one ear. She’s making no sense at all, but she’s being cute and sweet and ridiculously sexy, and that is the whole entire point of this evening, really.
“Why does-” He begins, but her careful fingers lay down her fork, and her smile as she tilts her head to gaze at him is like sunshine, or really good tequila, and he’s utterly, utterly happy, right now.
“Have you ever read ‘Like Water For Chocolate’?”
A vague wisp of memory stirs somewhere in the back of his brain, and although it is probably not what she wants to hear, it’s all he’s got to offer her.
“Wasn’t there some girl in that movie who had a shower outside, then rode off naked on the back of some guy’s horse?”
It’s a testament, and a touching one at that, to the history of their loosely-defined friendship, that her only reaction is a delicate eye-roll, and another smile.
“You would remember that part.”
“Yes, I would, and I do.” He gives a stage pause, plus an exaggeratedly blissful facial expression, before returning his full attention to her now almost-dissipated hysteria. “Please, continue.”
She smirks, and bites the corner of her lip, a new shade of pink, closer now to scarlet than pale-petal peony, rising to the apples of her cheeks. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Well, in that book - and film, obviously - the whole point of the story is… well, there’s Tita, and Pedro, and they’re in love. But they can’t get married, can’t be together at all, because Tita is the youngest of her sisters and has to look after their mother. So… Pedro marries one of Tita’s sisters, and…”
The expression on her face is something so uniquely her, something truly, indefinably Cuddy, that a quick, sharp bark of laughter escapes him.
“What are you on about?” He manages to splutter, choking now on a gulp of Pellegrino, as she begins to scowl good-naturedly.
“As I was saying, before your rude interruption, House…. Tita and Pedro are in love, and it’s forbidden, and all that. So, on the day when Tita bakes her sister’s wedding cake, she’s upset, right? She’s miserable, and so she cries-”
“Cuddy-”
“Yes, I’m getting to the point, shut up! She’s crying, Tita’s crying, all into the cake mix, and then, when the cake is baked, and everyone at the wedding eats it, they all cry too. As if ingesting Tita’s misery through the cake transfers the same emotion to all of the wedding guests. And-”
“Are you high?
It’s a perfectly reasonable question, and one she’s asked of him a hundred times before, but for some reason she finds it somewhat offensive, judging by the pursing of her lips and the narrowing of her eyes to two gleaming, glittering slits.
“Would you shut up, please?”
“Yes, yes. Of course. Do continue.”
“Anyway-”
“What do crying wedding guests have to do with you laughing like you’re the one who should be locked up in Mayfield, and then blaming it on my cooking?”
“House!”
“Sorry.”
But he isn’t, not remotely, because she’s glaring at him with her standard ‘I’m going to hex you into a thousand little squishy pieces if I could just find my wand’ look, and it’s familiar and funny and so very reserved for him, and no-one else on the planet, that he couldn’t stop her talking if he tried. She sighs dramatically, and shakes her hair back from her shoulders in one graceful movement, and he is concentrating, once again.
“The point wasn’t actually about the wedding cake as such. The point, although now, looking back, it wasn’t really much of a point, I guess… was that obviously the emotional state the chef is in whilst creating the food can be transferred, by some kind of… alchemical process… to the person eating it. So… were you hysterical with laughter while you were cooking this?”
It’s ridiculous, but the very second the words leave her pretty mouth he remembers.
He was stirring the chilli into the pot, and watching the temperature closely to avoid the bottom layer burning, when Wilson had come into the kitchen. Nothing unusual, except for the bright, bubblegum pink shirt wrapped snugly around his best friend’s person. And, perhaps, the lavender tie to match.
She’s right.
“I… yeah. Yeah, I was. Laughing. At… at Wilson.”
“Naturally.”
“Naturally.”
It’s another one of those break-your-heart-a-thousand-times-over smiles; lopsided and quirky and the tip of her tongue trapped delicately between her teeth, and it’s all he can do, as she sits smiling in self-satisfied way at him, not to reach right across the small space between them and pull her bodily against his chest. She’s beautiful, and smart, and she knows him, and she’s still here. It’s too much, and he looks away, choosing instead to stare blindly into the depths of his water glass.
Her silence rings out like a tolling bell.
“House?”
“Yeah?”
And her fingers, those small, carefully tapered and pale fingers, twine like a ribbon around his wrist, and Maria Callas is lamenting her lost love, again, and he can’t make himself look at her.
“Thank you. For… for doing this. All of this.”
“You’re welcome.” He mutters, the tone coming from his mouth darker than expected or intended, and he can viscerally feel her gaze shift from his face, to stare, perhaps, out of the window into the blue velvet night, or at the Jackson Pollock remains of their fourth course on her plate.
She says nothing more, staying mostly quiet during the chestnut and truffle dish, the silence punctuated only by the slight, careful, appreciative little sighs she gives, as the food works its magic upon her. Something’s shifted, however, because he can’t quite bring himself to look her in the face, or trust himself to speak any more useless words. It’s scary; terrifying and gut-wrenching and he’s a stupid, idiotic fool for getting himself into such a mess, thinking that he could just seduce her with a carefully plotted menu and a stack of Callas albums, and that would be that.
It could be, but that isn’t what he wants.
She could fall into bed with him; she would, most likely, given the right conversation and the right touch to her hand or face and perhaps the right alignment of the planets, but that isn’t what he wants.
He could make her fall into bed with him, he could even make her stay if he really tried, with some more pretty words, some Auden and a song, perhaps, but that isn’t what he wants.
He thought he did, but he was wrong.
He doesn’t want to seduce her.
He doesn’t want it to be this way, doesn’t want at all to trick her and coax her and angle her into his bed and soul and life. He doesn’t want it to be a game. For the first time in forever, he doesn’t actually want this to be a puzzle he can solve with the right application of his cutting intelligence. He doesn’t want her to be an endgame, a goal to stretch out towards and finally conquer, victorious.
He wants her, but not like this.
“House.”
There is nothing he can say, so he gives her a grim little smile, and stands, leaving her alone, at the corner of their shared table.
The dessert course is all ready to go. Two identical plates, piled with an elaborate, carnival confection of chocolate and toffee and her beloved Turkish delight, two matching slashes of bitter chocolate and coffee fondant running in jagged scars down the sides of each dish, a crumbling pyramid of pistachios, green and precious and piled in the centre and topped with a single, perfect mint leaf.
It looks like art.
A full days’ planning, another full days’ prep, and the whole point of it all now lies abandoned on the floor at his feet. He could drop the two perfect dishes; he could just let them slide silently from his fingertips and revel in the sound they might make as they smash and smear on Wilson’s tile floor, but he doesn’t. He stands stock-still, something that could be grief, or revelation, quaking through him, and at first he doesn’t even hear her voice.
“House.”
His name, falling in a whisper from her lips, like a blessing or like a prayer, as the song goes, and when he turns she is there, framed in the doorway and frightened, and she looks like she did that night when it wasn’t even her, when the her he remembers was a figment of his own mind run amok.
She’s beautiful, and afraid, but she's nothing if not brave, too.
He can’t seem to move, other than to set the two dishes back down on the bench, where he is already almost completely certain they will go untouched, tonight. He can’t read the expression on her face, but her hands, pale and translucent and ghostly in their bird-soft movement, are lifting, reaching out, to touch him, or perhaps to break his fall.
“There was another part to that story, House. Another dish.”
The book. The film he only barely remembers, the tale he is sure he never read, but she has, and for whatever reason, right now she seems to want to tell it. Her voice is pale, faded and pastel-coloured with gentleness.
“Pedro gave Tita roses. A… a bunch of roses, red roses. And she used them… for the cooking, for the dish she was preparing. Quail in rose petal sauce.”
He doesn’t understand, not yet, but his eyes won’t move away from her face, and she is moving, slow and careful and with that same dancer’s grace she’s always had, and he listens.
“He gave her the roses. And… and she knew, she knew right then… what she felt, House… what she felt, as she was stripping the petals from their stems, it was… desire. She felt desire… desire for Pedro, for the man she loved but could never have, and… she, she stripped all the roses down and made the dish, and all the while she… he was all she could think about, all that time, and then…”
And he knows, he gets the point of the story, at last, but he still isn’t sure what she means by telling it. Her face is bright, now, eyes blazing, breath coming in quick, shallows slips that move like a pulse through her body, and if it is desire he is supposed to be feeling right now then her story has done its job. He can’t breathe; all the air in his lungs feels trapped, like he has been inflated and set adrift on the wind, and he can’t even decide if it is a good feeling or a bad one. And all the while she’s moving ever closer, closer, until her fingers find their purchase, one small hand curling into an unrelenting fist into his shirt, the other smoothing the rough plane of his jaw, and it is only a slight, careful touch, but it is enough.
He falters.
The very ground seems to shift, or perhaps it is an earthquake or the old apartment building itself moving on the breeze, but it hardly seems to matter the cause because her gentle, knowing hands are there, and he falters, but does not fall.
In the movement, her forehead brushes like another gentle blessing against his, and his brain somehow understands her words without so much as a sound escaping her.
“House. This isn’t a game.”
And it’s crashing, crashing like waves or boats or teutonic plates, just like Dave Matthews says it is, and she winds like a hurricane around him, mouth searching and seeking and claiming brutally against his own, and in the hot mesmerism of it he gets one last glimpse, one last look into her almost-grey eyes, before the desire takes over and sends them reeling like astral bodies toward the bedroom.
She’s smiling, still, as Maria sings like a bird released, and the two perfect plates of dessert, his final, victorious course, remain untouched, unwanted and unloved, it seems, upon the kitchen bench.
~